A day in the life of a nutty right winger

Today I got an email blast from World Nut Daily trying to sell some of the books they publish. One of the books is by famed birther book author Jerome Corsi. It is entitled Atomic Iran, and it details how Iran is on the verge of creating an atomic bomb because of the misdeeds of the Clinton Administration. This book boldly predicts that Iran would have a bomb within five years.

Pretty scary, eh? That means that we need to work hard to keep Iran from getting an atomic bomb, maybe even to the point of launching bombing raids on Iran to keep them from building a bomb. There's only one problem with that bold prediction and prescription for action: This book was published in 2006. Today is 2012. Which is, erm... *six* years after Jerome Corsi made that prediction. Oops! Yet Crazy Joe Farah of WND.com actually *included* the publication date in his email blast, even though the publication date *proves* that Corsi is either an idiot, a moron, or a liar!

Fail.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Austerian dreams

The Austerians have been driving economic policy in Europe lately, cutting government budgets dramatically in order to eliminate "crowding out" and thus spur economic growth. So has economic growth increased? Erm... No. In fact, much of Europe now is seeing economic collapse on a scale that exceeds the Great Depression, with enormous increase in unemployment and sizable declines in economic output.

So what's the retort of the Austerians? Well, their retort is to lie -- to say that despite huge budget cuts, their retort is to claim that there is no austerity in Europe because the unemployed are receiving unemployment insurance. At which point it's, WTF? Are the unemployed supposed to simply drop dead in the streets from starvation and exposure?

The Hayekian response seems to be, "yes". Or, rather, the actual argument of Cafe Hayek is that the unemployed workers are voluntarily unemployed, they’d have jobs if they only lowered their wages to the point where their value to employers exceeded their wages. I.e., the Great Vacation explanation for the New Great Depression, same one they use for the Old Great Depression. This of course ignores two points: a) that there is a bottom to wages imposed by survival (i.e., people will not voluntarily accept wages that are insufficient to provide basic food, shelter, and clothing), a point explicated further on Angry Bear where it's pointed out that when machines replaced horses for many tasks, the result was mass slaughter of horses whose feeding costs now exceeded their economic worth (i.e., Hayekians want humans whose feeding costs now exceed their economic worth to be slaughtered? Soylent Hayek?) and b) employers won’t hire additional employees at any cost above $0 if there is no demand for their product, because employers are in business to make money, which means having as few people on payroll as possible to meet current demand, which means the only way they’ll hire *at any wage above $0* is if demand increases.

But of course these unpleasant realities don’t happen in the bubble universe that Hayekians live in, where basic biological needs don’t exist and employers are charities. Of course, in *our* universe, neither of those statements are true…

- Badtux the Reality-based Penguin

Shorter me from yesterday

Real GDP declined by over 12% from 1945 to 1947 due to the collapse of government spending at the end of WW2. It took until 1951 for real GDP to rise back to 1945 levels again.

Those are facts, easily verified from the Bureau of Economic Statistics web site. Anybody who seriously states that our men and women came home from WW2 to prosperity and that this disproves Keynesian predictions of economic decline with the decline of government spending at the end of WW2, simply is either lying or an idiot. We had two years of *serious* recession (12% GDP decline ain't a picnic), then four years of recovery before GDP recovered to its 1944 level -- i.e., SIX YEARS of the economy struggling because of the collapse of government spending at the end of WW2. If six years of the economy struggling is prosperity, then my name is Richard Milhous Nixon. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the Economic History Penguin

Shared sacrifice

So I got an email from a supposedly "progressive" member of Congress saying that any deal to raise the debt ceiling should include "shared sacrifice". Excuse me? You raise my taxes by 5%, that's not a shared sacrifice -- I'm in the top 10% of taxpayers, I plop a big chunk of change into savings every month because I have way more money than I need to live on. You cut an old person's Social Security benefits, that's not only shared sacrifice, that's lying and theft -- that person worked all his life paying into the Social Security fund expecting to get that money, and now you're yanking it away from him?

Funny how when folks talk about "shared sacrifice", it's only about how much the *poor* will sacrifice, because the supposed "sacrifice" that the rich would have to make is not one. I mean, if I can only put $2800/month into savings rather than $3000/month... some "sacrifice". Oh wah! Yeah, right. Meanwhile, you yank away old people's Medicare and make them wait for 2 more years to get it, and people *die*. But Republican lizard people apparently don't have a problem with that. They, like, get woodies the size of fucking TREES just thinking about dead corpses in the morning. All them old prunes just clog up the highways as they poke along in their old cars anyhow, right?

Meanwhile, as The Onion so accurately points out, Congress continues the debate over whether the country should be economically ruined. Oh joy.

-- Badtux the Unsacrificing Penguin

OMG!

Fox News is hyperventilating 'cause Obama invited a scary black rapper to a poetry event! Nevermind that six months ago, Fox News said about this very same rapper, "Common", that he was "a "rap legend" whose "music is very positive." That was then, and this is now. Down the memory hole that "positive rap legend" stuff goes, now he's a scary black man to use to scare the tighty whities who watch Fox News, next thing you know they're gonna say that "Common" killed a man in Reno just to see'em die...

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

That birth certificate thang

Obama releases his long-form birth certificate.

Will the release of this document change the mind of birthers? Of course not. World Nut Daily already doubled down on the crazy and announced, "Even Hawaii birth won't make Obama eligible". Other birthers like Oily Taitz swiftly followed suit. Because no document in the world will ever make Obama eligible to be President in their eyes, because no document in the world will ever turn Obama white.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Today, 150 years ago...

the South committed a massive act of treason against the United States of America. They did this in defense of slavery. You do not need to take my word for it. Their own secession convention said so. Their own Constitution said so -- in quite explicit terminology. To quote Article 1 Section 9: "4. No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." That is, slavery was enshrined in the Confederate constitution as an inherent part of what it meant to be a Confederate. If you wanted to abolish slavery because the ownership of other human beings is inherently evil and abhorrent to all civilized men, you weren't a Confederate -- period.

After General William Tecumseh Sherman taught the South the error of their ways, Southerners started claiming that the war was about "state's rights", not about slavery. But if that's so, why does the Confederate constitution explicitly prohibit states from banning slavery within their borders? The "state's rights" thing came about after the war, the secession conventions were mostly silent on the issue, instead containing rant after rant about how the evil North wanted to take their slaves away from them...

Finally, the notion of states with an existence apart from the Federal government would apply to Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, which existed before the Federal government. It could even apply to Texas, which was an independent nation for a short period before joining the United States. But it most certainly could not apply to Florida, which was bought from Spain for $5,000,000 in cold hard cash, or Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, which were bought from France for $15,000,000 in cold hard cash, or indeed Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, or Tennessee, which were ceded to the United States as territories when the U.S. won the American Revolution and never had any independent existence before that. Those states were effectively purchased with the costs of the American Revolution, which was around $70 million dollars. If those states wanted to be independent at the very least they would have been required to reimburse the Federal government for the expenses incurred in purchasing them from foreign powers in the first place.

But of course no such proposal was ever made on the part of the Confederacy, because it wasn't about states, it was about slavery, and pretending that it was about states wasn't part of the early existence of the CSA. They were quite explicit that it was about slavery... they didn't pretend, they stated it flat out. For example, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens. In 1861, in Savannah, Georgia, Stephens bluntly declared that slavery was "the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution." He said the United States had been founded on the false belief that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, in contrast, had been "founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural moral condition."

And that "great truth" stated bluntly by Stephens is what's behind the veneration of the Confederacy today amongst white Southerners. Sure, it's about heritage -- a heritage of bigotry and hate against black people. So for the next four years we have to put up with those insufferable bigots claiming that they are not, in fact, bigots, because they're only celebrating their "heritage" of hate, not hate itself. Personally, I'm waiting for April 26, 2015 -- the 150th anniversary of the surrender of the final Confederate army, that of General Joseph Johnston, to General William Tecumseh Sherman. We need to dig up ole' Willy and put him to work again on the South, methinks, just on general principals, maybe if we burn the place flat down to the ground again and built it back from scratch, we can bring civilization to a place that's not had it in the lifetime of anybody living, with the exception of a few pockets of sanity like Austin (which we'll allow to stay unburned). The rest... burn, baby, burn! Yeeehawwww!

-- Badtux the History Penguin

Thought for the day

Hayek thought socialism was the road to serfdom. Hayek was a fool. Feudal lords didn't need socialism to reduce their serfs to abject poverty and subjugation. So it was then, so it is now.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

50 little Hoovers

When calculating from December 2007 -- the month that the National Bureau of Economic Research determined was the start of the Great Recession -- state and local government employment has fallen by 703,000 jobs amid a downturn that cost the nation more than 8 million jobs overall. In other words, almost 10% of unemployment is caused by state and local governments firing people. Wow. That is scary.

That's one of the tidbits from an excellent McClatchey article that speaks truth to talking points. It turns out there *isn't* an immediate pension crisis -- as with Social Security, if not a single thing were changed about state and local pensions, they're solvent for the near future and can pay at least 80% of benefits in the far future. And unlike Social Security, state and local pension funds will gain value as Wall Street goes up again and as they win their lawsuits against the bond rating agencies for rating trash as AAA securities, meaning that even that pessimistic take on their solvency probably isn't true.

-- Badtux the Fact-based Penguin

Short answers to easy questions

When Mike Huckabee (R-Huckleberry) says that Obama grew up in Kenya, is he an idiot, or a liar?

Answer:

• Yes.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Why does California have a net outflow of people?

It's been the case since about 2003 that more people leave California than come to California from other states. The crash of the dot-com bubble explains 2003, but what about since then?

Demographers say that the primary problem is high cost of living, the most important of which is the high cost of housing. It's not taxes, because if the problem was taxes, the wealthy (who stand to gain more by moving to lower-tax states) would exit the state at a higher rate than the poor. The opposite is true -- 1.73% of California's poor outmigrate, while only 1.09% of California's wealthy outmigrate. Furthermore a smaller percentage of the wealthy who do outmigrate go to low-tax states as compared to the poor. In short, the data simply does not support the supposition that taxes cause the majority of the outmigration, because if the problem was taxes, the rich (who do pay more money as taxes) would outmigrate to low-tax states in higher numbers than the poor do.

So why does California have higher housing prices? Part of that is the market distortions caused by Proposition 13, which provides a disincentive to buy and sell when your family's needs change (due to a new kid, or the kids leaving home), since you'll pay higher taxes on your new (smaller or larger) home than you paid on your old (grandfathered) home. This results in fewer homes on the market, and thus higher housing prices than would otherwise exist.

Still, that cannot explain the full reason for high housing prices, because the Central Valley of California has significantly lower housing prices than the coastal job centers, and has traditionally been perhaps 10% more expensive than the rest of the country. Yet housing prices in the San Francisco Bay area are often as much as three times more expensive than the rest of the country. The 2010 median home price in the U.S. was $168,000, while the 2010 median for the California Bay Area was $375,000 (Source: U.S. Association of Realtors) -- 2.23 times the national average. What gives?

Well, it's like this: The wealthy individuals who create new companies in California prefer to live in the milder climate and nicer scenery of the coastal areas rather than in the blazingly hot desert that is summer weather in the Central Valley. The core problem we run into then is geography. There are only three large areas of coast in California that can be developed -- the San Francisco Bay area, the Los Angeles / Orange County area, and the San Diego area -- the rest of the coast is mountains with only small flat areas such as around Monterrey Bay that cannot support a large population. And all three of these areas are largely built out -- in Contra Costa County, for example, every flat area of land with the exception of some salt ponds along the coast are built out. The salt ponds are below sea level, which means that homes cannot be built there without being built upon expensive landfill with expensive foundations that have stilts down to firmer soil, which basically restricts these salt ponds to commercial development or to parkland. As for the notion that "most of Contra Costa is zoned for greenbelts", well, yes -- but the greenbelt areas are the coastal mountains which are largely unbuildable due to the San Andreas Fault, landslides caused by all the faulting (since the underlying rock has been fractured by centuries of earthquakes and will slide if you breathe hard on it), and simple steepness of the geography, which makes it extremely expensive to build anything in these areas. Thus as landowners moved away from ranching, they've sold or donated their property to the state or county for preservation as natural areas.

In other words, supply and demand says that housing in the three coastal metropolitan areas will always be more expensive than in most of the nation because a) that's where the jobs are due to the decision makers preferring to live in those areas, and b) thus there will typically be more people who want to live there than there are houses for them. What that means is that during times of a growing economy when these three areas are adding jobs, there will be net inmigration. When the economy is stagnant or declining, there will be net outmigration as people lose their jobs and are forced to return back home to their low-living-expense states. And in fact the data appears to support that. The San Francisco Bay area has experienced net job loss in the lower income job categories over the past ten years. And it's primarily the lower income people who've left for lower-expense areas.

And at this point I'm drowning in data, so I'll let you go. But the salient point is this: High taxes are *not* a cause of people leaving California. Rather, high living expenses -- primarily driven by the cost of housing -- is the major cause of outmigration from California. Anybody who tells you high taxes are causing the loss is saying that based on ideology, because the facts simply do not support such a statement. But then, I keep forgetting, the facts have a liberal bias :).

-- Badtux the Reality-based Penguin

More libertard zombie lies

And now here go the libertards again, claiming that "businesses are fleeing California due to high taxes". Err.... no. We have two separate studies on this over the past ten years. Businesses aren't fleeing California for *any* reason, taxes or no. The the vast majority of businesses closing shop in California are doing so due to bankruptcy, not taxes. Furthermore, 40% of new venture-funded companies are in California -- California is still by far the preferred state to start a new company in. F

Furthermore, California's tax rates for corporations and the wealthy aren't even that onerous, due to California's generally non-progressive tax scheme. From a standpoint of the wealthy, the top 1% pay only 7.4% of their income as state and local taxes (the bottom pays 20% pays 10.2% of their income as taxes), which is pretty much middle of the pack (look through the data in that paper and you'll see that the top 1% pays on average around 7% of their income as state and local taxes of all sorts). California's statutory corporate income tax rate of 8.84% also isn't out of the ordinary, being somewhat in the middle of the pack (still looking for effective tax rate, but given that California gives billions in tax breaks to corporations (whether it's the bogus "enterprise zones" or "pay taxes only on sales within California" break), it'll be somewhat lower. As I previously pointed out, corporate property taxes have been shifted to individuals due to various tax shelters available with Proposition 13 (the "partnership" shelter being the big one -- by leasing your building from a "partnership" which has held ownership of it since initial construction, you lock in your property taxes at its initial construction rate). The end result of all this is that California does have high taxes -- if you're in the bottom 20% of taxpayers. For everything else, California's in the middle of the pack.

So there's the facts. There's no evidence that a) California has high taxes on corporations or the rich, or that b) high taxes are causing corporations or the rich to flee California. Indeed, the evidence explicitly contradicts both assertions. Yet the zombie lies still get repeated time after time by zombie liars.... it is to laugh, if it wasn't for the fact that they're so effective at catapaulting their propaganda lies via repitition after repetition, until the majority think their lies are true.

-- Badtux the Fact-based Penguin

Corporate Smaugs

Guess what. If you paid $5 in income tax last year, you paid more income tax than CitiBank, JPMorganChase, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Boeing, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and probably a shitload of other big corporations--combined!

As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, corporations paid 30% of income taxes paid in 1950, and 7% of income taxes paid today. Who pays the 23% that corporations no longer pay? Look in the mirror!

At this point the libertarian fucktards say, "Corporations don't pay taxes. The taxes are passed along to the purchaser of their goods and/or services or a reduction is made in the dividend payout to the stockholders. Either way, people pay. Lower the corporate tax rate to zero and see how may jobs are created." At which point, I say... wha the fuck? First of all, corporations don't set prices. The *MARKET* sets prices. Secondly, you stupid ass libertard motherfucker, CORPORATIONS do not create jobs. *DEMAND* creates jobs. Corporations are sitting on TRILLIONS of dollars of money right now (at least $1.7T according to the Federal Reserve) and NOT CREATING A SINGLE GODDAMNED JOB WITH IT because, look. Libertards seem to be ignorant of the most rudimentary and FUNDAMENTAL law of business, which is that YOU DON'T HIRE UNLESS YOU GOT DEMAND TO JUSTIFY HIRING because the whole POINT of a business is to maximize profits. Corporations are not welfare agencies. They don't hire people just out of the goodness of their hearts. They hire people because they HAVE to hire people, otherwise they have no product to sell. And if demand for their product is low, it doesn't matter HOW many trillions in tax breaks you give them -- they will hire NO workers. None. Zero. Nada. ZILCH.

You don't have to believe me. In fact, please DON'T believe me. Believe the actual DATA. Because the DATA says that anybody who says that corporations will hire just because they have money is a LYING COCKSUCKER WHO PROBABLY LICKS HIS CORPORATE MASTER'S ASS EVERY MORNING and then takes it up the rear while cheerfully saying "Thank you sire, give me more!" Because the data says that corporations are already sitting on trillions of dollars and doing nothing -- nada -- zero -- hiring with it. What, you think giving them two MORE trillions will make them suddenly start hiring out of the goodness of their heart? If you believe in such a deranged notion, you're either the dumbest motherfucker on this whole goddamned planet, or you're stuck so far up your corporate master's ass that you probably can't even remember what your own dick looks like.

And that's my response to the libertards on this issue. The data simply refutes their notion that giving corporations more money or reducing their tax liability to zero will cause them to hire more people. The data is the data, and doesn't give a shit what moronic ideology you have. But oh I forget, in THEIR universe, where unicorns are pink and cotton candy grows on trees, poor beleaguered corporations hire people just out of the goodness of their stockholder's hearts. What a strange, strange universe libertards must live in! Too bad it's not ours... I just wish they'd keep their nonsense in their novels, where it's okay to have that kind of nonsense alongside the unicorns and cotton candy trees, and quit spouting that nonsense in *this* universe where it just plain is not true

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin

Google is an Islamist plot

Did you know that Google is an Islamist plot to impose sharia law upon the United States? Neither did I... until Glenn Beck said so.

Yes. Google. Is an Islamist plot. A sinister conspiracy. Eeeeeevil. Between that and his delusional notion that the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings are part of a vast plot to create an Islamic caliphate, Beck ain't just jumped the shark -- he's jumped a whole row of shark tanks. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the Insanity-scryin' Penguin

The politics of spite

World Nut Daily has joined the right-wing pogrom against public employees by railing about public employees' "outrageous" pension plans. At which point I say to the folks whining about these "outrageous" pension plans, "are you going to give up your Social Security?"

The deal is that public employees, with the exception of federal employees hired in the past 25 years, do not get Social Security. Their pension from their state or local government is all they get. And the reason the pension funds are underfunded is because they got looted -- the money in them got "invested" into worthless securities that scammers assured them were as good as cash (said scammers being called "credit rating agencies" -- S&P, Moody's, and Fitch being the Big Three and still in business, still pulling the same scam with no repercussions). So let me get this straight. The pension funds got looted because the politicians let scammers steal all the funds out of them, and the employees should pay for that?! That ain't right.

So what's the deal with the right wing attacking public employee pensions? Well, it's part of their ongoing anarchist project to destroy the effectiveness of government so that corporations can further loot the country by taking on the former functions of government (setting up hydraulic empires in major sections of the economy to assert control over the people). And they get a lot of the white trash "spite vote" to go along with this because the white trash lost their pensions when all the good-paying industrial jobs left the country, and rather than ask "Why don't we get pensions at our place of employment?" they instead attack anybody who has more than them because, well, just because they're mean spiteful people, I guess. If not, they'd be going after the politicians who've allowed our good-paying jobs to be outsourced overseas... but, y'know, attacking the people who really did you harm is no fun, especially if you're too stupid to understand what those people have done to you. Far easier to just attack anybody who has more than you, to try to bring everybody else down to your level...

-- Badtux the Unspiteful Penguin

The Big Lie

I haven’t talked about Rep. Steve Cohen’s comment about the Republicans using Goebbel's "Big Lie" technique about health care reform because frankly I think he didn’t make the sell. I know what he’s referring to, but the average American would just be baffled. But he’s certainly correct that we have a political party and their propaganda arm (Fox News and talk radio frothers) who regularly engage in the Big Lie technique pioneered by Goebbels, where even lies that can be debunked simply by looking at a calendar get repeated over and over again until people believe them (like “Obama’s bailout of the bankers”, which happened in 2008 when TARP was passed, said legislation which was proposed by the Bush Administration and signed by, err, President George W. Bush, not Obama, who did not take office until January 20 2009).

But now we have Republicans saying that Cohen is *just like* Caribou Barbie when it comes to language comparing political opponents to Nazis. Say wha?! We’ve established that Cohen is telling the truth about the Republican Party using the Big Lie technique, so that makes his case of "intemperate language" utterly different from Palin's, where Palin was not telling the truth about being the victim of a “blood libel” — nobody has libeled her by accusing her of participating in secret rituals where she kills Christian children and bakes their blood into matzoh balls, as far as I know. So Cohen (who is Jewish, BTW) is "anti-Semitic" because he made a "comparison between Nazis and Republicans"? Err, no. Telling the truth isn't anti-*ANYTHING*. It's just the truth -- unlike Palin's "blood libel" lie.

-- Badtux the Propaganda Penguin

World Nut Daily praises white extremists

The usual, the usual. In this case, Kinston, NC kept electing black Democrats to office. In retaliation, Barbour Haley's beloved Citizens Council (relabeled of course for the new millennium) got passed a new ballot initiative outlawing putting party affiliation onto the ballot, so that voters would have trouble seeing who was the black Democrats just by looking at party affiliation, thus hopefully depriving the black candidates of a few votes and getting more whites elected. The Justice Department sued, and a judge agreed that the ballot initiative is illegal -- because the entire intent of the law was to get more whites elected, it's illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

World Nut Daily's writer is incensed, incensed I say, at this untoward interference in local affairs! Why, if the whites of a town want to insure that their own get elected via hook or by crook (mostly by crook in this case -- as in, crooked), it's their own affair, and the Feds should not get involved!

Remember, whenever you see a Republican talk about "state's rights" or "local autonomy", what they mean is a state's right to discriminate against people of color (and other minorities). It's just short-hand for bigotry and hate. That's all.

-- Badtux the Helpful Penguin

WikiYawn

Been watching the Wikileaks freakout by the tighty righties and the U.S. government with amusement. Especially amusing is the fact that this latest document dump has even led a few journalists to, well, commit acts of actual journalism (gasp!). For example, this evening on NPR News, NPR's correspondent in Baghdad asked around quietly about the Iranian influence upon the current Iraqi government and... err... found that this part of the document dump was, well, true (duh!). Which even Poppy Bush coulda told you, that's why he didn't depose Saddam in the first place back in '93, 'cause it'd turn the place into Iran West, but WTF, you gotta lead today's "journalists" to stories by the nose and stick it into the story nostril-deep before they can see what's been in front of their face all along...

Meanwhile, watching the tighty righties and Obama administration fulminate about how they want to have Wikileaks declared a terrorist group (yeah, their document dumps are a terror alright, but only a terror to liars who don't want the truth to come out), about how Julian Assange should be charged with the crime of espionage (he's not in the United States, he's not a U.S. citizen, he's not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, about the only way you could do that would be to invade Sweden and kidnap him like we did Noriega, and that's unlikely), etc., just goes to show that the term "freedom of the press" is a foreign term to both the tighty righties and to the Obama administration, which continues its authoritarian ways. The person who gave Wikileaks the documents could be charged with espionage, but committing an act of journalism by, well, actually publishing them, that's called "journalism" a.k.a. "the press" and in case you haven't figured it out, you can't legally go after folks for publishing government documents here in the United States because said documents are public domain.

Next up, Assange is going to publish some documents from one of the big banks (rumor says BofA) showing that they knew they were issuing fraudulent mortgages, and engaged in many other sketchy activities, but didn't care. Unfortunately, this *will* open up Wikileaks to legal challenges that the current document dumps didn't address. Those documents are copyrighted by BofA, and publishing them outright is a violation of numerous copyright laws. Assange is probably going to argue that there is a public interest exception for documents of this nature, but that exception allows you to publish only the minimum amount needed in order to illustrate your commentary, it doesn't allow you to just verbatim publish copyright documents without any surrounding commentary for each excerpt published. Maybe Assange *should* be accepting that refuge in Ecuador (whose leftist President, an acolyte of Hugo Chavez, has offered said refuge)... on the other hand, Ecuador's tiny military would be hopeless if the U.S. decided to do a Noriega on him. Decisions, decisions...

-- Badtux the Easily Amused Penguin

Tea party supports tea

Texas tea, that is. Black gold. Texas crude. Big Oil. Yeppers, the San Jose Murky News reports that California tea baggers have been spotted waving signs in support of oil companies hoping to get passed Proposition 23, which would overturn the state's strict carbon emissions law. The main funders of the Prop 23 effort are three oil companies -- Valero, Tesoro, and Koch Industries.

This is just more proof that the whole tea bagger phenomenon is a bought and paid for subsidiary of the same oligarchs who got George W. Bush electorated and who are doing their darndest to turn America into Mexico North, where the oligarchs are filthy rich and the rest of us are their servants. The money quote from the article:

"When I see senior citizens out on the street corner holding 'Thank You Valero' signs, it just doesn't jibe," said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog. "Clearly the tea party is being used, and they are becoming the ground army for the oil refineries. Senior citizens would not come out to defend Valero unless there's some formal structure to get them out there."

You think? Like, duh?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Can Social Security go bankrupt?

That's a question often asked by right-wing liars. The answer is a single word: No.

Social Security is a dollar-denominated sovereign fund. Because it is denominated in dollars, which can be raised by taxing the general public and/or by printing dollars (that invention the printing press again!), it can go "bankrupt" only if the general public refuses to pay taxes or print dollars to pay the Social Security debt. But this isn't "bankruptcy" in any traditional sense of the word. Bankruptcy implies something involuntary -- the person involved wants to pay his debts but just doesn't have the money. But voluntary refusal to pay your debts (which is what refusing to raise taxes or print money to pay the Social Security debt would be) isn't bankruptcy -- it's just plain being a deadbeat, no different from the millionaire who refuses to pay the carpenter who fixed his porch because "paying debts are for the little people."

In short, Social Security can't "go bankrupt" because "bankrupt" implies involuntary. The only way Social Security goes "bankrupt" is if the general public decides to be a bunch of deadbeats and willfully refuses to pay their debt to the Social Security fund-- a willful refusal, given the fact that the U.S. government possesses that wonderful new invention the PRINTING PRESS (invented *only* 650 years ago!) and thus has no inherent incapacity to pay dollar-denominated debts.

-- Badtux the Non-deadbeat Penguin