Paul Ryan: A One-Man Fiscal Cliff?

Paul Ryan demonstrating his patented "Budget Karate Chop"

There were a couple of funny hashtags trending on Twitter the day Romney announced Paul Ryan as his choice for Vice Presidential running mate. Republicans were giddy about the prospect of a Romney/Ryan ticket, and together with horrified Democrats, they propelled the #RomneyRyan2012 hashtag to the number one spot for at least a full 14 hours. One excited tweeter cited the top-trending status as proof that Romney had knocked it out of the park, to which I felt obliged to reply, "Yes, haven't seen this much excitement since McCain picked Palin."

The thrust of the #BidenDebateLines thread seemed to be that Biden was a doddering fool, and that the silver-tongued Ryan would give him a sound thrashing in a debate. My contribution to the campaign is this debate line: "My opponent is on record as wanting to dismantle Social Security and Medicare... I think we're done here." Go ahead, Joe. That joke is on the house (pun intended).

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We've found a witch! May we burn her?

Scene from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"

Writer and editor David Okrent's famous observation (also referred to as "Okrent's Law) is that "The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true."  As much as progressives rant about Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, et al, there's little doubt that this "false equivalence" phenomenon is far more corrosive than such overtly biased reporting and commentary.  One of the more recent and arguably most egregious examples of this is the unaccountably evenhanded coverage of Mitt Romney's blatant lies about the Obama campaign's Ohio lawsuit.  George Zornick of The Nation sifts through the crap and unambiguously breaks it down in this recent article.

Only Nixon Could Invent ObamaCare

Brent Budowsky of The Hill nails it:

"[T]he totality of the healthcare law as enacted closely tracks healthcare proposals offered in the 1970s by President Nixon, offered in the 1980s and 1990s by senior Republicans in Congress, and enacted into law in Massachusetts under a governor whose name I cannot remember, who stood next to Ted Kennedy celebrating passage of the state law that became the model for current federal law. Isn't it strange that Republicans now demonize plans that were originated by Republicans"

Shocker: Right Wing News Editor Seriously Misinformed About Breast Health

I know, I know. I hate article titles that begin “Shocker:” too, but after reading the idiotic Townhall.com piece by idiotic news editor Katie Pavlich, “Shocker: Susan G. Komen Pulled PP Funding Because They Don’t Perform Mammograms,” I simply couldn’t resist. Now, Townhall has never been known for its intellectual rigor, but even in that notoriously obtuse shed, Pavlich isn’t the sharpest tool. Even so, she manages to plumb new depths of ignorant asshattery in this ponderously dull-witted piece. Now that Komen has apparently reversed course on Planned Parenthood, Townhall has “updated” Pavlich’s article with a cut-and-paste statement from Komen’s website, rendering the original article following the update as an object lesson in rhetorical face plants.

Incontinent Marines Are Unintentional Anti-Heroes

I posed the question recently, more or less seriously: “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one uploads the video, does it make a sound?” The infamous video of four American Marines urinating on the dead bodies of (presumed) combatants, uploaded to LiveLeak.com… (live leak, get it?), has certainly resulted in plenty of noise, much of it unintelligible.

Buddy Roemer: The Best Republican Presidential Candidate You’ve Never Heard Of

Imagine a Republican candidate for President who truly has all the right stuff:

• Looks the part like Mitt Romney, but not a mealy-mouthed animatronic prig.
• Silver-haired, silver-tongued devil like Newt Gingrich, but not a delusional windbag.
• Defender of individual rights like Ron Paul, but not a torch-waving anarchist.
• Experienced legislator like Rick Santorum, but not a rigid, moralizing dandy.
• Shoot-from-the-hip Governor like Rick Perry, but not a stammering loose cannon.
• Consistent message like Michele Bachmann, but not a gaffe-prone idiot.
• Successful businessman like Herman Cain, but not a womanizing puff-talking wanker.

Ron Paul in One Lesson: A Primer on Libertarianism

Quadrennial asterisk Ron Paul is once again displaying his Libertarian Wolf Boy exhibit at the Republican freak show, again prompting puzzled onlookers to remark "oh yeah, I remember that guy," and "what the hell is he doing up there?" Now that Paul has risen from novelty candidate to so-called "top tier" status, his libertarian principles arguably merit closer examination before being mothballed for another four years.

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.”