Asides
LIP SERVICE
Yes, she thinks you think she’s speaking extemporaneously; not reading off a teleprompter.
Never hesitate to admit failure. Make no attempt to hide failure under deceptive smiles
and beaming optimism. It sounds well always to claim success, but the end results are appalling.
Such a technique leads directly to the creation of a world of
unreality and to the inevitable crash of ultimate disillusionment.
— The Urantia Book
STILLWATER, MN — Resplendent in her foxy* deep blue silk jacket and cultured pearls, Michele Bachmann announced she will not seek another term in the United States Congress.
The Tea Party darling’s very long list of denials about why she is not leaving may become more credible, if and when the rumor we are accused of starting turns out to be true: that she will be joining “Prancersize” inventor Joanna Rohrback‘s firm as its Presidential “Prancer” and Commander-in-Chief horsey:
Another unfortunate example of Camel Toe. But all is not lost; watch with the volume off.
And speaking of prancing show horseys… another angry beaver attacked a man on a roadside near Shestakovskoye lake, west of Minsk, Belarus, slicing through an artery in his leg which caused him to bleed to death. It was the most recent in a string of angry beaver attacks in Belarus, where the beaver population has tripled in the past decade to around 80,000. Belarusian beavers can weigh up to 65 pounds and stand three feet high.
Experts say the increase in attacks is largely due to springtime aggression in young beavers that are trying to make a name for themselves and stake out their own territory after being forced to leave home by their parents. Some older beavers can also become disoriented in life and attack out of fear; others become bitter and vengeful when faced with the inevitable crash of their ultimate disillusionment.
* Foxy I.e., Fauxy, Republican shemale drag
Michele From Hell Bachmann, R.I.P.
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Like progressive bloggers blessed with a satirical warp everywhere, we at US are deeply saddened by the departure from the Beltway Bubble of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Wingnuttia). A search of our site contains more “here” “here” “here” Bachmann links than we have the time, desire, or patience to document.
The many comments from the blogosphere over this momentous political and comedic event spans the political spectrum. From Reality Challenged Wingnuttia, we have The Beckster who called it “sad and tragic”, the result of the “Chernobyl” that is Washington, D.C. with her “honor and integrity” intact. (Gag me with a ladle.)
On the left, we enjoy FDL’s TBogg, who writes:
I, for one, am sad to see her go and, in fact, I was previously unhappy to hear that she might actually lose in the upcoming 2014 election. While there are many profoundly stupid conservatives in the House (I’m looking at you guys: Louie Gohmert, Patrick McHenry, and Jason Chaffetz) to hang around the Republican neck, Michele Bachmann brought a special bright-eyed ingenue lunacy to the party. Although she lacked the 12-hour meth-binge feral viciousness of a Sarah Palin, she was no less a virtual Pez dispenser of “Hunh? Whut?….” quotes, but always served with a “Bless their hearts” chaser and a squirrels in the attic stare.
I shall miss her star turn panache and amphetamine eyes; she gave good face to the Loonier Than Thou wing of the party. Now we are left with Peter King and the aforementioned Gohmert who are nothing more than stock villains sent over from central casting when the call went out for red meat slabs of resentment, ignorance, and opportunistic yahooism. I expect that Michele will probably move on to something a bit more on the evangelical side, since she lacks the dirty stripper-past-her-prime hardness that Fox prefers from its lady talkers,
Of course the big loser in all of this is delightful hubby Marcus Bachmann who stands to lose more “Me Time!” with Michelle always about the house and constantly under his marabou bedroom slippers with the four-inch heels.
What he said.
(With a nod to Liberace, for his implied, fabulous influence on Marcus.)
Rethug Scandophiles
Impatience is a spirit poison; anger is like a stone hurled into a hornet’s nest.
–The Urantia Book
Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore writes :
Even as “investigators” seek without much success so far to find evidence that the IRS scrutiny of applications for 501(c)(4) status represents a vast political conspiracy—one that might have changed the outcome of the 2012 election, no less—the aggrieved Tea Party Movement is taking action…
I would have hoped everybody has figured out by now that the Tea Party Movement is not some news-from-nowhere citizens uprising that’s recruiting previously apolitical Americans in a battle against Washington, but a large, radicalized segment of the conservative “base” of the GOP (none the less Republican for the self-identified independent status of many Tea Folk, who vote Republican very loyally but don’t want to identify with it because they don’t trust it is or will remain sufficiently conservative). As such, it is much less a threat to the Democratic Party than to the GOP—insofar as Republicans have political objectives that don’t always coincide with the truculant and ideologically extreme attitudes of the activist “base.”
Precisely. The recent hyperventialtions by the Rethug Scandophiles are less a threat to the Obama Administration than it is to the Rovian wing of the Grand Obstructionist Party. A point we have been trying to make here repeatedly.
Or as Willie might have said: Go for it:
“Lay on, McDuff, and be damned he who first cries, ‘Hold, enough!”
-William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Medical Repatriation: Bedsores In Paradise
Stephen’s helpful suggestions on how to reduce hospital overcrowding
Stephen Colbert warns us that a hospital is no place to get sick, especially if you are indigent or have fallen into a coma.
If, for instance, you’re an undocumented immigrant, you might find yourself discharged from an Intensive We Don’t Care Unit in Las Vegas and given a one way bus ticket to Los Angeles, with 3 days of meds and instructions to dial 911 when you get there. Same goes for the mentally handicapped.
If you’re really lucky and have fallen into a coma, you could be flown on a private jet for free and deposited in another country altogether.
But there is a darker possibility. You could be shipped off to somewhere that no one ever returns from…a Carnival Cruise vacation.
And That’s the Word.
MAC ATTACK Update
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)
You know the feeling. You’re working along, like there’s, you know, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and like man has perfected all his machines. Then the monitor suddenly goes black for fifteen or twenty seconds. Followed by a tantalizing flash of what you were working on for two, maybe three seconds, then back to black again. Only this time for long enough to make that ache come in your chest, the ache that means all your files are belong to them.
So, as a proud Merkin gun owner, you are left with only one choice: shoot that sumbitch.
Or, if you’re not a gun owner, you call Apple support, and they walk you through a couple processes that inevitably lead to an appointment with some local “geniuses.”
That was twelve days ago, after three different and expensive parts were replaced, and yet the geniuses remain surprisingly ungenius-like. And you know what that means. They can’t fix that sumbitch. And you know what that means.
Sabbatical! Vacation! Goodbye Blog!
Yes, so we’ll be gone awhile; you can record your tears and consternation below until we get back.
Or, you can get away from your infernal computer machine and go strutting and fretting, and get some fresh air. That’s where I’m going.
UPDATE:
Okay, that was an adventure in moving. All our junk stuffed into a 24 foot moving van; well, except for a half dozen big plants, which deserved special handling. And I’m not even gonna tell you the story about the box springs that took four scheduled attempts and half a dozen phone calls to the City of Carlsbad to get them hauled away.
So the old iMac apparently crapped the bed. A year and a half “old,” that is. (Sent back to the glue factory for a dose of refurbishment.) But a new one took its place, thanks to the AppleCare$. I’m cautiously optimistic this one may last longer.
And oh yeah; It occurs to me that artists have a lot of physical baggage; especially if they don’t sell all their paintings. But, for most of them, it’s like selling one of you kids. So I keep them.
Was the move worth it? I’m not sure. No question about the new location, but I shoulda let somebody else do more of the lifting. I’ll see what the doc says on Friday; the initial diagnosis is hernia. I’ll tell you what— whatever it is, after about thirty minutes of harmless puttering around, it will make me lay down.
Is that so wrong?
Avatars of Austerity: Won’t Get Fooled Again
Lost amid the tidal wave of media coverage over the Boston Marathon bombings this week was the destruction of a foundational argument of the Avatars of Austerity, aka “deficit hawks.”
Thanks to a little fact checking and spreadsheet analysis by a U Mass grad student and his associates, they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that key economic data used by the Austerians to justify their slash and burn budget prescriptions is full of shit.
The bogus data is enshrined in a paper by two Harvard economists, Reinhart and Rogoff, frequently cited as Holy Writ by everyone form Erskine-Bowles to Paul Ryan to Fux News. Details to follow, but first, an overview.
Following the collapse of the international financial system during the George W. Bush Administration, deficits worldwide exploded as former tax paying workers were laid off in the tens of millions. Instead of putting them to work building infrastructure and the like, the strategy chosen by FDR during the last Great Depression to re-start the economy and thereby raise government revenues, the uber rich offered their own re-cycled remedy of trickle-down economics, with a twist– tax cuts for them and budget cuts for everyone else.
While the subtext of the Austerians’ campaign to slash government budgets, which overwhelmingly disadvantage the poor and middle class, is obvious: the One Percenters resent having to pay taxes that benefit society as a whole (see Willard Romney’s attack on the 47% as parasites demanding “free stuff”); and while the actual real world results of austerity regimes currently in place in Europe have resulted in deeper economic dislocation and misery — Great Britain is in the middle of a triple dip recession despite deep cuts in vital government institutions like the BBC — one would think that the Austerians would accept reality and admit their anti-Keneysian belief system is wrong.
Fat chance. Depression levels of unemployment in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, accompanied by negative GDP, the contagion effect of austerity is being felt in even healthy exporting countries like Germany, to the extent that even the IMF came out this week against austerity. Despite irrefutable facts, the Austerians remain convinced of the rightness of their crusade. Ignoring Einstein’s definition of insanity — doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result — they argue for even greater cuts, and more time for them to work their expected magic.
Just what is behind their rationalization, the keystone upon which the Austerians<a href=”http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/04/19/austerity-economics-takes-a-major-blow-as-key-research-paper-discredited/#comments“> base</a> their unshakable faith?
[T]he Rogoff-Reinhart paper entitled Growth In A Time Of Debt became the intellectual backbone for the austerity movement/plutocrats and their apparatchiks in Washington and elsewhere. The big take away was that a high government debt to GDP ratio – past 90% – would hurt economic growth. Hence, the austerity movement’s central claim that cutting government spending is necessary to restore higher growth levels. And if you are following along, you probably realize why this argument does not even work in its own context. Cutting spending does not eliminate debt – which increases perpetually with interest. Nor is debt itself a reflection of spending levels, debt merely represents borrowing. The government can spend as much as possible and avoid high debt to GDP ratios if taxes are levied to pay for the spending. In fact, the highest growth period in the history of America was during one of its highest tax periods. Neither taxes, debt, nor government spending are, in and of themselves, determinative of economic growth.
Sounds reasonable enough on the surface, assuming that the data they used and its analysis reflect reality. But Houston, we have a problem:
Thomas Herndon, a 28-year-old economics grad student at UMass Amherst, just used part of his spring semester to shake the intellectual foundation of the global austerity movement.
Herndon became instantly famous in nerdy economics circles this week as the lead author of a recent paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” that took aim at a massively influential study by two Harvard professors named Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Herndon found some hidden errors in Reinhart and Rogoff’s data set, then calmly took the entire study out back and slaughtered it.What Herndon had discovered was that by making a sloppy computing error, Reinhart and Rogoff had forgotten to include a critical piece of data about countries with high debt-to-GDP ratios that would have affected their overall calculations. They had also excluded data from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia — all countries that experienced solid growth during periods of high debt and would thus undercut their thesis that high debt forestalls growth.
Oopsie. Paul Krugman in his Friday column asks the logical, resulting gobsmacking question:
So, did an Excel coding error destroy the economies of the Western world?
Informed of the mathematical mistake that undergirded his and his BFF Alan Simpson’s whole austerity thesis, Democrat deficit hawk Erskine Bowles in essence replied that he didn’t care–he still believes in its viability, the facts be damned.
“I have obviously read the report and have referenced it a number of times,” Bowles said. “I know they had a worksheet error in the report and my understanding is that does make a difference.”
“But what it doesn’t change is the common sense and my own personal experience in both the public and private sector that when any organization has too much debt that is an enormous risk factor and your risks go up then people lending you money will want more money for their money,” Bowles said.
Translation: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
So, Bowles is reduced to playing the “common sense” card so popular among conservatives these days when one of their pet ideologically driven crusades fails an objective analysis of its underlying facts. Sure, there is evidence that debt in excess of 90% of GDP retards economic growth by a measurable percentage. But it doesn’t drive it down anywhere near the level the Austerians maintain, making their Chicken Little The Sky Is Falling routine absurd on its face.
(Reminds me of the cognitive dissonance I used to see operating inside the criminal justice system. As advocacy groups like the Innocence Project has shown, not everyone convicted of a crime is guilty, as post-hoc DNA tests regularly show. You’d think that the original police investigators and prosecutors would eat a little humble pie for being proven wrong, but you’d be wrong. Like chest thumping politicians, they are geniuses at rationalization, maintaining that the victim was guilty for some other reason, because, well, just because. After all, they are professionals, experts who know their stuff.)
Other problems with R&R’s analyses includes the counterfactual case of England, which despite violating the 90% threshold for 19 continuous years, still maintained positive economic growth; and worse, cancelling its influence on the overall data set by giving it equal weight with a single year of severe negative economic growth in New Zealand in the early 1950s. Furthermore, economic conditions change over the decades, and when one analyzes R&R’s data from the beginning of the 21st century forward, the presumed relationship between the 90% level of economic stagnation becomes even more tenuous.
The question now is whether this cold slap of mathematical reality will be enough to end the hysteria of debt obsession that has the Serious People is D.C. so enthralled, and whether the far more critical and economically productive emphasis on job creation is once again the subject of serious policy debate.
I wouldn’t bet on it, since this isn’t a debate about economics but politics. Just as the Ryan Budget, which cited as its only academic justification the now discredited R&R paper, isn’t about deficit reduction but an ideological crusade to roll back the New Deal. As DSWRight over at the Lake <a href=”http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/04/19/austerity-economics-takes-a-major-blow-as-key-research-paper-discredited/#comments“>puts it</a>:
Democratic accountability has been sucked out of the nation-state system and deposited into the hands of a planetary bureaucracy of transnational corporations and central bankers. And from their perspective there is no crisis, at least not anymore, just a continued redistribution of wealth up and the necessity of building a police state to protect it. Austerity forever.
As the Master of Disaster W. once said: “Fool me once, shame on, shame on, you. Fool me–you can’t get fooled again!”
