Speech Impediments

Dave Whitlam, The Kindness of Strangers (DeviantArt, 2014).

It's a little bit fun watching the Republicans in the wake of the McCutcheon decision basically trying to think of ways to say how much they approve of it without just running out in the street like kids in a summer rain in their bathing suits, to dance in the gentle Kochfall.

To the editors of the National Review, it's all about demonstrating that money really is speech:

There's something I've got to tell you

I'm not like other guys.

Large-format (32" by 40") oil by Russ Docken, undated (it's not on Docken's website, which hasn't been updated since 2009, so it's after that), depicting the famous scene where the 19-year-old Jesus declines a marriage proposal from an upper-class Nazareth girl, [jump]

Cheap shot: Selling out is now for sale

A really splendid comment from Ed Kilgore on George Washington U's new MA program in International Lobbying, allowing you to prepare yourself for a lobbying career without ever having spent any time on the other side of that revolving door, compares his feelings about it to

the disdain I felt when I discovered, after years of low-paid anonymous work as a speechwriter, that this whole academic field called Political Communications had sprung up since I left college. But to the aspiring lobbyist, this is even worse: how can you sell out when you haven’t even bought in? 

Mann in Drehtür, Waldemar Otto, 1986. Wikimedia Commons.

Cheap shots and Dinge-an-sich

$34K puts you in the worldwide one percent. Image via Bossip.

I meant to offer a cogent critique of the WSJ op-ed by Charles Koch, but everybody else and in particular Steve M and NTodd already did, while I was getting blindsided by one minor detail early in the piece that was too bizarre for anybody more steady-minded than me to take the trouble to notice, where he was Kochsplaining collectivism:

Neoliberal watch: This is going to be a bumpy ride

Moloch. From the Oedipus Aegyptiacus of Athanasius Kircher, 1652. Wikimedia.

Remember Kenneth G. Langone, the Home Depot founder warning that it was Kristallnacht time for our beleaguered billionaires?

“I hope [the supposed ongoing shift to populism is] not working,” Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot and major GOP donor, said of populist political appeals. “Because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.” (Slate, March 2014)

Or proposing to shut down Pope Francis with all this inequality talk with a bribe of an unspecified number of millions (somewhere between one and nine)?

Annals of derp: Outlaws of Gender Gap

From Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute a chart showing (at least to his satisfaction) that according to the latest (2012) numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics

Once you impose the ‘ceteris paribus’ condition, the alleged 23% gender pay gap starts to quickly evaporate

You see? It's just an artifact of your family status! If you've never been married and you're a woman, you get to earn almost 96% of what a man who has never been married earns, and if you're a woman who is not married at the moment but with grown-up kids about the [jump]

L'égalité majestueuse des lois...

Sleeping sarariman, Tokyo 2011. Photo by Pawel Jawszszuk via DesignTaxi.

...qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain...

The majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal bread, by the same token permits the poor, [jump]

Brooks Announces Job Search

In a shocking development, New York Times columnist David Brooks today served notice on international panditry that he is looking for a job, by publishing his résumé cover letter in lieu of his usual Tuesday op-ed piece:

Dear Employers,

Would you like to have a powerful impact on the culture and moral ecology of our era? Would you be interested in correcting some of the perversities at the upper levels of our meritocracy? Would it give you any satisfaction to help cultivate deeper, fuller human beings? If you answer "strongly agree", "somewhat agree", or "neither agree nor disagree" to any of these questions, or if you're not very sure what a moral ecology is, you need to get your HR staff to shake themselves up by adopting the following principles:

Marxism: So great before it went mainstream

Supermarx. Via Inciclopedia.

Well, glory be, the Revolution must have been and triumphed without anybody noticing it, because here's the New York Times seriously running a debate as to whether the theories of the noted economist Karl Marx could have some contemporary relevance—

White House fool report: I channel Maureen Dowd

Normal Chelovechik.

Apologies to President Obama, who was as it turns out not trolling me at all. Actually he was trolling National Review's Andrew Stuttaford-Stuttaford of That Ilk, I think:

(I’m sorry Mr. President, Russia is rather more than the “regional power” that you were — ludicrously — claiming the other day)

And Dr. Krauthammer:

No law of capitalism?

Image via GulfCoastProgressive, 2006.

Sorry, But There’s No ‘Law Of Capitalism’ That You Have To Pay Employees As Little As Possible - Business Insider http://t.co/ThJukP5Zo3
— Pierre Omidyar (@pierre) March 29, 2014

Wanted to reply, but didn't,

Cheap shots and objets trouvés

Classic

White House fool report:

Image from Mi Ex es una Meme.

Hey Mr. P,

You're trolling me, right? At the Palais des Beaux-Arts? As quoted in Slate?

Russia has pointed to America’s decision to go into Iraq as an example of Western hypocrisy. Now, it is true that the Iraq war was a subject of vigorous debate, not just around the world but in the United States, as well. I participated in that debate, and I opposed our military intervention there.

Poem

There once were some bold employees
Who wanted to use IUDs;
But the boss, with his hobby
Of rushing the lobby,
Just wanted them all on their knees.

Lord's Prayer Pillar Candle from Hobby Lobby, $17.99. Wonder if it feels weird to be melting the Word of the Lord.

Everybody baits Chris

Jennifer Stefano in 2010, via Robert Stacy McCain.

“Throw out the mandate, throw out the exchange,” Hayes then told her. “Bumping up Medicaid eligibility from 100 percent of poverty line to 133 percent of poverty line so that some working poor people can get some health insurance — what is the objection to that? Why does every conservative Republican governor oppose that? Explain that to me.”

The only thing we have to fear is looking too brave

Ratchet Deadlocked Campfire, by weslouie at DeviantArt.

The trial of Sulaiman Abu Gaith on conspiracy to kill Americans, and providing support to Al Qa'eda was held in New York City and came to a successful conclusion, like the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed before it, in spite of fears that—well—something...

In a letter to Obama, Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggested that holding a trial in New York was dangerous. “New York City has been a high-priority target since at least the first World Trade Center bombing,” she wrote. “The trial of the most significant terrorist in custody would add to the threat....”

No, you can't. It's classified.

Image via FoodJobsBlog.

The great filmmaker Errol Morris has a new film, to be released April 4, The Unknown Known, on former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, contrasting I guess his sublime psychopathy with the confused guilt of Robert McNamara captured in The Fog of War. His series of articles on Rumsfeld and the film, "The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld", is just starting in the Times, and I wanted to single out this bit from an interview with NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, the reporter who asked Rumsfeld the question that led to the famous "unknown unknowns" remark:

JIM MIKLASZEWSKI: Well, not just [Rumsfeld] but the entire building was in denial. Doug Feith — don’t get me started on Doug Feith — told me that they had a Marshall Plan all set to go in terms of rebuilding Iraq. And he pointed to this stack of huge three-ringed binders, all of them black. There must have been about 10 of them stacked up on top of a cabinet. And I asked to see them, and he said, “No, you can’t. It’s classified.” And I said, “Well, O.K., I understand that, I guess.” But I raised it to somebody else within the next couple of weeks. I said, “Well, Doug Feith showed me the Marshall Plan for Iraq.” And this person laughed, and he said, “Mik, that was the Marshall Plan.” It was a copy of the original Marshall Plan, not a plan for Iraq.

"Dumbest fucking guy on the planet" according to General Tommy Franks (no slouch in the dumb department himself). But as with Rumsfeld—and George W. Bush himself—the stupidity is a kind of act, masking the operative feature of total pathological irresponsibility.Via HuffingtonPost.

Fellow dirt miner Driftglass has been visiting the same places as me again, and has more to say, essential as usual.

Let them eat policemen

Shorter David Brooks, "The Republic of Fear", New York Times, March 25 2014:

Several horrifying anecdotes prove that the entire developing world is locked in the grip of fear because the United States spends more money on eradicating poverty than on creating better justice systems in these unhappy countries. Startlingly, it seems that instead of having too much government, they don't have enough. Forget being the world's policeman, we need to be the world's personal organizer.

Kirsten Dunst in the 2006 film by Sophie Coppola.

The message Brooks is cribbing today is from a quite new book by Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros, The Locust Effect, whose authors and publisher will no doubt be too [jump]

Secret policy department

Photo via MobShield.

One of the most gratuitously bad policies anywhere in the Bloomberg administration was the one relating to students' use of cell phones in public schools, and I'm glad to hear that it is being revised under the Soviet dictatorship of Bill De Blasio and his educational minion Chancellor Fariña. But the message I've just received from Young Harry's school is not very encouraging, nor does it suggest the Most Transparent Administration in History:

Cookie Wookiee

Image via TorWars.

In a fairly astonishing tour de Cooke or Cooke's tour, as we call them in English, Master Charles C.W. (Chemical Weapons) Cooke (Oxon.) takes on President Obama's unseemly witticisms: