Strange Guest on a Sunday Talk Show

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Monday May 13, 2013 · 2:44 AM PDT

2013/05/13 · 02:44

Very early Sunday morning, Nicole Belle publishes "Sunday Morning Bobblehead Thread" at Crooks & Liars, listing all the distinguished luminaries who will be appearing that day on the political talk shows.

For years I watched as many of those shows as I could, especially NBC's highly rated Meet The Press. (I used to like the late Tim Russert, whom I thought was one of the more courageous interviewers; today's David Gregory, not so much.) I thought I was staying well-informed by watching the latest political controversies being debated by prominent, influential people who could offer some valuable insight.

Eventually, though, I came to realize I kept seeing the same fat cats telling the same lies, bobbing and weaving in completely predictable fashion, without any pushback from the same compliant hosts. I reached a point where I couldn't stand it any more; I haven't watched a Sunday talk show for a long time.

Speaking of fat cats, several years ago I was watching an episode of Fox & Friends (I know, I know) when guest Geraldo Rivera was discussing a proposed tax bill that would only affect those with an income of more than $400,000 a year, an amount that seemed pretty damned high to me. Said Rivera to Doocy, Kilmeade and whoever that blonde is: "Let's face it, all of us make a lot more than $400,000 a year."
I nearly fell out of my chair. Like it or not, whether he deserves it or not, Geraldo Rivera has been a controversial and notorious media star for decades (H/T to Homer Simpson of the B-Sharps: "There was nothing in Al Capone's vault, But it wasn't Geraldo's fault -- d'oh!'). Learning that he made "a lot more than $400,000 a year" did not come as a surprise -- but those third-rate hacks on the Fox couch? Outrageous!

tequilamockingbird

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Sunday March 25, 2012 · 10:45 PM PDT

2012/03/25 · 22:45

Santorum won Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama; Gingrich won Georgia and South Carolina. Romney won a whole bunch of states where his victory is irrelevant, because those states will vote Democratic in the general.

The South -- the Republican heartland -- has no love for Romney. Huge numbers of voters there will vote for Romney because he has an (R) behind his name, but they won't knock on doors for him; they won't man the phones for him; they won't donate money to him. And on election day, they may not even work up enough enthusiasm to go to the polling station and vote for him.

President Gingrich?

tequilamockingbird

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Saturday September 24, 2011 · 10:36 PM PDT

2011/09/24 · 22:36

Fox News polled 70,000 Fox viewers after the Fox/Google Republican debate. After a few hours, they pulled the results off their website, apparently because they weren't too happy with the results:

Ron Paul: 39%
Mitt Romney: 23%
Rick Perry: 13%
Herman Cain: 11%
Newt Gingrich: 7%
Michele Bachmann: 2.25%
Gary Johnson: 1.95%
Jon Huntsman: 1.59%
Rick Santorum: 1.44%

Herman Cain subsequently won a meaningless straw poll in Florida with 37%, far outpacing Perry (15%) and Romney (14%).

Well, the Republican race is heating up (melting down?).

tequilamockingbird

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Wednesday July 20, 2011 · 10:11 PM PDT

2011/07/20 · 22:11

I think it's important that the debt ceiling situation be explained to people in simple, clear, understandable terms. Here is my layman's perception of the artificial "crisis" the Republicans are forcing on the nation. If you have any corrections or suggestions as to how to better explain the situation in simple terms, I'd appreciate it.

The debt ceiling is a limit on the amount of debt the United States can incur. U.S. debt has been rapidly increasing since the Reagan administration, when the country went from being the world's biggest creditor to the world's biggest debtor. Nevertheless, the country has honored its debt and made its payments every year. It makes those payments out of the tax revenues it receives, and any shortfall is covered by the sale of Treasury bonds, to individuals and to foreign countries. As long as U.S. Treasuries are seen as a safe investment, the government will be able to pay its debts.

If the debt ceiling is not raised, the U.S. will lose the ability to pay its debts to bondholders and simultaneously keep the federal government running at its present level. No one knows what would happen, because such a situation has never arisen before. But one thing is sure: Whatever happens, it's going to be bad.

tequilamockingbird

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Tuesday July 12, 2011 · 12:46 PM PDT

2011/07/12 · 12:46

Have any of you read posts by "The Relentless Conservative" featured on Huffington Post? If not, you're in luck.

I've seen five of his pieces. In his first column, he purported to be offering an olive branch to "intelligent liberals"; by his second, he was spewing nonsense and insults. He would not be out of place as a feature writer on RedState or Atlas Shrugs.

I read HuffPo all the time. Since reading TRC's third column, I have written a protesting comment each time, urging they remove this guy as a contributor. (HuffPo, of course, censors a lot; I don't think my comments are published.) But from now on I intend to read HuffPo only until I reach this guy's column; at that point, I'll write a comment in protest and leave the site.

I urge fellow Kossacks to join me; if you read HuffPo, please leave a protesting comment to TRC's posts. The occasional article from such as Erickson, Breitbart, or Tony Blankley is one thing; a regular feature from a right-wing mudslinger that has no wit, no insight, and nothing important to say is something else entirely.

Justice, circa 1970

tequilamockingbird

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Sunday June 12, 2011 · 11:57 PM PDT

2011/06/12 · 23:57

I was about 18 years old when I picked up my local paper and read three articles on page 1.

The first was how the 22-year-old heir to the founders of a megastore had wrapped his Porsche around a tree and was found in possession of a small amount of marijuana that in those days -- 1970 or so -- would have put me in jail for 20 years. He was given probation and a $1,000 fine. Big money in 1970, but not to a kid that rich.

The second was that a theft ring had been busted and an apartment discovered filled with washers, dryers, fridges, and ranges -- dozens of them, piled floor to ceiling. The perps were given probation.

The third was an 18-year-old who had done a grab-and-run at the bus station: as bags were being unloaded, he had grabbed one and started to run. He was tackled, subdued, taken to jail -- and sentenced to three years in prison.

Well, I'll be damned - I'm a Marxist!

tequilamockingbird

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Saturday June 11, 2011 · 1:05 AM PDT

2011/06/11 · 01:05

There's a great piece by Bob Burnett at Huffington Post entitled Roll Over, Karl Marx.

In the thirties and forties, the American Left embraced Marxist ideas, but in the fifties Communism and Marxism fell out of favor; first because of revelations about the genocidal policies of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin and then due to the "red scare" launched by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Okay, that's where I came in. My parents were middle class. My father had a university education -- rare in those days -- and managed a store; my mother was a homemaker until the late fifties, like almost all women. Politically, they were lefties who had suffered growing up during the Great Depression. I sympathized with them, admired them, and wanted to emulate them, but the general public's anti-Communist feeling was too strong. Politically, I became a pale version of my parents, with leftist leanings but also going with the popular flow.

"Marxism" was a dirty word. Support in Canada for my parents' CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) -- or my generation's version of it, the NDP (New Democratic Party) -- was as far as public opinion would tolerate. So while in my politically formative years I read a little -- a very little -- about Marx and Marxism, it was with a very jaundiced eye. After all, Marx's predicted revolution had led to terrible circumstances for the people of Russia, and to the horror of Stalinism.

tequilamockingbird

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Friday June 03, 2011 · 10:07 PM PDT

2011/06/03 · 22:07

On today's episode of Washington Week, Speaker John Boehner was reported as saying: "If you talk to job creators around the country, like we have, they'll tell you that the overtaxing, overregulating, and overspending that's going on here in Washington is creating uncertainty and holding them back."

That's the Republican economic plan in a nutshell: Cut, Cut, Cut. Cut taxes, cut government regulation, and cut government spending (on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, education, and programs for the poor; certainly not on defense, or on subsidies to Big Oil, Big Pharma, or Big Ag). Then the "job creators" -- where have they been since the Clinton administration, anyway? -- will no longer feel uncertain or held back, and those piles of money they've been sitting on will finally start to trickle down, as was foretold 30 years ago by St. Ronald of Reagan. Cake and ice cream for everyone!

You think?

Me neither.

tequilamockingbird

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Wednesday June 01, 2011 · 3:01 PM PDT

2011/06/01 · 15:01

Tea Party Republicans were elected in large numbers in November 2010 with the promise of Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. The economy was struggling; while there had been constant private sector growth, that growth was slow and uncertain, and unemployment remained unacceptably high. A "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" platform was a vote-getter, even though the GOP were extremely vague about where these jobs were to come from. Rather than proposing anything concrete at all, their proposals were along the lines of: We will cut taxes on corporations and the rich, thereby unleashing a dynamo of job creation and prosperity for all as the wealth trickles down.

If that policy had worked, the economy would have boomed for the last 30 years and George W. Bush would have presided over the greatest job-creation period in history. Instead, it was one of the worst job-creation periods in history, culminating in the most savage economic downturn since the Great Depression.

The newly elected Tea Partiers took office in January. By now, any kind of job-creation effort has dropped off the radar screen. When out of power, the Republican strategy had been to be The Party Of No. Newly resurgent in the House, they have become The Party Of Cut, Cut, Cut -- but only in the right places! Nothing that would hurt them or their wealthy friends!

Here are the basics of the Tea Party Republican economic plan.

tequilamockingbird

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Sunday May 22, 2011 · 5:58 AM PDT

2011/05/22 · 05:58

Many conservative pundits hungered for Mitch Daniels to enter the race to bolster the contingent of "adult" candidates; now that he's taken himself out of the race, here's how things stand:

FIRST TIER
These people have a legitimate shot at winning the nomination. Their political fortunes may wax and wane, and two of them will eventually be relegated to the second tier before they withdraw. Right now Gingrich is flailing wildly at the bottom of the pack, trying to avoid that fate.

tequilamockingbird

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Saturday May 21, 2011 · 5:45 AM PDT

2011/05/21 · 05:45

"According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously."

That's according to an article entitled The Guantanamo "Suicides" by Scott Horton, a professor at Columbia Law School known for his work in human rights law and the law of armed conflict, in Harper's Magazine on January 18, 2010.

Those events took place late in the day on June 9, 2006. The NCIS report was two years later. But Horton tells us that a group of students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey carefully examined 1,700 pages of heavily redacted documents released by the NCIS in response to a Freedom of Information Act demand. The group concluded that the official story was "full of unacknowledged contradictions," and the military's reconstruction of the events was simply unbelievable.

tequilamockingbird

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Friday May 20, 2011 · 7:35 PM PDT

2011/05/20 · 19:35

The nomination of liberal judge Goodwin Liu for the U.S. Court of Appeals was defeated by filibuster yesterday in the Senate. 40 senators are needed to defeat a proposed statute or nomination unless 60 senators vote to invoke "cloture," which ends the filibuster and restores majority rule. According to a HuffPo article by Geoffrey R. Stone:

Yesterday, 42 Senate Republicans (joined by one conservative Democrat) used the filibuster to block the Senate's consideration of Goodwin Liu. Although 53 senators voted to invoke cloture, the minority succeeded in preventing the Senate from even voting on the nomination.

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Strange Guest on a Sunday Talk Show

Romney Can't Carry Republican Heartland

President Gingrich?

Debt Ceiling For Dummies

Boycott "The Relentless Conservative" on HuffPo

Justice, circa 1970

Well, I'll be damned - I'm a Marxist!

Boehner's economic plan: Cut, Cut, Cut! (Taxes, regulation, and spending.)

Tea Party Plan To "Take Our Country Back"

Daniels Is Out: Now What?

A Tangled Web: Murder Or Suicide At Guantanamo Bay?

Liu Filibustered: Bork Revisited