I can’t say I quite understand everything going on in Egypt, but here are some articles I found helpful, in no particular order —
Juan Cole, Egypt’s Waco; It’s not about Democracy: Top Ten Reasons Washington is Reluctant to cut off Egypt Aid; and Has Military Suppression of Political Islam ever Worked?
Andrew O’Hehir, Is Egypt’s blood on America’s hands?
Via edroso, I give you a classic example of projection on steroids, Ben Shapiro. Read this, and then ask yourself why “batshit crazy” is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, because it bleeping well should be.
Speaking of which — Jeff Tiedrich of Smirking Chimp Tweeted this yesterday —
The premise for Breaking Batshit: a science fiction writer becomes increasingly convinced that Obama is an fascist dictator. #OrsonScottCard
— Jeff Tiedrich (@jefftiedrich) August 16, 2013
Made me laugh. Click here if you don’t get the Orson Scott Card joke.
Anne Laurie found an article by Ralh Benko titled, For The Republicans To Win, Libertarians And Conservatives Must Find Common Ground.
Benko’s brilliant idea? He wants libertarians and conservatives to rally under the banner of LGBT discrimination, because (Benko says) extending marriage and other rights to unstraight people violates religious freedom.
Whether or not one agrees with orthodox religious values … the adherents are legitimately, and constitutionally, entitled to have, to practice, and to press for the State to reflect their values. Libertarians and conservatives can disagree while taking a principled stand for the legitimacy, under the Constitution, of one another’s position. Even though many libertarians fully approve of gay marriage they can, with authenticity, also honor the First Amendment guarantee of “… no law …prohibiting the free exercise [of religion].â€
I’ll pause awhile to let that sink in. Yeah, definitely, standing up for discrimination against gays represents the path to victory in the 21st century. Not.
And once again, righties do like to pretend the establishment clause isn’t there, right before the free exercise clause. It’s so damn inconvenient.
If this doesn’t make you want to bite the wall and howl at the moon, nothing will.
An abortion clinic sitting in a residential area of Wichita, Kansas poses a safety hazard to the surrounding community, pro-life activists argued to the Wichita City Council this week.
This is the abortion clinic that once was operated by the late George Tiller, who was murdered by a “right to life” activist. Keep that in mind.
,
Representatives from local pro-life groups, including Kansans for Life, Operation Rescue, Word of Life Church and the Kansas Coalition for Life, appeared in front of the Wichita City Council Tuesday to convince government officials to rezone the neighborhood surrounding South Wind Women’s Center to prohibit abortions. The clinic is located on the city’s eastside at Kellogg and Bleckley.
The pro-life representatives told city council that South Wind Women’s Center poses a safety threat to the surrounding residential community, and employees at the clinics are often aggressive towards pro-life advocates seeking to provide pregnancy alternatives to women entering the clinic.
“Some of the clinic workers are aggressive and harassing toward the pro-life people who are attempting to offer help to abortion-bound women. An escalation of their hostile behavior has every possibility of spilling out into the neighborhood, causing a safety concern to residents along Bleckley,” Cheryl Sullenger, senior policy advisor for Operation Rescue, one of the pro-life groups present at the meeting, told the council. “An abortion business does not belong in a residential neighborhood,” Sullenger added, according to LifeSite news.
What they are saying here is that because they are are aggressive and obnoxious jerks who harass women entering the clinic, and sometimes the clinic staff express a hostile attitude about this, the clinic must be moved.
The pro-life groups also argued in a joint press release that it is inappropriate for schoolchildren commuting past the clinic to see protest signs depicting graphic images relating to abortion.
Yes, you read that right. They want the neighborhood to be shielded from the inappropriate signs they are carrying. The clinic must be moved somewhere where they can be obnoxious and carry inappropriate signs with impunity, or something.
It gets better. Today one of the Fetus People accused the clinic of trying to provoke a shooting incident. Like the one that killed George Tiller, maybe?
Mark Gietzen, chairman of the Kansas Coalition for Life, said he believes the South Wind Women’s Center is allowing volunteers to escort women into the clinic in hopes that they will harass the anti-abortion protesters outside and provoke a shooting. He said Julie Burkhart, the founder and owner of the clinic, would blame the incident on the protesters in order to raise money.
Gietzen also said it’s possible that the father or boyfriend of the woman seeking an abortion might show up to the clinic angry and armed because they disapprove of the abortion, and a security guard or nearby protester could end up getting shot.
Are we biting the wall yet?
Haha, we think that is supposed to be a joke, but godDAMN, it’s a bad one, isn’t it? Everyone knows that most “pro-lifers†are really super nice people who do not do violent things or terrorize anyone, and that the most prominent “pro-life†organizations do not condone violence. Except those like, say, the most famous “pro-life†organization, Operation Rescue, which hired Cheryl Sullenger as its senior policy advisor after she served her time in federal prison for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic, but hey, she has SO renounced violence since then, and it’s a TOTES coincidence that she helped Scott Roeder stalk Dr. Tiller and then murder him. That was an isolated incident anyway. Just like the thousands and thousands and THOUSANDS of other isolated incidents of violence and terrorism by “pro-lifers†against doctors and their patients.
Besides, as Gietzen points out, it’s really the clinic’s fault for provoking and antagonizing the protesters in the first place, what with the clinic being there and all, and if the clinic does not want to get blowed up, or its employees and volunteers and patients do not want to get shot, well, then, the clinic just shouldn’t be there, should it?
I say the FPs are terrorists, and they should be treated as such.
Politico (yeah, I know, it’s Politico) has a photo gallery of Dems who might be presidential nomination candidates in 2016 and who are not Hillary Clinton. As I really don’t want Hillary Clinton to run again, I took a look.
Of these 12, the only one who makes me say “hell, yes” is Elizabeth Warren. Of the remainder, I don’t know enough about Martin O’Malley, Amy Klobucher, John Hickenlooper, or Pete Shumlin to have an opinion, except that I would eliminate Klobucher and Hickenlooper on their names alone. Sorry, but let’s get real here.
What say you?
Dave Weigel must be the hardest working man in blogging, because he seems to post 35 times a day and nearly always says something new. And he writes that the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination is already heating up in Iowa. Rick Santorum, Steve “Cantaloupe Calves” King, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz are the current contenders. Weigel says Cruz is the current front runner, with only 29 months to go!
My latest story was written during the FAMiLY Leader Summit in Ames, the annual meeting of social conservatives (which gets larger every year but wasn’t quite large enough for its current venue) where Ted Cruz is king and … actually, let me try a new analogy. Where Mike Huckabee is Moses, Rick Santorum is John the Baptist, and Ted Cruz is the big J.C.
Ted must’ve really wowed them in Iowa. The crowd also heard from Cruz’s dad:
His father, Rafael, a Cuban-born pastor, precedes him with a speech that’s one-third about his son and two-thirds about how candidates who promise “hope and change†are paving the road to serfdom. “In 1976 I was shocked when I saw a government starting to implement socialist policies in this country, which perhaps the majority of this country didn’t recognize,†he says. “Having seen socialism at work, I clearly recognized the socialist policies of Jimmy Carter.â€
President Carter’s actual economic policies were about as “socialist” as a Paul Volker fan club, but of course it’s what Carter represents to the crowd that’s important, not what he actually did.
It’s a hit. More than one activist tells me that the senior Cruz’s story takes away an advantage that has belonged to Marco Rubio—the crowd-pleasing parable of Obama as Castro. After a short break, Ted Cruz himself arrives, walking back and forth across the stage in black ostrich-skin cowboy boots, delivering old jokes about the root words of “politics†being “poly†and “ticks†before getting to applause line after applause line about his battles in Washington.
Cruz is a paleolithic piece of work, of course, but I’ve seen him in videos, and he seems a little more polished than fellow Texan Rick Perry. And yeah, your average junkyard mutt is more polished than Rick Perry. It’s all relative. I’m just saying that it won’t surprise me if Cruz does become a serious contender.
Weigel also writes that Rand Paul is not going to have an easy time of it if he goes for the nomination.
So Rick Santorum now is telling people that the U.S. is a classless society, and that to even speak of a middle class is “Marxism talk.” Which is a bit confusing, because I thought Marx was the one advocating for a classless society. Is Frothy confessing to being a closet Marxist? Weird.
See also Scott Lemieux, Steal a TV and They Throw You In Jail, Steal a Lot of Houses and They Give You a Golden Parachute. Well, the whole post is the title, plus a link to an article about mortgage fraud. But some classless society, huh?
See also Charles Pierce, Truth and Consequences.
Via Mistermix, do read this post by Kathleen Geier, “No, Walmart doesn’t create jobs.”
Guess what? Contrary to the happy talk, Walmart does not create jobs. Actually, it kills them.
Here’s why: first, at the local level, all Walmart does is put mom-and-pop stores out of business. The overwhelming body of evidence, including the most rigorous peer-reviewed studies, suggests that when Walmart enters a community, the most likely result is a net loss of jobs; at best, it’s a wash. In fact, the biggest, best scholarly study about the impact of Walmart on local employment was done by an economist at University of California at Irvine named David Neumark, who is not exactly a wild-eyed liberal. He’s the kind of economist, actually, who writes anti-minimum wage op-eds for the Wall Street Journal.
The devastating impact Walmart has had on jobs becomes most clear when you go macro, and look at its impact not just locally, but on the national economy. In its relentless quest for low prices, Walmart strong-arms its suppliers to cut labor costs to the bone. What this has meant in practice is that many suppliers have been forced to lay off workers and ship jobs to low-wage countries overseas. Because of Walmart, countless jobs in the U.S. have been lost, mostly in manufacturing.
Anyone of a certain age from just about any southern or midwestern small town can tell the story of how the old Main Street businesses died after the Walmart opened. The Walmart not only represented a net loss of jobs; it also changed the way money circulated in the community. It used to be that all the little stores and businesses were owned by local people who also shopped in the community, so the profits they made in their businesses went back into the local economy. The old home town seems poorer and shabbier now.
And, of course, to add insult to injury, taxpayers subsidize Walmart profits by providing government assistance to its employees, so they don’t starve on what Walmart pays them.
Walmart is to the U.S. economy what cancer is to a body.
I’m struggling to not enjoy this too much —
A leap of faith that sent an Arizona family bound for the South Pacific in a sailboat has returned them in an airplane after a harrowing ordeal at sea that saw them adrift and nearly out of food in one of the remotest stretches of ocean on the planet.
Hannah Gastonguay, 26, and her husband, Sean, 30, were fed up with abortion, homosexuality, taxes and the “state-controlled church” and so “decided to take a leap of faith and see where God led us,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. With them were Sean’s father and the couple’s two daughters, one 3 years old and the other an infant.
A few weeks into their ultimately 91 days at sea, the Gastonguays encountered “squall after squall after squall” that damaged their boat. Originally on a heading for the archipelago nation of Kiribati near the international dateline, they changed course to the Marquesas Islands, but were unable to reach them either.
Along the way, they apparently suffered damage to their mast and, unable to set a foresail, made little westward progress.
They were down to “some juice and some honey” and whatever fish they could catch when a passing Canadian cargo ship tried to help out with supplies. But when it came alongside, it did even more damage to the tiny sailboat.
Eventually they were picked up by a Venezuelan fishing boat, which transferred them to a Japanese cargo ship, which dropped them off in Chile, where they apparently still were when the news story was written. Wait; the State Department of the evil and satanic U.S. government arranged for them to fly home to the states. I assume this was paid for by the oppressive taxes the family didn’t want to pay.
Apparently they had no experience sailing and navigating in open ocean, and they did this damnfool thing with a baby and a toddler on board, and they were heading off to an island chain that is sinking because of global warming and whose government is telling citizens to give it up and move somewhere else. Brilliant.
I loved this part —
Gastonguay told the AP that she never thought the family was going to die: “We believed God would see us through.”
If we’re lucky, maybe they will stay in go back to Chile.
Stuff to read, in case I don’t have time to post any more this weekend. This should keep you busy.
Kim Messick, The Tea Party’s paranoid aesthetic. For Mahablog readers this will be old ground, but Messick does a good job explaining how Richard Hofstadter predicted the Tea Party way back when. Also old ground, baggers perceive people with different views as a personal, existential threat, which is why they are paranoid. Also, too,
The Tea Party’s paranoid aesthetic conveys this narcissistic view of itself and its role in our politics and history. If its fusion of form and content is compelling to its audience — and it obviously is — this is because it offers one of the most intense pleasures any narrative strategy can: the pleasure of luxuriating in our own importance and significance, qualities only confirmed by the fact that history itself has resolved on our total defeat. This is the message paranoid narcissism ceaselessly delivers to its devotees. “The Others are irreligious, unproductive, licentious, treacherous. You are the rock on which this nation was built and you are the foundation on which it will rise again. You. It’s all about you.”
See also Michael Lind, once again skewering libertarianism in Conservatives once ridiculed Ayn Rand.
When she died in 1982, Alissa Rosenbaum — the original name of the Russian-born novelist — was the leader of a marginal cult, the Objectivists, who had long been cast out of the mainstream American right. But the rise of Tea Party conservatism, fueled by white racial panic and zero-sum distributional conflicts in the Great Recession, has turned this minor, once-forgotten figure into an icon for a new generation of nerds who imagine themselves Nietzschean Ubermenschen oppressed by the totalitarian tyranny of the post office and the Social Security administration.
So baggers are paranoid narcissists and libertarians are narcissists with a mixed martyrdom/superiority complex. Got it.
C u n d gulag pointed this one out in comments — Sorry, It’s Not A ‘Law Of Capitalism’ That You Pay Your Employees As Little As Possible by Henry Blodget. Don’t miss it. See also Sean McElwee, Republicans have no clue how businesses work.
(Righties believe they are inherently knowledgeable about business, even if they’ve never run one, just as they are inherently knowledgeable about war and the military, even if their entire military experience consists of watching John Wayne movies. It’s just who they are. Libtards will never understand.)
Another must read — Death Panels and the Apparatchik Mindset, by Paul Krugman.
Aaron Carroll reads the Wall Street Journal, which is outraged, outraged, at the prospect that Oregon’s Medicaid system might seek to limit spending on treatments with low effectiveness and/or patients who aren’t going to live much longer in any case. Death panels!
Carroll points us to the actual staff recommendation, which is far milder than the WSJ blast would have you believe. But as Carroll points out, the larger point is the absurdity of the Journal’s position. On one side, it’s fanatically opposed to Medicaid expansion — that is, it’s eager to make sure that millions have no health coverage at all. On the other side, it claims to be outraged at the notion of setting priorities in spending on those who do manage to qualify for Medicaid. It’s OK for people to die for lack of coverage; it’s an utter horror if taxpayers decline to pay for marginal care.
Yeah, funny how that works.
When one considers Rand Paul is among the more viable candidates the Republicans might offer in 2016 … well, let’s just say the GOP has come a long way since the days of Dwight Eisenhower and Thomas Dewey. And that long way is mostly downhill and into a big tar pit of stupid.
Here’s a bit of a recent Rand Paul interview:
You’re a big reader of Austrian economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who don’t believe in stimulus and say the economy can return to health only through austerity.
You can stimulate prosperity by leaving more money in the hands of those who earn it. If you want to stimulate the economy in Louisville, leave more money in Louisville and send less to Washington. My plan has a 17 percent flat tax with very few deductions, and it would leave $600 billion in the economy. But it would work better than a government stimulus because of the Milton Friedman proposition that nobody spends somebody else’s money as wisely as they spend their own. I think you’d have a boom like you’ve never seen in this country.Who would your ideal Fed chairman be?
Hayek would be good, but he’s deceased.Nondead Fed chairman.
Friedman would probably be pretty good, too, and he’s not an Austrian, but he would be better than what we have.Dead, too.
Yeah. Let’s just go with dead, because then you probably really wouldn’t have much of a functioning Federal Reserve.
This is not someone I’d trust with sharp objects, never mind the country.
In this same interview, Paul said,
…what I would say is extreme is a trillion-dollar deficit every year. I mean, that’s an extremely bad situation.
But Paul Krugman says the deficit is now at about $600 billion and falling fast. He also said,
I think it’s pretty clear that Paul actually has no idea that the deficit is falling; it’s quite possible that neither does Cantor. The whole incident reminds me of 2011, when supposedly well-informed candidates like Tim Pawlenty went on about soaring government employment during a time of unprecedented cuts in the public payroll. Once you’re inside the closed conservative information loop, you know lots of things that aren’t so.
Yes, and I suspect a President Rand Paul would make George W. Bush look like a genius. Dubya was, I suspect, sort of willfully stupid; he seems to have believed thinking was a job for the help. But I doubt Rand Paul had a choice in the matter. See also Jonathan Chait, “Rand Paul Not So Good With Numbers.”