ThinkingMeat

Tim O’Reilly:

[I wanted] to voice my support for some of the key ideas behind [the Occupy Wall Street] protest — that many of the companies in our financial sector have started extracting far more value from our society than they provide to it, and that we need businesses to remember a more honest form of capitalism, where companies make money by providing sufficient value to customers that they are happy to pay for it, where the gap between the amount extracted in profits to owners doesn’t so far outstrip the amount paid to workers in the business that those workers need to go into debt to pay for ordinary living expenses, where government protects all its citizens, not just those who can afford lobbyists, and where society as a whole feels the virtuous circle that can only happen when companies create more value than they capture for themselves.

(cross-posted from DailyKos)

Hello, idiot teatards. Guess what? Your little sound bite that goes “SQUAWWWK… STIMULUS FAILED… SQUAWWWK… STIMULUS FAILED” is a clumsy and obvious lie:

In June of this year, Recovery Act funding was still supporting up to 2.9 million jobs. This chart tracks the change in employment that occurred following the passage of the Recovery Act:

Thus far, economists have offered “mainly positive reviews” of Obama’s plan, with Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics estimating that “the plan would add 2 percentage points to GDP growth next year, add 1.9 million jobs, and cut the unemployment rate by a percentage point.” Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate that the plan will boost growth by 1.5 percentage points, while the Economic Policy Institute said that the plan will create 2.6 million jobs and support another 1.6 million, boosting overall employment by almost 4.3 million.

The reason that unemployment is so high, even with the Recovery Act, is that it wasn’t big enough to deal with the scale of the problem. But to Republicans, the millions of jobs created by the Recovery Act signal abject failure, and therefore Obama’s new jobs plan doesn’t warrant consideration, even as the economy struggles to throw off the chains of the Great Recession.

Here’s oh-so-very-very-honest Jeff Schreiber in a recent post:

September 5, 2011 — Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, warming up the crowd for President Barack Obama at a Labor Day event in Detroit, Michigan:

We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers. And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party. And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war. The one thing about working people is we like a good fight. And you know what? They’ve got a war, they got a war with us and there’s only going to be one winner. It’s going to be the workers of Michigan, and America. We’re going to win that war … President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.

Please condemn these senseless, meritless and hopelessly inflammatory remarks, Mr. President.

Now, what did James Hoffa actually say? Because you know that terribly-awesomely-honest Jeff Schreiber isn’t going to give you the whole story, don’t you? Here’s the transcript of the section of the Hoffa speech that Schreiber kinda-sorta quotes; I’ve highlighted the parts that Schreiber saw fit to delete:

We have to keep an eye on the battle we face — a war on workers. And you see it everywhere there is the Tea Party. And you know there is only one way to beat and win that war.

The one thing about working people is we like a good fight. And you know what, they’ve got a war, they’ve got a war with us and there is only going to be one winner. It is going to be the workers of Michigan and America – we are going to win that war. All the way.

But it starts with your involvement, it starts with next November. We’ve got a bunch of people there that don’t’ want the president to succeed, and they are called the Tea Party – the people who don’t want him to do anything right and he is working hard for us.

President Obama is frustrated by what’s going on. Well, guess what, we’ve got the vote. And the answer to what we say is, we remember in November. We will beat the Tea Party and give this country back to workers and America. We can do it together.”

We’ve also got to talk about jobs. I get so tired about people who …(inaudible) these big corporations that send our jobs to Mexico, they send our jobs to China, and they’ve got the audacity to say ‘where are the jobs?’

Well I’ve got news for you. It’s time to bring those jobs back to America and bring America back to work. That’s what we’ve got to do.

We are going to hear from President Obama in a few minutes, and I am so glad that he has come to Michigan because this is where he sees the real America. He looks out on this army of people and you know what I say? President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. President Obama, we want one thing: Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs…(The crowd joins the chant.)

That’s what we are going to tell America…..When he sees what we are doing here, he will be inspired, but he needs help. And you know what? Everybody here has got a vote. If we go back, we keep the eye on the prize, lets take these sons-of-bitches out and give America back to America where we belong.

Hoffa did not issue a call to violence, as the wingnut noise machine has accused him of doing. Hoffa issued a call to the ballot box. But anyone reading the carefully-edited version of Hoffa’s remarks that Schreiber published wouldn’t know that.

What do we call what Jeff Schreiber just did here, boys and girls?

Listen to the applause at 0:11 into this clip:

The right wing in this country loves death. They are ecstatic at the very idea of killing other human beings.

Anybody else feel the need to puke?

(hat tip: Balloon Juice)

UPDATE 09/08/11 12:32 PM EDT: Here’s even more proof that Republicans love the idea of killing other people.

Mike Lofgren recently retired after 28 years as a GOP staffer in Congress. He sees the Republican Party as an apocalyptic cult, inimical to democracy in this country. Tell me he’s wrong, please.

As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America’s plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction — and even less spending reduction! — than Obama’s offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society’s overclass.

…

2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia – a nuclear-armed state – during the latter’s conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? – “we are all Georgians now,” a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading “defense experts,” who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year’s defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges’ formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.

…

3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines “low-information voter” — or, perhaps, “misinformation voter.”

Go read the entire piece. It is invaluable for understanding exactly what kind of lunatics we are up against.

(hat tip: ThinkProgress)

Texas Governor Rick Perry has jumped into the race for the GOP nomination for the 2012 Presidential election. Who is he, and what does he stand for? Political Munky has a good primer on the man many call “Governor Goodhair”:

Perry has been governor for over 11 years, under his leadership Texas can boast the following:

• A quarter of Texans lack [medical] coverage, the highest share in the country.
• Texas ranks 47th in the country for the level of state spending on schools.  Texas state capitol in Austin saw thousands of protesters descend on the grounds for a rally against a proposed $10 billion—yes, billion—in education cuts to the state. Representatives from 300 school districts, students, teachers, parents, and others marched and called on Perry to use the state’s “rainy day fund” to cover the shortfall in schools rather than lay off a projected 189,000 education workers.  The New York Times called Perry’s impending cuts “the largest cuts to public education since World War II.”  Of course, the budget cuts are still coming.  Aside from the impact such layoffs will have on the economy, since a good chunk of the new jobs Perry touts as part of his economic miracle were in schools, there’s the actual impact on the state’s students. It’s not just public schools that take a hit—universities will see their budgets slashed and financial aid eliminated for 43,000 students.
• Texas ranks highest in the country for the levels of toxic chemicals released into the water and carcinogens released into the air.  BP spill was still churning oil into the Gulf of Mexico, Perry called it “just an act of God” and warned against any “knee-jerk reaction” that might include things like halting deepwater drilling until the dangers could be assessed. Unsurprisingly, Perry also got $129,890 from the oil and gas industry for his last reelection campaign.
• Under Gov. Perry Texas has had the most active death-penalty regime in the country -  232 people, more than any other governor in history. (The previous record, 152, was held by George W. Bush.) He remains embroiled in controversy over the 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. Perry removed three appointees from the Texas Forensic Science Commission just days before the board was going to investigate a flawed arson investigation in Willingham’s case.  “Outside of Texas, the name Cameron Todd Willingham did not mean much to most people until the fall of 2009. In a 17-page article published by The New Yorker magazine, a curious and brave woman, a brilliant fire expert, and an investigative journalist re-opened the case against this man who was put to death for killing his children. The ‘classic arson case’ was picked apart, revealed to have been based on junk science and a misguided sense of expert intuition.  Proof of the flawed fire investigation had been rushed to Rick Perry and the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole before the execution, to no avail. Five years later, the article uncovered new evidence to all but confirm what a number of people had suspected for years: That the state of Texas had executed an innocent man.”