They never learn

The 2012 presidential campaign is over. The 2016 campaign is starting up.

Oh, dog, but I just want them all to fucking go away.

But I am compelled to comment on this. The first Republican out of the starting gate is Marco Rubio. He’s Latino! The Republicans lost the Latino vote again! So he’s exactly what they need: a brown-skinned person who’s just as stupid and socially regressive as the old white geezers they regularly nominate. Apparently, brown-skinned people won’t pay any attention at all to the policies of the candidate, but will just vote on the basis of skin color. Like white Republicans do!

But here’s the thing: Rubio is a creationist moron.

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

Marco Rubio: I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

BZZZZZT. WRONG.

We have answered that. The Earth is 4½ billion years old. It was not created in 7 days, but evolved over billions of years.

And you know, in a country faced with skyrocketing gas prices, it would be nice to have a leadership that understood where oil comes from (hint: it wasn’t poofed into existence 4000 years ago.) With looming climate change, it would be nice to have a leadership that understood how carbon cycles work and how gases affect the atmosphere (hint: no angels are involved.) With the prospect of emerging infectious diseases, it’s necessary that our leadership understand how microorganisms evolve (hint: the moral turpitude of the victims is not usually a factor.)

I don’t expect a president to be a geologist or physicist or climatologist or microbiologist, but I at least expect them to respect and use the informed advice of scientists.

Rubio won’t. Please let his campaign whither and die on his first visit to Iowa.

Only manly men are permitted in the American Taliban

It’s a sad story: the Niagara Falls Reporter was one of those urban weeklies that have been popping up all over the place in the last few decades. A good paper, apparently, with a lot of popularity…and then it was sold to a new publisher, a guy who dreamed of being Rupert Murdoch, perhaps, and it began to go downhill into teabaggery and censorship of the more liberal columnists. A movie reviewer, Michael Calleri, found his submitted reviews disappearing, strangely, so he asked why. The publisher wrote back and explained. It’s a long post with a long letter, but do not be daunted: it’s horrifying. The publisher did not like him reviewing movies with strong female characters.

I don’t want to publish reviews of films where women are alpha and men are beta.

where women are heroes and villains and men are just lesser versions or shadows of females.

i believe in manliness.

…

with all the publications in the world who glorify what i find offensive, it should not be hard for you to publish your reviews with any number of these.

they seem to like critiques from an artistic standpoint without a word about the moral turpitude seeping into the consciousness of young people who go to watch such things as snow white and get indoctrinated to the hollywood agenda of glorifying degenerate power women and promoting as natural the weakling, hyena -like men, cum eunuchs.

the male as lesser in courage strength and power than the female.

it may be ok for some but it is not my kind of manliness.

That’s just a short excerpt, and there’s much more. That guy really does not like women, except the meek and mild ones, and he hates movies that feature strong women so much that he doesn’t even want to know they exist.

He doesn’t even notice that in most movies, women “are just lesser versions or shadows of” men. I guess all we need to see in the future are more remakes of The Expendables (which so far I consider the very worst big budget movie of the decade.)

It also reflects something insidious. You can be a world-class idiot and regressive asshole and be filthy rich; there are economic niches, like, say, running a casino or a coal mine, where you can actually thrive with those characteristics, or even better, you can just inherit the wealth. And then what you can do is take over media and poison the intellectual environment.

The teabaggers know this. Christians know this. Look around you and you see it everywhere: there are so many lower level opportunities that can be snapped up and used to shape the culture: you don’t have to run for president or be rich enough to own Fox News. Run for school board, edit the local paper or entertainment weekly, charge into your regional political caucus and twist the agenda of your county. Conservatives are great at doing that, and if they don’t succeed in building something up, they’ll at least have destroyed a public school system or newspaper.

Look around your community. Stark raving lunatics can get positions of influence at the local level. And before you know it, conspiracy theorists and kooks are taking over your state, and instructing legislators on the finer points of madness:

Keep this in mind. We managed to get a conservative Democrat elected to the presidency. He’s going to be crippled because he has to work with a hierarchy of wingnuts.

Irony alert

Guess who just “called on Republicans to “stop being the stupid party” and make a concerted effort to reach a broader swath of voters with an inclusive economic message that pre-empts efforts to caricature the GOP as the party of the rich”?

Bobby Jindal.

He went on:

“It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that,” Jindal said. “It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”

Bobby Jindal. Creationist. The guy who allows state funds to pay to teach children from A Beka Books. That Bobby Jindal — the disaster from Louisiana is complaining about dumbed-down conservatism and insulting the intelligence of the American people.

Does he realize that if the Republican party wised-up and tossed out the anti-intellectual wing, he’d be one of the first up against the wall?

WTF, UK, WTF?

A fellow ‘celebrated’ Remembrance Day (aka Armistice Day aka as the end of WWI) by burning a poppy, the symbol of the day, and posting a photo to facebook. This seems to be a free speech issue to me; aren’t we supposed to be allowed to harmlessly criticize practices and ideas? And being allowed to destroy a symbol that you own seems an entirely reasonable freedom. The UK police don’t think that way: the man has been arrested for making a “malicious communication”, whatever that is.

You know what this means? We’re all going to have to post that trivial photo of a burning poppy everywhere.

That’s at the very least. If you’ve got a box full of fake paper flowers and a flamethrower, you know what to do.

As long as you aren’t harming anyone, committing harassment, or otherwise forcing people to pay attention to your sacrilegious activities, you should be free to speak out and demonstrate against anything you object to. Dropping by the VFW and setting fire to their stock of poppies? No, arrest people who do that. Buying a poppy from the VFW, taking it home, and destroying it? You should have every right to do that.

I’m just curious — aren’t the British police going to be really busy this week, checking out everyone’s trash cans and arresting all the people who threw out the poppies they bought to celebrate Remembrance Day? Apparently, you’re supposed to preserve those things forever, and with great reverence.

Voting while brown

Ah, those Republican poll watchers: here’s one phoning in his report on the election.

People were orderly and polite, they were helpful to one another but not to the point of electioneering, but uh-oh, there sure were a lot of non-white people exercising their rights. Just the existence of brown people voting was grounds for suspicion.

It never seems to have crossed his mind that maybe at an open civic function in which all people have an interest, he might see a different group of people than he’d find on the golf course at his country club.

Tin soldier

The recent Petraeus scandal has me divided: I think it’s absurd that we and the press are so sensitive to sex scandals, scandals that are really only the concern of the people and families involved in them, and except where they are hurting other people or perpetuating inequities, I really don’t give a damn where some politician or celebrity is putting their penis. So I’m a bit appalled at the sleazy gawking at some guy’s train wreck of a personal life.

But on the other hand, the press given to Petraeus has been embarrassingly fawning — they’ve treated him like Apollo brought crashing to earth, and as if they just want to put the hero back on his pedestal. There is far too much soldier-worship in this country: I can respect the work and sacrifice of soldiers defending our country, but it does not make them greater than the teachers who educate our children or the firefighters who protect our homes or any other occupation that requires hard work and dedication to accomplish well. And as we know from recent experience, military training does not necessarily make one wiser and a better advisor on how to apply military force.

So I was very happy to see Glenn Greenwald summarize the real story here so well.

it is truly remarkable what ends people’s careers in Washington – and what does not end them. As Hastings detailed in that interview, Petraeus has left a string of failures and even scandals behind him: a disastrous Iraqi training program, a worsening of the war in Afghanistan since he ran it, the attempt to convert the CIA into principally a para-military force, the series of misleading statements about the Benghazi attack and the revealed large CIA presence in Libya. To that one could add the constant killing of innocent people in the Muslim world without a whiff of due process, transparency or oversight.

Oh, for a media that actually questioned the powerful and how they exercise that power.

Math keeps interfering with the Republican rationale

It’s like math has a liberal bias. One of the current common tropes from the people making excuses for Romney’s loss is that it was Hurricane Sandy’s fault: it broke Romney’s momentum, it gave an unfair advantage to the incumbent, it discouraged Republican voters.

Oops. Data!

No wonder they usually seek comfort in fantasy and lies. The truth hurts.

They just weren’t misogynist enough or racist enough to win

I’m feeling so frustrated: I’m buried in work right now (and hey, Skepticon this weekend!), but after the election, it’s a target rich environment for whiny far right conservatives making excuses for their defeat. And I don’t have time to look at them all, let alone savor the schadenfreude. But here’s one that’s got all the sexist and racist tropes Republicans love, and it was on Christian Men’s Defense Network, a blog that is now playing turtle as people point and laugh at it, so you might also try this link if the cached version is gone.

we should have known how the leftists in the media and the Obama campaign (redundant, I know) intended to define the campaign. Because on radio ads, on TV, and on the web, the Democrats tried to make this election about a single issue:

The right to slut.

Or more precisely, the right to slut without the responsibility of consequences. The famous “gender gap” isn’t really a gap based on gender. The right overwhelmingly wins older and married women. The “gender gap” should more accurately be called the slut vote.

I think he just called all the women who voted for Obama “sluts”. Note also how he casually slid in another excuse: the media is all synonymous with the Obama campaign, never mind that Fox News…screw it, we can just end the sentence like that, FOX NEWS, period. Argument refuted. I could also make the case that none of the other networks are exactly liberal.

But wait, this guy isn’t done. It’s not enough to just blame the election on slutty women, he’s also got to make the racist argument.

Contrary to common belief, the primary reason the Democrats own the black vote has nothing to do with civil rights. The Democrats were only partially supportive of civil rights in the 60′s (with southern Democrats advocating “segregation forever”). Lincoln was a Republican, and Republicans in the House and Senate voted for civil rights legislation in the 60s.

Rather, Democrats have won the black vote because the black community is dominated by illegitimacy, and the Democrats are willing to subsidize and support that illegitimacy (as well as provide access to cheap abortions) so as to take away from sluts the consequences of their actions. Consequently, young black people grow up on the dole and not only never realize there might be something wrong with that, but eventually come to believe that’s the way it should be. The Democrats have won the black vote by first “empowering” single black mothers.

Raise your hands if you think the Republicans will learn from their loss and realize that this is an attitude that needs to be repudiated. I predict that in 2016 these losers will be the core of the Republican base, still, and they’ll do little more than try to cloak the more overt expressions of sexism and racism in yet more dog whistles.

Oh, that wasn’t enough demented thuggery for you? Here’s a bracing and NSFW video if you’ve got 20 minutes to spare.

Want more amusement? See Conor Friedersdorf tear into conservative illusions, all promoted by their favorite pundits…who all led their party into the wilderness with bad information.

In conservative fantasy-land, Richard Nixon was a champion of ideological conservatism, tax cuts are the only way to raise revenue, adding neoconservatives to a foreign-policy team reassures American voters, Benghazi was a winning campaign issue, Clint Eastwood’s convention speech was a brilliant triumph, and Obama’s America is a place where black kids can beat up white kids with impunity. Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense — not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there’s no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it’s often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.

On the biggest political story of the year, the conservative media just
got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media. And movement conservatives, who believe the MSM is more biased and less rigorous than their alternatives, have no way to explain how their trusted outlets got it wrong, while the New York Times got it right. Hint: The Times hired the most rigorous forecaster it could find.

It ought to be an eye-opening moment.

But I expect that it’ll be quickly forgotten…

This might just be my favorite result from yesterday

There’s so much opportunity for sweet, sweet schadenfreude coming out of yesterday’s electoral results, from the Big News about Romney losing to local things like Sonny Bono’s widow getting edged out by a progressive Latino physician, thus flipping the Coachella Valley House seat to a non-Republican for the first time since the Reagan Administration. But this one’s my favorite:

California Democrats appear to have picked up a supermajority in both houses of the state Legislature Tuesday night, a surprise outcome that gives the party the ability to unilaterally raise taxes and leaves Republicans essentially irrelevant in Sacramento.

I first moved to California in 1982, just four years into the Great Reign of Stupidity launched when the state’s voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978. Prop 13 was (and is) politically popular due to its strictly limiting property tax increases on residential properties. Since 1978 any criticism of the measure is taken as demanding old people be taxed out of their homes, and thus it’s become a third rail in California politics.

But the measure also did two other things:

  1. It likewise capped property taxes on corporate properties;
  2. It enacted a two-thirds supermajority requirement for any tax increase passed in the state legislature.

Since then, especially as the electorate in California gets younger and browner and more liberal, the whole purpose of the California Republican Party has been to obstruct the state government’s authority to raise and spend money doing frivolous socialist market-meddling things like paving roads, or fixing broken windows in schools, or buying textbooks that were published sometime after the Apollo Program ended. And a fair number of otherwise non-braindead Californians went along for the ride, because who likes taxes?

It was a pretty foolproof business plan on the Republicans’ part:

  1. Slash government income with Proposition 13.
  2. Cut funding to public education, creating two generations of mathematically illiterate Californians
  3. Advocate a series of mathematically unsound economic policies to those Californians
  4. PROFIT!!1!

There have been other horrible effects of Prop 13 besides the obvious cuts in education infrastructure and social services kind. For instance, the cap on property tax assessments provided a serious incentive for municipalities and counties to approve sprawling development so that they could generate revenue by taxing the new properties. Local governments have had little incentive to promote things like infill development, which would add new properties to the tax rolls by destroying existing properties.

And if you’ve paid attention to the Left Coast at all in the last few months, you know the end result of all this: a state teetering on the edge of an insolvency that would make New York City’s crisis in the 1970s look like running out of lunch money — all due to the Republican Party’s stranglehold on the legislative process.

Yesterday the voters of California approved not one but two tax increases — one more a loophole closing on out-of-state businesses — and, it seems, whittled the Republican presence in the Assembly and Senate down just below 1/3. There are still Republicans in Sacramento, and they still serve important functions. For instance, in the case of Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, America’s Stupidest Legislator, he often provides much-needed comic relief.

But now it seems that they may not have much to say about actual adult pursuits like paying for services and raising revenue, because the Dems may well have that supermajority. The Democrats are not in any way immune from the temptation to grandstand or engage in chicanery, but I still allow myself the hopeful sense that maybe, for the first time since I landed here, the grownups will be in charge for a while.