Better Pay, More Independent Workers -- No Wonder GOP Hates Obamacare

The bad news keeps coming for the anti-Obamacare right. Not only did a Congressional Budget Office report released yesterday detail how the Affordable Care Care would empower workers to work fewer hours if they chose, but further examination of the report finds even more good news for America's working people. Talking Points Memo's Dylan Scott is once again on the ball:

TPM spoke with... top economists who agreed with [this] analysis: People choosing to work less because of Obamacare, as CBO projects, would mean higher wages.

"That stands to reason. You get this sorting effect," Dean Baker, co-founder of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research. "You have a lot of people working now who don't want to work. The only way they can get insurance is through their employer."

Those people retire or cut back their hours or otherwise lower their participation in the labor market -- a possibility that CBO raised itself -- reducing the labor supply. Over the long term, that drives up wages. Baker said that CBO said as much in its analysis: The report projected that total hours worked would drop by as much as 2 percent by 2024 because of Obamacare, but total compensation would fall only 1 percent.

Supply and demand: reality's greatest defender -- at least, in matters economic.

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How Not to Deny You're Waging a War on Women

You may need a refresher on Virginia state Sen. Dick Black, a far-right Republican who just doesn't get how marital rape can be a thing. If so, here's Mother Jones' Molly Redden's reporting on the subject from January 15.

After taking a drubbing in last year's state elections, Virginia Republicans are debating whether their party has come to be defined by its extremists. But in a congressional district in Northern Virginia, one of the state's main instigators of culture warfare, state Sen. Richard H. "Dick" Black, is running in the Republican primary to replace longtime GOP moderate Rep. Frank Wolf, who is retiring. And he's guaranteed to ignite wedge-issue passion. Exhibit A: As a state legislator, Black opposed making spousal rape a crime, citing the impossibility of convicting a husband accused of raping his wife "when they're living together, sleeping in the same bed, she's in a nightie, and so forth."

Black has referred to emergency contraception, which does not cause abortions, as "baby pesticide." Black also fought to block a statue of Abraham Lincoln at a former Confederate site in Richmond. He wasn't sure, he explained at the time, that statues of Lincoln belonged in Virginia. He has argued that abortion is a worse evil than slavery. And once, to demonstrate why libraries should block pornography on their computers, Black invited a TV reporter to film him using a library terminal to watch violent rape porn.

Last week, we got the not-unwelcome news that Black was dropping out of that race. Black said he was staying in the state Senate to "maintain our 20/20 split," but there's good reason to believe that he was pushed out. Black is exactly the kind of candidate establishment Republicans don't want running in November -- the kind who uses hard-ass conservativism to be a jerk and troll everyone who isn't a true believer. Maybe he could've won the district or maybe he couldn't have. But he would've been guaranteed to engage in jackass antics that would make national waves and make the party look bad as a whole. And, as I pointed out last week, Black's not the only candidate that Republicans have who's making trouble for the GOP as a whole.

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Freedom vs. the Cult of the GOP

Let's face it, there are really two reasons why Republicans want to put up significant obstacles to voting, The first is the obvious one that everyone knows: faced with an ever-shrinking demographic base, Republicans want to even the playing field by keeping Democratic voters away from the polls. If you ever doubted that one, then consider Texas' onerous voter ID law, which recognizes gun licenses as valid voter identification, but not a college ID card.

The second is similar, but more cultish. It's the Tea Party's rationalization for voter suppression. Like the first, this reasoning has it that too many Democrats vote, but this one tries to argue that making it harder to vote is a good thing, since then only the people who really want to vote will make it to the ballot box. These people worry about the "low information voter" (LIV), who -- if they only took the time to listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on the Blessed Electronic Gospel Box -- would understand all and see the Starry Wisdom of the Tea Party Way. It's ironic, since the people who think this way are actually the LIVs they worry about. They're factually wrong about pretty much everything, but reject any disagreement as heresy and even as some sort of mental defect. In any case, the result of this cult-thinking is the same as that of the more reality-based suppressors' thinking -- weeding out Democratic voters. Only the reasoning behind the suppression effort is different.

Of course, there's a third reason and it's the stated reason: that democracy is at risk from voter fraud. But that's the excuse, it's not the reason why. When it comes down to why Republicans introduce laws to restrict voting, one of those two reasons are at the heart of it. Voter fraud is just the lie they tell as cover.

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How the Gun Industry Profits Off the Carnage its Product Creates

It's one of the gun lobby's and firearms industry's most successful scams; the "fear buying" marketing campaign. The way it works is this, you convince a certain cowardly subset of the population that there's some imminent threat to their safety or that the government is minutes away from scooping up all their guns and said cowardly subset will run out in a fit of panic buying, like people who get into fights over water before a big storm.

And how do we know it's the same subset every time? Because the numbers are too contradictory any other way. After a string of high profile and extremely shocking killings in 2013, it started to look like some real action was about to take place in the arena of gun safety. That this didn't happen is a matter of national shame, but the panic buying set in, making 2013 a banner year for firearms sales.

So, did everyone run out and buy a lot of guns and ammunition? Actually, no. Hardly anyone did. A study launched by the General Social Survey showed that gun ownership was actually at a 40-year low. Logic dictates that these are the same panicky grandmas out buying guns in a Pavlovian response to perceived danger -- danger that the guns would become illegal, danger that some other unhinged shooter would attack them, or both. And the gun-buying was in no way rational. If you're extremely skilled, you might be able to use two firearms at once, but record sales after record sales, combined with the number of gun-owning households in free fall, suggests these people have a lot more guns than two, which means a lot more guns than they can use at any given time.

So the "safety" conferred by gun ownership starts to look a lot more talismanic than utilitarian. In other words, the "guns keep you safe" argument basically becomes superstition.

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Murder as a By-Product of Rightwing Fearmongering

Josh Marshall writes that the BS storm surrounding Obamacare right now has become a "white noise of derp and mendacity" -- i.e., there's so much spin and propaganda here that it all sort of cancels itself out, at least in terms of specificity. There's a lot of criticism out there, but there isn't any single line of attack. Apparently, piling on over the rocky rollout hasn't seemed to have been enough to do much of anything. More is needed. The volume mut be increase. The anger must be red-hot. The rightwing herd must be driven to  panic.The derp must peg the stupidometer.

And that's just what Republicans are planning to do -- if they can manage to settle on one single messaging strategy. Marshall warns us of one narrative that seems to be forming on the right: "Top Republicans are now making a concerted effort to convince the public that Obamacare 'navigators', people trained to help people navigate the new system, will steal their identities and private personal information."

They're diving on testimony from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and -- surprise! -- taking it out of context to induce hysteria. On Nov. 6, Sebelius was asked whether it was a requirement that the Obamacare "navigators" undergo a criminal background check. She said there wasn't a federal requirement, but that they were farming the job out to private contractors. Those entities have "the responsibility to screen their individual navigators and make sure that they are sufficiently trained for the job."

Who are these fly-by-night organizations filled with unchecked felons? According to the report, "local United Way chapters, higher education institutions and the like."

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Getting Healthcare News from People Who Told You Second Hand Smoke was Harmless

Back in the '90s, one of Rush Limbaugh's big issues was the "junk science" that held that second hand tobacco smoke was bad for you. Never mind the obvious; that if first hand smoke was bad for you, the idea that second hand smoke was not is absurd. But Limbaugh was and is an expert in making endless gullible people believe patently ridiculous things, which made him the perfect propagandist to rile up dopes into thinking you had some sort of a right to smoke around the baby and that the liberal nanny state was taking that right away -- not because of health concerns, but because they're all commies who hate big business. Limbaugh continued the fight long after the battle was lost, insisting as recently as 2010 that "second hand smoke is harmless."

This campaign wasn't exactly Limbaugh's idea. Tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds enlisted him and others in a big PR push that included the arguments that nicotine was "NOT addictive,"  to "point out 'victimhood' of smokers--outside in wind and cold--as pariahs." The idea was to "create fear of loss of liberty" and to "incite smokers to rebel and spread that rebellion to nonsmokers now!" Who would be more perfect than Limbaugh's audience of "dittoheads"  -- a group of constantly whining conservatives completely convinced of their perpetual victimhood? Always quick to reactionary rage and never prone to deep thinking, the far right talk radio base has always been a herd of buffalo that corporations could panic into a stampede and send to trample (or try to anyway) anyone they wanted. They became the "town hall mobs," which in turn became the Tea Party.

This, I believe, is essential background in understand the furor around this:

Talking Points Memo: Donna received the letter canceling her insurance plan on Sept. 16. Her insurance company, LifeWise of Washington, told her that they'd identified a new plan for her. If she did nothing, she'd be covered.

A 56-year-old Seattle resident with a 57-year-old husband and 15-year-old daughter, Donna had been looking forward to the savings that the Affordable Care Act had to offer.

But that's not what she found. Instead, she'd be paying an additional $300 a month for coverage. The letter made no mention of the health insurance marketplace that would soon open in Washington, where she could shop for competitive plans, and only an oblique reference to financial help that she might qualify for, if she made the effort to call and find out.

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Tea Party's Concern for Veterans is Short-Lived

During the shutdown, Rep. Blake Farenthold was one of the 'bagger reps exploiting veterans for political gain. When veterans learned that the WWII Memorial was closed, Farenthold was right there, making sure the barricades were pulled away. See, during a government shutdown, the real important thing is not making sure that families have food assistance, that homeless shelters remain open, or that the families of soldiers killed in action received death benefits. No, what was really important was to get plenty of photos of Rep. Blake Farenthold and other Republicans gladhanding vets, blackslapping each other, and generally acting like moving a temporary fence was pretty much equal to landing at Normandy themselves.

"Today, I was proud to join some of my fellow Texas members in welcoming WWII veterans from the Dallas/Ft. Worth area 'Honor Flight' to the World War II Memorial in D.C.," Farenthold said in a Facebook statement at the time. "These heroes made the ultimate sacrifice in serving our nation - and no barricade should prevent them from visiting their memorial."

Strictly speaking, the "ultimate sacrifice" would be dying, since "ultimate" means "last." So they haven't actually made that sacrifice for Blake Farenthold's freedom quite yet -- but Blake's working on that.

Burnt Orange Report: Farenthold sat down with Kristv news to discuss what exactly the shutdown did to the country and his motives for supporting it.

Kristv news quickly pointed out that many of Farenthold's constituents have said they will not vote for him again. Kristv asked Farenthold about the people who say he's lost their vote; people like retired veterans who were on the verge of losing their disability checks next month.

"I feel like my mandate when I was elected was to go reduce the size of government, lower taxes, and increase freedom, and freedom isn't free, and sometimes you have to make a small sacrifice to move forward with what you're after," Congressman Farenthold said.

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And the Whole Republican Shutdown Goes Off the Rails

This is what often happens with high-profile protests and political movements. After a while, mission creep sets in and suddenly it's not about the original issue, it's about the fight itself. Think of Occupy Wall Street, where the protest became less and less about Wall Street corruption, wealth privilege, and growing in income inequality. As time went on, it became more and more about the protesters' right to occupy Zuccotti Park and the police brutality used there and by other police departments in other cities. Eventually, the whole thing went off message and that was the beginning of the end of the Zuccotti Park protest -- although not the movement as a whole.

Keep in mind, this took a while. Now consider this story from yesterday -- which was day three of the government shutdown.

Steve Benen: Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) isn't the most prominent member of the House Republican caucus, but in recent weeks, he's played a pretty important role in shutting down the government. It was Meadows who initiated a formal letter, endorsed by around 80 of his House GOP colleagues, vowing to oppose any spending measure that failed to gut the Affordable Care Act.

To this extent, Meadows helped identify that most radical contingent of his caucus, and positioned himself as one of its ringleaders.

With this in mind, as Brian Beutler reported yesterday, "it was a big surprise" when Meadows told reporters this week that the government shutdown has nothing to do with Obamacare. "This fight now has become about veterans and about national guard folks that perhaps -- reservists that are not getting paid," the North Carolina Republican said. "That's where the fight is today."

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Unable to Fool Anyone Else, Republicans Resort to Scamming Each Other

The government shutdown drags on. And from the nation's rightwing media, Republicans are getting some really lousy advice.

"I think the worst outcome, though, for the Republicans in the House at this point -- as they have been reasonable and the president totally unreasonable, Reid unreasonable -- is to cave," says Sean Hannity. "I don't think they should give in at all. And if that means that they're going to sit this out for a month or two months, or however long the president wants to be arrogant and not talk to anybody, then just sit it out."

"Media lies only have so much traction, eventually people will ask: 'Why won't Obama/Dems offer anything.'" advises Breitbart.com's Jon Nolte. "Hang in there, GOP!"

Other brilliant strategists urging a "stick to your guns" approach are Sarah Palin, Erick Erickson, and Newt Gingrich -- the latter apparently having learned nothing from his own government shutdown fiasco. For the most part (Gingrich now sadly included) these are all rightwing media types. They'd probably prefer that Republicans win elections, but not nearly as much as they'd prefer not to lose their audience. The GOP base are emotionally-driven and poorly informed, so they really do think that if Republicans just hold out long enough, shout loud enough, and wish with all their little hearts, they'll do away with Obamacare.

A rally the troops message brings in the dopes. A "hey look, we have to face reality..." approach is a fast ticket to HasBeentown, by way of RiNOville. The base doesn't tune into rightwing media to hear reality -- that much should be obvious to anyone. They tune in to have their prejudices and misconceptions reinforced. They want to be lied to and if you level with them, you're outta here. So the wingnut punditry are going to be a chorus singing the praises of self-destruction.

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The GOP -- Pretend Warriors in a Made-Up War

If you want a good indication that the current particular manufactured crisis of a government shutdown threat is winding down into nothing, I give you the fact that Republicans are already talking about how they plan to use the debt ceiling as a hostage strategy to attack Obamacare. This plan presupposes the failure of the current attempt, obviously. Greg Sargent gets to the skinny:

The conservative drive to threaten a government shutdown to defund Obamacare is collapsing, thanks in part to the news that Mitch McConnell won’t vote with Ted Cruz, effectively meaning the strategy is dead. So now, multiple reports are telling us that House Republicans are preparing to use the debt limit to force an Obamacare delay.

This comes as new polling confirms yet again the basic dynamic here: The American people, even if they disapprove of Obamacare, do not support using this fall’s fiscal confrontations to sabotage the law, whether we’re talking about a government shutdown or the debt limit.

Aha! So that's how they're going to destroy Obamacare once and for all, by... delaying it?

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Sorry Gun Fans, Reality Doesn't Work that Way

A recent news release is bad news for those who think everyone and their brother should be armed. From NPR:

Investigators now do not think there was a second shooter, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said late Monday evening. Throughout Monday, authorities had run down witness reports and other evidence indicating there might have been additional gunmen.

Aaron Alexis, acting alone, killed twelve people and died himself as a result of his rampage. And the fact that there was no second -- or third -- shooter is a terrible blow to the "arm everyone" argument, since it demonstrates panicked people aren't extremely good at identifying shooters. Second shooter reports had other shooters wearing uniforms with guns drawn wandering around, causing havoc. But these "shooters" were most likely law enforcement. Had any one of these witnesses been armed, the tragedy would likely have been aggravated. The panicked witness might've fired on law enforcement and, given the situation, there's no reason for the law enforcement personnel not to return fire.

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The Latest Anti-Science from the Conservative Flat Earth Society

In order to be a global warming denying wingnut, you have to leave logic at the door. This is why climate-deniers crawl out of the woodwork whenever there's a blizzard someplace and laugh at this whole crazy global warming idea. Remember how scientists said that global warming meant it would never snow anywhere ever again? Ha! Libtards...

Never mind that blizzards aren't usually accompanied by especially cold weather and that winter storms, like all storms, are driven by heat energy. Let's all laugh and laugh and laugh. And let's look out for stories like this one, so we can proudly parade our scientific ignorance around.

Telegraph: There has been a 60 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, they equivalent of almost a million square miles.

In a rebound from 2012's record low an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin.

The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes.

A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century.

According to climate-deniers, decades of data showing a warming planet can be safely ignored, but one season of ice recovery proves beyond all doubt that the planet isn't warming, but cooling. Because that's how rightwing science woks -- you cherrypick the data that seems to back up your argument and ignore the mountains of evidence that don't. And even that cherrypicked data is presented dishonestly.

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No, MLK Didn't Want a 'Colorblind' Society

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Martin Luther King Jr's "I have a dream" speech is considered one of the greatest speeches in American political rhetoric, yet conservatives tend to abridge it down to that one sentence. Charlie Pierce explains why:

There it is. That's the great loophole. It is an otherwise unremarkable sentiment given the context of the entire address, but, for the people who almost certainly would have lined up on the other side of the movement in 1963, it subsequently has been used as an opening through which all manner of historically backsliding mischief has come a'wandering in, from "reverse discrimination" to Allan Bakke, to what is going on today with the franchise in too many places, to the reaction to the killing of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Modern conservatives have used that line to conscript Dr. King into their ideology, now that he's dead and unable to speak for himself. It's the only line in the speech that they remember.

Conservatives have in recent years taken to trying to coopt King as one of their own and that one sentence is pretty much the whole of the evidence for their case. Conservatives see him through the lens of what Cornell West calls "the Santa Clausification" of Dr. King -- i.e., King was a magical figure who came one day and ended racism, then was tragically taken from us by someone who didn't understand. Never mind that King advocated for a minimum guaranteed income for all Americans. Never mind that he died supporting the collective bargaining rights of striking sanitation workers. Never mind that he opposed the Vietnam War and supported the Voting Rights Act. Ignore all that and concentrate only one that one short sentence from one speech and, if you squint and cock your head just right, you can almost believe King was as conservative as your average teabagging frootloop.

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Tape Shows Benghazi 'Scandal' Kept Artificially Alive by Far Right Activists

About a week ago, President Obama mentioned "phony scandals" that were drawing attention and effort away from the real work Washington needs to do to rebuild the economy. "With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals," he said in a speech on the economy at Knox College, "Washington has taken its eye off the ball. And I am here to say this needs to stop... Our focus must be on the basic economic issues that the matter most to you -- the people we represent."

Those remarks became a minor scandal in itself, the daily worst thing ever! we've all become so familiar with. The unceasingly outraged right were outraged at the outrageousness of this latest outrage. "It is dismissive. It is insulting. It is minimizing. It's not validating the concerns that people have," Rep. Michele Bachmann said, as if validating unfounded concerns was something anyone should be interested in doing.

A lot of critics ran to the Benghazi story -- although the president didn't mention it directly. People died, they said, did they make those deaths up?

Well, no. They didn't make up the deaths, just the controversy over them. New evidence shows a concentrated effort between GOP leadership and conservative activists to turn a foreign policy tragedy into a "scandal" that was supposed to rock the presidency.

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Are Selective Reading, Social Media Driving Partisanship?

On the bright side, it's good evidence that rightwing complaints of "liberal media bias" are baloney. A new Gallup poll tracks public confidence in the media and finds that confidence down across the board. Confidence in newspapers is now at 15% for conservatives, 25% for moderates, and 31% for liberals. In television news, it's 18% conservative, 24% moderate, and 26% liberal. Sure, conservatives trust media the least, but if there were any hint of liberal bias, liberals would be pleased as punch with these news outlets.

According to Gallup, the trust in newspapers peaked in 1979 at 51% and has been rocky since. Trust in television, on the other hand, has never been very high -- it topped out at 46% in 1993. The reason for this drop in confidence is fairly clear, according to Gallup:

Americans' confidence in newspapers and television news has been slowly eroding for many years, worsening further since 2007. By that point, newspapers and television news had been struggling for years to figure out how to adjust their strategy for a growing Internet audience.

It was also around that time that social networking sites truly began to proliferate, causing news outlets and journalists to work to find their place on them and serving to expand the role of citizen media and user-generated content. Twitter had launched in 2006, and by 2007-2008 was growing its audience rapidly. Facebook had reached 30 million users by mid-2007 and more than 100 million by the end of 2008.

Unfortunately, a lot of this social media information is complete BS. Your crazy uncle Howard's Facebook links about Barack Obama's secret terr'ist background and his fake birth certificate are not reliable news sources. Yet a Pew study on the state of the media finds that, while TV is still the king (likely driven by local news), online sources are now a close second when it comes to the places where people get their news. Granted, a lot of that online news is still newspaper and TV reporting, but even that old school news reporting is commented on by partisans right there on the page. Further, the links to many of these stories are supplied by people with an ax to grind -- stories that back up their point of view get shared around, those that don't get ignored. Stories about snow storms and cold snaps get passed around by global warming deniers, while stories about steadily rising temperatures, heat waves, and droughts don't.

This selective sharing would result in the appearance of partisanship by the sources shared. In other words, if crazy uncle Howard keeps linking to AP articles about poll numbers and faux scandals, then someone who's not on Howard's side of the divide may begin to wonder how reliable Howard's favorite wire service can be. You never see the stories he ignores; all you get are the "Sarah Palin says Pres. Obama kicked her dog" headlines and never the "Factcheck: Sarah Palin full of crap" ones.

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A Vanishing Opportunity to Turn the Tables on the GOP

Politico called last week a "political gift" for Republicans. The convergence of three controversies had a fading political party drooling. Of course, Benghazi was an entirely made up conspiracy theory, the IRS story may or may not be scandalous but doesn't involve the White House, and seizing phone records from the AP is the sort of thing Republicans can actually get behind in their never-ending War on Terror.

Still, the press went a little nuts with the stories on an otherwise slow news week and Republicans began to believe the hype. Wall-to-wall coverage of these three stories merged into one rat king of story and the nation was transfixed. Completely and utterly transfixed.

Or were we?

CNN: President Barack Obama comes out of what was arguably the worst week of his presidency with his approval rating holding steady, according to a new national poll.

But a CNN/ORC International survey released Sunday morning also indicates that congressional Republicans are not overplaying their hand when it comes to their reaction to the three controversies that have consumed the nation's capital over the past week and a half. And the poll finds that a majority of Americans take all three issues seriously.

According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53% of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president's approval rating was at 51% in CNN's last poll, which was conducted in early April.

So Americans take these issues seriously, but not seriously enough to change their opinion of the president. "The CNN poll is in-line with Gallup, which also indicated a very slight rise in Obama's approval rating over the same time period," the report continues. "And Gallup's daily tracking poll also indicated a slight upward movement of Obama's approval rating over the past week. But as with the CNN poll, it was within that survey's sampling error."

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Republicans Need to Dig Up Some Better 'Scandals'

Want a scandal? Here's a scandal:

Salon: Try, if you can, to ignore all the lurid coke-and-sex bombshells contained in the three Department of Interior Inspector General reports about the shenanigans at the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS). The program director who snorted speed off a subordinate’s toaster oven, and made her give him a blow job while driving around the neighborhood. The two “MMS Chicks” who were notorious for getting plastered at conventions and having one-night stands with oil industry employees.

Try — and yes, I know it’s hard — try even to ignore the allegation that one program director told a subordinate that if she could score him some coke during the MMS performance appraisal period, he would increase her performance award. What’s the big deal? Who wouldn’t be motivated by such an incentive? And what’s a little drunken sex and coke binging on government time among friends? It happens to the best of us.

The significance of the three reports delivered by the inspector general to Congress on Wednesday lies not in the prurience of some of the indiscretions, but in the symbolism. The Royalty-in-Kind Program of the U.S. Minerals Management Service is where offshore drilling meets the U.S. government. And gosh, is it ever one heck of a mess. You want a toxic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Just read the reports.

You'll happy to know that this isn't happening now, but in the misty, far-flung past of bustling 2008. This was the Bush administration's scandal and it was bad. The MMS was responsible for leasing federal land for oil and natural gas drilling. And it was corrupt nearly beyond belief. An Inspector General found not only ethical breaches, but criminal misconduct in an agency who's mission had changed under the Bush administration from serving the interests of the American people to making as much money as possible for the oil and gas industry. The agency was basically run by lobbyists, practically guaranteeing malfeasance. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the agency was finally eliminated under Interior Department restructuring.

I don't bring this up to try to distract from the current controversies plaguing the White House, but to make a simple point; as salacious and shocking as it was at the time, no one talks about the MMS scandal anymore. Of course, the Bush administration had four colossal scandals that leap immediately to mind: the failure to take terrorism seriously, resulting in 9/11; the lies and hype about WMD that led to the invasion of Iraq; the awful response to Hurricane Katrina; and the use of torture. There were also warrantless wiretaps, blowing the cover of Valerie Plame, Dick Cheney getting hammered and shooting some poor guy in the face, and some I'm either forgetting or skipping over for the sake of brevity. In the scandal-production department, the Bushies were overachievers.

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Graham and McCain Exploit Boston Tragedy

After the arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in connection with the Boston bomb attacks, the nation's top unrepentant neocons --  John McCain and Lindsey Graham -- are currently engaged in a high-profile demonstration of grandstanding. The purpose of this posturing seems to be to showcase how Very Important and Serious they are, why you should have them on Meet the Press, and why you should vote for Graham instead of whatever random Tea Party nutjob the far right base will try to primary him with.

Graham and McCain would very much like Tsarnaev to be charged as an enemy combatant. Slate's Emily Bazelon spells out exactly why this is all pretense -- Graham knows this can't happen because "he helped write the 2009 law [pdf] that says Tsarnaev may not be tried as an enemy combatant and thus points away from holding him as one. But that’s not stopping Graham and the others from trying to score terror points—and, of course, trying to make the president appear weak. This isn’t about actually fighting terrorists. It’s about running for election."

So far, the rightwing blogosphere is following along like a brainless puppy. Mostly because they too are more interested in embarrassing Obama than rights or justice. After all, it was just weeks ago that half of them where defending the right of suspects like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to due process in the case of drone attacks on American citizens. But that was because the Obama administration held the opposite view, not because they gave a damn. Now that an American citizen is not in the sights of a drone hitman, they're all wondering why anyone would be at all concerned about due process for terrorists. As always, consistency is not their strong point.

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The Pointlessness of Spinning an Event Like the Boston Bombings

I saw the article yesterday, but I kind of set it aside. In it, the Boston Globe reported that the Boston Marathon bombing has all the earmarks of a domestic terror attack.  I bookmarked it and tagged it for later, thinking that maybe it would be better reference from a historical standpoint than from a predictive one. After all, rightwing bloggers have been using baseless speculation to cover themselves in clown paint and I wasn't eager to emulate their failures. I thought the article would better serve as a "clues were there" reference (or "clues were misleading," as the case might be). The article describes the bombs as "crudely made" and suggest that the death toll indicates they weren't as effective as the bomber would've hoped, "making it unlikely that they were the work of a foreign government or global terrorist group, such as Al ­Qaeda." Besides, Islamic terrorist organizations always claim credit for bombings -- that is, after all, the point: to spread terror -- and we're now approaching the end of the 72 hour window in which those claims usually are issued. In incidents of attacks by lone domestic terrorists, it's generally the case that no one takes credit, because the perpetrator doesn't want to risk providing more evidence. In these cases, the purpose of the attack isn't to spread terror, but to "strike a blow" against a perceived enemy from the perspective of their own lives (i.e., the DC Sniper, the Olympic Park bombing, or Oklahoma City). Sophisticated terrorists try to perceive their attacks from the eyes of the media and the populace. From the Globe article:

Juliette N. Kayyem, a Globe columnist and lecturer at ­Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who has spent years working on counter­terrorism and homeland security, said she thought the bombing was probably the work of a terrorist in the ­Boston area who would appreciate the race’s importance to the local culture.

“It is probably home-grown, someone with a political cause from the right or the left,” said Kayyem, “someone who knows how appealing the Boston ­Marathon is to citizens here.”

“Even though it’s an international event, it is still a local event,” she said.

Of course, none of this is to say it isn't an Islamic terror attack -- which was why I approached the piece with a healthy amount of caution and a grain of salt. What people surmise and what people know are two entirely different things.

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Tea Party Bloggers, the Boston Bombing, and the Cult of Perpetual Victimhood

It's a shocking and terrible crime. A blast that was almost certainly terrorism (run of the mill mass murder can't be ruled out yet) rocked the finish line at the Boston Marathon, followed quickly by another. The brutal carnage has resulted in the death of three, with the real possibility of that number rising still -- many of the injuries were horrific.

The smoke had barely cleared before the speculation began -- and with it, the idiocy. Reports were confused, unclear, sometimes contradictory. But one group of Americans felt they had a firm grasp one the true story in Boston. And that story was that they -- the rightwing, Tea Party, wingnut bloggers -- were the real victims in the day's tragedy.

Leading the charge was the blog "Fire Andrea Mitchell," claiming that CNN's Wolf Blitzer had blamed the Tea Party for the bombing. The right went insane on Twitter, which is where the right goes to go insane these days, and the story spread like widlfire. "CNN's Wolf Blitzer just speculated if anti-tax groups were behind the bombing WITH ZERO EVIDENCE," one tweeted -- which turned out to be a massively hypocritical statement.

Blitzer's supposed "blaming" of the Tea Party right consisted of one sentence, "It is a state holiday in Massachusetts today called Patriots' Day and, uh, who knows if that had anything at all to do with these explosions." The only way you to take that as an attack on the right is if you wanted so badly to wear the mantle of victimhood that you'd twist anything anyone said in order to take offense. If you were so self-absorbed as to be able to do that, then the victims weren't those people bleeding on the streets of Boston, the real victims were the wingnut bloggers and their audience.

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