Krugman at 4 a.m.
Filed Under Finance, Politics, Scratching Sounds | Leave a Comment
Famous, mega-rich person, Marie Antoinette, has been credited, though not so in reality, with the ugly phrase, “Let them eat cake” when observing the starving poor — a similar asshole stance from GOP wag, US Sen. Mitch McConnell: “…that no one in this country will pay higher income taxes next year than they are right now.”
(Illustration found here).
Of course, mush-mouth Mitch was yakking about the 1 percent at the top of the US income braket — the rich.
Paul Krugman this morning takes a whack at the self-pity wailings of the rich if George Jr.’s tax cuts are allowed to expire at the end of this year — it’s just so pathic.
The economic bottom dwellers aren’t the ones blubbering:
Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans.
You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.
…
At the same time, self-pity among the privileged has become acceptable, even fashionable.
Tax-cut advocates used to pretend that they were mainly concerned about helping typical American families. Even tax breaks for the rich were justified in terms of trickle-down economics, the claim that lower taxes at the top would make the economy stronger for everyone.
These days, however, tax-cutters are hardly even trying to make the trickle-down case.
Yes, Republicans are pushing the line that raising taxes at the top would hurt small businesses, but their hearts don’t really seem in it.
Instead, it has become common to hear vehement denials that people making $400,000 or $500,000 a year are rich.
I mean, look at the expenses of people in that income class — the property taxes they have to pay on their expensive houses, the cost of sending their kids to elite private schools, and so on.
Why, they can barely make ends meet.
And in a similar vein from Robert Reich:
The rich spend a far smaller portion of their money than anyone else because, hey, they’re rich.
That means continuing the Bush tax cut for them wouldn’t stimulate much demand or create many jobs.
But it would blow a giant hole in the budget — $36 billion next year, $700 billion over ten years.
Millionaire households would get a windfall of $31 billion next year alone.
And the Republican charge that restoring the Clinton tax rates for the rich would hurt the economy — because it would reduce the “incentives” of the rich (including the richest small business owners) to create jobs — is ludicrous.
But dude, cake is expensive.
Herculean Disappointment
Filed Under Madness, Politics, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
UPDATE BELOW
If there’s going to be any kind of future history — or any kind of logical future history with all the shit hitting the earth’s fan right now — President Obama will be named/remembered as the most-greatest letdown of all time.
Indeed, there’s thousands if not millions of people completely discouraged by US politics after Obama talked cool during the 2008 campaign, then became a toady for business-as-usual, despite all the nefarious goings-on created in the past decade — a shitload of young people have lost their ‘yes, we can.’
My own problem with Obama began as a kind of metaphysical, too-cool-for-school sense that there was more to the guy than just a nearly-incredible ability to say what the mass of people wanted to hear, and do it in such a sincere way that it formulated an almost giddy, happy-time feeling.
This nagging doubt surfaced within my own brain when Obama visited Afghanistan in 2008 and pulled off a three-point basketball shot in front of adoring US troops — see the video here.
Although this doubt continued, I was more than overjoyed by how the young were grouping around candidate Obama — a photo from some political blog (might have been Daily Kos) depicting a white, middle-class-looking teenager sporting a tee-shirt which proclaimed: ‘My Future Rests With Obama’ at a huge campaign rally in Portland, OR, seemed to say it all.
And, of course, John McCain’s horrible, trainwreck of a campaign helped a great deal — McCain’s biggest dumb-ass, long-lasting piece of action was to inflict the US with the Sarah Palin disease, thus lowering the political IQ into the negative.
When I told one of my daughters about my gut feelings with Obama’s basketball shot, she didn’t want to hear it — in fact, many people, young and old, didn’t want to hear it.
There’s a long list of Obama’s disappointments, starting nearly right away with the naming of a nit-witted economic crew (literally giving control of the hen house to the fox) to the re-designing of the endless Afghan war, but the most degrading, simple-minded move came just the other night on his sugar-moistened speech continuing the big lie on the Iraqi war.
He praised George Jr.
Obama gave the former Decider an near-direct bit of commendation: “…no one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security… As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it, and all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hopes for Iraqis’ future.”
Despite George Jr.’s role as a war criminal — read Jonathan Steel’s piece on the 2001 set-up for the Afghanistan invasion and see how the US has lost more than troops and treasure.
And that little move was one of the least of the disasters formed by George Jr. and The Dick, among them, torture, illegal wars, wholesale slaughter of Iraqis and Afghans, nothing more than just an all-around horrifying time for all.
And I’m not the Lone Ranger in a growing legion of former Obama supporters.
A striking example is today’s post by James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, on his blog, Clusterfuck Nation.
The biting bit:
I voted for Barack Obama.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a tad disappointed in how things turned out with him.
These days he makes Millard Fillmore look like Frederick the Great.
His speech last week on Iraq and, incidentally, economic matters, was such a puffery of hollow platitudes that I was a little surprised he didn’t go up in a vapor at the end of it like a genie and retreat inside his desk lamp in a little trail of steam.
Nobody can figure out why he keeps the same krewe of viziers at his elbow after all these months of failure to engage with reality.
The voters were expecting a champion and got a Labradoodle instead.
Sad, way, way-sad.
UPDATE
Another similar view of Obama’s Iraqi war speech last week from Jeff Huber in a post this morning (9/7/10).
Is Obama out-sourcing Bush?
The scoop:
Bush could give a speech like that with a straight face because he lacked sufficient moral and cognitive subtlety to understand how full of crap he was.
Obama doesn’t have that excuse.
His father didn’t even stick around to watch him grow up, much less buy him degrees from Harvard and Yale, and Air National Guard pilot wings, and spiritual redemption from a televangelist, and a baseball team, and a political career.
Obama had to acquire clout the hard way, which means he spent more time operating under the table than a Bangkok bar girl.
As a result, Obama has developed a sophisticated capacity for Orwellian Doublethink, the ability to simultaneously accept both of two contradictory beliefs as truth.
Read all of Huber’s piece, it also covers Obama’s timeline on warmongering.
And, yes, once again, sad, way, way-sad.
‘Net Virus Hoax as Hoax
Filed Under Media | Leave a Comment
A few scant seconds can mean the difference between truth and a lie.
Such as the case of Desiree Jennings, a 25-year-old training to become a Washington Redskins cheerleader, who has claimed the noted swine-flu vaccine she took last August gave her a rare, but terrible disease.
And from that came the “flu girl hoax” that spread across the Internet — see one example here.
A big problem, however, might lie in some kind of lie.
Sharp-eyed blogger Eric Metze might have uncovered a glitch:
I’ve used a web service called Splicd to highlight these five seconds of the original two minute piece from Inside Edition.
In this clip, you will see/hear a glitch in the video.
This glitch causes the narrator to say, “Doctors say what happened to Desire should [glitch] discourage people from getting a flu shot.”
Now listen to this longer clip so you can hear the glitch in context.
It’s obvious that the doctors say that even though this happened to the young woman, people should not be discouraged from getting the flu shot.
But considering how that clip is edited, it’s not exactly clear what they mean unless you happen to catch it.
…
What does this mean? It means that someone took the original Inside Edition article, chopped out the word “not”, and provided physical copies for people to upload. There are dozens (hundreds?) of people actively spreading an obvious propaganda virus that was edited by an anonymous person and injected into the veins of the internet.
Another Fox News moment — Run with a falsehood no matter the facts.