Turns out the Greeks had a word for what ails the Republican Party — Anosognosia. To explore this disorder on its home turf, go to a Tea Party rally armed with official budget figures, agreed upon by economists of both the Keynesian and the Friedman schools, which prove beyond the shadow of a mathematical doubt that the Republicans are, historically, the party of high deficits. Now try to convince any random demonstrator of this simple historical fact.

The thing can’t be done, because the poor devil suffers from anosognosia. It is what allows him to cry out “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” without his head exploding.

Here’s a dictionary definition of what keeps his head together:

Anosognosia is a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability.

For more, go here.

First, appearances are everything. To be a good Republican you have to look like a good Republican. Which is not so easy these days. It used to be that a good Republican looked like a small-town banker — an agreeable Kiwanian with a prosperous paunch, dressed in a dark gray suit, a white shirt and a red tie drawn at the neck into a carefully constructed knot. If he had an adventurous bent, the banker might essay a triangular Windsor knot. Winter or summer, he always wore a hat.

The Windsor knot, by the way, is said to have originated with the Duke of Windsor, whose only other contribution to the world was to demonstrate just how thin royal blood could get. Before the war started, the newly minted Duke and Duchess made nice with the Nazis on one of their endless trips to nowhere, and were eventually shuffled off to the Bahamas by an exasperated British government. The Duke spent the war years perfecting his knot and studying the tango. Had he been an American citizen, there is no doubt the Duke would have been a Republican.

Republican women used to look like the banker’s wife, who was considered a style trendsetter and a model of sensible, plump American womanhood. She subscribed to family values before the phrase was invented. She was chairwoman of the annual bake-off fund-raiser for the hospital and wore a silver fox stole in the winter. She also wore a hat with some sort of bird feather in it and thought New York City was the home of the Devil. She was an enthusiastic Republican because her husband was an enthusiastic Republican. That’s all there was to it. She would have thought the Tea Party was inhabited by dangerous lunatics with terrible manners, sort of like the Hell’s Angels.

But all that was a long time ago, before everything got so confusing. Now where does a good Republican look for inspiration and guidance? Where once there was Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater and Dwight Eisenhower, all earnest and boring and utterly unsurprising, now we have John McCain, Michelle Bachmann, John Boehner, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich? Oh, what a rich choice! But first…

No matter how you knot your tie, as a good Republican you will want to keep your eye on the donut. You will want to embrace the essence of Republicanism, the spirit of conservatism; you must long for the way things used to be, or at least say you do, before Big Government came along and ruined everything. You will want to have at hand a few phrases about fiscal responsibility, self-reliance and the American Way, even if you don’t quite know what the American Way is. If you happen to have one of the old GOP handbooks, go through it and cross out Communism wherever you see it and substitute Terrorism with a capital T. Cross out Roosevelt and insert Obama. Cross out New Deal and replace it with Bad Deal. Make sure you’ve got the words of the “Pledge of Allegiance” and “God Bless America” down pat and memorize the First Amendment.

Now you’re ready to adopt the GOP style that suits you. Which do you like best? Boehner or Bachmann, Palin or Gingrich? And don’t forget the Old Pilot. Maybe the bolts have popped out of his wings but he’s still flying the plane, more or less. How about Orrin Hatch? Now there’s a guy knows how to knot a tie. He can do it one-handed while the other hand is busy wielding the scalpel. How about Mitch McConnell? Isn’t he cuddly cute? Nobody said this was going to be an easy choice.

Perhaps it would be easier to make a selection from a list of GOP adjectives and construct your very own Republican persona. Here are a few descriptive words to help you: smug, hypocritical, selfish, greedy, hawkish, myopic, negative, reckless, stupid.

And, finally, let’s not forget wrong.

It’s worth reading Matt Taibbi’s whole article in Rolling Stone on the tea party. This tiny sample contains a particularly fine specimen of snark — one that will ring true to anyone who has attempted communication with these muddled patriots.

Hardcore young libertarians like Koch — the kind of people who were outside the tent during the elder Paul’s presidential run in 2008 — cared enough about the issues to jump off the younger Paul’s bandwagon when he cozied up to the Republican Party establishment. But it isn’t young intellectuals like Koch who will usher Paul into the U.S. Senate in the general election; it’s those huge crowds of pissed-off old people who dig Sarah Palin and Fox News and call themselves Tea Partiers. And those people really don’t pay attention to specifics too much. Like dogs, they listen to tone of voice and emotional attitude.

The question raised but not answered in this don’t-miss story from Discover Magazine is whether these overendowed squirrels experience lust while masturbating.

If so, Christine O’Donnell wants you to know that when that last nut is harvested you’ll go straight to squirrel hell.

If you have no lust in your heart, however, prospects brighten. Christine will be totally okay with your little auto-fellatio games, and you will ascend post-death to squirrel heaven.

These mighty genitals suggest that sex, and sperm in particular, is a serious business for Cape ground squirrels. To get the best odds of fathering the next generation, they need to ensure that it’s their sperm that fertilises the female’s eggs and not those of rivals. So they make a lot of it; hence, the oversized testicles.

With sperm being so important, it’s odd that some Cape ground squirrels regularly waste theirs. Yet that’s exactly what Jane Waterman saw while studying wild squirrels in Namibia. Some of them would masturbate, apparently squandering their precious sperm. What does squirrel masturbation look like? Apparently, it’s rather acrobatic…

The final explanation is that masturbation is actually a form of self-medication. By cleaning their genitals, males reduce their odds of contracting a sexually transmitted infection. It’s a new hypothesis that Waterman herself put forward, but it’s the only one that actually fits with all of her data…

Great catch by Robert Stein at Connecting.the.Dots:

As Glenn Beck’s Dr. Frankenstein, Karl Rove’s rehabilitator and Sarah Palin’s sugar daddy, Murdoch has defined media deviancy down to the point where it matches the now rock-bottom ethical standards of politics.

One gauge of his dual motivation is reflected in the antics of the Journal, which Murdoch has put behind a pay wall online, but which in recent weeks has made freely available to all its most virulent attacks on Obama.

In today’s edition alone, one columnist calls Barack Obama “kind of a jerk,” another parses his “disastrous fall” and still another explains why “Connecticut voters want a smackdown of the president’s policies.”

But if would-be readers are interested in a critique of Stephen Hawking’s views on God or what Congress should do about IPOs to help the American economy on “the road to recovery,” they will have to pay Murdoch for the privilege.

Nice piece in the Los Angeles Times by novelist Anne Lamott:

But even as we enjoy the antics, we must hasten to the aid of our country. The reason has nothing to do with the minority leader’s skin tone, or the three aforementioned Republican comediennes or, for that matter, Mitch McConnell’s chin or John McCain’s tiny anger issues, or C Street, or Rush or Cheney or Glenn Beck.

We must take on today’s radioactive politics for the sake of my 1-year-old grandson.

I was babysitting him on the night when Miss O’Donnell won the Republican nomination for senator in Delaware. The television was filled with footage of the incomparable O’Donnell and news of how she opposes masturbation and believes that scientists have successfully implanted human brains in lab rats. I could not have taken my eyes off the television for anyone else except my grandson, with his huge luminous black eyes and hair, his rosy brown skin, his toothy smile. But this toddler is so lovely, innocent and funny that he broke the spell…

Why am I not surprised by this:

Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life…

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences…

That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

From the Wall Street Journal, of all places:

They may be an eccentric minority, or (in the view of conservatives) a lunatic fringe. But a Quinnipiac University poll this year showed nearly two-thirds of those with household incomes of more than $250,000 a year support raising their own taxes to reduce the federal deficit…

An op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times by Garrett Gruener, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, makes two important points about taxing the rich. (Mr. Gruener founded Ask.com and is the CEO of Nanomix and is a co-founder of Alta Partners, so he’s got street cred.)

First, he says tax rates don’t make or break the success of an entrepreneur — or the jobs he creates. He says he’s paying the lowest rates of his working life. But “if you want the simple, honest truth, from my perspective as an entrepreneur, the fluctuation didn’t affect what I did with my money. None of my investments has ever been motivated by the rate at which I would have to pay personal income tax,” Mr. Gruener writes.

History, he says, shows that “modest changes in the tax rate for wealthy taxpayers don’t make much of a difference if the goal is to build new companies, drive technological development and stimulate new industries…”

“What will change my investment decisions is if I see an economy doing better, one in which there is demand for the goods and services my investments produce. I am far more likely to invest if I see a country laying the foundation for future growth.”

Here’s another great song in the Hard Hittin’ Song Series, this one by Woody Guthrie’s long time singing companion, Lead Belly. We hope you enjoy it.

Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times today:

There’s a sound political rationale for this, of course. Reducing spending is always difficult, and a Republican Party coasting toward a midterm victory has little incentive to stake out controversial positions. And as everybody knows, the only way to really bring the budget into balance is to reform (i.e., cut) Medicare and Social Security, a topic that nobody in Congress — save the indefatigable Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan — is particularly eager to touch…

Step right along, folks, nothing to see here. Or so goes the Conventional Wisdom, taken totally for granted by the political and the media establishments in our whole debate over taxes and the deficit.

And yet what’s that huge corpse lying beside the road, bloated and stinking in the sun for all to see? Why doesn’t “everybody know” that cutting War Department spending is also a way of balancing the budget, and one that has the added advantage of being sane?

Presidents Johnson and Carter both tried to impose a discipline called zero-based budgeting on the government, with barely visible success. It involved assuming that your department’s budget had just been reduced to zero, and then restoring functions one by one until you reached a prescribed limit.

Let’s try that with the War Department. Overnight it’s all gone, every bit of it. No more soldiers or sailors, tanks, bombs, planes, guns, submarines, aircraft carriers, drones, generals or admirals. Nothing left. The end of our known world. We stand here naked in a hostile world, shivering and defenseless like Costa Rica — which actually does lack an army.

What will become of poor us? Surely we will be crushed by our enemies, all three hundred million of us from sea to shining sea. Our cities burned, our fields sowed with salt, our women raped, our children sent to madrasas, our surviving men reduced to serfdom.

Just like Costa Rica, except that in the real world none of those things ever seems to happen to Costa Rica.

Nor would they happen to us. We, too, have no military enemies — and therefore no rational reason to maintain much more than a token army. After all America hasn’t been invaded since 1812, and then we pretty much asked for it.

We have wars because we have a War Department, simple as that. No department, no wars. Then we might be forced to think for a living instead of priming the pump of our economy with bombs, bullets and blood. Sure it would be tough, but we can handle tough. We’re Americans.

Sometimes a few words can bring a whole era to life. These are from the review in this week’s New Yorker of Ron Chernow’s new biography of George Washington:

The mar to his beauty was his terrible teeth, which were replaced by unsuccessful transplant surgery and by dentures made from ivory and from teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.

From Jimmy Carter’s White House Diary:

I think it’s crucial that I keep in touch with the people of the country and let them know I’m interested in their viewpoint. The Congress has got to know that I can go directly over their heads when necessary. And of course, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it. So far I don’t feel isolated from the rest of the country since I’ve been in the White House. Reverend James Baker from South Carolina, immediately after he talked to me, called his sister-in-law and was so excited that he died, unfortunately. I called his wife to express my regrets.

I’m pretty well launched now on President Carter’s White House Diary, and find it fascinating. Some of this is because I was there, but much of it comes from watching a serious and moral man wrestle with serious and moral problems in a world that too often is neither.

Most of the interest in these sorts of books is not in the “news” which we’ll be seeing these next few days from those who determine what “news” is, but rather in the small revelatory glimpses along the way. As I go through the book, I’ll pull some of these out for you.

For starters:

During my presidential campaign in 1975, thirty-eight U.S. senators sponsored a resolution never to change the treaty, and this prompted me to study the terms and history of the original agreement, which had been in effect since 1903. It was obviously unfair, and I learned that it was hastily signed in the middle of the night before any Panamanian official could read its terms. My commitment to furthering justice and human rights made me determined to negotiate a new treaty; it was also important to insure the long-term safety of the canal. Securing the Senate ratification of the agreement was to become the most difficult task of my political life.

The thing to remember here is that political pressure to renegotiate the Panama Canal treaty was essentially zero. The president had nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing the right thing — against huge political opposition coming from, among other quarters, Ronald Reagan. None of the opposition’s childish fears ever came true, but Jimmy Carter nevertheless took a substantial political hit from the jingoes. I still have in my files a list of the objections raised by Navy admirals, which time has proven to be just as silly and ignorant as they sounded then.

I just bought President Carter’s White House Diary yesterday, and haven’t got far enough along to have any useful thoughts on it. Just as I arrived home, though, I got a call from Samuel P. Jacobs of The Daily Beast who wanted my opinion on the current craze for comparing President Obama’s problems to President Carter’s.

I didn’t really have any useful thoughts on that either, but that didn’t stop me. For those who give a feces, the result is here.

In many countries the army is used frankly and directly to keep the poor afraid of the rich. Most soldiers, worldwide, never have and never will fight in the actual military defense of their countries. They would mostly be incompetent to do so, as the murderous Argentine army proved to be in the Falklands war.

A principal if unadmitted point of armies is to keep the citizenry in line, using the traditional methods of rape, theft, prison, extortion, torture, kidnapping, and murder. Many armies do nothing but this; all armies stand ready to do it. Ours is no exception, as we have seen in the Homestead Strike, the Kent State murders, in General MacArthur’s attack on the Bonus Marchers, and on countless other occasions.

And yet the people doing this dirty work, the soldiers, are themselves poor. Why would they do such a self-destructive thing? Because they themselves will be murdered or imprisoned by their upper class officers if they refuse, of course. But even more sadly, because all of their lives they have been made to believe, by the schools, the media, the church and the government, that the army is not just for the country but in a very real sense is the country.

For the occasional chance of promotion to the officer ranks, for an escape from poverty, for health care and housing, soldiers are easily convinced that the enemy du jour is real, whether made up of socialists, capitalist or communist imperialists, Moslem or Christian crusaders, or immigrant hordes of dusky terrorists. But all too often the true enemy is their own brothers and sisters.

A little off the point, but I’ll throw it in—

Police bureaucracies in the United States, unlike the military, make no sharp distinction between enlisted men and officers. Police are all “officers” and their leaders, almost without exception, come from the ranks. In this respect civilian society is coming to be structured more like the army and less like the police, with an absurdly expensive college degree required for entrance into the officer class.

The beauty of this is that it seems to make advancement a matter of “merit,” and few stop to think that most college education has nothing to do with the jobs for which it is required. Lloyd C. Blankfein and Hank Paulson wouldn’t have got their first Wall Street jobs without college degrees, but they no more needed them than Jay Gould did, or Andrew Carnegie.

(Again off the point, but not too much: When Gould hired strikebreakers during a 1886 strike against his railroads, he is reported to have said, “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.”)

This, excerpted from a longer piece in Naked Capitalism, sounds right to me. But then what do I know about money-lending and economic theory. How does it strike you?

Wolf then comes perilously close to making a fundamentally important observation, but pulls back (emphasis ours):

We cannot assess the costs of regulation without recognising a few facts: first, both the economy and the financial system have just survived a near death experience; second, the costs of the crisis include millions of unemployed and tens of trillions of dollars in lost output, as the Bank of England’s Andy Haldane has argued; third, governments rescued the financial system by socialising its risks; finally, the financial industry is the only one with limitless access to the public purse and is, as a result, by far the most subsidised in the world.

Read the italicized part again. Big finance has an unlimited credit line with governments around the globe. “Most subsidized industry in the world” is inadequate to describe this relationship. Banks are now in the permanent role of looters, as described in the classic Akerlof/Romer paper. They run highly leveraged operations, extract compensation based on questionable accounting and officially-subsidized risk-taking, and dump their losses on the public at large.

But the subsidies go beyond that. To list only a few examples: we have near zero interest rates, which allow bank to earn risk free profits simply by borrowing short and buying longer-dated Treasuries. We have the IRS refusing to look into violations of REMIC rules, which govern mortgage securitizations. We have massive intervention to prop up real estate prices, with the main objective to shore up banks; any impact on consumers is an afterthought.

The usual narrative, “privatized gains and socialized losses” is insufficient to describe the dynamic at work. The banking industry falsely depicts markets, and by extension, its incumbents as a bastion of capitalism. The blatant manipulations of the equity markets shows that financial activity, which used to be recognized as valuable because it supported commercial activity, is whenever possible being subverted to industry rent-seeking. And worse, these activities are state supported…

So, the reality is that banks can no longer meaningfully be called private enterprises, yet no one in the media will challenge this fiction. And pointing out in a more direct manner that banks should not be considered capitalist ventures would also penetrate the dubious defenses of their need for lavish pay. Why should government-backed businesses run hedge funds or engage in high risk trading, or for that matter, be permitted to offer lucrative products that are valuable because they allow customers to engage in questionable activities, like regulatory arbitrage? The sort of markets that serve a public purpose should be reasonably efficient and transparent, which implies low margins for intermediaries.

David Weigel pointed me to this clip, for which I am eternally grateful and you will be too. It shows Al Franken and Christine O’Donnell, Delaware’s answer to Alexander Portnoy, debating sex ed.

Here’s something for all you helicopter moms and dads to think about. Not that you will.

If history is any guide, we seem to veer between overreaction and underreaction — all while defining our own response as “moderate.” There is an inherent hypocrisy in our attempts to control our odds — putting the organic veggies (there is no actual data proving that organic foods increase longevity) in the trunk of our car (researchers tell us there is “evidence” but not “proof” that car emissions accelerate heart disease), then checking our e-mail on our cellphone at the next red light (2,600 traffic deaths a year are caused by drivers using cellphones, according to a Harvard study).

And while we certainly make constant (mis)calculations in our adult lives, we seem all the more determined yet befuddled when it comes to the safety of our children. For instance, the five things most likely to cause injury to children up to age 18, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are: car accidents, homicide (usually at the hands of someone they know), child abuse, suicide or drowning. And what are the five things that parents are most worried about (according to surveys by the Mayo Clinic)? Kidnapping, school snipers, terrorists, dangerous strangers and drugs…

“The least safe thing you can do with your child, statistically, is drive them somewhere,” said Lenore Skenazy, author of “Free-Range Kids,” a manifesto preaching a return to the day when children were allowed to roam on their own. “Yet every time we put them in the car we don’t think, ‘Oh God, maybe I should take public transportation instead, because if something happened to my kid on the way to the orthodontist I could never forgive myself.’ ”

A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial. That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.

…and have been since that night early in the millenium when I first heard Professor Warren on late night radio as I drove through Virginia on I-95. Thrillingly, she was talking about a trick employed by insurance companies to extort fake “late fees” out of customers. The companies, it seemed, would require East Coast customers to mail their payments to a West Coast address, and vice versa. That way a sucker could pay on the dot but still incur a late fee because of the extra day or so in the mail. A few million pennies here, a few million pennies there… It all added up.

Here, I knew at once, was a woman who really, truly understood me to the depths of my socialist soul. We two could find true happiness together, I said hopelessly to myself as I drove forlorn and lonely through the gathering dark of Bush’s America.

For years a lefty lawyer I know was a regular reader, operating on the Know Your Enemy theory, of The National Review. On the Starve the Beast theory he would fill out a free trial subscription card and then stiff the Buckleys. When the magazines stopped coming, he’d sign up for a new trial subscription.

“What you couldn’t help noticing was the obsession with sex,” he says. “The magazine was full of innuendos and double entendres and sexual references, like a bunch of little kids sniggering about their wee-wees. Very bizarre. You never saw that kind of stuff in The Nation. Still don’t.”

But it lives on in conservative rhetoric, which is increasingly studded (now I’m doing it) with barely concealed racism and naked gay-bashing. Well, not so much “barely concealed.” Actually it’s dangling right out there in the open, unlike Rush Limbaugh’s anal cyst.

Here’s just one from the many examples collected by Perrspectives.com:

Even before the election of Barack Obama, right-wing radio host and Viagra enthusiast Rush Limbaugh debuted “bend over” as a Republican talking point. Before regularly using terms like “man-child” and “little boy” to describe the first African-American president, Limbaugh declared “Democrats will bend over, grab the ankles, and say, ‘Have your way with me’” to black and progressive voters. (In case listeners had any lingering confusion about his metaphor, he later added “anal poisoning” to his repertoire.)

After Obama’s inauguration, Limbaugh announced “We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.” And in August 2009, Limbaugh coughed up this metaphorical two-fer:

“You people are out calling us Nazis, saying we’re running around with Swastikas. We get tarred and feathered as Nazis because we don’t just bend over, grab the ankles and let you guys ram whatever down our throats you want.”

ABC News is reporting that the Obama administration will name Elizabeth Warren to a position that will allow her to serve as interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Board, bypassing the inevitable Republican virtual filibuster.

Why the Democrats continue to allow virtual filibusters rather than forcing actual physical ones remains beyond my limited conception.

But if this report is correct, it is just barely possible that Obama has realized how completely politically screwed his policies have left him, and is in the process of tacking toward his base and away from that part of the electorate that will never accept him no matter how many tax breaks he gives them.

Maybe, just maybe, Obama will manage to pivot from this moment of weakness toward finding his voice on important social issues, and welcoming the hatred of those who suck the lifeblood from society, as generally happens in late-stage empires.

I try to hold onto hope, at least.

Ezra sez:

The immediate impact is that the GOP became that much less likely to take over the Senate in November. A clear Republican win in Delaware became a likely Republican loss. But though that’s getting all the headlines, it slightly misses the point: The long-term impact of these primaries is not going to be on the incumbents who have been defeated. It’ll be on the incumbents who survived.

It was hard for incumbent Republicans to see Sens. Bob Bennett and Lisa Murkowski unexpectedly toppled in their primaries. But Alaska and Utah are conservative, quirky states. They were likely targets for an angry conservative electorate. The same cannot be said for Delaware, a moderate state that often goes blue. Rep. Mike Castle’s defeat was proof that no heterodox Republican is safe from a primary defeat — it doesn’t matter how popular you’ve been, or how clearly purple your electorate was. You’re not safe. You’re never safe.

Politicians are, by nature, a fearful species. But their nightmares became a lot more specific last night. The Tea Party, for all its unexpected successes, cannot topple every incumbent Republican in the country. But by toppling the right ones, it can make every incumbent Republican vote and speak and act with the Tea Party in mind. So though the Tea Party isn’t likely to send all that many of its own Republicans to Washington, the likely outcome of last night’s primaries is that the Tea Party takes over the Republicans who are already in Washington, and don’t want to be sent home.

I know a young lady of irreproachable character and veracity who is just starting her freshman year at the University of Edinburgh. She writes as follows. Eat your heart out, American frat boy.

So, I am all moved in and (mostly) settled (I will blog about my room soon, once I get a little more comfy). And freshers week has started, and boy is it crazy. Since everyone can drink most of the events are about drinking which is strange.

Another strange thing I have encountered was at a meeting for people living in my house; the house warden (or resident grown up) told us all about the noise policy and the policy for fire safety — and then he embarked on a discussion of stripper policy.

Yes, the official policy for bringing strippers into the dorm (if you were curious, you are allowed to have strippers in the largest common room but you have to put up a sign that says “Private Party” and shut the door; also you have to remember to tell the warden, for security reasons).

The best part was when he introduced the stripper policy by asking if any boys had birthdays coming up because he knew that often for their friends birthday boys “Like to have female guests who seem to find our air conditioning rather hot and feel the need to take off their clothes.” (Allow me to point out, briefly, that my warden is a professor of divinity, which I think makes the story even funnier).

Anyway, that got me thinking about the differences between here and home and one thing stands out: here the prevailing attitude seems to be ‘do whatever you want, just don’t bother anyone else’ while I think schools at home are more inclined towards trying to police everyone’s actions and dictate what people should do (this is all speculation of course since I have never gone to college in the US).

Tomorrow, my first meeting with the other psychology students! And a visit to the gym! And a literary tour of the city!

When you live in a national security state that tortures people and wages constant war, it’s hard to be surprised or even upset by stories like this:

WASHINGTON - Twelve U.S. soldiers face a variety of charges in what military authorities believe was a conspiracy to murder Afghan civilians and cover it up, along with charges they used hashish, mutilated corpses and kept grisly souvenirs.

[…]

According to the military documents, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs and four other soldiers were involved in throwing grenades at civilians and then shooting them in separate incidents. Three Afghan men died.

Authorities allege Gibbs kept finger bones, leg bones and a tooth from Afghan corpses. Another soldier, Spc. Michael Gagnon II, allegedly kept a skull from a corpse, according to charging documents. Several soldiers are charged with taking pictures of the corpses, and one — Spc. Corey Moore — with stabbing a corpse.

We run an empire. Doesn’t this kind of thing go hand-in-hand with that? We give American kids assault rifles, send them into war zones and encourage them to waste “hajjis” and “get some.” If a few of them take this to its next logical step, do we really have the right to whip out our hankies and cry foul? We want you to kill for us, but only if you promise to kill nicely? Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. These Frankenstein monsters are our creation. They are the organic by-products of a hyper-militarized culture that worships war. We declare war on anything we oppose. Virtually every public event and holiday is saturated with militarism. Our favorite sport is little more than a metaphor for war. And, as the great George Carlin pointed out, we have the only national anthem that mentions rockets and bombs in it. If these guys hadn’t been caught, we’d all be patting them on the backs when they got home. We’d thank them for their service and call them heroes.

Our culture and our institutions breed killers, and the fact that we’re constantly at war gives psychopaths plenty of opportunities to indulge their sadism. But rather than question that, we’ll treat this event as some kind of wicked aberration, blame it on a few bad apples (hashish smoking bad apples, no less!) and keep chugging along as violently as before.

These guys didn’t fall from outer space. They came from right here, the good old US of A. This is from a 1944 issue of Life magazine. The caption says, “Arizona war worker sends her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her.”

Today is Chlamydia Monday in Sweden, yet another reason to keep that country on your list of emigration possibilities in case Boehner and McConnell take over this one in November. Go here to see the Official Chlamydia Day Videos (try saying that fast five times in a row). The clips are not limited to just the one sexually transmitted disease, nor to a species-specific method of transmission.

From ThinkProgress:

A planned Quran burning Saturday in Amarillo was thwarted by a 23-year-old carrying a skateboard and wearing a T-shirt with “I’m in Repent Amarillo No Joke” scrawled by hand on the back.

Jacob Isom, 23, grabbed David Grisham’s Quran when he became distracted while arguing with several residents at Sam Houston Park about the merits of burning the Islamic holy book. “You’re just trying to start Holy Wars,” Isom said of Grisham after he gave the book to a religious leader from the Islamic Center of Amarillo.

To those of us who are getting along the news these days can seem, in a certain sense, comforting. After all we have been here before, haven’t we? — time after time, even. For an instance take a look at this, substituting Tea Party for pseudo-conservativism, Obama for Eisenhower, and so on as needed. Very few of Richard Hofstadter’s words would need changing if they were written for tomorrow’s New York Times. In fact they were written for The American Scholar in 1954. We somehow managed to stumble through that outbreak of national idiocy, soiled and tattered but mostly intact. With luck, we may even do it again.

The new dissent is certainly not radical — there are hardly any radicals of any sort left — nor is it precisely conservative … It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions.

They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it it represented by the Eisenhower administration.

Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society … Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released in action, would be very far from conservative.

The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulsiveness and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere … The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or subconsciously aims at their abolition.”

Who is the pseudo-conservative and what does he want? It is impossible to identify him by social class, for the pseudo-conservative impulse can be found in practically all classes in society, although its power probably rests largely on its appeal to the less-educated members of the middle classes. The ideology of pseudo-conservatism can be characterized but not defined, because the pseudo-conservative tends to be more than ordinarily incoherent about politics. The lady who, when General Eisenhower’s victory over Senator Taft had finally become official in 1952, stalked out of the Hilton Hotel declaiming: “This means eight more years of socialism,” was probably a fairly good representative of the pseudo-conservative mentality…

The restlessness, suspicion and fear shown in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the anguish which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics in the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization…

All those opinion polls must be sinking in at last. This is the first time, so far as I can remember, that John the Bronze has yielded so much as a millimeter in his lifelong battle to hand everybody else’s money over to the rich. Presumably Boehner’s about-face is due to President Obama’s recent discovery that class warfare is a game two can play.

WASHINGTON — House Republican leader John Boehner says he would support extending tax cuts only for middle-class earners even though he considers it “bad policy” to exclude the highest-earning Americans from tax relief during a recession.

President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser said Sunday he is happy that Boehner, R-Ohio, isn’t willing to hold hostage an extension of tax cuts for those earning under $250,000 a year, or more than 97 percent of earners, to try to gain a continuation of breaks enjoyed by the wealthiest…

News from the unincorporated community of Mount Carmel, Kentucky:

“I have to admit, a little grin came across my face when I saw his brains go flying,” Smith said. “He’s been trouble ever since he’s been here. He’s always been trouble.”

More good sense, as usual, from Daniel Larison at The American Conservative:

According to the story Republicans tell themselves, they lost power because they spent too much, and they believe they are proving that they understand where they went wrong by opposing all forms of new spending. Even though they may be winning by default because of economic conditions, they very much want to link any success they have with this new opposition to more spending.

It’s a very neat, tidy, convenient and completely false narrative. According to the same narrative, the public supposedly soured on the stimulus because they became anxious about deficits. In fact, the stimulus lost support because it wasn’t enough of an actual stimulus bill, and so did not “work.” In some of the early Republican criticism of the bill, there was a basic acceptance of the belief that enough money spent in the right way would be stimulative. Now that a majority finds fault with the original bill, the new interpretation is that there should never have been one at all.

This makes the same mistake that Barone and a thousand others have made about the health care bill. They take all opposition to a complex, flawed, compromised, unaffordable bill and treat it as if it were all one thing, but opposition to the bill came from many different sources, including from those on the left who thought it was too weak, too much of a sell-out to insurance companies, or insufficiently ambitious in some other way.

Hostility to the compromised bill that was passed does not imply support for returning to the way things were, and hostility to the compromised bill does not necessarily reflect opposition to an increased government role in the health care sector. Barone wants you to think that it does, and he is basing almost his entire interpretation of the public mood and his expectation of a big midterm victory for the GOP on this misunderstanding. Barone’s mistake is the national GOP’s mistake in miniature: he is treating the election as a national one with a unifying theme that has a clear ideological meaning when it isn’t and it doesn’t.

Barone may end up being right that the GOP is going to win the House, but it will have been mostly by accident, because he refuses to acknowledge the real reasons why the GOP is in a position to win. The party is in a similar position: possibly on the verge of a great victory, but unable or unwilling to accept the real reason for it.

Every political system involving some sort of centralized power has so far led to attempts by the central power to gain control. Since the cannon set kings and princes above mere lords, centralization has been the trend.

That trend continues in our increasingly centralized power structure.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information.

The sharply divided ruling was a major victory for the Obama administration’s efforts to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers. It strengthens the White House’s hand as it has pushed an array of assertive counterterrorism policies, while raising an opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule for the first time in decades on the scope of the president’s power to restrict litigation that could reveal state secrets.

The case reveals — or reiterates — the continuing stance of the executive branch of the current form of government. Regardless of party or ideology, every President has tried to accumulate power. As our economic system concentrates wealth, the political system designed by the founders tends to concentrate power.

On the plus side, our system concentrates power more slowly than, say, a monarchy or a dictatorship, whether of the elite or the proletariat. But late-stage empires, regardless of ideology, have already concentrated wealth so heavily that politics cannot fail to be deflected by the private interests of a very few. Suppose we in the US decided to free ourselves of the oil industry, or hedge funds; how would we accomplish that?

One thing we’ve hopefully learned is that electing a chief executive on the promise of change isn’t guaranteed to produce any.

While the alleged abuses occurred during the Bush administration, the ruling added a chapter to the Obama administration’s aggressive national security policies.

Its counterterrorism programs have in some ways departed from the expectations of change fostered by President Obama’s campaign rhetoric, which was often sharply critical of former President George W. Bush’s approach.

The crowning touch on the 6-5 ruling that state secrets trump human rights, that the state can decide which legal cases are allowed to proceed, is the court’s admission that the plaintiffs had a legitimate case.

There were signs in the court’s ruling that the majority felt conflicted. In a highly unusual move, the court ordered the government to pay the plaintiffs’ legal costs, even though they lost the case and had not requested such payment.

…now that you mention it. A correspondent sends this:

Hope springs eternal that Obama may be smart enough to realize that his current accomodationist trajectory is a ticket to one-term obscurity; I wonder, was Obama canny enough to see this, and orchestrate Mayor Daley’s stepping down to get Rahm out of the White House without any blood on the floor? I’m guessing Rahm is the kind of guy to wreck the place on the way out if he was forced to leave.

If Daley winds up in the cabinet in a few months, we’ll have our answer.

It’s not censorship when you do it to yourself, people. It’s editorial judgment.

He whose name ought not to be spoken wants to burn Korans in a southern state on the anniversary of 9/11. He exists as news because various television, internet, radio and newspaper editors and writers decided that he was news. And so he became news.

Another editorial judgment, this one based not on the law of the journalistic herd but on that of common sense, would turn this fool back into nonnews, and restore him to his proper invisibility as pastor of a church with a congregation of fifty. Maybe fifty. Has anybody actually counted, or did you all take his word for it? Because he exaggerates, you know. For instance, he calls himself a Christian.

Here:

It takes only a little investigation to learn how bad things have been inside those buildings. The list of offenses for which the DeCosters and their farms have been fined in Iowa and Maine only begins with hiring children and illegal immigrants.

In 2000, Jack DeCoster, the operations’ founder, was named a “habitual violator” of Iowa’s environmental laws. His egg factories have been cited by OSHA for deplorable working conditions. In 2003, Mr. DeCoster paid more than $1.5 million to settle an employment discrimination suit charging that 11 women working in the Clarion plants had been subject to sexual harassment, including rape and threats of retaliation. There have been nearly 1,500 illnesses as a result of the salmonella outbreak. Every one of the billions of eggs produced this way has been tainted.

And here:

The recall, which began Aug. 13, involves more than half a billion eggs from the Iowa operations of two leading egg producers, Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms. About 1,500 reported cases of Salmonella enteritidis have been linked to tainted eggs since the spring — the largest known outbreak associated with that strain of salmonella.

The F.D.A. inspection reports portray areas of filth and poor sanitation at both operations, including many instances of rodents, wild birds or hens escaped from cages — all of which can carry salmonella — appearing to have had free run of the facilities.

Wright County Egg is owned by Jack DeCoster, who has a long history of environmental, labor and immigration violations at egg operations in Maine, Iowa and elsewhere. The inspection report identified Mr. DeCoster’s son, Peter DeCoster, as the chief operating officer of the Iowa operation.

A reliable source in the Maine legal community tells me that over the years two law firms in the state have dropped Mr. DeCoster as a client. Basically, my source says, because the guy was such a flaming asshole.

Think about that for a minute. How flaming an asshole would a millionaire client have to be for a law firm to fire him? Remember that O.J. Simpson had a lawyer and Tom DeLay had a lawyer. Bernie Madoff had a lawyer. Even Leona Helmsley had a lawyer.

…because we plainly can’t do it by ourselves.

The Yahoo main page had some interesting stories posted yesterday. First, there was a ‘news’ item about islands you can actually buy. Then, later on, they told us about the best day of the year to purchase a new car. The most interesting piece was called “7 Spending Tips From Frugal Billionaires.”

Apparently, we’re supposed to get wet over the fact that Warren Buffet lives in a relatively modest home in Omaha and eschews luxury spending, “Toys are a pain in the neck.” There’s no mention of the fact that he disinherited his granddaughter for appearing in a documentary called The One Percent, which is about the gross disparities of wealth in this country. Given their druthers, even nice guy billionaires prefer not to give the game away. Besides, that would ruin the theme that Yahoo seemed to be pushing, which is envy the rich. There’s another billionaire who figures prominently, someone named Carlos Slim, who could spend “$1,150 dollars every minute for a hundred years before running of money.” He’s lived in the same home for forty years and doesn’t own a yacht or a plane. Hey, I’ve never owned a yacht or a plane either. Does that make me especially virtuous?

This is just another example of our one true national religion in action, money worship. Billionaires are singled as objects of special praise for doing exactly the kinds of things that we all do anyway. If the CEO of a company drives a pick-up truck and wears blue jeans, we’re supposed to melt with admiration and regard the prick as something extra special. Forget that he makes his money by laying people off, slashing wages, eliminating benefits, running sweat shops in Indonesia and Nicaragua, and financing Republican political campaigns to keep his taxes low. Nah, he flies coach and gets ten dollar hair cuts just like you. Shoot, he’s a swell guy!

The more insidious effect, of course, is to imply that you aren’t rich because you don’t do enough of those frugal things. You spend too much. You carry too much debt. Why can’t you be more like Warren Buffet? On second thought, maybe you just don’t deserve to be rich. And on it goes, the perpetuation of one of our most harmful national myths, the idea that rich people are rich because they are smarter, more thrifty, and work harder than you. If you’re poor it’s your own damn fault, so quit complaining. That’s one of the reasons we never have any structural economic reforms in this country. That’s why poor dumb Tea Party types with virtually no hope of crawling out of the depths always vote to give people like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney a tax cut. We’ve internalized the slave master’s morality.

Here are a few of the tips offered in the article that spendthrifts like us would be well advised to follow: Keep your home simple. Buy your clothes off the rack. Drive a dependable car and avoid luxury items. You know, things that have probably never occurred to you. It’s pretty unbelievable. What do these people think we do, blow our unemployment checks on Cristal? Call in sick from Wal-Mart in order to get measured for tailored suits? Just what kind of country do they think we’re living in? These articles assume the existence of a middle class that really isn’t here anymore (largely, I should add, as a result those awesome, ascetic billionaires and their never-ending quest to make more money at our expense.) What’s left of a traditional American middle class is subsisting on credit cards and fading fast. Instead, we’re becoming a nation of college educated service workers, bartenders and waiters and cashiers. We are under-employed, impecunious serfs with useless college degrees, mountains of student debt, and no future. Part-time, no benefits, and don’t forget to smile and wear plenty of flair. It’s even becoming impossible to get a second job because your schedule is deliberately changed from week to week. You can’t organize anything else around it. Your DMV record and your urine are inspected prior to employment.

And don’t forget, you are not an employee. That implies a contractual relationship between two parties —employer and employee — with obligations on each side that must be performed. That isn’t really the case now. You have obligations, they don’t. You are a useless slab of fat that can be sliced off and discarded on your boss’s slightest whim or because of any tiny blip in the market. Nor are you a worker. That’s a word which carries some dignity. It refers to an honorable and meaningful activity that you can take pride in. That’s definitely not the reality anymore. No, you are now an associate. That’s the term du jour these days. It’s a clever if transparent trick designed to mask the obscene inequality between you and the board of directors. After all, what do associates do? They associate on a free and equal basis. They are partners and friends who work together in a common enterprise for the mutual benefit of both. Isn’t that nice? It almost makes you forget the CEO of the company makes one-hundred times more than you and the only retirement you’ll ever get is death.

That’s the reality of things today. Working harder’s got nothing to with do it. Trimming your expenses doesn’t either. Intelligence, ambition, drive, the Puritan work ethic, none of these things have any real relevance at all. The fact is, we’re increasingly trapped in a system that is explicitly designed to keep us poor. Rather reform anything, we’re cheerfully told to copy a few superficial habits of the rich and famous.

Happy Labor Day. We’re screwed.

Here’s Steve Benen, who knows what happens in the middle of the road:

Lindsey Graham wants Obama to “come back to the middle?” Here’s a silly question for Graham: when might your party “come back the middle?” When was the last time congressional Republicans offered a centrist compromise on literally any policy dispute? When was the last time Graham’s Senate caucus allowed the Senate to vote up or down on meaningful legislation without a filibuster, a hold, or both? When was the last time the GOP mainstream responded to White House outreach with a single idea where the parties could work together?

I never thought I would feel sorry for Sharron Angle, but a bunch of bottom feeders doing business as Righthaven have done the trick. I’m omitting one sentence from the AP story below in hopes that they won’t sue me too.

LAS VEGAS — A company has sued Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle, claiming she reprinted two Las Vegas Review-Journal articles on her campaign website without permission.

Las Vegas-based Righthaven is seeking unspecified damages in its complaint filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas.

The suit alleges Angle neither sought nor received permission to display a Review-Journal article and editorial on her website this summer…

Righthaven tracks Internet traffic for copyright infringements of Review-Journal stories. It then buys the copyright for a story from the newspaper’s owner, Stephens Media LLC, and sues the alleged infringer.

More good stuff with which I agree, this time from Professor Wolff at The Philosopher’s Stone, who is almost as old as I am and even wiser:

I never imagined Obama was a left liberal, and I didn’t campaign for him under that illusion. I thought he was a centrist, a left-centrist, in the framework of American politics, with the ability to mobilize the center and the left to defend against the horrors promised by the right. I was right about that. Had the depression not hit, he would in fact be doing quite well now, by his own lights, but quite well means successfully pursuing centrist-left policies. In point of fact, he has been astonishingly successful in that regard. The health reform bill … is the best that we could get, given the realities of American politics, and he is the first president in ninety years to get it.

You are mad at the wrong person. The real villain in this piece is the enormous number of Americans — not, I think and hope a majority, but enormous none the less — who are either conservative or hysterically insane with religious fantasies and political paranoia.

Do you want a genuinely leftist president? Fine, so do I. How do we get one? Answer, we change eighty or a hundred million Americans. Let me remind you — and I was there, so I know — that Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter were all Left Centrists at best. My grandfather gave his life to the Socialist Party, and its high point was electing him and six others to the NYC Board of Aldermen. This has NEVER been a country that was hospitable to genuinely leftist politics.

What we are now facing is a threat from the right unlike any I have seen in forty years. We are in danger of losing such tattered remains as we still have of a social safety net, and of seeing maniacal religious fanatics running our country. I am hoping that Obama will tap into his considerable political skills to stop that from happening, but even if he does, we will nonetheless be stuck with a politics that is markedly to the right of where it is now. These are godawful times, made all the more perilous by the fact that the very large number of genuine progressives in this country are dispirited.

Here’s Daniel Larison in The American Conservative, making some excellent points (points, that is, with which I agree).

As I have said before, I don’t think the GOP will win the House, but if that did happen it would primarily be bad news for the Republican Party and the conservative movement. If that seems a little too counterintuitive for you, let me explain. Should the GOP somehow win the House, they will not have earned it and they will not deserve it, and they will proceed to destroy themselves in very short order.

Arguably, there was nothing worse for the American right than to be given the free gift of winning the 2002 midterms, because this win encouraged them to pursue the policies that proved to be their undoing, and a similar win in 2010 would have the same effect of enabling Republicans’ most destructively self-indulgent impulses. As one horrified by the prospect of Republicans in power, Erik should look forward to this.

After all, even if the Republicans won the House there would not be much that they could do once in office, except waste their time as they did in the ’90s hauling executive branch officials before committees to testify on this or that outrage of the week. They would likely be stymied by the Democratic majority in the Senate on any major legislation, and Obama would veto just about anything they passed if it somehow got to his desk. At the same time, Obama would make them into a much more effective foil for his arguments once they had some hold on power, and out of frustration they would become increasingly obsessed with “getting” Obama and become even less interested in representing the interests of their constituents…

I took this photo a few years ago at Machu Picchu. I intended on posting it as a nice break from politics. You know, cut a little slice of beauty from all the muck and anxiety that currently surrounds us. Get away from it all and forget. I even stole the title from my favorite Orwell novel, which has a similar theme.

But it just isn’t working. Something about those llamas conjures up images of low-information voters. Maybe it’s the expression on the white one’s face. Serenely content and a bit dumb. And notice also that they’re lounging on the ruins of a dead civilization. I see chomping consumers. I see shopping carts and a Wal-Mart parking lot. I see on-ramps and off-ramps and endless freeways that go nowhere. Heaven help us!

Hey, I tried. I really did.

New Left Media, may Allah smile on all its works, went to the Glenn Beck pray-in so you wouldn’t have to. Take a look at the result, in case you suffer from American exceptionalism. Something is certainly exceptional about us, and certainly Jesus hasn’t been able to cure it. Maybe we need more mosques. More libraries. Less TV. Who knows? Just help us for God’s sake, any God at all, because we’re on the point of drowning here. Already we’re up to the lower lip in stupidity.

In his address to the nation Tuesday night about Iraq and Afghanistan, President Obama took a refreshingly frank approach: “Today we mark the end of our nation’s military commitment in Iraq. Our foolish adventure there has been a catastrophe, a nightmare inflicted on us by a past president whose stupidity was exceeded only by his arrogance. Iraq was a disaster that cost thousands of American lives, God knows how many Iraqi lives, and increased our national debt by an amount that is almost beyond counting. What did we get for this immeasurable investment? Nothing.

“Here’s where things stand now. The Iraqi government, if that’s what you’d call it, is a shambles. The economy is wrecked, and life in Iraq is still so dangerous and unstable that nobody wants to be there anymore. And neither do we, baby. We’re outta there.

“Now we can turn our full military attention to Afghanistan where we’ve been fighting for ten years without any success whatsoever. We’ll be putting lots more troops and treasure into the effort, which will result in many more American casualties and plenty more dead Afghanis, including lots of hapless women and children who keep getting in the way of our smart bombs and missiles. But, hey, don’t look at me. I didn’t start this and there’s no way, politically speaking, that I can just pull out of it. Which would be the smart thing to do.” The President had some other things to say about bravery and sacrifice, etc. etc., but nobody bothered to write it down or record it.

Meanwhile, down the road at the Capitol, Democrats and Republicans in both houses of Congress adopted a resolution to stop acting like willful little brats. Rep. John Boehner, the Republican obstructionist from Ohio and minority leader in the House, said, “We thought it might be interesting to pass some laws that would actually be good for the country.”
Boehner’s counterpart in the Senate, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky obfuscator, announced that from now on he would work with senators from both parties to respond to the needs of the American people. “Tantrums will no longer be tolerated,” McConnell said. “We are also going to try to keep lying to a minimum. We want the Senate to be a kinder, gentler place where work actually gets done.”

Cynical observers of the Senate noted the timing and language of McConnell’s statement, which closely followed a threat by his fellow senators to stone him to death if he didn’t stop acting like a five-year-old with a skin rash.

Many Democrats of dubious standing also clamored to partake of this new Era of Good Feeling. So-called Blue Dog Democrats in the House, who have been trying for many months to play both sides of the fence while also sitting on it, came out in favor of the resolution. The Blue Dogs issued a statement that said in part, “The American people do not want…” Nobody bothered to record the rest of the statement because everybody knows that the Blue Dogs haven’t the slightest idea what the American people want or don’t want. And also, because nobody cares what the Blue Dogs think or don’t think, say or don’t say, stand for or don’t stand for.

Glenn Beck issued a refreshing statement in which he apologized for being a contemptible scumbag and announced that he was retiring from broadcasting to raise pigs. “I’m going to quit while I’m ahead,” said the now wealthy conservative ranter. “I sense that people are about to catch on that I am the worst kind of hate-mongering, lying phony. Even my mother thinks I’m disgusting and I kind of agree with her.”

Over at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, the liberal blabber, announced that she was not going to be cute anymore. And her colleague, Keith Olbermann, said that while he intended to continue his arch ways, he was giving up his insufferable “special comments,” having recognized that what was special about them was that they were pompous and embarrassing.

Rush Limbaugh issued a one-sentence statement. It said, “Who the hell is Glenn Beck and who cares if he’s retiring?”

Bill O’Reilly also issued a statement that said, in part, “Who cares what Rush Limbaugh says on the radio? Doesn’t he know that nobody listens to the radio anymore. Hey, Rush, get a life. Join the parade. This is the twenty-first century and you’re just a fat loudmouth with bad breath.”

Limbaugh is said to have issued a response but nobody heard it.

For the past 15 or 20 minutes, hummingbirds have been strafing each other over the feeder outside my window. Whenever one gets close enough to feed, another darts down and drives it away. There is plenty of sugar water and three sipping holes, each in the center of an imitation flower, but so far no bird has been allowed by the others to perch and feed. Hummingbirds are so cute. Sometimes they seem almost human, only they never actually hurt each other.

Hardly a CEO in the country would not argue that high wages are necessary to attract the very best type of chief executive. They make precisely that argument in defense of their own bloated paychecks. Paying less would put the stockholders at the mercy of a lower type of CEO altogether — a less competent and less efficient steward entirely.

But not a one of these CEOs, obscenely overpaid or merely grossly so, would give a moment’s consideration to the idea that low wages might result in less efficient and less competent workmen as well. Nor that higher wages might attract a better class, likely to work smarter and harder. Somehow workers do not need the motivation of good pay, while managers can hardly exist without it.

As we see in this uplifting story from CNN:

According to the report “CEO Pay and the Great Recession,” chief executive officers of the 50 firms that laid off the most workers since the start of the economic crisis earned nearly $12 million on average in 2009. That’s 42 percent more than the average pay of CEOs at S&P 500 firms as a whole.

“I think that really shows a really perverse incentive system in this country,” said Sarah Anderson, lead author of the Institute for Policy Studies’ 17th Annual Executive Compensation Survey. “You are handsomely rewarded for slashing jobs in the middle of the worst economic crisis in 80 years,” she said…

Another disconcerting finding of the report: 72 percent of layoff-leading firms announced mass layoffs while delivering positive earnings reports. Anderson explained layoffs are really driven by efforts “to boost short-term profits even higher and also just to continue to have such high CEO pay levels.” She said these mass cuts are often bad for business over the long-term because they impact worker morale, which can lead to lower productivity. She said they also result in additional costs related to hiring and training new workers down the road.

Should we let those terrorists build that mosque on what Chris Matthews keeps calling hollowed ground? Or not until they let us build a megachurch in Mecca? Or until hell freezes over? Or is the whole squalid fuss actually, literally, about nothing? It looks that way, to judge by a Politico story which has so far attracted zero attention.

In GOP World, however, enormous structures can be fabricated easily and profitably on the basis of impossible hypotheticals. One might think the suckers would have wised up by now, but one would be wrong. Look at the birther myth, which has no more substance than a floating figure in a Macy’s parade. Or than a nonexistent non-Mosque never to be built on the unhallowed ground formerly occupied by a Burlington Coat Factory.

When President Barack Obama turned the battle over a planned New York Islamic center into a national debate over religious freedom, he unwittingly allied himself and his party with an ill-planned, long-shot development project described by one of its most prominent allies as “amateur hour.”

The efforts to launch the $100 million Cordoba House (now dubbed Park51) two blocks north of the World Trade Center site have been an uphill battle from the start, and not just because of controversy. And even as the “Ground Zero Mosque” emerges as a hotly debated national symbol, New York government officials and real estate insiders are privately questioning whether the project has much chance of coming to fruition.

The Cordoba Initiative hasn’t begun fundraising yet for its $100 million goal. The group’s latest fundraising report with the State Attorney General’s office, from 2008, shows exactly $18,255 — not enough even for a down payment on the half of the site the group has yet to purchase…