Regarding Rep Steve King’s pointless comments that Obama would be a victory for terrorists. David Kurtz thinks that

It doesn’t matter whether you support Obama or Hillary, it’s got to give you pause that the leading Democrat in the race (at least in terms of delegates) can’t handle these predictable attacks more effectively.

I am not convinced that there is any good way to address this nonsense, because its so off the deep end. Its not the same as the swift boat attacks which made specific claims (John Kerry was not a war hero) that had to be addressed by the campaign. Rather, these types of comments are intended to create sort of feeling out there that Obama = terrorist coddler. This can only in my opinion be counter by ignoring the claim and staying on message about terrorism, defense etc. Create a positive message. If Obama goes on TV and specifically addresses this attack it will make it bigger, you don’t want to be caught on TV saying “my middle name, Hussein, will not cause terrorists to dance in the streets when I win”.

This is a classic tactic, make a spurious claim hoping to get the candidate on TV denying it: “I do not eat babies. I have never eaten babies”.

PS: Elliot, we hardly knew ye. Word to the wise: don’t sleep with prostitutes.

See this NYT article.   NYC schools, and soon Baltimore too, are giving kids monetary incentives to excel on standardized tests.   This is actually great news, because it blatantly exposes the once “hidden curriculum” of disciplining students to be capitalists.  Hey kids, dodgeball is the new class war.

Okay, so there are surely lots of reasons why we haven’t been blogging lately (laziness, other work, drugs, etc.). Yet, is it also because we’ve been too busy following the elections and worshipping Obama to write on our blog about real politics?  I say “real” politics, because of course we could write about the election contest itself, but that seems so manufactured, what with all the tens of millions of dollars the candidates spend on PR.  I’m hypothesizing that we’ve been suckered into this world of manufactured politics.  Personally, I think that what hooked me is all the numbers (the delegate counts, the polls, the campaign contributions, etc.), because my obsession with these numbers is just like how I used to follow sports stats everyday, but with an additional veneer of legitimacy attained from the supposedly “democratic” character of representative government.     Well, I’ve had enough of this horseshit.  As I’d say stop watching basketball and go outside to play it with your friends, so I’ll now say it with politics: reject the spectator sport version, and instead go out into your community, participate in direct democracy, and create a better world yourself (and do it now, not waiting a year for our holy savior Obama).  BTW, I was inspired to write this post from reading James Herod’s Getting Free.

It’s so amusing!

Make your own album cover! Here’s what you do: The article you get when you click this link is your band title.

The last four words of the last quote on this page is your album title (you will probably need to reload the page if you do more than one, if you’re like me.)

And the third picture, the upper right hand, will be your cover photo.

I’m adding a rule that you have to square off whatever picture you get, so that it’s a realistic album cover.

Mine after the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

Defense budget (minus DoE and Iraq war): $638.9 billion

Cost of Iraq war: $141 billion

Mega lefty Chalmers Johnson on military Keynsianism.

The economy is faltering. Look out, because our leaders see it as another excuse to cut taxes for the rich. They did it in the 80s and they will do it again. The Milton Friedman conventional wisdom is that economic troubles are cause by insufficiently pure implementations of a pure free-market economy. So when times get tough they will reach for the low taxes switch. But unfortunately they won’t cut spending, they will just increase the debt. That’s because huge amounts of the budget are for defense, and for some reason cutting the defense budget is never on the table.

The economy seems to be sputtering, luckily I have found two experts that know more than I to talk about whats going on. The first is the always interesting Paul Krugman

He thinks our economy has been the beneficiary of a lot of foreign investment:

In particular, third world economies…were shaken by a series of financial crises beginning in 1997…they abruptly switched from being destinations for capital to sources of capital, as their governments began accumulating huge precautionary hoards of overseas assets.

The result, said Mr. Bernanke, was a “global saving glut”: lots of money, all dressed up with nowhere to go…

In the end, most of that money went to the United States. All of this was right, except for one thing: U.S. financial markets, it turns out, were characterized less by sophistication than by sophistry, which my dictionary defines as “a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone.” E.g., “Repackaging dubious loans into collateralized debt obligations creates a lot of perfectly safe, AAA assets that will never go bad.”

…Directly or indirectly, capital flowing into America from global investors ended up financing a housing-and-credit bubble that has now burst, with painful consequences.

What does this mean for us? After the jump, a different view:

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Well, it looks like the economy is starting to fall apart. Too much foolishness on too many levels. Profligate government spending, very lax credit standards, “creative” investing and of course a housing bubble. (thank you, ownership society). I don’t know enough to be able to say if this could have been avoided. At this point I suspect that their isn’t much that can be done to stop it.

What will be the consequences? Certainly that will affect the election, it will be very interesting to see how.

Until about yesterday I was thinking to myself that Mitt Romney would be a great opponent because he had almost no chance of winning. Mitt Romney is, in my opinion, a transparent panderer. Right now he is on the campaign trail trying to out-bigot and out-hawk all the wingnuts in the field. This is a guy who was pro-choice, signed a (flawed) universal health care bill in massachussets and was governer when same-sex marriage was made legal there. This was all in the last five years, not twenty years ago.

But then it occured to me…dishonesty can work. This is a guy who managed to get elected in Massachussets. If he gets the nomination he will run to the center as fast as he can. He will suddenly be the reasonable candidate. And with our useless political press he might even get away with it.

This article made me feel ill:

The big showdown between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could come down to California’s “beer-drinking Democrats” versus its “wine and cheese” liberals - with the Bay Area playing a pivotal role in the outcome.

Can we stop talking about politics in the terms of beer, pizza, coffee or other class markers that may or may not exist? Gah.