I KNOW, THIS IS NOT A SURPRISE

I was just listening to a re-broadcast of the Glenn Beck's radio show and he claimed that The Blaze was the 48th most visited website in America.  I went to Alexa and found that he lied again:

• theblaze.com
  

  •  
  • Rank:592
  • Keywords: the blaze tv, the blaze email, the blaze.com, glenn beck the blaze

A QUESTION FOR JUAN WILLIAMS

(h/t Charles Johnson)

before he writes a defense of Dr. Ben Carson: Do YOU also believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old?

A DIFFERENT WAY TO ASK THE QUESTION

I noted below that a veteran reporter implicitly wondered why we give the bullshitters so much attention instead of pointing out how foolish they are.  Another good case is this Dennis Prager remark at CPAC:

Unlike Europeans of the Enlightenment era — and unlike the Left today — the Founders understood that people are not basically good. That is a defining belief of Judaism as well as of Christianity. Therefore, to be good, the great majority of people need moral religion and belief in accountability to a morally judging God.

If we take Voltaire as a legitimate representative of the European Enlightenment, it's clear that Prager is WRONG:

For Voltaire, those equipped to understand their own reason could find the proper course of free action themselves. But since many were incapable of such self-knowledge and self-control, religion, he claimed, was a necessary guarantor of social order.

SOMETHING TO DISCUSS

Lambert at Corrente & others have written a 12 point platform for The Left along with 12 reforms. I don't understand what platform 10 - 10. Slow Food (Too) - means and I'm a little suspicious of reform 2 - 2. Fairness Doctrine.  I don't think the latter is necessary or desirable unless media consolidation changes my mind.

THE BANKSTERS WERE ABUSING MORTGAGES FOR OVER A DECADE...

I didn't know that they had been fucking up the housing market for so long:

UPDATE 1-JPMorgan whistleblower gets $63.9 mln in mortgage fraud deal

Fri Mar 7, 2014 3:47pm EST
By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) - A whistleblower will be paid $63.9 million for providing tips that led to JPMorgan Chase & Co's agreement to pay $614 million and tighten oversight to resolve charges that it defrauded the government into insuring flawed home loans.

In the Feb. 4 settlement, JPMorgan admitted that for more than a decade it submitted thousands of mortgages for insurance by the Federal Housing Administration or the Department of Veterans Affairs that did not qualify for government guarantees.

JUAN WILLIAMS ASKS...

"Why Do Liberals Have So Much Hate For Black Conservatives?" in reference to Condoleeza Rice.  It's because she's a neocon war criminal.

CONSERVATIVES SURE ARE INCOMPETENT AT RUNNING CAMPAIGNS

Mitt "Mr. Free Market Fairy" Romney ran a remarkably incompetent campaign and he's just one of many conservatives who FAIL:

National GOP turns on Florida candidate
By ALEX ISENSTADT | 3/7/14 5:05 AM EST
POLITICO

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Their frustration had been mounting for weeks. But by late January national Republicans had had it with David Jolly, their candidate in Tuesday’s nationally watched Florida congressional special election.

Over the past week, a half-dozen Washington Republicans have described Jolly’s campaign against Democrat Alex Sink as a Keystone Cops operation, marked by inept fundraising, top advisers stationed hundreds of miles away from the district in the state capital and the poor optics of a just-divorced, 41-year-old candidate accompanied on the campaign trail by a girlfriend 14 years his junior.

TO BE FAIR, THERE'S ALSO PLENTY OF STUPID ON OUR SIDE...

This is almost immoral:

Activists to Kerry: Keystone a 'bigger mistake' than Vietnam

By Laura Barron-Lopez
March 07, 2014, 11:35 am
THE HILL

JOHN BOEHNER IS AS STUPID AS SEAN HANNITY...

and that's really stupid:

Counter Putin by Liberating U.S. Natural Gas
By John Boehner
March 6, 2014 7:12 p.m. ET

A JERK AND AN ASSHOLE

NOT A FACT BUT AN IDEOLOGY

The notion that an economic downtown must be followed by austerity budgets seems to have become part of the background assumptions of far too many influential people all over the world despite the fact there never was any good evidence for that claim.  I'd like to know where this idea originated and who's been supporting it in the face of little evidence.

OK, IT'S ONLY A POLL AND I KNOW IT'S FAR TOO EARLY

But I can't resist because FOX News did the polling:

Hillary Clinton Leads Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz By Wide Margins In Presidential Poll
The Huffington Post | by Samantha Lachman
Posted: 03/06/2014 3:37 pm EST Updated: 03/06/2014 3:59 pm EST

The poll, conducted by Fox News from March 2-4, shows Clinton leading Bush 51 percent to 38 percent. The margin between Clinton and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is even wider, at 52 percent to 36 percent. The head-to-head matchup that produced the closest margin in the poll is between Clinton and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R): 49 percent would pick Clinton, while 38 percent would vote for Christie.

Here are the relevant charts:

BERNIE SANDERS IS RIGHT

He would make a better President than Hillary Clinton and so would Elizabeth Warren. 

LEAVE MY SOUL ALONE!!!

Rep. Paul Ryan delivered an instant classic at CPAC and his best line was liberals were only offering people “a full stomach and an empty soul.”  Seriously, it's not the job of government to fill your soul with Puritan bullshit.

MORE BULLSHIT FROM OBAMA

I am fed up with Obama acting like a neocon (e.g., NSA spying, drone murders) and I wonder if we liberals can organize a little pushback on this absurdity.

Obama Signs Order Declaring Ukraine Crisis an ‘Extraordinary Threat’ to National Security
by Noah Rothman | 7:55 am, March 6th, 2014
MEDIAITE

ALBERY JAY NOCK & ME

Nock is considered to be an early libertarian by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and he can also be thought of as an anarchist, but not like Kropotkin.  I'm reading a collection of essays, etc. written by conservatives from 1900 to 1945 and includes Nock's Anarchist Progress (1928) in which I pretty much agree with this observation by Nock:

Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a
boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor,
scared little brat, who had intended something
no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be
a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence
the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but
the law left him no option. I was struck by
this. The judge, then, was doing something
as an official that he would not dream of doing
as a man; and he could do it without any sense
of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because
he was acting as an official and not as a man.
On this principle of action, it seemed to me
that one could commit almost any kind of crime
without getting into trouble with one's conscience.
Clearly, a great crime had been committed against
this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it—the judge,
the jury, the prosecutor,the complaining witness,
the policemenand jailers—felt any responsibility about
it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials.

SOMETHING ELSE YOU WON'T HEAR FROM THE GASBAGS

(h/t Wonkette)

Last January, the economy improved and that was mostly because of Obama, according to this report in the Wall Street Journal:

Obamacare Effects Account for Most of Income, Spending Increases
By Jeffrey Sparshott
12:12 pm
Mar 3, 2014

The Affordable Care Act, President Barack Barack Obama’s signature health law, is already boosting household income and spending.

The Commerce Department reported Monday that consumer spending rose a better-than-expected 0.4% and personal incomes climbed 0.3% in January. The new health-care law accounted for a big chunk of the increase on both fronts.

On the incomes side, the law’s expanded coverage boosted Medicaid benefits by an estimated $19.2 billion, according to Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. The ACA also offered several refundable tax credits, including health insurance premium subsidies, which added up to $14.7 billion.

Taken together, the Obamacare provisions are responsible for about three-quarters of January’s overall rise in Americans’ incomes.

I'M POSTING THIS FOR POSTERITY...

just in case someone in the future thinks that Michele Bachmann was a decent human being.

Michele Bachmann: Veto of AZ bill means ‘terrible intolerance afoot’ against Christians
By David Edwards
Wednesday, March 5, 2014 16:07 EST
The Raw Story

During an interview with ABC News, Jeff Zeleny asked the Minnesota Republican to react to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s (R) decision not to sign a bill that would have protected Christian business owners who discriminated against LGBT people.

“I believe that tolerance is a two-way street, and we need to respect everyone’s rights, including the rights of people who have sincerely held religious beliefs,” Bachmann remarked. “There is no price that you can put on constitutional liberties.”

Zeleny noted that Bachmann’s view was in the minority, even among Republicans, who feared that the bill would have been bad for business in Arizona.

“Religious liberties and the protection of our religious liberties is right,” Bachmann said, disagreeing with the likes of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.  “Right now, there’s a terrible intolerance afoot in the United States,” she added. “And it’s against people who hold sincerely held religious beliefs.”

A HIGHER MINIMUM WAGE IS NOT A SIGN OF THE ENDTIMES...

despite what Baggers & gasbags would like you to think.  Even better, this was done with the benefit of fracking, a current Sean Hannity "solution" to unemployment.

Highest Minimum-Wage State Washington Beats U.S. Job Growth
By Victoria Stilwell, Peter Robison and William Selway Mar 5, 2014 9:54 AM MT

When Washington residents voted in 1998 to raise the state’s minimum wage and link it to the cost of living, opponents warned the measure would be a job-killer. The prediction hasn’t been borne out.

In the 15 years that followed, the state’s minimum wage climbed to $9.32 -- the highest in the country. Meanwhile job growth continued at an average 0.8 percent annual pace, 0.3 percentage point above the national rate. Payrolls at Washington’s restaurants and bars, portrayed as particularly vulnerable to higher wage costs, expanded by 21 percent. Poverty has trailed the U.S. level for at least seven years.

ANOTHER BAD SIGN FOR THE RADIO GASBAGS

Mark Ramsey, a media analyst, thinks folks into digital won't bother much with radio and when they do, the gasbags won't be on their list.

Will Young People Grow Into the Radio “Habit”?
03/04

Another broadcaster asked me a great – and related – question: Will young people grow into the radio “habit”?

Will they, in other words, become more like the rest of us?

The answer is an unambiguous “no.”

In fact, quite the opposite is happening.

Will digital natives mature to more thoroughly appreciate news or politics or finance or spiritual content – the stuff that characterizes the radio diet for folks of a certain age?

Yes, they will.

But they will not wake up one day and exclaim “How have I ignored Rush Limbaugh all these years?!”

They will grow with their own content, not the legacy content tailored to previous generations.

EVEN IN TEXAS, THE BAGGERS CAN LOSE

Bagger candidate Katrina Pierson challenged incumbent Pete Sessions and lost badly:

RACE	NAME		PARTY	EARLY VOTES	PERCENT	TOTAL VOTES	PERCENT
U. S. Representative District 32
	Katrina Pierson		REP	7,240	31.30%	13,392	35.71%
	Pete Sessions - Incumbent		REP	15,884	68.69%	24,104	64.28%
				-----------		-----------
		Race Total		23,124		37,496
		Precincts Reported		143	of	209 Precincts		68.42%

THE AMERICAN SECURITY STATE GETS A LITTLE SCARIER...

(h/t billmon)

Judging by past CIA behavior at the highest levels, McClatchy's report is certainly plausible:

Probe sought of CIA conduct in Senate study of secret detention program

By Jonathan S. Landay, Ali Watkins and Marisa Taylor

McClatchy Washington Bureau
March 4, 2014

WASHINGTON — The CIA Inspector General’s Office has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations of malfeasance at the spy agency in connection with a yet-to-be released Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, McClatchy has learned.

The criminal referral may be related to what several knowledgeable people said was CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate aides to prepare the study. The monitoring may have violated an agreement between the committee and the agency.

THIS MAY NOT BE SO BAD IF IT'S DONE RIGHT

The Financial Times reports that white collar jobs are in jeopardy of being taken over by robots and use this example:

If Daniel Nadler is right, a generation of college graduates with well-paid positions as junior researchers and analysts in the banking industry should be worried about their jobs. Very worried.

Let's replace ALL the banksters with robots that follow Asimov's 3 Laws:

1 - A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2 - A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3 - A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

REMEMBER THE NSA'S CLAIM THAT ITS SNOOPING PREVENTED 70 TERRORIST ATTACKS?

That turned out to be another Big Lie and I strongly suspect this remark from JCS Chairman Gen. Dempsey will be another one:

" Our loss of depth across the force could reduce our ability to intimidate opponents from escalating conflicts.”

When did we last successfully intimidate an opponent? I can only think of Qaddafi back in the 80s.

DAVE WEIGEL LOSES HIS NORMAL GOOD SENSE

Not only does he support Romney's ridiculous claim that Russia is America's biggest geopolitical threat, he also endorses this stupidity from Romney

Iran is the greatest national security threat we face.

Anyone an have a bad post but Weigel's endorsement of the latter statement is simply deranged.

FATS LIMBAUGH & CHARITY

I read that several radio gasbags do a lot of work for charities and I immediately wondered what Fats Limbaugh did:

Premiere Radio’s Rush Limbaugh has raised literally millions of dollars with his annual radiothons for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

I am a fairly regular listener to Limbaugh and unlike Don Imus, I don't recall Limbaugh having a telethon.

UPDATE: I was wrong, Limbaugh has given money to the L & L Society:

Search Results - The Rush Limbaugh Show

February 22, 2014 Feb 22, 2014 ... Rush Donates $300,000 to Lead 2009 Leukemia & Lymphoma . ... Now, the work of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is international funding research at ...

ANOTHER CASE OF A "SKEWED POLL"

Cathy Herrod is the president of the Center for Arizona Policy (CAP) which tries to legally enact  the social views of James "The Bigot" Dobson.  The recent veto of the Bigot Bill was a well-deserved blow to Herrod and the CAP so this new poll had to be discounted by Herrod:

Poll: 3 of 4 Arizonans favor gay marriage, civil unions
Arizona Daily Star
PHOENIX — Three out of four Arizonans support the right of gays to at least form civil unions, if not to wed outright.

A new statewide survey finds 45 percent of the 870 voters surveyed in the last week find nothing wrong with gays to wed. That finding is in line with prior statewide polls done by other organizations.

But what is a surprise is another 32 percent said while they cannot support the idea of "marriage'' for same-sex couples, they believe they should be allowed to form civil unions that provide many of the same legal benefits and recognition.

Cathi Herrod, president of the Center for Arizona Policy, said she does not believe the poll represents how Arizonans would vote two years from now, after she has had a chance to make her case.

Herrod & the CAP have been making their bigoted case for over 10 years but the people of Arizona are no longer buying into Dobsonism.

A REFLECTION OF BAGGER INFLUENCE

(h/t Atrios)

Sen. Lindsey Graham has said a lot of stupid things over the last year and I think this is one of the very worst:

Lindsey Graham Blames Benghazi For Ukraine Crisis

By Zack Beauchamp on March 4, 2014 at 2:20 pm
THINK PROGRESS

WHO'S TO BLAME FOR THE UKRAINE?

According to conservatives, the blame falls mostly on Pres. Obama, then the US media, as if they actively encouraged Putin to be a bully.

THIS IS A GREAT QUESTION

(h/t Dahlia Lithwack)

A veteran DC reporter asks an existential question:

What is the appropriate journalistic response to Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) when he announces that evolution and the Big Bang theory are all “lies straight from the pit of hell”?

THE UKRAINE & CONSERVATIVES

I would think that after the failures of conservative war-mongering since 9-11, most of them would keep a low profile about the mess in the Ukraine but once again I underestimated the true believers and its not just them:

Democratic Senator: Crimea Crisis Is Happening Because America Looked Weak in Syria

By David Weigel
March 3 2014 10:07 AM
SLATE

Every year, a large sector of the Washington Convention Center is occupied and bedazzled for the AIPAC Policy Conference. It's an overwhelming event, with optics and booming Hollywood soundtracks that make other political conferences look like Aslyum movies. The scale of the thing tends to elevate what's said there. That happened yesterday, when Delaware Sen. Chris Coons (who's up for re-election this year but lacks a credible challenger) joined former Sen. Joe Lieberman and former Shin Bet head Avi Dichter for a discussion of foreign policy. It was Coons, a Democrat who holds the seat formerly filled by Joe Biden, who suggested that the Obama administration had shown weakness and invited new threats.

A NICE BACKGROUND & SUMMARY OF THE SITUATION IN THE UKRAINE

I don't have any backup for the claims made in the article beyond the trite "it has the ring of truth" feeling, especially this passage:

Has it ever before happened that people associated with Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Armenian, Polish, and Jewish culture have died in a revolution that was started by a Muslim? Can we who pride ourselves in our diversity and tolerance think of anything remotely similar in our own histories?

UPDATE: To my genuine surprise, at least one writer for the National Review approved of the article.

NEAL BOORTZ & TOM PERKINS ARE GETTING THEIR WAY

(h/t echidne)

Both want rich people to have a vastly disproportionate influence over elections and that seems to be coming true without allowing them extra votes:

Big-Money Donors Demand Larger Say in Campaign Strategy

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
MARCH 1, 2014
NYT

The quiet revolt signals a broader shift in the world of big money. Clubs of elite donors in both parties are taking a more central role in shaping policy and campaigns, displacing party leaders and the outside-spending organizations they helped create after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. And the sheer scale of their spending is almost certain to rewrite the playbook for political campaigns this year, as candidates reckon with the strongly held views of some of the world’s wealthiest people.