Years ago an elderly relative of mine, sick and near death, told me the only thing that kept him going was opening the paper one more morning to see what stupid shit the bastards were up to now.

He’d be alive yet if he had known that Oklahoma State Senator Ralph Shortey would surface one day, introducing a bill to ban the sale of food made from the kidneys of aborted human fetuses.

The senator believes that cells from these innocent pre-born Americans are already being used, or could be used, or might be used, or something, to enhance the flavor of soft drinks and potato chips. Or something. But let Senator Shortey tell you about it himself. Here’s the audio.

I’m in a bit of a quandary. I can’t decide who I dislike the most, Newt Gringrich or Mitt Romney. They are both exquisitely loathsome in their own unique ways. They each represent different facets of the same repulsive id. Gingrich is Gingrich, a poisonous reptile who is a hypocrite by conviction: “People want to hear what I say. It doesn’t matter what I do.” He is a bona fide scourge to our democracy, a genuine menace who will bring disaster upon us if he ever makes it to the White House. The dude is cracked. That he fancies himself the savior of civilization is laughably grotesque. It’s like Hitler insisting he was a man of peace or hearing Mussolini extol the virtues of a free press. That nasty little toad is partly responsible for making our politics as low and reprehensible as they are.

But hardly a day passes that we aren’t given a fresh new glimpse into the multi-dimensional world of Mitt Romney’s assholianism:

A ThinkProgress examination of Mitt Romney’s presidential personal financial disclosures from May 2011 reveal that the former Massachusetts governor and his wife own or owned millions of dollars worth of a Goldman Sachs investment fund invested heavily in mortgage-backed obligations. And the current owners of those mortgage debts began foreclosure proceedings against thousands of Floridians.

Along with his investments in Bain Capital funds linked to offshore tax havens, the Romneys have large investments in the Goldman Sachs Strategic Income Fund (institutional class). The firm’s March 2011 annual report for the fund notes that about 8 percent of the fund is invested in banks and 24.5 percent is invested in mortgage-backed obligations. Romney’s form says he has invested between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000 in the fund and his wife Ann has invested an additional $1 million-plus. Since the 2008 economic meltdown and the enactment of the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, this fund has done quite well, growing 7.88 percent between April 2010 and March 2011.

Yes, ladies and gentleman, he is a vulture, a despicable carrion bird who makes money by inflicting misery on others. Even his ‘successes’ are dubious: Dominoes Pizza? As I said, he makes money inflicting pain …

So who is worse, the slimy and repellent Gingrich — backstabbing moral reprobate and self-appointed savior of American civilization, cough, gag, chuckle — or the coldly venal Mitt Romney, fake Galtian capitalist hero and dog abuser?

Robert Paul Wolff is a Jewish philosopher who taught at Harvard, Columbia and Chicago before becoming head of the Afro-American Studies department at the University of Massachusetts. Now retired in North Carolina, he blogs at The Philosopher’s Stone. The excerpt below is from an essay called “Free, White, and Twenty-one.” In it he takes on the political question of the week: What Can South Carolina Possibly See in Newt?

It was more or less at this time that a new and curious linguistic practice entered the public speech of America. Ordinary White working class families began to be referred to, and increasingly referred to themselves, as “middle class.” Now “middle class” is itself a rather suspicious bastard sociological category. It does not have the historical roots and deeper meaning of “petty bourgeoisie,” which conveys the notion of shopkeepers and small business owners who, although owners of their means of production, are yet not the great geldbesitzeren or haute bourgeois who command the economic heights. But it also does not merely mean “between rich and poor.” It does, in the American context, somewhat correspond to the old distinction between “suits” and “shirts” or “white collar” and “blue collar.” However, in the racially segregated America of the ’50s and ’60s, “middle class” clearly meant suburban, respectable, not living in an inner city ghetto. It meant NOT BLACK.

The Civil Rights Movement challenged the Black Codes, it challenged Jim Crow, it challenged the deeply embedded caste system of American society. And it was successful! I will yield to no one in my outrage at the discriminations that still afflict Black Americans, but I am old enough to recall what this country was like in the ’40s and ’50s, and that change has been dramatic, transformative, and irreversible.

We may celebrate this change as the greatest progressive victory of the twentieth century, but to a large number of Americans, the change has been devastating, incomprehensible, and hateful. No longer can Whites at the bottom of the economic ladder console themselves, in the dark night of their souls, with the secret thought, AT LEAST I AM NOT BLACK.

If nothing else, Romney is capable of achieving Bushian levels of verbal chaos: “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”

And believe in. Now go sit in the corner and eat your pudding, and don’t talk to socialists.

From the Associated Press:

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. — A Marine accused of killing 24 unarmed Iraqi women and children pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty on Monday, reaching a deal that will mean a maximum of three months confinement and end the largest and longest-running criminal case against U.S. troops to emerge from the Iraq War…

[Staff Sergeant Frank] Wuterich faces a maximum of three months confinement, two-thirds forfeiture of pay and a rank demotion to private when he’s sentenced, likely on Tuesday. The plea agreement calls for manslaughter charges to be dropped…

Wuterich’s former squad members testified that they did not take any gunfire during the 45-minute raid on the homes nor find any weapons, but several squad members testified that they do not believe they did anything wrong, fearing insurgents were inside hiding.

The prosecution was further hurt by the testimony of Wuterich’s former platoon commander who said the squad was justified in its actions because house was declared “hostile,” and from what he understood of the rules of combat at the time that meant any use of force could be used and Marines did not need to positively identify their targets…

Six squad members have had charges dropped or dismissed, including some in exchange for testifying at the trial. One was acquitted.

From The Guardian, May 31, 2006:

George Bush pledged yesterday that any marines found to have been responsible for the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha last year would be punished, and that an investigation into the killings would be made available to the public…

“If, in fact, laws were broken, there will be punishment. I know this. I’ve talked to General Pete Pace [chairman of the joint chiefs of staff] about the subject. He’s a proud marine. And nobody is more concerned about these allegations than the marine corps,” he said…

The army is also examining the possibility of a cover-up by senior officers, who approved compensation to families of the victims, but failed to investigate allegations of execution-style killings until presented with hard evidence by journalists.

The first official report on the incident claimed that the civilian casualties had been killed by the roadside bomb, but the New York Times reported yesterday that a preliminary investigation by an army colonel as early as March uncovered serious discrepancies in the marines’ account.

John Murtha, a veteran marine and Democratic congressman, told CNN: “Something like this happens, they knew about it. The Iraqis knew about it. The Americans pay them, and then it goes up the chain of command and somebody stifles it.”

I have to admit I’m overjoyed that Newt Gingrich won in South Carolina.

Not that I’m a Gingrich fan, mind you, but the way he won seems indicative of some heartening trends. Obviously the victory itself, in dramatic come-from-behind fashion, combined with the reversal of the result in Iowa’s caucuses, drastically reconfigures the race for the Republican nomination. The increasing nastiness of the campaign fits the mood of many in the Republican base, and indeed of their world view. It indicates that the Reagan rule is dead and the Republican monolith disintegrating.

The relationship between the country clubbers and the fundamentalists, always exploitative, has become verbally abusive. Kansas has begun to realize that something is the matter, though without knowing precisely what, a familiar situation after all to the fearful authoritarian mindset as Altemeyer describes it. The two groups never had much in common in the way of interests, with one focused on extracting money while the other played morality police. Neither really has much use for the other’s obsession, and it was a pairing bound to rupture at some point. At this point it looks serious for the Republicans. But one must ask whether prime Republican candidates who could rise above the current crop might have opted to wait for 2016, and whether such candidates might rebuild the coalition.

The way (She Turned Me Into a) Newt managed to pull off his surprising victory bodes well for our side, too, it seems to me. Although he personally backed out of the fray after drawing blood on first contact, a Super PAC in his camp released an anti-Romney film, which portrayed Romney as a capitalist predator in ways that sometimes reminded one of a union organizer back in the day. It’s a natural theme for a populist, which is Gingrich’s current garb. The small business person, whom Republicans have long professed to love but rarely actually taken out on a date, is indeed among the targets of ruthless, predatory big business people like Romney and Bain Capital who earn their money by creative destruction, also known as profiting by firing people. Gingrich has a ready audience when he points to Romney as emblematic of the folks who move South Carolinian jobs overseas.

Occupiers who wonder if the protests left their mark can rest assured after Gingrich’s victory in South Carolina. Even the Republican base is now sufficiently angry to be set off by an anti-Wall Street message. Social dominators, Altemeyer tells us, tend to overreach in their megalomania, and it looks like they have once again tried to gather too much of the goodies into too few piles, a cyclic situation we’ve no doubt faced for many millennia.

With Gingrich’s attack on Romney’s wealth as ill-gotten, a concept previously unknown to many Republicans, inequality is once again taking center stage. The idea that maybe we shouldn’t slant all our society’s rules to benefit those who already have massively more than they need is now speakable. The barrier has been broken, and Gingrich will probably compare himself to Nixon going to China. Or perhaps Cæsar crossing the Rubicon.

Plus, what could be more entertaining than a disgraced former Speaker of the House running as an outsider?

Obama wants more foreign tourists to come to America, and he has a plan to make it happen. It’s all about facilitating the process:

Frequent travelers who pass an extensive background check will be able to scan their passports and fingerprints and skip long lines at immigration at more airports. We’re going to expand the number of countries where visitors can get pre-cleared by Homeland Security so they don’t need a tourist visa. And we’re going to speed up visa processing for countries with growing middle classes that can afford to visit America — countries like China and Brazil.

While we’re at it, why not require a stool sample as well? If the applicants are upper middle class or better, we can just let them mail it in.

That seems like a pretty big hassle to go through to see Disneyland. Is Donald Duck really worth a rectal search? Personally, I’d rather go to Napoleonland.

Hey, sports fans, the Iowa Hawkeyes play Penn State's Lady Lions Sunday at 3 p.m., eastern standard time. ESPN2 is broadcasting it nationally, so the world will have a chance to watch our favorite freshman forward in action. Bethany Doolittle wears number 51 for Iowa (scroll down for a picture of her scoring against Wisconsin).

I saw an evocative phrase in a book I was reading about the Roman Republic, a society that, like our own, was chronically plagued by extreme inequality: The fields of the poor. The fields of the poor. That’s a very picturesque way of referring to something that, in reality, was unbearably grim and awful. I don’t think it could be done today. Modern poverty defies any such sweet-sounding descriptions: The rent is late, the overdue bills are stained with soda, and your rusty Corolla leaks radiator fluid. Judge Judy is on TV. The kids are heating up frozen macaroni and cheese for dinner, and you’re praying for a call back from the manager at Target. This is home:

Try to capture that with a poetic phrase. It’s a difficult thing to do. Trailer parks of discontent? And how could you describe the broader American landscape in which this dismal scenario transpires, the one that exists outside the confines of the trailer court? Soulless parking lots of despair? Strip malls of worn-out consumerism? The specific character of American poverty reflects the specific character, in a greatly exaggerated form, of the larger American culture that produced it. The trashier the culture, the trashier the slum.

There is a unique emptiness to the wreckage we’re leaving behind. Most of it won’t have any intrinsic beauty that posterity will be able to appreciate, as, for example, we can still appreciate a Byzantine mosaic or an Etruscan vase. It will just be a mass of cheap, disposable trash. Future archaeologists will sift through layers of sheet metal, plastic, automobile parts and broken DVDs, meticulously searching for some indication that American civilization — at least in its latter stages — had any sense of value. What were they really about, future scholars will wonder, until, at their wit’s end, they’ll be forced to bow to the truth and conclude that America, in it’s final decades, wasn’t about anything at all.

They invented plastic and never looked back!

…Read on

Bethany goes up for another as Iowa downs Wisconsin 69-57:

Here’s David Brooks in his latest column: “I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return.”

Tune in next week when Brooks discovers that the earth is round, witchcraft doesn’t cause droughts after all, and the stars are not, as previously believed, pinpricks in the sky that reveal heaven’s light.

Consortium News interviews Phil Donahue, fired by MSNBC in 2003 for telling the truth in a public place:

Well, there’s almost a worship of people in power. You never see a peace worker or leader on Meet the Press. The established journalists cover established power…

So did the so-called expert generals, defense people on CNN and the other channels … I mean [the run-up to the Iraq war] was so managed and the press made it happen. One of the few journalists that I admire who doesn’t care if the White House calls them back is Sy Hersh. And I’m sure you’ve interviewed and you know you won’t see him on Meet the Press…

You know, if a Marine goes into a Fallujah home and blows away the family with an AK47 that’s a war crime. If we drop a bomb on that house and incinerate the family, it’s collateral damage. We are in denial. And we are creating language to help us continue to be in denial. This is awful…

A president doesn’t get a statue for fixing health care. The only way you get a statue in a park is winning a war. That’s why we’ve got horses and swords; we have military airplanes in parks that kids play on. We’ve cannons in parks, in parks! We celebrate war. There’s no other way to say this.

In what is surely the longest, most peculiar slog ever toward a GOP nomination for president, nothing has been or will be weirder than this story from Newsweek.

Go take a look. Trust me on this one.

The Rude Pundit quotes Martin Luther King:

Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

Exactly. Greenspan and the Chicago boys. Newtie. Governor Walker. The Koch brothers. Cantor. Perry. Reagan. Bush the Lesser. McConnell. The Tea Party. The two Pauls. On and on. All of them conscientious objectors in the war against poverty. And all of them bound, if the Bible is right, for the same place as Dives.

From The Economist:

Vietnam is the world’s second-largest coffee producer, but also one of the most obscure. Unlike coffee exports from countries such as Brazil and Ethiopia, Vietnamese beans are typically used in cheap instant Western coffee, which earns scant international commendation. His country, he declares, needs to market a trendy style of coffee drinking—like Starbucks, he adds, but finer. “Civet dung,” he proclaims. “Civet dung makes coffee good. It’s natural, and it makes real coffee.”

Mr Hung is one of a handful of Vietnamese aficionados trying to revive tastes for this epicurean and elusive beverage. At specialised coffeeshops around the world, this coffee sells for around $30 a cup. As it happens, civet cats are coffee connoisseurs. With their long noses, they sniff out and eat the best and fleshiest beans. Their digestive enzymes ferment the beans and break down the proteins. These beans, harvested from the faeces, then create a coffee that tastes rich and slightly smoky with hints of chocolate. The beverage is known in Vietnamese as ca phe chon, or civet-cat coffee, and is also commonly produced in Indonesia and the Philippines. The final cup delivers a smooth, dark palate that is stronger but, some say, less bitter than typical coffee.

From the New York Times:

LONDON — The chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, António Horta-Osório, decided Friday to give up his bonus for last year after taking a leave of absence from the struggling financial firm.

Lloyds, which is partly owned by the government, said Mr. Horta-Osório told the bank’s board that he did not wish to be considered for an annual bonus for 2011. Mr. Horta-Osório was in line for a bonus of as much as £2.4 million, or $3.7 million. The board accepted the request, Lloyds said in a statement.

“As chief executive, I believe my bonus entitlement should reflect the performance of the group but also the tough financial circumstances that many people are facing,” Mr. Horta-Osório said. “I also acknowledge that my leave of absence has had an impact both inside and outside the bank including for shareholders. On that basis, I have decided to request that the board does not consider me for a 2011 bonus…”

Are you listening, Jamie Dimon? How about you, Blankfein?

I take back every nice thing I ever said about Mitt Romney, and since I’ve never said anything nice about him it ought to be easy.

True story: I was out walking the dog the other day when a nice, kind of slow fellow wandered up and made small talk. He asked me about the dog, which is a two year old golden retriever named Farley. He’s the friendliest damn dog you’ll ever meet, a burglar’s delight. He’s so friendly, in fact, he gives me at least one quarter of the bed every night.

Anyway, anyway, this guy says to me, “So did you hear about what that one guy did, Mitch Roffner, Roffney, or whatever his name is, the guy running for president?”

I try never to hear about him if I can help it, I thought. “Nope,” I said.

“He tied his Irish Setter to the top of the car and drove down the freeway, and it pissed and shit all over the place.”

I hate to say it, but my first thought wasn’t concern for the dog’s safety. My first thought that was that if this is true, it could potentially sink Romney. Yes. “Really?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, its piss was flying all over.”

Beautiful, I thought, just beautiful. Prince Romney, Lord of Bain Capital, is a stupid and inhumane jerk. And the fact that he let his dog crap all over the public highways has a certain symbolic value, don’t you think?

When I got home I Googled it up to see if it was true. Sure enough, it was true:

The reporter intended the anecdote that opened part four of the Boston Globe’s profile of Mitt Romney to illustrate, as the story said, “emotion-free crisis management”: Father deals with minor — but gross — incident during a 1983 family vacation, and saves the day. But the details of the event are more than unseemly — they may, in fact, be illegal.

The incident: dog excrement found on the roof and windows of the Romney station wagon. How it got there: Romney strapped a dog carrier — with the family dog Seamus, an Irish Setter, in it — to the roof of the family station wagon for a twelve hour drive from Boston to Ontario, which the family apparently completed, despite Seamus's rather visceral protest.

Sigh. Double sigh. Where to begin?

Seamus doesn’t get to ride inside the car, kids. Dogs are unpredictable and make messes, like workers. He might soil our matching denim shirts. We musn’t get dog hair on our khakis! Strap him in a cage and ignore him, like the rest of those troublesome things. What do you call them? Oh yes, the people. Sorry, dears, it’s so easy to forget they’re out there.

If we were living in better times, I wouldn’t have any problem with a Romney presidency. I wouldn’t be happy about it, of course, but whaddya gonna do? He could take his place in the dull gray parade of mediocre presidents that bejewel our history, people like Chester Alan Arthur or Benjamin Harrison, or Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, or Franklin Pierce. Just about every major political figure out there gives me indigestion. Until I heard about this, though, I didn’t find Mittens any more or less disagreeable than any of the other snakes who rule us. Excuse me, I mean legislators. He’s just another garden variety rich prick who thinks he’s entitled to the presidency. They’re a dime a dozen. They seem to emerge by fuckin’ parthenogenesis in this circus of a country we live in. But what kind of asshole straps his dog to the roof of the car for twelve hours? What were wifey and the kids doing all that time, meekly obeying daddy? These people are seriously messed up. This puts him in the Sandusky zone of villainy as far as I’m concerned, or at least the Michael Vick zone.

Do you think these plastic weirdos will treat the country any better than they treated Seamus?

From Tom Degan at The Rant, a line I wish I had written:

Well over a year ago I predicted on this site that the religious bigots and crazy people who long ago hijacked the “the party of Abraham Lincoln” would never nominate Mormon Mitt Romney. “David Duke will be named head of the NAACP before that ever happens” I speculated at the time. It appears that I might be forced to eat a healthy dish of crow on the occasion of Mitt’s victory in the New Hampshire Primary last night. This is not to imply that the half-witted “base” of that party are happy about what happened last evening. Anything but. Let me put it to you this way: The Republicans just got the news that they’re pregnant and they’re trying to fall in love as rapidly as possible.

According to Wednesday’s Washington Post, a recent study by the Pew Research Center indicates that two thirds of Americans now think there are “strong conflicts between the rich and poor.”

The nonprofit think tank in Washington released a study Wednesday that reported a growing number of Americans say there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and poor — a number that has risen by 9 percent since July 2009.

Though 43 percent still believe the rich become so “because of their own hard work, ambition or education,” a full 46 percent think they become wealthy as a result of “connections or birth.” Furthermore,

… these attitudes seem to be shared regardless of income level. Nearly 67 percent of adults with a household income of less than $20,000 a year believe there are serious conflicts between the rich and poor, as do 67 percent of those earning $75,000 a year or more, Morin wrote.

Sharp class divisions are a fact of American life, and class warfare will be the inevitable result. Pointing this out is not, as Mitt Romney claims, to indulge in some spurious “politics of envy.” On the contrary, it is to engage in the politics of plain reality, to respond to the way things actually are. No amount of happy talk about fictional “opportunity societies” or ego-stroking rhetoric about Americans being “blue sky, can-do people” will change the fact that a dangerously high number of us know our lives are being flushed down the drain so a that a privileged few can buy $1200 wastepaper baskets, or a presidential candidate worth $250 million dollars can remodel his $12 million mansion in La Jolla, California, during the worst recession since the 1930s (all the while lecturing the rest of us about getting off unemployment and learning to work harder, like his rich daddy did).

“An imbalance between rich and poor,” wrote Plutarch, “is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” Our leaders need to wake up and recognize this simple fact. They need to understand that gross economic inequality, regardless of its cause, is a dangerous and corrosive social evil that must sooner or later be soberly addressed. Free-market platitudes cooked up at the University of Chicago or in the comic book mind of Ayn Rand don’t qualify as serious solutions. …Read on

Tacked on to the end of The Rude Pundit’s daily scatology is the question below. None of Romney’s Republic opponents will dare to raise it, for fear of having to answer it himself. However we can surely count on the truth-seeking pit bulls of the MSM to… Okay, okay, forget it.

In other words, everything Mitt Romney wants to do would harm Americans. Everything. So of course he’s gotta get out there and be the total dickhead he always was and always will be.

Here’s the question someone needs to ask, repeatedly, of Romney: “If you had been elected in 2008, what would you have done to clear the wreckage left behind by George W. Bush?”

Hot off the wire from CNN:

In his last days in office, outgoing Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour pardoned two men convicted of murder, a state official said Monday…

OMG, is it possible I’ve been wrong about Haley Barbour all these years? Is it possible he’s not a complete, top-to-bottom, front-to-back vicious asshole? Could he really be correcting some hideous miscarriage of justice? Nah—

Both men, according to the affiliates, were working as trusties at the governor's mansion.

Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest and a history professor at Barnard College, writing in RD Magazine:

When I lived in Iowa in the 1970s, my father was pastor of one of the largest evangelical congregations in the state. Although he remained a Republican to his death, my father was resolutely apolitical in the pulpit.

Things began to change for Iowa evangelicals — and for politically conservative evangelicals elsewhere — in the late 1970s. Iowa, in fact, was the proving ground for abortion as a political issue. Until 1978, evangelicals in Iowa (as elsewhere) were overwhelmingly indifferent to abortion, even after the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973; they considered it a Catholic issue.

The Iowa race for United States Senate in 1978 pitted Dick Clark, the incumbent Democratic senator, against a Republican challenger, Roger Jepsen. All of the polling and the pundits considered it an easy win for Clark. In the final weekend of the campaign, however, pro-lifers (predominantly Catholic) leafleted church parking lots all over the state. Two days later, in an election with a very low turnout, Jepsen narrowly defeated Clark, thereby persuading Paul Weyrich and other architects of the religious right that abortion would work for them as a political issue.

Politically conservative evangelicals in Iowa began to mobilize. Ronald Reagan carried Iowa in 1980 over Jimmy Carter, the incumbent, evangelical Democrat. In 1988 I returned to Iowa for the precinct caucuses to write about evangelicals negotiating the vagaries of political life. Many were self-identified “housewives” who were “lobbying from the kitchen table.”

The religious right in Iowa never looked back. Concerned Women for America, Beverly LaHaye’s organization, became a political force. Rush Limbaugh and other fixtures of the downstream media became staples on WHO, Iowa’s Clear Channel radio station. The radio station KWKY, located — literally — in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, became a beacon of evangelical political rhetoric, most of it leaning toward the hard right. Gannett’s purchase of the Des Moines Register in 1985 diminished the newspaper’s independent voice.

Tom Engelhardt points us to a list of the top twenty contributors to Mitt Romney’s campaign, courtesy, as he says, of “the invaluable OpenSecrets.org website”.

Goldman Sachs ($367,200)
Credit Suisse Group ($203,750)
Morgan Stanley ($199,800)
HIG Capital ($186,500)
Barclays ($157,750)
Kirkland & Ellis ($132,100)
Bank of America ($126,500)
PriceWaterhouseCoopers ($118,250)
EMC Corp ($117,300)
JPMorgan Chase & Co ($112,250)
The Villages ($97,500)
Vivint Inc ($80,750)
Marriott International ($79,837)
Sullivan & Cromwell ($79,250)
Bain Capital ($74,500)
UBS AG ($73,750)
Wells Fargo ($61,500)
Blackstone Group ($59,800)
Citigroup Inc ($57,050)
Bain & Co ($52,500)

Thomas Frank is out with a new book (excerpted in The Guardian), and the promotion includes an article at TomDispatch.

The TomDispatch article takes the form of an open letter to the Tea Party, though given their Authoritarian and Social Dominance tendencies Tea Party members are highly unlikely to read it. In the letter Frank urges Tea Partiers to get behind Mitt Romney because he’s actually their kind of guy: an explicitly anti-worker free-market capitalist who doesn’t really care about anything but money and is thus quite comfortable switching positions on social issues when necessary.

Not only that, but Romney embodies the hypocrisy of the movement as well, railing against big government while being heavily subsidized by various aspects of government policy. The Tea Party disliked Romney’s embrace of the TARP program, for example, but how much difference is there between the bankers’ demand for TARP in the face of their free-market rhetoric on the one hand, and on the other the Tea Party’s demands encapsulated in the now-iconic sign reading “Keep your government hands off my Medicare”? Both want everything that’s coming to them, and everyone else should keep their greedy hands off.

Pointing out that everyone who withdraws money from a bank that’s been bailed out by the FDIC is taking a government bailout, Frank talks to the TPers about bankers and TARP.

The reason they — I mean, you — do these things should be as obvious as it is simple: “free market” has always been a high-minded way of saying “gimme,” and when the heat rises, the “market” is invariably replaced by more direct methods, like demanding bailouts from the government you hate. Banks get bailouts for the simple reason that they want bailouts and have the power to insist on them — the same circumstances that got them deregulated in wave after wave in the Eighties, Nineties, and Aughts.

In this sense, Romney, who is loud and proud when it comes to the need for further deregulation, has actually been more consistent than you. He’s the gimme candidate of 2012 and so he should really be your guy.

Frank is an excellent writer, but more importantly a perspicacious observer. He likes to start by describing a well-known situation in such detail that we’re struck by the depth of his hipness. Then he steps back from the immediacy and applies a deep knowledge of history, particularly the history of popular movements in the US. This leads the reader to an almost postmodern realization of the nature of the spectacle. Which is immediately followed by a realization of the ridiculousness of the whole thing, in this case the idea of capitalism as a value in human life, something God-given and not to be violated at our peril.

That we don’t have pure capitalism in America is not a revelation vouchsafed to the great Tea Party awakening. For decades, the idea has been a staple of the left, where the limited-capitalist model is generally understood as a good thing. The state is involved in the economy all right, the libs say, but that’s because it has to be. A complete free market would be a disaster, something not even the business community itself wants to try. The real problem, from the liberal perspective, is that government doesn’t go far enough — it merely doles out public subsidies of one kind or another while shareholders of private companies walk off with the profits, in the now familiar scenario of socialised risk and privatised gain.

The revitalised right simply turned this argument upside down. Yes, government had its finger in every segment of the economy, and that’s what was to blame for everything that had happened. Market forces had never been truly free, and therefore they bore none of the blame for our current predicament. And so the obvious answer arose from a thousand megaphones: get government out of the picture completely. Until the day free enterprise was totally unleashed, capitalism itself could be held responsible for nothing.

My training as a private in the U.S. Army has permanently jaundiced my eye when it comes to the military. But credit where credit is due. In this pirate story from the Gulf of Oman, our navy seems to have done everything right — including a number of intelligent things that would never have occurred even to an ex-private. Added PC note: the commander of the rescuing destroyer was a woman.

Woody Allen once said his idea of hell was being locked forever in a room with an insurance salesman. That would be hellish, to be sure, but not as bad as being trapped in “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer.

If you can’t imagine what that would be like, tune into Wolf on CNN some afternoon and get ready for the Big Sleep. Before you can adjust the sound level, you will be unconscious, hypnotized by Wolf’s narcotic monotone and lost in a stupor that for some could prove fatal. Wolf is bad, very bad, but not as bad as what follows him on the Cute News Network. Wolf will make you sleepy; the others will make you sick.

OutFront with Erin Burnett, for instance. Now here’s a show that is the opposite of soporific; it is in fact — perky. Perky news. Perk, perk, perky news.

Burnett is an articulate young woman of obvious intelligence. But those are not the reasons she’s been chosen to anchor the show. She’s been chosen because she’s perky, and she’s young, and she sounds like so many other thirtysomething women. She talks very fast from somewhere in the back of her throat; she runs words together, and then runs sentences and paragraphs together. If you listen to Burnett from an adjacent room it sounds like a broadcast from a duck pond.

But, if you can stand the quacking, you might glean enough information to make you want to read a serious account of the same stories, if you can find one.

Or, you can stick your fingers in your ears and wait an hour to hear the very same stories on “Anderson Cooper 360”. Anderson’s the guy in the black tee shirt, you know, the one with prematurely gray hair you’ve seen on billboards looking resolute as he plunges through jungles and treks across Saharan wastes chasing the news. What a guy! The message on the billboards, spoken and unspoken, is that Anderson will go anywhere, risk any danger, bear any burden, to get the story for TV news viewers smart enough — hip enough — to watch CNN.

Anderson likes to say he’s keepin’ ’em honest, which is his no-nonsense way of saying nobody is pulling the wool over the super-bright, cute-as-a-button gang at the Cute News Network. A lot of people think Anderson is adorable and it doesn’t much matter what he’s saying as long as he keeps on wearing those black tee shirts. Whatever. The point is, if you like your news lighter than air, you are not going to improve on Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper. So cute!

But just to round out the picture, let’s not forget that Cute News Network doesn’t have a corner on cute news. There is cuteness to be found elsewhere on the cable channels — over at MSNBC, for instance, where Rachel Maddow spins a unique brand of irony and sarcasm that is irresistibly witty and charming, and nauseating. Like the News Kids over at CNN, Rachel is one of the leading lights of the new generation of TV news broadcasters who are unmistakably accomplished, smart as whips. And cute as buttons.

Keith Olbermann apparently failed the cuteness test at MSNBC and was cast into the darkness. Apparently, Olbermann thought ranting would trump cuteness, which shows how out of touch even a well-established TV news personality can be.

Olbermann resurfaced at Current TV, Al Gore’s entry into the cable news sweepstakes, with more tiresome rants against people and things he doesn’t like. What Olbermann never understood was that even when we didn’t like the same things he didn’t like, that didn’t mean we wanted to hear him rant and rave about them. Now there are rumors that he is in trouble with his new bosses. Sooner or later Olbermann wears thin.

He should stop obsessing about Fox News and pay more attention to the lighter-than-air gang over at CNN. Olbermann mistakes news for serious business. That’s all wrong, Keith; news is fun.

Here’s a post from W.W., on The Economist’s Democracy in America blog. You won’t get any argument from me, except over the author’s assumption that religions other than Mormonism are not equally “weird and made-up”:

Pundits keep talking about the “non-Romney” candidates, but what they really mean is the “non-Romney, non-Paul” candidates. Mr Paul, who clinched a close third-place finish Tuesday night, filled Iowa’s airwaves for months with ads aimed squarely at social conservatives, but he didn’t win anything close to Mr Santorum’s support from evangelicals or tea-party movement symps, despite the fact that Mr Santorum barely advertised at all. Why? Because Ron Paul is anti-war.

Mr Weigel, citing Sarah Posner, is spot on; the tea-party movement is “a new framework for the same conservatives who dominated the GOP a month before the Tea Party began.” Which is to say, the tea-party movement is just another expression of the American right’s signature brand of identity politics. It’s overriding concern is elevating the power and social status of those who hold dear a certain conception of American authenticity — white, evangelical, exceptionalist nationalism — and it does this, bizarrely, using the rhetoric of constitutionalism, limited government, and free markets.

Actual laissez-faire constitutionalists, such as Mr Paul, don’t stand a chance as long as they insist on leavening their exceptionalist rhetoric with the insistence that it is appropriate to evaluate American foreign policy by the same standards we use to judge others. Mr Romney’s desperate, almost lunatic jingoism keeps him in the running, but the suspicion that he is a squish on zygote murder and gay nuptials, in addition to his membership in a weird, made-up religion, keeps American-authenticity conservatives casting about for a better champion.

Mr Santorum may or may not have the talent necessary to obscure his brand of big-government, right-wing paternalism with tea-party rhetoric. But it’s certain he can’t obscure his Catholicism, which isn’t nearly as bad as Mormonism, but sure isn’t great. I reckon a combination of Mr Santorum’s popery and unusually explicit hostility to freedom will do him in. That’s why Rick Perry’s staying in the race, I think. American-authenticity conservatives don’t mind that much if their man can’t utter a non-mangled sentence, as long as he’s right with God, and it’s the right sentence.

Son Ted boils it down for us: “So coming out of Iowa, the GOP contest is Senator Man-on-Dog vs. Governor Dog-on-Car.”

Here’s Nicholas von Hoffman (Make-Believe Presidents, Pantheon Books, 1978) on the apparently indissoluble marriage between presidents and the Pentagon:

Laissez-faire, free market competition, is incompatible with the coordination, planning and allocation of resources for mobilization and the quasi-permanent war alert of our own times. Conservatives, with their free-enterprise faith, seem unable to grasp that their military and militant foreign policy assures the continued existence of the centralized state they profess to abhor.

This remains true, with the result that those segments of industry involved in war production have become so close to the Pentagon as to become indistinguishable, combining government inefficiency with private greed. Militarization is a job creator for sure, but of jobs that don’t need doing. Our massive war machine is a solution in search of a problem. Too often, it creates one.

From The Loyal Opposition:

At an early-morning rally today, a few hours before the Iowa caucuses begin, [Romney] discussed his love for the patriotic song — probably the most beloved in the canon — and recited several of the song’s verses, strongly suggesting that its vision of the country differed from President Obama’s…

The lyrics were written in 1894 by the Massachusetts poet Katharine Lee Bates, an ardent feminist and lesbian who was deeply disillusioned by the greed and excess of the Gilded Age.

Her original third verse was an expression of that anger:

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!