Last Call

Hey wingers?

When Confederate Yankee is your lone voice of reason that actually bothers to fact check something as crazy as the claim that Mexican drug cartels have invaded Texas, you have lost the game.

A Film You Have To See

I caught Inception today and I have to say, it's a rather amazing piece of cinema as well as being a wonderful story.  I agree with Roger Ebert's 4-star rating.  It's the best film I've seen in quite a long time and the one movie you'll be talking about with your friends for weeks.



No spoilers here, but I will say this is a movie you want to see in the theater.  The sad part is like last year's District 9, Inception is that rarity in Hollywood these days:  an original work, not a sequel, not a remake of a film from decades past, not a retread of a Boomer pop culture icon or SNL skit, not an 80's TV show or a live action cartoon, not a reboot of a franchise and not the American version of a foreign smash either.

Most of all it accomplishes what a truly great summer flick should do: it's a hell of a ride AND it makes you think.  See it with people whose opinions you respect, which is as far as I'm concerned, the highest accolade you can give a movie.

[UPDATE]  If you have seen the film, check out GigaOm's "7 Reasons Why Techies Love Inception".

Iran The Long Game

One of Daniel Larison's readers flags down how we've taken yet another step towards open war with Iran.

One of my commenters alerted me to House Res. 1553, which states:

Expressing support for the State of Israel’s right to defend Israeli sovereignty, to protect the lives and safety of the Israeli people, and to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force if no other peaceful solution can be found within reasonable time to protect against such an immediate and existential threat to the State of Israel.

Naturally, Rep. Jason Chaffetz is among the resolution’s 46 co-sponsors. The National Iranian American Council has called on Minority Leader Boehner to reject the measure, but why would he bother? Two of his leadership colleagues, Mike Pence and Thaddeus McCotter, co-sponsored the resolution, and it has the support of other high-profile Republican members, including Paul Ryan and Dan Burton. That tells me that this is not just a product of hard-liners such as Michelle Bachmann and Peter King, but that it expresses the views of a fairly broad-cross section of the Republican members in the House. I guess I can’t stop “nitpicking,” but this seems like an awfully strange resolution for an “antiwar” Republican to co-sponsor. It is also thoroughly depressing that Paul Ryan, one of the few credible figures in the conference when it comes to fiscal responsibility, is among the supporters of such a ludicrous measure.

I respect Larison's logic, but I'm shaking my head that he's actually slightly surprised that an attack on Iran is something that a "fairly broad cross section" of Republicans want.  No offense Dan, but have you been paying attention to the GOP over the last 50 years?  They're not Eisenhower conservatives anymore.  Not to say that the Democrats have been much better on the subject of blowing things up, but the Republicans have certainly perfected the practice here in the last decade or so.

Yes, a large percentage of the United States Congress is willing to go to war for Israel.  There's something disturbingly, if not deadly wrong with that.

It's not just Congress, either.  But hey, the worse the economy gets, the more and more smacking around Iran looks like a better reflationary option, eh?

When You're Surrounded On Eight Sides, Where Do You Go?

GOP Rep. Zach Wamp is running for Governor of Tennessee, and if you don't like his stance on Tenth Amendment rights trumping that there federal law, well, if elected there Zach might have to do something about it.

"I hope that the American people will go to the ballot box in 2010 and 2012 so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government," said Wamp during an interview with Hotline OnCall.

He lauded Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who first floated the idea of secession in April '09, for leading the push-back against health care reform, adding that he hopes the American people "will send people to Washington that will, in 2010 and 2012, strictly adhere" to the constitution's defined role for the federal government.

"Patriots like Rick Perry have talked about these issues because the federal government is putting us in an untenable position at the state level," said Wamp, who is competing with Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam (R) and LG Ron Ramsey (R) for the GOP nod in the race to replace TN Gov. Phil Bredesen (D).

Really?  Separation from the government?  Didn't the last time that happened A) not work out real well for the country and B) specifically not work out for states like Tennessee?

Also, last time I checked the Volunteer State got $1.27 for every dollar in federal taxes paid.  Texas at least comes out slightly behind at 96 cents for a dollar.  Blue states like California and New York have been losing money on federal taxes for years, while red states like Tennessee have been coming out ahead.

You know what?  On second thought, maybe Wamp should take his parasite state with him when he separates from the government.  I'm sure New York and California would appreciate it.  Hell, I'm sure his fellow GOP governor Chris Christie of New Jersey would appreciate it...out of all 50 states, it's New Jersey that gets shafted the most on federal taxes.  They get a measly 61 cents back for every federal tax dollar they pay in.

I'm sure Christie would be thrilled to up that ratio some to give his state more revenue.

Orange Julius Cuts The Mustard

Even John "Orange Julius" Boehner admits that there is a dangerous, violent element in the Tea Party.

"I’ve been to my share of tea party events. … Let me tell you about these events. Yeah, there’s some disaffected Republicans there. There are always some Democrats there.  Always a couple of anarchists who want to kill all of us in public office.  But I'll tell you this. 75 percent of these people who show up at these events are the most average everyday Americans you have ever met. None of whom have ever been involved in the political process. And I would guess, half of whom have probably have never voted."

In the end, Boehner concludes:

"We should listen to them. We should work with them. We should walk amongst them."

Despite the dangerous element, the GOP of course wants to embrace these guys, some of which Boehner admits are people who want to do violence...kill, even....politicians like himself.  Last time I checked the threat of violence used in order to affect political policy was the textbook Bush-era definition of terrorism.

Now all this brings us to William "Colonel Mustard" Jacobson of Legal Insurrection.  Now that the wingers have discovered the concept of "context" it seems ol' Mustard here wants the left to apologize for what he sees as breaches of context, including folks like yours truly.  He has taken umbrage with the fact that eleven months ago I made the argument that there's a violent fringe of the Tea Party that admits to wanting to use violence in order to affect political policy.

Now, where have we heard that argument before?  Oh yes, Orange Julius just admitted to that this week in the above exchange.

Maybe you should try getting an apology out of Orange Julius there first, Bill.  Me?  I stand by my analysis.  There is a part of the Tea Party that is dangerous, violent, and yes, even racist.  Boehner wants the GOP to embrace them anyway.

Anything for political power, I suppose...even anarchy and terror.  Time for a new tag:  Orange Julius.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Tropical Depression Bonnie has moved back into the waters of the Gulf and is heading towards the oil spill site this weekend.
• North Korea is threatening a nuclear response to joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises.
• Researchers in Florida have now proven that the underwater oil plumes in the Gulf are a product of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
• Disney looks to be the latest company looking to get into the Facebook game market.
• The Pentagon is taking the lead in testing and using mobile speech translation devices for US troops in Afghanistan.

Last Call

We passed the 100 mark in failed banks in 2010.

Community Security Bank of New Prague, Minn., was the 101st in a string of small, regional banks to fail this year. While conditions have improved for many of the nation's largest banks, the lingering effects of the financial crisis continue to take a toll on local lenders across the country.

The FDIC expects the wave of bank failures that started in 2008 to peak sometime this year. Lending activity has picked up in some areas and many troubled firms have found new sources of capital.

FDIC spokesman Andrew Gray said the agency expects the number of failed banks to exceed last year's total of 140, though he added that failures this year will not approach the historic levels seen during the savings and loan crisis. In 1989, a record 534 banks were closed by regulators.

Still, banks have been failing at a rapid pace this year. At this time in 2009, regulators had closed a total of 57 banks.

Won't exceed that level this year, no.

Your New Normal Kinda Sucks

White House projections are 9% plus unemployment for, oh, the next couple years.

The White House said Friday it expects that unemployment will stay at or above 9% until 2012, but at the same time forecast that the economy will grow by at least 4% in 2011 and 2012.

It also revised its long-term deficit estimate under President Obama's proposed 2011 budget: The administration now believes the 10-year deficit will be $58 billion less than projected in February when the budget blueprint was first released. 

Really?  Four percent growth and still 9% unemployment?  How does that work?  Oh yes, that 4% growth I guess goes to the top 1% again.  Rest of us?  Well, not so much.

And this is the optimistic projection.  Reality is more like 11 or 12% unemployment and the next leg of the depression.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

The ethics violations facing Charlie Rangel must be pretty gruesome indeed if he's already apologizing to Luke Russert for snapping at him yesterday.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) has apologized to NBC reporter Luke Russert over berating him for asking whether ethics charges will force Rangel out of his job.

After the charges dropped Thursday, Rangel became angry when Russert asked the question in the Capitol. The veteran congressman called it a “dumb question” and asked if Russert was “trying to make copy.”

“It doesn’t really sound like NBC asking these dumb questions, but it just shows what has really happened to a channel that did have some respect,” Rangel said. 

At a news conference on Monday, Rangel said he called the reporter to apologize.

“I had a very good conversation with Luke Russert [this morning] and apologized for the way I treated him on television,” he said. 

Translation:  Charlie is in real, real trouble here and he's been in the game long enough to know he who controls the news cycle, controls the universe.  Next week should be really interesting if he's already sucking up to NBC's Junior Villager In Training.

And So It Begins

The D-D-D-Dee Word is here.  No, not Depression.  That's next after the current one:  Deflation.

During the height of the U.S. recession, grocery stores embarked on a price war to keep consumers. Now as the economy improves slightly but unemployment remains high, food manufacturers are backing aggressive price cuts to woo back shoppers they lost to lower-priced store labels.

Safeway executives said the strength of that push on pricing caught them by surprise.

"Deflation continues in price per item and is not expected to significantly improve until the fourth quarter," said Chief Executive Steve Burd, who oversees supermarkets including Safeway, Vons and Dominick's.

Burd acknowledged that retail deflation was much greater than expected in the second quarter and drove a decline in identical-store sales.

Remember, there is no deflation.  We must cut trillions in government spending and tighten our belts.  Homeowners must be made to pay back their underwater mortgages in full.  We must deregulate everything to allow the innovation of Big Casino.  We must cut taxes to create jobs because supply creates demand. And why hasn't Obama fixed the economy yet?

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

How does Pat Buchanan continue to have a job at MSNBC when he writes idiotic, outright racist drivel like this?

Where the erosion is taking place is in white America, among working- and middle-class folks who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries but took a chance with Obama in the fall. Now, every time some new incident erupts, these folks are being tarred.

Opposition to affirmative action is racist. Supporting the tea party gives aid and comfort to racists. Opposing health care puts you in league with folks who used racial slurs on Rep. John Lewis. To raise the issue of the New Black Panther Party is to play the race card.

One understand the bitterness of tea party folks who carry signs that read: "What difference does it make what this placard says. You'll call it racist anyway."

As the National Journal's Ron Brownstein has been reporting, white America is increasingly alienated and distrustful of all our major economic and political power centers -- the banks, big corporations, the government.

And, for the first time in our lifetimes, outside the South, white racial consciousness has visibly begun to rise. 

Poor White America, it's been so terribly victimized by those mean old black people for what, 400 years now?  If only we would stop electing so many black Presidents, race wouldn't be at the forefront of the political argument. White people I guess are going to have to stick together before the Man comes to take away their rights.

Or, to put it more succinctly, with President Malcolm Shabazz X there, who will finally stand up for white people in our system?

Ai-ya.  I need booze.

Unimpeachable Character

Expanding on my post from earlier today, you'd better 100% believe impeachment of Obama is coming if the GOP gets back in control of Congress.  The Teabaggers will demand it, and so will the nutbars in GOP politics that the Republicans refuse to disown, like Tom Tancredo.  Tancredo is already building his "case" against Obama and he clearly expects the rest of the Republican Party to follow through on this.  First, Obama must be convicted in the court of public opinion.

Yes, Mr. Obama is a more serious threat to America than al Qaeda. We know that Osama bin Laden and followers want to kill us, but at least they are an outside force against whom we can offer our best defense. But when a dedicated enemy of the Constitution is working from the inside, we face a far more dangerous threat. Mr. Obama can accomplish with the stroke of his pen what bin Laden cannot accomplish with bombs and insurgents.

Mr. Obama's actions, not just his words, show the threat he poses. A level of government deficit spending unheard of since World War II and trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see represent an unacceptable threat to our economic security and our children's future. Mr. Obama could be the first president to guarantee that the next generation of Americans has a lower standard of living than their parents.

Mr. Obama's most egregious and brazen betrayal of our Constitution was his statement to Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican, that the administration will not enforce security on our southern border because that would remove Republicans' desire to negotiate a "comprehensive" immigration bill. That is, to put it plainly, a decision that by any reasonable standard constitutes an impeachable offense against the Constitution. For partisan political advantage, he is willfully disregarding his obligation under Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution to protect states from foreign invasion.

No really, that's Tancredo's entire plan.  Obama told Sen. Jon Kyl to back off, so IMPEACH THE SEEKRIT MUSLIM WHO IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN AL-QAEDA.  You'd better believe this kind of crap is dead serious too.  They will spend all their waking moments going after Obama on pointless crap like this, and they will never rest.

That's what you can look forward to with a Republican Congress trying to "keep Obama in check" all the time. That and defunding every Obama agenda item they can find, starting with health care reform.

Yes, I still stick by my prediction that a Republican House will go for all three before 2012: endless hearings, a government shutdown, and impeachment proceedings.

Sin Of Admission

Greg Sargent catches the Politico guys telling the truth again.

A striking admission by Politico's John Harris and Jim VandeHei in their big piece today on the new media reality:

At POLITICO, we have an unusual vantage point on this new reality. We are both an enabler (in the eyes of some critics) of the deterioration of political discourse, and a target of it (as we try to defend our values as neutral journalists amid constant criticism from activists who think we fail at neutrality or are disdainful of the goal in the first place).

There is some truth on both counts. Like all news sites, we are aware that conflict clicks. More traffic comes from an item on Sarah Palin's "refudiation" faux pas than from our hundreds of stories on the complexities of health care reform or Wall Street regulation.

This is actually an important concession: Frivolous items about Sarah Palin do degrade our discourse, but we need to do them, because the simple fact is that people click on them in droves. 

Well no kidding, Greg.  Politico's in the infotainment business, not the news business.  At least they are admitting the fact that they exist to get clicks, not inform people.

What, you thought they were a news outfit?  What, like FOX?  That's funny.  Despite FOX and Breitbart and Politico around, it's the Liberal Media that has the agenda.  Right.

When In Doubt, Punch Those Hippies

With any serious climate bill completely dead even while the worst environmental disaster in American history continues during the warmest June on record, it's nice to know that you can always count on Politico to find some Dirty F'ckin' Hippies to punch over it, and Obama too.

One exasperated administration official on Thursday lambasted the environmentalists – led by the Environmental Defense Fund – for failing to effectively lobby GOP senators.

“They didn’t deliver a single Republican,” the official told POLITICO. “They spent like $100 million and they weren’t able to get a single Republican convert on the bill.”

But many say it was Obama who didn’t do enough to make the climate bill a big enough priority, allowing other monster big-ticket items like the economic stimulus, health care and Wall Street reform to suck up all the oxygen and leaving environmentalists grasping for straws too late in the game – well past the expiration date for other big accomplishments during the 111th Congress.

“The absence of direct, intense presidential leadership doomed this process,” said Eric Pooley, author of “Climate War,” a just-published book that chronicles the past three years of debate on global warming. “We did have a window there, and now the window is shut. It’s more about prying it back open than anything else.”

Going back to Day One, Obama never turned his campaign proposals into formal legislative text, leaving lawmakers to shoulder the load. And when Obama spoke publicly about the issue, it was only with a vague call for “comprehensive energy and climate” measures that did little to help win votes.

Obama’s hands-off approach didn’t matter as much in the House, where Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and, later, Speaker Nancy Pelosi built their winning coalition region by region to scrap out a 219-212 vote just before the July 4, 2009 recess. But it was another story with his former colleagues in the Senate, where carbon caps had never topped 48 votes on the floor.

Here's the real reason why there's no climate legislation:  the Republicans blocked it because they're not interested in helping the environment.  They are however very interested in helping big companies escape costs of cleaning up their pollution and winning political power.  There's nothing Obama, Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid can do if all 41 Republican Senators say no.  Blaming Obama or environmental groups is pointless here...Obama has to get legislation on his desk to sign it.

Well there is, but that would mean getting rid of the filibuster, and the Dems don't have the balls to do it.

Epic Meanwhile At The Hall Of Justice Win

For some inexplicable reason, Fred Phelps and his crew of "God Hates Fags" assholes from the Westboro Baptist Church is protesting...the San Diego Comic-Con.  My views on Comic-Con in general?  Right now we have a bunch of delusional fanboys who dress funny and will violently attack anyone who doesn't agree with their twisted, fanatical views.  No wait, that's Fred Phelps and his inbred morons.  The Comic-Con counter protest is awesome sauce.

They've faced down humans time and time again, but Fred Phelps and his minions from the Westboro Baptist Church were not ready for the cosplay action that awaited them today at Comic-Con. After all, who can win against a counter protest that includes robots, magical anime girls, Trekkies, Jedi and...kittens?

Unbeknownst to the dastardly fanatics of the Westboro Baptist Church, the good folks of San Diego's Comic-Con were prepared for their arrival with their own special brand of superhuman counter protesting chanting "WHAT DO WE WANT" "GAY SEX" "WHEN DO WE WANT IT" "NOW!" while brandishing ironic (and some sincere) signs. Simply stated: The eclectic assembly of nerdom's finest stood and delivered. 

Freddie picked the wrong batch of cosplayers to mess with.



EPIC WIN.