JHB
JHB's JournalAlternative video of Trump speaking
Toles: The elites have led the way: Permission granted to be irresponsible
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/01/elites-have-led-way-permission-granted-be-irresponsible/By Tom Toles
Editorial cartoonist
February 1 at 9:23 AM
It is more than a little ironic to see progressive ideas being subjected to the test of whether they are responsible. Where does the idea come from that responsibility is a standard anymore?
Elites — and I define those as the wealthy, the leaders of corporations, government, think tanks, universities and the media — enjoy their positions and privileges to set the ethical standards for a society and to guide the direction a society moves in. So how have they been doing?
***
Last I saw, the federal government gave stupendously MORE in tax cuts to the rich. How was this funded? It wasn’t! It was written entirely in red ink! Oh, yeah, the deficit. Which has been another area of endless empty lecturing from the elites. And yet there is always room for more tax cuts for the rich.
***
But suddenly, it’s: Is Medicare-for-all RESPONSIBLE? Are higher marginal tax rates RISKY? Is a Green New Deal properly DETAILED? Mightn’t there be costs or TRADE-OFFS? And — again, for progressives only — what about the DEFICIT? These progressive proposals aren’t irresponsible. They are aimed at undoing prior irresponsibility. If we are going to use responsibility as a standard, let’s let the current swath of leaders back things up, reduce the vast inequality they have allowed and institute their own program of carbon reduction, and then we’ll resume the discussion about responsibility.
***
Toles: Why is anyone astonished by the resurgence of the left?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/31/why-is-anyone-astonished-by-resurgence-left/By Tom Toles
January 31, 2019 at 10:08 AM
***
We are at the end of the conservative revolution because the accumulated wealth disparity they never promised, but surely delivered, is now so pronounced that everybody sees it. And the new ultra-rich simply cannot bring themselves to help correct the imbalance. They are so besotted with their personal net worth and wealth-ranking that they are paralyzed in their death grip on their money. The death grip that is the death knell of their appeal.
Regular Americans, whether they are moderately well-off or really struggling, are working their heads off to just stay afloat and no longer see any realistic prospect that the “EVERYBODY gets rich!” implied promise of laissez-faire capitalism is ever going to deliver for them.
In addition to the shared-prosperity fail of the conservative project comes another market fail of even more monstrous proportions: the unwillingness of energy producers or users to take responsibility for their externalities of carbon pollution. The market purists have been content to decree that loading carbon dioxide into the atmosphere should be booked as “free.” Nobody had to pay, except future citizens. And no cost piled onto them, including death by fire or drowning, was considered an excessively high price for them to pay. Like the mountains of plastic garbage clogging the oceans, the costs of produce-and-dump-onto-somebody-else is an economic system that people are eventually going to become fed up with.
The way the conservative movement chose to deal with the mounting contradictions between promise and outcome has not been to moderate their ambitions or agenda. It has been to lie and discredit facts and science. Their most recent policy “triumph” has been to cut taxes on the rich AGAIN, with the same promises that everybody now KNOWS are fictitious. The result has been MORE money for the rich, LARGER deficits and no accountability. Never accountability. The other way they have managed to hold their dishonesty-riddled movement together is by doubling down on racial and ethnic animosity. Great plan. Thanks.
***
Video of Trump conceding to Pelosi about SOTU
Started long before the teabaggers...
Conservatives, including every "NeverTrumper" who made a career of Republican messaging or conservative media, have spent some 40 years building that base, the one that's so hypervigilant for "betrayal" and primed to punish any backsliders.
They scare-mongered and scandal-mongered and played to all the bigotries and pet peeves, and called it "playing hardball". They wanted to get conservative Republicans elected, and there was no part of that job that involved "dialing it back." They painted Democrats as supervillains: utterly-corrupt, moral degenerates out to destroy the nation and all that's good and holy to get their voters all hot-blooded and into the voting booth.
But the drawback is: When you paint the story that way, it's supposed to end with you bringing the bad guys to justice. They rot in jail, or better yet get hanged or fried. Blow up the Death Star. Drop the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. The Enemy surrenders unconditionally and their symbols get blown up.
Your audience wants this:
But they never get it.
When you tell that story for decades, continually amping it up despite its blatant falsehood, you create an expectation that you can never really deliver on. You can justify decades of investigations and re-investigations and re-re-re-re-re-re-re-investigations, but that's not going to hold up in court. So you put yourself into the position of portraying the other side as unbearably evil and an active threat, and then don't do anything about it. The base still has their hot buttons pushed, still believes every word of it, they just start thinking you're ineffectual at best, or more likely are part of the problem.
Conservatives have purposely whipped up this extremist frenzy to give them the margin of victory. They've been punishing any Republican who didn't fall in line since the 70s when they started ousting Rockefeller Republicans.
Just because the foam is whipped up to new levels of frothiness doesn't mean we should lose sight of the fact that they've been whipping it up for so long that what counts as "whipped up" keeps getting redefined.
The Cornfield Resistance: Ep 465 SPECIAL Pre-Election Episode: Both Sides Don't!
with Driftglass and Blue Gal (as seen (well, read) on Crooks and Liars). http://ProLeftPod.com
"How We Know Kavanaugh Is Lying" by Nathan J. Robinson
Lengthy, and most of what it talks about has been the subject of multiple threads here on DU, but it neatly puts in one place why Kavinaugh's own testimony exposes him as lying his ass off.
Quoted text is from farther down in the article, not from its opening paragraphs.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/09/how-we-know-kavanaugh-is-lying
How We Know Kavanaugh Is Lying
This man should not serve another day as any kind of judge…
by Nathan J. Robinson
Not quite. The existence of a “he said, she said” does not mean it’s impossible to figure out the truth. It means we have to examine what he said, and what she said, as closely as possible. If both parties speak with passion and clarity, but one of them says many inconsistent, evasive, irrational, and false things, while the other does not, then we actually have a very good indicator of which party is telling the truth. If a man claims to be innocent, but does things—like carefully manipulate words to avoid giving clear answers, or lie about the evidence—that you probably wouldn’t do if you were innocent, then testimony alone can substantially change our confidence in who to believe.
In this case, when we examine the testimony of Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford honestly, impartially, and carefully, it is impossible to escape the following conclusions:
1. Brett Kavanaugh is lying.
2. There is no good reason to believe that Christine Blasey Ford is lying. This does not mean that she is definitely telling the truth, but that there is nothing in what Kavanaugh said that in any way discredits her account.
I want to show you, clearly and definitively, how Brett Kavanaugh has lied to you and lied to the Senate. I cannot prove that he committed sexual assault when he was 17, and I hesitate to draw conclusions about what happened for a few minutes in a house in Maryland in the summer of 1982. But I can prove quite easily that Kavanaugh’s teary-eyed “good, innocent man indignant at being wrongfully accused” schtick was a facade. What may have looked like a strong defense was in fact a very, very weak and implausible one.
***
But while the FBI investigation may turn up additional useful information, at this point there is absolutely no need for it unless Christine Blasey Ford wants it. It’s completely unnecessary in determining whether Brett Kavanaugh should be on the Supreme Court; even the very limited questions already asked of Kavanaugh have yielded disqualifying answers. Kavanaugh is lying, it’s provable, and that’s all there is to it. Unless you think it’s acceptable to have someone on the federal bench who treats duly sworn oaths as meaningless, the guy shouldn’t be holding any office.
crossposted in GD
Article: How We Know Kavanaugh Is Lying
Lengthy, and most of what it talks about has been the subject of multiple threads here on DU, but it neatly puts in one place why Kavinaugh's own testimony exposes him as lying his ass off.
Quoted text is from farther down in the article, not from its opening paragraphs.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/09/how-we-know-kavanaugh-is-lying
How We Know Kavanaugh Is Lying
This man should not serve another day as any kind of judge…
by Nathan J. Robinson
Not quite. The existence of a “he said, she said” does not mean it’s impossible to figure out the truth. It means we have to examine what he said, and what she said, as closely as possible. If both parties speak with passion and clarity, but one of them says many inconsistent, evasive, irrational, and false things, while the other does not, then we actually have a very good indicator of which party is telling the truth. If a man claims to be innocent, but does things—like carefully manipulate words to avoid giving clear answers, or lie about the evidence—that you probably wouldn’t do if you were innocent, then testimony alone can substantially change our confidence in who to believe.
In this case, when we examine the testimony of Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford honestly, impartially, and carefully, it is impossible to escape the following conclusions:
1. Brett Kavanaugh is lying.
2. There is no good reason to believe that Christine Blasey Ford is lying. This does not mean that she is definitely telling the truth, but that there is nothing in what Kavanaugh said that in any way discredits her account.
I want to show you, clearly and definitively, how Brett Kavanaugh has lied to you and lied to the Senate. I cannot prove that he committed sexual assault when he was 17, and I hesitate to draw conclusions about what happened for a few minutes in a house in Maryland in the summer of 1982. But I can prove quite easily that Kavanaugh’s teary-eyed “good, innocent man indignant at being wrongfully accused” schtick was a facade. What may have looked like a strong defense was in fact a very, very weak and implausible one.
***
But while the FBI investigation may turn up additional useful information, at this point there is absolutely no need for it unless Christine Blasey Ford wants it. It’s completely unnecessary in determining whether Brett Kavanaugh should be on the Supreme Court; even the very limited questions already asked of Kavanaugh have yielded disqualifying answers. Kavanaugh is lying, it’s provable, and that’s all there is to it. Unless you think it’s acceptable to have someone on the federal bench who treats duly sworn oaths as meaningless, the guy shouldn’t be holding any office.
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