Category: Hypocrisy

I Wonder What Rush Limbaugh Will Say About This Tomorrow

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Un-Dirtyword-Believable.

Keith Bardwell, Justice of the Peace for Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana just denied a marriage license to a couple because they were interracial:

A justice of the peace in northern Louisiana has refused to grant a marriage license to an interracial couple because he believes it would harm any children born of that relationship.

“I’m not a racist,” Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in the state’s Tangihapoa Parish, told the Hammond, Louisiana, Daily Star. “I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house. My main concern is for the children.”

Ummm….Dude, You Are a Racist, and with a little bit of justice in this world, you will shortly be a convicted felon.

As to what Rush will say? I’m not sure, but not that he won’t be part owner of the Rams, I’m pretty sure it won’t be “sensitive new age” stuff.

Pissing On Antonin Scalia’s Grave

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PZ Myers notes on his Pharyngula blog that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is an incompetent hypocrite, which is not a tough call.

In this case, it was during arguments in Buono v. Salazar, during which Fat Tony basically said that everyone uses crosses to memorialize the dead, and when the counsel for the ACLU Peter Eliasberg notes that you won’t find crosses in Jewish cemeteries, Scalia finds it, “an outrageous conclusion,” that people would consider the symbol of Christianity to be….Well …. Christian.

Well, Dr. Meyers has a suggestion, which I endorse with one caveat:

Since Scalia is such an open-minded syncretist, I suggest that when he dies, right after all the partying and celebration, we atheists pass around a hat and get a collection going to erect a huge Muslim crescent over his grave. Not only will it honor the dead man, but it’ll let us do double-duty when we all line up to piss on it. Everyone wins!

My only request is that he be buried near enough to Ayn Rand that I do not need 2 beers to “show my respects” to both of them.

If You Want to Have an Opinion On Spending, Pay Some Damn Taxes

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So, the Conference of Catholic Bishops is saying that it would be , since they don’t like them, but somehow or other they don’t say a single word on the millions of dollars spent every year on capital punishment that the Pope also says is immoral, or the bank bailout, when the Pope condemns the excesses of capitalism, or the fact that our current system of healthcare victimizes the weak and helpless and kills them.

How about calming down, and drinking a nice warm glass of shut the F%$# up?

So, We Have Another Paleocon* Moron Wishing for Another 911

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We have Gregory Rodriguez penning a paean to the unity following 911, and suggesting very strongly what we need is to be very frightened about al Qaeda when he asks, “Where is Osama bin Laden when we need him?”

You see, he thinks that we need some of that good old post-911 unity, you know that wonderful stuff that Republicans used to :

  • Pass the PATRIOT Act.
  • Invade Iraq.
  • Illegally wiretap ordinary Americans.
  • Become torturer to the world.
  • To use the post 911 unity almost exclusively for Republican partisan political advantage.

His conclusion:

In the meantime, we all but ignored Bin Laden’s most recent tape, and attention to the arrest and indictment of Afghan Denverite Najibullah Zazi on WMD conspiracy charges has been surprisingly low-key. Such blase responses to our true enemies set us up for self-destruction, until we once again find out the hard way that we’re all Americans.

The reason that this is low key is because it should be low key, because Bush and His Evil Minions™ are no longer juicing every half baked tyro with half a terrorism plan and multicolored terror alerts.

The reason that this is low key is because it is Barack Obama, for all the complaints about him, is not Karl Rove, and does not see terrorizing the American public into supporting him as a legitimate goal of anti-terror policy.

It’s no wonder that quotes Samuel P. Huntington glowingly when suggesting that there is a need for an external enemy in order to create unity in society.

This is the same Samuel Huntington, whose entire career, and perhaps his entire life, to finding people to hate, whether it was the Arab Muslim (Clash of Civilizations), the brown mestizo Mexican (Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity), a suggesting that civilian (small d) democratic government is undesirable when maintaining a standing military (The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations), that democratic change is generally a bad thing(Political Order in Changing Societies), and advocated the near-genocidal “hamletization” policy in Vietnam.

Seriously, can this man is a moral pygmy.

*I read some of his other articles, and it appears that his guiding principles are stupidity, not Neoconservatism.

This Won’t Criminalize Anyone

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The recent moves to curb secrecy in private banking does not make any a criminal, it simply makes catching the crooks easier:

European leaders should give up the attack on Swiss banking secrecy and accept a withholding tax on foreigners to avoid criminalizing wealthy taxpayers, said Konrad Hummler, managing partner of Switzerland’s oldest private bank.

“If there is really a desire to criminalize part of the elite in European countries, then it would be a bigger problem for these countries than for Switzerland,” Konrad Hummler said in an interview at the offices of Wegelin & Co. in Zurich. The “majority of European clients were not criminals but just diversifying away from their home country

There is nothing illegal about using a private banker, but people are using private bankers to conceal income from tax authorities and to conceal income, and assets from spouses in divorce cases, and these are explicitly criminal acts, tax evasion and fraud.

Under the current world banking regime, people can put money in almost any institution that they want in almost any country, including Switzerland.

What is a crime, and has always been a crime, is putting money some where to hide it from tax authorities and opposing counsel.

Maybe we should go Chinese, and have a roving execution van, and put bullets in the heads of tax evaders, and their co-conspirator bankers, like Konrad Hummler.

Mr. Hummler, if you didn’t want to go to jail, you shouldn’t have been a criminal

Why Conservatives are Dancing Like the Palestinians Did on 911*

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You know, I’m not a big fan of the Olympics. I know of no event which has drifted further from its original purpose, which was that athletes set aside national differences, and compete for the “joy of the sport.”

The Olympics these days is all about nationalism, commercialism, and pumping up national differences.

When this is juxtaposed with the enormous costs, which always seem to overrun their budget and require a taxpayer bailout, I know that if I lived in Chicago, I would be strongly opposed to the Olympics being in the Windy City.

So, there are many valid reasons not to want the Olympics in your city, or your country.

That being said, the behavior of the right wing was all about, as Nuisance Industry at Daily Kos notes, celebrating the defeat of the United States of America:

That’s not what this is about. Today, great joy and celebration greeted America losing the Olympics. This joy was not in the streets of Rio (where celebrations certainly are underway), but in the offices and studios of people who facetiously claim to be patriotic Americans.

It’s happening in the offices of the Weekly Standard:

Standard blogger John McCormack published a celebratory post on the magazine’s blog, titled “Chicago Loses! Chicago Loses!.” McCormack wrote that “Cheers erupt at WEEKLY STANDARD world headquarters

It’s happening in Glenn Beck’s studios, where Herr Beck declared the news is “so sweet.” In Herr Limabugh’s studio, the bloated junkie happily declared this “the worst day of Obama’s presidency.”

Newsmax, the fascist organization that earlier this week fantasized about a military coup against the president, happily tweeted “ChicagP//n3D!”

We get it. You hate not just our president, but our country. You hate us for our freedoms. You’d rather have our people die that provide them health care that doesn’t bankrupt them. You’d rather risk catastrophic damage to the environment rather than doing something about greenhouse gases. You actively fantasize about killing the president and hamstringing government from doing the work of government. (I would have guessed that this Norquistian fantasy would have subsided after you so successfully drowned New Orleans, but that just whetted your appetite for more American blood.) The United States loses the opportunity to host the Olympics, and you’re thrilled, simply because you can’t stand that the president is a Democrat?

Let me close with Nuisance Industry’s last sentence, “So I conclude with all due compassion: Get the f$#@ out of my country.” ($#@ mine)

*I know, you’re about to say it was all 10 year old video of the invasion of Iraq. The problem is that it was actually video of September 11, 2001, and the “10 year old video” bit was dreamed up by a Brazilian student. The claim of fraud is the actual fraud, and it’s not just Snopes (link above) that confirms this.

Not only is there documentation of the celebration across the Arab world, there is ample documentation of the cover-up by the PA, which confiscated footage from reporters.†
†The real question to be asked about Arabs celebrating 911 is not whether they did so, but why they did so.

Well, I was Experience of Schadenfreude

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But Senator Ensign (R-NV, and many bedrooms) just keeps on delivering.

So, the New York Times has done some journalism, and discovered that, in addition to boinking his chief of staff’s wife, stalking her, and getting mommy and daddy to pay hush money, reporters Eric Lichtblau and Eric Lipton have now discovered that Senator Ensign arranged for Douglas Hampton to get a cushy lobbying job, and then had Hampton lobby one…Senator John Ensign, in a direct violation of Senate ethics rules and federal laws, which require a 1 year cooling off period:

Mr. Hampton said he and Mr. Ensign were aware of the lobbying restriction but chose to ignore it. He recounted how the senator helped him find clients and ticked off several steps Mr. Ensign took to assist them with their agendas in Washington, activities confirmed by federal officials and executives with the businesses.

“The only way the clients could get what John was essentially promising them — which was access — was if I still had a way to work with his office,” Mr. Hampton said. “And John knew that.”

Gee….Who’d a thunk it?

Needless to say, the folks at Leno and The Daily Show are chortling about this, though David Letterman might be too busy boinking his staffers on his show.

When I Agree with Mitch McConnell…….

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I know that something is wrong, and in this case it is how accurately the Senate minority leader nails the attitude of Barack Obama and His Stupid Minions™: “

Senator McConnell dismissed the President’s substantive involvement in the debate, dryly noting the president “would sign anything the Congress sent him, provided it had ‘Health Care Reform’ written at the top of the page.

It’s not just McConnel who is saying this. We also have Robert Reich, who has always been an extremely big booster of the Obama campaign and later the Obama Administration, so when he says this:

Big Pharma and big insurance hate the public insurance option even more than they hate big Medicare discounts. And although the President has sounded as if he would welcome it, political operatives in the White House have quietly reassured the industries that it won’t be included in the final bill. At most, the bill would allow the formation of non-profit ‘cooperatives’ that wouldn’t have the scale or authority to squeeze the profits of private industry, or a ‘trigger’ that would allow states to form public insurance options eventually if certain goals for cost savings and coverage weren’t met.

Which is a clear statement against his own political interest.

He cannot bring himself to voice it explicitly, is that Barack Obama and his people do not care about healthcare reform, but that they are looking for phony reform for 2012.

The results of White House “Axis of Weasel” on this is plain to see, with , as Rockefeller’s public option amendment being voted down, as well as Schumer’s weaker tea public option.

It gets worse, of course, with Baucus proposing that nationwide standards on insurance be written by the insurance industry in his bill.

He is suggesting that the National Assn. of Insurance Commissioners write binding regulations on insurance company behavior, it has issued advisory regulations for some years, with , “States would be permitted to deviate from the standards only by appealing to the Department of Health and Human Services.”

What’s more because the NAIC is a private organization, there would be no requirement for public meetings or public access to records.

It’s mice to know that there are a few bright spots, but, as with the case of Sen. Byron Dorgan (!)

offering an amendment allowing for drug reimportation, but you know that Rahmbo , with the President’s full approval, will go all out to kill this, because the White House has already cut a deal with health insurers and pharma to boost their already obscene profits by requiring people to buy health insurance.

Well, Now We Know How Lame the New York Times Is

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It appears that the New York Times has decided that they do not spend enough time paying attention to deranged dishonest right wing stories, and their response is to assign an (unnamed, lest he get stern emails) editor to the giving blow jobs to right wingers beat, to ensure that all of their bullsh&% gets mainstream press coverage:

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

(emphasis mine)
Two points:

  • This story was, and always will be, bulls$%#, and so the coverage should be on the politics, because a close examination of the real story, shows no story.
    • Having “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio,” is a mark of journalistic success, not journalist failure.
  • Anyone who claims to be a journalist, much less an editor, but is afraid to do their job because they will get nasty emails, should not be working in journalism. I said this about Monica Hesse, and I will say this about this unnamed editor.

Seriously though, separating the wheat from the chaff is a part of a journalist’s job, and what is going on here is the aggrandizement of the chaff.

H/t tbogg.

Adventures in Ass Covering

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It looks like any number of financial institutions are realizing that Congress is going to do them like a College Republican does a drunk sorority girl if they don’t get their act together, so they are now taking actions that they should have taken years ago. (See Barn door, cows missing)

First, the Federal Reserve has finally concluded that it should regulate some more of the non-bank lenders out there:

Tuesday that it will extend its regulatory umbrella to cover a group of lenders that includes several major originators of subprime loans, policing whether they follow federal laws that protect consumers of mortgages, credit cards and other financial products.

Federal banking regulators already oversee companies that own banks, known as holding companies, along with the banks themselves. Under the new policy, the Fed will extend the same oversight to other businesses owned by those holding companies, such as units that make home-equity loans.

The policy places subprime lenders such as CitiFinancial, an arm of Citigroup, and Wells Fargo Financial, an arm of Wells Fargo, under Fed oversight for the first time. The same laws protect all borrowers, but until now, no federal agency watched to make sure non-bank subsidiaries followed the law.

And we also have the FED suddenly requiring the financial institutions submit their pay policies to them for review.

What is going on here is that there is significant push-back in Congress against the Obama proposal that the Federal Reserve be the primary systemic risk regulator, and the desire of the Fed to be the “financial consumer protection agency”, as Bernanke is aggressive lobbying for this role shows.

When this is juxtaposed with increasing support in Congress for the Paul/Grayson proposal to audit the central bank, and we are having a gallows conversion, where they attempt to show that they are really concerned about regulation and protecting ordinary people.

Hopefully, this won’t work, and we will see a Federal Reserve with a smaller, and not a larger, role than it has today.

I think that the only two people who want the Fed’s role to expand are current chairman Ben Bernanke, and White House Economic Advisor Lawrence Summers, who is hoping to be Fed chair one day.

We are also seeing the same things with banks and overdraft fees, where proposals in Congress to regulate fees, as well as “automatic overdraft protection” and check clearing orders, are creating an orgy of heretofore non-existent concern for consumer among the big banks, with Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and J.P. Morgan Chase announcing that they will be rolling back their fees.

There is no big surprise here, the banks know that if they can always raise fees again.

The argument is the same: “We’ll be good, there is no need for legislative restrictions.”

What goes unspoken is the idea that once people are looking the other way, the rates will go back up again.

It’s the same thing with the Conference Board, an organization created for, and funded by, business executives, who are now saying that they will be issuing a report suggesting fixes in how executive compensation is determined:

The report to be released today urges companies to avoid paying for personal travel, hefty severance packages or above-market returns on deferred compensation. The recommendations were endorsed by the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, AT&T Inc. and others.

“In order to restore trust in the ability of boards of directors to oversee executive compensation, immediate and credible action must be taken,” the report from the New York research group said.

This is not about fixing things, this is simply an effort to create the appearance that things might fix themselves, in order to forestall any potential laws or regulations that would prevent excessive compensation from returning in the future.

I suppose that there is a silver lining to all this, which is that the people involved are clearly worried, which perhaps real changes can be initiated.

I Do Not Know If This Shows Anti-Semitism, but It Does Show Stupidity

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This is Not a Swastika (Pic from Proud Zionist)

The latest controversy involving Human Rights Watch is the fact that their senior military analyst, Mark Garlasco, is also an avid, and fairly prominent, collector of Nazi military memorabilia, and he has now been suspended from his position.

I think that a lot, though not all, of the issue here is stupidity, whether or not Mr. Garlasco harbors anti-Semitic thoughts or not.

When you are a military analyst who collects such stuff, and you are assigned to look at Israeli military operations, you need to know that it is best to not accept the assignment, and if your boss knows your hobby, he needs to know that he should never give you such an assignment.

They both had to know that it would harm his reputation and that of HRW.

Still, it’s clear that some of the commentary out there is clearly hysterical, such as hyping the picture of him with a German Cross on his hoodie, and NGO Monitor assertion his name on various boards, “Flak88,” is a secret Nazi symbol thing (8=H, so 88=HH=Heil Hitler). His specialty is German anti-aircraft memorabilia, his grandfather was a conscript serving in an anti-aircraft unit, and the Krupp 88mm gun was the best known AA (and anti-tank) gun of the war.

In any case, Mr. Garlasco published a response on Huffpo.

My assessment is that there is no evidence that he is an anti-Semite, nor that sympathizes with the Nazis.

That being said, there is another issue, which is whether Marc Garlasco, and Human Rights Watch are biased against Israel for other reasons, most notably nostalgie de la boue, literally “love of the mud”, which can either refer to the “elites” affecting “peasant” style and the like, or, and this is the definition that I’m using, the idea that those non-western “less advanced” societies are somehow more inherently good because they are less polluted by civilization.

I think that there reasons to be concerned that both Garlasco and HRW watch are guilty of this, and objectively anti-Israel as a result.

Omri Ceren observes that while no one is perfect, that the errors that have been found have always cut against Israel, and so, much like the “errors” in Florida in the 2000 presidential vote recount, show bias, though Mr. Ceren makes it very clear that he lacks any sort of smoking gun.

I do think that there is a smoking gun on the part of Human Rights Watch and Mr Garlasco as to a double standard.

Specifically, Daled Amos digs into the interviews with him, and uncovers two telling quotes.

The first is from 60 minutes:

“I don’t think people really appreciate the gymnastics that the U.S. military goes through in order to make sure that they’re not killing civilians,” Garlasco points out.

“If so much care is being taken why are so many civilians getting killed?” Pelley asks.

“Because the Taliban are violating international law,” says Garlasco, “and because the U.S. just doesn’t have enough troops on the ground. You have the Taliban shielding in people’s homes. And you have this small number of troops on the ground. And sometimes the only thing they can do is drop bombs.”

This is not something you see in reports from Human Rights watch in any report about Israeli military actions until at least page 6, and then only in the most circumspect terms.

And the news broadcast further states:

Garlasco says, before the invasion of Iraq, he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets — Iraqi officials.

But he says none of the targets on the list were actually killed. Instead, he says, “a couple of hundred civilians at least” were killed.

Note that “targeted killings” that he advised on is something that Garlasco has specifically said is a war crime when Israel does this.

My thesis is that much of the overwrought nature of the coverage of Israel comes from the fact that the existence of Israel is an indictment of the western industrialized world.

The origins of modern Israel are that Jews in western Europe, particularly as a result of the Dreyfus affair in France, felt a need to have a homeland to flee to, and the events of the following century reinforced this need.

Israel exists because of the moral failure of the west over the past 120 years, and acknowledging that failure does not sit well with a lot of people.

Time for a Blogger Ethics Panel

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There are two questions raised by the kidnapping, and rescue of, New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell in Afghanistan.

The first, and the one I don’t know enough about to come to a decision is whether it was worth the lives lost to rescue him, particularly since it appears to have been a series of spectacularly ill-advised decisions by Mr. Farrell precipitated this.

However, I am disgusted at the people who say something to the effect of, “It’s the New York Times, and they hurt the military, and so should be given no security consideration whatsoever.”

Here’s a thing, if you sound like Ann Coulter, it means that you are an asshole.

By the same token, if people routinely do amazingly stupid things, and expect to be rescued because they work for the New York Times, making it clear that neither the public purse, nor the blood of our military will be spent in such an endeavor makes sense.

The second question, is one that I do feel qualified to discuss, is whether news of kidnappings of journalists should be suppressed.

Bill Roggio reported the kidnapping on the Threat Matrix blog, and has been widely criticized by many in the media (here, and a few of the comments in response to his story) for reporting on this despite the request by the New York Times that he sit on the story.

I think that Mr. Roggio nailed the issue in a response in the comments on this post:

I speak as someone who has reported from both Iraq and Afghanistan since 2005. To me, this is simple. Either a kidnapping is news, or it isn’t. When soldiers, contractors, etc. are kidnapped, it is news. When a reporter is kidnapped, it is also news.

(emphasis mine)

Bill Ardolino, also of Threat Matrix, adds a useful data point:

A partial list of reports by the The New York Times on kidnappings:

November 15, 2002: NYT: Red Cross workers kidnapped in Chechnya

September 17, 2004, NYT: Insurgents kidnap American and British civilians in Iraq

January 18, 2005: NYT: Catholic Archbishop of Mosul kidnapped in Iraq

May 17, 2005: NYT: CARE worker kidnapped in Kabul

December 29, 2005: NYT: German Family Kidnapped by Yemeni Tribe

January 27, 2008: NYT: NGO worker kidnapped in Afghanistan

August 29, 2009, Reuters in the NYT: Foreign Aid Workers kidnapped in Darfur

20 hours ago: NYT: Greek national kidnapped in Pakistan

It is clear that the demands for news suppression are self serving and dishonest.

Republican Family Values

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Michael Duvall, Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee Vice Chairman was caught on tape bragging about having affairs with two lobbyists.

The money quote:

I’m getting into spanking her and yeah I like it..

Ummmm….Ewwwwwwww!!!

In any case, he has been removed from two of the committees he serves on, one would assume the ones that the lobbyists “served”.

He also talks about her underwear…..Ummmm…..Ewwwwwww!!!!!

But he’s a family values kind of guy:

Such thinking impressed certain constituencies. Earlier this year, the man who never graduated from high school received ‘100 percent’ approval scores 
by the California Republican Assembly, the state’s leading conservative outfit, and the Capitol Resource Institute (CRI), a fierce guardian of traditional family values.


Great googly moogly…I though that I had rather uninhibited tastes during my single days,* but I had the good sense not to brag to everyone in the room, on a live mike.

*Full disclosure: Said “uninhibited tastes” were mostly in my imagination…I was a geek.

This Looks Bad

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So, the Supreme Court will be looking at overturning the bans on corporate campaign contributions.

The last time this hit, it was 6-3 supporting the bans, but 2 of those 6 votes are now Roberts and Alito, whose jurisprudence is politically motivated hypocrisy rather results oriented, which makes it a 5-4 decision which will overturn the most basic campaign finance regulations.

So much for stare decisis. They explicitly lied to congress during their confirmation hearings, but you won’t be able to get a conviction.

I’m just waiting for the first case where a Chinese owned firm uses funds to aid a political campaign.

Glen Beck Wins Because Barack Obama Has No Balls

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Van Jones, formerly Obama’s “Special Adviser on Green Jobs, was fired resigned, because he founded a group, Color of Change, that has succeeded in getting a significant portion of Glen Beck’s sponsors to pull their ads, and because there is a Youtube of him calling Republicans “assholes”.

Mr. Jones is no longer a member of CoC, but Beck wanted his scalp, and he got it, because Barack Obama has no balls.

LBJ would have had J. Edgar Hoover strip search Beck’s sorry ass.

What’s worst is that this will only encourage the next faux right wing sh$# storm.

Giving Blowjobs to Corpses for Cheeseburgers Since 2005*

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Time Magazine notes that Tom Daschle, failed nominee for head of HHS, and regular talking head on the Sunday shows regarding healthcare, is also extremely well paid by the health insurance industry.

The problem with corruption in Washington is not campaign donations, though they are a bit of an issue, it is the fact that anyone who is in Congress knows that if he sucks up to corporate interests, he can get a 7 figure a year gig lobbying or giving strategy advice when they leave office.

*Yep, it’s another of Matt Taibbi’s bon mots.