Democrats Will Pick Their Nominee On July 25-- No Matter What Rachel Matthews Claims

Tonight Hillary and her media allies are trying to claim she already won; it's a lie. Tomorrow's a big day here in California. Ignore the Clinton-press-- like Maddow-- and keep in mind that as Californians vote for the 470 delegates they pick tomorrow, Hillary and Bernie are just 270 delegates apart. And he's leading in the polls-- with momentum. If independent voters turn out in big numbers-- he leads her 50-34% among them-- he can run up a significant victory.

RT makes MSNBC look like Fox News by comparison. Watch Lee Camp (above) doing his Redacted Tonight show on RT, explaining why the "pledged" super-delegates don't mean squat 'til they vote in Philly on July 25th. Pretty different from the garbage Maddow has been spewing since they removed her brain and replaced it with something-or-other they grafted from a scraping they took from Chris Matthews cranium.

Damn! I wish my TV got that channel! Oh, and by the way, let's remember the stakes here, OK?

Lee Camp feels obliged to go after The Donald, among many other concerns. Meanwhile, has The Donald gone too nutty even for nutty GOP basers?

by Ken

At the top of the Redacted Tonight clip above, the great Lee Camp says:

I don't want to do what I'm about to do. I really, really don't want to. I don't want to talk about Donald Trump. I never want to talk about Donald Trump. But now I feel like I have to, because he's running number one in the GOP poll of . . . likely words people have heard. Now, he won the freaking poll, but here's the thing. If you put Spider Man on that list, I guarantee you he will be number one with a bullet. All right? People are, "Yeah, I'm voting for Spider Man, because he took on Dr. Octopus, and I figure if he's taking on doctors, he's probably anti-Obamacare."

Lee sent out this three-minute clip as a tease for what he says he thinks is "the best episode yet of Redacted Tonight. ("I gotta be honest.")

I hope you take a moment to check it out and send it to friends. I take on the insanity of Donald Trump, how the Koch Bros. are trying to buy our national parks, and how we spent millions in Afghanistan to build schools that don't exist. My team also tackles the how the army has infiltrated your favorite movies and proscription pills are being pushed on our kids.

And if you let the clip run, it appears, you can continue right on into the whole show. Next up: Lee celebrates the triumphant opening of a school Afganistan whose only slight negative is that it doesn't exist. But then, he points out, many of our favorite things as Americans are things that don't exist. "Clearly, what we suffer from in this country is an overactive imagination."

SPEAKING OF THE DONALD, IS HE TRYING TO
TOP HIMSELF FOR OUTRAGEOUS IMBECILITY?

You have to wonder if this is going to go over with the nutjob corps of the Republican base quite as well as The Donald's raving racism and hate-mongering. From washingtonpost.com:

Post Politics
Trump slams McCain for being ‘captured’ in Vietnam ; other Republicans quickly condemn him

AMES, Iowa — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump slammed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a decorated Vietnam War veteran, on Saturday by saying McCain was not a war hero because he was captured by the North Vietnamese.

“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said. Sarcastically, Trump quipped, “He’s a war hero because he was captured.” Then, he added, “I like people that weren’t captured.”

Trump’s comments came during his appearance at the Family Leadership Summit, a day-long gathering of about 3,000 social conservative activists that is drawing nine other Republican presidential candidates. . . . .

One can imagine that those "other Republicans" who "quickly condemn[ed] him" were offering up prayers of thanks to their deity for this gift from the Mouth That Soared.


THE DONALD KNOWS: SOMETIMES BEING A HERO
MEANS BEING A, YOU KNOW, GUTLESS WAR WIMP

AMES, IOWA (The Borowitz Report)—Presidential candidate Donald Trump revealed a little-known episode of personal heroism from his youth on Saturday, telling an Iowa audience that he narrowly avoided capture in Vietnam by remaining in the United States for the duration of the war.

“The Cong were after me,” Trump said, visibly stirred by the memory. “And then, just in the nick of time, I got my deferment.”

The former reality-show star said he had never shared his record as a war hero before because “I don’t like to boast.”

He said that he only disclosed the episode now because “the way this nation treats our deferment veterans is a disgrace.”

Trump complained that he received no official commendation or medal for his heroism, calling the lack of recognition “shameful.”

“Those brave Americans who, like me, avoided being captured by not serving at all—we are the true heroes,” he said.

Trump’s tale of valor appeared to move many members of his audience, some of whom waited in line after his speech to thank him for his lack of service.

At a guess, it's going to be awhile before The Donald is invited to watch videos at Senator McCranky's house.

#

Lee Camp needs a bit of help, and says "it will only take 30 seconds"

7 Totally False Panics Created by the Media

Watch -- and then share!

by Ken

Have you seen this Lee Camp segment from RT America's Redacted Tonight? (We were just talking about Redacted Tonight a couple of weeks ago.) AlterNet picked it up, and our pal Lee is looking for some showering of love.

Need Your Help - It will only take 30 seconds... And then you can check out my web exclusive interview with JESSE VENTURA.

The popular website ALTERNET just posted one of my pieces from Redacted Tonight. We need it to get a lot of love (shares, FB links, Tweets) so that the people at Alternet know that Redacted is popular. The more "action" this post gets, the most Alternet will post Redacted. So please, even if you've already seen the video, take 30 seconds to go to this link and share it!

http://www.alternet.org/video/watch-7-totally-false-panics-created-media-humorous-take

Did you do it? You're a freaking hero! Okay, next I have a special WEB EXCLUSIVE for ya. This did not air on the TV show. This is my interview with former governor Jesse Ventura! I'll give you a hint - At one point he yells "You should be ashamed of yourself!!" Watch it here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTiqi8WFTEo

Thanks guys. You rock. Keep fighting, my friends.

~Lee

Meanwhile here's what AlterNet's Janet Allon had to say about it:

In his weekly comedy news show, Lee Camp took on the topic of fear this week, and how false panics are used to whip people up into a  non-thinking frenzy. In the segment, Camp takes on everything from shark-fearing Nebraska farmers to panics about teenagers sticking vodka-soaked tampons up their butts.

Not a trend, Camp says. He tried it. Stings way too much.

It's a topic that might sound familiar to regular readers of AlterNet, as it features many of the same unnecessary panics that we covered in our recent "Fear" series. Remember the "Knockout" game, supposedly random vicious attacks by black youths (who else?) on unsuspecting elderly Jewish people? Not a thing.

The panics are not as random as they seem. They're used to distract the gullible masses from the issues that we should really be scared of, like big banks and overwhelmingly stupid politicians.

Camp even quotes AlterNet's Don Hazen in the end. "People cannot think clearly when they are afraid. Fear is the enemy of reason."

Too true. Too true.

Watch the humorous approach.

And remember, once you've done your part for Lee's video share, you get to collect your "bonus" -- watch the interview with Jesse Ventura at the link above.

#

Catching up with the great Lee Camp

by Ken

I feel bad about not keeping readers up to date with the doings of the great Lee Camp, the incredibly agile-minded, perpetually outraged, and fearlessly funny writer and comic. (I have to say "writer and comic," because as I've mentioned, you could read something Lee has written and think him a brilliantly incisive, poised stylist -- a wonderfully different effect from what we get when he performs his material.) The fact is, I haven't been keeping up so well myself.

I've known from Lee's regular e-mails that he's become involved in some kind of regular telecast called Redacted Tonight, airing Fridays at 8pm on RT America, but I'm just not much of a computer watcher, YouTube or otherwise, and I confess that I've never seen it. (Honestly, I don't know what RT America is.) I see the show is also available on both YouTube and Hulu.

So I thought you might be as interested as I am in finding out what Redacted Tonight is all about, and it so happens that Lee has just sent out a link for an appearance that he and two of his partners on the show, John F. O'Donnell and Abby Feldman, just made on Larry King's PoliticKing and explained the whole thing. (Huh, wait! Larry King has a show of some sort? Have I fallen asleep like Ichabod Crane but traveled backwards in time? I guess this means Larry is still alive and ambulatory?)

Then, if you're curious, here's an online posting of Redacted #41, apparently the March 20th episode.



Meanwhile, don't forget Lee's website, leecamp.net, where you can no doubt get some help figuring all of this out as well as tracking Lee's doings -- past, present, and future!

#

Lee Camp on the NYPD slowdown: "I bet there are now PLENTY of police available to respond to REAL crime or REAL emergencies"

As dimwitted, dishonest, or peer-intimidated NYC cops dishonor their ranks, Lee Camp notes about the current slowdown: "Has all hell broken loose? Has there been a crime spree across Gotham worse than anything seen in the Batman movies, with catwomen throwing people out of windows? . . . Well, no. There's been . . . um . . . peace and quiet."

by Ken

We haven't touched base in a while with crusading comic Lee Camp, whose uproarious maximum-voltage performing style often masks what pops out at you when you read him in print: that he's one of the most lucid real-world commentators around.

As you've probably heard -- and if you haven't, you're hearing about it now -- here in New York City we're in the grip of a police slowdown that the cop-union boss says isn't one (apparently unconcerned about the spectacle of the head of the police union standing up for the media and lying his silly-billy guts out). The cops, you see, are madder than wet hens at Mayor Bill de Blasio, for reasons , . . well, we'll come to that. For now let's just say they're so mad, they could turn their backs on him at public events and even boo him. Okay, it's not that they "could," they did. (See Howie's post last week "The Next Generation Of NYPD Looks To Be About As Rotten As The Current One.")

First let's take a look at this missive Lee Camp has sent out to his e-mail list, with the subject line "Something I noticed recently":

Hey Fighters,

Because they're mad at NYC's mayor, the NYPD decided to largely stop working over the past couple weeks. (Yes, really.)¹

They decided to only arrest people "when they needed to be arrested," rather than arresting people all day simply to keep our backdoor class system in place and make money for the state.² Arrests are down 66% and traffic violations are down a whopping 94%.

And WHAT HAPPENED? Has all hell broken loose? Has there been a crime spree across Gotham worse than anything seen in the Batman movies, with catwomen throwing people out of windows?

...Well, no.

There's been... um...peace and quiet.

Turns out that NOT arresting every Black person because they got annoyed with you after you threw them up against a wall for having the nerve to walk down the street does NOT bring about Armageddon.

Turns out that NOT giving out thousands of parking tickets and hundreds of summonses for riding a bicycle the wrong way down an empty street does NOT turn NYC into a Mad Maxx world of mob rule.

And on top of that I bet there are now PLENTY of police available to respond to REAL crime or REAL emergencies. Perhaps arresting people only when they "need to be arrested" is a better plan, and the NYPD just accidentally proved it to the nation.³

We have 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prisoners. So either you need to believe that we are a uniquely criminal society OR that we have a uniquely fucked up criminal justice system.

I'm going with option B.

Thank you -- and as always...

Keep fighting,
Lee

Citations for the above stories/claims:
1. New York Magazine, NYPD Continues That Whole ‘Not Really Arresting Anyone’ Thing
2. Rolling Stone, The NYPD's 'Work Stoppage' Is Surreal
3. Think Progress, How Low Income New Yorkers Are Benefiting From The NYPD’s Work Stoppage

NOW IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE --

about the police slowdown, and what exactly their grievances might be (they don't seem very clear about this, or at least not very honest), the sources Lee cites above happen to be excellent.

The ThinkProgress piece, called "How Low Income New Yorkers Are Benefiting From The NYPD’s Work Stoppage," by Kira Lerner and Igor Volsky, has some interesting things to say about this business of the police being used as what the old cartoons might have called "revenooers" for municipal government, apparently now forced to drum up a significant portion of the city budget (links onsite):

Although it’s not the intended goal of the work stoppage, the decline in arrests could save New Yorkers money. The city residents who are normally hit with tickets for minor violations tend to be low income individuals who are forced to pay up a hefty portion of their paychecks.

The city began following the broken-windows style of policing in the early 1980s, a strategy championed by NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton which focuses on eliminating low-level crime to prevent more violent offenses in the city’s neighborhoods. But a report earlier this year by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan found that the NYPD’s practice of arresting more people for minor offenses since 1980 has disproportionately affected young black and Latino men.

While de Blasio and Bratton have followed through on their promise to reform the city’s stop and frisk practices and the mayor announced in November that police would stop making arrests for low-level marijuana possessions, there are still racial biases in police practices throughout the city that result in a tougher financial burden on those already struggling to make ends meet.
And New Yorkers of all income levels are also saving money on one of the most consistent ways the city can slam people with tickets— parking violations are down by 92 percent, from 14,699 to just 1,241 this year.

NYPD officers have long spoken about quotas which require them to issue a certain number of summons per month to maintain statistics showing a reduction of crime in the city’s neighborhoods. Although Bratton promised an end to arrest quotas when he took office in January, the city’s police are still operating under a quota system which is illegal under state law, according to a recent report by the Police Reform Organizing Project. The group called on Bratton and de Blasio to end the quota system in its October report, which described how police are still using the quota system, as evidenced by the number of misdemeanor arrests and the poor quality of those arrests under Bratton.

The Rolling Stone citation is a piece by Matt Taibbi called "The NYPD's 'Work Stoppage' Is Surreal," and naturally you should read in its entirety, because it's, you know, Matt Taibbi. Let's focus on what Matt has to say about the cops' enforced revenue-generating activities (again, links onsite):

I don't know any police officer anywhere who would refuse to arrest a truly dangerous criminal as part of a PBA-led political gambit. So the essence of this protest seems now to be about trying to hit de Blasio where it hurts, i.e. in the budget, without actually endangering the public.

So this police protest, unwittingly, is leading to the exposure of the very policies that anger so many different constituencies about modern law-enforcement tactics.

First, it shines a light on the use of police officers to make up for tax shortfalls using ticket and citation revenue. Then there's the related (and significantly more important) issue of forcing police to make thousands of arrests and issue hundreds of thousands of summonses when they don't "have to."

It's incredibly ironic that the police have chosen to abandon quality-of-life actions like public urination tickets and open-container violations, because it's precisely these types of interactions that are at the heart of the Broken Windows polices that so infuriate residents of so-called "hot spot" neighborhoods.

In an alternate universe where this pseudo-strike wasn't the latest sortie in a standard-issue right-versus left political showdown, one could imagine this protest as a progressive or even a libertarian strike, in which police refused to work as backdoor tax-collectors and/or implement Minority Report-style pre-emptive policing policies, which is what a lot of these Broken Windows-type arrests amount to.

But that's not what's going on here. As far as I can tell, there's nothing enlightened about this slowdown, although I'm sure there are thousands of cops who are more than happy to get a break from Broken Windows policing.

I've met more than a few police in the last few years who've complained vigorously about things like the "empty the pad" policies in some precincts, where officers were/are told by superiors to fill predetermined summons quotas every month.

It would be amazing if this NYPD protest somehow brought parties on all sides to a place where we could all agree that policing should just go back to a policy of officers arresting people "when they have to."

Because it's wrong to put law enforcement in the position of having to make up for budget shortfalls with parking tickets, and it's even more wrong to ask its officers to soak already cash-strapped residents of hot spot neighborhoods with mountains of summonses as part of a some stats-based crime-reduction strategy.

NOW IF THE COPS WERE BITCHING ABOUT THIS --

they'd have not only a point but a fair amount of deserved sympathy in the metropolis. Instead they're claiming that what they're really steamed about is the fact that Mayor de Blasio has this crazy idea that the cops who are charged with enforcing the law also have certain obligations to follow the law. This is apparently an intolerable departure from the practice of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani and, in particular, Emperor-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who treated the cops as his personal imperial guard, and a law unto themselves -- except, of course, for all that revenue-raising he forced them to do, which apparently matters less in memory than their implicit 007-style License to Kill. Or rather more-than-007-style, since James Bond, after all, had to listen to M natter on about all those guys he killed who he was supposed to bring in alive -- and listen without so much as talking back, let alone going on strike.

Instead our cops are either dimwitted enough or dishonest enough or intimidated enough by their brethren to scream about blood on the mayor for the recent murders of the two ambushed cops, which is bullshit. And alas, they probably are garnering public sympathy, for dangerously wrong reasons, among similarly dimwitted or dishonest or peer-intimidated New Yorkers. This will only make it harder for the city and its residents to find real ways of dealing with our real problems.

Of course, if the cops did make a federal case, or at least a union-rulebook-slowdown case, out of this whole business of their forced participation in the city's revenue-raising rackets, they probably wouldn't get a much happier response from city government. And this has nothing to do with this particular mayor, because he inherited this fiscal from predecessors who didn't get backs-turned-on or booed by New York's Finest.

Which brings us to the sad reality that for us New Yorkers to maintain this gaudy lifestyle we're accustomed to, the municipal treasury is dependent on: (a) taxes paid from the bloated wages and bonuses paid to the Wall Street moguls and stooges, and (b) the racket revenues raised this way, with the burden falling on New Yorkers least able to pay.

Sheesh! I wish there was somebody I could turn my back on and boo.


FOR MORE ON LEE CAMP --

and his ever-growing assortment of offerings and activities, visit his website, leecamp.net.

#

"The Number One Thing the U.S. is Subsidizing Is Ignorance" (Lee Camp)

"Most of us don't understand the economy, so Wall Street is allowed to caress it, molest it, and digest it, and then run off with bags of money. Our tax dollars are then used to save these fucking Armani-clad poop farmers when they can't pay their debts."

by Ken

I couldn't resist this newly posted Moment of Clarity from the great Lee Camp, #207.

A couple of nuggets from "The Number One Thing the U.S. is Subsidizing Is Ignorance":

We've subsidized our ignorance. Running out of cheap oil? We begin fracking the fucking frack out of every square foot of the country. What is the consequences? I don't know. You don't know. We don't need to know. Sure, there are reports of earthquakes, and tap water that's now more combustible than Alex Jones sucking helium in a room filled with the parents of Sandy Hook students. "But I've never seen any water catch fire!" And at the end of the day we can run our cars and heat our homes for way cheaper than on the other side of the pond. We've subsidized our ability to ignore reality.

Running out of space to put our garbage? Ship it to people somewhere who would be happy to have our garbage. I mean, that garbage is probably filled with amazing shit! Like clothes that were worn once, and iPods that were thrown out because the color fuchsia isn't popular anymore, and perfectly edible edible underwear -- it's only missing the crotch section. Sure, you'll have to dig through 500 DVD box sets of the Twilight movies before you get to the good stuff, but it'll be in there.

And of course check out the website, leecamp.net, for all matters Lee Camp -- news, interviews, Moments of Clarity, schedule, the book and CDs, and so on.

NOTE: Lee says at the end of MOC #207 that he'll be performing live in the coming weeks . . .

. . . in Boston, Baltimore, and Stowe (VT). Details at leecamp.net/schedule. If you're within striking distance, you'd be foolish not to check it out.

#

Lee Camp brings his special brand of "clarity" to the gun-control debate

". . . If the military created a laser handgun tomorrow that could shoot through everything from New York to Idaho in a single shot -- every person, creature, house, barn, every Applebee's, Chuck E. Cheese . . . I think very few people would argue that everyone should be allowed to sit down at a dinner with one in their pocket. No one seems to claim that their Second Amendment rights are infriged upon because they can't own a home Panasonic atom bomb. My point is that people say they are against gun control, but clearly everyone is for some weapon control of some varying degree. If you're not, you're more psychotic than the love child of Kim Jong-Un and Mad Dog Tannen. . . . The question is, instead, where to draw the line, at what level or size of gun. . . ."

by Ken

Yes, it's another Moment of Clarity from Lee Camp, #194.

By the way, you may remember ("Super funnyman Lee Camp makes an offer you can hardly refuse") that Lee was offering a free download of his last comedy CD, Chaos for the Weary, but that at the time the intertubes were apparently too jammed up for serious moochers to establish contact. Well, the offer is still good, and there's even an alternate link provided. (I had no trouble accomplishing the download via the primary link.)

"All I ask in return," says Lee, "is that you put up a Facebook post telling others to do the same." Once again if you, like me, don't do Facebook, there's an alternate ask on the link page, where Lee says, "All I ask in return is that you tell people to do the same and that if you like the album, you consider purchasing my new album, Pepper Spray the Tears Away. Anyway, enjoy!" For the record, let it be known that I just told people.

And I definitely plan to buy the new album, as soon as, um, I get around to it. Any week now. For information about the Pepper Spray the Tears Away CD, and about the new book version of Lee's Moments of Clarity, check out this page on his website, leecamp.net.

#

Super funnyman Lee Camp makes an offer you can hardly refuse

BULLETIN:

-- a message from Lee this evening on the website

"We're scared of change. We're frightened by the idea that we could wake up tomorrow and things might be different. . . ."

-- the start of Lee's Moment of Clarity #190, "How To Make
Your Life Better . . . And Other Trivial Matters" (see below)

by Ken

This just in by e-mail from the world's most trenchant and side-splitting political mayhem-maker:

My Live Comedy Album FOR FREE!!!

I am giving away my award-winning comedy album Chaos for the Weary for free for a limited time only.

To grab a copy just go here:
www.bit.ly/FreeLeeCamp

It's that easy! All I ask in return is that you put up a Facebook post telling others to do the same.

As it happens, in this form this is an offer I not only can but have to refuse, since I don't do Facebook posts. (It's somewhere between a matter of principle and a matter of incapacity. Just about the intersection point between them.) However, in the version of this offer on Lee's website, leecamp.nethttp://leecamp.net/, he frames the Chaos for the Weary offer a bit differently:

Just go to the link below to download it. All I ask in return is that you tell people to do the same and that if you like the album, you consider purchasing my new album Pepper Spray the Tears Away. Anyway, enjoy!

By that standard I definitely qualify for the download and definitely plan to do it, as soon as the pile-up of freeloaders thins out.

In the e-mail, Lee adds:

In other very cool news -- I am featured in the new Peter Joseph project "Culture In Decline." You may know Peter as the creator of the massively popular Zeitgeist movie trilogy. I appear at around the 14-minute mark in the new episode.

Click HERE to watch it.

HERE'S LEE'S LATEST "MOMENT OF CLARITY" (#190):
"How To Make Your Life Better . . . And Other Trivial Matters"




AND DON'T FORGET LEE CAMP'S
MOMENT OF CLARITY THE BOOK!

I should make the point I usually do about Lee: that as a performer, his raucous joyousness and trenchancy make him a unique comic and commentator. But on the page, which is the way I first encountered him, even when the material is essentially identical, the reader can appreciate an amazingly analytical lucidity that's just as funny but even more rare. I don't know which way he's more brilliant, but that one person is such a master of both media kind of blows my mind.

The book, we're told, "contains 90 Moment of Clarity transcripts PLUS 20 never-before-seen photographs from professional photog C.S. Muncy on the front lines of Occupy Wall Street."

On the appropriate webpage on the website you'll find information about various e-book formats as well as the hold-in-your-hands-and-laugh paperback edition. The same webpage has information and links for the new CD, Pepper Spray the Tears Away.

#

Catching up with Lee Camp: Lee and Negin Farsad have the nerve to try to deliver a petition to Jpmorganchase CEO Jamie Dimon

This is the amazing Lee Camp's Moment of Clarity #159.

by Ken

Okay, the petition in question suggests that CEO Dimon resign, but I thought that in the land of the free it was okay to deliver a petition. What our Jamie would have done with the thing would of course have been up to him. (I'm guessing he wouldn't have called an emergency board meeting to tender his resignation.) But when crazy people show up in your lobby to deliver a petition, isn't the American thing -- as well as the right thing -- to do to, you know, relieve them of the damned petition? If only to get them the hell out of your lobby?

I don't think I've updated you on Lee's piercingly hilarious doings since February, when I passed on an assortment of news Lee had shared, including that he was about to tape a comedy album. (That post followed close upon a January post I still love just for the quintessentially Lee title: " 'I thought one of the gifts of comedy was supposed to be the ability to tell the fucking truth' (Lee Camp).")

Well, the album is out now, and there's a whole bunch of other stuff to check out on his website, leecamp.net. In an e-mail sent out to his mailing list yesterday, Lee urged:

Check out my new live comedy album Pepper Spray the Tears Away as well as my new book and e-book Moment of Clarity. You can get them and see/hear samples at iTunes, Amazon, SmashWords, Barnes & Noble, and LeeCamp.net.

There are five recent video clips, including MOC #159 above:

* "Me on The Point with Cenk Uygur"

* MOC #158, "The Euro Was DESIGNED to Fail!"

Okay, the title of this video might be a bit misleading. The euro wasn't designed to fail. Instead, it was designed to do what many of us view as failure. It was designed to fuck the average workers 12 ways to Sunday, and right now the fuckfest is in full stride. . . .

* MOC #157, "In Defense of Bad Words"

Fu-u-u-u-u-u-uck. There, I said it. I said a curse word. I hope you got through it okay. If you're listening to the censored version of this, then you just had to sit through a long, piercing bleep. It was probably far more fucking annoying than the simple word "fuck." . . .

* MOC #156, "America Is Too Fat, Skinny & Free!"

The United States of America has the most obese people in the world. We also have the most anorexic people. That's mind-blowing. We are literally the land of the thin and home of the fat. That's like being the land of the free and home of a police state. Well . . . .

Then there's a link for both the new comedy album, Pepper Spray the Tears Away, and the Moment of Clarity book and e-book, with links for free samples.


If you know Lee's work, and haven't been keeping up, then all you need is the links. If you don't know Lee's work, then you're in for a real treat.

As I always point out, if you read a transcript of any of Lee's pieces, or read one of his actual writings, you think you're dealing with the most articulate -- as well as bluntest and funniest -- of political deconstructors. Which he is. But when you see him perform his stuff, in his unrelentingly high-voltage, take-no-prisoners mode, you get another whole perspective. And yet the material is still every bit as smart as you thought it was in written-down form.

Either way, enjoy, and consider signing up as a member, to help make it financially possible for Lee to continue his uncompromisingly comic subversion.

#

"The opposite of [religious] questioning is not deep belief but arrested develoment" (Garry Wills)

In this Moment of Clarity, Lee Camp asks: "Should Hearing
from God Disqualify You From Running for President?"

I'm really tired of political goons claiming that "God" told them to run for office or go to war or go to the bathroom. First of all, if it were a God, he or she wouldn't want anything to do with this Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey clusterfuck that we have going here. Motto: "The Greatest Puppet Show on Earth." . . .

Rick Santorum says that God told him to run for president because Satan is trying to take down America. Apparently this God of his thoroughly hates gays, women, black people, Latinos, everybody earning under 100 grand a year, and considering evangelicals only act friendly to the Jews because they believe all the Jews need to be in Israel in order to bring about Judgment Day, in which the Jews will burn in a fiery Hell for eternity, I'm going to go ahead and add the Jews to that list. Santorum's God despises all of those people. What a douchebag Lord! If you had ten kids and treated nine of them like shit, people would call you a dickface to your face, and yet that guy somehow landed the job of God? They need to get some new people in the HR department, for Christ's sake.

Mitt Romney belongs to a religion that believes in magic underwear. How weird is this shit gonna get? I let it slide with the magic crackers, the magic wand, the magic facial hair, the magic shroud, the magic skulls, the magic hats. But there is nothing magic about a wedgie. . . .

The actor Jimmy Stewart starred in a well-known movie called Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which he's elected to office. He starred in another famous movie in which an imaginary giant white rabbit talked to him and told him what to do. Let's stop combining the two when we're picking a president.

"I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end; where all men and all churches are treated as equal; where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice; where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind; and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and the pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood."

-- John F. Kennedy, recalled in Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's WaPo
op-ed "What Rick Santorum doesn't understand about JFK"

"Minds grow by questioning things, and adolescence is a great period of questions. . . . An unquestioned faith is not faith but rote recitation. The opposite of such questioning is not deep belief but arrested development."

-- Garry Wills, in a new New York Review of Books
blogpost, "Santorum’s Arrested Development"

by Ken

It's hardly coincidental that the Vatican has finally dropped the inevitable cardinal's beanie on the frothing wacko plucked out of the diocese of Bridgeport by Pope John Paul II in 2000 to oversee the country's still-prime archdiocese, New York. It's just in time to lend the weight of that red beanie to the sustained campaign of slathering poison over the American body politic which will be Eddie Egan's contribution to this U.S. electoral cycle.

Religious craziness is hardly the only craziness now polluting our political discourse. About 98 percent of what has come out of the mouths of would-be Republican presidential candidates has been the sort of thing that would once have qualified them for intensive institutional care but now is accepted with hardly a blush as normal subject matter. But the religious bullying carries a special quality of intimidation, claiming as it does spiritual force, and never mind that the people professing these higherly-called imperatives have absolutely no claim to moral superiority. Indeed, when you take an even slightly closer look at most of these people, you often find it hard to discern that might be considered remotely moral.

(It was astonishing that, when it was finally revealed many years later that Ma and Pa Santorum brought their dead fetus home for the live Santorum kiddies to play with, this was accepted as a demonstration of perhaps slightly excessive religious faith rather than stark staring insanity, which should have occasioned some sort of intervention on behalf of the junior Santorums by the appropriate child protection services.)

But no, Santorum's insanity -- and I mean literal insanity, not just the driveling preposterousness of everything that comes out of his mouth -- gets cover for his supposedly deep faith. We Americans don't like to question people's faith. So I was inordinately cheered a a couple of weeks ago when as deep a thinker and as knowledgeable a Catholic as Garry Wills, in a NYRB blogpost called "Contraception's Con Men" which I've been meaning to write about, wrote, under the subhead "The Phony 'Church Teaches' Argument":

Catholics who do not accept the phony argument over contraception are said to be “going against the teachings of their church.” That is nonsense. They are their church. The Second Vatican Council defines the church as “the people of God.” Thinking that the pope is the church is a relic of the days when a monarch was said to be his realm. The king was “Denmark.” Catholics have long realized that their own grasp of certain things, especially sex, has a validity that is lost on the celibate male hierarchy. This is particularly true where celibacy is concerned. . . .

Before I could get around to writing about that post, in which Wills traces the tawdry behind-the-scenes politics of the Church's narrowly retained official position on contraception, it was overtaken by this new Wills blogpost, "Santorum's Arrested Development," responding to the imbecile blithering about college "elitism," focusing particularly on the nonsensical argument that colleges are engaged in a warn on children's religious faith. "Of course," he writes,

the idea that colleges are stealing people's children from their parents' God is an old belief on the right wing. William Buckley proclaimed it in his God and Man at Yale, published over half a century ago, in the 1950s surge of religiosity that some conservatives now look back on with nostalgia. Of course, as Catholics, Buckley and Santorum (and I) are heirs to a long tradition of trying to control what people think or read or see. When I was young, the list of movies we were forbidden to see was posted every Sunday in the vestibule of our church. The priests who taught me in high school sent me and my fellows out to drug stores to demand that "dirty" magazines like Esquire be removed from their stands. There was still an Index of Forbidden Books we are supposed not to read -- including works by Milton, Rousseau, Voltaire, Sartre, Gide -- without a priest’s permission.

Wills is lying in wait for the Santorum claim "that 62 percent of people who go to college lose their 'faith commitment' there." He takes note of "a 2007 report that found even greater decline among those who don’t attend college," then continues:

I do not know how one measures such things, but I think it inevitable that questioning of childhood beliefs should take place at various stages of adolescence. This does not happen in junior year or senior year on campus. It is part of a long process called growing up.

At some point, late or early, children disengage themselves from the stories crafted for them. Their loss of belief in the tooth fairy is only slightly behind their loss of teeth. There is a slow motion race to disappear between Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. The Stork undergoes, for some, a lengthier demise -- and "the birds and the bees" do not long outlast it. Others, I hope, soon disabuse themselves of belief in their parents' infallibility. Certain religious myths are discarded without necessarily losing faith. That I do not believe in Noah's Ark does not mean that I must stop believing in God -- though certain home schooling parents force that connection on their kids.

Minds grow by questioning things, and adolescence is a great period of questions. Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken learned to cross-examine the Bible all on their own, without any help at all from college. An unquestioned faith is not faith but rote recitation. The opposite of such questioning is not deep belief but arrested development.

So Santorum has mistaken his enemy. It is not colleges that steal his kids from him, but growth, especially the wrenching growths of adolescence. He should get at root causes. Abolish adolescence. I am sure modern science, with the help of hormonal retardants, could make this practicable in most cases. Of course, it would wipe out the human race. But perhaps a tested few, home schooled to insure arrested development in all other matters, could be permitted to grow up and breed. And we know they would breed prolifically, denied all contraceptives.

I suppose you could say that abolishing adolescence is in good part what the 21st-century Right is aiming to do, if by adolescence we understand a period when humans develop their sense of the world around them and their relationship to it.

#

There's something explosive about the combination of truth + funny -- the latest from Andy Borowitz and Lee Camp

The latest "Moment of Clarity" from the great Lee Camp. For news of a special show Lee's doing in NYC on February 18, scroll down.

by Ken

Thinking back, I'm not sure I can overstate the importance of the emergence of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show during the darkest depths of the Chimp-the-Prez Bush regime. It seemed as if it mattered mostly because it was one of the few mainstreamish national outlets where, despite the guise of a fake-news show, viewers were exposed to so much of the actual news. But somewhere in there you have to factor in the fact that Jon and company made it all so funny.

I don't have any scientific formula for how this marriage of truth and funny works. It's patently obvious that truth isn't inherently funny, and deserves to be heard and spread without having to be, and it's just as obvious that you can be funny without being aspiring to the condition of truthfulness. (Daily Show alum Stephen Colbert introduced us to the crucial concept of truthiness, which essentially aspired to the condition of un-truthfulness, offering instead the appearance of truth.)

But still, there's something special about that combination of truth and funny. Thinking about it, it occurred to me that while there are lots of other reasons why Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have carved out such important places in the truth-telling game, it's probably no coincidence that they both have sensational senses of humor, and understand how to incorporate the funny without in any way diminishing their seriousness.

It's just a matter of personal time management that I've drastically cut back my political-TV-watching time. In part it's been made possible by the emergence of brilliant online funny-truth-tellers like Andy Borowitz and Lee Camp. How terrific is it to encounter stuff like this on a regular basis in my e-mail?

LA JOLLA, CA (The Borowitz Report) –- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney today released the following letter to the American people:

Dear American People:

Yesterday, comments I made about poor people made me look terrible. This always seems to happen when I say what I really believe.

The fact is, I do care about poor people. That’s because I’m poor myself, when you compare me to Mark Zuckerberg.

According to most projections, Facebook’s IPO should net Mr. Zuckerberg a personal fortune of $28 billion. I couldn’t make a pile of dough-re-mi like that even if I fired people twenty-four hours a day.

Now, let’s take a look at Mitt Romney’s net worth: a measly $200 million. Now do you see why I consider myself poor? Compared to Mark Zuckerberg, Mitt Romney is practically a crack whore.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and envy a rich person like Mark Zuckerberg. That’s exactly what President Obama wants poor people like me to do. Mark Zuckerberg made his money fair and square, by creating useful products like imaginary sheep and angry birds. Say what you will about Facebook, it has totally revolutionized the way we waste our lives.

The fact is, if you’re poor in America, you should do what Mark Zuckerberg did: create a social network. I’ve just started my own, called TwoFaceBook. With TwoFaceBook, your profile doesn’t stay the same for more than two seconds.

In closing, there’s one more reason I don’t worry about poor people. They have Groupons.

Vote for me,

Mitt Romney

LOS ANGELES-AREA FOLKS: ANDY B IS COMING TO YOU!

On February 28, Writers Bloc will present Andy in conversation with another seriously funny guy, Patton Oswalt (left), at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills, in what Andy describes on his website as his "only scheduled show on the West Coast this year." (I guess that "only scheduled show" weaseltry protects him from lawsuits by disgruntled literal-minded fans in the event that he should wind up doing another show on the West Coast between now and December 31.)

For more information and online ticket-buying, go here.


AND IN NEW YORK, LEE CAMP IS TAPING AN ALBUM

On January 20 Lee reported:

I will be taping my second comedy album at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC on Saturday, Feb 18th at 10pm AND I WANT YOU TO BE THERE. It’s only $8 to get in and there is no drink minimum. Special Guest: Ted Alexandro! Plus, there will be free brownies. …Not kidding. My last comedy album was listed as one of the top 5 of 2011 in Dusted Magazine, so why would you miss this one LIVE? Tickets are available online here: www.bit.ly/LeeCampTix

At that price I could afford to snap up a ticket as soon as I saw the announcement. Though space is limited, I believe there are still tickets available. If you've seen any of Lee's videos you should know what to expect, but I can vouch for the fact that seeing him do it in person -- and doing a whole show -- is amazing. (If you can't make it, you can get more information about Lee's first album here, including a link to free samples on iTunes, where you can also download it.)

#

"I thought one of the gifts of comedy was supposed to be the ability to tell the fucking truth" (Lee Camp)

"I thought one of the gifts of comedy was supposed to be the ability to tell the fucking truth, but you know what TV's most scared of? The fuckin' truth! . . ."

-- Lee Camp, in Moment of Clarity #103,
"What TRULY Offends The Masses?"

by Ken

Since I last wrote about the great no-holds-barred political essayist-ranter Lee Camp, he's posted some new Moment of Clarities (the official plural form of "Moment of Clarity"), including #103 above, on his website, LeeCamp.net. (There's also #104, "The FINAL Word On 2011: A Year In Review," and #105, "Hydraulic Fracking Causing Fracking Earthquakes!")

In #103, Lee say, "I realize my form of comedy is not for everyone," and eventually comes around to this:

So to some degree I understand why networks say they can't use what I do. But that being said, the comedy du jour seems to be offensive for offense's sake -- jokes glorifying pedophilia, justifying rape, thrashing women, and trashing minorities. That form of comedy seems to get rewarded and broadcast to the masses for their viewing pleasure.

And I understand different people enjoy different brands of comedy. Different strokes for different stroke victims, right? But what's annoying is that this means that to the TV execs, and supposedly the viewing public, hearing about corporate criminals and the ills of the mindless materialistic bubble in which we live is more threatening, offensive, and more grating to the ear canal than racist jokes, mysogyny, kid-diddling, and homophobia. I thought one of the gifts of comedy was supposed to be the ability to tell the fucking truth, but you know what TV's most scared of? The fuckin' truth!

A joke justifying wife-beating will make you a star, but good luck tearing down Walmart or JPMorganChase. Good luck calling out Disney for their child labor, or Nestlé for their Third World privatization and starvation. Middle America can't handle hearing about that stuff, dear God, no, so just be a good comedian and stick to the friendly race joke that seems to make everyone comfortable with their station in life.

Let me say again that one thing I find so awesome about Lee's work is that the writing, despite being written expressly for his distinctive performance mode, reads so brilliantly in written-down form. Each mode of delivery adds dimensions to the other.

Which leads me to a reminder about Lee's advisory at the end of the M.O.C.:

Want to see Moment of Clarity continue and remain advertiser-free? Please become a member at LeeCamp.net. It's cheap, and it really makes a difference. Thanks a lot.

I look at the way Lee and Andy Borowitz -- and no doubt other brilliant comics I'm too preoccupied to keep track of (feel free to throw your favorites into the comments section) -- throw everything they can come up with at the challenge of eking a living out of doing what they do so brilliantly, and I . . . well, I don't have a finish for that sentence. (I'll bet Lee or Andy would.)

In that last post I wrote about Lee, I reproduced some wonderfully holiday tweets from Lee's Twitter feed . . . .

. . . and also the engagingly lucid explanation Lee offers on his Membership page for his plea for membership support. As I mentioned, I wasn't able to afford more than the lowest membership level (with the discount offered for paying for a full year), but I felt heaps better having given -- even after discovering that I missed by only a day or two the offer of a free signed CD. That isn't what it's about.

#

Comedy Tonight: Here's hoping you're having a happier holiday season than Lee Camp

-- from Lee Camp's Twitter feed

by Ken

So I was wondering what was up with the great Lee Camp, and was reduced to checking his Twitter feed (if that's what you call it) -- I don't do Twitter normally. And I thought in the spirit of the holiday season, or rather "a" spirit of the holiday season, these three Tweets tell a little story.

Naturally I also wondered what's new in Lee's inimitable "Moment of Clarity" videos. I was going to say "in Lee's inimitable 'Moments of Clarity,' but I see on Lee's website, leecamp.net, that the plural of "Moment of Clarity" is apparently "Moment of Clarities." I also see on the website that the latest video is M.O.C. #102:

The TRUTH About War With Iran --




BY THE WAY, LEE IS ENCOURAGING MEMBERSHIP SIGN-UP

It's hard to resist when he puts it in terms of, you know, making a living from producing such content:

We pay for a lot of things in our lives -- coffee, cable TV, couches, concerts, and having our private areas waxed. We are willing to pay for all those things. However, the way our world is currently set up, we don’t pay to watch or hear hard-hitting internet comedy and commentary. So there’s only two ways for the producers of that content to make a living and keep at it. One is to cover their product in ads, which not only hurts the product, but also forces the producer to manipulate his/her audience. The second way is by donations from people like you. YOU make Moment of Clarity possible. YOU make it so that this webseries/podcast can continue. If my stuff means as much to you as, say, a cup of coffee, then please become a sustaining member. If you’re able to give more, then please do. Trust me, I’m not getting rich from this. I’m just trying to continue putting out my content and creating a safe, fun place for smart open-minded people to gather and talk about changing the world…. I can’t thank you enough. Keep fighting.

There are membership levels from $5/month to $50/month, with an ascending schedule of benefits, and there's a discount for paying the entire year now. I find Lee's logic is hard to argue, and I don't know of anyone else who does quite what he does, so while I couldn't afford much, I couldn't say no either.

#

Comedy Tonight: "Right and left really doesn't matter on the big stuff, and even nations are only a small part of the equation" (Lee Camp)

It's been awhile since we partook of a "Moment of Clarity" from the great Lee Camp -- this one dispatched last week from Edinburgh. Lately Lee has been posting a number of interviews on his website, leecamp.net.-- Ken

From "Do Countries Matter Anymore?":

For the most part, the future of the world is decided by multinational companies and the billionaires who run them.

Sure, there are smaller issues that the leaders have control over. President Bush boldly created a "no-call list," securing his legacy as the president who saved the sanctity of family dinnertime, even if families no longer have the money to afford dinner. I'm sure when your average American family is scavenging for roots and berries for suppertime, they're fucking thrilled no telemarketer is interrupting them.

Another example: President Obama put a regulation on Wall Street making it so that when banks partake in predatory lending it's now strongly frowned upon for them to brag about it.

#

Will criminal prosecutions of financial-sector misdeeds ever be more than a sideshow?

Don't think there's not shit you can do, ways you can at least slow down this angry demon. Each and every one of us must do something. Stand up, take a swing, fuckin' throw an elbow. For example, after your job steals your health care coverage, steal their staplers! It's the least you can do. Yeah, I may not be able to get the catscan I need, but good luck affixing two pieces of paper together, you twat-lickers! Or refuse to pay a parking ticket, when the state is trying to make up the money they lost by giving billionaires tax cuts. . . .

If you work for a franchise restaurant, give shit away for free. Tell the manager that table five didn't like their trademark potpie-a-rooney and they demand a free cheesecake-a-rooney, whether they did or not. You don't owe that franchise anything. Why? Just because they stopped calling you a waiter and started calling you an "associate" or a "friend of the company" or a "franchise cuddlebunny" or whatever-the-fuck? Man, if only the Southern slave-owners had known this trick, everything would have been different. "Hey, we're gonna stop calling you 'slaves' and me 'master.' Instead you're gonna be called 'associate,' or 'friends of the plantation,' and we'll be one big happy family. . . .

-- Lee Camp, in the video

by Ken

And this is almost the least of it. Lee is on fire, overflowing with ways we can fight back against the corporate masters. You're gonna die!

Meanwhile, in the new (June 27) New Yorker George Packer has a piece, "A Dirty Business," on "going after financial-sector crime," basically tracking the uncharacteristically successful prosecution of Galleon hedge-fund wizard Raj Rjaratnam by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, made possible almost entirely, it appears, by the successful cultivation of informants.

A month after Rajaratnam's arrest, Bharara gave an unusually dark speech at N.Y.U.'s law school, speaking of "epic frauds surfacing with increasing frequency." He noted, "There is a lack of faith in the economic system; a lack of belief in the markets; and a lack of trust that the playing field is level." He made no apologies for ferreting out insider trading by using wiretaps, a practice that was unpopular on Wall Street. "When sophisticated business people begin to adopt the methods of common criminals, we have no choice but to treat them as such," he said.

U.S. Attorney Bharara elaborates for Packer.

In May, Bharara met with me in his office, on the eighth floor of 1 St. Andrew's Plaza, a brutalist concrete structure near the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. His windows face south, and through the murky light of a damp late afternoon the towers of Wall Street were barely visible. "There are often two categories of reasons to do the right thing," he said. Category 1 is a sense of right and wrong. "But if that doesn't work for you -- and it doesn't for a lot of people -- then there's the Category 2 reason: you're going to get caught, your business is going to go down the tubes, you're going to go to jail. For a lot of these people, maybe Category 1 doesn't work but Category 2 should. But maybe there was not enough enforcement, such that they thought, What's the big deal?" Insider trading, Bharara observed, was unlike other federal crimes -- it wasn't committed by people with a violent outlook or a bad upbringing, or by serial lawbreakers who knew no other life. "These folks seem not to have been of that type," he said.

Packer acknowledges that some Wall Street observers have called this case "a sideshow." Filmmaker Charles Ferguson, who made Inside Job, "told me that Bharara's focus on an insider-trading scandal was misplaced, given that the financial crisis was caused primarily by shoddy mortgages and the cynical trading of those irresponsible loans. And --

Last month, the Times columnist Joe Nocera accused Bharara of displaying phony toughness while sending a message to Wall Street's élites that "crime pays." Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone, has taken the even harsher view that prosecutors have given bankers a pass because they covet lucrative jobs in the private sector.

And by the time Packer's done, even after Bharara has objected testily that people who assume his office isn't looking at criminal proseecutions of meltdown-related activities (he points out that grand-jury secrecy means that any grand-jury proceedings that have proceeded or are proceeding are, you know, secret) you have the sense that there are people who would like to do something of a criminal-prosecution nature about financial-sector abuses, but there are more than enough reasons why it's never going to happen.

#

"What we should really ask ourselves about Bin Laden's death" (Lee Camp)

Another gem of a "Moment of Clarity" from the one and only Lee Camp. -- Ken

. . . What do you do after your Enemy No. 1 is no more? We have a choice. We can continue bombing endlessly in places like Afghanistan. We can continue to operate 900 military bases worldwide. We can continue to be the bitter, angry man who was beat up on 9/11 and now takes it out endlessly on his children.

Or we can use bin Laden's death to conclusively move on. We've finally banged the hot chick who turned us down in high school and dumped Beefaroni in our lap in the middle of the cafeteria, causing us to self-consciously spend the following 20 years making sure nothing that humiliating ever happened again by behaving like a douchebag to everyone we ever met, just in case they had secret Beefaroni plans of their own . . .

#

What would Ayn Rand make of Lee Camp? Or of Johann Hari skewering Republicans and their new BFF the Donald?

Lee Camp's latest "Moment of Clarity" video: "Hedge Funds Make More in an Hour Than You Make in a Half Century"

What level of obscene does this need to reach before we stop respecting and supporting this system? . . .

We've created a cancer, and one of the hardest parts about defeating cancer is finding it. But we know where this one is, and as it grows larger, we seem to celebrate it. We admire these billionaires. As they grow, we think, "Man, if only I could be as cancerous as them. Man, if only I could suck up the resources of this country while others go hungry and homeless and live in tent cities, being lorded over by some bearded tent-city mayor with a mangy sheepdog and a divining rod like a smelly Moses. Then I would have the American dream."

Should it bother us that by obtaining a monstrous version of the American dream these people effectively destroy the American dream for so many others? Let's have a race for the cure for this. . . .

by Ken

Watching Lee Camp's latest "Moment of Clarity" video set me to rooting around my brain for something I just recently read. Finally I remembered: It was a column passed along by a colleague by The Independent's Johann Hari: "Donald Trump's lunacy reveals core truth about the Republicans."

ABOUT JOHANN HARI

Johann Hari has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde and others. He has won many of the most prestigious awards in British journalism, including the George Orwell prize (he is the youngest ever winner), the Martha Gellhorn Prize, the Amnesty International Journalist of the Year award twice, for his reporting from the war in Congo, and Dubai. At the British Press Awards in 2010 he became the youngest person ever to be shortlisted for the Journalist of the Year award.

-- bio on The Independent's website

"Every six months," Hari writes of U.S. Republicans since the election of Barack Obama, "the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale." After dispatching Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, he writes (emphasis added),

I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

You'll have to read the column for three of the trends. The first is "towards naked imperialism," referencing the Donald's prescriptions for Libya ("I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff") and Iraq ("We stay there, and we take the oil"). The second is "towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it," referencing the Donald's gleeful embrace of birtherism. The fourth is "to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower," referencing the debt-ceiling follies (Trump: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart," to which we might say yeah, but compared with you . . .), the problem of oil prices, and growing Chinese economic clout (Trump "will order them to stop manipulating their currency. . . . This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America –- or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one").

But it's Hari's third trend -- "towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself –- and exempting them from all social responsibility" -- that was rattling around my head as I watched Lee Camp's video. (Again, emphasis added.)

Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.

Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects –- which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".

Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump –- and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.

How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the Senate slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this: he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.

Hari allows that "Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee,"

but not because most Republicans reject his premisses. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly.

He reminds readers that the party "has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, which "halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance" and "pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services." Hari points to Ryan's declaration that he got involved in politics based on reading Ayn Rand.

"The tragedy," Hari writes,

is that Obama needs serious opposition –- but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.

The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running –- but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.

As we just heard Lee camp ask, "What level of obscene does this need to reach before we stop respecting and supporting this system?"

#

Fallout, good and bad, from the economic elites' tanking the economy, then getting their butts bailed out, then profiteering amid the wreckage

"Now here's the interesting part: During the half-hour when everyone thinks the hoax is true, the company's stock tumbles like crazy. GE lost billions. Dow lost billions. This means we've created a system where companies get massively punished for doing good things for humanity."

-- funnyman Lee Camp, riffing on the hoaxes in which Dow and GE were, shockingly, purported to be acting responsibly

by Ken

And Lee continues:

Our financial market actively rewards being a giant cunt, like a radioactive Ann Coulter who's grown to Godzilla proportions. Does that not freak anyone out? So if a corporation announces it will hostilely take over a 50-year-old locally owned company and fire all the employees, it's given the financial equivalent of a high five and a reach-around. If on the other hand it announces it will give free AIDS medication to the dying people of Ghana, then Wall Street knocks it unconscious and draws the word "queer" on its forehead.

Now this is hardly surprising coming from a wild-eyed leftie like Lee Camp. What strikes me as new is that -- coincidentally or not, just as the American middle class has discovered that it no longer figures in the economic elites' plans for cutting up the American economic pie -- unkind words are being heard spoken about a once-sacred buzzword.

FALLOUT, PART 1: IN SOME MAINSTREAM PRECINCTS, IT'S
NOW OK TO SAY NAUGHTY THINGS ABOUT (GASP) CAPITALISM

Here's Chrystia Freeland blogging on the Reuters website:

Chrystia Freeland

Capitalism is failing the middle class

Global capitalism isn’t working for the American middle class. That isn’t a headline from the left-leaning Huffington Post, or a comment on Glenn Beck’s right-wing populist blackboard. It is, instead, the conclusion of a rigorous analysis bearing the imprimatur of the U.S. establishment: the paper’s lead author is Michael Spence, recipient of the Nobel Prize in economic sciences, and it was published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Spence and his co-author, Sandile Hlatshwayo, examined the changes in the structure of the U.S. economy, particularly employment trends, over the past 20 years. They found that value added per U.S. worker increased sharply during that period -- 21 per cent for the economy as a whole, and 44 per cent in the “tradable” sector, which is geek-speak for those businesses integrated into the global economy. But even as productivity soared, wages and job opportunities stagnated.

The take-away is this: Globalization is making U.S. companies more productive, but the benefits are mostly being enjoyed by the C-suite. The middle class, meanwhile, is struggling to find work, and many of the jobs available are poorly paid. . . .

PART 2: WHEREAS IN OTHER PRECINCTS, THE FLIGHT
FROM REALITY SOARS INTO THE OUTER AYNRANDOSPHERE

Now it can be argued whether what we have here is any species of capitalism, except perhaps, for the sake of convenience, hallowed crony capitalism. And pretty much the last thing the American elites want is any sort of "free market," which for them would be a wildly unacceptable stepdown from the paradise of megacorporate welfare they've created, in which profits are "capitalized" and losses "socialized." However, the right-wing deep-space flight from reality is zooming into goofier and goofier corners of the universe.

Today's ThinkProgressReport focuses on a favorite subject of Howie's: "The Truth About GOP Hero Ayn Rand," possibly the stupidest person ever to wangle her way into print. Here's just a bit of it (with lots of links onsite):

RAND'S INFLUENCE ON GOP: "For over half a century," says Jennifer Burns, a recent biographer of the novelist, "Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right." And with good reason. Besides her prominence in the Tea Party's intellectual and cultural lexicon, some of the Republican Party's leading lights have cited Rand by name as an inspiration. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said she was the reason he entered public service. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) called Atlas Shrugged "his foundational book." Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an avowed fan and quotes extensively from Rand's novels at Congressional hearings. His father Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) told listeners that readers ate up Rand's Alas Shrugged because "it was telling the truth," and even conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas references her work as influence in his autobiography -- and apparently has his law clerks watch the film adaptation of The Fountainhead. The phenomenon holds amidst the right-wing media as well: Rush Limbaugh called her "brilliant," Glenn Beck's panel on Rand featured the president of the Ayn Rand Institute Yaroom Brook, and Andrew Napolitano enthusiastically recounted a story in which his college-age self introduces his mother to Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. John Stossel and Sean Hannity have name-dropped her as well. Going further back, Alan Greenspan -- former chairman of the Federal Reserve and a fierce advocate of free-market ideology -- is an acolyte of Rand's thinking and knew her personally, and Rand was also dubbed the unofficial "novelist laureate" of the Reagan Administration by Maureen Dowd. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about Ayn Rand's reach on the right is how unremarked-upon it most often is.

If there's anyone reading this who doesn't know just what a total nutjob Ayn Rand was, the ThinkProgressReport continues with a neat section on "Rand's Philosophy" (using the word "philosophy" in the broadest imaginable sense, describing nothing more than "stuff somebody believes"), before going on to describe "Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand Budget."

Hilarious stuff. Or it would be if any of it was meant to be funny.

#