unknown unknowns

The talking points are about the talking points among our talking heads and not much of anything else.

Although, there does seem to be some muttering about other issues, but not too much, not enough to make the mutters matter, as you can bet the major players are all pretty heavily invested in keeping the oil flowing.

After all, a major election was just held, and the energy barons just like the rest of the 1% are now going to be held accountable. And you believe that, why, I am sure there is some property along the Jersey shore you might be interested in.

Cliff Notes

Ah, yes, a massive voter turnout in favor of keeping the social safety net, using the spending power of government to create jobs,  and making the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes makes compromise more difficult.

Well, that's a good thing.

bending the rules

It may be that it's all relative, even Relativity. Let's not worry about getting to Tau Ceti just yet.

If you could get to Mars in minutes instead of months, you might have a product to sell.

the Phantom Menace

With Robert Reich, Robert Kuttner, and Paul Krugman all trying their best to tell the One that the delusions of the Austerians are self-actualizing, you might think the Democrats would ignore the attempts of the Republicans to create their own reality.

After all, the name of the game is hegemony while making billions of dollars. What's the point of being Master of the Universe if there aren't slaves to lord it over?

You might think... if you thought there were no Democrats with the same mental illness.



 

it's a hit

don't give them any of that do goody good bullshit

Of course, it's because people tend to think that money is the same thing at the personal and national level, and the people who would personally make a lot of money off of national austerity can afford the ads to convince most of us they're correct.

Money is not gold, even if gold is worth some money.

only if someone can make a buck off it

ask a silly question, get a silly answer

caprica rising

Any machine that develops the capacity for human-like independent thought, is self-aware, and basically a solid-state person, will need human rights as well. To produce mechanisms capable of sapient thought without sapient rights is criminal. To enslave such a being and put them in control of the most vital aspects of out safety and security is madness. A self-aware learning machine will learn to love human beings and respect human life- as we respect its life.

thank you very much

Today we give thanks to global warming, which is producing a calm sunny day in the mid 60's in Michigan.

No Ending the Long War

Of course, the system actively selects against Generals who actually want to win wars.

The idea is to keep the wars, and their profitability,  endless.

stealin' th' booty

So let's get this straight.

A Republican administration uses their response to an act of terror as an excuse to generate a couple of war fronts designed to enrich the oil-and-gas barons that largely bankroll the election of toadies to the presidency and congress.  Said Christian Generals in charge of this "war on terror" are largely complicit in the manipulation of the media, and use the war to enrich themselves and their mistresses whenever possible, all the while rubbing everyone's noses in their patriotic morality.

Even after the economic pirates of the Republican administration are booted out of office, to keep the river of cash flowing to the bipartisan power structure, the wars are maintained and only gradually phased out, while the Christian Generals are entrenched in the bureaucracy of the military to ensure the industry of war.

And no one could guess the hard-bodied hypocrites of this power structure of either gender are stealin' all the booty they can get their hands on?  

One speculates that the real concern in D.C. isn't about the "ethics" of the Pentagon, it's that the people in flyover country might realize the true nature of their so-called betters.

they never met a disaster they didn't like

Naomi Klein on using change for disaster capitalism.

going down for getting down

I love it when a heavy-hitting, moralizing hypocrite of a war-monger gets hammered.

That's one less neocon tool with presidential aspirations to worry about.

not for my children

What Dean Baker says:

...The large deficits of recent years are due to the economic downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. If the economy were back near its pre-recession level of unemployment, then the deficits would be close to 1% of GDP, a level that could be sustained indefinitely.

But the deficit scare-mongers are not interested in numbers and economics; they want to gut key government programs – most importantly, social security and Medicare. That is why they are pushing the fear stories about the debt and deficit. This is the rationale for the Campaign to "Fix" the Debt, a collection of 80 CEOs ostensibly focused on getting the budget in order.

What is perhaps most infuriating about this crew is the claim that their efforts are somehow designed to benefit our children and grandchildren. This is bizarre for a number of reasons. First, while they do want to cut social security and Medicare for current retirees and those expecting to benefit from these programs in the near future, the biggest cuts in their plans will hit today's young.

In effect, they are promising to "save" these programs for young workers by destroying them. Under most of the proposals designed to "fix" these programs, social security will provide a sharply-reduced benefit for retirees in 40 to 50 years' time, compared to the currently scheduled level. And Medicare will by no means ensure most seniors' access to decent healthcare.

However, what's even more bizarre regarding their generational equity logic is the idea that, somehow, the well-being of future generations can be measured in any way by the size of the government debt. This point should have been pounded home to even the thickest deficit hawk by Hurricane Sandy. What we do or don't do in the next decade will have a huge impact on the climate conditions that our children and grandchildren experience. Imagine that we listen to our Campaign to Fix the Debt friends and find a way to pay down the debt while neglecting any steps to curb global warming...

There would be a lot of happy petrochemical billionaires- and billions more unhappy people dealing with Malthusian consequences.

against the rules

No contacting Starfleet. It's risky to the advertisers.

acts of an angry god

Ah, Karl, you know that excuse just isn't going to play in Peoria quite the way you intend.

making their own realities

It seems Mr. Rove and his band of billionaires haven't quite shifted the structure of the universe the way they wanted. Yet.

I'll table any speculations that Rove was Poppy's mole designed to exhaust the aspirations of the Tea Party faction and herd them back into li'l Jebbie's corner.

I particularly like Ms. Maddow's taunt:

"...Obama really won. And he really was born in Hawaii, and he really is legitimately President of the United States, again, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month, and the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy, and the polls were not screwed to oversample Democrats, and Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad, Nate Silver was doing math, and climate change is real, and rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes, and evolution is a thing, and Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us, and nobody is taking away anyone’s guns, and taxes have not gone up, and the deficit is dropping, actually, and Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and the moon landing was real, and FEMA is not building concentration camps, and UN election observers are not taking over Texas, and moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.”

 On the other hand,  not everyone a drone kills is a terrorist, many are actually innocent people, and we really did go into a war of choice in 2003 designed to enrich a few cronies of the Bush family. By the way, the Bush family absolutely knew 9/11 was going to happen. The CIA is on record warning them about it. Many of these same people enriched by the war became billionaires as a result, and they are doing their best to manipulate public opinion to ensure endless war for endless profit.

Just sayin'. I think there is a denial of facts among the Democratic elite, as well.

Choose Wisely

slippin' back to our same old used-to-be

There's a reason why half of America is in denial of climate change.

It's because a handful of people stand to remain very rich and powerful, relative to everyone else, if western culture goes back into the dark ages.

the final pushback

It's the suicide pill of the tea party wannabe kingmakers, in case the $election, the vote suppression, and the coming ploy to toss it to the $upremes doesn't work.

It's called the fiscal cliff, and these bastards are going to try to make sure we all drive off it.