The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Blog

  • 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…

  • My favorite internet spirits

    The coolest Muppets ever.

  • Quote of the Day … it’s a little petty but delicious nonetheless

    Posted as a comment in a Political Animal article on Mitt Romney’s increasingly desperate gyrations attempting to stay relevant:

    In fact, the conservative “movement” resembles a clique in junior high school these days. They shout during assemblies, make fun of gay people, and do nothing but posture in front of each other, trying to see who can look the most “bad-ass.” And they get shitty grades because they watch too much Fox News and slack off in science lab. And they don’t know anything about history. And they’re counting on their rich parents saving them.

    Meanwhile, the rest of the country just got an advanced degree from Harvard.

    Posted by: chrenson on March 22, 2010 at 4:22 PM

  • Health care reform passes

    So, against all expectation, the Democratic Party managed to hang together and finally pass the comprehensive health care bill.

    As a lifelong Democrat, I am flabbergasted. I was certain they’d find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and fumble on the proverbial one-yard line. I’m glad to be disappointed, but this long, ugly process has exposed disturbing trends in this nation. It’s still possible that this will be the high-water mark of a great republic.

    Though their target is incorrect, the Tea Partiers ironically have a point: the Republic does face a crisis. It’s not driven by phantasmical jackbooted insurance inspectors breaking into homes and dragging Grandma off to mythical death panels. It stems from the unholy matrimony among a slick ideological establishment; sensationalist, irresponsible, and manipulative 24 hour “news” media; and an angry, incoherent, willfully-ignorant populace. Though these people claim to revere the Founders, they in fact stand opposed to the core of Enlightenment democracy that was bequeathed to us: an informed and educated citizenry engaged in reasoned debate — with passion, to be sure, but never abandoning reason and never so cocksure as to assume that opponents must be enemies.

    Considering that the Tea Partiers have labeled rule by majority vote “tyranny”, it’s hard to see how anything resembling the United States of America could survive their rage.  Their unifying feature is anger and it will burn everything it can reach.  And the Republican Party stands on the sideline and feeds it, a mixture of cynical arsonist and maniacal six-year-old.

    How can a deliberative legislature — how can a functioning democracy — endure when one side has abandoned argument and evidence?  When one side decides that anything their opponents say must be untrue?  If one side locks itself in its own fantasy world and declares invalid any source that might challenge its funhouse-mirror self-reality?

  • The rising threat to music of the home taping phenomenon

    This video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3jkUhG68wY&feature=player_embedded) is a hilarious take-down of the music publishing industry’s allegation that personal filesharing is “killing” music.  Part of the fun is figuring out the early 1980s references.  Also, I would totally buy a flag that had that cassette-and-crossbones logo…

    Also, remember that according to former MPAA chief Jack Valenti,

    [T]he VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

    Not that the content cartels would ever condone the use of overblown and hyperbolic language to frighten lawmakers into writing into law special rights to protect their outmoded business models…

  • David Brooks is disingenuous, delusional, or an idiot

    Today, David Brooks had a column on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times.  It’s pretty much a standard Brooks piece, bemoaning the lack of civility in Washington today.  It is wrong on its facts and wrong on its interpretations and laughably wrong on its understanding of politics.

    • Ezra Klein takes it down analytically.
    • Jonathan Chait takes it apart with the devastating mockery it so richly deserves.

    The health care debate has revealed not only how dysfunctional our national politics is.  It’s exposed how vapid and worthless the self-appointed pundits and intelligentsia have become.

    (I also have to say how taken aback I am at how nakedly the professional punditry is willing to scoff at such a radical principle as “rule by simple majority”, which Brooks derides in no uncertain terms.  Isn’t rule of the majority more or less what we mean by democracy?)