Really?

Several political commentators (even some on the right) are having great fun today with the story of how Sarah Palin regaled the CPAC crowd with a creaky, old, repeat snark about Barack Obama using a teleprompter while she was reading the “joke” off a teleprompter.

This raises a serious question about our political commentariat:

Why do they care about anything Sarah Palin says and why do they think we do too?*

Seriously, why do these people have jobs?

*You could replace “Sarah Palin” with “CPAC” here and not miss a a note.

“The America That Works.”

That’s the title of an article in The Economist yesterday which beings by pointing out that, while China is laughing at us, the rest of the world is in despair about us and Washington better get its act together, there is more to the story…

[T]here is also another America, where things work. One hint comes from what those bosses like to call the real economy. Recent numbers from the jobs market and the housing sector have been quite healthy. Consumer balance-sheets are being repaired. The stockmarket has just hit a record high. Some of this is cyclical: the private sector is rebounding from the crunch. But it also reflects the fact that, beyond the District of Columbia, the rest of the country is starting to tackle some of its deeper competitive problems. Businesses and politicians are not waiting for the federal government to ride to their rescue. Instead, as our special report this week shows, they are getting to grips with the failings Congress is ignoring.

A “Must Read” about the history of the history we thought we knew. [UPDATED]

Over the weekend, the BBC provided more background on this story.

If this excerpt doesn’t get your attention, nothing I can add here will. Go read the whole damned–and damning–thing

Shortly after Nixon took office in 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed him of the existence of the file containing national security wiretaps documenting how Nixon’s emissaries had gone behind President Lyndon Johnson’s back to convince the South Vietnamese government to boycott the Paris Peace Talks, which were close to ending the Vietnam War in fall 1968.In the case of Watergate – the foiled Republican break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972 and Richard Nixon’s botched cover-up leading to his resignation in August 1974 – the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

The disruption of Johnson’s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. However, as the new President was taking steps in 1969 to extend the war another four-plus years, he sensed the threat from the wiretap file and ordered two of his top aides, chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to locate it. But they couldn’t find the file.

We now know that was because President Johnson, who privately had called Nixon’s Vietnam actions “treason,” had ordered the file removed from the White House by his national security aide Walt Rostow.

This week in America 2013.

(This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be leaving for the baffled historians who will scour the internets several decades hence–if and when civilization recovers from the imminent modern day Dark Ages–to try to figure out WTF happened in the early 21st century when America went mad…)

We have a Pope. Sadly, another placeholder, a 76-year-old guy who will leave or die in five years or so and allow the Papal Mafia in the Vatican more time to try and drag the Church and its dwindling faithful back to the 16th Century.

CPAC happened. National intelligence level dropped 01%. Hourly. For three days.

Paul Ryan trotted out a new GOP budget. Looks suspiciously like the old GOP budget. They’re not even trying to fool us any longer.

Teabag hero and Texas senator (is that redundant?) Ted Cruz attempted to lecture fellow Senator Dianne Feinstein on the Constitution. It did not go well at all.

A GOP senator’s son came out of the closet and so said senator changed his mind about gay marriage. Charles Pierce was not impressed.

President Obama said the Keystone XL pipeline will not really create many jobs or help make the US itself more energy sustainable but maybe he’ll approve it anyway, just because.

The President also  seemed determined to give his GOP opponents some semblance of victory they do not deserve by cutting “entitlements” which are not entitlements by any definition. Will his apparently desperate need for a “Grand Bargain” lead him to actually be the president who enables the first steps toward the dismantling of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society? Why?

Meanwhile, Congressional wingnuts have decided that the suffering endured by their constituents for whom they cannot currently arrange White House tours is the only bad thing about sequestration.

Also, Donald Trump.

One last once, because Paul Ryan just plain pisses me off.

Just posted on Facebook (that experiment–post there, then here–is over, as, most likely is this site, just sayin’)

No matter how often you scrape this guy’s BS off the bottom of your shoe, it’s right there again a couple of days later…

Here is Paul Ryan’s path to a balanced budget in three sentences: He cuts deep into spending on health care for the poor and some combination of education, infrastructure, research, public-safety, and low-income programs. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts remain, but the military is spared, as is Social Security. There’s a vague individual tax reform plan that leaves only two tax brackets — 10 percent and 25 percent — and will require either huge, deficit-busting tax cuts or increasing taxes on poor and middle-class households, as well as a vague corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.

But the real point of Ryan’s budget is its ambitious reforms, not its savings. It turns Medicare into a voucher program, turns Medicaid, food stamps, and a host of other programs for the poor into block grants managed by the states, shrinks the federal role on priorities like infrastructure and education to a tiny fraction of its current level, and envisions an entirely new tax code that will do much less to encourage home buying and health insurance.

Ryan’s budget is intended to do nothing less than fundamentally transform the relationship between Americans and their government. That, and not deficit reduction, is its real point, as it has been Ryan’s real point throughout his career…

Paul Ryan’s budget: Social engineering with a side of deficit reduction

Some additional ways I have cluttered up the Facebook, just because.

Free money is the best kind.

This past week was free money week. Thursday I received a check from the IRS for just shy of $200 as a refund on my _2010_ taxes. It was indicated as a replacement check so I assume the original was sent but never received by me. The way I pay my taxes with estimated payments which I are generally a tad less than my accountant suggests means I almost always owe them some small amount when I file so I am unaware of any over-payments until and unless they tell me so. Anyway, a very nice surprise.

When I found a VISA gift card in my wallet yesterday I was momentarily of the belief that the universe, recognizing my valuable contributions, was going to reward me with daily bucks going forward but then I recognized it was a Christmas gift from my daughter that I had used up and forgotten to destroy.

One out of two ain’t so bad.

Dumb liquor laws.

“[A] much worse problem than the state monopoly on wine and liquor, but politicians left it completely untouched in the alcohol reform proposal.”

TV notes.

Southland is the best “cop show” on TV at any level since The Wire, blending the intense reality of that classic with the best elements of Homicide, Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue. If you like that sort of thing and are not watching, shame on you. This week’s show alone had three storylines in which no punches were pulled and nothing ended well.

If you ever wondered what happened to Cappie from Greek, check out Zero Hour. As you always suspected, he is saving the world. Or not.

Some things I have posted on the Facebook since last we met…

1. A Sad Truth

 

2. More Evidence of Stupid Stupidity.
You think they cannot get more stupid. You are wrong.

3. He Just Noticed?
Wow! Even Fineman gets it. I am stunned.

White House officials are right to be contemptuous of much of the commentariat. Too often, too many of us (including me) toss out cheap insights or lame one-liners without first doing the reporting to justify them. Nor is web traffic generated by listicles and cat videos what the Founders had in mind when they envisioned a free press as a guarantor of good government. And the White House is correct that it does put tons of useful information out there — much of which is ignored or left unstudied by the national media…

4. New Pope Likely the Same as Old Pope.
And if he’s elected he will be de facto infallible on such matters.

Turkson thinks that the issue isn’t Church-wide cover ups of the sex scandal or a systematic problem within the Church itself. Instead, Turkson believes that all the sexual abuse happened because there were too many gay priests in North America and Europe…

5. Thought Provoking Is Good.

I love posts that make me think about an issue I haven’t always given a lot of thought to and this is one such. Interesting argument, a multi-comment thread in which others disagree with that premise, (mostly) in polite terms. Give it a read.

(Insiders Reference: The comment thread marks, I think, the first time I have seen the name “Albert Brooks” aside from the almost-always recent activity note I get when logging on to Facebook that “Albert Brooks posted in Why The PLCB Should Be Abolished.” or, the almost nearly as often, “Albert Brooks and Lew Bryson posted in…etc.”)

Rubio update.

(Also from Facebook; if you don’t know why, read this)

Earlier today I said that the best comment about Marco Rubio’s amateur hour last night was “Rubio mistakenly puts Tea Party 2013 convention speech in the teleprompter.” I was wrong. It was this, at Huffington Post:

“I heard that even Bobby Jindal was laughing at him.”

Today Rubio came out as a climate change denier, by the way.

Your new GOP, same as your old GOP. But ethnic.

Rubio talks himself dry while saying nothing of importance.

I posted this on Facebook just now:

Marco Rubio’s curious speech post the State of the Union address last night will mostly be remembered for his desperate lurch for the water bottle. But two things about it baffle me.

I thought his effort was entirely tone deaf, thus cementing it in the current GOP style: miss the point, argue against things your opponent never said nor advocated, try to be funny/snarky and come across as just mean instead. My favorite tweet of the night (this is from memory so may note be verbatim): “Rubio mistakenly puts Tea Party 2013 convention speech in the teleprompter.”

However, certain commentators I might not have expected to thought it was just fine. My favorite internet popper of dubious balloons, Paul Pierce,  had kind words for it in his first post today (he’s since come back to reality) and, on MSNBC last night, the not-nearly-as-smart-as-everybody-thinks-she-is Rachel Maddow initially reacted favorably as well, while the not-nearly-as-smart-as-HE-thinks-he-is Chris Matthews, usually a total sucker for fluff and platitudes, tore the speech apart. That was definitely a reversal of roles.

But what got me most was this Rubio comment about his parents:

“I didn’t inherit any money from them.”

Whoa, did somebody accuse him of inheriting money and I missed it? Can it be that he has abandoned the standard GOP position* that inherited money is absolutely the best kind of money? If not, what was the purpose of this non sequitur?

*That’s “the standard GOP position” for Old School Repubs, of course, the country club crowd; the best kind of money for the younger set (Palin et al) is grifter money.

Cardinal sins?

Posted this AM on Facebook:

Gotta admit I’m curious to see if the Catholic Hierarchy will look at the total disaster they’ve made of things under the last two pontiffs and embrace the “let’s give it to the black guy to fix and we can always blame it on him if he doesn’t” approach.