April, 2012 archive

Bill Maher, taking a cue from Clarissa, explains it all:

If you feel angry about so much money in this country going to defense, don’t forget, if we didn’t spend more money on weapons than every other country combined, then Iran could not put the bomb they don’t have on the Koran rocket that doesn’t work.

Jonathan Gottschall considers why some folks buy conspiracy theories. A nugget:

Part of the attraction of conspiracy theory is simply the attraction of a good story. Conspiracy theories fascinate us because they are such ripping good yarns. They offer vivid, lurid plots that translate with telling ease into wildly popular entertainment: novels like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and James Elroy’s “Underworld USA Trilogy”; films like JFK and the The Manchurian Candidate; television shows like 24 and The X-Files.

There are other biases that make far-fetched conspiracy theories so congenial to the human mind, including a reasoning bias that leads us to believe that a major event must have a major cause (peons like James Earl Ray can’t kill a King) and a confirmation bias that powerfully innoculates conspiracy theories against disconfirming evidence. But above all, conspiracy theory is a reflex of our need for meaningful experience.

The press seems to have decided that, after pandering to the far right, Mitt the Flip will flip back to pandering to the moderate right now that he is the next thing to anointed.

This headline from the Boston Globe illustrates this, implying that the fabled “pivot” is not a press theory, but rather a certainty:

Mitt Romney returning to N.H. to make general election pivot

This is amusing and distressing at the same time.

Amusing because there is so far no evidence beyond the assumptions of the punditry that Mitt is going to “pivot.”

Distressing because, in blandly assuming and reporting a “pivot” as a done deal, the press condones, without protest or remark, hypocrisy and duplicity (also known as “lying”) as legitimate, expected, even laudable behavior on the part of Republicans.

One wonders whether a “pivot” by a Democratic candidate would be so eagerly anticipated and approved.

“Well, I’ll tell you the truth,” Gorbachev said through a Russian interpreter, in response to a question about Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech, after addressing an audience at Judson University in Elgin. “Don’t be surprised but we really were not impressed. We knew that Mr. Reagan’s original profession was actor.”

No further comment.

Watch this now.

No, it’s not the Jesus I grew up studying.

It’s the new, improved Republican Jesus, ALEC edition.

Some excerpts:

Jesus: The Jesus Budget teaches you that:

Blessed are the poor, for their capital gains tax is low.

For I was hungry, and you gave me vouchers, I was thirsty, and you gave me trickle down, I was sick, and you saved me from Socialism.

And it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to be taxed in the Cayman Islands!

Many thanks to Dick Destiny.

Very early on in the history of shooting my mouth off on the internet, I realized that fundamental to Republicanism is a belief that wealth equals virtue, indeed, that possession of wealth bestows virtue, regardless of how the wealth was obtained or the purposes to which it is put.

It is a rather touching, if somewhat Calvinistic, faith in money as All That Really Matters.

At MarketWatch, Rex Nutting explains how the Ryan budget manifests this belief:

Once, not so very long ago, people saw the world as it really was. We all knew that the rich have it easy while the poor have hard times. Indeed, that’s the main reason people want to be rich instead of poor.

We knew why they called it “the working class.” We developed theories about the leisure class that explained why the rich spent so much time, energy and money making sure that no one would ever confuse them with someone who actually worked, with someone who got calluses or got sunburned. Read Thorstein Veblen’s book, ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class.’

Somehow, however, in the popular imagination, the rich and the poor have switched places. Now, it’s the rich who toil from sun-up to sundown, while the idle poor among us never lift a finger.

Read the whole thing.

Meghan Daum commits sacrilege, suggesting that, perhaps, being a parent isn’t the toughest job in the world, despite the sanctimous bleating surrounding the Hilary Rosen kerfuffle:

Look, I would never suggest that being a mom — or a dad — isn’t very difficult at times (and when severe disabilities or illness are involved, it can be unfathomably difficult just about all of the time). I would even make the argument that parenting may in fact be the most important job in the world, given that it involves overseeing the physical, intellectual, social and moral development of small humans who will eventually grow up and take charge of the planet. But off the top of my head, I can think of several other jobs that are tougher than being a mom. For instance, president of the United States. Or coal miner. Or teacher in an underfunded urban public school. Or Amish farmer.

She has a point.

I’ve spent too much time at PTA meetings, playgrounds, swimming pools, and scout meetings to buy the line that having children inherently exalts persons into some kind of superbeings called “Moms” and “Dads,” worthy of reverence because they have succeeded in doing something that almost everyone has succeeded in doing since Adam and Eve.

You can argue that parenthood is inherently transformative, at least for most (he said oxymoronically).

It is not, however, inherently ennobling. Just look around you, for Pete’s sake.

The persons who benefit most from the reverentially sanctimonious treatment of parenthood as somehow inherently ennobling are politicians who want to change the subject and companies that sell greeting cards.

Follow the link and read whole column.