At Last, Heh.

Mr. Romney's tax plan.  Because you need something good in the morning.  Or anytime.

(Via Echidne of the Snakes.  Straight-faced, too.)




[crossposted, of course]

Oh, No, Not Again...

Rearranging the deck chairs.  And calling for ice.                                                                                                                                                                                         .

Wha Hoppen?

Sorry; I just needed to change the background and everything.  There may be more fiddling.  We Shall See.

There's a Word for This

That word is "coercion."

Skippy points at a Think Progress article detailing Koch Bros. attempt to strong-arm employees.  With reproduced letter.

Just so you know.

A Little More Green in the Mix

I finally (and what took you so long?)(small print on screen.  Having to wake self up.  Busy) noticed that I can now listen to Daisy Deadhead's radio program via radio waves her radio website which kicks out a small player with each show when an entry is clicked.

I wanted to find her interview/conversation with Jill Stein, the Green Party Presidential candidate, mentioned recently in a comment.  That didn't turn up, [ETA (10/22/12): Daisy announces Jill Stein in February.] but the vice presidential Green Party candidate, Cheri Honkala, was given one question to answer by USA Today.  (Via naked capitalism)

In Memoriam

• Arlen Specter, former Senator and former Republican;
• Norodom Sihanouk, former King of Cambodia.  (He abdicated in favor of his son in 2004.)

The Amazing Shrinking Defense Budget and Other Stories

• The defense budget may have to shrink (horrors!) and the military may not be able to get all the toys it wants (perdition!) because money is kind of tight in the world.

  Not everyone agrees. Opinion pollsters say defense often tops the list of areas where the public would like to see cuts, while fatigue over the last decade's wars makes new overseas commitments hard to sell.

  [ETA: via Obsidian Wings]
  
• Mills River Progressive on Mr. Romney's plans for the American people who are not rich.  With video.  (Daisy got a picture at the Asheville Comics Expo of a gent in a Palpatine/Vader '12 t-shirt that is apropos here--fifth from the top.)
• Video (no transcript, not captioned), The Age of Uncertainty, ep 2 with John Kenneth Galbraith, at Naked Capitalism.  Social Darwinism, "moral" underpinning thereof.  A lot of it sounds very familiar...  [ETA:  Other episodes can be accessed once this one is played or at YouTube.  Ep 7 ("The Mandarin Revolution") is of particular interest.  Keynes and the Great Depression.  Need I say more?]

Three

Three articles from AlterNet:

• Mythologizing for fun and votes, or using some things people would like to believe, in order to get elected.
• Conservatives believe these four things about sex among the young.
• Americans susceptible to "behavior modification."  Some.  Particularly if they are "infantilized, dependent, alienated, and bored."  Hmmmmm.

A Pot of Message

• Walking a mile in others' shoes.  
• Via skippy, New Mexican official recorded teaching voter suppression:

  Am I the only one that’s had about enough of this war on democracy? The “True the Vote” nonsense and other accusations of voter fraud by the right wing (incidentally, all of the recent fraud scandals are by the right wing) are just excuses to lock minorities and others out of the election because it is well-known that they prefer to vote democratic (with, notably, their best interests).
  
  Interfering with that in any way is un-American, to say the least. We are a country that prides ourselves on the democratic process and this has no place in it.

• Spain still has not totally shaken off the effects of the fascist Franco regime.  (Although Franco is still dead.  I know there are Saturday Night Live fans out there.)
• Terrance Heath's take on the VP debate and Mr. Biden.
• Matt Taibbi's take on the VP debate and Mr. Biden.  [ETA:  via Mills River Progressive]
• Southern Beale on yet another lying politician.
• What was that about Republicans being better on security issues?

Nice to Nasty

• Cara continues with the Top 5 Motown Singles of 1970.  Marvelous.
• The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union.  I suppose that means they now have to start a war...
• Women are now allowed to inherit in Botswana.
• Best smackdowns of right-wingers.  (Not necessarily zingers, note.)  Oh, all right, a taste.

  On a September episode of her eponymous MSNBC show, Melissa Harris-Perry had on “business and finance expert” Monica Mehta as one of her guests. Mehta was spouting a lot of right-wing, pro-business, anti-welfare talking points, which Harris-Perry clearly took issue with. The discussion came to a head when Mehta referenced the risks taken by business owners. “What is riskier than living poor in America?” said Harris-Perry, raising her voice. “Seriously, what in the world is riskier than being a poor person in America? I live in a neighborhood where people are shot on my street corner. I live in a neighborhood where people have to figure out how to get their kid into school because maybe it'll be a good school and maybe it won’t. I am sick of the idea that being wealthy is risky. No! There is a huge safety net that whenever you fail will catch you and catch you and catch you. Being poor is what is risky. We have to create a safety net for poor people. And when we won’t, because they happen to look different from us, it is the pervasive ugliness! We cannot do that!"

• Ten conservatives trying to spin slavery as a Good Thing.  I have flushed better digestion by-products.

Paper Clips and Erasers

• Some advice for the Vice Presidential debate, too late to do any good, of course.
• Via Mills River Progressive, a jeremiad on America:

  Moreover, tyranny and violence came out in force, rights to free assembly and speech had long disappeared and no one had been there to notice. Worse still, more openly sold those rights for nothing more than the promise of security, with only those of intellect, fewer each day it seems, aware that the enemy was and is…us.

• Echidne of the Snakes on sexist questions when interviewing women but not men.

There were other interesting links, but I ended up tracking down an ancient kerfuffle.  Those were the days...

Yes, it's more "Fox News Lies," but the picture (thanks be to Photoshop) says it all.

"Including 'An' and 'The'"

So I am perambulating in downtown Oakland, as is my wont, and I happen to pass the Paramount just as the naturalization ceremony has concluded.  In front of the theater there are tables and hawkers and people with signs because the first thing you need to do after becoming an American citizen is to buy a cover for your certificate.  There are Romney and Obama tables, with pamphlets, and there are people both near the tables and scattered in the crowd and the only sentence they know is "Are you registered to vote?"

Mostly.

I am coming up alongside the Romney table.  The man there is repeating "Are you registered to vote?" to the people passing him.  I start to pass him.  "Hello, how are you today?"

Now it might have been that he varied the sentence every 8 or so people so that his mouth didn't seize up.

Nah, you don't believe that either.

See, I am not, to put it plainly, the Romney demographic in about 7 or 8 different ways, three of which are visible.

So I turn.  And I smile.  And I say, "Fine, thanks, and you have just confirmed what I've been saying on my blog for months.  Thank you."

And I walk away and offer congratulations to the people who know a lot more about this country than "patriots."

My Best Buster Keaton Face

Via delux_vivens on dreamwidth, Brad Friedman (of the Brad Blog, because there are 3,000 Brads in Blogtopia ™) on the voting scandal in Florida.  Three guesses as to the perpetrators, and the first two don't count.

Scant Mercy

• Long and beautiful post at flip flopping joy about roadkill, Battlestar Galactica, absent fathers and the Chicano archetype.  Very worth the time.

• It would undoubtedly shock Geller and her Islamophobic buddies to know that Muslims have been in America for so long they could almost have formed a welcoming committee to the Daughters of the Revolution.

  Lynn Parramore at Naked Capitalism. There's more.  I believe I mentioned that the Syrian community of lower Manhattan predated the Civil War.
• Southern Beale at First Draft:  Please Just Go Galt Already.

  Yes, please go. Go now. Don't wait until November. You are a bloated leech on the hard work of the middle class, the real engine of our economy, and the very people whom you deride as living a worry-free existence thanks to your sacrifice. This country would be better off without you. Ta-ta. Buh-bye.

I Thought I Was a Pessimist...

...but jurassicpork has me beat.

And that was after I saw this item at Raw Story/Pandagon on female supporters of Todd Akins.

Sorry I ruined your lunch.

Morning Cup of Lava -- I Meant Java. Java.

Article on debt and individualism by Philip Pilkington, posted at Naked Capitalism by Yves Smith, ending thus:

Almost every moral pillar of our contemporary societies – from the discipline of economics, to ideas that dominate about what constitutes good statesmanship – militates against the formation of such a new mythology. And, as psychopathology teaches us well, people are quite stubborn in their giving up of their mythologies, despite their possibly high degree of dysfunction. But given that the stakes are rather high and humans are a fairly adaptive species, we may surprise ourselves yet.

The daily howler has a posting on Jim Lehrer, moderator of last week's debate.  It is not flattering.

Jesse Curtis on Christianity and citizenship:

Besides, as some of the earliest Christians showed, the command to submit to government is conditioned upon being able to do so without violating any higher moral principles, such as loving our neighbor and sharing the gospel. Paul may have told the early Christians to submit to Rome, but he didn't tell them to get excited about the armies spreading Roman values on the frontier.

Also, you might want to stop eating rice:

It was no secret that arsenic was going into farms and fields where our food is grown, and yet the question of where the arsenic went was mostly ignored. The FDA recently released its own tests, confirming Consumers’ Union’s findings. As their data shows, even organic rice contains arsenic. (Organic farmers cannot use arsenical pesticides, but they can use manure from chickens fed roxarsone and other arsenical drugs.)

Let the River Run

So I mention Gary Johnson and he promptly turns up in the Grauniad (I hope that is correctly misspelled) advocating the legalization of marijuana.  Too bad he's a libertarian.

Conspiracy theories are supposed to be coherent, people!  I mean, really, the point of conjuring up a conspiracy is to make sense of something that doesn't make any sense.  This one would be like Warren Buffett deciding to buy up, oh, all the Twizzlers and then refusing to sell them on the sly to teenagers.  Not even Tea Partiers could be that brain-dead.

Here's a list of bills Mr. Obama proposed or favored that have been blocked by Republicans.  With sources.  Note that one of them is a jobs bill and one extends unemployment.

I have been to St. Vartan's and had Khataiff.  Yum!

Flights of Fancy Sing Thee To Thy Rest

The political class of the United States needs an intervention.  Possibly long-term.

• Gary Johnson (who I think is the Libertarian Party candidate, which shows how great an impact he has) was not invited to the debate (awwwww) and also seems to believe the men represented on Mount Rushmore were third party candidates. He apparently doesn't realize that:
  
  • Teddy Roosevelt was a third party candidate after he'd already been President,
  • George Washington did not belong to a party,
  • Abraham Lincoln's party was not a third party by the time he ran,
  • And Thomas Jefferson organized an oppositional party.
  Which means he's wrong on the history Right There.
• Echidne of the Snakes discusses Rep. Paul Broun.  No one seems to have mentioned to Mr. Broun that the Vatican has conceded that Galileo was correct; perhaps someone should.

Beeping to Beat the Band

• Ocean acidification.  Specifically, the Newsrag of Record downplaying it:

  So what is the coded message here? Yeah, we’re gonna lose some species, but they are so obscure most scientists don’t recognize them. The fact that acidification can and likely will make the ocean hostile to many forms of life, either directly or second hand, by diminishing their habitat or food supply, is acknowledged in “many will not adapt to new oceanic conditions,” a remarkably bloodless formulation.

• Permanent floating Global Financial Crisis.

  Yet unlike other post-Enlightenment political philosophies – both the capitalism of Adam Smith or the communism of Karl Marx – Mill saw growth as more than material. Borrowing from its classical antecedent – the Ancient Greeks spoke of humanity’s goal aseudaimonia, or flourishing – modern society is built on the ideal of improvement, development, growth and expansion, but it needn’t be so mono-dimensional. Indeed, Aristotle considered an essential pillar of eudaimonia, or one of the four cardinal virtues, to be moderation.

Because Naked Capitalism never sleeps.  Apparently, neither do I.  zonk

Jambalaya, Cornfish Pie, Filé Gumbo

• U.S. District Court Judge overrules ballot suppression tactic.

  [Michigan secretary of state Ruth] Johnson keeps claiming that there are thousands of noncitizens on the Michigan voting rolls, but hasn’t provided actual evidence to back that up. Her claims that illegal votes have been cast in previous elections are contradicted by her own Bureau of Elections. The “need” for that citizenship checkbox is a fabrication, which makes the motives for it suspect. [Emphasis added.]

  Via Mercury Rising.
  
• From the daily howler:  Debates past and present, with lies, corrections, omissions, and ignorance on the part of the media.  Mr. Bush and Mr. Romney lied, but the latter is actually getting called on it in real time.  
• Yankees play Orioles, Tigers play Athletics, the Reds play the Giants, and Washington plays St. Louis.  Best of luck in your best-of-seven!
• Originally from Salon, in AlterNet, via skippy:  Ten ideas for taking America back from the 1%.  I like reregulating Wall Street and fixing the tax system, but the other ideas are good, too.
• Also from AlterNet:  Bill Clinton was Right.  With graphs.

  Some observers will want to focus on Obama’s record. Here’s what we found on that score (using, as noted, the most recent available numbers for Obama). Based on all three of our measures, Obama’s manufacturing jobs record is currently better than eight of the nine Republican presidential terms. President Ronald Reagan’s second term does slightly better than Obama’s incomplete first term, but the numbers are close enough that this may change once we have all the numbers. An interesting question is what Obama’s manufacturing jobs record might have been had he not intervened to save General Motors and Chrysler.

• Some more from AlterNet:  Noam Chomsky (yes.  That Noam Chomsky) on climate change/global warming/your euphemism of choice:

  [...] Previous estimates had summer ice disappearing by 2050. “But governments have not responded to the change with any greater urgency about limiting greenhouse emissions,” Gillis writes. “To the contrary, their main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including drilling for more oil” – that is, to accelerate the catastrophe. This reaction demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children and grandchildren for short-term gain. Or, perhaps, an equally remarkable willingness to shut our eyes so as not to see the impending peril. That’s hardly all. A new study from the Climate Vulnerability Monitor has found that “climate change caused by global warming is slowing down world economic output by 1.6 percent a year and will lead to a doubling of costs in the next two decades.” The study was widely reported elsewhere but Americans have been spared the disturbing news. The official Democratic and Republican platforms on climate matters are reviewed in Science magazine’s Sept. 14 issue. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, both parties demand that we make the problem worse. [...]

I think AlterNet has to go on the blogroll.

Also, I need to remember to link to items before hitting Publish.

Post-Season Off the Starboard Bow!

Washington Nationals are not only the Eastern Division Champions, they have the best record in the league.  In both leagues.  Not bad for an expansion team.  The Wild Card playoff will be between Atlanta and St. Louis.  Mwahahahahaha.  The winner of that probably plays the Western Division Champs, and Washington gets to play Cincinnati.  (The actual schedule is probably different.)

Texas, meanwhile, gets to play either Baltimore or the Yankees, depending on who loses today's game.  And then Oakland and Detroit will mix it up.

I can hardly wait.

Afternoon Delight

So the first debate is tonight and it's soaking up a lot of the oxygen in the blogosphere; Driftglass has a training video for new judges plus some standards for evaluating debate.  (If you do not care for Mr. Romney, you might find this amusing.)

Meanwhile, Jurassicpork spotted an open letter from a manufacturer on craigslist and responded with a few of the realities of jobhunting in the twenty-first century.  (All that stuff one might suggest he try?  He's tried it already.)  Most unemployed people would prefer working, but employers are shutting out as many as they can through interlocking (and unrealistic) requirements.  Also, they're still discriminating.

Bipartisan banker pampering, or Wall Street might someday get the traditional wet-noodle lashing.  Maybe.  Power and disillusionment and Mr. Biden.  One of the very few areas where it is true that "both sides do it."  (Senator Feinstein isn't really all that liberal, though she must seem so to the rightward-leaning.)

And according to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tucker Carlson is flogging a video that he already reported on in 2007.  ETA:  Jesse Curtis is On the Case:

I'm glad to see a video like this. I sure hope Obama was angry, and I hope he's still angry. If you're not angry about racial injustice, I have trouble trusting you. If you're not angry, I'm not sure how to relate to you. I understand that many of us have not had the experiences necessary to open our eyes. I can respect that. But these men take it upon themselves to explain the truth to millions of people. They have audiences of millions, and as such their responsibility is heavy. Yet all they know to do is demand that everyone see the world exactly as they do. These men are not necessarily bad, nor are they necessarily stupid, but they have to be one or the other.

The conservative pundits keep promising the Bogeyman, but all they seem to produce is mouse corpses.

Also,

A judge upheld the contraception mandate.

Guess what?  Employees have religious freedom too.

Withholding the benefit is a violation of the employee’s religious liberty and since the benefit is part of a compensation package, trying to control how the employee spends it on religious grounds is really no different than telling the employee she can’t spend her money on birth control because you sign her paychecks.

[...]

Because this is about female sexuality and there’s all these sex-phobic and misogynist arguments being thrown around, the basic issue has gotten somewhat obscured, which is that your boss is not actually your master. Also, your compensation is not your allowance, and they don’t get to dock your pay because they think you’re being naughty on your own time. Conservatives would generally like to give employers more control over their employees, so anyone who supports the plantiffs in these lawsuits because they’re pissed that women are having sex without including them is being an utter fool, as well as an asshole. If the door is opened to allowing employers to control how you use your compensation after you’ve earned it, god only knows what other kinds of restrictions on how you spend your money they’re going to start angling for.

Brief Quote About Distrust of Polls from The Economist

It is, of course, possible that pollsters are all collaborating in an effort to re-elect Barack Obama, just as it is possible that pollsters are all members of the Order of the Knights Templar who are conspiring to effect the return of the Emperor Barbarossa and reinstate the Holy Roman Empire.

It's actually calling for less fanaticism when citing polls.

Mr. Romney just does not endear. Mr. Romney's not much fun with beer. Mr. Romney's written off my tribe. Mr. Romney has that robot vibe.  It's that simple.

Exactly Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel

but necessary.

In other words, Driftglass whacks the expired equine that is David Brooks.

And Melissa McEwan of Shakesville looks at another reason people might not vote for Romney:

Gee, it's almost as if staking out the position that women should have no control over their reproduction, and defending that position with narratives like "women are lying bitchez about rape, anyway," as if women are a dispensable voting bloc and not 52% of the population, is a bad idea. Huh. Who knew.

Y'know, grandfather clauses sound harmless enough if you don't know the history.

Via giandujakiss, voter suppression in Ohio.

From the first article (L.A. Times):

The racial dimension of the 2012 clash over weekend voting burst into the open last month when one of Ohio's most powerful Republicans, Franklin County GOP Chairman Doug Preisse, told the Columbus Dispatch, "We shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African American — voter-turnout machine."

Some Democrats see the developments in Ohio as part of a national drive by Obama's opponents to minimize turnout of his supporters, one that includes efforts elsewhere to impose new voter ID rules.

"Too much of this is going on for this not to be a coordinated effort," said Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Democratic Party in the tea party stronghold of southwestern Ohio.

The Rev. Rousseau A. O'Neal, one of a group of black ministers from Cincinnati who provided buses to take African Americans to the polls in 2008 and plan to do so again in November, described the tea party project and the curtailment of weekend voting as "bigotry of the highest order."

"Who ever thought we'd be fighting for the right to vote in 2012?" he asked.

The tea party groups, scattered around the state, have joined forces under the banner of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project. It is an offshoot of True the Vote, a Texas organization that has recruited volunteers nationwide to challenge voter rosters and work as poll watchers.

[...]

In Ohio, election records show, one of the project's top priorities has been to remove college students from the voter rolls for failure to specify dorm room numbers. (As a group, college students are strongly in Obama's camp.)

Voters challenged include 284 students at the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, 110 at Oberlin College, 88 at College of Wooster, 38 at Kent State — and dozens more from the University of Cincinnati, Miami University, Lake Erie College, Walsh University, Hiram College, John Carroll University and Telshe Yeshiva, a rabbinical college near Cleveland.

So far, every county election board that has reviewed the dorm challenges found them invalid.

From the second (Slate):

At issue are potentially thousands of Ohio ballots that the state will not count solely because of poll worker error. Here’s the problem: A number of the state’s polling places, especially in cities, cover more than one voting precinct, and in order to cast a valid vote, a voter has to be given the correct precinct ballot. Poll workers, however, often hand voters the wrong precinct ballot mistakenly. In earlier litigation involving a disputed 2010 juvenile judge race in Hamilton County, Ohio, a poll worker testified to sending a voter whose address started with the numbers “798” to vote in the precinct for voters with odd-numbered addresses because the poll worker believed “798” was an odd number. This “right church, wrong pew” problem with precinct ballots was a big problem in 2008, when over 14,000 such ballots were cast.

Ohio law says wrong precinct ballots cannot be counted, even for the races for which a person is eligible to vote (including president), and the Ohio Supreme Court confirmed this point in 2011, in the dispute over the juvenile judge race. Astonishingly, under Ohio law a voter can be disenfranchised not through some nefarious plan but through the simple incompetence of poll workers.

In the SEIU case, voters are arguing that the failure to count wrong precinct ballots caused by poll worker error violates the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process. A federal district court in Ohio agreed, and issued a preliminary injunction requiring the state to count these ballots (and some other provisional ballots as well). Ohio has appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit—that’s the hearing today.

Ohio, remember, is a swing state; there was some dispute about the results in 2004.

ETA:  Judge in Pennsylvania stops voter ID requirement from going into effect.  This year.

The Hard Stuff

In which people analyze things by way of other things and what I ignore is many other folks' fascination.  Or something like that.

• Mark Evanier looks at U.S. businesses and their practices:

  The thing I was asked to be an expert about — and I wasn't, which was one reason I said no — was about executive compensation. A senior exec was hired away from another firm. He did almost nothing at the new firm — and what he did do was by his own admission, wrong. They fired him and he left with a $20 million Golden Parachute. (I told them I could make bad decisions for them for less than half that salary.) The suit was about that he thought he deserved more.

• Via Cofax7's linkspam, the problems with political polling (the article is actually titled "The.  Polls.  Have.  Stopped.  Making.  Any.  Sense." but as you know I am rather an agnostic about polls and surveys anyway so my bias is confirmed; your bias may vary) in this election.  Yes, it is six pages.  They're still not allowed to make robocalls to cell phones.  Yet.
• Doghouse Riley on Mr. Romney as fact-checker.

  So to recap: the President a) refuses to acknowledge that insurance-paid contraception is actually abortion; b) refuses to admit that for-profit operations which receive federal funds but are owned by a particular cult are, in fact, churches, because 1) Karl Rove and 2) the Constitution clearly say so. And that c) this qualifies as "unprecedented", despite the fact that the identical thing has occurred in  American history, and occurs today with some of those same institutions under state law, and has actually been topped, unquestionably, by other restrictions on religious expression (notably the anti-Mormon laws that preceded Utah statehood).

Can I do a Rip van Winkle now?

There is also (you can Google it; I need a hot shower with a loofah) a new right-wing smear asserting that Mr. Obama was fathered by someone other than his father (which would mean Mr. Obama is neither Kenyan nor Muslim; I don't suppose that bunch is smart enough to figure that that invalidates their original lie).  The proper, Archie-comic level response is "Puh-leeeeeeeeeze!"  Yeah, they got nothin' (technical term) if that's the best they can do.

In better news, Washington has clinched the Eastern Division title; Atlanta has clinched the wild card.  Washington and Cincinnati are tied for best record in the NL.  Detroit gets the Central Division title (White Sox eliminated); Yankees, Baltimore, Texas, and Oakland have playoff slots.  St. Louis is likely to be the other NL wild card team.  We shall see.

In Memoriam

1. Eric Hobsbawm, historian.
   
   I have one of his books around here.  Somewhere.
2. Dr. Barry Commoner, scientist.

The Billionaires Cower

They're calling themselves victims.

No, really.