The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: politics

  • Beautiful encapsulation of Glen Beck’s mendacity

    Delivered, of course, by Jon Stewart:

    Mr. Beck lives in a cloistered world of paranoid delusion that is impervious to a priori evidence that contradicts his world view

    This is in response to Glen Beck telling his audience that no one but Fox “dared” show the footage of Israeli commandos repelling onto a boat and being attacked with clubs — despite (as The Daily Show makes painfully, hilariously clear) all major news outlets ran that footage in the 24 hours preceding Mr. Beck’s accusation.

    http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-june-3-2010/glenn-beck-airs-israeli-raid-footage

    The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
    Glenn Beck Airs Israeli Raid Footage
    www.thedailyshow.com
    Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

  • Seconded…

    This piece from the Atlantic captures my feeling pretty close to exactly, re: the recent Rand Paul flap on the Civil Rights Act and his alleged “courage”.  In particular, the conclusion:

    Now, after the police dogs, night-sticks and fire-hoses have been beaten back, Rand Paul wants to reopen the question, while, to be sure, claiming that he would have had the “courage to march with Martin Luther King.” This is a common strain of courage. It chiefly shines through in men born 50 years too late. Presently among the crowd, they are distinguished at that decisive moment when queried about wars they won’t have to fight, in times they will never live. These men populate our history books. They are all on the wrong side.

    Devastating.

  • Stabilizing US Debt

    Everyone says they could balance the budget if they were in charge.  Few understand what would be involved.  I just played a neat simulator that actually allowed me to explore what different policies would do.

    US debt stabilizationUnfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to post the results, but I did a screen-capture hatchet job:

    US debt pathClick for a full view.  My choices — like anyone’s — probably wouldn’t please everyone but I don’t think they’re monstrous.  A guiding principle was to avoid adding much new until the current spending is more under control.  In reality, I know that government should be countercyclical, so this set of choices might actually be less than wise.  But it was still a good thought experiment.

  • A fantastic visual response to “Show us your papers” in AZ…

    An editorial cartoon responding to the Arizona immigration law
    An editorial cartoon responding to the Arizona immigration law

    From the cartoonist Lee Judge ( http://media.kansascity.com/images/cartoons/judge/04-2010/judge_04272010_700.jpg)

  • How to Lie with the Truth — and how to counter it

    A meme spreading like wildfire throughout the rabid right is that “47% of Americans don’t even pay federal income tax.”  Clearly it’s time for another tax cut for the uber-wealthy in the interest of “fairness”.

    David Leonhardt wrote a piece in today’s New York Times exploring this.  Short version:  The number is true… and meaningless.  The working class pays far more in total taxes (once payroll, state, and sales tax is included).  People aren’t getting a free ride.  The article is worth a read, if only as an example of a calm, fact-based response to overheated breathless propaganda.

  • 16,500 : a “mistake” so egregious as to be a lie

    Where did the rabid right get the figure of 16,500 new “IRS agents” that (they claim) will be required to enforce the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act?

    They made it up.

    Really.  It came from nowhere.  In fact, the IRS will add few or no agents, and perhaps hardly any staff at all.  There’s a really nice dissection of this ludicrous claim over at factcheck.org.  Basically, the number was invented based on a bad estimate, inflated through dubious assumptions, and then just hand-waved into fact.

    Just remember, the next time someone quotes to you some scary scary provision of the ACA: There’s a non-negligible chance that they are lying or repeating a lie.

  • Deep pondering

    Does this story serve to expose the hypocrisy of the Republican Party’s self-proclaimed credentials as the “party of family values” (in that the RNC paid for an evening at “a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex”)?  Or does it serve to expose the hypocrisy of the equally fictional Republican claim to being the “party of fiscal responsibility” (in that the RNC apparently can’t say how such an egregious expenditure slipped past their checks)?

    One for the ages, I suppose.  But I suspect the media will drop the story after today (to the limited extent they carried it at all), because it’s the RNC and not the DNC…

  • Comment of the Day

    There’s a thread at Lawyers, Guns, and Money linking to another story about some people who want to see “Confederate ancestry” recognized as a legitimate group for ethnic protection, and who are using Box 19 of the Census to do it.   Commenter kommrade reproductive vigor says:

    I guess I’m supposed to fill in Confederate Southern American (3/5ths).

    Which, when you think about, nicely punctures that argument…

  • Quote of the Day

    From a comment on Political Animal, in a thread about a brick-thrower who wants to “end socialism and the government takeover”, and has time to do so because he’s receiving disability checks from the government.  In describing the futility of explaining this contradiction to the brick-thrower, a commenter pointed out,

    You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.

    And that is the actual greatest threat to the Republic today: The noisy whiners who don’t know anything factual and are proud of it.  How does an Enlightenment democracy function, when one side denies the value of both logic and evidence?

  • Republican Party to disband, according to RNC Chair Michael Steele

    I mean, what else might he have meant when he said:

    We will not hand our children a poorer, weaker America than the one we inherited.

    After eight years of surplus-to-deficit magic, unfunded giveaways, two wars (one of which was of choice), and a demolished financial system, followed by a year marshaling the troops to say No to every attempt to recover from the damage inflicted by those eight years, the best contribution the Republicans could make to America’s greatness would be to go away…