Egghead Week: Should Have Checked First

The headline:

 "Prominent Virginia pastor who said ‘God is larger than this dreaded virus’ dies of covid-19"

My response:

God is in fact larger than this dreaded virus, but God also says "Don't be an idiot."

Last Call For A Big L On Your Forehead

Now presenting Concerned White Guy Theater, starring Bill and Don, just two regular guys.

“The jobs have been taken out of the United States like we’re a bunch of babies,” Trump said. “I’m telling you, it’s an economic message. If you look at President Obama, he’s been a President for almost 8 years, it will be 8 years, you have with black youth, with African American youth, you have a 59 percent unemployment." 

“But how are you going to get jobs for them?” O’Reilly cut in. “Many of them are ill-educated and have tattoos on their foreheads, and I hate to be generalized about it, but it's true. If you look at all the educational statistics, how are you going to get jobs for people who aren't qualified for jobs?” 

Trump replied, “We’re going to have Apple computers made in this country, not just…” 

“But you have to have skills to make Apple computers," O’Reilly interjected again. 

“We will get the skills and we’ll develop the skills,” Trump replied, saying jobs are going to China and Mexico because of incompetent politicians. 

“It’s more challenging for a poor child in Harlem without parental guidance in a school that’s falling apart than it is for some white kid out in Garden City," O’Reilly pushed back. "You say you can bring jobs back, but if the kid isn’t qualified to do the job and can’t do the work. I mean, you’ve got to get into the infrastructure of the African-American community." 

“Well, it is true. It’s about education, but it’s also about spirit. A lot of people don’t have spirit,” Trump responded. “Not only African-Americans, they don’t have spirit in our country.”

We're all just tattooed, skill-free kids with no spirit anyway, so who really cares if a classy, yooge Trump presidency doesn't fix 59% unemployment (which is actually 22.9% by BLS March 2016 standards but hey, you can't expect Trump to be a numbers guy, he's a big picture guy that creates jobs for numbers guys without tattoos on their foreheads) or whatever.

Still can't understand why people think I'm too hung up on race here in 2016 but at least we replaced the dog whistle politics with easy-to-understand full-blown racists Bell Curve garbage for simplicity's sake.

Make America Overtly Racist Again.

A Discriminating Palate

And Sen. Rand Paul embarrasses Kentucky again by going on an epic rant against workplace discrimination laws, all but declaring that there is no discrimination that laws preventing discrimination doesn't create in the first place.  Paul showed up at a confirmation hearing of David Lopez and Charlotte Burrows to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and screamed at the nominees about why the commission even existed.

“Do you realize the downside of the unlimited nature of going after people with no complaint and what this is going to do to business? I mean, do you not understand what we’ve got to somehow balance that we want people to have jobs?” he asked Lopez. 

“How can you show up to work with a straight face?” he demanded. “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t resign immediately and say, ‘This is abhorrent.’” 

“This is so against what everything America stands for,” he blustered, “that you would go after people where there’s been absolutely no complaint, run them through the wringer and use the threat of the bully nature of your office to punish business and as a consequence punish their workers. I don’t get it.” 

Paul went on to describe the agency’s investigative practices as “entrapment” and “a crime.”

If Rand Paul's argument sounds a lot like the same logic MRAs and Gamergate nimrods use against women and minorities, it's because the arguments are the same.  The presence of people trying to get equal treatment is "destroying" everything.

Lopez responded, “I disagree that what the committee is doing is entrapment.” 

He went on to explain, “Most individuals who get discriminated against in the hiring process do not know that they’ve been discriminated against because employers usually do not say that they’ve been discriminated against.” 

“We’re going after mythology then,” said Paul. 

“Realize that there’s a penalty” for this, he went on, saying that there are millions of unemployed people in this country who would be happy to take whatever jobs they could get.

To recap, because discrimination is often subtle, covert, and pervasive, instead of overt, it's "mythology".  I'm sure that'll make a whole lot of people feel better that workplace discrimination is all in your pretty little heads.

But we're supposed to take this idiot seriously as our next President.

Sure.

Last Call For Misinformation Nation

Breitbart's clowns are screwing up everything they can find, as usual, and this time their stated mission of lying to America about the Obama administration is no different.

According to a November 8 Breitbart.com article by Warner Todd Huston, "few are talking about" the fact nominee Lynch "was part of Bill Clinton's Whitewater probe defense team in 1992." Huston pointed to a March 1992 New York Times article that "reported that Lynch was one of the Clintons' Whitewater defense attorneys as well as a 'campaign aide.'" And in a November 9 article Huston's colleague, Breitbart.com Senior Editor-at Large Joel Pollak wrote, "The connection to Whitewater ought to provide additional fodder for Republicans during Lynch's confirmation hearings".

Only one problem.  It's the wrong Loretta Lynch.

The Loretta Lynch referred to in the New York Times article is a California based attorney who has worked on several prominent political campaigns, not Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch. Obama's nominee is shown on the right, while the Loretta Lynch Breitbart refers to is on the left:

These idiots can't even get the correct race of the actual person right, which is everything you ever need to know about Breitbart.com.  Of course that doesn't matter to the right, they'll find some other way to block Lynch.

The same day that President Obama nominated Loretta Lynch to be the next attorney general, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) signaled that it won't be an easy process.

"President Obama’s Attorney General nominee deserves fair and full consideration of the United States Senate, which is precisely why she should not be confirmed in the lame duck session of Congress by senators who just lost their seats and are no longer accountable to the voters," the senators said in a Saturday statement.

So yes, I expect the lame duck session will be about as productive as the rest of this dismal GOP-ruined Congress.  The threat is simple: if President Obama dares take executive action on immigration, Lynch is done.

Maybe if Obama was nicer to the GOP and resigned from office, he'd get Lynch through. 

Just a thought.

The Screaming Abyss Is Seated At The Table By The Bar, Dr. Ablow

I know I like to allude that the crazier elements of the Tea Party have much in common with comic book super villains, but it's rare that one of them actually writes a column worthy of being included in a manifesto for an enemy of Captain America or Batman, between bouts of megalomaniacal laughter. Jon Chait on FOX News contributor(?) Dr. Keith Ablow, who apparently has a doctorate in Being Evil:

The Obama era has seen a resurgence of conservative constitutional fetishism — the belief that the Constitution not only requires the Republican domestic agenda, but is figuratively or even literally divine. Fox News columnist and television personality Dr. Keith Ablow has taken this premise and applied it toward American foreign policy. The result is a remarkable column calling for what he calls “American Jihad.” 

Ablow’s argument, at least conceptually, is extremely simple. The United States, like Al Qaeda, has a sacred document: “Our Constitution is a sacred document that better defines and preserves the liberty and autonomy of human beings than the charter of any other nation on earth.” 

Therefore, every person on Earth should enjoy its blessings: “An American jihad would embrace the correct belief that if every nation on earth were governed by freely elected leaders and by our Constitution, the world would be a far better place.” 

Note that Ablow is not merely endorsing a civilizational war between the West and radical Islam, as extreme hawks are wont to do. He is endorsing a campaign of conquest aimed at literally every other country on Earth. Ablow is not satisfied with bringing democracy to those who don’t enjoy it. He proposes to bring the American Constitution to every country, even democratic ones. Because there may be other democratic forms of government, but Ablow thinks they all pale before ours.

This guy is a few crock pots short of a company chili cook-off.  Usually "let's invade all the other nations and make them just as awesome as America, because America!" is rightfully classified as reductio ad absurdum snark, not an actual foreign policy talking point, but this is actually what Ablow is proposing here.

Bonus verbatim stupid:

We would urge our leaders, after their service in the U.S. Senate and Congress, to seek dual citizenship in other nations, like France and Italy and Sweden and Argentina and Brazil and Germany, and work to influence those nations to adopt laws very much like our own. We might even fund our leaders' campaigns for office in these other nations.

Oh sure, that's clearly the solution to the world's problems: we need to export more US politicians writing more awesome laws like the USA PATRIOT Act.

Chait ends his piece thusly:

It’s not terrorism if God is telling you to do it.

God is apparently mildly disturbed.  Explains a lot, actually.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

John Hinderaker reads ex-CBS reporter Sharyl Atkisson's tell-all book on how CBS wouldn't let her run crazy bullshit stories on the Obama administration and of course takes every word as gospel truth. Atkisson's book has some pretty nutty allegations to boot.  Assrocket then asks:

If the Obama administration hacked into a reporter’s computers, used them to spy on her, and even prepared to frame her for a potential criminal prosecution by planting classified documents, aren’t we looking at the biggest scandal in American history?

Short answer, no.

Long answer, This is a country that perpetrated the Trail of Tears and killed thousands of Native Americans, knowingly infected dozens of black men with syphilis and allowed hundreds more to suffer the disease for decades, rounded up Japanese-American citizens and put them in internment camps, grew an economy on slavery for centuries and then continued that slavery with Jim Crow laws, oh yeah and decided to go to war with itself to defend that slavery, killing hundreds of thousands, and I'm supposed to believe the biggest scandal in American history is a reporter who's watched Enemy of the State too many times and is grifting on paranoia over Obama?

Get the hell out.

Last Call For Getting Your Priorities Straight

The latest monthly Gallup poll on Americans and the issues important to them finds Ebola now outranks racism, crime, and poverty as top concerns among We The People:

These results come from an Oct. 12-15 Gallup poll, conducted while dozens of people in the U.S. were still being quarantined after coming in contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, who died earlier this month from the virus. Two of the nurses who cared for Duncan have now been diagnosed with the virus. Most others who had contact with Duncan were quarantined for three weeks, which ended Monday. 

Separate Gallup polling about Ebola specifically finds more than one in five Americans saying they worry about getting the Ebola virus.

We're so very, very screwed.

The Totally Moderate Rand Paul

Remember, Rand Paul's big selling point is that he's a moderate, a Republican who supports criminal justice reform and legalization of marijuana.  The fact he's a standard right wing nut job on most other things doesn't seem to matter, and the fact that he's a screaming tinfoil-hatted douchebag on everything else certainly doesn't seem to get enough play.

As this government-bashing tea partier moves toward a White House bid, journalists scrutinize his every wiggle and whisper. But one core component of his political personality has largely escaped exploration: The senator is close to being a full-blown conspiracy theorist. 

In 2010, before winning his Senate seat, Paul sat for an interview with Luke Rudkowski, a libertarian YouTube personality who specializes in quizzing political leaders about the plot to establish a "one-world socialist government." Rudkowski asked what Paul knew of the Bilderberg Group, a collection of government and business leaders whose annual conference is a favorite target of conspiracy-mongers. Paul replied, "Only what I've learned from Alex Jones." That's right: Alex Jones, the radio host who claims that Bilderberg is a key part of a global plot to create a "scientific dictatorship" that will exterminate the "useless eaters," a.k.a. 80 percent of the human population.

Rand Paul is nuts.

Paul had his own conspiracy theory about 9/11. In speeches in 2008 and 2009, he warned about the influence of military contractors and zeroed in on Halliburton, the corporation that Dick Cheney headed before becoming vice president. Cheney, he noted, opposed the advance of American troops into Baghdad when he was defense secretary during the first Gulf War. Yet as veep he changed his mind because, Paul explained, the war would benefit Halliburton with a "billion-dollar no-bid contract."

Rand Paul is bug nuts.

Paul also has embraced one of the conspiracy theories promoted by his father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul: that leaders from the United States, Canada, and Mexico are seeking to merge their countries into a socialist megastate that would issue the "Amero" currency to replace US and Canadian dollars and the Mexican peso. (Anti-feminist campaigner Phyllis Schlafly and Jerome Corsi, who led the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, are among the key proponents of this idea.) 

At an appearance for his father's 2008 presidential campaign in Bozeman, Montana, Rand Paul was asked what steps his dad would take to thwart the scheme to impose a North American superstate. The first thing to do, he said, was "publicizing that it's going on" and pushing Congress to "stop it." He insisted the Amero push was "a real thing" but cautioned, "If you talk about it like it's a conspiracy, they'll paint you as a nut. It's not a conspiracy, they're out in the open about it. I guarantee it's one of their long-term goals—to have one sort of borderless mass continent." He did not specify who "they" were.

Hey guys?

Rand Paul is completely effing nuts.

But he's still a contender?

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Jennifer Rubin is a terrible and stupid troll, but you knew this already.  Nowhere is she more terrible and stupid than on the subject of macroeconomics:

A drop to 7 percent unemployment and 203,000 jobs added is extremely positive news, suggesting there is something to be said for benign neglect. Without a stimulus, a new tax plan and or even a budget deal, we had the best month in quite a long time. The economy, if left largely alone, is very resilient.

The very next paragraph:

I agree with my colleague Greg Sargent that this shouldn’t lead to a cutoff in unemployment benefits. Seven percent is still a lot of unemployed people, and the number of long-term unemployed is still historically high. Conservative Doug Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum says via e-mail, “The unemployed are increasingly the long-term unemployed — the hardest policy problem to solve. In addition, memories are short — 200,000 jobs should not be a cause for celebration. At this pace, it will take another 19 months to get the unemployment rate down from 7.0 to 6.0 percent.” In exchange for extending unemployment benefits, Democrats should look at GOP ideas for consolidating and reforming work training programs.

To recap:  This proves Obama shouldn't do anything and let the jobs market correct itself, but why doesn't Obama do something about long-term unemployment?  And then there's the very next paragraph following the above:

The stratification in unemployment rates among college graduates (3.4 percent unemployment rate), high school graduates (7.3 percent) and high school dropouts (10.8 percent) is worrisome. If the president wants to do something about income inequality, focusing on the dropout program would be a good idea.

Obama should do nothing about unemployment and why hasn't he fixed income inequality yet?

This one is paragraph 5 on the list:

The improvement in the jobs pictures suggests a small-is-better approach to governance. Modest budget deals are perfectly fine for now. In the long-term our entitlement problem is deeply worrisome, but so far this president has shown neither the will nor the ability to face up to it. It will have to wait for the next president.

And finally she ends with this sentence:

Government should do no harm (see Nos. 1 and 5), but it would be better if both sides could agree on a package of growth-enhancing proposals.

We need growth, but Obama should do nothing and why hasn't he fixed the economy?

Here's a better economics question:  why is this vapid pile of derp still employed?