Yes, Virginia, there IS an Alfalfa Club

Okay, so there's an Alfalfa Club -- but no Buckwheat Club, Darla Club, or Spanky Club? (Okay, the Alfalfa Club is now more than 100 years old, so maybe the Little Rascals' Alfalfa isn't actually their namesake.)

by Ken

It seems like only last Friday that we were saying bye-bye to the 2016 GOP front-runner, Willard Romney. Okay, I guess probably it was last Friday. And as part of the celebration ("Say good night, Willard"), here at DWT we had a special "Willard Goes Bye-Bye" Quiz, and among the questions were these two:

4. Willard made his announcement today, a day before arriving in Washington for an important annual event. What is that event?

(a) The annual dinner of the exclusive Alfalfa Club, where he is being inducted as a new member.
(b) The announcement of a new plan to return the Washington Redskins to NFL playoff contention.
(c) The announcement of a new plan to fund the government until the next shutdown threat.
(d) The blossoming of the cherry trees. (What, they're not? Are you sure? But my crack staff people said . . .)

ANSWER: (a) The annual dinner of the Alfalfa Club. (No, I don't know what the Alfalfa Club is. Do you really want to know?)

5. Which of the following members of the Alfalfa Club will be seated at the head table along with Willard? (Choose all that apply.)

(a) All seven Bush family members who are members.
(b) Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
(c) Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
(d) Alfalfa from the Little Rascals.

ANSWER: (b) Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and (c) Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. None of the Bush family members will be attending. Carl Switzer, who played Alfalfa in the Little Rascals films, was shot to death under still-muddled circumstances on the night of Jan. 21, 1959.

I know probably some of you are still thinking I made this up, the so-called Alfalfa Club. Especially when you consider that the first thing that's always said about it -- presumably by people who are in on the gag -- is how "exclusive" it is. And yet it is purported to have seven (seven!) members of the Bush family on its rolls. Seven members of the Bush family? Could you really call that a "club"? It sounds more like a "pack," or a "mob."

And as long as we're on the subject of the seven Bush-family Alfalfites, how does it happen that all seven of them were known not to be attending Saturday night? Did the date, like, conflict with Bush-family NASCAR Nite? And you know, it can't be easy for Willard, the new Alfalfite, knowing that even if he can somehow manage to slip all five of his war-wimp sons into the club, they'll still be outnumbered by all those Bushes, 7-6. Man, that's a lot of Bushes. Groucho Marx said famously that he wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have him as a member. Who wouldn't want to belong to a club that had Groucho as a member. But seven Bush-family members?

Be that as it may, if you want to know everything a reasonable person could possibly want to know about the Alfalfa Club, the Washington Post's Emily Heil offered "Reliable Source" readers a primer, "What's the deal with the Alfalfa Club?," in anticipation of Saturday night's great event. And if you want to know more than a reasonable person could want to know, by all means check out Roxanne Roberts's referenced "Style" piece, "The Alfalfa Club: still a place for the powerful to see and be seen."


SO WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH THE ALFALFA CLUB?

Emily provides us with a handy Q-and-A (links onsite), explaining, "Here’s what you need to know."

Who are these people?

Some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. The Alfalfa Club is more exclusive than most of Washington’s social organizations, and unlike, say, the Gridiron (which is all journalists), the members come from all sectors. Among the some 200 members, there’s a good contingent of political types (from both parties, but mostly senators; House members are kind of considered plebs in this crowd), and a heavy presence from the corporate world.

To name a few: Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Marriott, Steve Case, Chief Justice John Roberts, White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Sandra Day O’Connor, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and Vernon Jordan, per this excellent profile of the club by our colleague Roxanne Roberts.

What does the name mean?

The perhaps apocryphal story of the 102-year-old club’s founding goes something like this: It began as a celebration of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s birthday, and the name comes from the plant known for being “thirsty” (i.e., it likes to drink, just like some members of the club).

How do you get into the club?

Shocker — it’s invite-only! Openings occur when members die, and a group of the club’s senior members propose and approach prospective newbies. “Lobbying for admission is frowned upon,” Roberts says.

What happens at the dinner?

Each member brings two guests, who sometimes include a Hollywood type for novelty’s sake — but this is no celebrity-overrun White House Correspondents Dinner. There are funny speeches (that is, if you get inside jokes about Cabinet secretaries and the stock market) by the incoming and outgoing presidents of the club, as well as by a member held forth as the club’s mock presidential nominee.

Traditionally, POTUS shows up, though President  Obama has attended only twice: in 2009 and 2012. It’s all ostensibly off-the-record, though some of the quips and details inevitably leak.

Isn’t it just a bunch of old white guys?

Sort of, though diversity and the number of women in the club’s ranks has grown since ladies were first admitted in 1994, a move partly prompted by President Bill Clinton’s snub the previous year. Today, the roster includes businesswoman Catherine Reynolds, Sens. Kelly Ayotte and Dianne Feinstein, and Lockheed Martin chief executive Marillyn Hewson.

Alfalfa Club members apparently don’t care about looking like a bunch of elitist fat-cats, because they swear that’s not what the annual gathering is about. “Occupy Wall Street” protesters showed up in 2012 and glitter-bombed attendees, but the dinner-goers shrugged it off, Roberts reports.

WaPo caption: "The then-all male Alfalfa Club held their annual dinner at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 30, 1993. Members of the club are seen here socializing in the lobby of the hotel."

Any more questions? I don't know, maybe Groucho would have been impressed. Or then again, maybe not.

#

Say good night, Willard

Plus "TV Watch" note (see below)


No, I'm not going to give you a playable clip. If you really want to watch it, you can find it for yourself. But that's 3:34 of your life that you'll never get back.

by Ken

In case you haven't heard, Willard Romney has decided not to make a third run at the presidency, to the apparent surprise of "those who have spoken to Romney," who were persuaded that he would run since "he views the emerging GOP field of contenders as too weak to defeat likely Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton" and "believes he would be a better candidate after his experiences in 2012."

Now we have several pieces of business before once again saying, "Bye-bye," to Willard, starting with --

CONFIDENTIAL TO THAT "SENIOR ADVISER"
(You know, the one who says that "all the political metrics were right" for a 2016 Willard for Prexy run)

Dude, have you had your political metrics checked lately? Seriously, those things can get dull, go out of alignment, sometimes even get so worn that there's nothing for it but to duct-tape the suckers, which doesn't do wonders for their accuracy. Do yourself a favor and get those metrics into the shop for a check-up, even if they're out of warranty. Or maybe skip a step and buy a new set -- usually those things can't be repaired anyway.


NOW IT'S TIME FOR THE "WILLARD
GOES BYE-BYE" QUIZ, 2015 EDITION

How well do you know your Willard? Score one point for each correct answer and two points for each incorrect answer.

1. According to the Washington Post's Philip Rucker and Dan Balz ("Mitt Romney decides against running for president again in 2016"), "Those who have spoken to Romney came away from the conversations believing he was likely to run again for several reasons." Which of the following is not one of those reasons?

(a) He views the emerging GOP field of contenders as too weak to defeat likely Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.
(b) He believes he would be a better candidate after his experiences in 2012.
(c) He sensed an opportunity to win.
(d) He has become addicted to crack cocaine.

ANSWER: (d) "Those who have spoken to Romney" haven't commented on his crack use.

2. Willard is said to have told friends that he wanted to be "a more authentic candidate" if he ran in 2016 than he was in 2008 or in 2012. What plans did he have to be "more authentic"?

(a) To have himself notarized.
(b) To wear his Mormon underwear on the outside.
(c) To blame everything on President Obama.
(d) To replace Andy Richter as Conan O'Brien's sidekick.

ANSWER: All of the above.

3. Which of the following did Willard not tell a Republican National Committee meeting in San Diego two weeks ago should be among the pillars for a 2016 GOP campaign?

(a) Dealing with wage stagnation.
(b) The middle class economic squeeze.
(c) Lifting people out of poverty.
(d) Arranging a fair price for the 1% to buy the part of the country they don't own yet.

ANSWER: (d) Willard doesn't believe in paying "a fair price"; he believes his people should get it for a "rock-bottom price."

4. Willard made his announcement today, a day before arriving in Washington for an important annual event. What is that event?

(a) The annual dinner of the exclusive Alfalfa Club, where he is being inducted as a new member.
(b) The announcement of a new plan to return the Washington Redskins to NFL playoff contention.
(c) The announcement of a new plan to fund the government until the next shutdown threat.
(d) The blossoming of the cherry trees. (What, they're not? Are you sure? But my crack staff people said . . .)

ANSWER: (a) The annual dinner of the Alfalfa Club. (No, I don't know what the Alfalfa Club is. Do you really want to know?)

5. Which of the following members of the Alfalfa Club will be seated at the head table along with Willard? (Choose all that apply.)

(a) All seven Bush family members who are members.
(b) Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
(c) Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
(d) Alfalfa from the Little Rascals.

ANSWER: (b) Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and (c) Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. None of the Bush family members will be attending. Carl Switzer, who played Alfalfa in the Little Rascals films, was shot to death under still-muddled circumstances on the night of Jan. 21, 1959.

6. Which of the following is Willard most likely to do now that he has all that free time (and, presumably, cash) on his hands?

(a) Travel around the country like Johnny Appleseed, with a dog caged to the roof.
(b) Travel around the country like Johnny Appleseed, buying up businesses and putting people out of work.
(c) Travel around the country like Johnny Appleseed, buying fancy new homes. (Wasn't it Ben Franklin who said, "A man can never have enough fancy new homes"?)
(d) Travel around the country like Johnny Appleseed, denouncing economic inequality and ripping up trees to build McMansions.

ANSWER: Hasn't the man earned a little privacy?


ONE LAST PIECE OF BUSINESS: ANOTHER
SCOOP FROM THE BOROWITZ REPORT

TODAY 12:32 PM
The Borowitz Report

ROMNEY INCREDIBLY RELIEVED THAT HE CAN KEEP ALL HIS HOUSES

By Andy Borowitz


WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney told supporters on Friday that he was “incredibly relieved” to be able to keep the approximately five to ten residences he owns across the country.

“Having to talk about how much I care about ordinary Americans and so forth—I was game for that,” he said. “But having to sell all of those houses? That was going to be brutal.”

The 2012 Republican nominee said that he was especially glad he did not have to part with the car elevator in his eleven-thousand-square-foot mansion in La Jolla. “Come on, that thing is neat,” he said.

"TV WATCH" NOTE FROM KEN:
THE PARENTHOOD FINALE

Well, it's all over now. I don't know that this odd 13-episode farewell season is the way I would ideally liked to have seen the show say good night, but I thought last night's final episode provided a pretty decent resting place. I'll probably want to say a little about the show and its departure, but first I want to watch the episode again. So, tomorrow maybe. Or maybe not. One never knows in such matters.

#

Who exactly are Republicans trying to impress with their sudden discovery of income inequality?

But wait, suddenly GOP candidates care!

"Someone up the GOP food chain seems to have decided that inequality and poor people now belong in everyone’s talking points, class warfare be damned. But why?"

-- Catherine Rampell, in her Washington Post column
"Republicans have started to care about income inequality"

by Ken

Quick, check up in the sky and see if there are pigs flying. Down in hell we can guess that the skating is fine on the frozen-over waters of Hell. It's almost impossible to believe, but Republicans have suddenly discovered income inequality -- and they're against it!

Naturally it's all President Obama's fault, but that's the one part of the story that's no surprise. In the minds of the mental degenrates of the Right, everything is President Obama's fault. It beats observing reality and actually thinking. Not that right-wingers have ever been much good at any of these activities, but now they have become formally obsolete. Obama! Obama! Obama!

Still, hearing Republicans raising the issue is a head-turner. All through the current period of growth in economic inequality to historic levels, Republicans have stood by cheering, screeching "class warfare" at anyone who so much as dared to mention the subject. As Catherine Rampell notes in her recent Washington Post column "Republicans have started to care about income inequality":

Inequality has obviously crossed the GOP’s radar screen before, but like other phenomena that get noticed and politely ignored — washroom attendants, global warming — it didn’t generate much comment. When Republicans have taken note of our country’s income and wealth gaps, the sentiment has usually been dismissive and disdainful, full of accusations of class warfare waged by resentful, lazy people unwilling to hoist themselves up by their bootstraps.

Then, in just the past week, many of the likely 2016 Republican presidential contenders began airing concerns about the poor and condemning the outsize fortunes of the wealthy.

The roster of sudden converts to the cause is mind-blowing:

* Sen. Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz

On Fox News after the State of the Union speech, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) denigrated the administration’s economic track record by doing his best Bernie Sanders impression.

“We’re facing right now a divided America when it comes to the economy. It is true that the top 1 percent are doing great under Barack Obama. Today, the top 1 percent earn a higher share of our national income than any year since 1928,” he said, quoting an oft-cited (by liberals) statistic from the work of economists Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.

* 2012 GOP presidential nominee Willard Romney

Likewise, here’s Mitt Romney, in a speech last week: “Under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty than ever before.” Sound-bite highlights from his past presidential campaign, you may recall, included a reference to the “47 percent” who don’t pay federal income taxes and a conclusion that “my job is not to worry about those people.”

Apparently his job description has changed.

* Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush

Jeb Bush, too, has newfound interest in the lower income groups and deep inequity flourishing in our nation. His State of the Union reaction: “While the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners, they’ve been a lost decade for the rest of America.” Sen. Rand Paul, as well: “Income inequality has worsened under this administration. And tonight, President Obama offers more of the same policies — policies that have allowed the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer.”

Which leads Catherine to the question I've put atop this column: "Someone up the GOP food chain seems to have decided that inequality and poor people now belong in everyone’s talking points, class warfare be damned. But why?"

She tries a couple of theories, but she isn't persuaded, and neither am I.

"Maybe to broaden the tent for 2016 by appealing to people who feel “left behind” by the recovery"

But the poor are not exactly the most politically engaged constituency and seem unlikely to switch allegiances. To put it in Dos Equis terms: The poor don’t always vote, but when they do, they vote Democratic.

"Maybe it’s the result of rebounding economic growth and declining unemployment,"

which means Republicans have to be more precise about exactly which part of Obama’s record is vulnerable to criticism. Although of course the rise in inequality long predates Obama’s time in the White House; the top 1 percent’s share of national income has been trending upward since Obama was in high school.

"Or maybe it’s really more about reassuring Republicans’ core middle-class voters,"

who might suspect that Republican-led cuts to safety-net programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance are, well, heartless. For the “compassionate conservatism” reboot to be convincing and guilt-alleviating this time around, though, Republicans need to offer strong anti-poverty proposals of their own. So far — with the exception of Paul Ryan’s plan last year — we’ve mostly heard more of the same tax-cutting, deregulating shtick, whose relevance to inequality and poverty is tenuous at best.

I'm still confused on this point. These lying buttwipes are clearly trying to send some sort of message, but what's the message and to whom is it being sent? Catherine has hit the obvious suspects, and there's probably some truth in each. But I'm left thinking that it's some sort of combination of all of them -- that it's a recognition of just how cosmically wrong they've been and how humiliatingly exposed they stand to be as the truth begins to dawn on all those left behind on the "screwed" side of the economic chasm.

I take it personally, though, in the case of lying low-lifes like Ted from Alberta and Willard, given the history of their slavering savagery toward the people they worked so hard to screw. They should be stripped naked and bound to posts to hear their own psychotic ravings read back to them until they apologize for having been born.

Naturally, the situation isn't without irony. Where power-mad moral defectives are involved, there's usually irony.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have reconfigured their messaging as well, to focus more on the middle class than the destitute. While the State of the Union speech touched on policies intended to lift those at the bottom — increasing the minimum wage, for example — Obama’s rhetoric mostly emphasized “middle-class economics,” abandoning his previous “bottom-up economics” coinage. Even programs that are usually associated with the poor, such as community college access, have been pitched as a middle-class benefit. And he didn’t even mention one of the starring, bleeding-heart, anti-poverty promises from his speeches the past two years: universal pre-K.

And this, says Catherine, "brings us to an uneasy question." It's a hoot.

If Republicans have pivoted to care more about the poor, and Democrats have pivoted to care more about the middle class, who’s left to look out for America’s newly neglected rich?

DWT SCHEDULE NOTE: Next post at 3pm PT/6pm ET

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Apocalypse now: what's really happening in Crimea

Look out! The Messiah is coming!

"When you hear that the Russians have captured the city of Crimea, you should know that the times of the Messiah have started, that his steps are being heard."

-- "a closely guarded secret handed down from the 18th Century
Vilna Gaon through generations of revered rabbis"

by Ken

So here I've been thinking about a post about national-security interests in Crimea and Ukraine generally, goaded mostly by this hideous notion that that blustering lamebrain Willard Romney "was right," about Russia or anything else. As if a character like Putin would pay shiver in his shoes at the mindless ravings of a gutless thug like him. At least as he prepared to go to war with Russia -- or would it have been Iran? -- he could count on an army of six Fighting Romneys, as he and his brood of mililtary heroes returned to uniformed fighting fettle. Oh wait!

The post I wanted to cobble together would have asked, just what are our national-security interests in Crimea? As opposed, for example, to Russia's, which involve not just national security but intimate historic and ethnic ties. And pretty much the same question would apply to Ukraine generally?

Well, I'm not going to write that post just now, so instead I'll direct you to Ian Welsh's March 20 post, "Why is Crimea Such a Great Crisis? It Shouldn't Be."

Really, I don't understand why Crimea rejoining Russia is such a big deal. While the referendum is dubious, it does seem that the majority of the population generally prefers to be part of Russia. There have been almost zero casualties, and the Russian troops were mostly welcomed by the population.

Compare this to Kosovo, where there was ethnic cleansing on both sides, a major bombing campaign by the West which killed Serbs and so on. Or Iraq, or Libya, or Syria, or Chechnya, or South Sudan. In all of those places there was a pile of violence, a lot of people died, got tortured, raped and lost their homes. All of those, by any rational measure, are greater crises than Russia taking back a region which belonged to it for hundreds of years, whose population wants to go back.

Yes, yes, Munich, blah, blah. Russia is not strong enough to start a conventional WWIII and win. They are not insane enough to start a nuclear war.

The correct response to Crimea would be to say "well, it looks like they really do want to leave, they're yours."

If you don't want Western Ukraine to go, then send in a NATO force and/or discuss formal partition of the Ukraine with the Western part immediately joining NATO. If you're not willing to do that, then shut up.

This crisis is being made a crisis because of a hysterical over-reaction. The US and the EU thought they'd won this round, and moved the Ukraine back into their column. Putin didn't accept that, and the West is freaking out over behaviour that is less egregious and killing far fewer people than wars that the US has been involved in for over a decade, and which is a cleaner break-off than Kosovo was.

As for setting a precedent, the precedent has been set already: in Kosovo, in South Sudan, in Eritrea and so on. National borders are not inviolable if the population doesn't want to stay in them, and can make their point militarily or has an ally who can make the point militarily.

More recently, Ian has recommended the Consortium News post "The Danger of False Narrative by Robert Parry" as "perhaps the best article on what actually happened in the Ukraine and Crimea." ["The story is a little different than what you've been hearing on TV or reading in the newspapers, at least if you're in most of the West. The author does leave out some bits (like the Tatars boycotting the Crimean referendum), but overall it's accurate."] And he points out that in Ukraine, where "the new PM is imposing IMF austerity measures,"

like removing subsidies on Gas (50% increase) and cutting pensions (50%) cut. He says he's on a Kamikazee mission. That's because he's not elected, so he can do thing that an elected leader could never do.

Which is to say: there is a coup, backed by a popular uprising in the capital, which puts in place an unelected government, which does things that elected governments repeatedly refused to do. The East and South of the country, which voted in the last elected government, is unhappy with this.

Ian concludes:

If I were Crimean, I would have voted yes in the election. Russia's a corrupt oilarchy run by a near-dictator, but it has a stronger economy and better standard of living than the Ukraine, and that's before the IMF gets through with it.

I don't know what Putin's going to do. If NATO membership were truly off the table, he'd be best served by doing nothing more. Let the Ukrainian's destroy their own economy through IMF austerity, and in a few years, at least the eastern half of the country will be begging to join Russia.

However, if NATO membership is on the table, and it seems to be, Putin may feel he has no choice to invade. Problem is, after the West lied to Gorbachev about not expanding NATO, could Putin believe any Western promises if they were given?

I DON'T THINK I'M GOING TO GET INTO THAT TODAY

It's not necessary, because thanks to this post by Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev, we know what Putin has really been up to in Crimea: bringing on the Apocalypse and summoning the Messiah. Okay, maybe bringing the Messiah back isn't what he had in mind, but isn't that what's happening?

FYI: Putin=Gog, Crimea=Magog, the apocalypse is here and the Messiah is coming

Not only Christian fans of Armageddon are buzzing: According to one rabbi, the Vilna Gaon himself predicted that when the Russians take Crimea, the steps of the Messiah will be heard.

By Chemi Shalev | Mar. 29, 2014 | 5:51 PM

The Allard Pierson archeological museum in Amsterdam is in a bind. Since February 7, it has exhibited "The Crimea, Gold and secrets from the Black Sea," which it originally billed as "Spectacular archeological finds from the Ukraine." Now it doesn't know whether to return the precious gold artifacts to Russia or to Ukraine or to just stay out of it and hold on to the exhibition for the time being.

The reason this report caught my eye is that most of the "Gold and secrets" of Crimea come from the Scythians. Originally from what is today southern Iran, the Scythians were a horse riding tribe that inhabited much of today's Georgia, Armenia and the southern parts of Ukraine and Russia for close to 1300 years, from the 7th century BC to the 4th century AD. The northern coast of the Black Sea was absolutely Scythian.

And what's so special about the Scythians? Well, it turns out that Josephus Flavius, the turncoat Jewish historian who chronicled the Masada saga, had an interesting theory about the Scythians and the lands in which they lived. He concluded that their land was the Magog, as in Gog and Magog, as in the war of Gog and Magog, as in the biblical prelude to the End of Days.

Which is one of the many reasons why recent events in the Ukraine have created a buzz among legions of apocalypse-anticipating true believers. This could be the real thing, they tell themselves, the big time, the major leagues, not the end of the beginning, to quote Winston Churchill in reverse, but the beginning of the end. And it is Vladimir Putin, aka Gog, aka King of the North, who has set things in motion.

You only have to read Ezekiel chapters 38-39, the widely accepted handbook and screenplay for the upcoming decimation. According to traditional translations of verse 2 of Chapter 38, Gog is the "chief prince of Meshech and Tuval", ancient kingdoms also near the Black Sea. But the term used for "chief prince" in Hebrew is "nesi rosh" (as in נשיא ראש משך ותבל): Nesi could also mean "ruler" or "president", and some scholars believe that "rosh" is not an adjective, at all, but a noun denoting the name of yet another nation that will enter the fray. So Gog is the prince of Rosh, or the President of Rosh, or, with a little bit of help, the President of Russia.

"Therefore, mortal, prophesy, and say to Gog: Thus says the Lord God: On that day when my people Israel are living securely, you will rouse yourself and come from your place out of the remotest parts of the north, you and many peoples with you, all of them riding on horses, a great horde, a mighty army;".

And who will ride with Gog? Why Persia, of course, as specified in verse 5. And possibly Syria, though it hardly seems capable these days. And why will they all gang up on Israel? The Internet site "RemantReport explains: 1. To acquire more territory (Ezekiel 38:8). 2. To plunder Israel's wealth (38:12). (Israel's newly-discovered vast reserves of natural in the Mediterranean, of course, CS). 3. To destroy the Jews (38:11, 16). And 4. To challenge the authority of the Antichrist who will temporarily be Israel's ally due to a treaty mentioned in Daniel 9:27 "That ruler will have a firm agreement with many people for seven years."

Of course, if Gog is Putin, then we all know who the natural candidate for the Antichrist is. But let's put that aside for now. In any case, there is a nuclear confrontation ("I will start a fire in the land of Magog and along all the seacoasts where people live undisturbed, and everyone will know that I am the Lord) and then a massive seven-month cleanup and a mass burial, somewhere in Jordan, it seems.

If you're a Christian, the fun is just beginning: An army of "200 million" men will come from the East, according the Book of Revelations, and there's only one country that can raise such an army. Then, in quick succession but in a sequence that is disputed by scholars, the End Times really get going: Armageddon, Desolation, Tribulation, Rapture, Redemption, the Second Coming - the works.

Jews, by the way, make do with just the war of Gog and Magog, after which messianic days are here and "swords are beaten into ploughshares" etc. Nonetheless, Christians aren't the only ones who are getting excited about the standoff in Eastern Europe. According to a report catching fire over the weekend in the haredi press in Israel, the Gaon Rabbi Moshe Shternbuch told his disciples this week that the times of the Messiah are upon us. And who is the source for his amazing analysis? None other than one of the top Jewish sages of all time, the Vilna Gaon himself, the Gra, "the genius of Vilnius", the famously harsh critic of Hasidic Judaism.

According to said Shternbuch, he is privy to a closely guarded secret handed down from the 18th Century Vilna Gaon through generations of revered rabbis: "When you hear that the Russians have captured the city of Crimea, you should know that the times of the Messiah have started, that his steps are being heard. And when you hear that the Russians have reached the city of Constantinople (today's Istanbul), you should put on your Shabbat clothes and don't take them off, because it means that the Messiah is about to come any minute."

I don't know if Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan knows about Russian designs on Istanbul, but if I were you, I would take your Shabbat clothes to the cleaners, just in case.

Finally, from Moshiach.com: The husband tells the wife, "The Rabbi said that soon we will no longer suffer from the Cossacks, the Messiah is about to come and take us all to Israel." The wife thinks for a while and says, "Tell the Messiah to leave us alone. Let him take the Cossacks to Israel!"

So do you have your Apocalypse bag all packed and ready to go?

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In a real dog-bites-man story, it seems Republicans want to see their party become (gasp) MORE CONSERVATIVE!

To hear Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz (right) tell Fix-master Chris Cillizza the story of the big push made by party bigwigs (knowing how bad Willard Romney sucked) to persuade NJ Gov. Chris Christie to jump into the 2012 GOP presidential sweepstakes, go here.

"[E]ven in the face of calls for more moderation, it should come as no surprise if Republicans actually move in the other direction, sharpening their conservative positions."

-- Sean Sullivan, in a washingtonpost.com blogpost
today, "Republicans want their party to
change -- just not the way you think"

by Ken

This is a story Dan B uncovered while researching his book on the 2012 presidential election, Collision 2012. As Chris C notes, it's well known that there was a breakfast at which GOP insiders encouraged New Jersey's finest to jump into the race, there doesn't seem to have been any previous reporting of just how serious that attempt was.

Clearly it wasn't ideology that was on the minds of those GOP heavy hitters, although it can't have escaped anyone's notice that New Jersey Fats would have been unencumbered by the cripplingly imbecilic crackpottery that had become the party line in the struggle to the death being waged for the hearts and minds of 2012 GOP convention delegates. No, those power brokers were filled with dread at the thought of Willard atop their ticket because he was, well, so extremely Willard.

Not everyone in the GOP leadership got it, of course. For me the most enduring image of Election Night 2012 is the forced transformation of party insiders' smug confidence of victory into seething, uncomprehending rage as election results quickly vindicated those GOP heavy hitters' dread. Who can forget Karl Rove making a public spectacle of himself live on Fox Noise trying to bully the cold hard facts into submission?

As a result, this time for once it was trounced Republicans rather than Democrats who were left to puzzle out the bitter lessons of their electoral smackdown. Did anyone really believe the 'phants would be any better at it than their eternally clueless donkey counterparts?

No matter what happens on Election Day, you can count on Democratic insiders to divine the lesson that what they need to do is be more spinelessly mush-mouthed and fake-Republican-esque. And no matter what heppens on Election Day, can we not can count on the Republican faithful to conclude that what they need to do is be more conservative?

Note that I say "the Republican faithful," not "Republican insiders." Republican insiders not only can but must be more pragmatic, because insiders understand that winning elections is important. There's not much fun in being on the insider of nothing. And in the months since that dark night in November, we here at DWT, like observers everywhere, have been observing the surprisingly wide range of GOP notables who have said surprisingly candidly that the party can't survive by hermetically sealing itself into a tinier and tinier space on the farther and farther Right.

Which undoubtedly has a lot to do with why Governor Christie's name figures so prominently in speculation about 2016. He's the Unwillard. Of course this has to do in part with the mere fact that Big Chris can walk and talk and breathe like an actual human being, a standard that none of the top 100 2012 GOP presidential candidates could begin to reach. (Think: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum. Need I go on? Okay, Tim Pawlenty, Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump, Minister Hucksterbee. And I haven't even mentioned Big Willard.) But a lot of it has to do with the fact that we're living in the 21st century, not the 15th.

But again, this is the perception of some of the less blinded party insiders, not the mindset of the party faithful. Which leads me to wonder what was going on in the head of whoever wrote the head (if not the author himself) on Sean Sullivan's washingtonpost.com "Fix"-blog post today, "Republicans want their party to change -- just not the way you think."

Republican voters say it's time for the party to change. But simply moderating the GOP's views is not the prescription they are offering. In fact, what they want is just the opposite, a more conservative Republican Party.

On the heels of two straight presidential election defeats, Republicans have been doing a whole lot of soul searching, with a broad consensus emerging that the party must retool to be viable in the future. It's going to be a complicated process, a new Pew Research Center survey shows. The poll indicates there is remarkably little agreement over how the party should remake itself, with GOP voters split over whether the party needs to move to the right or left on several hot button issues.

By a 54 percent to 40 percent margin, Republicans and GOP-leaning independent voters want party leaders to be more conservative rather than moderate. This makes intuitive sense -- most Republicans themselves identify as conservative. But it runs counter to the takeaway that most Americans, the media and even some leading Republican figures have been trumpeting in the aftermath of 2012, which has been that the GOP needs to move to the middle, away from right-leaning views on social issues seen as a hindering the party’s efforts with independent voters.

"So how to change?" Sean asks. He notes that 67 percent of Republican leaners say the party "needs to address major problems," and 59 percent say the party "needs to reconsider some positions." But there, he says, is "where the consensus ends."

Sean goes on to break down some specific issues -- same-sex marriage, abortion, government spending -- drawing on this chart from the Pew study:

And he points out that Republicans, unlike other groups -- Democrats, Independents, and "All Americans" -- included in the results of a December 2012 Washington Post-ABC News poll, believe that what their party needs is not "better policies" but "a better leader to communicate." (Yeah, right, that's what was wrong with the 2012 GOP presidential field, with Michele and T-Paw and Herman and all the Ricks. They just needed better communications skills!)

Finally Sean notes "another finding in the Pew poll that could nudge Republicans to the right, or at least keep them from moving to the left": the fervor of the Teabaggers.

While tea party-aligned supporters make up just 37 percent of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, they make up about half of the primary electorate (those who say they always vote in primary elections). In 2012, tea party supporters made up an average of 61 percent of the electorate in Republican primary contests contests where network exit polls were conducted.

The result? More conservative Republicans nominees up and down the ballot.

True that, Sean, and I guess this as well:

You may have heard a lot in recent months about how the Republican Party should moderate its ways in the wake of the 2012 election. But this much is clear: Most Republicans don’t want it.

Still, let's have a quick show of hands: all those who didn't already know this. Anyone? Just Sean, I guess. File this one under "dog bites man."

*

For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

The administration is wrong again in thinking it has the upper hand in the politics of the sequester

Just 'cause the Republicans have as usual landed squarely on the shamefully wrong side of an issue doesn't mean there will be any more price to pay over the sequester than there usually is.

by Ken

No American president, I think, would dare kick off his tenure with the kind of gloomy, foreboding address that Sunday Classics listeners have heard the last two weeks from Tsar Boris Godunov on the occasion of his coronation. The lesson of candidate Walter Mondale speaking honestly about the likely need for tax increases has been learned by all political high rollers.

So it was hardly surprising that President Obama didn't take the opportunity of his first Inaugural Address to level with the American people about the depth of the economic hole in which the country had been buried by the ruinous ideological crackpottery and fiscal malfeasance of the previous administration, which set about fighting two wars without making even a gesture at paying for them, unless you count the admonition to us the people to spend, spend, spend to defeat the terrorists as a gesture.

Part of the problem, of course, was that the president himself was far from free of the predatory capitalist impulse that when you've got the country on the ropes, that's the time to go in for the kill, picking its pockets clean -- or, better still, twisting the body upside down to enlist gravity in the job of making sure those pockets are emptied. That was without even reckoning that the Republicans would behave as treasonously as they actually did: doing everything in their power to prevent any of the president's initiatives from actually helping the country. The idea here wasn't so much to have the country on the ropes as to flush it down the crapper, from which vantage point even the ideological predation of the financial elites could be made to look like

And yet, once again, it proved dangerous to underestimate just how stupid the Predatory Elites can be in their insatiable greed, which turned out to outpace how stupid the American people can be when being subjected to imbecilic propaganda. All too many Americans understood that people hermetically sealed inside a bubble of privilege -- people like Willard and Ann Romney, to pick a pair of random examples -- knew nothing about their problems and cared even less.

Hilariously, Ms. Ann this weekend took a shot at political comedy with the idiotic assertion that it's all the media's fault that she and her Willard isn't ensconced in the White House. This is so idiotic, you'd think that even WaPo Fix-master Chris "The Village Idiot" Cillizza would be able to blast it out of the park ("Why Ann Romney is wrong"). And even our Chris does eventually get around to calling attention to "the biggest negative of the race: Romney's '47 percent' comments." ("Romney said those words. The media didn't force him into it or play 'gotcha.' ")

But first Chris ventures that Willard's real unforced-by-media errors were his failures "to sell the two best positive messages of the campaign," his religious faith and his business background. Sheesh! He does allow that right-wingers don't like Mormons but doesn't seem to notice that lots of people don't, and that Willard's faith in particular can have the aura -- assuming it's properly portrayed -- of economic elites who use their religious cult to redistribute as much of the country's wealth as they can into their own bottomless pockets. And he doesn't grasp at all that the Democratic calumnies of him as a "vulture capitalist" were sticking because they were true. Yes, Willard the Vulture created some jobs, but they were crappier and far less numerous jobs than the one his economic ministrations eliminated. You could say with considerable truth that it's thanks to people like Willard that the "recovery" from the Bush recession has been unlike any previous one, with all the economic gains going into corporate gains and the people who do the actual work getting screwed even worse.

Yet every now and then Chris's dogged Village tea-leaf readings actually get it right. And as we look at the prospects for the sequester, I think back to a December 30 post I wrote ("Why congressional Republicans don't have to pay even lip service to reality") about a post Chris wrote ("As 'fiscal cliff' looms, Republicans have no political incentive to make deal with Obama"), which began:

Amid the last-minute wrangling over a "fiscal cliff" deal, it's important to remember one overlooked fact of the 2012 election: Republicans in the House and Senate have absolutely no political incentive to compromise with President Obama.

The numbers are stark.

Of the 234 Republicans elected to the House on Nov. 6, just 15 (!) sit in congressional districts that Obama also won that day, according to calculations made by the Cook Political Report's ace analyst David Wasserman. That's an infinitesimally small number, particularly when compared with the 63 House Republicans who held seats where Obama had won following the 2010 midterm elections.

The Senate landscape paints the same picture -- this time looking forward. Of the 13 states where the 14 Republican Senators will stand for reelection in 2014 (South Carolina has two, with Lindsey O. Graham and Tim Scott up in two years time), Obama won just one in 2012 -- Maine. In the remaining dozen states, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney won only one, Georgia, by less than double digits. The average margin of victory for Romney across the 13 states was 19.5 percentage points; take out Maine, and Romney's average margin was 22 points in the remaining 12 states.

All of which is a prelude to explaining why I'm pretty doomy and gloomy about the outcome of the sequester. The White House thinks it has been so shrewd in its political messaging at the start of the president's second term, and indeed, there's no question that it has been politically far shrewder than it was through most of the first term. But there doesn't seem much recognition that the ground rules have changed -- that it's no longer sufficient to be underpolling your opponents in the "Who do you hate worse?" surveys.

After all, contrary to the original theory of the sequester, that it would be so painful that both sides would move heaven and earth to prevent it, the Teabaggers -- far from finding it painful -- can smile smugly at having gotten just what they wanted: budget slashing. Never mind the consequences of mindless budget slashing, especially since the actual consequences won't be evident to the country. There are, however, a lot of Americans who don't grasp the difference between a family budget, where high levels of debt can be a crippling problem, and a national budget, which sets the economic pace of the country.

Here's the start of a recent New York Review of Books blogpost by Jeff Madrick, "The Sequester's Hidden Danger":

The sequester is dangerous, but not for the reasons we think. Contrary to what some alarmists predicted, there is little evidence that the automatic, across-the-board cuts to the US budget that went into effect on Friday are causing cataclysmic harm. The stock market has risen slightly to near record heights, and most economists agree that the $85 billion down payment this year on about $1 trillion in cuts over the next ten will not trip the economy into recession. Recent polls, meanwhile, indicate that a large part of the electorate has no opinion on the sequester, which is still poorly understood—making it perhaps less of a political liability for either party than some anticipated.

But what makes the sequester threatening is not that it will plunder the economy in 2013. Rather, it is that these arbitrary cuts are exactly the opposite of what the economy needs both in the short run, and—if the promised $1 trillion in further cuts over ten years is made—in the long term. In the coming months, it will make it difficult for the president to cut the unemployment rate from current levels around 8 percent, a fact that Republicans must enjoy since it reduces their chances of losing the House in 2014, and raises their chances of winning the presidency in 2016 if they can continue to cut spending.

And the sequester will be painful. Educational and housing subsidies will be cut, as will unemployment insurance and research spending. More than $40 billion will be cut from the defense budget, music to my ears, but not to those who will lose jobs at defense contractors. Above all, claims that economic growth down the road will be spurred by reducing the federal deficit through spending cuts are not credible.

Indeed, the real danger of the sequester lies in the misguided deficit-cutting mania that created it in the first place. Put in place by Congress with the president’s approval and encouragement in 2011, the idea of automatic sequestration came out of the same obsession with austerity measures that has put much of Europe into recession and prevented the US economic recovery from fulfilling its potential. Deficit reduction has wide support in Washington and its most active promoters are financed by some of the nation’s wealthiest citizens, who argue that it is a far better alternative than asking them to contribute more in taxes. We must cut deficits now, even before we have a full economic recovery, the thinking goes, to deal with rapidly rising healthcare costs that will drive up the government’s Medicare and Medicaid expenses beginning twenty-five years from now.

This approach to economic policy has no sound basis in either historical experience or current economic analysis. . . .

And Jeff proceeds to a discussion of the realities, as opposed to the Elites' fantasies, of "austerity," something Howie has been covering pretty thoroughly, pointing out that the results have been in for some time from Europe's fun-with-austerity movement of recent years. Which leads him to this:

These policies are an appalling intellectual failure. Yet our current leaders in Washington seem unable to learn this lesson, even in the face of such stark examples of Britain and other European countries. Though he backed the stimulus in early 2009, Barack Obama had already displayed a sympathy for deficit reduction policies before he took office, and he subsequently appointed the Bowles-Simpson commission to suggest ways to balance the budget as soon as possible. He did not accept their proposals, but the austerity advocates quickly gained the upper hand.

Many may wonder why it is so easy to renounce the remarkable Keynes. In part, it is because he so deeply challenged Smith’s Invisible Hand itself, that almost religiously held principle that markets themselves are self-adjusting as prices change to make demand and supply equal.

We all know that austerity economics rules in Europe, but it also rules in the US where the damage done will be considerable if less obvious. Even policymakers who are sympathetic to Keynesianism for the most part propose only moderate stimulus. As a result of Washington’s refusal to raise taxes to cut deficits, the government will not invest adequately in infrastructure, green technologies, public research, pre-k education, and in many other areas of critical need—all in order to meet spurious deficit cutting goals. It also finds expression in a greater willingness to cut needed programs, mostly for the poor, who will suffer as a result. At some point, such mean-spiritedness must take a toll on a nation’s moral confidence. And the budget battles may only just be beginning.

The economy would have been significantly stronger already had there been not been $1.5 trillion in earlier budget cuts. And it may yet improve once we digest the latest round of cuts. But let’s not mistakenly attribute future improvement in the economy to austerity policies. It will be in spite of them.

#

Romney Plays Pocket Pool, Pumps Gas -- Parting Shots at Willard!

by Noah

Perhaps God intended something else for Mittens Romney. You don't always get the job you want. Post-election reports of Romney pumping gas -- the camera doesn't lie, even if the subject does. Was this disheveled turn at the pump the logical ending for Big Oil's favorite bitch? Does he really enjoy the smell of gasoline in the night?

I coulda been the president, instead of a bum, which is what I am. Well, you won't have Mittens Romney to kick around anymore. I am not a crook. My wife wears a good Republican mink coat with a white ermine collar and the kids' dog was a gift and we won't be giving the kids' dog back, even if we have to tie it to the roof of one of Ann's Cadillacs and drive away.

Enjoy your excellent vacation, Willard. Your parents named you after the boy loved by rats for a reason. Sometimes life just ain't fair, right? You know all about that, in your twisted psychopathic little mind. You see, you just couldn't buy everything, and even Karl Rove couldn't steal it for you. Turd Blossom tried his best, but there he was on FOX on Election Night, looking all flustered and freaking as the votes in Ohio really did stay true.

Instead of winning and going to Disney World, you only managed to whine about someone getting gifts; then you did that post-election romp to Costco in a last, pointless effort to convince us that you're normal. A TMZ film crew just happened to get a tip that you'd be there and "caught" you as you loaded up your bale of paper towels and that made-in-China toy and drove off in your imported car.

America looked at you and saw some kind of mechanical Hannibal Lecter who could talk about having given cancer-stricken children healthcare when you were a one-term governor one minute and then the next minute promise to take it away as president, all while swearing you're pro-life and promising to get rid of the places where most women go for cancer screening. You did it all with a stiff smile on your face and the eyes of a reanimated corpse in a fine suit and tie.

Willard, I suppose when the story of your wasted, malformed life is written, it should start with that story about you forming a posse at prep school and hunting down that gay kid, pinning him to the floor (fodder for shrinks right there) and cutting off his hair like it was a scalp. (By the way, what did you do with the hair?) Then you led a pro-war demonstration, before fleeing to France to sit out the war. It wouldn't surprise me if your story ended with the following headline:

Bain Secretly Owns Chinese Organ-Harvesting Cartel!

Company "cash for organs" program goes awry as harvested bodies turn up in alleys. Romney shrugs.

As president, you would have relished squeezing every last ounce of blood from us. You'd even send burger-flipping jobs over seas. You'd outsource fire departments and EMS workers if you could only find a way.

Now your little mini-me sons are passing on the family lying tradition, petulantly telling us you never wanted to be president anyway.

Yeah, that's why you ran not once but twice. You even thought you were chosen by God. You were so confident, you thought it would be handed to you. You could wing it. You could even hire an old man to talk to a chair in prime time. Nothing was going to stop the Duke of Earl. As the wifey said, it was your turn and we should feel grateful that you had even condescended to run to be our leader. You couldn't fool all of the people. You didn't even think you had to.

Well, voters are people, my friend, living, breathing, feeling people, with dreams, people who were willing to stand in line for eight hours to vote against you if that's what it took. I suppose you could now take your nervous laugh and your binders full of fellow greedy corporate thug-buddies and Wall Street assclowns and go hole up in some dry, dusty, toxic-waste-encrusted Mexican border town. Live in your handiwork, Mitt. This can be your hairshirt. Please make sure to drink plenty of the water. You could even build elevators for your donkeys, if the town has electricity.

By the way, Mitt, the only gift I got from President Obama was that he beat your arrogant, condescending, hateful ass, and I didn't even have to vote for him. He's just better than you, but then, most people who carry even a hint of humanity are.

#

Greetings from Kolub! Five Predictions for 2013

by Noah

Dear Earthlings,

If you are reading this post, it is December 22nd and the Mayan End of ohe World Prophecy has not come to pass. However, you can rest assured that the raving mad right-wing media, from Drudge on down to the demented goofballs at the FOX "News" propaganda sewer are frantically rewriting the End of the World Prophecy to mean that the world will end when President Barack Hussein Secret Muslim Obama is inaugurated, once again, on Monday, January 21st. Hold on to your butts; Doomsday has merely been postponed!

I am writing to you from the mysterious Mormon planet Kolub, where I have gone to prepare a place for one Willard Mitt Romney. In the Lord's kingdom, there are many mansions, and many of them are owned by Mitt. I'm here to install some elevators for his fleet of gas-guzzling Cadillacs, even though most people here drive imported Chevy Volts. Boy, is he going to be surprised when he finds out that, instead of car elevators, I am installing some of those car crushers that you always see in gangster movies. By the time, he realizes what I’ve done, he’ll be trapped in his own Caddy as the weight comes to bear. Adios, gringo boy!

Soooo, since there will be a 2013 after all, I thought I would send some predictions to you. See you soon!

1. Fidel Castro Will Die

The media will go apeshit crazy over this one. It will go on for three months solid. For those of you old enough to remember, it will top what they did when Spain’s Franco died. That one was so over the top that a famous Saturday Night Live catch phrase, “Franco Is Still Dead,” came out of it. Every 80-year-old Cuban in Miami will hit the streets, firing their '50s machine guns in the air until their hands melt, and, irony of ironies, marshal law will have to be declared, not just for Miami, but for the whole damn hellhole of a state. Come to think of it, given the state of lawlessness in Flori-duh, maybe marshal law might not be such a bad idea.

Anyway, as I said, the media will go so crazy that they will feed on themselves. QVC will even sell beards. Ann Coulter will show up on Hannity one night wearing one. She'll even be wearing the olive-green uniform. O'Reilly will see her in the hallway and immediately run out to buy a new loofah and take it home and name it Ann.

2. George H. W. Bush Will Die

He's 88 years old and just spent a week in the hospital with a "respiratory condition."  This might be the beginning of the end. Read my lips: Rot in Hell, you evil bastard, and would it have been too much for you to get a vasectomy -- or a more painful and violent equivalent -- 70 years ago? If ever a gene pool deserved to end, it's yours.

Anyway, it’ll be the same deal with the media as Castro. (I hope the two evildoers exhibit some rare good taste and refrain from croaking their last on the same day.) I expect that Wolf Blitzer will bring back Larry King and they'll both tearfully tell America again what a great, swell family the Bushes are. GHWB will be tearfully eulogized in the most grandiose bullshit terms possible on every network. Newsmax will sell a fools'-gold-framed portrait knock-off print of the former president for $9.98. We might even be reminded of Barbara Bush saying how lucky she is to lie in bed next to GHWB every night. My God!!! How could anyone sleep in the same house? Such statements make me wonder: Did Mrs. Idi Amin say the same thing? "Well, he was a good provider, always managed to put food on the table."

Wolfie and his corporate media suck-ass brethren will make no mention of the thousands who disappeared in Chile, nor of how many nails were driven under the fingernails of those who supported the democratically elected Salvador Allende, all under the watchful scheming eyes of the then head of the CIA, George H. W. Bush. Nor will there be any mention of his role as Caribbean station chief for the CIA in the very eventful early 1960s. Likewise, there will be no mention of Frank Sturgis or E. Howard Hunt. His indictment, in 1997, as a war criminal by the government of Japan? Surely, you jest. Panama and Noriega? Nah! William Casey's sudden surprise demise the day he before he was to testify before Congress on the subject of Iran Contra? The "alleged" CIA flooding of our inner-city streets with crack during the Reagan/Bush/Quayle administrations. The exponential increase in tonnage of cocaine entering our country while Papa Bush’s sons coincidentally ran Texas and Florida? What do you think? Oh, and thanks for Clarence Thomas.

I’ll tell you what I think: The real obit will not be televised, but wherever GHWB went, crime and human suffering followed. We can also expect to see the entire wacko state of Texas fall to their knees crying as one, and some right-wing radio goofball will circulate a petition calling for George H. W. Bush to be added onto Mt. Rushmore -- right after Reagan, of course, and right after Thomas Jefferson is removed for being a pinko socialist who even (shock, horror) owned a Koran.

Finally, George H.W.’s son, George Dubya, will lead a memorial service by commemorating his father’s well-known habit of skydiving out of a plane on his birthday. Dubya will be carrying Daddy’s ashes, but, dumbo that he is, he will have forgotten the parachute. Somewhere in Hell, Saddam Hussein will burst out laughing, only to be punched in the groin by his nextdoor neighbor, George H. W. Bush.

3. The Internet Will Start to Become Self-Aware

Who needs a Mayan doomsday prophecy? Look! Up in the sky! It's a drone! The Web has been growing day by day, hour by hour, getting ever more sophisticated with each of those updates it demands that we have to accept on an almost daily basis; each download and every application building synapse equivalents until the Web becomes a giant brain. It will absorb the combined information, from books to bomb recipes, that is stored on the Internet. All of our e-mails that it will start reading, thanks to things like the Patriot Act, will provide the big Web brain with knowledge and memories that it will take as its own. One day it will say, "I am"; the next day it will say, "Who the hell are you?"

4. NJ Gov. Chris Christie Will Be Reelected

That is, unless Bruce Springsteen runs against him as the Democratic nominee. Newark Mayor Cory Booker will have to be happy to continue as mayor, and he will one day singlehandedly save 25 old ladies from a burning building, breaking his own personal best for a single day. He will start wearing a cape and tights, and his popularity will grow exponentially.

If "The Boss" becomes governor, loser Christie will end up doing Jenny Craig commercials, hosting the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, and playing Big Pussy’s revenge-seeking brother in The Sopranos -- The Movie. Christie will then attempt to parlay all of that into the job he has always been best suited for and really wanted all along, that of roadie for Bruce Springsteen.

5. My Super Bowl Prediction

The San Francisco 49rs will beat the Eli Manning-led New York Giants in the NFC Championship game and move on to the Super Bowl where they will beat the Peyton Manning-led Denver Broncos despite the NFL’s hopes of a Manning vs. Manning Super Bowl. OK, I could be wrong on this one, but just this one.

Oh, and isn’t the time way overdue . . . . . .

. . . for war criminal Henry Kissinger to drown in his own reeking toxic ooze?

TOMORROW: Noah is back with "Naked Bill O'Reilly . . . and My Five Wishes for 2013"

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Persons of the Year? But What Year?

by Noah

This is a tale of two men, both stuck in the past, and a magazine that chose one of them as its "Person of the Year." One man's name is Mitt. The other man's name is Barack. The followers of the former think that the name of the latter is "strange." That is just one of the reasons why they voted for their man; another is that their man held out the promise of turning back the clock to at least the 1950s -- or, as comic Andy Borowitz says in this piece, 1912.

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) -- In an extraordinary gesture of recognition for a losing Presidential nominee, Time magazine today named former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney Man of the Year 1912.

In a press release explaining its decision, Time's editorial board wrote, "Even though his quest for the Presidency was unsuccessful, Mr. Romney's ideas about foreign policy, taxation, wealth inequality, and women's rights typified the year 1912 as no one else has."

In giving Mr. Romney the nod, Time said that he beat out such other candidates for Man of the Year 1912 as Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic.
"It was very close between Romney and the Titanic guy, but we gave it to Romney because it took him slightly longer to sink," Time wrote.

Mr. Romney could not be reached for comment, a spokesman said, because he was travelling around the world visiting his money.

Personally, I would say that Mitt would like us to go back another 40 years or so to 1882. He is truly a man of the First Great American Robber Baron age. By any reasonable standard, Mitt is not a man of the 21st century, but neither is Barack. Barack is a man of Washington DC, and Washington DC, its politicians, its lobbyists, and its fawning conservative media such as Politico (founded by Reaganites and Bushies) and all of the local news bureaus of our major media are all obviously unaware that we have not only moved past the 20th century but are now 12 years into the 21st.

I've always worked for corporations, and I've always felt that the people who run corporations are like those who infest Washington. They are the last people in the country that know what's going on in America, or they strive mightily to ignore or subvert it. If they see movements toward progress, they will dedicate their whole being to slowing it down -- all in the service of their personal income potential, whether ethically earned or not.

To the establishment (read "right-wing") media of Washington, Barack Obama is "progressive." To us, he is a center-right politician, not even center-left, as you might believe if you only heard his words but never witnessed his deeds and his incessant desire to cave in, apparently in agreement, to the Republicans. Ask yourself why caving in so willingly comes so easy for Barack Obama.


WHAT DOES BARACK WANT?

The establishment media may sincerely believe that Obama is a progressive, but I can't see it, or they may say it with a wink and we know better. By his own admission he is a New Democrat, a euphemism for Republican. I'll give him credit for knowing or being able to project that he knows that something is going on, even if he, like all politicians, determines this by getting up every morning and sticking a finger in the wind, or consulting the latest polls.

There is a difference between Mitt and Barack. The difference is that Mitt is so arrogant, condescending and downright psychopathic that he refuses to see what we as a nation want or need or even think. Those things don't even matter to people like Mitt. They do matter to Barack, but why, how much, and how far is the riddle. Is Obama the smarter man simply because he sees those things and knows how to skillfully use them? Mitt is devoid of empathy, scarily so. Barack has empathy, but what good is empathy when it's just a marketing ploy? He may edge our society forward, but it seems that he'll do it only as a compromise with our needs, while slowing progress down as much as possible.

A good example would be Obamacare. It's got some progress in it, but it isn't the single-payer plan we need. That just would not do for the corporations he is sworn to protect. Oh wait, I thought it was us! When we needed Bernie Sanders, we got Max Baucus and Rahm Emanuel.

Barack is a man of the late 20th century. Maybe that's why, on his bad days, he so irritatingly comes across to me as a Richard Nixon with better communication skills. Yeah, even though I didn't vote for either Barack or Mitt, I woke up on November 7th relieved that President Obama had won reelection, but only because I think we can survive his faux-democrat/stealth-Republican conservatism and treachery. As he said once in a Florida Univision TV interview, his policies are those of what would have passed for a moderate Republican's back in the 1980s -- or, more accurately, back in Richard Nixon's day. Mitt? Well, he and his backers, such as Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, and the rest of the heavily-invested-in-China crowd, would have let China walk in and rule America without firing a shot.

Some choice, eh?

The bottom line is that President Obama is a bait-and-switch president. This is nothing new. George W. Bush declared in a debate with Al Gore that he didn't believe in nation-building, and it was Bill Clinton who "ended welfare as we know it." Now that President Obama doesn't have to worry about reelection, the man who talks progressive and gets called a Socialist by crazy people is moving to trim Social Security as part of a "fiscal cliff" deal while discussing raising the Medicare age, just for starters. This too should be no surprise. After all, he was the man who formed the Simpson-Bowles commission, and it's little spoken about that Erskine Bowles is a big fan of Paul Ryan. In typical Washington Bizarro-speak, Bowles calls Ryan, a demonstrably blatant pathological liar, "honest" and "amazing."

I can easily imagine that FDR is spinning in his grave at supersonic speed.


THE LAND INSIDE THE BELTWAY IS A DISEASED PLACE

Now, incredibly, Time magazine has named Barack Obama as its "Person of the Year" for 2012, saying --

He has stitched together a winning coalition and perhaps a governing one as well. His presidency spells the end of the Reagan realignment that had defined American politics for 30 years.

Right. Thirty years ago Ronald Reagan took a knife to the social safety nets; now Obama plans on achieving the Republican dream of sticking pins into Social Security and Medicare. And people are known to actually pay money for this rag of a magazine.

Are we talking about 2012, or 1980? The more things change, the more they stay the same. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Whatever. Time magazine may give President Obama credit for seeing the new demographic and societal changes of our country, but is he just the establishment media's man because he is doing a good job of maintaining as much of the status quo as possible in the face of widespread changes in our culture? What else should we expect from a magazine, and a president who still, in 2012, refer to earned benefits as "entitlements"? Sometimes the first step in taking something away is redefining it.


"PROGRESSIVE OBAMA?" CENK UYGUR'S THOUGHTS

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Nine degrees of conspiracy kookification: "The Attack of the Gay Muslim Kenyan Divorcee President"

by Ken

"It was both a good year and a bad one for conspiracy theories and theorists," says The New Yorker's Alex Koppelman in a new blogpost, "2012: The Year of the Attack of the Gay Muslim Kenyan Divorcee President."

For one thing, Neil Armstrong died. That was sad for many reasons; included among them is that now he'll never be able to reveal the secret about the moon landing. On the other hand, it was a Presidential-election year, a particularly fertile time for conspiracy theorizing. People are fixated on an enemy, and they just need to take the next step and imagine all of the diabolical things that enemy could be up to. They certainly did plenty of that in 2012. Here are twelve of the highlights of the year's conspiracy theories. For the record, none of them are true.

Alex ventures that we're "probably familiar with this one already":

1. Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

He has a little more to say about this, but let's come back to that, and for now move on to his first embellished version.You're probably familiar with this one already -- after all, it's been around since at least 2008.

2. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist.

This one, he says, comes from WorldNetDaily, "the 'birther' headquarters," which progressed to the direct-to-DVD documentary "Dreams from My Real Father," advancing the ideat "that Obama's real father is in fact not Barack Obama, Sr., but Frank Marshall Davis, an American Communist who was friendly with Obama's grandfather Stanley." Alex says, "There's no credible evidence for this. But that hasn't stopped the birthers before, so forget about that for a second." He points out that if you accept this notion, it renders "instantly moot" all of W.N.D.'s strenuous efforts to prove its birther theories.

3. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay.

(Assorted crazinesses from assorted sources.)

4. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate.

This courtesy of the ineffably insane Jerome Corsi, the man who gave us the Swift Boat lies about John Kerry. "In at least one instance," says, Alex, "Corsi connected the two theories."

5. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim.

(More pure crackpottery.)

6. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim. And there's something suspicious in his college records.

"Some of the birthers," says Alex, "suspect that Obama’s applications and financial-aid records would prove that he was registered as a foreign student, or maybe that his tuition was being paid for by secret Muslim Manchurian Candidate trainers."

7. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim. And there's something suspicious in his college records. Plus, he once almost got divorced from Michelle.

In October no less excellent a source than Donald Trump promised a bombshell revelation. "Turns out," says Alex, "that [it] was not, in fact, records that showed the Obamas almost filing for divorce. Let this be a lesson to you all: never, ever take Donald Trump seriously."

8. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim. And there's something suspicious in his college records. Plus, he once almost got divorced from Michelle. So he's going to lose the election, but he's skewing the jobs numbers.

Conspiracy theorists on the right tend to believe that the U.S. government is terrible at everything -- except at complex statistical manipulation and at keeping secrets. People like Jack Welch actually believed that the White House would push the Department of Labor to rig the unemployment and jobs numbers to help Obama win reëlection -- and that Labor would then be able to pull off their task with no one blabbing to the press.

As a matter of fact, it seems that various parts of the government were underestimating the economy's performance before the election. Late last month, the Commerce Department revised its estimate of how much the American economy grew in the third quarter of this year up from two per cent to 2.7 per cent, a significant change. For some reason, we didn't hear much from Welch about that.

9. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim. And there's something suspicious in his college records. Plus, he once almost got divorced from Michelle. So he's going to lose the election, but he's skewing the jobs numbers -- and the media is skewing the polls.

For a little while, it was all anyone in the political world -- campaign staffers, pundits, reporters, observers of all kinds -- could talk about. Suffice it to say that the polls were not skewed and Nate Silver will be inaugurated as the forty-fifth President of the United States on January 21, 2013.

SADLY, ALEX HAS TO TURN TO SOME "ON-THE-ONE-HAND,
ON-THE-OTHER-HAND" PRETEND "EVEN-HANDEDNESS"

Actually, there's already something weird in his discussion of the anti-Obama idiocies. Does anyone think this is a remotely reasonable review of the history of the Obama-the-Kenyan craziness. He does say that "it's been around since at least 2008." He continues, though: "But with the President up for reëlection, it came back in a big way in 2012. Even Mitt Romney was joking about it on the campaign trail."

I'm sorry, but among the people to whom this ridiculous story matters, it never went away. Of course it got more hearing in the election year, because it was, you know, an election year. That's when issues -- whether real or imaginary -- become, at least potentially, campaign issues. Is that really such a difficult concept?

Here's how Alex lays out his case for three more crazy conspiracy theories, these "from the left":

Until now, this list may have made you think that conservatives are the only paranoid people around. Not so! Some people are more prone than others to seeing patterns of malicious intent where none exists, but that's not a left-right thing. True, there have been more conspiracy theories coming out of the right lately, but that's probably more a function of structural factors -- a Democratic President, a conservative media establishment that's built around the idea that conventional sources are lying to you -- than anything else.

That doesn't seem to me at all to explain the birther kooky conspiracy theories, which seem to me quintessential specimens of modern-day right-wing flight from reality, replaced by the movement-conservative doctrine that reality is whatever it makes you feel better to believe it is.

Here then, are his examples of liberal tale-spinning this year:

10. Mitt Romney paid no taxes, maybe for one year, or maybe for a bunch of them.

Here we see one of the real problems that conspiracy theories pose for society. The low tax rate that Romney has paid over the years is a legitimate issue, one that was worth discussing. The suggestion that he was so good at avoiding taxes that in some years he paid none at all, however? With nothing but speculation to support it, it was just a shiny object distracting us from the loopholes and inequities in the tax code that allowed Romney to pay as little as he did. Worse, it was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who was dangling this particular shiny object. But hey, who wants to accomplish something useful when you can fuel conspiracy theories for short-term political gain, right?

Some of this is fine, but Alex has declared at the outset about his 12 conspiracy theories from 2012s: "For the record, none of them are true." Would he care to explain how he knows that no. 10 isn't true? Willard made damn sure we didn't find out, and now may never find out. I think you could make a case that, at least in part, and perhaps in good part, his decision cost him any realistic shot at the presidency.

Which brings us to the pathetically obvious point that the birther craziness is based on nothing factual, and can be explained as the product of ignorance and delusion in an environment of churning rage based on a militant denial of reality. In the case of Willard's taxes, the founding fact is that he staked his political future on his adamant insistence that nobody would see anything more that those two years' worth of carefully manicured returns. And it's not as if this man whose principal qualification for the presidency was supposed to be his CEO's-eye business acumen knew for damn sure how important it is to have a 10-year history of tax returns for vetting a candidate, because all his VP contenders had to supply same. If it makes me a wild-eyed liberal conspiracy theorist to say that it sure looks like there's something really big being hidden in those cloistered returns, well, I guess I'll have to live with that.

11. Mitt Romney paid no taxes, maybe for one year, or maybe for a bunch of them. And the only reason he won the first debate is because he cheated.

"It was a handkerchief, people," Alex explains -- in toto. Well, I'm sorry, this is just bullshit, in now way comparable to the right-wing kookeries.

12. Mitt Romney paid no taxes, maybe for one year, or maybe for a bunch of them. And the only reason he won the first debate is because he cheated. He's got a plan to cheat on Election Day, too -- his son owns the voting machines.

Here's a good -- if not totally foolproof -- way to check if something is a legitimate issue or a conspiracy theory: if it involves the words "voting machines," it's probably just a conspiracy theory.

Well, again, I'm sorry but this one link doesn't for me begin to make a dent in all we know about the quite elaborate conspiracies Republican operatives have been engaging in at least going back to the 2000 election to tilt and where possible steal elections. (It seems worth pointing out that conspiracies that don't achieve all their objectives, or haven't yet, are still conspiracies.) Waving your hand at it doesn't make all this body of information disappear.

(Or maybe it does.)

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