Dear America:

"This President is awful.  I mean really, really, really awful.  If you vote for him in November, it means you're stupid because you've bought his awful argument that Big Oil, Wall Street and Republicans actually have anything to do with how awful the country is right now, and you're not stupid, are you?"

--Jay Cost, Weekly Standard

Bonus Verbatim Stupid:

If Obama is reelected with such terrible feelings about the national condition, it will be unprecedented in the history of public opinion polling. Obviously, that would be no little feat, so what this president is doing is a classic case of misdirection. 

The country needs a bad guy to blame for its problems, so day in and day out Obama is providing them with a smorgasbord of villains from which to choose: Wall Street, Big Oil, the Tea Party, Paul Ryan, Rush Limbaugh, the Supreme Court, the Catholic Church, and so on. In fact, virtually everything that comes out of this president’s mouth is about redirecting blame onto some straw man.

Super Bonus Complete Takedown, courtesy of BooMan:

He says these are straw men. But, ask yourself, how have these groups been comporting themselves? Do we have any reasons to be critical of Wall Street? Big Oil? The Tea Party? Paul Ryan? The Supreme Court? The Catholic Church? 

It's telling that BooMan can eradicate Cost's 1500 word tirade with a single paragraph.   Most of all, we need better conservatives.  Just because the entire conservative argument is "No, YOU'RE the ones who are destroying the country!" doesn't make it true.

Cat House... Not What You Think

Continuing the animal news, Japan has enjoyed long-lasting success with "pet houses" where stressed clients come pay to pet cats.

It's no secret that pets reduce stress, but there is so much more benefit than just lowered blood pressure.  Many cannot afford pets or don't want the everyday responsibility and can now enjoy time sharing affection that is both pure and good for the soul.

The house rules include not waking any cat that is sleeping, holding a cat that is clearly unhappy and no flash photography because it irritates their eyes.  The cats are living a good life, and the people who come through leave happier than when they came in.

For a bonus bit of happy, there is the story of Poldi, the cat who was reunited with his former owner... after sixteen years living in the wild.  Thanks to a registry and marking the animals, he is now home with his family.

Take A Michigander At This

Liberal bloggers are still reeling from the very real prospect of the GOP's unconstitutional legislative gains in Michigan.  Rachel Maddow broke the story Thursday night:

In a nutshell, the story is that the Michigan Constitution requires that bills wait until the end of the session -- essentially, the end of the calendar year -- plus 90 days before becoming law. You can, however, put a bill into effect immediately, provided you have a two-thirds majority in both chambers. Republicans have that super-majority in the Senate, but not in the House. Yet they appear to have given nearly every bill since they took over in January 2010 immediate effect.

Michigan Republicans have applied immediate effect even to legislation Democrats have opposed in a block, from taking away domestic partner benefits (pdf) to blocking the expansion of union rights (pdf) to the souped-up emergency manager law (pdf) that lets the state replace elected officials with managers who have unilateral control. As you can see in the clip above, the Republican speaker calls for a rising vote, waits a blink, and then gavels in his party's super-majority.

Michigan Democrats have begun using their numbers to demand a record roll call vote, as a means of trying to make Republicans prove they have the super-majorities they claim to have. They say Republicans are denying them roll call votes, and last week,  they sued the House (and specifically Republican House leadership) over it. On Monday, a county judge ruled for the Democrats. Issuing a temporary injunction, he ordered the House leadership to grant the roll call votes; he also put on hold several recent bills passed improperly.

The reality of this comes into shocking view when you consider that Michigan Republicans want to pass a voter suppression law that would immediately go into effect under this scam in order to try to steal the state for the GOP in November.

These people are lawless cowards.  My good friend Chris Savage, Michigan blogger extraordinaire at the unparalleled Eclectablog, has been all over this story since it broke.

As Rachel Maddow points out, if Public Act 4 had not been passed in this way, it would only have gone into effect in the past few weeks, 90 days after the last legislative session. Think about that for minute. Think about how much has been done to, using Maddow’s phrase, “rout democracy” in our state under that law in the year that it has been on the books. Think about how it could have been different if they hadn’t used immediate effect.

Maddow then went on to show just how illegal this is. It’s something that I pointed out in my piece yesterday titled “Michigan GOP appeals ruling preventing them from violating the state constitution”. It’s the fact that immediate effect can only happen if 2/3 of the members of the House vote for it. But Republicans do not HAVE 2/3 of the House. The entire reason that they have been avoiding using roll call votes is because they did not have the votes to make the laws immediate effect. In other words, over 96% of the laws passed by the Republicans since January 2011 have been illegal in their implementation.

Illegal.  Think about that.  Nearly all of the laws passed in Michigan since 2011 have been done so illegally and in clear violation of the state's Constitution.  It's a crisis and it has to be addressed.  Now.  You'd better believe Chris and the ABLC crew will continue to be all over this.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

This may be the greatest idea in the history of truly horrendous, awful, hideously bad ideas.  Ever.  Of all time.  Charles Johnson:

You know all that rhetoric about “race war” that’s showing up at Breitbart.com and many other right wing sites these days? It’s not just rhetoric. There are some people in Sanford, Florida right now who are taking it very seriously indeed: Armed Neo-Nazis Now Patrolling Sanford, Say They Are ‘Prepared’ for Post-Trayvon Martin Violence.

Oh now what could possibly go awry in this scenario?

The patrols are comprised of between 10 and 20 locals and “volunteers” from across the state, including some from Miami, he added. He couldn’t go into specifics on what kind of firepower, exactly, the patrols had with them.

“In Arizona the guys can walk around with assault weapons and that’s totally legal,” Schoep said, referring to the group’s patrols of the US-Mexico border. “What I can tell you is that any patrols that we are doing now in Florida are totally within the law.”

Asked if the patrols wouldn’t just make things worse — spark a race riot, for instance — Schoep insisted they were simply a “show of solidarity with the white community down there” and “wouldn’t intimidate anybody.”

“Whenever there is one of these racially charged events, Al Sharpton goes wherever blacks need him,” Schoep said. “We do similar things. We are a white civil rights organization.”

They're like the non-violent NAACP.  Only with craploads of firearms, which of course was the main reason my Trayvon died in the first place.  Awesome.

StupidiNews, Easter Weekend Edition!

• A Navy F-18 jet has crashed into a cluster of apartment buildings in Virginia Beach after a critical training flight malfunction.
• Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh is claiming that the US has trained an Iranian dissident group in order to destabilize the Iranian regime.
• President Obama compared his record on women's issues to that of the Republicans in a White House forum for women voters on Friday.
• Apple says it's ready to defend its e-book price agreement with publishers in court to oppose the government's accusations of collusion.
• New estimates show as many as half a million Macs may be infected worldwide by the Flashback malware virus.

Last Call

David Brooks inevitably weighs in on Scary Black Man Is Being Mean To Serious Paul Ryan, and writes arguably one of the most rottenly mendacious aggregations of swill he's ever disgorged onto his PC.  Starting off with the title of "The Other Obama" (and you can practically hear the comma after the second word in that) he dives into the abyss with his floaties strapped on:

I suppose it’s to his credit that he’s most inept when he tries to take the low road. He resorts to hoary, brain-dead clichés. He wanders so far from his true nature that he makes Mitt Romney look like Mr. Authenticity. 

That’s pretty much what happened this week in Obama’s speech before a group of newspaper editors. Obama’s target in this speech was Representative Paul Ryan’s budget. 

It should be said at the outset that the Ryan budget has some disturbing weaknesses, which Democrats are right to identify. The Ryan budget would cut too deeply into discretionary spending. This could lead to self-destructive cuts in scientific research, health care for poor kids and programs that boost social mobility. Moreover, the Ryan tax ideas are too regressive. They make tax cuts for the rich explicit while they hide any painful loophole closings that might hurt Republican donors. 

But these legitimate criticisms and Obama’s modest but real deficit-reducing accomplishments got buried under an avalanche of distortion. The Republicans have been embarrassing themselves all primary season. It’s as if Obama wanted to sink to their level in a single hour. 

Needless to say, Chuck Pierce leaves a blackened glass crater where this column went.

It's gotten to the point where, when I hear Serious Pundits talking about "Simpson-Bowles," the room starts smelling of incense and votive candles. There was no Simpson-Bowles plan. There were suggestions put out by Messrs. Simpson and Bowles that couldn't pass their own commission, largely because the Democrats were shocked and the Republicans were nuts. And trickle-down, Trojan horse-bearing social Darwinism was once known as the Reagan Campaign. Hell, at the time he was St. Ronnie's budget director, David Stockman called the whole Reagan economic plan "a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate." And, not for nothing, but Alan Simpson actually is an '80's cliche.

So yes, Brooks admits Obama is correct and then proceeds to try to completely contradict himself, and fails at it.  Badly.  It's like he's his own Tao of Failure.  All he does is end up proving pretty much 100% that the President is right.

So, I guess I should be thanking Brooks for his own ineptness.  Good bad job, Bobo.

The Orange Julius Job

The White House noted yesterday that if Republicans were really serious about job creation, we'd have local and state governments hiring and infrastructure humming.  Since Republicans are serious about creating only jobs with the word "Chief" in the start of the title, that's not going to happen, of course.

Obama has long championed sending more aid to state and local governments and boosting infrastructure spending. These two areas received billions of dollars from his 2009 stimulus act in hopes of reversing the nation's freefalling economy. But Congress has resisted funneling more money to assist these sectors.

Since then, they have continued to lag, even as companies have ramped up their hiring. State and local governments have shed nearly 600,000 jobs since the recovery began in mid-2009, though they have recently stabilized. And the unemployment rate for experienced construction workers remains higher at 13.1% for the fourth quarter of 2011 than the national average of 8.3%.

Now is an especially good time to revamp the nation's infrastructure, which would boost job growth, Obama said. Interest rates are historically low, construction workers are dying to get back on the job, and contractors are competing for projects, coming in on time and under budget.

Seems like a simple prospect to me.  Sadly, since we now live in a totalitarian thugocracy where there is no rule of law if the President is re-elected, the House GOP will of course have to respectfully decline actually doing anything like this until we rid the country of all Democrats and usher them into a permanent supermajority which would be completely nothing like Obama's current crypto-fascist Hunger Games.

Hurry up, Mayans.  I'm getting a headache from the waiting.

Valley Of The Jolly Tech Giants

If you want a big clue as to why the JOBS bill passed so easily in the House, the Senate, and was signed into law in relative record speed, you can look towards Silicon Valley's new lobbyist clout.  Republicans certainly are, and they're making the pitch to multi-billion dollar tech giants like Google and Apple that Silicon Valley could join Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big Ag in the DC money game...for the right price.

The software developers and smartphone designers may not agree with their guests on gay marriage or abortion, but they’re anxious to protect their businesses from new taxes and regulations. Republicans say it’s a natural fit: They’re younger than their Democratic counterparts in Congress, and they’re making better use of these companies’ platforms in the political sphere. Best of all, they don’t have to tailor their business message to appeal to Silicon Valley — they oppose new government regulations across the industrial landscape.

“There is a growing realization on the part of the players in Silicon Valley, in the venture [capital] community as well as the startup community, that the Republicans in Congress, and in the House, really do represent the next generation in terms of wanting to move the country forward in innovation,” Cantor told POLITICO in an interview.

In essence, Republicans are packaging themselves as the next great innovation for Silicon Valley: a plugged-in protection force pledged to defend private enterprise. It’s part of a sustained GOP effort to position itself as the party of the future, both for the industry and for the voters who use its products.
“A lot of us came out of a small-business world and are naturally sympathetic to startup companies, to capitalism, to free enterprise, to innovation,” said Walden, who chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.

At the same time, the tech companies have been undergoing a political maturation process in which they are, for the first time, looking at Washington as a major battlefront, and stocking D.C. offices with new lobbyists — many of them Republicans — in hopes of staving off taxes and regulations.

Republicans may never turn a traditionally Democratic constituency into a Republican bastion, but there are signs that Silicon Valley is a little less blue today than it was just a couple of years ago.

Considering the billions at stake in the tech industry right now, and the burning issue of small donor funding for startups for Silicon Valley in general, Dems really didn't have too much of a choice in order to keep these guys happy.  Republicans know this, which is why they worked so many deregulation points into the JOBS act.  In return, the Dems and President Obama are leaving the final say of these new rules up to the oversight agencies in the Executive.  Republicans figure that when they get the White House back someday, they'll just eliminate that oversight altogether.

Unfortunately, that's how the game works these days.  President Obama has to play in order to try to win.  I'm certainly not happy about the JOBS act weakening critical small investor oversight, but I'm hoping other options in the Executive branch are available.  And you certainly can't blame Silicon Valley for wanting in on getting the green.

We'll see how it works out.

Remembering The Classics

Of course I love my LolCats.  I'm always making my own captions and even contributing here and there. But while organizing my files and archives, I found The Best One Ever.  This was the one that I had in every office since 2005.

My friends, today I share the saga of Karl.

Happy Caturday!

Science Awesomeness

This was one of those times when I just had to share the awesomeness I stumbled across. This is a caterpillar who will take petals from the flower it is on, and attach it to its back with silk. No matter where it may be, this little guy will be safe, and then come out as a beautiful, pale green wonder.

I love Mental Floss.  They are constantly filling my well of useless information.  This one surprised me, and answered something I had wondered about off and on for my entire life.  I learned that the reason your nose gets stuffy one nostril at a time is because your nostrils switch off and on.  You have a primary and a secondary, and through involuntary muscle regulation, they take turns.

I hope you enjoyed this bite-sized bit of science.  Now get out there and have a good weekend!

At The Chart Of The Matter

Steve Benen kindly presents compelling evidence to squish "the stimulus failed, this President failed" nonsense on jobs and unemployment:

Despite last week's annual revisions, the same metrics still apply: when jobless claims fall below the 400,000 threshold, it's considered evidence of an improving jobs landscape, and when the number drops below 370,000, it suggests jobs are actually being created rather quickly.

And with that, here's the chart -- which reflects the revised, seasonably-adjusted data -- showing weekly, initial unemployment claims going back to the beginning of 2007. (Remember, unlike the monthly jobs chart, a lower number is good news.) For context, I've added an arrow to show the point at which President Obama's Recovery Act began spending money.

Stimulus happens, unemployment claims go down, and they've been decreasing steadily now for 3 years.  The problem is it took Bush roughly one year to cause the damage, and the expectation that President Obama could fix it by any means in that short of a time frame was ridiculous.  But even by November 2010 things were remarkably better by comparison.  Would have been nice if he and the Democrats in Congress who passed the stimulus had gotten a little credit then from the voters.

Would be even better if the voters gave them credit this November, yes?

Well Now Here's Your Problem

President Obama gave a speech this week to assembled Associated Press editors (among other news professionals) and cited obnoxious Both Sides Do It(tm) false equivalence in political media narratives as a contributing factor to the problems in fixing our broken government.  As Tim Murphy of MoJo points out, the inevitable AP fact check of President Obama's speech is rife with...yeah, you see where this is going, right?

President Obama delivered a fiery (as we journalists like to call such things) speech to a gathering of newspapers editors in Washington on Tuesday, chiding Mitt Romney for using words like "marvelous" and knocking GOP Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan as "social darwinism." It was, by most accounts, a sign of what's to come from the campaign over the next seven months. Let's hope this fact-check of the speech from the Associated Press isn't also a harbinger of the future. ("It's not even 10 A.M. and we already have a 'worst of the day' winner," tweets Pema Levy.) The problem with the piece, by the normally solid Calvin Woodward, is that it doesn't really check any facts (inflated jobs figures, spending increases, that kind of thing). Instead, it suffers from a massive glut of false equivalence.

It's like the AP did this on purpose or something.  I give it Five Pinocchios On Fire!

As a candidate, Obama campaigned on a public option. Progressives were devastated when it was nixed from the Affordable Care Act—to the extent that some refused to support the final bill. Instead, Obama went with the market-driven approach favored by the Republican governor of Massachusetts. Why? Well, in part because Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley suggested there would be "broad bi-partisan support" for such a solution. Can you really knock someone for moving to the left when they started off on the left and ended up where the center used to be?

The fact-check goes on to rebuke Obama for accusing Republicans of wanting to toss out lots of economic regulations (something Republicans want to do) by pointing out that Romney himself doesn't want to literally eliminate every federal regulation—only a lot of them, including the Dodd–Frank Wall Street reform package, which was designed to prevent a repeat of the practices that led to the 2008 crash. But Obama didn't actually say Romney wanted to eliminate all federal regulations—only a lot of them.

A sense of nuance is helpful when writing about Washington politics—and nuance, incidentally, is something campaign speeches generally lack. But fact-checks are for objective facts, not subjective arguments about what does and doesn't constitute excessive deregulation. Pieces like this sort of defeat the point.

No, pieces like this have always been the point of "fact-checking".  PolitiFact and the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler do it all the time.  The entire point of stuff like this is to conflate objective fact checking and subjective refereeing and leveraging the credibility of the former to justify making calls on the latter.  Hence, we get "Even PolitiFact says X is wrong about Y!" when X is a subjective judgement call and not an objective fact check.  That is a cottage industry in DC, if not your raison d'être of being a Villager.  PolitiFact and Kessler are far from alone in this respect.

It's how we end up with "Lie of the Year!" and such.  There's danger in conflation like that, as anyone who might, say, want to ever see the tax dollars they paid into the Medicare system again would tell you.

StupidiNews!

• The nation's smallest town, Buford, Wyoming, has been sold lock, stock, and barrel for $900,000 to a pair of Vietnamese real estate developers.
• Corporations like Kraft, Coca-Cola and Pepsi have pulled out of supporting conservative legislative group ALEC after protests from voter rights groups.
• With short-term funding for the nation's highways on hold since March 31, Congress will return from Easter recess with a major fight on its hands.
• Economists predict the US created 205,000 jobs in March, keeping the unemployment rate even at 8.3%.
• The MPAA is reportedly making another effort to revive the reviled SOPA anti-piracy act, according to movie industry chief  and former Dem Senator turned lobbyist, Chris Dodd.

Last Call

I bet you didn't know President Obama's greatest feat of Kenyan Socialist Witch Doctor voodoo so far this campaign season was mind-controlling the WaPo's Chris Cillizza to write this.

In what was a defining speech of his 2012 reelection campaign, Obama repeatedly called out Ryan and Republicans for their “laughable” approach to deficit reduction, describing the budget plan put forward by the Wisconsin Republican as a “Trojan horse”. Added Obama: “Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism.”

Them’s fighting words. And, they make clear that a major part of Obama’s strategy heading toward November is to make Ryan — and the budget plans he has proposed in each of the last two years — famous or, more accurately, infamous. (Make sure to read Ezra Klein’s smart piece on Obama’s efforts to elevate Ryan.)

Knowing now that Obama is going to go all-out on the Ryan plan, it makes an increasing amount of sense for Romney to not only fully embrace the plan (as he has done) but to fully embrace the man too.

It’s not hard to imagine this thought in Romney headquarters this morning: You want to make the Ryan plan the centerpiece of this campaign? Fine. Game on. That’s a fight we want.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

OK, let me start again, I should really take the idea of a Romney/Paul ticket seri--BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Do it, Mittens.  Forever make this about the bland CEO who made a killing firing American workers and cashing in their companies out from under them and team him up with the bland government wonk who wants to makes a killing adding a profit margin to Grandma's health care plan and tossing millions off of food stamps and Medicaid.  Do it now, for all the Reasons.

Obama would win by 20 points.  Republicans cannot be this stupid.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Scary black guy is scary.

Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) on Tuesday accused President Obama of "threatening" the Supreme Court as it prepares a ruling on the constitutionality of the healthcare reform law.

Speaking a day after Obama warned against "unelected" judges overturning the law, Johanns said Obama crossed the line with his remarks.

"What President Obama is doing here isn't right," Johanns said Tuesday in an interview with local Nebraska radio station KLIN. "It is threatening, it is intimidating."

Seven more months of "But he's The Uppity Kenyan Colonialist Gangsta Thug!  Hide your nubile daughters!" is going to be awesome like a migraine surrounded by smaller autonomous migraines.  Then again, it's not like Republicans can run on issues or anything, so the full court press on BLOOGITY BLOO HE'S BLACK is pretty much their entire hand at this point.

I for one think people would remember 15 months of this in 2007-2008 not working, but it really hasn't stopped these guys from regularly visiting the dog whistle factory, ordering crates of dog whistles, melting them down into slag and then using the slag to paint HE'S BLACK in 50 foot tall letters on the side of every skyscraper in America as a stimulus project.

I swear if the President ever gave anyone the side-eye, there would be Articles of Banishment to the Phantom Zone before the end of the day.