TheDailyBanter.com

Matt Osborne Invades Tea Party Central

Matt Osborne took a video camera to the Sarah Palin Tea Bagger convention and shot the following footage:

Matt's written report is a must read, so check it out here.

Socialist Black Water Wants Government Money

The private military corporation Black Water (now known as 'Xe') now wants more government cash to do things the actual military could do, but for far more money (around a billion dollars).

This is another classic case of the corporate-socialist system that is passed off to the American public as 'the free market'. The fact is, tax payers money is going towards a private, largely unaccountable company that only benefits itself. The soldiers are paid far more than US army soldiers and there is little evidence to say they do a better job. It seems to be a blank spot in people like Dick Cheney and John McCain's mind when they support a parasitic company like Xe and simultaneously call for government to stop intervening in the market.

You could call them ignorant, but I think it's fair to say they're willfully deceiving the public. They know better, and continue to support a corrupt system that only benefits themselves and bankrolls their campaigns.

Jobs For Morons on Wall St

Matt Taibbi on CIT Group Inc. hiring of dufus John Thain:

Man, exactly what do you have to do to become unhirable in this country? Eat Christian babies on CNN?

John Thain is the dope who was buying himself an $87,000 area rug as his company was going bust. He became a symbol for brainless greed on Wall Street just in time to complete a tortured sale of Merrill to Bank of America in which billions in losses were somehow kept hidden from BofA shareholders.

Now he gets another big job, just like every other high-end Wall Street buffoon who wrecks a company in this era.

It's amazing how socialistic/parasitic the financial sector is: Failure is not only encouraged but rewarded, and the tax payer ends up footing the bill. Single mothers taking home $200 a week are routinely vilified by the Right, yet none of the Republicans will stand up to the financial sector that takes trillions of dollars from the government and doles it out to losers.

Sarah Palin: It's Okay for Rush Limbaugh to Insult the Handicapped

I'm trying to avoid weighing in on this latest controversy as I still have a hard time giving Sarah Palin serious attention, but the news that Palin says it's okay for Rush Limbaugh to use the term 'retard' because it's 'satire' and not for Rahm Emmanuel when he says it in private was simply to good to pass up on.

Palin's ridiculous assertion proves three thing:

1. She has no intellectual or moral consistency.

2. She doesn't really care about the word and was using it to score political points.

3. Rush Limbaugh controls the GOP.

Palin's outbursts on matters of national importance are becoming a feature of political news. Whenever she decides to have a rant about taxes, drilling in Alaska, or some perceived slight by a nasty liberal, Palin has an entire media infrastructure to echo her thoughts. The problem is, Palin can barely string a sentence together, let alone a coherent political ideology.

As a result, we get a schizophrenic stream of consciousness that makes no sense whatsoever. The notion that Rahm Emmanuel should resign for something he said in private that Palin finds offensive is ridiculous, but her logic that concludes Limbaugh shouldn't resign for the same offense in public goes even further into the realms of the absurd. 

The fact is, Sarah Palin doesn't know what she is saying. And when she crossed Rush Limbaugh (who does know exactly what he is saying), she was quickly slapped back into place. The whole debacle is so painfully childish and transparent that even the most hardcore Tea Baggers won't be able to explain what their de facto leader is on about.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really matter. Palin is way beyond explaining her garbled rants, and it seems her fans will cheer her on regardless.

It's funny for the rest of us, but I'm seriously considering leaving the US if this woman makes a run for President in 2012. And it looks like she probably will.

No Conservative or Liberal Bias in the Media

 
I've been meaning to comment on the whole 'the media is biased' line for some time now. Both liberals and conservatives adamantly maintain that the media is inherently biased towards the other side. Liberals point to Fox News, while conservatives point to MSNBC and CNN as proof that the Main Stream Media skews reality to favor their narrative.

The truth is, the MSM isn't biased towards either side - or anything in between.

Media conglomerates in America are doing one thing: Selling you products through news. There are different markets that have different tastes, and Fox News and MSNBC simply cater to them with mouthpieces that speak directly to their demographic. After the War in Iraq and George Bush became unpopular, MSNBC hired Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow to capture the anti war segment (no offense to either of them - but they'd most likely admit as much). A good 25% of the population simply hate reading or thinking rationally, so Fox hired Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin to feed into their anger while selling them lawnmowers and diet Coke at the same time. 

The one thing they aren't giving us is news. Why? Because real news doesn't sell.

Real news would tell you what was going on with the subprime mortgage crisis across poor neighborhoods throughout the country. Real news would tell you just how devastating the lack of health insurance is to the 47 million Americans who lack it. Real news would be reporting on what Iraqis and Afghanis think of the US troops occupying their countries. Real news wouldn't need to be done by good looking sorority sisters with perfect smiles and permed hair. It would be done by real journalists wading in to real stories, unafraid to get their hands dirty.

Instead, we get Glenn Beck drawing diagrams about Maoist plots to take over America, and Chris Matthews honing his debating skills against party hacks. 

The media in America is biased towards America. And within that, it sometimes swings to the Right, and sometimes to the Left. But people don't like being told how shitty their country is behaving, so the MSM simply ignores it and focuses on a spectrum of debate so narrow, it's hard for an outsider to see any substantial differences.

The conservative and liberal media may disagree on whether the Iraq war was a good idea or not, but neither would for one second contemplate the idea that America had committed a grievous crime against another nation. 

The conservative and liberal media may disagree on the extent to which the US should support Israeli violence against the Palestinians, but heaven forbid either acknowledge that they were actual crimes. 

The conservative and liberal media may disagree on the extent to which Iran is viewed as a threat to the United States, but neither would question the orthodoxy that Iran should be a sworn enemy.

The MSM operates under a series of assumptions that must never be challenged: That America is the greatest country on the planet, that Israel is an ally and can do no wrong, that socialism is un American, and that whoever the government declares an enemy must be. 

And for that reason, debate in America will continue to be a vicious cycle of name calling and point scoring, while nothing substantial is ever discussed. While the media focuses on the minor differences of the parties corporate health care plans (do we give the insurance companies complete control, or just most of it?), thousands of Americans will die. While Chris Matthews debates Robert Gibbs as to whether Democrats are alienating the center, more money is being spent on wars in countries most people couldn't place on a map.

If the MSM provided us with real news, the war in Iraq may never had happened, and the entire economy may not have collapsed. But they didn't, and while MSNBC an Fox are busy shouting at each other, the rest of us are stuck picking up the pieces.

Obama Laughs at Birthers

In style, Obama responds to the Birthers:

Glenn Beck is a Racist Idiot

This is why Glenn Beck is a racist, ignorant idiot:

He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America -- you don't take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical? Really? Searching for something to give him any kind of meaning, just as he was searching later in life for religion.

Bob Cesca has a wonderful rant on this garbled, offensive idiocy and is well worth a read. Anyhow, I thought I'd add my own.

Firstly, what is an 'American name'? The whole country is made up of immigrants (other than the minute Native American population that survived the holocaust), so by definition, there isn't one. We must then deduce that Beck must mean a white American name, because otherwise, it doesn't make any sense. And if he means a white American name, it must mean Beck doesn't consider non-white Americans to be American. Therefore Beck is a racist idiot.

According to BehindTheName.com, 'Glenn' comes 'From a Scottish surname which was derived from Gaelic gleann "valley".'

Why does Glenn insist on using a name that could only be identified with the country of his heritage, Scotland? Why didn't Glenn just call himself something else like 'Hot Dog' or 'Candy' so we could be sure he was a proud American? Barack Obama changed his name (kind of - he actually just went back to his original name after being known as 'Barry'), so why couldn't Beck?

Because Glenn Beck is un-American.

Or just an idiot.

Private Defense Contractors: A Permanent Part of Government

A fascinating report from The Real News on the ever expanding military industrial complex, now referred to as the 'Military Industrial Anti Terrorism Complex':

Obama Spells it Out to Centrist Democrats

Obama explaining to corporate Democrats, Senators Bayh and Lincoln, why the party must differentiate itself from the Republicans (via Cesca):

"If the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place for eight years leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression -- we don't tinker with health care, let the insurance companies do what they want, we don't put in place any insurance reforms, we don't mess with the banks, let them keep on doing what they're doing now because we don't want to stir up Wall Street -- the result is going to be the same," he said. "I don't know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us into this fix in the first place."

Deficit Obsessions

The conservative obsession with deficits threatens to reverse much of the good the fiscal stimulus has done over the past 6 months. According to the orthodoxy, a country's economic health is directly related to it's level of debt. Except it isn't true. As Paul Krugman points out:

A couple of samples from today’s Times — not terrible examples, but illustrative of the prevailing conventional wisdom. David Sanger asserts that

the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded.

Is that really true? I thought Japan’s influence has waned because of its economic stagnation, its failure to maintain its status as an economic superpower; I have never heard anyone cite the debt as a central cause. Bear in mind that so far, at least, Japan has had no problems financing its deficits.

It's worth banging the drum on this one, as conventional wisdom is often extremely hard to dispel, especially if there are huge incentives not to. Debt reduction is extremely useful for the rich and powerful as it ensures the state only spends money on them. They get to look fiscally responsible by lecturing the poor to 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps' while they raid the coffers to ensure their own success.

The corporate welfare state is wide and far reaching, starting from no bid contracts for tech and military companies to the limitless credit line for Wall St. It is one rule for the rich, and another for everyone else. Socialism for Haliburton and Goldman Sachs, and free market capitalism for small business and individuals.

The truth is, there's only so much money to go around, and heaven forbid those who actually needs it get any of it.