Onyx Lynx

Terrance, Republic of T:

Maybe facing the possibility of living in poverty does add a much needed dash of adventure to one’s old age. Maybe programs like Social Security and Medicare are depriving people — old and young — of that adventure. Maybe worrying about where your next meal is coming from, or how you’ll get medical care makes life less dull. Maybe programs like food stamps and Medicaid sap life of its suspense and mystery. Maybe getting medical care in a livestock stall is more interesting than getting it in a community clinic or doctor’s office. Maybe health care reform is making life a little less interesting less interesting.

[...]

If anything the safety-net programs Ryan, Romney and the Republican party are wont to portray as beachheads for a brand of communism that hasn’t existed in any form large enough to threaten the “American way of life” in decades, are all that stands between the one percent and and real trouble.

And the people in red states are more dependent on government benefits.  Because in fact we are interdependent.  That's Terrance's conclusion.  Bet you can't prove him wrong.

In, actually, operaramblings' laudatory review of a production of La Clemenza di Tito, the reviewer notes an oddity:

Meanwhile a very gorgeous, rather exotic looking woman; clearly Berenice (who otherwise doesn’t actually appear in the opera) [i]s drawn across the stage in a giant baked potato. ... Why the potato? ... I have no idea. But at least it provides us[ ]with the useful term a Berenice’s potato to describe such things in future.

And it turns out he got the concept from The Earworm reviewing the same production (video).

I am not applying it to Mr. Eastwood's performance at the Republican National Convention, because I saw the video and I have to believe that he believed that Mr. Obama has a magic wand somewhere (ahem) because all those things he was citing as Mr. Obama's failures are things the Republicans oppose.

More on the Medicare/Affordable Care inability to clarify the money situation.  Mr. Somerby additionally calls out the Washington Post for highlighting the fact checkers of Mr. Ryan's speech rather than fact checking Mr. Ryan's speech.

Driftglass' Master Class.  With videos.

• Book review about conservative lack-of-humor.  (Dennis Miller was not the only comic to go conservative/unfunny after 9/11; James Lileks, who had one of those amusing blogs about his job and family, also began dropping right-wing talkpoints into his writing.  The blog is still running, at least when I last looked, and he is still amusing about his family and curmudgeonly about change in the Twin Cities, but I jump over anything else he has to say.)
• Several people have used the term "lies" about Paul Ryan's speech, including Fox News, which lies all by itself:
• Mills River Progressive, who relied on the noise machine and was not wrong;
• Shakesville's RNC 2012 Discussion Thread, with a link to the direct Fox News quote;
• The Daily Howler on dishonesty and misdirection.  And lies;
• Welcome Back to Pottersville, which mentions Isaac.  The storm Isaac;
• ETA:  Pandagon at Raw Story adds another data point.
• Jurassicpork on enabling vs. doing the right thing.
• Jesse Curtis on Mitt Romney's racebaiting. 
• Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) on Romney's time at Bain Capital, which includes this paragraph so you can have no doubt:

  By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. [Emphasis added.]

• Let's have another war!  Thanks, I already have one.
• Just because:  Jon Carroll on authors' looks.

• We begin the day, as the newscasters say, with Mr. Somerby, who addresses "The Medicare Muddle" in which the conservatives blather about Mr. Obama looting Medicare to pay for the Affordable Care provisions while liberals are using almost the same language (except calling it "savings") and the pundits are not clarifying matters (possibly because they don't understand it either).

  It doesn’t occur to someone like Dean that older white voters (and others) may believe these GOP claims because they’ve heard very similar claims from the White House itself; or because he and Schultz did a very poor job explaining what is wrong with the claim; or because we’ve all been swamped in disinformation about the federal government’s “trust funds” for the past forty years, with zero attempt at clarification from our liberal leaders.
  
  Zero; nada, none.
  
  For the past forty years, conservative disinformation machines have spread a massive amount of confusion about the Social Security trust fund. The current muddle about Medicare’s trust fund is, in part, one fruit of that larger effort.

• Vouchers?  Vouchers?  Pandagon (Amanda Marcotte) at Raw Story:

  That’s always what Republicans have been on about when they talk about “rationing” and “death panels”. The concern is that if more people get insurance, then they’ll also get to have access to health care and that means you have to share. I’ve said this from the beginning, but much of the conservative discourse around health care is blowing dog whistles. If you translate their concerns into non-euphemism, they’re mostly worried that they’ll have to share waiting rooms with poor people. But what’s really annoying about all this is that Republicans are sweeping the elderly white people vote, and so they’re getting votes from people on Medicare who basically want to keep everyone else from getting coverage for fear of having to compete with them for resources. This, of course, makes no sense, since the fear is based on an incorrect assumption that younger people need as much medical care as older people. But that’s why I think race- and class-baiting is the underlying subtext to the concern-trolling about “rationing” that Republicans have been doing with their base. That’s how you get people to stop thinking and start fearing. Because they have to turn their brains completely off to think replacing a program that pays for their medical care with coupons is a good idea.

• Also from Mr. Somerby:  Journalism's elite corps in search of epiphany.
• Driftglass:

  And you know. in a way the social issues of 2012 bears some eerie similarities to the Iraq War circa 2004-2005. Once again, the GOP has painted itself into an ideological corner that is violently at odds with reality. Once again, to get out of the noose, the Party of Personal Responsibility resorts to and all-out campaign of slander and lies. Once again the spineless press simply transcribes and transmits the slander and lies verbatim. Once again, the roof they have thatched together out of pure fraud and bullshit works for awhile...and then starts to collapse right on top of their victory parade.
  
  And then comes the Holy Shit moments as the scam falls apart.

  Followed by several of the Holy Shit moments.
• Riposte to comment on Mr. Ryan's offensive statement.

Via Avedon Carol at The Sideshow, Down With Tyranny!'s posting about the fight to break up Too Big To Fail banks.

The big banks are Romney's world and they're the toxic world his campaign is being financed by. Erickson's analysis might sound off-kilter-- and it should; it is-- but the route the right takes is bringing them to the same goal sane people want as well... breaking up the big banks. Robert Reich has been talking about it for a long time. And the most trustworthy man in the U.S. Senate, Bernie Sanders has as well.

Via skippy, The Street's discovery that Iceland has succeeded by not following the world's advice:

Now in what may be the greatest economic "mea culpa" in history, we have the media admitting that this government/banking/propaganda-machine troika has been wrong all along. They have been forced to acknowledge that Iceland's approach to economic triage was the correct approach right from the beginning.

What was Iceland's approach? To do the exact opposite of everything the bankers running our own economies told us to do. The bankers (naturally) told us that we needed to bail out the criminal Big Banks, at taxpayer expense (they were Too Big To Fail). Iceland gave the banksters nothing.

I had accounts at a smallish bank with five branches in the late '70s. It went through a couple of mergers, issued stock for a while, then went private. I stopped using them because shortly after I moved away, they decided that everyone needed a new PIN. Which had to be done in one of the branches. Hahaha. I opened an account at a smallish bank with three main areas of branches. Which got bought by another bank. Which got bought by a monster bank. Which still has my money because it has convenient branches in either of the places I normally travel and some of the others, too. And which sends new ATM cards every couple of years (this is hilarious because I never remember until the ATM rejects the expired card), although I have successfully fought off their desire to saddle me with a debit card.  Um, NO.  But I'd prefer a small bank on a large network.  Large banks too often believe that because they have custody of your money it is theirs.  The mattress is looking excellent.

(By the way, did our legislators learn nothing from the savings and loan debacle back in the late '80s-early '90s?)

Bustednuckles charts the decline of the American middle class both personally and via Business Insider:

They are proudly killing off anything, and I do mean anything, that would help the average American in any way.

If it doesn’t help big business or their corporate overlords then it isn’t going to happen and these people have been proven to be unable to govern this country repeatedly yet they will look you in the eye and tell you that they alone know what this country needs to prosper while they give away another billion dollar subsidy to their buddies in Big oil and then after lunch kill a successful program that helps single mothers.

Warning for strong, not-child-safe language.

Jesse Curtis quotes from an interview with John Lewis by Andrew Cohen in The Atlantic.

As a people and as a nation, we are too quiet. All of us should be up on our feet. There should be public outcry. There should be a sense of righteous indignation over what is happening during this election season. We should not just roll over and allow it to happen.

History lesson from Alan Grayson via Mills River Progressive: A coal miners' strike.

If voter ID is enacted in Minnesota, the equipment alone will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Follow the links at Mercury Rising.

Part 5 and Part 6 of Jesse Curtis' series on American Christianity, touching on adoption and casting one's lot with the poor.

Pennsylvania voter ID.

Neil Armstrong has died.

That was the dream.  It had a tune.  There were several dreams that interwove and this is the only bit I remember because I wrote it down and then fell back asleep.

Some food grown in Japan is dangerous.

The Daily Howler pokes at unasked-in-the-media questions.  For example:

Might we suggest another “dark moment” from Romney’s life which might “offer clues into his character?” This moment led to very bad outcomes for people not in his family.

We’ll suggest the moment we’ve mentioned all year—the looting of GS Technology, the story the New York Times has simply refused to report. Our question: How did workers’ pensions get “underfunded” at this company while Romney was lugging off big wads of cash? Why was Bain unable to meet its obligations regarding these people's health care?

The New York Times has refused to report this story, even though Reuters offered a detailed report on this episode all the way back in January. The Times still hasn’t reported this “dark” episode—although this morning, Stolberg offers us two dark moments which we might find inspiring.

I ran across a comment somewhere suggesting electing Romney because he's a bigger crook (not the original phrasing); *twitch*

Musical background:  Gary Numan, "Are Friends Electric?"  Make of that what you will.

An appreciation of the author of A People's History of the United States by Anthony Arnove at AlterNet.

Howard had that rare ability to step back and help us understand our topsy-turvy world primarily because he approached politics and history from the standpoint of someone who thought it was possible to turn our world right side up — to put people before profit, the environment before the interests of mining companies.

(I haven't read it, by the way, and I ought to, if only to see what he gets wrong.)

Gawker, of all publications, has obtained 950 pages of documents that spell out the Byzantine holdings and corporate shells that Mitt Romney uses to avoid having to pay a fair tax rate on his obscene amounts of wealth. They’ve published the documents and briefly described them, but there’s a lot more analysis to come after the lawyers look over it. So far, the big reveal is that Romney is a dedicated tax-dodger, willing to use every trick in the book to avoid paying what he owes to a country that has given him so much. Regardless of the legality of it all, the immorality matters.[Emphasis added.]

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, with a little about who survives scandals and why.  Direct link to Gawker and its links.

Lance Mannion on the National Geographic, continental drift, and maps of the ocean floor.

Frankly, after the recent conservative dingleberry display, I need to read about intelligent people.

• Part 3 and Part 4 of Jesse Curtis' series on American churches, Christianity, and Biblical exhortations.
• The Daily Howler:

  That said, Lyons made a direct statement: Obama didn’t rob, steal or otherwise remove that money from the trust fund. Obama hasn’t taken a dime from the fund, Lyons directly said.
  
  Indeed, Obama has extended the life of the Medicare trust fund, Lyons directly said. It’s hard to know how Obama could do that if he’s been stealing the trust fund's money. [Emphasis Added.]

  Apparently there's a rumor about money stolen from the Medicare fund. Apparently it is a false rumor, but the MSM don't seem to want to talk about it.  Mr. Somerby is citing Gene Lyons here.
  
• Ta-Nehisi Coates has two pieces up today, one of which is in the hardcopy edition of The Atlantic:  "Irony of a Black President," which functions as introduction, plea for subscriptions, and teaser, and "Fear of a Black President."  I will post a tiny taste, but you really need to read the whole thing:

  These cultural cues became important during Obama’s presidential run and beyond. Obama doesn’t merely evince blackness; he uses his blackness to signal and court African Americans, semaphoring in a cultural dialect of our creation—crooning Al Green at the Apollo, name-checking Young Jeezy, regularly appearing on the cover of black magazines, weighing the merits of Jay-Z versus Kanye West, being photo­graphed in the White House with a little black boy touching his hair. There is often something mawkish about this signaling—like a Virginia politico thickening his southern accent when talking to certain audiences. If you’ve often been the butt of political signaling (Sister Souljah, Willie Horton), and rarely the recipient, these displays of cultural affinity are powerful. And they are all the more powerful because Obama has been successful.

• Via Mills River Progressive, Alex Baer of TV News Lies.org on the subject of Republicans above their competence.
• On the occasion of Twisted Sister objecting to Paul Ryan's use of "We're Not Gonna Take It," SFGate offers a slide show of "Musicians vs. Politicians."

So I apparently missed this article by Sara Robinson on the people needed to get a revolution under way (or as I keep saying, "We don't need a revolution, but we do need a change."), and I wish I could find my musings on the topic a couple of years ago.

Media not in cahoots with power would also help.

From Pandagon, which is actually under the aegis of Raw Story:

But for conservatives, of course, it’s all about Punish the Bitches. The official stance is to feign compassion for women while bleating about the fetus, but it takes very little to scratch the surface and find the roiling hatred towards women. Specifically, the sexy young women of their imaginations who are out having fun that excludes them, and therefore must be punished. (That abortion bans also affect women they don’t find attractive, aren’t jealous of, don’t identify as women, and are boring married ladies in their 30s and 40s doesn’t seem to matter.) Resentment of others perceived as getting away with something is the primary motivating force behind modern conservatism.[Emphasis mine.]

"Clearly, the Phrase 'Pro-Life' Is Ironic"

As I wrote a couple of years ago, these deals are common in states that have been the epicenter of job loss. That includes rust belt states hit by the recession, which have become new sources of cheap labor, as the very offshoring that Romney helped pioneer led to a decline in union membership and the loss of good jobs that unions won, and that gave workers a shot at upward mobility, and a chance to give their families the advantages of middle-class economic security. It also includes the Southern states that became the last stop for jobs headed overseas, after offshoring killed the Southern textile industry.

Terrance Heath, Republic of T, talking about modern welfare queens.  With sources.

1. Bartolo Colon is suspended for 50 games, having tested positive for (presumably, "excessive") testosterone.  Well, there goes the Wild Card.
2. Department of You Can't Make This Up:  This morning there was a commercial.  For testosterone.  On the radio.  "After 30, your levels of testosterone decrease."  They offer a thirty-day supply.  I wish I remembered the code trade name for it.  It may well be prescription, but the ad didn't sound like that (no disclaimers, no "see your doctor").  ETA:  The ad just ran again.  Name of the substance sounds like Proteem.  There's a phone number to call (no, I didn't catch it) for the thirty day supply.

The question being:  Why aren't we in the streets and otherwise committing Serious Fomentation and Riot?

I know I sound like a broken record, but seriously: when is the fucking march? When is the rally on the National Mall? Where is the bra barbecue? I’m ready to sign up, show up, you name it. Someone tell me where to go, when to be there, what to do. I just don’t know why we aren’t better organized. This Akin shit is stirring the outrage and no one seems to be capitalizing on it. Do we not have the infrastructure?

I don’t want to sign a fucking petition. I want to kick some ass.

I know that Americans--people in general--are highly complacent. I know that writing blogs on the Internet is a safe catharsis as such things go.  So far, anyway.  I know about the boiled frog and denial and sheer disbelief.  Really.  When I was 16, I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  I am never going to be able to sit through The Garden of the Finzi-Continis because I'd be screaming like someone in a horror movie.

I would rather not wait around for Nehemiah Scudder.  (No, I don't think the candidates are preachers-turned-dictators.)

I'm not interested in revolution.  I used to be, but too many of them end badly.  I recognize we've all got lives and concerns preventing marching.

(And, by the way, where are the Tea partiers protesting the abrogation of the First Amendment?  Hmmmm?)

But really, where are the organizations who used to rally large numbers of people?  Because mostly turnout and marching don't happen by themselves.

(Don't even think it.  I am old and cranky and suggested a couple of years ago somewhere that something new was needed in the get-people-fired-up-for-mass-action department, having burnt out in 1972.)

1. The Onion on the real apology of Mr. Akin.
2. Jesus' General on an empty chair and skinny-dipping.

• Second part of Jesse Curtis' series on American Christian giving.
• Red Sox pre-mortem, courtesy of jurassicpork.
• Comrade Misfit notes a small problem in the attempt to get Mr. Akin to quit the Missouri Senatorial race and offers la phrase juste about the Chavis Carter case.

A Christian contemplates his faith and American practitioners thereof.

A very tiny taste:

I believe that there are millions of American Christians who want to be challenged, who want to be told to be more, do more, give more, and to be told that this is not expected just of the radical few but of the very ordinary masses, those of us without precocious talents or spiritual superpowers. Where are the leaders to challenge us along these lines?

Which dovetails with Melissa McEwan of Shakesville Expecting More.  (Sometimes searches work.)

• Scott McKenzie, singer/songwriter ("San Francisco [Wear Some Flowers],"/"Kokomo").
• Joey Kovar, actor
• Tony Scott, director (Top Gun, Unstoppable).
• ETA:  Phyllis Diller, comedienne and actress

• Via Skippy, a collection of Beltway pundits' partisan "faith sentences" so that you won't have to read those journalists any more.  (Batocchio also does the annual Blogroll Amnesty Day and has other neat posts including this dissection of Paul Ryan.)

  Members of the chattering class tend to be well-educated, and it's not that they're stupid per se, but they mistake pedigree and status for merit. They're also lazy and really don't like to do policy analysis. The Beltway Conventional Wisdom is socially determined, not a matter of careful thought and analysis. As a class, pundits are shallow, careless people, and most of their opinions are issued after putting a finger in the wind and judging what will play well with the other club members. [...] Many Beltway pundits do not really think per se as much as they regurgitate unreflective class attitudes; their pronouncements are based on cosmetics, not substance. The Emperor's New Clothes isn't just a parable; it's the eternal ethos of the ruling class.

  ETA: And Mr. Somerby holds a new writer at the New York Times up to ... scrutiny. That's why, o Good People, they won't employ you.
  
• The best bagel in the Bay Area is Schmendrick's.  Also, the most expensive bagel in the Bay Area is Schmendrick's.  Probably still a sweet roll, though.  (They didn't run it past my mother the bagel maven.)
• s. e. smith at Tiger Beatdown on the vanishing paid sick day.

Via Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast, Ohio voter suppression.

It's infuriating that the Republicans aren't even trying anymore to hide that they plan to steal yet another presidential election through vote suppression and dirty tricks -- and all we hear is crickets and half-assed attempts at fighting back from the Democratic side of the aisle.

Hello? WAKE UP OUT THERE!!!!!

• Frank Godden, developer of resort for African Americans.
• William Windom, actor.

[crossposted]

[Vomit warning:  Do not read if you have eaten less than two hours ago.  Just go read Doonesbury for a while.]

And yes, I'm counting Donald Trump as one.

When host Greta van Susteren asked Trump what he thought of polls showing that women really do like President Obama, the business magnate suggested that perhaps their ignorance prevents them from seeing things the way he does.

"Well, maybe they don't know him [Obama]. Maybe they don't get what's going on," Trump said.

Oh, I think women "get what's going on" just fine, Mr. Trump.  Maybe, though, you don't.

And here's someone who claims to understand biology:

“If it’s a legitimate rape,” he said, “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

He said his understanding of the issue came from “doctors,” though he did not specify what kind of doctors – or what, exactly, constitutes “legitimate rape.”

Sorry; I'd have to see the research results first. Because that's not the way bodies work, toots.

ETA:  Justine Larbalestier and Feminist Hulk.

EFTA:  Mr. Akin now says he "misspoke" in the interview.  ("Deep empathy," my Aunt Fanny.)

These guys didn't wank enough as teenagers, poor things. [/sarcasm]

By Neddie Jingo!

(Since July, from the evidence; link is to Civil War story.)

One of the reasons I won't monetize (or lesnerize.  But you knew that) is that I'd get ads based on what I mention.  I've had to talk about lying conservatives a lot, so I'd get ads supporting lying conservatives.

Republic of T leads with a hard hitting piece on Joe Biden's statement and the Republican reaction and why the former is truer than he knew and the latter is rightly and properly scorched:

Conservatives cried foul, but have not yet cited any evidence that the vice president was wrong. And I don’t mean in the literal sense, though it might be a stretch for conservatives like Peter Beinart to consider that Biden did not literally mean that “Romney, who once claimed (falsely) that his father marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., plans to bring back slavery.” (It makes sense, though, that a party that either defends slavery or labels anything it doesn’t like as “slavery” — was too cowardly to face up to the reality of slavery in the constitution — wouldn’t see the deep irony here.)

Mr. Heath is not only talking about black disenfranchisement, either; he's talking about the drug war.

Direct link to News21, which is looking into Republican Satanic ritual abuse "voter fraud."  And not finding a lot, although the source of the push for voter ID seems to be related to--surprise, surprise--ALEC. Via Skippy, who pointed at nbcnews.com, which has the bullet-point version.

Social media in the fight against disenfranchisement.

(The event mentioned has already happened, but the other info is pertinent.)

The new interface also does not like quotes in the labels.  Wouldn't you just know it.

• Via Mercury Rising, Victor Fleischer does not think Mr. Romney's being exactly correct when he claims to have paid 13% in taxes.

  Romney’s claim may be literally true only because our method of tax accounting doesn’t calculate economic gains until those gains are realized through a sale or some other disposition. Romney may have paid tax at a rate higher than 13% on his 2009 return, but the dollar amount was likely to be embarrassingly small as a percentage of his economic income and wealth. That’s why he doesn’t want to release his tax returns. Normal people don’t think like tax lawyers — they would see a tiny amount of tax paid and recognize the injustice.

• Jesse Curtis reviews How Nations Fail.
• The Daily Howler:

  Here at THE HOWLER, we have worked on Campaign 2000, with few breaks, since March 1999. We have no idea when “liberals and media monitors” ever came to hate the way the press corps covered that race. And by the way: Weigel is using his widdler in place of his brain when he describes the problem with the coverage of Campaign 2000. “It wasn't that the press was insufficiently pro-Gore?” As everybody surely knows, though no one is allowed to say, the actual problem was massively different:
  
  The mainstream press was virulently ANTI-Gore all through Campaign 2000! [Emphasis in original.]

  Just for the record, probably about October of that year, I stopped listening to the pundits because, as I stated then, I just could not vote for Bush.  (A few people around me favored Nader, but I kept bouncing off him.)  I'd like to think it was because I recognized that the press corps was Not On My Side anymore, but more likely it was stubbornness on my part.  Gore had his faults (and I think he made a mistake distancing himself from Clinton), but Bush was kind of an empty suit.
• Speaking of elections, Southern Beale reports on some kinds of fraud in the voting process.  [Warning:  the last paragraph is sarcasm and contains depreciated language.]
• And last, the Pussy Riot trial and sentence.  Where I just say that the Russian tradition of jurisprudence goes back through Soviet show trials to the tsars and does not seem to have acquired any justice.

But first:  It's the 35th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley.  Skippy has a performance video (posted by Cookie Jill).

Later I'm going to have to hunt up some funky music to clean out my brain.

• "Excessive" levels of testosterone.  Mr. Cabrera is suspended for 50 games, pretty much the rest of the season.  (Every version I've heard of this story this mornng just said that he'd tested positive for "testosterone." Well, of course he has testosterone.  Nitwits.)
• On the other hand, Felix Hernandez of the Mariners pitched the third perfect game of the season.  

Harry Harrison, author.

I never did get around to reading Make Room, Make Room, but I did read The Stainless Steel Rat and Bill the Galactic Hero.  And of course I saw the movie.

Republicans still want to gut Medicaid (or whatever they call it in your state).

Cutting Medicaid is as unpopular now as it was when Republicans adopted the Ryan Budget. Cutting Medicaid is especially unpopular in swing states. That’s why some Republicans are already trying to distance themselves from the Ryan budget, which is now effectively the Republican budget and the Romney budget.

That’s why the Romney/Ryan ticket will quickly lose its shine, if Democrats just explain just what the Romney/Ryan plans really mean.

Terrance Heath at Republic of T.

I wonder if that's why the lies about Medicare/Affordable Care Act have been popping up lately (I have clicked on too many links today to remember anything that isn't already up).

Via The Sideshow, a short rant on voter suppression efforts by a name you might recognize.  The comments are particularly interesting.  Particularly the commenters whose source of information is so obviously Fox News, which lies.

Well, I had this mess wrangled down to a few small piles by the beginning of May and since then all the papers underwent mitosis and stuff hid (that key was under the clock, where it had been for years, but last week?  Vanished without trace.  And still unfound.  Aaarrrggghhh) and at the other end of the tunnel is a very long freight train.  That's why I've got Billy Joel up today; there are some admittedly rare times when only Billy Joel will do.

• Jurassicpork has an elegy to Johnny Pesky.
• Doghouse Riley has been paying attention to both politics and the Olympics:
• "Look, fifty years ago your party fell under the spell of Western 'movement' 'conservatism', in an effort to halt the onrushing tide of the sixty-three-year-old 20th Century, and simultaneously adopted the idea that Bill Fuhbuckley was an intellectual, in an effort to cover your embarrassment. Neither worked; to survive, the party separated itself from the rest of the political spectrum, then from Reality Herself. Your elder statesmen now are people like Will and Dick Cheney, still pissed off that hippie girls wouldn't lay them in the 60s, and your middle-aged mouthpieces, when they aren't starkers, are toadies like Brooks, who bought the program when they were adolescents and still cling to it like Douthat clings to his St. Christopher medal, hoping Zombie Reagan will rematerialize if they just Believe. Of course Mitt Romney has no ideas. Your entire party has but one, and that one was disproved a generation ago."
• "Usain Bolt is the greatest Olympian since Aleksandr Karelin, and the greatest Track and Field champion since Al Oerter. And he gets no respect from the American media, for being insufficiently American. And for "showboating". This from a country so besotted with itself that every one of its winning athletes is required to parade around using Old Glory as a bath towel.
  
  "He's up to his antics again," I heard someone voice over some video, and even if I remembered who or where I'd be too embarrassed to admit what I was watching, because there's an outside chance it was Today. The man left daylight between himself and the first 100 meter field in history where everybody broke ten seconds. And that's the second time he's done it. If you don't understand how astonishing that is then quit watching sports."
  
• "[A]ren't you the same Bob Costas who rather hurriedly hosted Maurice Greene after the men's 4x400 in Sydney, so you, and he, could excuse the preening and clowning and flag-snapping he and the team had done during their victory lap and on the medal podium? I mean, once it became known to you both that Nike wasn't happy about it?"
• Arabella Flynn on social awkwardness v. possible autism spectrum behavior v. creepy entitlement.  Note to all:  Do not gronkulate my fleebwanger.  Ever.
• Actual study of voter "fraud" using proper statistical methods.

  Voter-impersonation fraud has attracted intense attention in recent years as conservatives and Republicans argue that strict voter ID laws are needed to prevent widespread fraud.
  
  The case has been made repeatedly by the Republican National Lawyers Association, one of whose missions is to advance “open, fair and honest elections.” It has compiled a list of 375 election fraud cases, based mostly on news reports of alleged fraud.
  
  News21 examined the RNLA cases in the database and found only 77 were alleged fraud by voters. Of those, News21 could verify convictions or guilty pleas in only 33 cases. The database shows no RNLA cases of voter-impersonation fraud.

  And that's not even the main study.
  
  "Voter fraud" is beginning to sound like the "Satanic ritual abuse" of the Republican Party.  Speaking of which, Scott Horton notes:

  The problem, of course, is that the truth can’t be found by triangulating between Democrats and Republicans, so the story’s structure serves the interests of the Republicans—indeed, it implicitly legitimizes their tactics. In an interview on On Point, [Ethan] Bronner ultimately conceded the point under pressure, “It’s a little harsh to say that the only point of these things is to suppress voting for Democratic candidates,” he said, “but that clearly will be the effect.” Harsh? It’s not only the obvious truth, but one even Republicans can occasionally be caught admitting. Why should Bronner struggle so mightily to suppress it? And why does he seem to think it makes his writing more professional if he avoids “harsh” truth?

• Lots of links concerning Mr. Ryan.  Via Twistedchick on Dreamwidth.  Because face value is a mask.

Paul Ryan's family's business?  Thrived because of government contracts.

So, just to get this right, Paul Ryan and his family are beneficiaries of expanded government spending to improve infrastructure. They continue to benefit from government contracts, including state and local ones. That's Paul Ryan, whose budget would inevitably gut most infrastructure spending and who, with Mitt Romney, wants to shrink federal spending to the point where, if the federal government had felt that way throughout a good chunk of the 20th century, his family would not have made a dime and, well, then we would have never heard about Paul Ryan.

That's the depth of hypocrisy in play here.

And the Rude One has links to documentation.

Laundry first, though.

OK.

•  There's been a shooting at Texas A & M.  Still awaiting those aliens...
• In memoriam:
• Joe Kubert, legend of comics.  (More the DC than the Marvel side, but I read mostly DC until 1963.)
• Helen Gurley Brown, editor and working-class mother of feminism (there was a bio a few years ago that I reviewed the review, and I should look for it while I still have 300 posts/page, which suggested that she had had an effect on the attitudes of women, and not just around sex.)
• Ruggiero Ricci, violinist (note his and his brother's original names, by the way).
• ETA:  Johnny Pesky, player and manager, Red Sox.
• Phoenix Woman cites Paul Krugman on Paul Ryan.
• Sappho at Noli Irritare Leones on Demisexuality.
• s. e. smith at Tiger Beatdown on the ID problem. (I have been singularly fortunate in that I do have papers and have not (except informally) changed my name, but my birth certificate is ancient and paper and I'm afraid to touch it now.)
• [Highly harsh language warning] Jurassicpork is Rude about Jamie Dimon (and banksters generally)
• Southern Beale on proposed changes at Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).  With reminder:

  We need to have a little chat about the Tennessee Valley Authority, aka, TVA (and by the way, on a “you didn’t build that” note? If you live in the seven-state Tennessee Valley region — almost all Red States, let me add — you are enjoying cheap power made possible by every taxpayer in the US of A. If you’ve got a factory or a business? You didn’t build that. Think VW or Nissan would open a factory here if we didn’t have a ready and reliable supply of cheap power? Yeah, seems the free market fairies didn’t have any incentive to wave their magic wands over this part of the country and bring flood control and electricity to the hicks and hayseeds here. It took that Commie Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress to do that. So suck on that one, why don’t you.

• I forgot to credit Mills River Progressive as the source of the Naked Capitalism piece on Ayn Rand and her swoon over a serial killer.  (There's an article in Wikipedia on said killer, if you want the history.)
• I am slowly getting the hang of just clicking once on the URL and copying it.  Triple-clicking is a habit I got into back in the '90s because one had to.  Go Lion!
• Yes, I've been listening to a lot of Moody Blues and Bruce Springsteen.  Deal.

• 'Mitt' Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, has a Skeletor in his closet.
• He is vocally repudiating the Skeletor ("Ayn Rand"), but there is much documentation on the place of Randish writings in his life.
• Ms. Rand, not to put too fine a point on it, idolized serial killers.
• Not that Mr. Ryan doesn't do bad all by himself.  With coda:

  The funniest (in a very very sad way, not a ha ha way) story I’ve heard is about the Tea Party guy who is bitching and moaning about having to spend down all of his mother’s assets so she can qualify for Medicaid and get the round-the-clock nursing care she needs. Dude, if you hadn’t been voting Republican all of these years, and rallying in your tea-bag adorned hat against healthcare reform, you wouldn’t have to do that.

• And I don't have a fifth bullet point.

Some Nina Simone for your delectation.

Someone was fool enough to believe that a generational argument would flummox Avedon.

Don't you be up in my face telling me how much you hate the baby boomers just because you were told to hate them by a bunch of rich toffs who want to steal money from people who earned it so they can make us all their slaves.

You know why they want you to hate boomers and refuse to listen to their counsel? Because boomers are the last generation that remembers.

[Italics in original; bold is added.]

I will note that there are conservative boomers, and they have to lie to themselves just as much in order to maintain their faith, and that houses built on lies eventually fail the inspection, one way or another.

• Poverty:  Not what you think.

  Yet evangelicals, of all people, should realize that by cutting ourselves off from those our society considers poor, we are impoverishing ourselves. Scripturally, this is obvious, but most of us are not nearly as serious about believing scripture as we claim to be. Most of us are not ready to hear the word of God because our mind is too clouded by American dreams.

• Also from Jesse Curtis:  Old fake "colorblindness."

  In this advertisement we see that colorblind rhetoric is nothing new. This lobbying group was set up by rabid segregationists, yet they presented their argument in colorblind language, and even pretended that the bill was a threat to "the least of us, black and white alike." And notice how they completely invert the meaning of everything. Segregated labor markets and jobs reserved for white skins becomes "the right to freely seek employment." Discrimination based on race becomes "the right to hire, fire, promote and demote without Federal interference."And despite the South having a long tradition of rule by police state, they pretend they're concerned about "the rule of law."

• Via Skippy:  Republicans and The Media (yes, it's a good name for a band) are The Problem.
• In memoriam:  Marvin Hamlisch, composer.
• Southern Beale at First Draft on the Gibson Guitar case.  Er, legal case.

1. Ghostbusters is a remarkable example of deadpan comedy, but everyone knows the punch lines by now.
2. And before the movie was a Bugs Bunny cartoon.  "Super-Rabbit," in fact.  With the cheer "Frickafracker, firecracker, sis, boom, bah!  Bugs Bunny, Bugs Bunny, rah rah rah!" that has been stuck in my head (in long-term storage yet) for a really long time.
3. One of these days, "bran mash" rhyming with "Graham Nash" will be useful.
4. Daisy has a different perspective on the chicken sandwich restaurant thing:

   Too bad we can't get these Christians to care about the poor and homeless as much as they care about hating gays. Society might actually change for the GOOD, and we certainly can't have THAT!

5. I should go to bed now, yes?

Via The Sideshow:  Cartoons revealing that conservatives are obsessed with "voter fraud," probably for the same reason that homophobic politicians are obsessed with gayness.

Speaking of which, problematic steroid with off-label use.  (ETA:  via James Nicoll on dreamwidth)

• Margaret and Helen:

  Maybe it’s just me, Margaret, but I smell a rat. In the name of God, love of country and apple pie, the Republican Party’s biggest criticism is that President Obama is making healthcare affordable. They can’t even call it The Affordable Care Act. They have to call it Obamacare. What does Obamacare even mean? Sure sounds like “I hate poor people” to me. But I don’t always hear well at my age. Maybe it just means “I don’t like a black man as President.” Because I can’t for the life of me understand how else you explain their constant whining about taking care of the old and the poor. I thought that doing otherwise was the morally objectionable thing.

• Fukushima Diary:

  Anti-nuclear members said, Noda stated he won’t restart nuclear plants in rapid succession. He is going to judge on the new strict safety standard under the control of Japanese Nuclear Regulatory Commission. However, the chief of Japanese nuclear regulatory commission is highly likely to be a pro-nuclear scientist. Additionally, he can’t be replaced for 5 years after inauguration. They don’t disappoint us as always. Probably Japanese nuclear regulatory commission is presumed to be the biggest supporting organization for nuclear industry.

• Mills River Progressive:

  What I and other inquiring minds want to know is, when the HELL is anyone from our corrupt puppet Government going to investigate, arrest, and prosecute all the American war criminals living luxuriously among us - wealthy, free, and most receiving gratis health care paid for by US??!!

• Glenn Greenwald in Salon, via AlterNet:

  There is zero question that this drone surveillance is coming to American soil. It already has spawned a vast industry that is quickly securing formal approval for the proliferation of these surveillance weapons. There’s some growing though still marginal opposition among both the independent left and the more libertarian-leaning precincts on the right, but at the moment, that trans-ideological coalition is easily outgunned by the combination of drone industry lobbyists and Surveillance State fanatics. The idea of flying robots hovering over American soil monitoring what citizens do en masse is yet another one of those ideas that, in the very recent past, seemed too radical and dystopian to entertain, yet is on the road to being quickly mainstreamed. When that happens, it is no longer deemed radical to advocate such things; radicalism is evinced by opposition to them.

• Goblinbooks:

  It doesn't make you a better, more loving, more righteous person to pretend you're living in the 18th century while you take advantage of the antibiotics, airplanes, computers, and air conditioning that comes from the scientific progress of the 20th and 21st. It just makes you a tool. And you're making me look like a tool with you.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Avedon also mentioned the push for voter ID to combat the (spurious) rash of illicit voting ("For reporters to treat this issue like just another political squabble is journalistic malpractice."); Scott Horton at Harper's cites some journalistic malpractice ("But it’s a mystery why some reporters emphasize it in the face of misconduct by specific political actors.").

Avedon Carol on paying people to not work:

Personally, it seems to me that in an ideal world, it would be a jolly good thing to have the government pay people who can't function in the workplace to stay out of the way of those who are trying to get things done. Who knows, maybe if they had a guaranteed living income and could just sit around reading or playing games on their own, they could come up with some bright idea that would create jobs for other people who, you know, want to work.

"Overqualification" seems to frighten a great many people involved in the hiring process, when it's not being used as an excuse to avoid saying "You're not our kind," to applicants who'd just like to work.  (The fear seems to be related to 1) being smarter than anyone there is comfortable with and 1) being likely to move on to another job.  As if anyone stayed with one job for life anymore.  That's kind of specious.  As for smarter, if college degrees are required for everything, occasionally a smart person will apply for the job.  Deal.)  A guaranteed income would eliminate this dread bugaboo.

Bob Somerby at the daily howler has some linked work:  "Elite Delusions" and "The Iron Laws of/for Discussing Elites.  No, you can't trust the press either.

Comrade Misfit on:

• Romney's tax "plan" (citation from Brookings.edu--high wonk, for serious)
• Defense cuts
• Romney's contradictions on "socialized" medicine 

Jesse Curtis supports the conservative candidate (of course there's a twist...).

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog on the latest sample of the Irrational Right.

Which means that if Chris Christie really wants to be president, he's crazy to do things like what he did yesterday, which was to break ground on a solar farm in Hackensack. It means that Mitch Daniels, if he runs, will be raked over the coals for having urged a social-issues "truce." It means Bobby Jindal's youthful participation in an exorcism could be a selling point, not a liability.

Doghouse Riley [ableist, sexist, and occasionally harsh language] weighs in on:

• the attempt (by conservative women this time) to recast contraception as a religious issue;

  Neither of these women ever drew a breath in Pre-Pill Moral America. Neither has the slightest inkling, let alone concern, of what life was like for a half-billion Indians in 1948, or a half-billion landless Chinese peasants before Mao, or 20 million African-Americans in their own country around the time the National Review was founded to set them free.

• the chicken sandwich restaurant controversy (let them get their own Google juice)

  I'm gonna guess here that people eat at that joint for the same reason they eat at most joints: the car was traveling past it. It helps, of course, that few if any Americans know what a chicken is supposed to taste like when it isn't raised in an industrial ant farm. I've been astonished by the number of liberal commenters who've praised their crap in the interim. "Their chicken sandwich is really good." Take it from someone who'll never have one: No, it isn't. It's the processed body parts of a bird pumped with chemicals to avoid dying of any of the hundreds of diseases God in His mercy would visit on the simplest of creatures rather than see them "live" like that. What's "really good", apparently, is the fat they fry that crap in, if you go for that sort of thing.

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast has the story: One of the things Republicans are trying to kill is the postal service.

Whew!