Confidential to the Ohio Denali-deniers: If you really can't grasp the name change, bear in mind that it's none of your frigging business

With (Lord help us) Trump update -- see below

Mount Denali (20,237 feet)

"President McKinley never visited, nor did he have any significant historical connection to, the mountain or to Alaska."

-- Interior Secretary Sally Jewell

"I'd like to thank the president for working with us to achieve this significant change to show honor, respect, and gratitude to the Athabascan people of Alaska."

-- Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)

by Ken

Confidential to Ohio Republicans mouthing off about the Obama administration's redesignation of the continent's highest peak from Mount McKinley to Denali, as it was long known to indigenous peoples, from an Athabascan word meaning, we're told, "the great one," and as it has been known for decades now to Alaskans:

Have you looked at a map lately? (Or ever?) This is none of your frigging business. How about you just shut your frigging pieholes?

Jeez. Every time you think right-wingers who do all their thinking with their stinkybutts have reached the limit of Obama-bashing crackpottery, they kick it up another notch. After all these years they still don't know an effing thing about Barack Obama except the color of his skin -- and, oh yes, that they hate him and everything he believes, whatever that may be. But that's enough for the bully-boy crackpots. Often the only way they know what they believe is by pointing at "that Obummer" and squealing: "The opposite of what he said, the opposite of what he said!"


SO HOW DID IT BECOME "MOUNT McKINLEY"?

Perhaps you think I'm being hyperbolic when I say that President McKinley had no connection whatsoever to the great mountain? Okay, here's how it became "Mount McKinley." A gold prospector named William Dickey who went prospecting in June 1896 later wrote: "We named our great peak Mount McKinley, after William McKinley of Ohio, who had been nominated for the Presidency, and that fact was the first news we received on our way out of that wonderful wilderness."

That's it, the entire McKinley connection to the mountain.

The name Mount McKinley was adopted by Congress in 1917, some 16 years after the president's assassination. It is, of course, too bad about President McKinley being assassinated, and I don't think you have to be from Ohio to think so. But that has nothing whatever to do with a mountain in Alaska. In fact, many Alaskans never accepted the new name. In 1975 the Alaska Board of Geographic Names renamed the mountain Denali (and tried to get their federal counterparts to do the same), and since 1980, when the former Mount McKinley National Park was merged with Denali National Monument, the result has been known as Denali National Park and Preserve.

Now in a simple, carefully legally grounded stroke, at the president's behest, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has restored its most common indigenous name to the mountain itself, replacing the name of a president who had nothing whatsoever to do with the place. So naturally the current crop of Republican doodybrains from McKinley's home state of Ohio go nuts. In a U.S. News piece, "Mt. McKinley to Denali: How A Mountain's Renaming Got Tied Up in Politics," Jon Schuppe reports (I've intentionally omitted all links):

Ohio Republicans lashed out.

"I'm deeply disappointed in this decision," House Speaker John Boehner said.

Boehner cited McKinley's service in the Civil War, in Congress, as Ohio governor and as the 25th president.

Sen. Rob Portman accused Obama of "going around Congress." But he seemed resigned to the renaming.

"I now urge the administration to work with me to find alternative ways to preserve McKinley's legacy somewhere else in the national park that once bore his name."

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, also said Obama had acted outside his authority.

As POTUS once again oversteps his bounds, Ohio knows every carnation is a monument to our own William McKinley.

— John Kasich (@JohnKasich) August 31, 2015

Rep. Bob Gibbs vowed to find a way to block what he called "Constitutional overreach" and a "political stunt" that was "insulting to all Ohioans."

My full statement on @POTUS ignoring an Act of Congress and changing the name of Mount McKinley. [LINK OMITTED]

— Rep. Bob Gibbs (@RepBobGibbs) August 31, 2015

I hold no great brief for President McKinley, about whom what most of us remember is that he was the founding father of 20th-century American imperialism. But still, even he deserves a higher caliber of acolyte than these clowns. Portman, a dismally dull political hack, is at least the sort of fellow he would recognize, and I suppose maybe Kasich as well. They're embarrassments but not disgraces. These other clowns, however . . . well, words fail me.

In order:

To Boehner: What the living hell are you talking about? Do you have any clue at all? Are you even aware that your gums are flapping without any input from a working brain? Boehner cited McKinley's service in the Civil War, in Congress, as Ohio governor and as the 25th president. So what? None of this has the slightest, remotest connection to the name of the highest mountain in North America. Is your brain so pickled that you're incapable of grasping this pathetically simple concept? Did you give the matter even the merest split second's worth of thought before you opened your yap?

To Portman: Why on God's green earth should anything in Denali National Park be named for McKinley? Are you truly not aware that WM had nothing whatever to do with the place? If so, then you should resign from the Senate on the ground that even by the dismal standards of that body you're too ignorant to serve. On a personal note, this level of arrogance and self-importance piled on top of this level of ignorance and stupidity is a really unattractive combination. If it's your beloved state you're concerned about, don't you worry that people will think that all Ohioans are as mentally incapacitated as you are?

To Kasich: Again, making those bullying noises when you have no effing clue what the eff you're talking about does not put you in a flattering light. The president didn't overstep anything (the governor is no doubt thinking of previous, successful efforts by Ohio hack pols to forestall the name change), and before you make an accusation like that, as the governor of a state you sure the hell should have taken the time to acquaint yourself with the actual legalities. Congratulations on demonstrating that you are an incompetent buffoon.

To Gibbs: Yikes! Do you ever listen to yourself?

To all four of you: If any of you actually has a brain, it's not working. You should check your warranty to see if it's covered; if not, you should really consider the one available remedial action.

For the record, Google Maps has now officially changed the name to Mount Denali. (But Bing, no.)


IF THESE GUYS THINK IT'S THEIR DUTY TO HONOR
AN OHIO GOP PREZ VIA A NAMING OPPORTUNITY --

Then get serious. Do something real instead of wasting everyone's time with this insulting, aggressive, imbecilic mouthing off.

Here's a suggestion. Proclaim that from now on all Ohio Republican men will officially call their penises McKinley. Maybe hold a  competition for a design they can all have tattooed on the little fellers, with the competition winner earning a chance to drink "Sunny John" Boehner under the table.


LIKE MOST ALASKANS, GOP SEN. LISA MURKOWSKI
COULDN'T BE MORE PLEASED BY THE NAME CHANGE

It's only fair to note that not all Republicans have followed the lead of the Ohio Twits.


“For generations Alaskans have known this majestic mountain as the Great One. Today we’re honored to be able to officially recognize the mountain as Denali. I’d like to thank the president for working with us to achieve this significant change to show honor, respect, and gratitude to the Athabascan people of Alaska.”


UPDATE: GUESS WHO'S JOINED THE OBAMA-BASHING
DENALI-DENIAL CLUB. BY GOLLY, IT'S THE DONALD!

To quote myself above: "Every time you think right-wingers who do all their thinking with their stinkybutts have reached the limit of Obama-bashing crackpottery, they kick it up another notch." Here I thought we could go out on a gracious note with Senator Murkowski's enthusiastic comments. But no. Howie passes along this from The Hill:

Trump pledges to reverse Obama’s mountain renaming



By Timothy Cama - 08/31/15 09:17 PM EDT

Donald Trump promised Monday that he would return the name of North America’s largest mountain to Mount McKinley, undoing President Obama’s decision to call it Denali.

Calling Obama’s act a “great insult to Ohio,” Trump, who is running for president next year, tweeted late Monday that Obama reversed the name the peak had for more than 100 years, in honor of President William McKinley, an Ohio native.

What were some of the epithets I applied above to the Obama-bashing Ohio Denali-deniers? Let's see, there was ignorant and imbecilic and bullying and aggressive. No evidence of a working brain, has apparently never looked at a map, doesn't think before he opens his yap, can't mind his own frigging business. No wonder The Donald wanted to join this club!

I would encourage The D to take my McKinley Penis Picture Pledge, but he might then feel obliged to show it to us, and nobody wants to see that.

#

On Iran, listen to the euphony between crackpot right-wing raving in Israel and the crackpot raving of the American Likudniks

Haaretz illustrated the Yossi Verter piece referenced below with this remembrance of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu addressing Congress last March at the invitation of aspiring American Likudnik House Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner.

"Sometimes it’s hard to know where Sheldon Adelson, the biggest Republican donor, ends and Netanyahu begins."

-- Haaretz's Yossi Verter, in "Netanyahu lost his
Iran bet, but his next gamble may be disastrous"

by Ken

The braying jackasses of the American Right take on a somewhat different rhetorical character when their chorus is led by the Likud-firsters whose primary allegiance is not to the American Republican Party but to the Israeli Likud. The rhetoric tends to take on a graven-on-Mt. Sinai character, with an in-our-face confidence in and commitment to the lies and delusions the American Likudniks pull out of their stinky behinds which pretends to biblical certainty. (If you need to have your image refreshed, check out any post by washingtonpost.com's designated right-wing gargoyle, Jennifer Rubin.)

Not surprisingly, the nuclear deal with Iran came into the world as an automatic target of the jenniferrubinites. Since most of these people are as lazy as they are stupid and dishonest, which is to say plenty lazy, they probably still don't know what's included in the agreement, but that never mattered. As I was saying the other day, they don't have to know what's in it to know that it's the awfulest agreement in the history of agreements, and the parties to it -- well, let's be blunt, that Kenyan dupe-or-devil Obama -- have either stupidly or knowingly betrayed all decent folk, not to mention striking a dagger to the heart of Israel.

All of this was a given. Does this sound familiar at all?

Even before the details of the agreement were known, and without having any idea what was or wasn’t included, senior Likud officials were firing cannon shells through the electronic media. Talking points that had been sent to them in advance contained three main points: 1. The agreement is bad, terrible, and awful; 2. If not for Netanyahu, the situation would have been much worse, much earlier; 3. The opposition is to blame and ought to be ashamed for not being supportive enough/for being critical now/for not standing tensely quiet at the side of the prime minister, meaning the State of Israel.

The specifics here relate to Israeli politics, and so isn't familiar because the jenniferrubinites don't acknowledge Israeli politics, only the politics of the crack-brained devils of Likud.

The paragraph is from a piece written midweek last week by Haaretz's Yossi Verter, headlined "Netanyahu lost his Iran bet, but his next gamble may be disastrous," with an even more provocative deck: "After the deal was announced, the prime minister's appearance was that of a desperate gambler who had lost everything. But now he wants to wreck what’s left of U.S.-Israel relations."

Here's how Yossi began his piece:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looks defeated. He was ashen-faced on Tuesday next to the Dutch foreign minister at their joint press conference in Jerusalem; his appearance was that of a desperate gambler who had lost everything. The Iranian nuclear agreement, against which he had vigorously and repeatedly warned, had become a fait accompli. The deal over which he had declared political war on the president of the United States, while breaking all the rules of diplomatic relations between friendly countries, had become a reality, for better or worse.

Now I don't suggest that Haaretz represents views that are held universally in Israel, but I suspect that anyone conditioned by the bullying rhetoric of the American Likudniks may be surprised to learn that on Bibi Netanyahu's home turf he's not regarded as a biblical sage but as a grubby and often dangerous politician.

"The prime minister himself," Yossi wrote, "hastened Tuesday to call on the opposition to 'put petty politics aside and unite for the State of Israel's national interests,' as if the Iranian nukes hadn't served as an effective political weapon for him during every recent election campaign." Does this sound familiar? With the American Right too, if you're beating the drum for hard-core right-wing ideology, you're speaking truth on behalf of the national interest, whereas any disagreements are dismissed as "petty politics." (Of course if such disagreements happen to touch on any possibility fallibility in the Likud worldview, you're also automatically branded an Enemy of Israel.)

Yossi actually gives Bibi "credit for stubbornly putting the nuclear issue on the global agenda, significantly contributing to the intensified sanctions on Iran."

On the other hand, he lost his brakes when he did not hesitate to hook up with the Republican Party in its campaign against U.S. President Barack Obama. Sometimes it’s hard to know where Sheldon Adelson, the biggest Republican donor, ends and Netanyahu begins.

Which brings us to what Bibi is up to now.

Netanyahu’s spokespeople said he plans to “kill himself” pursuing the last remaining option for scuttling the deal – preventing its ratification by the U.S. House of Representatives – by persuading Democratic congressmen to defect to the Republican camp and vote against their president. The destruction and devastation he avoided inflicting on the nuclear facilities scattered throughout Iran, he now wants to wreck on what’s left of U.S.-Israel relations. Here we again see his compulsive gambler syndrome: After losing his pants, he’s now putting his underwear on the roulette wheel in a move that experts on American politics say hasn’t much of a chance.

I'm not so sure that this gamble is a sure loser. The American Likudniks and the rest of their right-wing brethren, not to mention the great Right-Wing Noise Machine, know how to press buttons with the American public which can whip up a lot of influential hysteria. It's Yossi's judgment, though, that "in this context, the call by Likud ministers for 'internal cohesion that's been lacking until now' sounds pathetic." And he asks:

Why exactly is Netanyahu demanding that Labor’s Isaac Herzog, Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid, Meretz’s Zehava Galon and Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman join him? So they can share responsibility for the worsening of the fight between Israel and the leader of the free world?

Yossi proceeds to describe a political moment in Israel that again sounds grubbily familiar:

Herzog and Lapid were competing with each other on Tuesdayto show whose patriotism was greater. Lapid drew first with an interview he gave to a foreign television network. But Herzog landed a crushing blow on him by tweeting that he had spoken with the prime minister and would soon be traveling to the United States “to advance a package of security measures to suit the new situation.”

Perhaps Herzog has been named defense minister and nobody told us. Perhaps something else is going on between him and Netanyahu, and under the pretext of the “new situation,” the chairman of Zionist Union plans to bring his party into Netanyahu’s government.

#

Is there any chance of informed discussion of the nuclear deal when critics offer only lies and psychosis?

by Ken

I had the radio on while President Obama announced the deal on Iran's future nuclear capability agreed to by the five permanent Security Council members, Germany, and Iran, and I listened as well as I could. My gut impression was that it actually sounded like a pretty reasonable deal, and certainly a lot better than the alternative, which is to say no deal, where the only real check against Iranian nuclear aspirations is war -- which in the end is very likely the outcome desired by U.S. critics of the deal, who are so stupid and uninformed as to have no conception of what such a war would actually entail.

Now that doesn't mean I think this is a "good" deal. Honestly, I don't know. From the president's presentation, it seems to encompass more of the realities of the situation, including the conflicting agendas of the various parties to the deal, than I would have thought possible. But hey, I don't know.

I would welcome some real discussion of what has been agreed to -- including the fairly limited (as I understand it) areas where the deal remains secret -- by people who actually know what they're talking about: what's workable in the agreement, what's not so workable, what's problematic, what we just don't know, and of course what the alternatives might be.

The problem is that we can't have any such discussion without parties to that discussion who are: (a) informed, (b) honest, and (c) interested in getting to the realities of the matter. And unfortunately, among the U.S. critics, there's unlikely to be anyone contributing to the discussion who has any of these qualities.

What we're getting is what I might call jenniferrubinism, hysterical braying -- an even worse deal than I imagined, a formula for Israel's suicide -- where you start with a few carefully selected facts, or factoids, ignoring the other 97 percent of the reality, and then you manipulate those factoids by starting with a predetermined conclusion and then applying the analysis that would be performed by an individual with zero functional analytical capacity. It's what I've called the right-wing ideal of the Functional Zero IQ, where you always look at the world as if your brain had no capacity to receive or process actual information.

If you want cases in point, check out a piece like washingtonpost.com's "Congress greets Iran deal with skepticism." Or the nonsense coming out of the mouths of Republican presidential wannabes. (In terms of GOP presidential-candidate promises to scrap any Iran deal, Paul Waldman had an interesting "Pllum Line" take yesterday, "The next GOP president won't walk away from the Iran deal. Here's why," arguing mainly from the differences between real-world governance and crackpot campaign rhetoric.) Or for punditocratic knee-jerk gibberish there's the supposedly "reasoning" conservative Michael Gerson's "Obama’s Iran deal is a reckless bet," which would have read exactly the same no matter what the deal actually said.

Amazingly, these people always wind up with the conclusion they programmed in, with no regard whatever for reality, not to mention decency, humanity, or practicality, and since the preprogrammed conclulsion is that of ignoramuses, predators, self-aggrandizing rabble-rousers, and/or outright psychopaths they will fairly reliably represent some combination of ignorance, predation, egomaniacal rabble-rousing, and/or garden-variety psychosis.

the jenniferrubinists claim to be motivated by concern for the safety of Israel, but they aren't in contact with anyone who is seriously and informedlyl concerned with the safety of Israel. The only Israeli voices they hear are those of Israeli liars and psychopaths. So when they talk about this being the worst deal they can imagine, or a deal that means the suicide of Israel, it's all 100 percent unmitigated bullshit.

Are there risks for Israel? Undoubtedly. Are there risks for Israel without a deal? Unquestionably. Do any of the U.S. right-wing screechers have any idea of what either of those sets of risks might be? Not as far as I can tell. All that exists in the jenniferrubinist mind is an agenda driven by bullshit.

As for "Israel's suicide," these are the same patholoogically lying sociopaths who still don't seem to grasp the most basic reality about the future of Israel: that it is impossible for it to remain both democratic and Jewish. Israel is already engaged in a program of suicide unless it plans a campaign of extermination against its Arab populations -- a possibility that, I'm astonished and appalled to say, seems increasingly less impossible to me.

To any serious discussion about Israel's survival, I'm not aware of Benjamin Netanyahu having ever contributed the merest syllable. He contemplates no future except as a ruthless oppressor state -- leaving open no realistic alternative except Israeli suicide or genocide.

#

Maine Gov. Paul LePage Conjures His Inner Terrorist

Benefit Cuts
(The Statue of Levity replacing the lamp for a placard sign)

link (h/t Amanda Terkel @ HuffPost)

by Noah

Maine Gov. Paul LePage isn't the only batcrap-crazy, nihilistic, sociopathic Republican governor in our country. There's Abbott (TX), Brownback (KS), Christie (NJ), Jindal (LA) and Walker (WI), just to name five. But when even a right-wing media outlet like Politico (founded by  former Reagan Chief of Staff Fred Ryan among others, and endorsed by the Bushes) suggests that LePage may be America's craziest governor . . . well, his chances of being Numero Uno on the wacko list are greatly enhanced. If for some reason one wanted to create a fetid blend of Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann, one would likely end up with Paul LePage.

Remember that name. For some reason LePage hasn't received the media coverage that others get, but this may be changing after reports of a LePage pronouncement last week that things might be better if a local cartoonist, George Danby of the Bangor Daily News, was killed.

The story goes that he said this to a local high school audience in answer to a question from Danby's teenage son. Swell guy, eh? How is LePage different from the Muslim terrorists that shot up the offices of Charlie Hebdo in France, killing five of the humor magazine's cartoonists? The answer is, of course, that George Danby is still alive and no one has shot up the offices of the Bangor Daily News, no matter how happy that would make one of the republican party's rising stars.

Has LePage apologized for his remark? Not as of this writing, and let's not hold our breath waiting. In fact, he has doubled down. On Thursday, the Maine Sun Journal reported that LePage said state lawmakers from the city of Lewiston, Maine, should be "rounded up and executed in the public square."

Ideally, LePage will be exposed before he kills someone more directly than his fellow governors. While the other lunatic governors kill people by denying health care or providing extra pollution to the local air and water, LePage has now expressed the more direct approach.

Think about this. Suppose a Muslim citizen said the same things as LePage, either publicly or in an e-mail intercepted by the Department of Homeland Security. Wouldn't that person be halfway to Gitmo by now? Instead, LePage is free to roam about the country, irresponsibly mouthing off.

When Pigs Fly

link (h/t Amanda Terkel @ HuffPost)

Even more frightening is that we have a lot of unstable people among us that hear what passes for a leader say such things and their reaction is to take it as some sort of permission or justification to act accordingly. It's not lost on me that LePage made his kill-the-cartoonist statement in front of a high school audience in a time where a month does not go by when we don't hear about a couple of unstable kids planning on shooting someone at their school. Is what LePage did any different from a terrorist website that offers suggestions of targets for murder and mayhem?

Two weeks ago Dylannn Roof, a young man who had bought into twisted ideas about minority people raping white women, in addition to the constant drumbeat about "black on white crime" that is the standard fare offered by white supremacy websites, republican talk radio and FOX News, shot up the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, killing nine African-Americans. He was under the impression that others he had listened to would follow his lead into a race war. FOX, along with republican leaders such as SC Sen. Lindsey Graham, initially tried to cover their tracks by presenting the event as simply yet another "attack on Christianity."

Years ago, the right, led by such republican leaders as Newt Gingrich, engaged in an incessant spew about bringing down big government and blowing up big government. An unstable man named Timothy McVeigh was listening. Ideally, no one is listening to Paul LePage. I'd like to think he isn't so far gone that he would take action himself. People like him rarely do, preferring that someone else act in their behalf. But for LePage to do what he has done reveals some serious, out-of-control anger issues.

In the meantime, some politicians and pundits are talking about impeaching LePage. But again, don't hold your breath. The only people who seem to do the impeachment thing are republicans, and you don't really see them impeaching one of their own, do you? Besides, although Democrats control the Maine House, Republicans control the Senate. There's also the fact that Maine voters have elected LePage to be their Governor twice. They must be very proud.

Perhaps the water and air up there are more polluted than any of us imagined.

#

E. J. Dionne Jr. on "The wound Netanyahu left"

Bibi is greeted by members of Congress before his speech Tuesday. "It was disconcerting," E.J. says, "to watch Congress cheer wildly as a foreign leader, the prime minister of one of the United States' closest allies, trashed an American president's foreign policy."

"It fell to Isaac Herzog, Benjamin Netanyahu's leading opponent in Israel’s March 17 election, to make the essential point: that Tuesday's speech was 'a very harsh wound to Israel-U.S. relations' and 'will only widen the rift with Israel's greatest ally and strategic partner.' "

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post
column "The wound Netanyahu left"

by Ken

Well, good luck to Isaac Herzog, because I don't imagine the mass of Israelis are any more interested in hearing this message than the mass of Americans, who know virtually nothing about Iran, or possibly less than nothing when you consider how much of what they think they know is bullshit. From our media, meanwhile, we seem to hear little except the great triumph Bibi's speech was, rather than the great shame it was -- to him; to his U.S. political patrons, notably House Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner; and to the American people.

As E. J. Dionne Jr., that perennially fairest and most balanced of political observers, writes in his Washington Post column "The wound Netanyahu left": "The rapturous greeting that Congress bestowed on Netanyahu for his attack on President Obama’s approach to negotiations with Iran no doubt created great footage for television ads back home and won him some votes at the right end of Israel’s electorate."

For E.J., however, "it was disconcerting to watch Congress cheer wildly as a foreign leader, the prime minister of one of the United States' closest allies, trashed an American president's foreign policy." And "it was equally strange that the speaker of our House of Representatives interjected the U.S. Congress into an Israeli political campaign."

And, E.J. says, "Herzog’s observation stands":

John Boehner’s unprecedented act of inviting the leader of another nation to criticize our president, and Netanyahu’s decision to accept, threaten to damage the bipartisan and transideological coalition that has always come together on behalf of Israel’s survival.

Netanyahu may have spoken the words, “We appreciate all that President Obama has done for Israel,” but the rest of his speech painted the president as foolish and on the verge of being duped on a nuclear deal by the mullahs in Tehran.

The Israeli leader reached for the most devastating metaphor available to him, the appeasement of the Nazis that led to the Holocaust. He urged the United States “not to sacrifice the future for the present” and “not to ignore aggression in the hopes of gaining an illusory peace.”

"This is what he was accusing Obama of doing," E.J. says. "No wonder House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) described herself as 'near tears' over Netanyahu's 'condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran.' "

E.J. doesn't put it this way, but the issue here really is that the minds of far-right-wingers, like Bibi in Israel and the American right-wing bloc I usually refer to as Anti-Semites for Israel, apparently can't function without anointing demons who stand at the opposite end of the virtue spectrum from us-the-saintly. None of this has anything to do with the real world.

As E.J. points out, nobody believes that "the Iranian regime in its current form is trustworthy." That's just your typical right-wing straw man, perhaps based on their carefully cultivated mental incapacity to imagine any situation more complex than the choice between vanilla and chocolate -- or, more aptly, between ice cream and toxic sludge. It's inconceivable to them that the Iranians are capable of acting rationally in their own self-interest, perhaps because they themselves are incapable of acting rationally in our self-interest. Acute simple-mindedness doesn't allow it.

"At stake" with Iran, says E.J., "is a balance of risks, a choice between two imperfect outcomes."

On one side is a deal that would buy at least a decade in which Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon and would be subjected to inspections and other limitations. On the other side is a decision to blow up the current negotiations because the guarantees of any likely accord would not be sufficiently airtight.

Yes, the emerging deal does carry the risk that down the road Iran could get nuclear weapons. But failing to reach an agreement will not necessarily stop Tehran from going nuclear, and an end to negotiations would in no way ensure that the rest of the world would return to effective sanctions.

What Bibi really dreaming of, E.J. notes, is regime change. "But how exactly," he asks, "could that happen without armed conflict?"

And, one might add, looking at our recent record of supporting various regime changes, is there any sane reason to hope that we can influence the situation to an outcome that's even happier for us, let alone the people living under whatever regime is in question. It boggles my mind that right-wing foreign-policy delusionals have gotten away with demonizing President Obama for making foreign-policy decisions in the Middle East that may be debatable but are at least recognizably in touch with reality. Press them for alternatives, whether it's on Syria or Iraq or Egypt or Afghanistan or Libya, and you psychotic war-mongering imbecility that ensures a significantly more dangerous and deadly outcome.

Again, E.J. is too confoundedly polite and even-handed to put it this way. He does allow, though, that Bibi did an end run around the reality of the Iranian situation "offering a thoroughly rosy scenario."

“Now, if Iran threatens to walk away from the table — and this often happens in a Persian bazaar — call their bluff,” he said. “They’ll be back, because they need the deal a lot more than you do.” Really? If the Iranian regime is as horrible as Netanyahu says it is, why does he expect its leaders to be as flexible as if they were haggling over the price of a carpet?

"The crux of the difference between Obama and Netanyahu," he insists, "is about a bet on the future."

The Israeli prime minister argued that “the ideology of Iran’s revolutionary regime is deeply rooted in militant Islam, and that’s why this regime will always be an enemy of America.” He added, “I don’t believe that Iran’s radical regime will change for the better after this deal.”

Obama’s bet, by contrast, is that a deal opening up space and time would provide the best chance of encouraging political evolution in Iran. Of course there is no guarantee of this, but it’s a reasonable assumption that ending the negotiations would set back the forces of change.

Skeptics of an agreement, Netanyahu included, can usefully push Obama to get the longest timeline and the toughest guarantees he can, and U.S. negotiators can try to use the threat of opposition in Congress to strengthen the final terms.

And Bibi, E.J. notes, "never gave a satisfactory answer to the most important question: What is the alternative?"

He concludes by saying of "Netanyahu’s provocative and divisive intervention in U.S. politics" and "Boehner’s meddling in Israel’s election": "The voters of our friend and ally will render a judgment soon."

Yes, they will, but I don't see any reason to believe that that judgment will be any more sensibly based than the one we're hearing in the homeland of the Anti-Semites for Israel.

#

National Security Watch: Congress just manages to eke out an extra week to take another stab at doing its job

by Ken

Feel free to "Read more" if you like. Myself, I just clicked through to get the link for you, to the piece headlined "Congress averts Homeland Security shutdown with one-week extension." I'd just as soon not dwell on the combination of savagery and imbecility we now have passing itself off as a "government."

I just have one small thought to toss in in response to this national disgrace. It seems to me that the people who have made the funding of DHS undoable are part of the chorus of red-blooded patriots who bray and screech at every opportunity about all the limp-wristed America-haters whose inability or unwillingness to act like real manlymen causes the world, and in particular the villains of the world, to treat America with contempt. You know, wimps like our Kenyan Muslim president, the one who doesn't love America.

(This is, of course, the gutless weak President Obama, not to be confused with the blood-thirsty tyrannical dictator who is the most massively executively overreaching tyrant since the heyday of Caesar Augustus, Ivan the Terrible, and Hitler. We'll be sure to let you know when we're talking about that President Obama.)

So my small thought for today is: What might the rest of the world, including all those dastardly villains, think of an America that is overrun, and even run, by grotesque buffoons like these?

Buffoons who preach the gospel of "National Security" but whose ranks are filled with war wimps who love preaching war but who themselves never served in the military and pulled every string they could get their grubby mitts on to make sure that no blood relation of theirs ever did. Gutless piles of puke who, although themselves from families of immigrants, bray and screech about immigrants who in reality do the nationi's grunt jobs at near-slave wages but are imagined to be savage hordes penetrating our borders to deliver the country unto godless Commies, or godless Ebola, or godless Islam -- whichever demon their tiny brains are salivating over at the moment. Mental defectives who routinely come up empty when it comes to the things that really do affect our actual nationial security.

Yes, I bet the rest of the world -- both would-be enemies and would-be friends -- is mightily impressed to learn that that 20-day extension of DHS funding, a goal that apparently represented the very height of their ambitions, proved just impossibly out of reach.

That's all. You can go back to whatever you were doing.

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So this is what confirmation hearings are going to look like in the new Thug Senate

Dana Milbank says: "The case against [AG nominee Loretta] Lynch deflated faster than if the New England Patriots had run the hearing."

by Ken

So now we've actually seen what the confirmation process is going to look like in a Senate under the control of thugs and mental defectives. I guess it's about what any reasonably informed person would have expected; it's just more revolting to actually witness. And this is a case where most of the loonies, actually noticing how exposed they were, tried to back off.

To start with a bit fo reality check, here's some of what Dana Milbank has to say in his Washington Post column today:

GOP case against Loretta Lynch falls apart

By Dana Milbank

Loretta Lynch had them at Jim Crow.

Senate Republicans had delayed confirmation hearings for President Obama’s attorney general nominee until they took control of Congress — giving them a chance to use the nomination to protest Obama’s immigration policy and other actions by Obama and the outgoing attorney general, Eric Holder.

But those who figured they could take out their frustrations on Lynch had misjudged her: The nominee has a long and impressive résumé as a no-nonsense prosecutor, and she managed at Wednesday’s hearing to be both assertive and anodyne in her testimony, expert in the law but opaque about controversial legal matters. As important, Lynch, with the help of committee Democrats, painted an unassailable biography: This daughter of a fourth-generation minister and a segregation-fighting mother from the South would be the first African American woman to be the nation’s top law enforcement official.

The case against Lynch deflated faster than if the New England Patriots had run the hearing.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) toned down his prepared statement as he read it. “I, for one, need to be persuaded that she will be an independent attorney general,” he read, but he then departed from the text and added, “I have no reason to believe at this point she won’t be.” He read a long list of complaints about the administration’s actions but then ad-libbed, “As far as I know, Ms. Lynch has nothing to do with the Department of Justice problems that I just outlined.” . . .

WASHINGTONPOST.COM DID ITS STAR
RIGHT-WING HATCHET HEAD NO FAVOR . . .

. . . by popping in a presumably automatic link, to a November post she wrote called "Let the new Senate confirm Loretta Lynch. " Since the only factoid she could process in the skuu space traditionally occupied by a brain is IT'S ALL OBAMA'S FAULT, she puked up this:

[I]t seems President Obama would rather start an unnecessary fight than get his way and get along with Republicans. A case in point is his attorney general nominee, Loretta Lynch. . . . Barring any surprise revelation, one strongly suspects she will win confirmation in the new Senate. (Republicans have much bigger fish to fry than getting into a standoff over a female, African American nominee.)

But Obama won't wait, it seems. He would rather jam her through with Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in charge than treat the new Senate with a modicum of respect. . . .

Confirmation hearings serve other legitimate purposes aside from approving nominees. . . .

YES, AND NOW WE KNOW WHAT THOSE
SO-CALLED LEGITIMATE PURPOSES ARE

It's to set the stage for a spectacle like yesterday's SJC confirmation hearing, to allow hysterical, IQ-free thugs to wallow in their own psychotic, imbecilic filth.

Giving the new Senate every imaginable benefit of the doubt, "a modicum of respect" is by conservative estimate a million billion quadrillion times more respect than this tub of human waste could ever dream of laying claim to.

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And speaking of Governor Booby: Having established that he's a boob, is he trying now to show that he's thuggier than Fox Noise?

Fox Noise has backed off the "no-go zones," but not our Booby.

by Ken

Boy, all of today's stories seem to just tie together! Earlier today we were talking about the, er, distinguished roster of orators who have made their name in the Village by delivering responses to the president's State of the Union address, especially in the Age of Obama -- a list that will now and forever be headed by the biggest boob of them all, Louisiana Gov. Booby Jindal. Who can forget the shock of discovery that night in 2009 when most of us got our first glimpse of this latest GOP rising star, the policy genius?

Well, for better or worse, Governor Booby hasn't gone away. And perhaps sensing that this moment on the calendar is "his" time, he's plunged himself into the news, telling Britain and Europe generally about their "no-go zones," where non-Muslims fear to tread and police stay away.

For a while after the Charlie Hebdo murders the "no-go zones" were apparently part of the Right-Wing Talking Points Packet, and got a lot of play on Fox Noise (where else?). But then a funny thing happened. Fox Noise not only backtracked but started apologizing. I'd still love to know why, of all the made-up stuff the Fox Noisemakers spew 24/7 into the mediasphere, this produced such a response chez Roger Ailes. I mean, if the Noisers actually cared about the factual record, they'd probably have to start a separate Fox Noise Apology channel.

But there we had it: the Noisers apologizing for stuff they said without factual basis. But there too was Governor Booby, standing by his story! Leaving us with another question: Just as puzzling as why Fox Noise backed off the "story" is why our Booby didn't.

Luckily, washingtonpost.com Fix-master Chris Cillizza is on the case. And when it comes to explicating life forms particular to the Village like right-wing oh-so-slowly-rising stars, Chris C is the man, am I right? The gist seems to be, if I may paraphrase, that Booby is now timing his rise to coincide with the 2016 GOP presidential nominating derby, and while he's amply demonstrated his credentials as a genuine right-wing boob (the "Rick Perry factor"), for harder-core right-wing constituencies he still needs to establish his thug potential -- i.e., can he show that he's as tough as, say, Willard Romney?

Take it away, Chris! (Links onsite.)

The Fix
Bobby Jindal won’t back down on ‘no go’ zones. Why?

By Chris Cillizza

In a speech Monday in London, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), who is running for president in 2016 (this is a decidedly relevant piece of information) said there were places in Europe in which Islamic law was enforced and where non-Muslims were afraid to go. He called these places, appropriately, "no-go zones," and insisted that a willingness to allow communities like these to exist within countries was at part of the world's problem with Islamist extremists.

While Jindal's comments drew criticism, he was unbowed, insisting in an interview with CNN that he was speaking truth to power.

That interview shows what Jindal's underlying motives here may well be. In the space of 74 seconds, Jindal makes two references to "the left" -- despite the fact that the interviewer isn't asking questions about "no-go zones" in the context of politics. "The radical left wants to pretend like this problem isn't here," Jindal says at one point. "I know the left wants to make this an attack on religion ... and that's not what this is," he says at another.

Here's what Jindal is up to: He is struggling for political oxygen in a Republican field that includes (or might include) the likes of Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. So, how do you solve that problem? Throw red meat to the Republican base while simultaneously trolling the left.

It worked.

Conservatives leaped to Jindal's defense. Erick Erickson at Red State pointed out that CNN had done a report on these so-called "no-go zones." And, when Arsalan Iftikhar said on MSNBC that Jindal's comments amounted to him "trying to rub some of the brown off his skin" (Jindal is Indian American), the right responded with fury. (MSNBC said it would not have Iftikhar on as a guest again.)

Disgusting --> MSNBC Guest: Bobby Jindal ‘Trying to Scrub Some of the Brown Off His Skin’ http://t.co/OKbcSlm6Y3 pic.twitter.com/sw5PaQ1RHT
— Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) January 19, 2015

"It's embarrassing for MSNBC to give voice to such shallow foolishness," Jindal told the conservative Washington Examiner on Tuesday. "Much like Michael Moore denigrating our military servicemen, these comments deserve no comment." Curt Anderson, a consultant to Jindal, was more blunt in an e-mail to me: "Liberals hate to hear what Jindal is saying. They cannot in public argue the main points of what he is saying, so they are trying to make hay out of noting the obvious -- that 'no-go zones' are not official or part of the law. Duh."

Regardless of Jindal's motives, here's what he's accomplished: In the eyes of the random Republican activist, he's gone from the guy they vaguely remember giving a widely panned State of the Union response to the guy who is willing to stand up not only to radical Islam but also to the political left.

Thanks, Chris, and shesh! When the Right-Wing Bullies 'n' Noisemakers start slinging muck at one another, it's wisest to just jump back and try to stay out of the line of fire.


FURTHER NOTE: DID CNN "LIE"
ABOUT THE "NO-GO ZONES"?

Among the right-wing fans of European "no-go zones," there has been righteous indignation directed at CNN for hounding Governor Booby when, they say, a 2013 report on CNN itself established their existence. But washingtonpost.com's Erik Wemple Blog looked at the claim yesterday ("Bobby Jindal remarks: Does two-year-old CNN report prove existence of 'no-go zones'?") and came away, er, unpersuaded:

Commentators Erick Erickson on Red State and John Nolte on Breitbart cite a February 2013 report by CNN correspondent Dan Rivers as evidence that the network is questioning a phenomenon that it already knows to be true. “JINDAL NONTROVERSY: CNN CAUGHT LYING ABOUT MUSLIM ‘NO GO ZONES,” notes the headline on Notle’s piece.

The CNN report in question, by correspondent Dan Rivers, provides a profile of … well, here’s how it was described in a teaser: “Sharia law in the heart of London, details of Muslim vigilantes harassing women, gays, people just out for a drink.” Rivers walked the streets of Whitechapel with the so-called Muslim patrol — yes, vigilantes who were out to harass people and make them follow their rules. “You cannot dress like that in Muslim area,” said one of the patrolmen to a woman dressed in a skirt.

Evidence, indeed, of Jindal’s comment that there are some Muslims trying “to carry out as much of Sharia law as they can…”

Yet the 2013 CNN report also deflates this whole “no-go” thing. First of all, Rivers reports that “only a handful of men are involved in the self-styled patrols.” Second, Rivers reports that five people had been arrested “on suspicion of harassment.” Third, Rivers reports that the “vast majority of Muslim people living in this part of East London want nothing to do with vigilantes whatsoever.” Fourth, Rivers reports that “police patrols have been stepped up as the authorities take a tough line.” Arrests, heightened police presence — not exactly the hallmarks of what we’ve come to know in recent weeks as a “no-go zone.”

You have to especially love the Nolte "CNN CAUGHT LYING" headline. It's fun when people who wouldn't or maybe just couldn't tell the truth about anything if their lives depended on it call other people liars.

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Those goddamn Frenchies . . . oh wait, suddenly we love the French

This week's New Yorker cover -- "Solidarité," by Ana Juan

by Ken

I've refrained from comment on the horrors in Paris, because really what is there to say? The realities of the situation are at once clear and deeply twisted, at once a challenge to conscience and a summons to abject hopelessness. But one thing you can count on is that the American Right, which can always be counted on not just to get it wrong, but to get it wrong from every imaginable angle, will get it violently wrong, displaying perhaps unprecedented depths of ignorance, imbecility, dishonesty, vileness, degradation, and savagery. Take the case of Texas Rep. Randy Weber, who in his now-famous tweet put himself in the position of urging, as washingtonpost.com's Alexandra Petri put it, "Oh, President Obama, why can't you be more like Hitler?"

The congressman has apologized, of course, but it's hard to think what a suitable apology might be for screeched ignorance of such violence, even with the obvious explanation that the screecher is screeching without benefit of a working brain. Note that I say "explanation," not "excuse."

I was especially grateful to Dana Milbank for his ripe appreciation, in his Washington Post column today, of the irony of the American Right's sudden-found solidarity with the French.

A decade ago, Republicans in Congress were renaming French fries “freedom fries” and French toast “freedom toast” because of that country’s refusal to support the Iraq war. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld belittled the “old Europe” French, President George W. Bush mocked an American reporter for speaking French to the French president, and conservative critics called the French “weasels,” “appeasers” and worse. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, was ridiculed by the Bush administration for being “too French” and looking French, and his fluency in French was a liability in the campaign.

And now, that very same Monsieur Kerry, the secretary of state, and his boss, President Obama, are being condemned by conservatives for . . . not being nice enough to the French.

Quelle horreur!

And Dana goes on to note with special astonishment the fatuousness, as well as historical obliviousness, of charging Secretary Kerry with insufficient sympathy for the French.

BUT TO RETURN TO REALITY --

Contrary to the delusive imagining of GWB-era Pentagon buttwipe Dov Zakheim, who spoke of "what may have been the most important demonstration for decency since the fall of the Berlin Wall," beyond the feel-good symbolism of the even, it has no practical significance. All those leaders can get together and wag their fingers at the terrorists, but that won't lessen either (a) the underlying grievances of the peoples among whom terrorism has arisen or (b) our general powerlessness to protect ourselves from the terrorists even as the would-be bullying in fact strengthens them.

Even as the French nation makes its brave show of standing up for freedom of expression, the result will be the opposite, in part because the French legal system's stakehas never been in protecting free speech but in limiting it, making sure that any exercise of it that's subject to challenge falls into the extremely limited categories of speech that are protected under law. And meanwhile, not only in France but most everywhere else, the defense of freedom of expression will be carried out mostly by clamping down on it.

Of course you could argue that this suits the right-wing thugs just fine, since clamping down on freedom of expression has always been high on their list of priorities. Oh sure, the American Right over the last decade or so has come to fall back repeatedly on free speech as its bulwark, but of course they're no less opposed to free speech, to all freedom of expression really, than they ever were. The whole point about the freedom of expression is that it's meant to cover the people you don't agree with. The Righties have no interest in the freedom of expression of people they don't agree with. All they care about is their right to lie, smear, and brutalize with every resource at their disposal. If all else fails, they seem to say, we'll Second Amendment you into oblivion.

Which brings us to the latest outbreak of right-wing psychosis. With their brains, as usual, set to Absolulte Zero IQ mode, they have -- surprise -- arrived at a state of affairs where the villain of this dramedy is (who else?) President Obama, and maybe Secretary of State Kerry.

Yes, the U.S. should have had some sort of representation in Paris. But as Dana Milbank puts it, this falls "in the category of faux pas," not diplomatic crisis.

Sending the president across the ocean on 36 hours’ notice to an open-air rally of hundreds of thousands of people was never a possibility, for security and logistical reasons. But Vice President Biden could have gone; instead, the closest he got to Paris was dining at the French restaurant Le Diplomate in Washington on the eve of the attack. At least Attorney General Eric Holder, already in Paris, might have dropped by. Officials I spoke to said it was a simple screw-up: They didn’t understand how significant the event would be, with leaders of some 40 countries in attendance.

To imagine that the demonstration, beyond its very low-level feel-good quality, is of any practical importance is to show an absolutely total lack of understanding of absolutely any of the issues involved, from the simplest to the most complex.

The fact remains that the people who believe in free speech will now be looking over their shoulders, even as they can't be protected from violence, while the people who don't believe in free speech have the pleasure of attacking it and circumscribing it -- in the name of protecting it! This is so preposterous that it ought to be funny. It just happens not to be.

This is actually not much different, if you think about it, from the way the paradox of the right-wing call for brutal repression of terrorism, which has the effect -- so obvious that even the brain-deadest right-winger should be able to see it -- of creating broader, deeper, and more tenacous support for the grievances that underlie it. Even as George W. Bush was blundering his way through Iraq, wasn't it blindingly obvious that the long-term effect (and I don't mean all that long-term) would be to create more terrorists with deeper and wider support? But this turns out to suit the interest of the right-wing blowhards, because it ensures them of a permanent subject for blowing hard on.

So we have people (and I use the term in its broadest, most genetically fundamentalist sense) like Rafael "Ted from Alberta" blithering about it with an even more example of his invariable cretinousness and viciousness. Is there any possible explanation for him not being safely confined in a maximum-security mental facility, for both his own and the world at large's benefit?

In other words, it's business as usual.

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Of course there's no chance of any actual discussion about immigration

From today's Washington Post "Tuesday's Opinions" e-mail

by Ken

If I told you that I didn't bother to click through to the specimen of op-ed illumination promised by the above e-blurb, and merely waved it at you saying "See? See?," you would probably say, "Well, sure, that's dumber than dirt, but it probably doesn't represent what that noted far-right-wing sage Marc A. Thiessen really wrote or, you know, oversimplifies it." (As if everything MAT writes didn't come to us presimplified down to the single-cell-life-form level.)

So I clicked through, and you know what? What the simple one actually says is if anything dumber. To wit:

President Obama’s immigration address was profoundly moving and deeply cynical. Obama spoke of the plight of illegal immigrants who struggle in the shadows to build a better life for their kids and of his desire to “work with both parties” to find a solution. If Obama really believed a single word of that, he would not have taken unconstitutional executive action that he knows will kill any chances for reform.

Obama is not acting to help illegal immigrants. He is acting to provoke the GOP. The giveaway moment in Obama’s address was when he told Republicans that “Americans are tired of gridlock” and urged them not to “let a disagreement over a single issue be a deal breaker on every issue. That’s not how our democracy works, and Congress certainly shouldn’t shut down our government again just because we disagree on this.” . . .

You're welcome to pursue this on your own if you like: "Obama's cynical immigration ploy." But whatever one may think of the president's planned executive action on immigration, it's simply impossible for anyone with a working brain to say with any degree of sincerity that the purpose of the president's initiative is "to provoke Republicans." (On the simplest, most literal level, it would be a simply imbecilic idea, only likely to occur to someone who's not only an imbecile but an imbecile of a particularly paranoid and savage variety, such that from the fetid muck of your pre-brain might arise a pre-thought along the lines: "Leastwise that's what I'd fuckin' do if someone fuckin' put me in fuckin' charge of some fuckin' thing.")

I threw in the "with any degree of sincerity" to cover the possibility that Marc T isn't really that stupid -- is it even humanly possible to be that stupid? -- and rather is, for some unknown purpose, simply lying his putrid guts out. Although he has a long track record that suggests something close to a genius level at stupidity, it could instead by some sort of cunning. Perhaps it would be helpful if he began, as I've suggested in the past, by saying either "Speaking as a pathological liar" or "Speaking as a gibbering idiot." But would it make much difference?

The reality is that the dope has somehow gotten this electrical impulse (I hate to dignify it by calling it an "idea") buzzing about his brain, most likely by implantation from some other ultra-right-wing zero-brain-function life form, this notion that the president "is acting to provoke the GOP," and he's by God going to keep blithering about it until his word count says it's time to stop.

It's not even worth going into, say, what Marc T knows about the Constitution. The zero-brainers have implanted in his brain that this executive action is, plain and simple, unconstitutional, even though the whole pack of them put together don't know anything about the Constitution except that it's awful scratchy when you try to use it to wipe your festering stinkybutt.

What's important here is to note the effect: It makes any discussion of the rights and wrongs of, and possible fixes for, immigration policy literally impossible. And there you have the whole hulking Modern American Right: "Our brains are like a fortress, and no way can you come in."

And these hulking life forms loom and bluster and threaten, and there is no sentient human being to talk to. In some hard-to-quantify ratio they're people who either: (a) have no capacity to receive and process information, or (b) are at the service of masters who in one way or another command their fealty.

And Benghazi to you too, buttwipe.

(Afterword: Apologies to Professor Lakoff. Yes, I know I'm supposed to be remembering that right-wingers aren't stupid, and aren't necessarily even lying; they just have different values from regular people. I'm really trying, George. It's just that I look at a lunk like Marc T and I don't see values, I see a yutz who, apparent from his dominant mode of self-promoting careerism is brain-dead beyond believe, and viciously determined to avenge his deep awareness of his personal worthlessness on, well, any poor fucker he can get in the crosshairs of his word processor.)

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This line from "Ever Decreasing Circles" almost made me feel sorry for brain-locked right-wingers

Until eerily close to air time, the show didn't have theme music, or even a name. Then somebody, or probably somebodies, thought of (a) Ever Decreasing Circles and (b) No. 15 of Shostakovich's 24 Preludes for Piano, Op. 34 (played by pianist Ronnie Lane). In Part 1 of the pilot episode, "The New Neighbour" (Part 2 is here), Richard Briers is Martin Bryce; Penelope Wilton is Ann Bryce; Peter Egan is Paul Ryman, the new neighbour; and Stanley Lebor is old neighbor Howard Hughes (no, a different Howard Hughes).

"No, no, what we mustn't do, Martin, is deprive ourselves of the sheer excitement of not knowing what we might end up with."

-- Paul Ryman (Peter Egan), in "House to Let," Episode 3 of
Series 3 (aired September 1986) of Ever Decreasing Circles

by Ken

I love that phrase "the sheer excitement of not knowing what we might end up with." I can't tell you who exactly wrote the line, because Ever Decreasing Circles was written by one of the great TV writing teams, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey. In one of the DVD audio commentaries, recorded some 20 years after the series (1985-87, plus a 1989 special) finished, the actors recall Esmonde as a "dark" writer and Larbey as contrastingly "light," one of the things that, obviously, made them such a good team. In case you don't instantly recall the names, they had written the classic series The Good Life -- which we in the U.S. got as Good Neighbors, for some name-conflict reason -- with the great team of Richard Briers, Felicity Kendal, Penelope Keith, and Paul Edding. (The DVDs were released in 2007, at which time, by great good fortune, Richard Briers, Penelope Wilton, and Paul Egan were all still available and eager to participate. The audio commentaries are spectacular.)

To illustrate the brilliance of Esmonde and Larbey: After they've concocted that wonderful line about "depriv[ing] ourselves of the sheer excitement of not knowing what we might end up with," the writers have "what we might end up with" turn out to be the Danbys, the tenants Paul has found for the the house he's bought, as an investment, in the close where he and the Bryces live. Martin is deeply concerned about the effect of a new tenant on the perfect equilibrium of the neighborhood. (Of course what Martin fears most of all is another Paul.)

Dan Danby -- borderline nuts?

As it turns out, Dan Danby is, well, borderline nuts, or perhaps over-the-border. Since his nuttiness is in the service of absolute social orthodoxy, Martin loves him, while both Paul and Martin's wife Ann are horrified. Sometimes what we end up with, after all that excitement of now knowing, turns out to be our worst nightmare. (Ann guesses correctly that what Martin assumes was an intensive search for just the right people was in fact Paul signing up the first people who looked at the place.)

The point here is that nobody could be less interested than Martin in the sheer excitement of not knowing what we might end up with, or in ending up with anything other than exactly what he expects, and approves of. The key to Ever Decreasing Circles, of course, was Richard Briers, who was one of the few actors (if there have ever been that many) who could make a character like Martin anything other than unbearable. He had spent his estimable career charming the pants off of audiences, and the show's creators reckoned that he could make Martin not only bearable but likable, but likable only in his utter impossibility. In one of the DVD commentaries, Penelope Wilton -- now best known to us as Downton Abbey's Isobel Crawley, mother of the unexpected heir to Downton, the now-late Matthew Crawley -- mentions that she used to get letters from viewers asking how she could be married to that man.

This is where comedic genius, in both the writing and the acting, comes into play. I always think of Seinfeld and the character of Kramer. Sometimes it has been pointed out to me that our Kramer, Cosmo K, was ripped out of the real-life existence of Larry David's and Jerry Seinfeld's old acquaintance Kenny Kramer, and certainly Kenny Kramer felt ripped off. But I ask the obvious question: Does anyone suppose that anyone ever found the real-life Kenny Kramer funny? I have a strong hunch that he drove acquaintances stark staring crazy, and probably night unto unbearable, about as far from amusing as you can get. The genius of the Seinfeld team, it struck me, was to have made their Kramer both hilarious and deep-down charming.

So it must have been with Ever Decreasing Circles's Martin Bryce. Martin is almost limitlessly exasperating, and the viewer often wonders, as those correspondents of Penelope Wilton's wrote her, how her character could have remained married to Martin. But, almost incredibly, the team of writers Esmonde and Larbey and actor Briers made Martin both entertaining and, infuriating as he is, sympathetic. He means so well, after all, and after all what could have produced a person so deeply damaged?

So maybe it was because of this context, the context of Martin's hopeless befuddlement, that I was able to hear Paul's line -- the line about "the sheer excitement of not knowing what we might end up with" -- so vividly. And heard it as something like a textbook description of the far-right-wing mind. For the adherents of right-wing orthodoxy, what matters more than never having to be uncertain about what to expect, and that what they expect is all their old certainties.

And suddenly I found myself feeling sorry, almost, for all those right-wingers who have been denied, or have denied themselves, the saving human grace of curiosity, of looking at the world around them with a passion to understand and explain -- and to reserve for themselves the sheer excitement of not knowing what they might end up with.

Ironically, they can't ever get their wish to always know what they're going to end up with, because reality doesn't allow it. Reality insists on behaving according to its own rules, showing hardly any respect for the protocols of institutionalized hokum.

There's a lot more to talk about in this connection, but for now let me just feel a little bad for those people who deny this fundamental aspect of their humanity, the deep-rooted need to explore and try to understand.

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Yes, we know, guns don't kill people

"Much like the long-running national debates about jumping off a roof, licking electrical sockets, and gargling with thumbtacks, the vexing question of whether children should fire military weapons does not appear headed for a swift resolution.

" 'Like the issue of whether you should sneak up behind a bear and jab it with a hot poker, this won't be settled any time soon,' [pollster Davis Logsdon] says."

-- from The Borowitz Report

by Ken

Yes, we know, guns don't kill people. Sometimes nine-year-old moppets frolicking with Uzis on gun ranges kill people {"Child firing Uzi at Ariz. shooting range accidentally kills instructor, police say").

Gun enthusiasts become heated in their defense of responsible gun ownership and use. And I'm sure many of them are responsible. And yes, we're hearing some of them saying, "Wtf?" At this point, however, it carries less and less weight in the face of their steadfast defense of a do-nothing policy on gun control.

Earlier tonight I voiced some reluctance to make a big deal of the news that, just as opponents of torture warned out at the time of the waterboarding scandal, the practice has now been turned against us, now that we know that executed newsman James Foley and others have been waterboarded by the ISIS thugs. Gosh, who coulda predicted?

Despite my reluctance I thought it extremely important for once to try to hold the right-wing slugs who had pooh-poohed waterboarding and the whole torture scandal for their avalanche of lies and delusions. Similarly, I think it's important that the scum-of-the-earth liars and deluders of the NRA be forced to work a little harder at their never-ending game of lying and deluding.

Over at Daily Kos, Hunter passes on this presumably accidental but, shall we say, embarrassing juxtaposition:

Here's what the NRA Women twitter account piped up with on Wednesday while the rest of American media was showing videotape of a presumably now-traumatized 9-year-old girl losing control of a fully automatic Uzi before spraying her tourist-friendly "instructor" with bullets, killing him.



The tweet was deleted about an afterwards; the article linked to is a look at various products meant to make shooting at things more fun for small kids, such as targets shaped like animals or zombies or targets with bright colors or things that explode when you shoot them. You know, kid stuff. They do note, parents, that with the exploding targets you "do need to be extra careful."

So smooth work yet again, NRA. And hey, technically you did hold off until the body was cold—we might even count that as an improvement over your past work.

It was just earlier this month that I was registering astonishment and horror at the publication of a kiddie book, My Parents Open Carry ("An Open Carry Adventure/Safe - Responsible - Fun"). Yes, this is what we need, teaching kiddies to drool over guns. Raw Story's Scott Kaufman noted in his report:

The book’s authors, Brian Jeffs and Nathan Nephew, claim that they were inspired to write the book because they “looked for pro-gun children’s books and couldn’t find any. Our goal was to provide a wholesome family book that reflects the views of the majority of the American people, i.e., that self-defense is a basic natural right and that firearms provide the most efficient means for that defense.”

Well, maybe Monday's incident was just one of those things that happens. What're you gonna do? Oh sure, people are wondering what the hell a nine-year-old was doing with a submachine gun in her hands. Well, go figure!

The CNN report linked above included this:

Charles Vacca was accidentally shot in the head as he instructed the 9-year-old girl how to fire an Uzi, an Israeli-made 9mm submachine gun. As she pulled the trigger, the gun jumped out of her left hand toward Vacca, who was standing beside her.

"To put an Uzi in the hands of a 9-year-old ... is extremely reckless, " CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes said.

Gun experts contacted by CNN on Wednesday said young children should be taught to shoot with single-shot firearms rather than submachine guns.

They also said that safe learning is connected to the ability and experience of the instructor.

"It's always the supervision," said Greg Danas, president of Massachusetts-based G-and-G Firearms. "But you also have gun enthusiasts running businesses where they place firearms in the hands of the uninformed, whether they're 9-year-old kids who are not capable or adults. It all stems from gun enthusiasts running businesses that require a level of professionalism and education. The unexpected with firearms is something that's only learned through years of being a trainer, not a gun enthusiast."

Representatives of the gun range declined CNN requests for comment on the incident. But Sam Scarmardo, who operates Bullets and Burgers, told CNN affiliate KLAS on Tuesday they "really don't know what happened."

Did you catch that? "Gun experts contacted by CNN on Wednesday said young children should be taught to shoot with single-shot firearms rather than submachine guns." I guess it's wisdom like this that qualifies them as "experts." Yessir, the system is working like a machine -- a death machine.

It seems to me that a bevy of idiots collaborated to make the Arizona incident possible. The nine-year-old girl behaved like an idiot, but then, she's nine. What can possibly have been going on in the heads of the adult idiots who collaborated?


THE BOROWITZ REPORT TARGETS THE "EXTREMELY
COMPLEX ISSUE OF CHILDREN FIRING MILITARY WEAPONS"

August 28, 2014

NATION DEBATES
EXTREMELY COMPLEX ISSUE
OF CHILDREN FIRING
MILITARY WEAPONS

By Andy Borowitz



WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — Across the United States on Wednesday, a heated national debate began on the extremely complex issue of children firing military weapons.

“Every now and then, the nation debates an issue that is so complicated and tricky it defies easy answers,” says pollster Davis Logsdon. “Letting small children fire automatic weapons is such an issue.”

Logsdon says that the thorny controversy is reminiscent of another ongoing national debate, about whether it is a good idea to load a car with dynamite and drive it into a tree.

“Many Americans think it’s a terrible idea, but others believe that with the correct supervision, it’s perfectly fine,” he says. “Who’s to say who’s right?”

Similar, he says, is the national debate about using a flamethrower indoors. “There has been a long and contentious national conversation about this,” he says. “It’s another tough one.”

Much like the long-running national debates about jumping off a roof, licking electrical sockets, and gargling with thumbtacks, the vexing question of whether children should fire military weapons does not appear headed for a swift resolution.

“Like the issue of whether you should sneak up behind a bear and jab it with a hot poker, this won’t be settled any time soon,” he says.

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"Don’t listen to the right-wing lies about inequality. Know the truth, and act on it." (Robert Reich)

"The truth is, America’s lurch toward widening inequality can be reversed. But doing so will require bold political steps."

-- Robert Reich, in "The Four Biggest
Right-Wing Lies About Inequality"

by Ken

It's hardly surprising that the Right doesn't want to talk about economic inequality, and is so quick to label any impudent talk about the subject as "class warfare." After all, economic inequality has been one of the principal goals of the warfare their preferred class has been waging against the rest of us for decades now.

There aren't many people who are better than Berkeley professor Robert Reich at laying these economic facts of life out simply and clearly, and if you haven't already seen this piece (which I encountered via the invaluable Nation of Change), I think you'll be glad to see it. He's such a splendid explainer that I think I'll just shut up and let him talk.

The Four Biggest Right-Wing
Lies About Inequality

by Robert Reich

Even though French economist Thomas Piketty has made an air-tight case that we’re heading toward levels of inequality not seen since the days of the nineteenth-century robber barons, right-wing conservatives haven’t stopped lying about what’s happening and what to do about it.

Herewith, the four biggest right-wing lies about inequality, followed by the truth.

LIE NO. 1: The rich and CEOs are America’s job creators

So we dare not tax them.

The truth is the middle class and poor are the job-creators through their purchases of goods and services. If they don’t have enough purchasing power because they’re not paid enough, companies won’t create more jobs and economy won’t grow.

We’ve endured the most anemic recovery on record because most Americans don’t have enough money to get the economy out of first gear. The economy is barely growing and real wages continue to drop.

We keep having false dawns. An average of 200,000 jobs were created in the United States over the last three months, but huge numbers of Americans continue to drop out of the labor force.

LIE NO. 2: People are paid what they’re worth in the market

So we shouldn’t tamper with pay.

The facts contradict this. CEOs who got 30 times the pay of typical workers forty years ago now get 300 times their pay not because they’ve done such a great job but because they control their compensation committees and their stock options have ballooned.

Meanwhile, most American workers earn less today than they did forty years ago, adjusted for inflation, not because they’re working less hard now but because they don’t have strong unions bargaining for them.

More than a third of all workers in the private sector were unionized forty years ago; now, fewer than 7 percent belong to a union.

LIE NO. 3: Anyone can make it in America with enough guts, gumption, and intelligence

So we don’t need to do anything for poor and lower-middle class kids.

The truth is we do less than nothing for poor and lower-middle class  kids. Their schools don’t have enough teachers or staff, their textbooks are outdated, they lack science labs, their school buildings are falling apart.

We’re the only rich nation to spend less educating poor kids than we do educating kids from wealthy families.

All told, 42 percent of children born to poor families will still be in poverty as adults – a higher percent than in any other advanced nation.

LIE NO. 4: Increasing the minimum wage will result in fewer jobs

So we shouldn’t raise it.

In fact, studies show that increases in the minimum wage put more money in the pockets of people who will spend it – resulting in more jobs, and counteracting any negative employment effects of an increase in the minimum.

Three of my colleagues here at the University of California at Berkeley — Arindrajit Dube, T. William Lester, and Michael Reich – have compared adjacent counties and communities across the United States, some with higher minimum wages than others but similar in every other way.

They found no loss of jobs in those with the higher minimums.

The truth is, America’s lurch toward widening inequality can be reversed. But doing so will require bold political steps.

At the least, the rich must pay higher taxes in order to pay for better-quality education for kids from poor and middle-class families. Labor unions must be strengthened, especially in lower-wage occupations, in order to give workers the bargaining power they need to get better pay. And the minimum wage must be raised.

Don’t listen to the right-wing lies about inequality. Know the truth, and act on it. 

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