You have to sympathize with Mortimer, and not just because that’s his name.  Not being able to offer the voters anything good each election cycle, Republicans continually have to remind us that all these sacrifices we have to make for their profligacy are the tithe we must pay to avoid something really, really, bad.  The bad things are as interchangeable as they are numerous, and all ludicrously unlikely.  Mushroom Clouds, Communism, Fascism, Death Panels, FEMA Camps, Reparations, One-World Government, European-Style Socialism, Collectivism, and my personal favorite, Sharia Law.  People not confined to mental institutions actually say, on a daily basis, the the Islamofascists are going to come over and forcibly put burquas on our women.  Seriously.  Here’s Rush Limbaugh, whom the Free Market has chosen to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for his yammerings, waxing all feminazi on 600 radio stations across America:

Let’s take, at face value, the template that the partisan political hacks spew at me. I am, according to them, anti-women’s rights. Equal rights for women is no concern of mine, right? I’m the guy that came up with the name “feminazi.” I’m not a friend of women’s rights, they say. If that were true, I would be pushing for the mosque at Ground Zero. If I were anti-women’s rights, I would be all for Sharia law. Sharia law is a not-so-stealth way to undermine women’s rights in this country. It would be a perfect cause if I was who they say I am.

Yes, Rush, some Muslims have some weird ideas about women, but your oft-spoken views are as bad or worse, and your relationships with women haven’t exactly turned out stellar, either, so it’s pretty audacious for you to take this line of argument, but do go on:

Anti-women’s rights is a cause of the left. That’s who’s pushing Sharia in this country: The left. It’s the left that wants a mosque at Ground Zero. It’s left who thinks “America’s chickens came home to roost” on 9/11. It’s the American left that thinks we got what we deserved on 9/11. It’s the American left that wants the mosque at Ground Zero. No one can be pro-women’s rights and remain silent about the metastasizing cancer that Sharia law is on women’s rights.

Ah, allowing a church and community center to be built on its own property, regardless of religious affiliation, which is to say, following the Constitution, is somehow related to wanting to impose Sharia Law, when any idiot would recognize it as the opposite.  Better yet, “the left,” which is deliberately presented as some monolithic force, is on the side of the terrorists, because some of the braver among us admitted that our foreign policies in the Middle East probably led to 9/11.  Who knew Ron Paul was a lefty?  But the newly-minted Betty Friedan of the AM dial has more:

The left is closer to the politics of Nazis than I will ever be. The person who was a National Socialist and anti-Israel would be anti-capitalist; pro-nationalization of health care, banks, education, car companies; pro-Central Planning; and try to force Israel (against its will and history) to divide its capital, Jerusalem, and to cave in to all of its enemies. None of that describes me. It describes them. It describes the left. Meaning if I were all that they say I am, I’d be one of them. Here is a leftist statist liberal, a person who believes that people should be treated differently according to their gender, the color of their skin, and their religion. Such as: Let’s use NASA to help Muslims feel better about themselves in math and science, and let Muslims build Sharia law shrines anywhere they want and pretend that we don’t know what that means.

Honestly.  The crazy here is so deep and thick, and so clearly from the fever swamps of the Rapture Right, it’s enough to make your head spin.  While he’s clearly at pains here to point out that although he famously favors ethnic cleansing, aggressive war, and torture, he’s no NAZI, Rush is a fat and happy capitalist who just bought himself a fifth wife (after a little rough patch with the drugs and the hookers); do you think he gives a flying fuck about Jerusalem and all that bible crap?  Of course not .  He’s paid, ridiculously lavishly, to foist this horseshit on Idiot America, and so he does.

Zuckerman must be so envious.

Just as Reagan taught the Republicans that (their) deficits “don’t matter,” Bush taught us, repeatedly, that failure also doesn’t matter.  Granted, you might need to start a well-timed war, capitalize on a terrorist attack you failed to prevent, get a leg up from the Supreme Court, work the US Attorneys into doing some voter supression and whatnot, but getting 50% + 1, as Tom Delay liked to call it, simply does not constitute a wave.  (Why Republican would even use the word “wave” is yet another mystery:  all the waves I see these days have oil in them…)  It’s official: Republicans have finally untethered performance from electoral success, but have American voters, really?

No one ever went down to defeat betting against the amnesia of the media, but a large number of Americans do remember what happened last week, last month, or even ten years ago, and to them Michele Bachmann’s vengeful rantings about taking down a Democratic President by taking back the House sound both deranged and drearily familiar.  The Temper Tantrum Party of the Gingrich years is clawing to get back to do the same old thing, and “Independents” are supposed to find such a prospect appealing and vote for them in record numbers.  There are reasons to doubt this.

Remember, Bush’s squeaker elections were not only shakily achieved, they were also deliberately deceptive: he didn’t come out and say he was going to bankrupt the country, start and lose a war or two, get rid of Social Security, and all that.  He was a “Compassionate Conservative” who would follow a “humble” foreign policy, and “give back the surplus” to taxpaying Americans.  In short, he had the good sense to lie.  Not so the Teabag-Americans of 2010.  Even as Michele Bachmann promises her investigations, Sen John Kyl announces that thirty billion for the unemployed would have to be scrapped to pay for $700 billion for the rich, and George Steinbrenner dies and leaves his multibillion dollar estate untaxed.  In other words, several more lies of the Bush Administration are exploding before our eyes, mainly the budget trickery that led to the sudden “expiration” of his ruinous tax cuts on the wealthy, and Republicans think they can make lemonade out of these lemons.  Good luck with that.

At least Sharron Angle has gotten with the program, and now denies that she ever said people needed to be “weaned” off Social Security, which of course is a lie, but at least a smart one.  Rand Paul just stopped talking altogether, and here in Oregon, free-throw champ Chris Dudley even ducked out of the traditional meeting with state newspaper publishers for a well-timed “family vacation” that happened to include a speech at the Republican Governor’s Association, in which he aspires to be a member.  Sarah Palin, whose half term compares favorably with Dudley’s none has gone ahead and, you know, while Marco Rubio has started a war with Rachel Maddow.  Is any of this wave-riding behavior?  Deliberate vagueness about governing priorities as an announced and obviously observed campaign strategy, of course, is the same tacit admission of unpopularity Republicans adopted long ago, since kleptocratic oligarchy has never polled too well, but this time it seems that the cat has even gotten Frank Luntz’s tongue.  When they aren’t lying, Republicans are simply clamming up, hoping to just ride the “wave” of their own fantasies back to the glory days of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay.  ”Cowabunga,” says the media.  I’m not so sure.

The Financial Times reports that the number of Americans giving up their citizenship to protect their families from America’s onerous worldwide tax system has jumped rapidly. Even relatively high-tax nations such as the United Kingdom are attractive compared to the class-warfare system that Obama is creating in the United States. I run into people like this quite often as part of my travels. They are intensely patriotic to America as a nation, but they have lots of scorn for the federal government. Statists are perfectly willing to forgive terrorists like William Ayres, but they heap scorn on these “Benedict Arnold” taxpayers. But the tax exiles get the last laugh since the bureaucrats and politicians now get zero percent of their foreign-source income. You would think that, sooner or later, the left would realize they can get more tax revenue with reasonable tax rates. But that assumes that collectivists are motivated by revenue maximization rather than spite and envy.

As usual, imaginary friends and tinny cold war epithets form the duct tape that purportedly hold this flimsy argument together, but could it possibly have been made slightly less offensive and a bit more plausible by leaving out calling tax evasion “patriotic” and misspelling its manufactured villain’s name?  (It’s Ayers, you righty halfwit…)  The best part is that he treats “revenue maximization” as something good and holy, while “spite and envy” are sordid and evil, as a supposed justification for such greed-driven voluntary statelessness.  Anyone who has watched how the Republicans talk about the unemployed and all manner of their other chosen “lesser people”  (thanks, Alan Simpson for putting it so refreshingly bluntly…), and it’s pretty obvious where the spite, if not the envy, lies in this debate.

The number of wealthy Americans living in the UK who are renouncing their US citizenship is rising rapidly as more expatriates seek to escape paying tax to the US on their worldwide income and gains and shed their “non-dom” status, accountants say. As many as 743 American expatriates made the irreversible decision to discard their passports last year, according to the US government – three times as many as in 2008. …There is a waiting list at the embassy in London for people looking to give up citizenship, with the earliest appointments in February, lawyers and accountants say. …“The big disadvantage with American citizens is they catch you on tax wherever you are in the world. If you are taxed only in the UK, you have the opportunity of keeping your money offshore tax free.”

Since, as we all know, but only Leona Helmsley came out and said, “Only the little people pay taxes.”  Tony Hayward calls them, perhaps in a nod to the Queen’s English, “small people,” but you get the idea.

To grasp the extent of this problem, here are blurbs from two other recent stories. Time magazine discusses the unfriendly rules that make life a hassle for overseas Americans.

See, even the “liberal media” is deeply worried about the rich…  you should be, too.  The point of the whole thing is that Time reported that wealthy people (500 or so of them), have such snazzy tax lawyers that, like Dick Cheney, they came up with a way to not pay taxes pretty much at all by buying a fake address someplace awful, then profiting off of American taxpayer money, bailouts, legal immunity, and (!) citizenship, while living wherever they damn well please.  The main complaint is that they have to report every little cash transaction over $10,000, which we all know can be so onerous.  I bet tipping will suffer from that.  Then they find the following hogwash in the New York Times, but leave out whether the author is Ben Stein, Tom Friedman, William Kristol, or Ross Douthat:

…. American expats have long complained that the United States is the only industrialized country to tax citizens on income earned abroad, even when they are taxed in their country of residence, though they are allowed to exclude their first $91,400 in foreign-earned income.

Oh, I see; they found a tax that wasn’t devised to tilt to the rich.  It’s like a bunch of Che Guevaras in mink.

One Swiss-based business executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of sensitive family issues, (That’s one way to put it…)  said she weighed the decision for 10 years. She had lived abroad for years but had pleasant memories of service in the U.S. Marine Corps. Yet the notion of double taxation — and of future tax obligations for her children, who will receive few U.S. services — finally pushed her to renounce, she said. …Stringent new banking regulations — aimed both at curbing tax evasion and, under the Patriot Act, preventing money from flowing to terrorist groups — have inadvertently made it harder for some expats to keep bank accounts in the United States and in some cases abroad. Some U.S.-based banks have closed expats’ accounts because of difficulty in certifying that the holders still maintain U.S. addresses, as required by a Patriot Act provision.

Ah, what suffering, to have one’s multiple six-figure income, floating through the ether in banks all over the world, bothered with by one’s freeloading fellow citizens trying to get their dirty paws on it.  (Under a law dreamed up by the socialist (?) Bush Administration,  but niggling details like that don’t faze Cato…)  At least these beleaguered expats have a better chance of seeing their tax dollars at work than those of us at home do; if they’re lucky a bomb or drone might kill somebody or flatten a town in their area.  More likely, a hefty dividend check from the latest no-bid contract, a court decision relieving you of all liability for your latest crime, or a no-strings government bailout will land in your Swiss or Cayman Islands mail box with nary a thud, courtesy of the American taxpayer.  That’s what I call patriotic.

-Mammy, to Scarlett in “Gone With the Wind.”

*”gentlemen” in Mammy-ese…  (as a slave, she knew what she was talking about.)

Where’s Mammy when you need her?  The formation of the Cat Food Commission is merely the latest example of the media and political class serially advancing the dunderheaded notion that the imaginary “Free Market” is not only the supposed prerequisite to less monetized forms of “freedom,” but if the “Free Market” so much as gets a cold, Democracy might have to just be put to sleep to make it feel better, and save on vet bills.  Thus, we are treated to spectacles like the IMF coldly informing us that our elderly simply have to die sooner to maintain our credit rating, and Arizona Senator John Kyl saying, without a trace of embarrassment, that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans were much more important than the relative pittance it would take to keep sending $1200 per month to people tossed out of the work force by deliberate Republican policies.  Never mind that for thirty years we’ve given the “free market” everything it supposedly wanted, and got another depression to show for it, along with the sort of vaulting inequality one associates with third-world dictatorships…  You see, the only reason the market failed was because it wasn’t free enough.  (!)

The boom and bust cycles of Randian Economics are well-known and depressingly familiar.  Corporations, usually those favored by government largesse (railroads, steel, real estate, autos, oil;  the list is long of industries that owe their very existence to the taxpayer dollar….), become so large and powerful that they have enough money left over to buy the government, even as they shower so much wealth to a chosen few executives that they can buy their wives opera houses for Christmas instead of another mink.   The purpose of free market fundamentalism is laughably obvious, and not exactly new…  selling despotism and mass poverty amid astonishingly concentrated wealth as something akin to God’s Will.  Remember that ol’ Divine Right thing?  What about “Let them eat cake?”  Down the memory hole for the Chicago School boys, who of course never expect to swallow the harsh medicine they endlessly prescribe for others.

Unfortunately for Louis XVI, there was no Fox News around in 1789, and thus no one was there to patiently explain to the uppity rabble that Marie Antoinette was not just expressing All-French Values, but was also an instrument of Our Lord.  If God had meant the peasants to have cake, He’d have given them all Easy-Bake ovens, as I’m sure Tom Friedman would be happy to tell you.  The measure of national greatness has become little more than the relative comfort of the superrich, a far cry from that dreary old “General Welfare ” crap those hippie Founders sneaked into Glenn Beck’s Constitution.  Freedom died a little, you see, when Dick Cheney moved his assets to Dubai.

It’s become increasingly clear over the last few decades that the Frankensteins created by the “Free Market:” a bloated and unproductive overclass dedicated only to Midas-like self-aggrandizement, a stodgy and backward industrial sector stuck in the 1950′s, a larcenous banking elite, and a policy-driving military sector aren’t just destroying the actual free market, but in the process are stomping all over the very concept of democratic government.

Protests, so revered by the corporate-sponsored Tea Party movement, fall like trees in an empty forest when they run counter to elite goals, and even two elections wherein the public overwhelmingly voted for change have been pushed under the rug in favor of the status quo…  The wars, the insider dealing, and the transparently false memes that sold it all still persist despite their failure and ruinous consequences.  Somehow, the Market didn’t fail us; we failed it, and must pay a heavy price:  public employees, those few who still have jobs anyway, must give up their hard-won pensions, Grandma must toil into her 70′s, and health care for the poor and elderly must be put before their own Death Panels.

Of course, the wealthy overclass isn’t being asked to give up anything; quite the opposite.  For them, even the recession ended a while back and they’ve already recovered so thoroughly that now their only worry is “the debt,” meaning the rather strong possibility that someday they might be asked to cough up something for the general good, which can never be tolerated.  Poll after poll shows that, propagandized and overworked though Americans are, few see “the debt” as a problem in the face of 10% unemployment.  Hedge fund managers are taxed at half the rate of waitresses, and Republicans say that it’s the waitress who ought to chip in by accepting sub-minimum wages….

Class warfare has reached its endgame; our idle and incompetent wealthy have decided of late that the biggest threat to America’s future is having a middle class at all, and are setting about doing away with it.  In a real democracy, such a thing would be impossible, because the wealthiest tenth of society is, in the end, arrayed against the other 90%.  Enter Citizens (!) United, FreedomWorks, electronic voting, and the Chamber of Commerce, with a healthy dose of craven propaganda about the hallowed “Free Market,” and its ironclad “laws,”  one of which seems to be that Democracy only exists these days for those who can afford to buy one.

Republicans had two enemies left to fight from those battles they lost back in the days of Martha Mitchell’s late night bathroom phone calls to Helen Thomas:  journalism and truth.  The first turned out to be remarkably easy, and once accomplished, the second followed with barely a push.  Instead of Nixon’s threats and lawsuits, sunny St. Reagan of General Electric strew flowers before a media that seemed, oddly, chastened by Watergate: offering deregulation, monopolistic expansion the government has wisely theretofore prohibited, and the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which, by mandating opposing viewpoints, historically made flat-out lying a lot more problematic.  With astonishing quickness, the many, often independent voices in the media lost their power as giant media conglomerates gobbled up everything in sight and the Wall Street profit demands hacked away at news budgets; soon, the administration could kill a potential Watergate like, say, Iran/Contra, with just a couple of telephone calls.  But all the media horses and all the President’s men couldn’t get a creepy incompetent (with poor delivery, to boot…) reelected in 1992, so much so that they later felt the need to compensate by falling all over his dunderheaded son.  This weird, self-flagellating dynamic turned out badly for everyone on the planet, except old-school right-wingers and the new, greatly empowered media elite, whom, perhaps bitter about what fools they’d made of themselves for embracing Reaganism, went after Clinton so mercilessly partly to “prove” to themselves that they hadn’t been so spectacularly wrong about everything for the past twelve years.

I do think that’s what’s at work today.  Surely Tom Friedman can no longer believe that the Iraq war was a good idea, but he’ll continue to play Pollyanna until he chokes on a Double Down, because if you never, ever, admit you were wrong, and you’re in the media, a lot of times people forget.  Surely George Will recognized that “Climategate” was a bunch of blatantly orchestrated FOX/BP horseshit, but he’ll be wearing his bowtie horizontally before he ever owns up to it.   Ruth Marcus must have some clue that rich Americans did pay taxes in excess of 70% for fifty prosperous years, and the drastic imbalance of wealth and power created when they stopped has caused most of our current problems, but to so utter would make her and almost all of her WaPoo colleagues look like lying nincompoops, so she’ll stay mum.  Bill Kristol, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh…  maybe I flatter these charlatans to say they couldn’t possible believe what they say, daily, but I’d bet one of my better furs that they don’t.

The media, as so successfully reconstituted these past few decades, is now as allergic to the truth as the Republicans they fawn over, and in any given situation, you can guess what they’ll say by checking in at Fox Nation.  After all, they’re privileged, often nepotistically promoted, wealthy know-nothings who neither know nor care about the lives of ordinary Americans….  They’ve got theirs thanks to embracing Republicans, no matter how crazy, and their policies, no matter how disastrous, and they intend to keep it; making an ass of yourself is a lot less stinging when you’ve got a cushy, no-work job and millions in the bank.

The latest absurdities, like “Americans are worried about the deficit,” “Americans support torture,” “Americans want to ‘win’ in (insert country here.), and on and on, when polls show the exact opposite, is now par for the course, and given this one-sided and screeching level of discourse, you could (almost) forgive the Obama Administration for caving to the Right on all these things.  Almost.  What the Obama Administration fails to realize is that both the media and Republicans are invested in his failure, if only to try and duct-tape back together their shared records of failure and incompetence, and the only route to political success is to repudiate them entirely and never let a lie go unpunished, either by the liar or the “journalist” who proffered it.  At this crucial point, they need to stop being Charlie Brown and start being Lucy.

Given the record, it’s the media and their Republican masters who ought to be lying on their backs, but they aren’t.  As Charlie Brown would say…   “Good grief!”

Reporting from Washington — The Supreme Court wrapped up its term last week after landmark decisions protecting the right to have a gun and the right of corporations to spend freely on elections. But the year’s most important moment may have come on the January evening when the justices gathered at the Capitol for President Obama’s State of the Union address.

Ah, we’re told, through laughably manipulative  wording, that the court’s multiple  ”landmark decisions” were about something like “protecting rights,” and  the “reporter” freely speculates that that must have been what pissed off the commie Kenyan in the White House, who then misbehaved.

They had no warning of what was coming.

If that were the case, the entire Republican bloc is too dumb to serve on traffic court, but maybe the “reporter,” David Savage, believes in fairies, too.

Obama and his advisors had weighed how to respond to the court’s ruling the week before, which gave big corporations the same free-spending rights as ordinary Americans. They saw the ruling as a rash, radical move to tilt the political system toward big business as they coped with the fallout from the Wall Street collapse.

Some advisors counseled caution, but the president opted to lambaste the conservative justices in the uncomfortable spotlight of national television as Senate Democrats roared their approval.

“Some advisors,” if they even exist, means Rahm Emanuel or some other corporate whore, no doubt, but since Savage failed to identify a single non-right wing source for his whole, pathetic opus, and based it entirely on the Fox News talking point du jour, this sort of omission is to be expected.  The best “reporters” always have these imaginary but talkative friends around.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is still angered by what he saw as a highly partisan insult to the independent judiciary. The incident put a public spotlight on the deep divide between the Obama White House and the Roberts court, one that could have a profound impact in the years ahead.

The fact that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence is, admittedly, going to be forever based on a petty, sorority girl vendetta is treated as though it’s the most natural thing in the world.  Ever since Clarence Thomas, the right has accepted that it needs angry, bona fide crazy people on the court to have its way, and the media’s job is to make such rank cynicism seem normal.  Unsuccessfully, I might add.

The president and congressional Democrats have embarked on an ambitious drive to regulate corporations, banks, health insurers and the energy industry. But the high court, with Roberts increasingly in control, will have the final word on those regulatory laws.

Well, they failed in all those plans, if they ever had them, and instead preserved and enhanced the power of all those interests, so it’s rather unclear to me whether this reporter lives on a different, though undeniably more interesting, planet.

Many legal experts foresee a clash between Obama’s progressive agenda and the conservative court.

Yes, clashes are inevitable, but not between those things, as I wrote above.

“Presidents with active agendas for change almost always encounter resistance in the courts,” said Stanford University law professor Michael W. McConnell, formerly a President George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Court of Appeals.

This was certainly true of George Bush, whose serial tramplings of the constitution did, disappointingly rarely, get shot down, but to say the same thing about Obama is so risibly dumb I can’t believe anyone could type it without laughing.

Already, the healthcare overhaul law, Obama’s signal achievement, is under attack in the courts. Republican attorneys general from 20 states have sued, insisting the law and its mandate to buy health insurance exceed Congress’ power and trample on states’ rights.

Yes, we do have at least 20 crazy, right-wing Republican Attorneys General who waste taxpayer money on insultingly stupid and political lawsuits.  This is news?  What about some actual legal opinions on the matter?

Two weeks ago, a federal judge in New Orleans ruled Obama had overstepped his authority by ordering a six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Who should have recused himself due to his direct financial interest in the case, and is clearly a corrupt sleazebag, but none of these salient details make it into this “story.”

On another front, the administration says it will soon go to court in Phoenix seeking to block Arizona’s controversial immigration law, which is due to take effect July 29. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer said Arizona will go to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary, to preserve the law.

Again, no mention of the fact that a couple of redneck local politicians and a cynical ol’ cocktailhag of a governor are playing the race card to save their sorry asses, while a responsible DOJ is doing what the constitution says: uphold it.  Expect even Roberts not to further sully his name on such (pardon the pun) small beans.  What he really cares about comes next:

As chief justice, Roberts has steered the court on a conservative course, one that often has tilted toward business. For example, the justices have made it much harder for investors or pension funds to sue companies for stock frauds.

Yeah, the founding fathers intended that every citizen had a self-evident right to be defrauded.  Ain’t America great?

Two years ago, the court declared, for the first time, that the gun rights of individuals are protected by the Constitution. This year, the justices made clear this was a “fundamental” right that extended to cities and states as well as federal jurisdictions.

I see.  ”We the people” is now “we the weapons industry.”  Got it.  Sounds conservative to me.

Since the arrival in 2006 of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., Bush’s second appointee, Roberts has had a five-member majority that was skeptical of the campaign funding restrictions. At first, he moved cautiously. Roberts spoke for the majority in 2007 in saying that a preelection broadcast ad sponsored by a nonprofit corporation was protected as free speech even though it criticized a candidate for office.

Last year, the court had before it another seemingly minor challenge to the election laws by a group that wanted permission to sell a DVD that slammed Hillary Rodham Clinton when she was running for president in 2008. This time, however, Roberts decided on a much bolder move.

Whenever a crappy reporter like this one calls something a right-winger does “bold,” you’d better watch out, because it’s always something of an understatement.

The 5-4 ruling in the Citizens United case struck down all the limits on direct election spending — for giant, profit-making corporations as well as small nonprofit groups. For more than 60 years, Congress and many states had barred corporate and union spending to sway elections. The court’s opinion dismissed all these laws as unconstitutional “censorship.”

None dare call this “Judicial Activism,” although a better example of it could hardly be found.

The decision came as a “real shock to the administration and to the Democrats in Congress,” said Simon Lazarus, counsel for the National Senior Citizens Law Center. “It’s also caused a sea change in their thinking about the court. Before, it was all about the ‘culture wars’ issues, like abortion, prayer and gay rights. Afterward, they saw this new activist thrust among the conservatives as a direct threat to their legislative agenda.”

No, stupid people in the media thought it was all about “culture war” issues.  After eight years of Bush, is anyone so clueless as to still see it that way?  With Republicans, it’s always about the money; end of story.

The change was on full display in last week’s Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. Democrats accused the high court of “judicial activism” in favor of corporations — “particularly by the five Republican appointees who have steered so hard to the right,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

A plain factual statement like that has to now be “balanced” with a cuckoo one, like this:

Meanwhile, Republicans in the hearings targeted Obama’s “tremendous expansion” of the government and argued for the court to aggressively restrain Congress and the White House. “The Supreme Court … ought to go for freedom, not more government,” said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).

Who’s writing his material, Trig Palin?  Why would anyone bother to quote such content-free nonsense?

Obama chose Kagan for the court believing she could bridge the gap with some of its conservatives. Her mission is to help uphold the laws that Obama and the Democrats are pushing through Congress.

So pushy, those Democrats.  You’d think they’d been elected or something.

During her hearings, Kagan found herself in the odd spot of defending judicial restraint before senators who usually worry aloud about sending a “judicial activist” to the court.

They’re Republicans, after all,  and thus “worry aloud” about things all the time that are the exact opposite of what they’re really worried about, but no one at the LA Times seems to suspect this after all these years.

“Can you name for me any economic activity that the federal government cannot regulate under the commerce clause?” asked Sen. John Cornyn (R- Texas).

“I wouldn’t try to,” Kagan replied, stressing that the court had long said lawmakers had broad power to regulate economic activity.

Was that the most enlightening exchange they could come up with?

It may be another year or two before a true challenge to the Obama agenda reaches the high court.

For the love of God, what agenda?

McConnell, the law professor, said the administration’s broad set of regulatory moves makes a clash almost inevitable. “It does not mean the courts are being ‘political,’ ” he said. “It is the way the institutions are designed, to create checks and balances.”

Oh, now the Bush appointee of a couple of paragraphs ago is brought in with his “law professor” outfit on, to talk about “checks and balances,” and blame the whole thing on Obama.  Quelle surprise.   Hint for Mr. Savage: you should read up about how your estimable colleague , Richard Serrano handles these inherently unflattering stories about the GOP.  The trick seems to be less content.

Thanks to our beloved and fearless Media, though, we are constantly told that war is like a delicate tropical blossom that must be carefully nurtured over many years, fertilized of course by organically decomposed greenbacks, lest it never bloom and our precious (but nonetheless expendable) troops will have died in vain.  That there is no historical evidence of this inane notion is never mentioned; it’s merely an oft-muttered prayer from the media’s rosary beads, and really no more or less nonsensical than everything else they say on any given day.  Given this fact, I about tipped over when I saw that Fareed Zakaria is once again hoisting a cheek and letting one rip, right in the front row of Our Lady of the Military-Industrial Complex, and on Sunday, too.  I’m sure it’ll go over about how you’d expect among the others in the congregation.  When I saw this, I immediately wondered if he’s single.  (Not that that’s a requirement or anything.)

Via Huffpo:

Fareed Zakaria criticized the Afghanistan war in unusually harsh terms on his CNN program Sunday, saying that “the whole enterprise in Afghanistan feels disproportionate, a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem.”

He actually mentioned that wars cost money?  He’ll be pumping gas soon.

His comments followed CIA director Leon Panetta’s admission last week that the number of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan may be down to just 50 to 100 members, or even fewer.

All Wile E. Coyote needed was one road runner, but his show didn’t run for nine years, either.

“If Al Qaeda is down to 100 men there at the most,” Zakaria asked, “why are we fighting a major war?”

Either CNN is just tired of paying for all that travel, or someone in the MSM got some oxygen to their brain.

Zakaria noted that the war is costing the U.S. a fortune in both blood and treasure. “Last month alone there were more than 100 NATO troops killed in Afghanistan.,” the CNN host said. “That’s more than one allied death for each living Al Qaeda member in the country in just one month.

He mentioned dead people, too?  Pretty soon even the gas stations won’t hire him.

“The latest estimates are that the war in Afghanistan will cost more than $100 billion in 2010 alone. That’s a billion dollars for every member of Al Qaeda thought to be living in Afghanistan in one year.”

Doesn’t he know the Blackwater/Halliburton rule?  ”If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”  It’s the bottom line on all their bids.  Maybe they just got the Google at CNN.

To critics who suggest that we need to continue fighting the war against the Taliban because they are allied with Al Qaeda, Zakaria countered that “this would be like fighting Italy in World War II after Hitler’s regime had collapsed and Berlin was in flames just because Italy had been allied with Germany.”

Somebody just compared somebody to Hitler….   Call AIPAC!

“Why are we investing so much time, energy, and effort when Al Qaeda is so weak?” Zakaria concluded. “Is there a more cost-effective way to keep Al Qaeda on the ropes than fight a major land and air war in Afghanistan? I hope someone in Washington is thinking about this and not simply saying we’re going to stay the course because, well, we must stay the course.”

Well, Fareed, perhaps you haven’t noticed that “stay the course,” often in those same words, has been the default setting of the US military for 60 years of lost/pointless/blowback-creating wars, but I have.  And the costs certainly aren’t new, either, although you might be forgiven for not hearing about this amongst your colleagues, who no longer bother themselves with such minutia.  Happy Fourth, and thanks, Michael Steele, for setting off some, uh, fireworks.

WASHINGTON — Nine days after a four-star general was relieved of command for comments made to Rolling Stone magazine, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates issued orders on Friday tightening the reins on officials dealing with the news media.

The memorandum requires top-level Pentagon and military leaders to notify the office of the Defense Department’s assistant secretary for public affairs “prior to interviews or any other means of media and public engagement with possible national or international implications.”

Uh, you’re the Pentagon, not a burrito cart.  Everything you do, by definition, has national and international implications, most of which are grave indeed.  All the more reason not to talk about them…  Too depressing.  As though this weren’t bad enough, Gates tosses in the word “possible,” which basically means burrito carts are to be included in the clampdown as well.

Just as the removal of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal from command in Afghanistan was viewed as President Obama’s reassertion of civilian control of the military, so Mr. Gates’s memo on “Interaction With the Media” was viewed as a reassertion by civilian public affairs specialists of control over the military’s contacts with the news media.

Yay!  We get our own Baghdad Bob!

Senior officials involved in preparing the three-page memo said work on it had begun well before the uproar that followed Rolling Stone’s profile of General McChrystal. But they acknowledged that the controversy, and the firing of one of the military’s most influential commanders, served to emphasize Mr. Gates’s determination to add more discipline to the Defense Department’s interactions with the media.

“I have said many times that we must strive to be as open, accessible and transparent as possible,” Mr. Gates wrote in the memo, which was sent to senior Pentagon civilian officials, the nation’s top military officer, each of the armed-services secretaries and the commanders of the regional war-fighting headquarters. “At the same time, I am concerned that the department has grown lax in how we engage with the media, often in contravention of established rules and procedures.”

Of course, “open as possible” doesn’t in this case mean what you think it means, clearly.  Rough translation:  We will henceforth speak with Fox News-like unanimity, on Fox News.  It’s that hopey-changey thing again.

The memo by Mr. Gates, a former C.I.A. director, also demanded greater adherence to secrecy standards, issuing a stern warning against the release of classified information: “Leaking of classified information is against the law, cannot be tolerated and will, when proven, lead to the prosecution of those found to be engaged in such activity.”

No wonder David Ellsberg is so exercised at the moment.  Sounds like Nixon to me.

A copy of the unclassified memo by Mr. Gates was provided to The New York Times by an official who was not authorized to release it. Douglas B. Wilson, the new assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, and Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, verified its content.

Nyeah, nyeah, you fascist douchebag…  A real American just gave you the biggest finger.

Mr. Gates’s memo “is based primarily on his view that we owe the media and we owe ourselves engagement by those who have full knowledge of the situations at hand,” Mr. Wilson said.

That is, only those that read the memo may speak, and repeating tired, counterfactual Bill Kristol talking points to a rightly disgusted public is somehow doing people a favor.

Mr. Gates was particularly concerned that civilian and military officials speaking to reporters sometimes had only a parochial view of a national security issue under discussion. The new orders, Mr. Wilson said, were devised to “make sure that anybody and everybody who does engage has as full a picture as possible and the most complete information possible.”

“Parochial” in this case means actual combatants.  The Big Picture guys are found in green rooms and think tanks.

The repercussions of the Rolling Stone profile have included heightened concerns that military officers will become warier of the press — and it is expected that many officers will read the new memo as an official warning to restrict access to reporters.

Is this article written for the retarded?

Mr. Wilson and Mr. Morrell rejected those assumptions, saying Mr. Gates would remain committed to having the Pentagon work closely with reporters.

That’s worked out so well so far, why not continue?  After all, now that war is a permanent thing, and the only media outlet able to expose its futility and the cynical arrogance of its promoters has ads for bongs in it, who cares?  Evidently not the NYT, as evidenced by the bland tone of this astonishing article.

“From the moment he came into the building, this secretary has said that to treat the press as an enemy is self-defeating,” Mr. Morrell said. “That attitude has been reflected in his tenure: he has been incredibly accommodating, incredibly forthright and incredibly cooperative with the news media. That said, he thinks we as a giant institution have become too undisciplined in how we approach our communications with the press corps.”

Never have I hear such errant nonsense, coming from the outfit that gave us Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, Judith Miller, Mission Accomplished, and on and on.  Stupid, yes.  Undisciplined?  Hardly.

But correspondents who cover national security issues, a realm that routinely requires delving into the classified world, have come to rely on unofficial access to senior leaders for guidance and context — and for information when policies or missions may be going awry.

Officials involved in drafting Mr. Gates’s memo cited several recent developments as central to his thinking. They included disclosure of the internal debate during the administration’s effort to develop a new policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, similar public exposure of internal deliberations over the Pentagon budget and weapons procurement, and, among others, an article in The Times describing a memorandum on Iran policy written by Mr. Gates and sent to a small circle of national security aides.

Ah, just niggling things that are none of our business like the current and next few wars, the earth-shattering amounts of money to be flushed down the toilet on ridiculous toys of war, and the way in which the booty is handed out to self-interested cronies.  Nothing in that could possibly be interesting to anybody.

On behalf of the military, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was consulted during the drafting of the memo on media relations and “fully supports the secretary’s intent,” said Capt. John Kirby, the chairman’s spokesman.

He cited Admiral Mullen’s visit to Kabul, Afghanistan, last weekend, in which the admiral told American military officers and embassy personnel that “we must continue to tell our story — we just need to do it smartly, and in a coordinated fashion.”

Hello, earth to New York Times.  Haven’t you shamed yourself, your country and your craft enough, slavishly telling the Pentagon’s “stories?”  Printing an article like this, basically describing the spoken intent of the giant, unaccountable US military to just, well, drop out of this whole, “quaint” free press thing, without rebutting its falsehoods and contradictions is bad enough.  But not at least getting a little balance, however false, from someone, anyone, who agrees with the majority of Americans who think that both the wars and the Pentagon are crazy, is pretty danged pathetic.  They even do that on Fox.

Thom Shanker, please make a note of it.

The memo is expected to reanimate the professional public-affairs cadre among the Pentagon’s civilian and military staffs, who have made no secret that they have felt challenged by the growing numbers of contractors hired for “strategic communications” issues. It was one such contractor who brokered Rolling Stone’s profile of General McChrystal.

From Halliburton, perhaps?

It turns out that the left-wing commentator Glenn Greenwald doesn’t like me (who knew?). In a rather long posting, he accuses me of many different sins, mainly, though not exclusively, having to do with my early support for the Iraq war, and for my reporting from pre-invasion Iraqi Kuridstan. (Greenwald has always been vehemently opposed to the invasion.)

So he starts right off obtusely saying, like a four-year old, that that “left-wing,”  long-winded Greenwald, for no apparent reason, just “doesn’t like me.”  Well, boo f*ucking hoo.  You say obnoxious, false, and asinine things in print; what’s to like?  And he manages, unconvincingly, to imply that Greenwald is some nobody anyway, even though he’s clearly smarter, much more highly regarded, and, well, more in touch with reality than ol’ Goldberg, and also lacks Goldberg’s lengthy and unblemished record of wrongness.

As it happens, I was e-mailing yesterday with the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, Barham Salih, and I mentioned Greenwald’s critique. I explained that Greenwald believes the invasion was a criminal act, to which Salih responded by asking if Greenwald had ever visited Iraqi Kurdistan. I said I didn’t know, not having too much contact with him, on account of him hating me. So Salih asked me to extend an invitation to Greenwald to visit Iraqi Kurdistan. So, Glenn, you are hereby invited to visit Iraqi Kurdistan. I’m happy to go with you (I’m actually a  pretty good travel companion — even Matt Yglesias says that I can be both “funny” and “charming,” though, to be fair, he also says I can be “dangerous” and “inaccurate”). But if you didn’t want to go with me, I’m sure I can find someone to go with you.

This paragraph smells so strongly of ass that I would only recommend it to the constipated, to be read on the toilet.  First, the bragging:  ”I emailed real Iraqis, nyeah nyeah.”  Then the fake best friend speaks up, then the completely fabricated offer, and then the insulting remark that Greenwald supposedly couldn’t find a traveling companion with the unfortunate but telling accidental admission that it’s Goldberg who has to beg people to ride with him on an elevator.  Glenn has a husband, fatso, and by the way, the Iraq invasion was illegal, and is seen as such by the majority of humanity.

The prime minister said we could invite Kurds from different political parties and media outlets to  a big, public forum, and Glenn could explain to them his position that the invasion was immoral, and the Kurds could explain why they supported the invasion. (Of course, we would try to find some Kurds who opposed the invasion, and there are, indeed, some out there, to meet with Greenwald as well).  We would also be able to visit Halabja, and the other towns and villages affected by Saddam’s genocide, and I’m sure we could arrange meetings with other Kurdish leaders and dissidents.

It’s funny how righties always try to pose as humanitarians, when they will gladly toss humans into the meat grinder, and money down the toilet, for their pet wars, which kind of makes life crappy or over for many more people that it “helps.”  Remember Laura Bush and the plight of Afghan Women?  Me neither.  Goldberg is just a cynical piece of shit who cares less about Kurds that he does about any other brown-skinned human;  Saddam was indeed a monster, but he never managed to kill as many Americans as, say, George W. Bush, who was, back in the day, Goldberg’s hero.

Obviously, I think this is a good idea, because I view the subject of Iraq as a complicated one, and I think that Greenwald has an overly simplistic, black-and-white view of the situation.  If he were to meet with representatives of the Kurds — who make up 20 percent of the population of Iraq and who were the most oppressed group in Iraq during the period of Saddam’s rule (experiencing not only a genocide but widespread chemical gassing) — I think it might be possible for him to understand why some people — even some Iraqis — supported the overthrow of Saddam. Also, as a bonus, I’m reasonably sure we could meet with Kurdish intelligence officials who could explain to him why they believe Saddam was secretly supporting an al Qaeda-affiliated Kurdish extremist group, and, if we have time, I could also arrange a visit to Najaf or the equivalent, where Greenwald could meet with representatives of the Shi’a, who also took it on the chin from Saddam.

This is where just being an ass descends into being a complete idiot with a lampshade on your head and a wet spot on the front of your trousers.  The bouncers are assuredly coming to get you when you, in 2010, claim that Saddam was involved with Al Qaeda.  Better yet, in Goldberg’s world, the rise of the Shi’a, which brought with it the rise of religious extremism in Iraq and directly led to the triumph of Shiite Iran in the region was all good, too.  Can a person be dumber and more self-contradictory than that and still be, pardon the expression, “toilet trained?”  As for the usual straw man arguments the pervade Goldberg’s thin and embarrassing tirade, saying Greenwald somehow fails to see how “complicated” the Iraq situation is is perhaps the most pathetic.  Greenwald, like every other sentient, “simplistic” human on earth, knew that Iraq would be a costly, pointless disaster, and it is, in spades, whether the Kurds are marginally and temporarily happier at the moment or not.

This is a sincere offer from a very important Kurdish official, and I hope Glenn Greenwald takes it seriously.

Why?  It isn’t serious.  The worst thing for the portly and pampered Goldberg would be that Greenwald takes him up on it, which I’m pretty sure he will.  That’s when Goldberg will pull a Sarah Palin (minus the cute) and back out and blame Greenwald.  I’ve seen this movie many, many, times.