Why I'm Rooting for Newt Gingrich To Be The Republican Nominee

If you're a liberal, you've probably had at least one Republican acquaintance inform you that you ought to be supporting Ron Paul for President. This is because Republicans don't really quite understand Ron Paul. Since he believes in civil liberties and doesn't like sending young people off to die in ill-conceived foreign wars, Republicans often assume he's a flaming liberal hippie in disguise. In the black-and-white world of Tea Party Republicans, he's not nearly white enough to be white, and must therefore be black.

House Republicans Hit New Low By Passing The Year's Dumbest Bill

While grocery shopping, I often chuckle at (for instance) the myriad varieties of vegetable oil lining the shelves, proclaiming "No Cholesterol!" It's vegetable oil, for crying out loud. Damn well better not have cholesterol. This sort of nonsense often sets me off on another tongue-in-cheek rant, remarking for the umpteenth time that Crisco ought to tout their product as caffeine-free and sugar-free while they're at it. Why, they oughtta introduce a whole new line of "fill-in-the-blank-free" oils and shortenings (at a premium price, naturally) and even beat the competition to market with an ultra premium line Certified Free of Death Crystals. After all, why would one worry about saturated fats or trans fats now that we're all threatened by Death Crystals? You don't want your family eating Death Crystals, now, do you? Of course you don't! And so on....

Chapter 11: The New Shape of Solar?

Once hyped as a prototypical green jobs pioneer, Solyndra Inc., a California-based maker of high tech solar modules, has filed for bankruptcy. One thousand workers are back to pounding the pavement, and $535M in Department of Energy loan guarantees to Solyndra are in jeopardy, triggering an FBI investigation. Sounds like a bad thing, but—if you're a Republican—bad things are good. Indeed, right wingers are doing victory laps, lambasting Obama's green jobs proposals with Solyndra as their cause célèbre.

Shift The Power: The American Dream Movement Is No "Left-Wing Tea Party"

Ronald Radosh's Pajamas Media piece "Can Van Jones Create A "Left-Wing Tea Party"? Don’t Bet On It" is only one of several recent articles about the American Dream Movement, but it's arguably the most comically irrational. Radosh has made something of a cottage industry out of hissing rather ineffectively at film director Oliver Stone, and occasionally frets about Russian spies and other bogeymen, but Van Jones and the American Dream Movement are the latest targets of his rapier illogic and willful ignorance.

Warren Buffett Stinks up the Billionaires' Garden Party

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has been preaching higher taxes for the extraordinarily well-to-do for more than a decade, but his August 15th Wall Street Journal op-ed was apparently the last straw for some of his pampered fellows in the velvet pantaloon club. Buffett had the temerity to remind us once again that despite his extraordinary wealth and income, he pays a lower percentage of his income in taxes than ordinary working class Americans. He asked Congress to finally stop "coddling billionaires" and make them pay their fair share, a vulgar indiscretion prompting a fusillade of grunting protests from the ivory towers of Koch Industries to the grimy corridors of the right wing blogosphere.

Dancing with the Devil: Obama's Perilous Pragmatism

President Obama's much-ballyhooed and much-maligned bus tour was reputedly an attempt to "pivot back to jobs" and reconnect with voters increasingly dubious about his ability to right our listing economy. Predictably, Republican Presidential candidates were quick to disparage Obama's message and his performance.

Same old same old...

Snooki Kabuki: Comedy, Tragedy, and Tea Party Stupidity

For weeks now, our government has been mired in a bizarre drama the likes of which we've rarely seen, and for weeks I've struggled for a metaphor to fully convey the surreal, theatrical attributes of this manufactured crisis. I finally settled on kabuki, the time-honored Japanese genre of dramatic play. If you're at all familiar with kabuki, you'll have to agree it's an apt metaphor, encompassing the elaborate staging, overt symbolism, and stylized extravagance of the Debt Ceiling Drama, not to mention the fact that—as with true kabuki—the characters' interpersonal and political struggles have completely overshadowed the plot. Sure, this particular surreal drama could potentially tip us into a global depression, but it's the political struggles that seem to have captured the attention of the audience—for now.

Tea Party Zombies Push GOP into Boston Harbor

When President Obama dramatically took leave of the theatrics in Wednesday’s futile debt negotiations, news outlets predictably focused on the melodrama. Right wing pundits pounced on the President as churlish and panicky, with Rush Limbaugh painting a cartoonishly dismal picture:

Going Postal: Darrell Issa's War on the USPS

As one of the first two Deputy Postmasters General of the colonies decades before independence, and the first Postmaster General of the United States thereafter, Ben Franklin knew a thing or two about running a postal service and running it profitably. No doubt he would be dismayed at the current state of affairs at his beloved P. O., not to mention the ludicrous grandstanding and thoroughgoing lack of statesmanship in D.C.

Sincere Ignorance and Conscientious Stupidity

Michele Bachmann’s mantra is that an appreciation of the founding and history of America provides is all that is necessary to solve our modern day problems. There may be a kernel of truth in this, but since she is apparently ignorant of American history (and the present, for that matter), she is in no position to arrive at any workable solutions. However, nitpicking her scholarliness on historical particulars is not only beside the point, it might very well enhance her popularity.

Will Budget Reality Finally Topple Right Wing Dogma?

In a recent Los Angeles Times piece, Washington Bureau reporter Lisa Mascaro offers a tantalizing peek into a Republican Party now fractured into two warring factions: conservatives, and paint-eating tea partiers. Mascaro reports, "One of the most treasured tenets of the Republican Party — 'No new taxes' — has been thrown open to debate by a simple question: What, exactly, is a new tax?"

The Right's Social Security Strategy: Lie Big And Lie Often

Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ best-known quotation is probably the following, a pithy commentary on truth and deliberate lies:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Rand Paul Declares A General Strike on Reality

As a registered TownHall.com lurker, I often receive automated emails from them intended for their ludicrously credulous target audience. Most are trying to sell gold coins, but many are openly political spam, pediculous with breathless right wing invective. Recently, I received a particularly repellent bulletin allegedly written by delusional tea bagger and Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, with the fanciful subject line, "Sign the petition Obama fears." This loathsome missive has been bouncing around the internets since Paul issued it in January in support of the National Right to Work Committee's petition demanding an "up or down" vote on the National Right to Work Act, a Chamber of Commerce wet dream designed to stamp the life out of the American labor movement.

Orrin Hatch Chides Struggling Americans While Defending Big Oil

When asked why he robbed banks, the legendary outlaw Willie Sutton reputedly quipped, "that's where the money is." In those days, people had what we call "horse sense," which is why no one asked him a follow-up question such as "why don't you rob orphanages instead?" Nowadays, the equine-mentality-challenged abound, and conspicuously so at the offices of Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.

Picking The Lock Boxes At Social Security And Medicare

Sociologist and author Margaret J. Wheatley once made the eminently sensible observation, "Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather," she said, "the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole." Sadly, Dr. Wheatley neglected to add a necessary exception to her otherwise serviceable rule—politics.

Pat Buchanan Blames Obama For Spooking S&P

My first article at PoliticusUSA.com:

Conservative scribbler and erstwhile Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has always been crazy, but apparently it hasn't kept him from going insane.
In a recent American Conservative article ludicrously titled "Barack Hussein Hoover," Patrick "Sybil" Buchanan begins by raising the specter of "a debt crisis to dwarf the one that befell us in 2008," a frightening prospect indeed. The theory is that if the US is unable to arrive at some consensus and get our debt under control, a global crisis will ensue, and the myopic soothsayers at Standard & Poor's have recently stoked such fears by revising their outlook to "negative" on their triple-A rating of US debt. In an overwrought attempt to forecast a catastrophe before it happens, S&P offers their prediction "that congressional negotiations could result in no agreement on a medium-term fiscal strategy until after the 2012 congressional and presidential elections."