Republicans are Very Serious About Hypocrisy

Republican party 2009: The Democrat's healthcare bill will cut medicare! The government wants to puts its filthy hands on your medicare! Obama will kill your grandma! We're very serious!

Republican party 2011: We must cut medicare! It's the only way to reduce the deficit! We're still very serious!

The current Republican deficit reduction proposal from Rep. Paul Ryan is not only breathtakingly ill-timed (cutting federal expenditures during the recovery from the recent recession is a fucking great idea boys!) but relies heavily on the effective privatization of medicare benefits and the more or less complete destruction of medicaid to achieve its ends.

Krugman calls Ryan's plan out for its reliance on unicorns:

First, the plan assumes that tax cuts will set off a literally unprecedented boom.

Then there’s the Medicare business. According to the CBO analysis, a typical senior would end up spending more than twice as much of his or her own income on health care as under current law. As Dean Baker points out, this means that seniors would end up paying most of their income for health care. Again, right.

But in a way, the worst part isn’t the Medicare plan: it’s the fact — which so far has not penetrated the debate — that the biggest source of supposed savings in the plan isn’t actually health care, it’s an assumption that federal spending on everything except health and Social Security can somehow be squeezed, as a percent of GDP, to a small fraction of current levels.

I encourage you to click through to the Krugman and Baker articles, but in short, Ryan's serious plan is on several basic economic levels, completely unserious. Surprise, surprise! Who could have guessed?

We can only hope that Senate Democrats and the Administration do not fall for the Republican bait and switch again during this budget battle. It already happened once during the healthcare debate. Today's Republican party relies on a simple tactic:

1. Accuse the Democrats of being unserious because they will not adopt batshit insane Republican ideas.
2. Wait for Democrats to adopt those very ideas in the name of compromise.
3. Move the goalpoasts for the current debate as far right as possible.
4. Repeat.

This is ample evidence that the Republicans are not only deeply unserious, but are also just mean, nasty, shysters. Fuckers.

Awww... Shit.

(Fancy graphic from the Atlantic)

Julio Friedman at the Atlantic has some shit your pants type numbers for us:

Every year, human activity emits about 35 gigatons of CO2 (the most important greenhouse gas). Of that, 85% comes from fossil fuel burning. To a lot of people, that doesn’t mean much — who goes to the store and buys a gigaton of carrots? For a sense of perspective, a gigaton is about twice the mass of all people on earth, so 35 gigatons is about 70 times the weight of humanity. Every year, humans put that in the atmosphere, and 85% of that is power.

Global warming? Fucked energy policy? Go fossil fuels go!

I had a conversation with a fine friend of mine a week or two ago about getting some solar panels for your house and selling that extra power back to the power company. Why power your house with store bought electricity from a coal plant when you can do this shit? Answer: (high start up costs). High costs or not, they are affordable for many, and you have to wonder why more of those many don't jump on this type of thing.

Truth or Dare?

Julian Assange - creator and public face of WikiLeaks










Mark Zuckerberg - creator and public face of Facebook

Amendments to the Constitution - Article I

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

I saw this image the other day and feel as though this is typical, contemporary American journalism. Laude those whose play ball. Crucify those who don't. After doing a bit more reading on Assange and Zuckerberg, I found out that both were in the running for Time Magazine's 2010 Person of the Year. Assange was a runner-up. Isn't that ridiculous? People who have two completely different motives for expanding their websites were nominated for the same honor? Not so fast, according to Time, the person of the year is the man or woman who had the greatest impact on world events in the previous year "for better or for worse." So is that to say that Julian Assange would've been Man of the Year for having the greatest negative impact on earth in 2011? That's putting him up there with Adolf Hitler (winner in 1938)  and Richard Milhous Nixon ('71 & '72, history's only back to back winner). Ludicrous. That also means putting Zuckerberg up in the pantheon of greatness with, just to pick a few names, Mahatma Gandhi (1930), Martin Luther King, Jr (1963), and Pope John Paul II (1994). Equally ludicrous. 


Reading their respective articles in Time, Assange is not portrayed as villainously as one would imagine, but he's not declared a pioneer or revolutionary either. I think he deserves both titles. Instead, the magazine's take on his influence is rather... neutral. They use all the clichéd terms such as "whistle-blower" and "mystery hacker" to describe the man with, quite possibly, the biggest nuts in the world. Most of the article highlights how private his life is in contrast to his desire to publicize the inner-workings of US foreign policy. However, Mr. Zuckerberg receives a 10-page hand-job "for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live our lives." This is American journalism folks. Setting the double-standard for the rest of the world. All I know is that Julian Assange is a man who dares to uncover the absolute truth. But apparently that's not worthy enough to be the most influential man on the planet. 


I'd like to end this post, a la Mark Landers (aka m0ehawk)....

Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) - In the End

You can't bargain with the truth
'Cause whether you're right or you're wrong
We're gonna know what you've done
We're going to see where you belong - in the end

Songs? ... Doomed?

Are our songs new or are we newly doomed, eh? The answer to that my friends, is surely and unfortunately both. Oh, a new song need be nothing unfortunate, but songs about doom usually are. Fuck it! We'll have to make do anyhow. On with it! We seek facts and raw wisdom! And we will have them!