September, 2012 archive
Appealing to the White Wing 1
From the webiste:
Mike Papantonio and Ed Schultz discuss the Tea Party’s constant charge that “Obama hates America,” as well as how the entire Republican Party has become a reactionary, intolerant bunch with no facts to stand on.
Understanding Republican Speeches 0
Psychology Today offers qualified assistance.
Spill Here, Spill Now, Never Gonna Let You Go 0
Buccaneer Petroleum’s legacy persists:
Large quantities of crude oil from BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster remain below the northern Gulf of Mexico, which is being churned by the storm. As a result, substantial quantities of oil pollution are expected to wash ashore in the form of tar balls, mats and strings from the marshes of Louisiana east to the Florida Panhandle.
The Entitlement Society 0
It’s not who you think.
It’s Republicans and their corporate masters, who believe that they are entitled to take away what little old folks have. (By the way, the link points to the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch dot com, hardly a fount of radical thinking.)
The Cutting Room Floor 3
Heh.
In other news, further down the story, individual Republicans seem to have adopted the empty chair as a symbol of the party.
It fits.
They nominated an empty suit.
Laborious Day 0
Contradict Me sees the irony:
…except for laborers.
Now this isn’t 100%, and I’m only speaking from my own observations, but the only people who seem to get to honor Labor Day with an actual day off are those who work for the government, are in positions of power within their companies, or both. Meanwhile the service industry is alive and kicking pretty much all day long? Want bubble tea? Labor Day sale! Want to go clothes shopping? Labor Day sale! Wanna see a movie? Well..I don’t think there’s a sale for that, but the theater is still open.
The (Job) Creationism Myth 0
In the Guardian, Aditya Chakrabortty examines the myth of the WEALTH-CREATOR™ (his spelling, not mine), who, he points out, is a wealth extractor–a taker, not a maker. Read it.
Yet the elite’s main ability is in making money for themselves. Just look at Mitt Romney, whose claim to the presidency is that he is part of this blessed group of wealth creators.
Before moving into politics, Romney’s game was private equity: buying up companies, loading them up with debt and stripping out their workers and costs, then selling them. It may have been rough and it may been bloody, but the Republican knows how to run a business and therefore how to steer an economy. Except that a study by the Wall Street Journal found that of 77 firms Romney’s private equity firm Bain Capital invested in between 1984 and 1999 when he ran the company, 22% ended up filing for bankruptcy protection or shut up shop (although some ran into trouble after Bain was no longer involved and others recovered following reorganisation). Another 8% came to so much grief that Bain lost all its money. The bulk of its returns came from a handful of lucky bets.
Legitimate Fire 0
Republican physics, from Valerie XVX, via Contradict Me.
Remember Summer 0
See you tomorrow.
Elephants Can Forget 0
Excerpt:
If your party can run the country for eight years, and then have a convention and not invite Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Karl Rove, or Tom Delay, you’re not a political movement, you’re the witness protection program.
Via Raw Story.
Republican Economics 0
The Rude Truth, as told by Delaware Liberal.
Why Republicans Lie 0
Disease of the Month 1
Back in the olden days, when I was a young ‘un and almost everyone read Readers Digest, there was a joke that doctors subscribed to that magazine so they could see the disease article of the month and prepare for the monthly onslaught of Readers Digest subscribers convinced they were about to die.
The disease of the month usually had three characteristics:
- It was a real and often deadly and scary disease.
- It was very very rare.
- Most of the persons who diagnosed themselves as having it were somewhere between delusional and nutters and frequently at least mildly narcissistic.
Later, a large number of persons I knew claimed with much authority and no doctor’s diagnosis that they suffered from hypoglycemia, though the truth was that most of them just ate too much of the wrong things too often.
At Science Two dot Oh, Hank Campbell spots a new trendy disease of the month. (I used to know someone who actually had this ailment. In real life, it is not something to be taken casually.)