Free advice for a miserabler hurensohn with a pink tie

*
My best guess about the Tea Party nullify-Obama movement and its activities has been that their period of useful idiocy to their paymasters will lapse when corporate oligarchs begin losing money or, alternately, when the political environment becomes too unpredictable to assure a constant and growing return on investment. There have been signs that the day is approaching, with outfits like Fox, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chamber of Commerce making moderate-sounding noises with respect especially to Tea Party intentions to interfere with raising the US debt ceiling. TPM ran the first direct story on the topic today, which I think is significant.

To be clear, I don't think anyone mentioned above is becoming more "moderate." But I do think that there is a growing demand for things to return to post-Reagan normal, meaning that Republicans play conventional bad cop to the Democrat good cop in the march toward globalization and its manifold "benefits" (such as destruction of national sovereignty in the areas of labor law, environmental protection, consumer rights, finance, etc.). So given my pessimistic view of things, I'm not sure there's any benefit to sweeping the Tea Party aside. But I have a plan for Herr John Boehner, galaxy-class sack of chickenshit and all-around SOB, that could exile them to the wilderness in short order.

Although there would be some scheming and logistics involved, not to mention more guts than Boehner ever had at his disposal, it's pretty simple: expel every one of them from the Republican Party.

I don't know the pertinent law, but I'm reasonably sure that nobody can run as a Republican (or Democrat) without sanction by the controlling party committee. For the sake of argument, let's just say that's true. So here's how it would work. If there really is a "silent majority" of Republicans who would vote for a clean CR if there were no danger of being primaried by a TP goon, then simply bring the clean CR to the floor to pass with Republicans and Democrats. But first make it clear to everyone in the caucus that a vote against it will mean that you may no longer promote yourself as a Republican. No more campaign funds or other party support. Most importantly: no rebellious TP'er will be slated as a Republican House candidate in 2014, whether as an incumbent or as a primary challenger.

US election laws make it very difficult for a third-party candidate to make the ballot. And with an irritated donor base consisting of corporate chieftains who don't like being ignored by peckerwoods and no-nothings, one would expect to see campaign money backing GOP party regulars in a majority of the cases.

The risks are self-evident, including a split of the right-wing vote to an extent that could lose a significant amount of GOP seats in swing-type districts. But in gerrymandered "safe" districts, I can't think of any reason why a new "moderate" Republican couldn't win the seat of an incumbent Tea Partier.

Republicans would surely lose the House. But let's face it, they've rarely controlled the House since the Great Depression. Yet the GOP has marched the whole country toward the end of the plank of representative democracy since Ronald Reagan smirked his way into the hearts of disillusioned Baby Boomers (i.e., dudes who couldn't tag enough pussy in the 1970s). Business as usual could return, and we could resume the lurch toward rule by transnational corporations---Republicans dragging regular people there kicking and screaming, alternating with the silky persuasive stylings of hip hierarchs like Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Boehner: feel free to take my advice, but not that you owe me one jumbo Swiss bank safe deposit box stuffed with stocks, bonds, and lots of green stuff from Lloyd Blankfein's wallet.

Even more dangerous than laissez-faire capitalism: Satire

*
Texas Governor Rick Perry was disgusted by this political cartoon back in April. Too fucking bad. I recommend Pepto Bismol, an Ambien, and 5 years in a US Civics re-education camp for what ails him.

Monsters

*
Wanton marquee-grade killing, whether the media label it as "terrorism" or "tragedy," understandably raises the eternal question of where "evil" comes from, and why. Opinions are diverse, understandably, because this is arguably the central mystery of existence to anyone who believes that life has a moral or spiritual dimension (in other words, that the universe is more than a bin of particles that follows "laws of science" to move from chaos toward order). My opinions on that aren't important; they're as unimportant as, say, Mike Huckabee's.

But around these events, the question of what to do about them always struggles to be considered. Predictably to anyone who knows something about post-70s America, Second Amendment enthusiasts and the politicians who exploit their preoccupation tell everyone else that "now is not the time" to talk about gun carnage because, after all, it is people who kill people. Everyone else is also admonished not to "politicize" tragedy, even though it's legitimate and imperative to discuss whether public policy is partially to blame or whether changes in public policy could reduce the frequency and carnage of mass shootings. Corporate media always propagate this conservative admonition, and are its foremost adherents.

I've got nothing profound to offer, but here is a small survey of media response with a comment or two.

This whole Charlie Pierce piece is worth reading. He ties any discussion of gun "tragedies" to the fundamental conservative fallacy---that (to borrow Margaret Thatcher's radical confession of global conservative principles) "there is no such thing as society":

There are things we must do together, in a political context, because these things are too big — and, in this case, too monstrous — for us to handle alone. Self-government and its institutions — public schools, police and fire departments, the ridiculously underfunded mental-health facilities, and all the people to whom we increasingly begrudge their salaries — are the only things keeping us from falling back into barbarism, and the only things keeping us safe and sane when one of us falls back into it on their own.

I agree. The absolute minimal conversation we should be having about gun violence, whether or not conservatives think any time is an appropriate time, is about the necessity of understanding that America needs fully funded and professional education, law enforcement, emergency response, and healthcare institutions... period. If the well off and the Job Creators don't want to pay for the privilege of enjoying an orderly society, they should repatriate their warty asses to China or Haiti.

Second, there is this piece by Maggie Koerth-Baker about "what science says" about gun control. Here is her profound takeaway:

Some studies are funded by biased institutions. Some studies aren't peer reviewed. Some studies feature poorly thought-out methodology.

All of that leads to a mess of frequently contradictory conclusions that can, frankly, be used to support just about any position you'd like to put forward. So, basically, just because you can support your position, don't think that makes you absolutely correct.

As so-called science writers go, Koerth-Baker is especially useless to me, with her patronizing and pseudo-profundities. But I think her conclusion is typical corporate media treatment: it's all just too complicated for us poor journalists and citizens to make heads or tails of, so let's all just love one another. Thanks for nothing, Maggie.

Speaking of the "media role" in public tragedy, the following is something I stumbled across this morning. It's a Roger Ebert anecdote about an interview he gave to NBC news (never aired) after Columbine (via BoingBoing again) in which the reporter was looking to cherry-pick quotes about violent movies causing gun violence. Ebert wouldn't play along:

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them.

As much as public policy, this is a piece of the problem that needs to be discussed. Logos and branding---bullseye. Personally, I wouldn't dismiss the media's normalization of violence as sensual and pre-political entertainment as quickly as Ebert seems to, but Hollywood is not directly responsible for Columbine or Tucson or Newtown.

And finally, there's this last word on the topic, straight from the mouth of a genuine monster:

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee attributed the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in part to restrictions on school prayer and religious materials in the classroom. 

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

As Rob Bechizza said about Huckabee's comments back on BoingBoing: "Don't be angry. Just understand what he understands: that this is political."

I think the conversation needs to be much more far-reaching than the topic of gun control. It needs to examine how this society has become so detached from its own collective humanity that even a discussion of gun control is taboo within both of our major political parties while kids are slaughtered on their mats in kindergarten.

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

*
First, read this. Read it all, including this.

Then, listen to this:



...while reading the following (provided by YouTube uploader Charles Van Driel, whomever he may be):

"Original Faubus Fables" performed by Charles Mingus. Taken from the 1960 "Charles Mingus presents Charles Mingus" record. Composed by Charles Mingus.

It was written as a direct protest against Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus, who in 1957 sent out the National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American teenagers. This composition was also released a year earlier on the "Mingus Ah Um" record as "Fables Of Faubus" but only instrumental as record company Columbia refused the lyrics.

Lyrics:
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em shoot us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em stab us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em tar and feather us!
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

Name me someone who's ridiculous, Dannie.
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won't permit integrated schools.

Then he's a fool! Boo! Nazi Fascist supremists!
Boo! Ku Klux Klan (with your Jim Crow plan)

Name me a handful that's ridiculous, Dannie Richmond.
Faubus, Rockefeller, Eisenhower
Why are they so sick and ridiculous?

Two, four, six, eight:
They brainwash and teach you hate.
H-E-L-L-O, Hello.

Charity toward all and malice toward none, my foot. In 5 years all we will have on the national political stage is Republicans and dissidents.

Original Faubus Fables, Charles Mingus (1960, from "Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus," Candid CCD 79005), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry (After Hours)

*
Here's an unpublished (so to speak) set of Beatles tunes performed live by Frank Zappa and his ill-fated "best band you never heard in your life," from a 1988 concert in Helsinki.



I reckon Sir Paul will authorize commercial release of these recordings by the Zappa Family Trust about the time he officially designates Heather Mills as the Fifth Beatle.

Two things stand out to me in this clip: the quaint topicality of the lyrics and the technical acumen of both the musicians and the engineers in echoing the studio-type feel of the original Beatles recordings.

At this point in Frank's life, he was preoccupied by (among many other things) how TV evangelism had infused US politics with a sinister overtone, and so he was delighted when preachers like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were publicly exposed as sexual "perverts" and moral hypocrites, and he gleefully used it as "material." Most of the lyrics here focus on Swaggart, whose sex scandal broke into the news during the band's 1988 tour. But these were the waning days of the second Reagan administration, with the Iran-Contra affair and other Republican outrages having broken the windshield of our little democracy flivver and flattened three of its tires while the President drifted into senility. So we hear Zappa's mocking references to such one-hit wonders as National Security Advisor Admiral Poindexter and Attorney General Ed Meese. I think Zappa's parody lyrics are at their best when they remain vulgar and playful, as opposed to the more coarsely obscene texts for which he became infamous (in the Clean World, at least). In these pieces he veers over into the "obscene" lane, but arguably expresses no greater magnitude of depravity than Swaggart guiltily preached on any given day in his ministry. And all these lyrics are based on True Facts---set to the music of the Fab Four!

As one commenter on this video said (but for a different implied reason than I would give, and with which I disagree), the Beatles could not have performed most of these songs live with anywhere near the fidelity that FZ and his band accomplish in this performance. That's partially explained by the level of sophistication that synthesizer technology had reached by the end of his career, but much more so by Zappa's almost-supernatural ears and almost-peerless skills as an arranger. The musicians must also be credited for their technical skills, but as herded and over-rehearsed by FZ and---worse---a junior musician whom he put in charge of drilling the band on a daily basis as his own health began to emerge as a debilitating problem. Because of his stature, Zappa could get away with rehearsal schedules that could fairly be called abusive, but his second-tier foreman couldn't command the same obedience. So Zappa's musicians revolted and the band fell apart halfway through the world tour. (Strangely, Wikipedia doesn't have any account of this major milestone in Zappa's career---the end of it as a performing musician, to be exact---so I can't link to it.)

This video presents the same 12-piece band documented live on Broadway the Hard Way, The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, and Make A Jazz Noise Here, which Zappa issued to help him recover from a financial loss of about half a million dollars (in an era when that probably meant twice as much as it does today). Broadway is the most broadly (hurhurhurrrr) appealing, but bristles with Reagan-era political topicality that isn't universal enough to have aged well. The others have a few high points, but come across as thrown-together filler tour tapes. The Beatles suite played here is much more entertaining and respectful of the source material than the pointlessly condescending covers of "Purple Haze" and "Stairway To Heaven" that show up on Best Band.

I think FZ really believed that this lineup was in fact his best band ever. From a technical standpoint, that would be his call to make. But as a fan, I've never gotten much enjoyment from his '80s ensembles. They achieved their precision and impressive responsiveness to Zappa's extemporaneous direction through the maestro's extreme exercise of control and, as I say, over-rehearsal to the point of sounding brittle underneath it all. Nevertheless, this particular segment sounds more relaxed and human than I've come to expect from Zappa's latter-day aggregations.

What do you think? Does this music do anything for you?

Beatles Suite, Frank Zappa and band (1988, live in Helsinki, Finland, provenance of recording unknown), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: as Fifty50 readers who have taken Music Appreciation will observe, this music isn't actually a medley, but a regular sequence of songs with each having a segue into the next.

You're welcome

*

Starting tonight in Tampa, Fla., and continuing for the next several days, the national Republican Party will transform a cavernous ice hockey rink into a cavernous horse hockey rink.

He just finds it "a little troubling"

*

John Ellis "Used To Be A Conservative" Bush (JEB), the former Florida governor whose Republican machine unethically thwarted a fair and balanced presidential vote recount in 2000, feels

it's a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people's fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective and that's kind of where we are"

according to a HuffingtonPost article with an embedded Fox link. JEB is of course referring to those nattering nabobs of negativism, the 2012 Republican presidential candidates. The HuffPost report indicates that JEB's opinion is shared by his bosom old buddy Karl "Still The Queen Of The Jackbooted Neocon Admen" Rove. I'd interpret their sentiment as an unintentional admission that they are momentarily embarrassed by the monster created by Rove's mentor, the late Lee "Nigger Nigger Nigger" Atwater.

Santorum at The Citadel

*

I awoke this morning to hear a recording of Rick Santorum campaigning at the famous South Carolina military academy, which was established as a paramilitary force to perpetuate the peculiar institution of slavery. Addressing an audience of cadets, Santorum worked his mad campaign skills with an opening volley in which he compared his "trademark sweater vest" to a flak jacket, then deploying his finely honed stump speech which included this rhetorical fusillade in which:

... he cast himself as a Goldilocks candidate: just right when compared to Gingrich's "too hot" rhetoric and Romney's "too cold" personality.

Because nothing will inspire loyalty in a soldier like comparing yourself to a naive little girl lost in the woods. Unless it's bringing your stuffed animal collection along for show and tell.

And I quote:

*

Here's Charles Pierce at Esquire commenting on how this cycle's Republican presidential crop is in a class by itself compared with all other past GOP fields:

Okay, maybe Jon Huntsman is a hyper-conservative John Anderson, and Mitt Romney is a hyper-disingenuous Bob Dole, but Huntsman's polling in the Marianas Trench, and the entire party wishes Romney would die in a fire.

 Also, today's doke.

Would you like some fresh-ground strychnine on your salad, Sir or Madame?

*

You probably know that former pizza mogul Herman Cain has a tax-reform plan he calls 9-9-9, a triple-decker version of a federal flat-tax program affecting personal income, purchases, and salaries payed by employers. He claims it will make the administration of taxation dirt simple while reducing everyone's tax burden.

Paul Krugman's blog links to a Tax Policy Center analysis of Cain's 9-9-9 proposal with respect to its impact on US taxpayers. Anyone who learned about regressive taxation in school can correctly guess the results.

A middle income household making between about $64,000 and $110,000 would get hit with an average tax increase of about $4,300, lowering its after-tax income by more than 6 percent and increasing its average federal tax rate (including income, payroll, estate and its share of the corporate income tax) from 18.8 percent to 23.7 percent. By contrast, a taxpayer in the top 0.1% (who makes more than $2.7 million) would enjoy an average tax cut of nearly$1.4 million, increasing his after-tax income by nearly 27 percent. His average effective tax rate would be cut almost in half to 17.9 percent. In Cain’s world, a typical household making more than $2.7 million would pay a smaller share of its income in federal taxes than one making less than $18,000.

So give it up for our GOP executive superhero of the week and his outstanding Plan 9-9-9 From Outer Space! Or at least do that if you wish to carpet-bomb the economy with kryptonite and dull your hunger pangs by eating lead paint chips.

By the way, the Tax Policy Center is no hippie commune; it's a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. I don't know anything about the latter, but Brookings is a right-leaning think tank that is about as Establishment as you can get.

Won't need to search in Pakistan this time

*

So Vice President Biden made news today by telling House Democrats today that the teabaggers have "acted like terrorists" during the debt ceiling standoff. President North Star will probably give him a scolding for saying so, but what he really should be doing is setting up a secure conference call with SEAL Team 6. Maybe a nice black-helicopter tour of the Potomac for a few properly selected chiefs of think tanks and cable news operations would be just the thing to lower the temperature in the glistening swamp on a hill. JK LULZ!!!

Meanwhile,at the bottom of the TPM piece linked above, we learn that Republican National Committee (RNC) chair "Reince Priebus" has "tweeted" that VP Biden has "more than crossed a line today when he called fiscal conservatives 'terrorists'. I demand an apology." Haha! I hope Biden gives "Priebus" an apology by way of his posterior annular ring.

By the way, I never make fun of a person's name, but I'll make an exception here. What the fuck kind of name is "Reince Priebus" supposed to be? I mean, really? And I'll add to that rhetorical question the amusing discovery made awhile back by some unnamed wag: if you remove all the vowels from his name, you're left with RNC PR BS. If that's not evidence that witty time travelers from the future have modified our current timeline, then I'm a monkey's uncle and so are you.

Stockholm, DC

*

Paul Krugman, paraphrasing Jonathan Chait in The New Republic (and himself on many other occasions), boils the so-called deficit crisis into its irreducible essence:

As Chait says, the first thing you need to understand is that modern Republicans don’t care about deficits. They only pretend to care when they believe that deficit hawkery can be used to dismantle social programs; as soon as the conversation turns to taxes, or anything else that would require them and their friends to make even the smallest sacrifice, deficits don’t matter at all.

In the Stockholm Syndrome world of Washington, DC, and the corporate media that sustain America's political withdrawal from consensual reality, this kind of talk from a liberal is condemned as "partisan bickering" or "uncivil."

Putting that childish, dishonest perspective aside for later discussion, preferably on someone else's blog, I simply suggest that a skeptical reader simply  at the evidence that has been right in front our our noses from the moment we learned about Grover Norquist's quest to drown the federal government in the bathtub. Use Occam's razor. Is there a simpler, more direct statement that explains the state of our political discourse today?

The S&P coup

*

I want to add a little to my previous post on S&P's implicit threat to blackmail the federal government into adopting a specific piece of legislation (i.e., $4 trillion spending reduction over the next 10 years).

Paul Krugman seems a little skeptical that an S&P downgrade of US debt would be huge deal because, basically, bond traders already know that ratings agencies don't know what they're doing:

The point is that when S&P or Moody’s speaks, that’s not the voice of “the market”. It’s just some guys with an agenda, and a very poor track record. And we have no idea how much effect their actions will have.

I don't doubt that. But to me the important point is not so much what financial traders do with an S&P intervention of this nature, but what the media and politicians will do with it. A ratings agency downgrade of US debt will be presented as something like scientific evidence that we need to finish drowning the federal government in the bathtub now! now! now! It's hard for me to see how our disinformation economy could get any worse---how it could further accelerate America's decline. But my intuition tells me we haven't reached terminal velocity yet. We'll be even closer when the press, the Congress, and the President anoint Wall Street as the new fourth branch of government.

Fourth branch, Third World

*

I think that Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, like the few other reports I've seen about the Standard and Poors threat to downgrade US debt to Third World status, just misses the point.

Yes, insane Republican ideology and The Conceder In Chief have done a swell job creating an existential economic threat by tying approval of the debt ceiling to the politics of government spending and taxation. This is the "Worst. Congress. Ever." Blah blah blah.

In journalism lingo, there's a "buried lede" in Klein's piece:

And having upset S&P, appeasing them might not be so simple. Beers repeatedly emphasized that he wasn’t just looking for a number. He was looking for something “credible.” And credible, in his view, was something that both parties had embraced. After all, he argued, deficit-reduction plans have to be continuously implemented over a decade or more, and if there’s not “buy-in from both parties,” there’s no reason to believe that the plan will survive the inevitable changes in political control.

On the one hand, the S&P view is a reasonable analysis. But on the other, sinister hand:

You might ask whether all this matters. S&P got the financial crisis almost entirely wrong — in fact, their analytical errors, alongside those of other agencies, substantially contributed to it — so why should we listen to them now?

But the question isn’t whether S&P should be listened to. It’s whether the market will listen to them.

Yes, that's right. The once-respectable financial rating agency, which is as tarnished by the 2008 economic implosion as any Wall Street investment bank, has made federal legislative politics an evaluative criterion for assessing the full faith and credit of the US government and the debt it issues.

And as a small digression, it's probably worth inserting here that there really is no deficit crisis. The deficit is high-ish in relation to conventional yardsticks, but interest rates are so low (near zero as applicable to government borrowing, in fact), that there is no problem servicing this debt... unless the ceiling isn't raised promptly. The "deficit crisis" is an invention of right-wing politicians, corporate media, and as a johnny-come-lately, President North Star.

But back to the libretto: There is nothing benign whatsoever about what S&P is up to here. They aren't trying to serve as a voice of reason: they're emphatically inserting itself into the political fray with the power of a fourth branch of government, but one outside of federal checks and balances. "You motherfuckers attend to the 'deficit crisis' ," S&P seems to be saying, "or else we'll sic The Market on you." With "you," of course, meaning both politicians and voters. It is an aggressive, unconscionable lobbying assault on behalf of The Corporation---a protection racket that the federal government must now subscribe to with an initial payment of $4 trillion extracted from middle-class taxpayers, the poor, and the elderly. If they pull this off, there will be no end to the racket until we're all living in sheet metal shacks on dirt lots.

The S&P threat gives every politician in Washington enough cover, or terror, to cave in to the demands of the Republican legislative caucus and The Conceder in Chief for "the good of the nation." Once this smelly, syphilitic Wall Street camel has its nose all the way into the tent, S&P might conceivably become as powerful as the Federal Reserve in dictating the grim economic future of America. No accountability; just the perpetual threat to shit everybody else's nest if some warty bankers and corporate chieftains don't like the drift of public policy.

Now, this

*

Today I read about a lot of celebrity Republican politicians---both of today and yesteryear---praising President Obama for "wisely" following the lead of George W. Bush's antiterrorism strategy in order to bag OBL.

Steve Benen of Washington Monthly has, in response, provided a nice collection of linked articles documenting the lack of concern Bush and ultraconservative personalities publicly displayed about OBL's whereabouts and significance dating back to March 2002. (!)

For a "bonus level," Benen throws in a link to a 17 April 2002 Washington Post story about bin Laden slipping through Tora Bora to Pakistan in December 2001 thanks (reportedly) to strategic cockups by Bush's Afghanistan operations chief, General "Tommy" Franks. I leave it to the reader to assess any potential relation between the 2001 Tora Bora failure and Bush's cavalier attitude toward OBL in 2002.

So, no: if you are among those who think the world is better off without Osama bin Laden, you owe precisely zero thanks to George Walker Bush for the terrorist's demise.

"Hold it! Next man makes a move, the 'nigger' gets it!"

*

Today the Standard & Poors "credit rating agency" borrowed a slick comedy move from Bart, Cleavon Little's character in Blazing Saddles. Specifically, S&P made a hollow threat to cut the rating of U.S. Treasury securities this morning---in effect, Wall Street holding a cap gun against its own head---which I assume is supposed to scare the President and the Democrats into doing whatever the right-wing deficit peacocks demand, such as abolishing Medicare and Social Security so rich assholes can have more tax cuts.

Right on cue, naturally, lame duck Senator Joe Lieberman was on my car radio this afternoon spewing turgid nonsense about the existential threat posed by current US debt levels and why it's important to cap federal spending at some absurdly low percentage of Gross Domestic Product. (I can't find a link to this, so you don't have to listen to his putrid, quavering voice here.) Why do I call it "turgid nonsense"? Because like most talk about federal deficits and debt in the corporate media today (including NPR), the somber generalities preached by deficit peacocks immediately break down to gibberish when real macroeconomists insist that the discussion include valid historic data, meaningful contexts, and other scary evidence-based features.

Nobel macroeconomist Paul Krugman, for example, quickly authenticated this S&P stunt as another episode of Wall Street's tiresome Saturday matinee serial entitled Uncle Sam and the Phantom Bond Vigilantes. It's fair to ask why I might put stock in anything Krugman and other neo-Keynesians say. My reason is simple: because his analysis have been consistently correct (i.e., consistently predictive about what would happen to the economy in the future) since I started following his New York Times blog 5 or 6 years ago, around the time he was was warning readers about the runaway US housing bubble and related phenomena. And he always backs his arguments with verifiable economic data and simple numerical models that every economist and most people with a high school diploma can understand.

Silly me

*

My firm prediction that the government would be shut down for between 5 and 7 days, not published here but explicitly stated to friends, was based on my certainty that Republicans needed a face-saving play to keep the tea bag caucus on board with Boehner. My guess was that this would come in the form of a short-term shutdown to satisfy the 'baggers, followed by an appeal to higher authority, such as reopening the government to restore "market confidence." Then we'd get a GOP declaration of victory, and their own well founded faith in having the history rewritten by party propagandists and broadcast on Fox.

Well, I believe I got the "face-saving" aspect correct. But I truly did not predict that it would be Harry Reid and Obama who would give Boehner his political cover, and also several extra billion in cuts to sweeten the deal. Silly me.

Betting against my own predictive prowess tonight [updated x2]

*

Up until a short time ago I was certain that there would be a government shutdown at midnight tonight because I assumed that the lugubrious Speaker of the House (Boehner) has much more to lose by compromising than by standing with his tea bag coalition. I would have staked my prognostication credibility on it, and in fact I think I did with a few friends at work.

But today, Herr Karl Rove, "presidential hopeful" Mike Huckabee, and "whatever she is" Michele Bachmann all announced that the wisest course for Republicans would be to take the money and run. Like Josh Marshall says, this might mean that the House 'bagger caucus has been convinced by leadership behind closed doors, accurately, that it would be stupid to hold out on the Planned Parenthood assault when they've already completely rolled Obama and Reid.

By reaching this "compromise" to rob social programs at no negative political cost to themselves, the GOP can frame their Planned Parenthood "giveback" move as a "diplomatic" and "adult" contribution to the national welfare (no pun intended). Meanwhile, President North Star and Reid stand there pretending they haven't been sprayed down in shitmist.

I didn't put this together until I read on TPM that Bachmann had expressed her opinion on the matter. If she brings the 'baggers around, then her status is significantly elevated in the GOP.  If that is in fact the case, then Boehner still looks weak in terms of House majority leadership and is vulnerable to a challenge by Eric Cantor, for example, the Majority Leader. And if that happened, Bachmann might come out of it in the future with a deputy-whip-type position or even shot at Republican Conference Chair, movin' on up to the East Side so to speak, George Jeffersonwise.

Editor's note: for purposes of Truth In Blogging, RubberCrutch discloses that he is employed by a small agency inside a larger one buried deep inside a cabinet-level department that is very good at blowing up things.

Update: if this (from TPM) is true about a three-day continuing resolution in the works, then Obama gets rolled in another way. He said he would not approve any more extensions. Yes, I know that he has to do this if there's an acceptable deal on the table---acceptable to himself and the invertebrate caucus, that is---but it will still be painted by triumphal Republicans as "further evidence" of Obama's weakness. I don't think Democrats could negotiate a discount on a Cabbage Patch Baby at a DuPage County flea market....

Update x2:  TPM sez the pending deal includes two fucking billion dollars more in spending cuts plus a "symbolic" floor vote on the Planned Parenthood attack. If true, then a total win for GOP, plus the corporate media will surely give Republicans all the credit for the "compromise." And I don't have any convincing reason to think this floor vote is necessarily destined to fail. Altogether, a fate worse than a gigantic rogue asteroid smashing up the joint in terms of what this means for the system of government under which we were privileged to be born. Democrats give away the farm and provide political cover for a cabal of thugs. Plus, I was sort of looking forward to having Monday off....

Disingenuous grandstanding

*

My congressman, Tim Johnson (IL-I5), is forced by circumstance to masquerade as a somewhat independent, somewhat moderate Republican because an important part of his district includes Urbana and Champaign, home of the University of Illinois. While this is, in my opinion, one of the most redneck Big 10 campus settlements, the university still exercises a liberalizing impact on civic life that Johnson cannot ignore. Virtually a straight party-line voter over the years, he has occasionally been permitted by GOP leaders to break party ranks on votes that might have a symbolic importance to the university community but whose outcome was not in doubt.

I'm not exactly sure what Johnson's motive is for leading an effort in the House to defund Libya military operations, but disingenuous grandstanding must be high on the bulleted list of possibilities. If you review Johnson's voting record, you can see that he's not been reluctant to vote for war funding during his first decade in Washington. I suppose he's trolling for some Tea Party cred. Oddly, any number of liberals and independents might be expected to strongly support Johnson's effort, but for different reasons than are motivating him.

One thing of which I am certain: if the current President were a Republican, we wouldn't be hearing a peep about Libya out of "The Honorable Timothy V. Johnson."

Hideous

*

And not only hideous, but very much foreseen and publicized by DHS over a year ago.

Do you remember what happened when DHS released that memo about the rising threat of right-wing extremism? And do you remember the howling about this from right-wingers at the time, like the samples captured at the bottom of the HuffPost article linked above?

And do you remember how DHS chief Napolitano fumbled against that right-wing pushback? And, finally, do you remember how, when questioned by TPM this past September about actual examples of right-wing domestic extremism over the year since the original DHS memo had been issued, she referred to it as "ancient history"? I do.

Right-wing celebrity pundits using mainstream communications media fire up haters with eliminationist rhetoric covered by a veneer of sick humor. Right-wing politicians refuse to disavow pigs like Limbaugh or Beck, and will even express sympathy for the seething fans who are infected with this violent, schizoid ideation. How many times have you hears a senior Republican establishment figure say something to the effect of "Well, I may not agree with the rhetoric, but I certainly understand why these people are so angry."

But "centrist" shape-shifters like Napolitano and President North Star, who always approach this topic without candor in order to spare themselves a scolding from John McCain and Rush Limbaugh and Erick Erickson, share in the accountability for this abominable political massacre. I'm sure that all we'll hear about this from Responsible Democrats in the coming days are abstract platitudes about the horror of it all in This Great Nation founded on principles of blah blah blah; and boilerplate expressions of how everyone's thoughts should "be with the families" of the victims. But not a goddam meaningful word about the hate mongers or their mesmerized audience.

Editor's note: yes, I am aware that we don't have many confirmed facts yet about the alleged shooter or his motives. I see no point in being "even-handed" at this point, but I will immediately apologize for jumping the gun when it is proven that the shooter is a smelly, card-carrying ACLU socialist vegan.