Category: Quick Hits

The title is a weak attempt to reference Tora! Tora! Tora! That the effort was probably unsuccessful is underscored by the fact that I am currently explaining it.

In Wisconsin-related news:

1. Rasmussen Reports – they of the infamous +4% average Republican bias in their 2008 presidential election polling, appears to have gone full Zogby. That is, what was once considered a legitimate albeit right-leaning organization is now just a bunch of hacks using cheap parlor tricks to produce numbers that will please the paying client. I was going to do a full post on this, but Nate Silver and a couple folks from Pollster already did write-ups. This saves me the trouble of having to explain question order effects. Any remotely knowledgeable pollster understands this concept; hence it is immediately obvious to all of us (I count myself among the remotely knowledgeable) what Rasmussen was trying to pull here. They knew exactly what they were doing.

2. Why go through the trouble and expense of cooking the poll numbers when you could just lie and reverse the "for" and "against" numbers? Oh, Fox. You make so many mistakes, like when you accidentally put a "D" next to the names of Republicans who get embroiled in scandals. Whoopsie.

3. On the topic of slipping non-collective bargaining related ideological pet projects into the bill, Walker's proposal includes a number of changes that would allow state executive branch agencies to make changes to Medicaid and Medicare without input from the legislature. Because if sweeping changes are going to be made to a major social program then clearly the best way to do so is outside of the democratic process. By gubernatorial appointees. I don't see what could go wrong.

4. Will somebody AutoTune the fake David Koch – Scott Walker prank call already? I'm disappointed in you, internet.

I need to take a little Scott Walker break, although check back early Thursday afternoon for a new post with a roundup of Wisconsin links.

Daniel Foster is one of the National Review's most reliable neocon extremists. This is no mean feat, akin to being the tallest guy in the NBA. If you think I am exaggerating, his proposed solution to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was to "nuke it." Seriously. It only makes sense, then, that his "solution" to the unrest in Libya involves aircraft carriers and air strikes – American ones, of course.

With reports that the Gaddafi regime — or what’s left of it — has effected the indiscriminate massacre of Libyan civilians, up to and including air strikes in Tripoli and the planned carpet-bombing of Benghazi, the suggestion that President Obama establish a “no-fly zone” above Libya has begun popping up on social media. I don’t say this lightly, but I think POTUS must so act.

After 32 years on this planet and almost a decade of devoting my time to trying to figure these people out I am not surprised that Mr. Foster doesn't seem to have learned any lessons from the last ten twenty fifty 100 years of aggressively interventionist American foreign policy. What does continue to escape me, however, is what motivates this knee-jerk recourse to American military intervention as the solution to every problem on the globe. Foster's "I don't say this lightly" indicates either a dry sense of humor or a delusional personality trait requiring medical attention.

Given how obvious it seems to the rest of us that Libya's domestic politics must play out among Libyans (as opposed to a solution brokered at gunpoint by the Pentagon – no, no problems with legitimacy there) I struggle to understand what intervention is supposed to accomplish and how. Do people like Foster think that we can air-strike our way into the hearts of foreigners, a revision of the old "They'll hail us as their liberators" theory? Or do they resort to sending in the Air Force because, well, that's the extent of what they know how to do?

Since the Wisconsin budget "repair" bill stuff from Monday and Tuesday is still getting a lot of attention I'm going to be more succinct than usual today. The amount of attention Monday's post has gotten is equal parts rewarding and disturbing.

I can't believe I'm the only person who bothered to, you know, open a copy of Walker's bill and read it. Not exactly Woodward and Bernstein stuff here.

Speaking of the fundamentals of journalism, CNN saw fit to commemorate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' record five years of silence during oral arguments in the most cloying way possible given the limitations of existing technology. None of the 112 men and women who have served on the highest court have managed to go a single one-year term without asking a question, yet Silent Cal (with respect to the original) has managed to do it five times consecutively.

This type of story has appeared in the mainstream media several times in the past few years, inevitably focusing on the same basic folksy themes – Thomas' silence as an artifact of his humility, intellectual seriousness, childhood racial abuse, growing up with English as a second language, and so on. Journalistic treatments of his judicial Persistent Vegetative State always tactfully avoid raising the possibility that Thomas has no judicial philosophy beyond "What Anton said" and that upon appointment he was expected to do little more than sit there, shut up, and vote as ordered.

On the topic of not-so-folksy themes that didn't find their way into this piece, Congress sure doesn't seem very interested in the revelation that Thomas lied on his tax returns – for nineteen years – to hide his wife's six-figure income from conservative interest groups like the Heritage Foundation. Or failing to recuse himself from the Citizens United case even though his wife's lobbying firm has extensive connections to Citizens United and other right-wing interest groups.

Then again, I see no reason why his wife getting paid (handsomely) to lobby against campaign finance laws would compromise Mr.

Thomas' judgment on a pivotal case. He'd have to think about the case and possibly even form an opinion about it before any compromising could occur.

Two quick hits for today:

1. I have never donated money to a presidential candidate and I never thought I would, but I am writing a check to Haley Barbour for President post haste.
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It is not possible to overstate the extent to which the 2012 election needs this guy. Can you imagine how boring it will be to watch Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney run against the "Defending the Mushy Center" version of Barack Obama? Good lord. It will make the 1996 and 2000 races seem like enthralling, white knuckle thrill rides with high turnout. Haley Barbour is like Central Casting's version of a Republican presidential nominee: a fat, sweaty racist from Mississippi with a Boss Hog drawl.

Short of exhuming and reanimating George Wallace to run on a ticket with Orval Faubus, Barbour is the best thing that can happen to this election. I need entertainment value to get through an 18 month election cycle; it won't get much better than seeing Obama debate Foghorn Leghorn. Maybe we can even convince him to wear a giant cowboy hat.

2. CNN ran a mildly caustic piece about the rapid income growth enjoyed by the wealthy compared to the stagnant earnings of the middle class since the 1970s. While I firmly believe that class is an integral concept in understanding politics, economics, sociology, and the like, I am always frustrated by the extent to which terms like "middle class" are meaningless in the American context. No one knows what that means – we know only that we're all part of it (in our own minds). When 40% of households with incomes under $20,000 identify as middle class (!!!!) there is a problem. When fully one-third of families with incomes over $150,000 say the same, it becomes clear that the label is applied loosely at best. I'm curious to know if the fact that everyone thinks they're middle class is a result of self-delusion or years of concerted misinformation.

After months and months of prodding, the House Republicans have finally coughed up a list of specific things they want to cut from the budget. The hit list totals…wait for it…$58 billion.

Wow! $58 billion sure is a lot of money! Unless of course we're talking about the Federal budget.
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Let me double check something.

Yes, we're talking about the Federal budget.

Let's take a quick look at these cuts in perspective, despite Perspective's well-established liberal bias. Click to embiggen:

Wow, over 4/10ths of one percent of the FY2011 budget! Oddly enough the $58 billion all comes out of non-defense discretionary spending, which makes sense because I think that is the largest share of the budget.

Oh.

Well surely they targeted wasteful spending and clear examples of unnecessary programs.

Oh for fuck's sake.

You could almost respect their misguided zeal – rhetorically, if not in practice – for "cutting spending" if it was not such an obvious smokescreen for partisan hackery. Like, "Let's target everything our donors and base don't like and call it fiscal responsibility" as though cutting the National Endowment for the Arts is actually going to make a dent.

Or perhaps I'm just being cynical. Maybe the two most unnecessary items in the budget really are job training and the EPA.
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This is somewhat brief, but tomorrow is going to be the shizzle. Promise.

Mubarak has now given two speeches since the civil unrest in Egypt began in earnest – one in which he asked the resignation of the government (which appeased no one) and another today in which he promised to surrender power after September elections (ditto). During both speeches I could not get this out of my head:

To me, this is the moment that defines the end of the Cold War. Most people think of Germans dancing on the Berlin Wall but the video of Nicolae Ceaucescu's final speech (1989) does more to stand out. The speech is famous as a symbol of the End of Communism (and who in America ever wants to stop reliving the glorious moment when we made the whole world safe for Taco Bell franchise distribution?) due to the way the aged Ceaucescu looks on in bewilderment as the agitated crowd begins to hiss with disapproval. It fit the western stereotype of the Communist leader to a tee – ancient, out of touch, and incapable of change.

I am reminded of this footage when Mubarak speaks because the two leaders share much in common – their tenure in power, their age, and their all-encompassing delusions. To hear them speak it seems as though everyone on the planet except them realizes that they are finished. Mubarak talking about how he is going to stay in power for 9 more months is like watching the scene in Goodfellas in which Tommy (Joe Pesci) gets "made." As he prepares for his big honor he is apparently the only person in the film (or audience) who does not understand that he is about to be taken to an empty building and shot in the head. Which is, coincidentally enough, exactly what happened to Ceaucescu and his wife Elena.

Mubarak will likely be fortunate enough to avoid that fate; no doubt he will live out his remaining years Idi Amin style as a guest of the Saudi royal family. Until that inevitability occurs to him we can continue to enjoy the fact that, unless he happens to be the world's greatest actor, he really does not understand that he's done. Nobody within or outside of Egypt is going to prop him up any longer and the domestic situation has gone far beyond the tipping point. Going quietly into his lavish retirement seems like an obvious choice at this point, but apparently 30 years of absolute power make it difficult to recognize when the jig is up.

I'm going to keep it brief today – I like Wednesday's post enough to keep it going for another day rather than bury it.

I strongly recommend that you find 20 minutes to read Jason Zengerle's "The Idealist" from the February New Republic. It is impeccably written and unfolds across seven pages like a good movie. The story concerns Jeff Smith, a young Missouri politician brought to some degree of fame as the subject of the documentary film Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?

Spoilers coming.

I absolutely love the Keystone Kops aspect of the relatively minor offense that led to the double indictment (although note that as is often the case, the attempt to cover up the crime was worse than the crime). Idealistic and book-smart people are just so bad at crime. Note the planning, which is reminiscent of the scene in Office Space in which the three nerds try to figure out how to launder money by looking it up in the dictionary. Later they base their efforts to avoid investigators on an episode of The Wire.

As Matt Taibbi's profile of John Boehner emphasizes, some people are cut out for Washington politics. Those people are almost universally scumbags. They lack any discernible positives as politicians or as human beings excepting the ability to raise money from lobbyists and get reelected. Idealistic people who enter this system – and I'm not attempting to portray Jeff Smith as an angel, but he is obviously a neophyte and somewhat naive – are skinned alive, picked over by the scavengers, and dumped on the trash heap.

Politics are much like any other form of crime. Poor people shoot each other and go to prison because they can't afford lawyers. The affluent, well connected elite hire a professional who is good enough to avoid detection to commit their crimes, and on the rare occasions that they are prosecuted their $100,000 retainer legal teams have them home by dinnertime.

I am not trying to be lazy here, but today's post will be relatively brief. Just a couple of follow-ups on Monday's post about the Giffords shooting in Tucson.

1. Glenn Reynolds gives us excellent evidence, as usual, of everything that's wrong with the right wing in American politics. Minnesota's Tim Pawlenty, who is attempting to position himself as one of the "mainstream" presidential candidates in 2012, made the following statement about Sarah Palin's "crosshairs" advertisement on Good Morning America:

"(I)t wouldn't have been my style to put the cross hairs on there."

That's it. That's what he said. He even followed it by noting that there is "no evidence to suggest that it had anything to do with this mentally unstable person's rage and senseless act in Arizona.
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" Criticism any milder than that would, of necessity, involve a handjob. Here's how Ol' Perfesser Shit-for-Brains responded to Pawlenty's slice of milquetoast:

TIM PAWLENTY DEMONSTRATES THAT HE’S NOT MAN ENOUGH TO BE PRESIDENT.

He links some no-name hack on Pajamas Media – in other news, PJ Media apparently still exists – who states that Pawlenty "preemptively caves in to false lefty narrative" and "I’m tempted to scratch him off my 2012 short list" (which I'm sure is tragic, tragic news to former Gov.
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Pawlenty).

Glenn "Manly Man" Reynolds and his keyboard chickenhawk allies will have none of Pawlenty's namby-pamby talk, which is a perfect example of why nothing remotely sane comes out of the GOP.

You tell 'em, tough guy!

2. Rep. Peter King, the hardcore wingnut from New York, is suddenly in favor of "gun control":

With that in mind, Peter King, the new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg this morning proposed federal legislation that would prevent people from knowingly bringing guns within 1,000 feet of an event at which members of Congress and federal judges are appearing.

I guess the 2nd Amendment isn't quite so sacrosanct when King thinks about the possibility of someone shooting him.

So, I had some relatively light stuff for NPF.
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But Thursday evening we hosted a dinner party as part of my wife's ongoing effort to make me socialize with other human beings.

I am not going to say whom, but one of us invited this really nice guy who just happens to be a white supremacist with a real affinity for Mark Steyn, and after listening to him rant for about an hour to close out the evening I don't much feel like writing anything non-political or fun. Or much of anything at all.

On the plus side, I feel like I have grown somewhat as a person. Eight years ago I would have flipped the dinner table, pinned him down, and turned his face into a pound of ground chuck.

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