lovable liberal

Global harming

2009-12-01T01:14:00.004-05:00

Why bipartisanship is a bad idea...

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

How are you adjusting?

2009-11-30T12:22:00.003-05:00

Click image for full Stephanie McMillan cartoon.

Walked unmolested

2009-11-30T00:00:00.002-05:00

On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan's unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today.

Complete Bushist incompetence, excused and covered by lies from Dick Cheney... Anyone surprised by that?

The horse is gone, and we're still trying to close the damn barn door.

Memories of ancient civilizations

2009-11-29T15:02:00.003-05:00

Print's not dead, but at this point blogging is ordinary.

Shopping Amazon the past two days, I noticed even more variety of its wares. Sex toys? Yep, though I bet they don't ship to Alabama. They're fulfilling orders now that they once left to partners. Why? Servers fulfill Kindle downloads automatically, and Amazon is really good at filling orders.

Click image for full Doonesbury by G.B. Trudeau.

Catching Roadrunner

2009-11-29T14:47:00.003-05:00

Followers ... follow.

Click image for full Chan Lowe/Sun-Sentinel cartoon.

Isaac Newton, if you ask me

2009-11-29T14:27:00.003-05:00

Believers see what they want to see, unconstrained by skepticism or reasonableness. God works in mysterious ... spray starch.

Photo credit for small clip: Grant Morris/AP Photo/The Eagle-Tribune

Ownership

2009-11-29T14:01:00.003-05:00

This is appalling example of unfair, regressive taxation:

[A] generous tax break for hedge fund managers, private-equity specialists, and venture capitalists ... has long been a target of tax equity advocates, who say it unfairly enriches high-earning financiers. Partners in those sectors of the investment industry enjoy a 15 percent tax rate on much of their profits, which are treated as capital gains, instead of the 35 percent rate they would pay if their earnings were taxed under normal income rules.

This vast and ugly loophole could only exist in a system bought and paid for by the interests of wealth. Haven't we bought the financial system back many times over by now?

It's time for pitchforks, metaphorical ones at least.

Why is this?

2009-11-29T12:45:00.003-05:00

There could be lots of maps like this one from the New York Times on food stamp nutritional support:

The now solidly Republican and always conservative South is anti-tax as an article of faith, but it suckles lustily at the teat of the federal government. The liberal states, which not coincidentally are the states with strong educated upper middle classes, subsidize the states whose political heroes so often call us un-American.

So what's the problem? Is it that we're willing to feed your black people?

(This graphic, by the way, is great, an example of how informative Internet journalism could actually be. Click on the thumbnail and play around with the app; there's a lot there to learn.)

God is great

2009-11-28T22:32:00.005-05:00

Tonight, I heard again the commonplace expression, "God is great." In Arabic, it would be "Allahu akbar."

I didn't think it was a marker of terrorism. I didn't mistake it for anything but a culture-specific assertion of faith, an attempt to bring religion into the public sphere.

I heard it - in English - from Tim Tebow after Florida smacked down Florida State. It was a Christian statement of faith - one of many he makes in the opportunity of his celebrity, including a Bible verse on his eye black.

Of course, of course, Islamic terrorists use this expression. The cause of this effect is that they're Islamic, not that they're terrorists.

Maj. Nidal Hasan may well have been a terrorist. Or possibly he just went postal because he was a frustrated failure who couldn't stand his deployment orders. Nonetheless, the fact that he reportedly shouted "Allahu akbar" is not proof of anything other than his religion.

Lessons of Nam

2009-11-27T15:55:00.005-05:00

Slow-learning wingnuts want to draft Cheney. At least they've learned that he won't volunteer.

Hey, you think I could get a story on CNN by the mere act of building a web site about a prominent Democrat? Would it have to be as cheesy and ridiculously thin and incompetent as this? No, not even then?

What if I just sell T-shirts?

Outrage, fine

2009-11-25T11:38:00.003-05:00

... but no censorship. Google shouldn't be picking and choosing what we can see, and they already allow each of us to choose to exclude offensive images.

"The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results," it says.

The American answer to offensive speech is more speech.

"I am absolutely disgusted by this picture, but the Internet has thousands and thousands of offensive images. Should Google get rid of all of them? Where do you draw the line?" [Jerry Wright of Hoboken, New Jersey,] ... said by phone.

Slandering Teilhard

2009-11-23T08:29:00.001-05:00

I've been following the Juxtacomm v. Ascential et al patent saga for years, especially for the past year on Vincent McBurney's now-silenced blog. Some pretty harsh things have been said on all sides, especially by the self-appointed defenders of management but also by various factions of shareholders. I've said some pretty harsh things, too, mostly to those same shills, though little if any of it related to their alleged very tiny penises.

I back down from nothing!

This suit was bullshit from the beginning. Its standing resulted from a commonplace failure of the US Patent and Trademark Office to know its ass from a hole in the ground where it comes to software. Patent 6195662 should never have been granted due to plain prior art. In nearly all its claims, it wasn't novel. Where it was novel (data bags and separate handling of some aspects), it was obvious. Anyone who ever coded an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool - and I worked on more than one - would know that.

Now Teilhard management has apparently announced to their shareholders that they will pursue slander lawsuits against people who have hurt their widdle feewings in the blogosphere. I say "apparently" because, as is the case with everything Teilhard does, they try to keep it as closely held as possible, and I don't have access to their shareholder announcements.

Wow! The people you begged to invest in your lawsuit, now you're suing?! Because they've been impatient for you to fulfill their perception of your pitch promises... Because they've gone years expecting, rationally or not, a dividend just around the corner and they've yet to see even a thin dime. Go read a Yahoo stock chat board for comparison. You think you've been slandered? Get a grip. Criticism comes with this gig.

My advice to Teilhard management: Take off the pull-ups, put on your big boy underwear, and try to sleep through the night without wetting the bed or suing your mommy for your night terrors.

Of course, Teilhard management is mainly threatening to sue the company's own private shareholders, which certainly suggests a different agenda. Unless otherwise convincingly explained, I'd say their agenda is not the recovery of their so-called reputations but instead the suppression by fear of debate, dissent, and organization by concerned shareholders.

In the U.S., we'd call this a SLAPP suit, and it would be grounds for rapid pre-discovery dismissal in some jurisdictions. Canada has a similar law, maybe better than the typical American patchwork. Anyone who would use lawyers as bullies deserves to be slapped down.

You can have my First Amendment when you pry it from my cold dead mouth.

Previous Teilhard posting.

The lone Republican answer

2009-11-22T23:26:00.002-05:00

Tax cuts! Economy's great? Cut taxes. Economy sucks? Cut taxes. And devil take the hindmost. If that's the hindmost half or more, so be it. That's Scott Brown's predictable panacea.

Typically, Brown ignored a key inconvenient fact: In fact, Massachusetts unemployment dropped by a record amount last month, and he still claims it's going up. Is he ignorant of this or just too committed to the wrong claim to give it up?

I've met Brown. He was out collecting nominating signatures, and he went off on an argumentative tangent when I told him I couldn't give him mine. Hey, I'm a registered Democrat, and the Town Clerk - a friend of mine - would have to strike my name from a Republican's petition.

I wasn't impressed with Brown's demeanor.

Making a difference

2009-11-22T11:38:00.001-05:00

Click image for full Doonesbury by G.B. Trudeau.

Faith and proof

2009-11-21T14:31:00.005-05:00

The Shroud of Turin is a proven fake. Proven. It's not a coincidence that the face looks like a 14th century painting. That's exactly what it is.

Faithful believers simply cannot be dissuaded from a story they like. No amount of scientific evidence is adequate.

Witness what a thin tissue of bullshit suffices to overturn definitive radiocarbon dating:

[Barbara Frale, a researcher at the Vatican archives,] asserts that the words include the name “(J)esu(s) Nazarene’’ - or Jesus of Nazareth - in Greek. That, she said, proves the text could not be of medieval origin because no Christian at the time, even a forger, would have mentioned Jesus without referring to his divinity. Failing to do so would risk being branded a heretic.

This fails on level after level. Frale's opinion of what a forger would do in no way answers to the word proof. A "Princess Bride" rejoinder is tempting.

But even Frale's rationale - fear of heresy - is utterly unconvincing. The forger was concocting a holy relic for, no doubt, profit. He was already a heretic. He was already a mortal sinner. He would have been at great pains to make a convincing forgery. The people he was trying to fool weren't such naifs as Frale; they would have noticed the contemporary usage that she claims a forger would have been too afraid to avoid, and that very usage would have clued them to the forgery.

The press, of course, is ever pleased to purvey more bullshit to the credulous in its audience. They're happy to push Frale as a researcher and only in passing to note that she's a historian, that she has no qualifications to dispute the science.

Click image for details on public domain image.

Too little, too late

2009-11-21T13:16:00.004-05:00

Nearly a year ago, Paul Krugman said that the $800 billion stimulus wouldn't fill the gap in aggregate demand. His colleagues are catching up.

Optimistic assumptions in turn contributed to producing a package that if anything is too small, analysts say. “The economy was weaker than we thought at the time, so maybe in retrospect we could have used a little bit more and little bit more front-loaded,” said Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, another financial analysis group, in St. Louis.

Now, finally, there's an expert consensus that we ought to reup for more. Yeah, experts and another half a trillion dollars would buy us the stimulus we needed in the first place. Unfortunately, the Republicans and the Senate Blue Dog Democrats are immune to experts and would rather have Hoovervilles than fix the problem.

Actually, the Republicans gain as America loses, and they're o.k. with that. The Blue Dog Dems? What do they get? Do they put keeping their own jobs ahead of keeping millions of their constituents employed? Or are they just not very smart? Only if the stimulus succeeds wildly are they likely to retain their seats, yet they dither like a bunch of pullets headed for the plucker.

Pro-death

2009-11-20T23:10:00.003-05:00

They call themselves pro-life, but their votes against stem cell research are pro-death. We should call them out on that.

The bait not taken

2009-11-20T09:37:00.005-05:00

A couple of days ago, I received an odd email about Juxtacomm v. Ascential. Unless my correspondent (who, again, could be totally innocent) spoofed his email header, his ISP is in Calgary.

The redacted text is:

My name is __________ and I am a medium investor in Teilhard. I have noticed that you have posted quite a bit in the blogs, past and present and seem to be quite knowledgeable in the industry. I seem to recall that you work(ed) for one of the defendants in the original group. I was wondering if you could answer a few questions?

Let me know if you have the time. I would really like to call you rather than email, so if it is possible, let me know how to get in touch and the best time to call.

Thanks in advance.

Innocent enough on first blush, but after all that Teilhard management has done to suppress open communication about their company, I don't think I was clinically paranoid to think twice. Colloquially paranoid? Sure.

This could still be innocent. I just don't know what questions I'd be willing to answer I haven't already posted about. At this point, the suit's over, and it's hard to see what I might have to offer privately.

I'll tell you this: No way I'm going to have a phone conversation that might expose me to caller ID. But I'm also not going to email back. There's just too much information in a mail header, especially if I were foolish enough to email while inside the corporate firewall (yes, the corporate address is visible even if you're mailing from the web interface of a personal account).

Has anyone else received an email like this?

Previous Teilhard posting.

Duhbya in an up-do

2009-11-20T08:18:00.003-05:00

With all the media foofaraw over Sarah Palin's expensive new ghost-written book, the liberal blogosphere has been all over the map trying to read the tea leaves about her future. The consensus is that, if she has a future, America as a success doesn't.

It's that if that divides our opinions. The cockeyed optimists (still!) among us imagine that there's no way we could actually elect such a simmering crock pot of vanity, resentment, undeserved and unearned self-esteem, and sheer blunt uneducability.

But I remember that this country was stupid enough to re-elect Duhbya (even if we weren't actually stupid enough to elect him in the first place). And she's a lot better looking than Duhbya.

Palin-Cheney 2012. Ouch.

Connecting the dot

2009-11-19T17:29:00.003-05:00

Singular. The FBI looked into Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan correspondence with a radical Islamic cleric. Good. They should have. It was certainly alarming on its face.

Many Republicans, including Joe Lieberman, already have a diagnosis for why the FBI didn't make waves about it, and they don't even know what the FBI found:

[Fran Townsend] expressed concern that “political correctness,” and fear of intruding on Major Hasan’s free speech rights, may have interfered with the sharing of information earlier this year, when an F.B.I.-led counterterrorism team examined his e-mail exchanges with Anwar al-Awlaki, a well-known radical cleric, but found nothing amiss.

By political correctness, Bushists like Townsend mean observance of legal and Constitutional rights. Free speech? Who needs it!

I know they object to having to abide by the law of the land, but that email correspondence is the single dot they have to connect to a conspiracy that coddles soldiering while Muslim. It doesn't seem like a web of failure.

The Walter Reed fitrep (or unfitrep!) might look like another dot, but it's a garden variety personnel matter. In addition to being undeniably Muslim, Hasan was a really bad psychiatrist, and there's no denying that that is another possible motive for his crimes.

The magic lie

2009-11-19T11:38:00.001-05:00

The Velvet Revolution began with a lie, so the New York Times says:

On Tuesday, thousands of Czechs marched through the streets here, to the sound of wailing sirens and the growls of police dogs, eerily replicating a nonviolent student march on Nov. 17, 1989, in which the police rounded on demonstrators and rumors spread that a 19-year-old university student named Martin Smid had been brutally killed. Scores had indeed been violently beaten. But no one, in fact, had died.

...

“Until that day, there had been a deal between the Communist regime and the people: ‘You shut up and we will take care of you,’ ” [Jan Urban] said. “But the moment people had the impression that their kids were being killed, the deal was off. As a journalist, I am ashamed of the lie because it was a professional blunder. But I have no regrets because it helped bring four decades of Communism to an end.”

Wingnuts are looking everywhere for the lie that will bring liberalism down. They send around emails that Snopes refutes but could never kill off in the fevered fear-driven conservative imagination. None of the lies they allege that Barack Obama has told are cited. They are all bullshit intended to appeal to people who will eagerly believe them without proof.

Wingnuts see themselves as heroic. They see themselves as guardians of the values that made the past so much better than the present. But it's fear that drives them.

The Times gets the interpretation of the story wrong. A single lie, no matter how motivating, won't have a butterfly effect on a political system. The Czechs and Slovaks - like all people in the Soviet Bloc - had already known for decades that communism was a system of lies. Their countervailing lie may well have broken the camel's back, but history had already prepared them to change. The police brutality alone might well have been enough.

Wingnuts who hope their lies will bring a reactionary sea change in America make four characteristic mistakes:

The U.S. is badly polarized (thanks to them), but it is not prepared for a mass movement to their side. Maybe they want another civil war, some in order to "correct" the results of the first.
Wingnuts are targeting their lies at their base, even though they think they're targeting people they might persuade.
The sheer volume of wingnut lies and deceits is so large that they have no credibility left. They "know" that they're righteous - God tells 'em, I guess - but we perceive them as habitual liars who are unconcerned with truth and only care about attaining the power that the Bushists so thoroughly abused.
The Velvet Revolution was a liberal revolution, not a conservative one. The fact that wingnuts can't tell the difference between liberalism and the political views farther left doesn't mean there's no difference.

Update (11/25): Digby smacks Rush on this.

Suckers!

2009-11-19T11:14:00.002-05:00

Newly elected Republican governors Christie and McDonnell just couldn't fit Sarah Palin into their schedules. They would have, honest, but they wrote their schedules in cuneiform on stone tablets four months in advance.

They are counting on Palin's supporters to believe such obvious bullshit. I guess if anyone would, her fans would.

Can't alienate the asylum

2009-11-18T23:18:00.003-05:00

Even though Republican Bob McDonnell ran to the center to win the governorship of Virginia, he is a bona fide fundie social conservative, a wolf in sheep's clothing. So it's not surprising that Pat Robertson and he are political associates.

Of course, Robertson only has a short half-life before he says something truly, smarmily insane. I'm not sure this was it:

“Islam is a violent, I was going to say religion, but it's not a religion. It's a political system,” Robertson said. “It's a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world and world domination. That is the ultimate aim.”

He's just jealous!

It is pretty silly for a man who exploits his own religion for profit and who aspires to Christian theocracy in the United States to criticize Islam for its theocratic scripture and its many theocratic institutions. Or has he suddenly become an advocate for the separation of church and state? As if.

However, the CNN item belies its own headline. In fact, McDonnell did disavow Robertson's remarks:

When asked if he believes Islam is “a violent political system,” McDonnell said no, but he did not condemn Robertson.

He just didn't disavow the man, although he tried to pretend Robertson was just another obscure supporter, one of fifteen thousand donors. Giggle.

Even though CNN's headline helps McDonnell with his fundie supporters, Robertson could be the gift that keeps on giving. At some point, he'll give that insincere smile of his and say something really nasty. Will the press notice? I wouldn't hold my breath.

No liberal could get this coverage

2009-11-18T01:06:00.002-05:00

Rudy Giuliani, who holds no position of importance in any organization, said something critical of Barack Obama. O.K., fine, he once executive officer over New York City on 9/11, and it's much bigger than many states whose Republican governors get attention waaay out of proportion with the population they represent. So maybe Giuliani's opinion is news.

Now, though, he's going to repeat his criticism on an RNC teleconference. Maybe there's some slow news day on which that would be news.

But there is no day when news is so slow that the mere announcement that Rudy's going to disagree again with Obama in the future is news. Only a Twitter twit would think otherwise.

Mark Preston mush think that his job is the regurgitate every damn press release he gets - as long as it's from a Republican. No Democrat (well, maybe a pretend Dem) could ever get coverage like this. Ever. From anyone.

Wiener dawgs unite!

2009-11-17T11:31:00.003-05:00

Click image for full Joel Pett/Lexington Herald-Leader cartoon.