3 weird sisters

Rick Perry fights a losing battle with Adam's Little Soldier

Courtesy of Gen. JC Christian.

Well, it’s official now:  the GOP has the obligatory dumb Texan candidate for the presidency; this one gets bonus points for conspicuously aping the last dumb Texan to run in both diction and physical gesture.

In keeping with my long tradition of trying to help out GOP candidates whenever possible, I’ve put together a few bumperstickers for Mr. Perry:

If it weren’t for the rapidly-approaching ground, this stupid debt ceiling impasse free-fall we’re in could be quite entertaining, because the cracks are beginning to show.

In what sounds like a “we can do it, yes we can!” pep rally for House Republicans, there’s this oddity reported by the Washington Post:

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the party’s vote counter, began his talk by showing a clip from the movie, “The Town”, trying to forge a sense of unity among the independent-minded caucus.

One character asks his friend: “I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later.”

“Whose car are we gonna take,” the character says.

After showing the clip, Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), one of the most outspoken critics of leadership among the 87 freshmen, stood up to speak, according to GOP aides.

“I’m ready to drive the car,” West replied, surprising many Republicans by giving his full -throated support for the plan.

Then today, there’s this from Politico:

Well, I have … it was this scene:

Or perhaps this one:

In any case, I predict we’ll be here by Saturday at the latest:

That’s Boehner in the role of Piggy; Eric Cantor is portrayed by the kid with the modified jewfro who levers the huge boulder off the cliff, while the other fools on the hill represent the Teabag Caucus.

There’s that old back-handed curse about living in interesting times; I don’t think this qualifies.  I think we’re suffering under the much more pernicious curse of living in stupid times.

Have you noticed that none of your bullshit is showing up in the comments? 

Feel free to continue wasting your time.  As for “last one to utilize this,” all you are “utilizing” is our spam filter.

Someone, somewhere, posted a link to this video in comments on one of the blogs I read sometime in the last couple of weeks.  Sorry I can’t remember who it was to give proper credit:

Following links from the video, I found this most excellent website, which looks like it was abandoned some months ago. Still lots of snarky goodness there, though.

Back in my day, we didn’t HAVE the ShoutyFace or Twitter, and these folks were known as “posers” (or “poseurs,” which was the poser term for “poser.”)

Now all you kids get offa my damn lawn!!!!

Why, it’s our friend Mr. Brooks.

When God put ears on this man's head, he ruined a perfectly good dick

Let’s see what he’s serving up today:  who caused the housing meltdown?  Fannie Mae and brown people.

Seriously, I’m not making this up.  He specifically cites ACORN and the Congressional Black & Hispanic Caucuses, and throws in Barney Frank for good measure.

All of this has been debunked already, so I’m not going to painstakingly go through and debunk it again – you should go read it for yourself.  But before you do, here are the facts you need to know:

1.  Bobo’s lying about the timeline, blaming the housing meltdown on affordable housing policies adopted in the 1990s, none of which stipulated that Fannie Mae was required to pick up more sub-prime loans.   In fact, at the height of the subprime lending orgy, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s overall share of sub-prime loans sold into the secondary mortgage market decreased by 50%.

2.  Bobo’s gratuitous swipe at Frank is in reference to a former partner of Frank’s, Herb Moses, who was an executive at Fannie Mae from 1991  – 1998, the year the two amicably separated…well before Fannie Mae became entangled in the subprime meltdown.  But, having already checked the boxes for “poor” and ”brown”, I guess Bobo figured he should check the box for “gay” as well, to make sure all the usual suspects were demonized.

3.  At the height of subprime lending in 2006, private lenders issued 84% of the subprime loans.  That’s individual loans, not dollar amount.  Keep in mind that low-income borrowers take out much smaller loans, and are the borrowers most likely to be offered a subprime loan (again, thanks to having lower incomes).  In that same year, 83% of subprime loans to low and moderate income buyers were made by private lenders.

4.  Is it reasonable to blame the meltdown of the entire financial system on 16 or 17% of the lending activity (actually less than that in dollar terms – see #3 above) in the housing market?  No.  No, it isn’t.  And in fact, those subprime loans that were securitized by Fannie and Freddie – and keep in mind, we’re only talking about 1/6th of them - have featured default rates less than half of the default rate of subprime mortgages issued by private lenders.

Again, Bobo knows all this.  He’s not a stupid man; he’s a huge prick.  I’m just pointing out for the umpteenth time that he’s a lying sack of shit because I have some friends who still cling to a belief that he’s a reasonable person.  I guess that’s possible, if you consider it “reasonable” to pull things out of your ass to support whatever bigoted or reactionary point of view you want to reinforce.  Personally, I don’t think it’s reasonable to cling to and defend ideas that can’t be defended without lying.

If Brooks keeps this up, they’re going to have to build a bigger Dickipedia.

The 3 Weird Sisters recently spent a week at the beach, and this one in particular spent several days longer “on break” – the result of a longer commute to and from the destination and some dental work that demanded immediate attention upon return.

If Dickipedia wasn't already a reality, the existence of this man would demand its invention

As a result, I missed out on this David Brooks gem, in which Bobo once again lectures us on the profligacy of seniors and their unreasonable expectations of receiving medical care when they are ill.  The problem, according to Bobo, is that there is no one acting as intermediary to put on the brakes when an old person goes to get medical care:

The fee-for-service system is incredibly popular. Recipients don’t have to think about the costs of their treatment, and they get lots of free money. 

Except, of course, they don’t.  The “free money” goes to the doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies & manufacturers of medical equipment and devices.  What the Medicare recipient gets is the care that the consulting doctor prescribes, based on his medical expertise.  Since I believe Mr. Brooks to be a towering prick rather than a stupid man, I’m pretty sure he’s entirely aware of the untruth he’s committed to paper here, and that it is deliberate.

Bobo continues:

Republicans point out that Medicare has tried to control costs centrally for decades with terrible results. They argue that a decentralized process of trial and error will work better, as long as the underlying incentives are right. They suggest replacing the fee-for-service with a premium support system. Seniors would select from a menu of insurance plans. Their consumer choices would drive a continual, bottom-up process of innovation. Providers could use local knowledge to meet specific circumstances.

Representative Paul Ryan’s Republican plan is controversial because of the amount of public money he would dedicate to his premium support plan, but the basic architecture of the plan has been around for decades. In less rigidly ideological times, many Democrats supported variations of this basic approach. 

We heard this same happy-crappy from Rep. Ryan in his sales video a few weeks ago; in the Ryan view, which Bobo fully embraces, the reason it costs so much to pay for medical care for seniors is that since they aren’t picking up the tab themselves, they’re failing to shop around like they would for, say, a car or a refrigerator.  That sounds reasonable, unless you’re a thinking person; if you are, it takes less than a minute for the realization to sink in that Consumer Reports doesn’t typically devote issues to “best surgeon to perform your triple-bypass” or “best orthopedic device for hip replacement.”  Ryan’s plan might work well if everyone was a doctor; in a country where most people aren’t, it’s guaranteed to fail.  And both Ryan and Bobo know this – these talking points are nothing more than a cynical ploy to fool stupid people into agreeing that seniors would be better off under the same system of institutionalized fraud the rest of us navigate in the private insurance market.

What both Ryan – and Bobo – leave unsaid are the following facts:  for all its “terrible results” at cost control, Medicare continues to deliver more health care at a lower cost than any private insurer, and that in fact, the reason that Medicare has had “terrible results” in controlling costs is that it is those segments of the market NOT covered by Medicare – i.e., the rest of the market where private insurers are running the show – that have driven cost increases, in no small part because they are skimming 30% and sometimes more off the top of every doctor visit, hospital stay, and medical procedure.  Also left unmentioned is the fact that Medicare got started in the first place because private insurers didn’t WANT to insure old people, and even now are not pressing for the privilege of insuring the least-healthy and most expensive-to-cover segment of the population.  But the biggest elephant in the room that goes unremarked is this:  the Ryan plan, as approved by Republicans in the House, provides only enough “premium support” to match the average Medicare costs of the youngest Medicare recipients – 65-year-olds - in the year of its implementation.  Expenses for people 5 years older than minimum Medicare age typically are double those of 65-year olds.  And the level of “premium support” does not increase after implementation, so as time goes on, it covers less and less of the actual cost of insurance.  Hence, when Bobo says that “Seniors would select from a menu of insurance plans. Their consumer choices would drive a continual, bottom-up process of innovation,” what he’s really saying is “Seniors will get to innovate in their decision of which of their chronic ailments will go untreated.”  And who knows, over time this knowledge will probably be useful to those of us who come later – we’ll know which things we really need to focus on in order to stay alive a few more months, and that being confined to a wheelchair in constant pain due to a degenerated hip joint we can’t afford to replace really IS much better than being dead because we didn’t take our blood pressure medication.

I will give both Ryan and Bobo this much – they see the end point I’ve laid out above, and their plan is remarkably honest in its reflection of their world view, even if their rhetoric isn’t:  the old and useless should be grateful that we allow them to go on living once we’ve extracted every bit of profit possible from their labors.  They shouldn’t push their luck.

Bobo rounds it out with this:

The fact is, there is no dispositive empirical proof about which method is best — the centralized technocratic one or the decentralized market-based one. Politicians wave studies, but they’re really just reflecting their overall worldviews. Democrats have much greater faith in centralized expertise. Republicans (at least the most honest among them) believe that the world is too complicated, knowledge is too imperfect. They have much greater faith in the decentralized discovery process of the market.

I’d only add two things. This basic debate will define the identities of the two parties for decades. In the age of the Internet and open-source technology, the Democrats are mad to define themselves as the party of top-down centralized planning. Moreover, if 15 Washington-based experts really can save a system as vast as Medicare through a process of top-down control, then this will be the only realm of human endeavor where that sort of engineering actually works.

To sum up:  no one knows which view is correct, though I’ve just spewed out hundreds of words claiming that I do, in fact, know which is best.  Now that we have the internet, everyone can be an expert and decide which internet source they want to believe, and this is bound to work much better than getting together a group of people who actually understand the subject matter well enough to make informed decisions.  Moreover, centralized planning and control never works for vast systems, which is why FDR was such a failure at providing relief during the Great Depression and why to this very day we have the least effective and competent military in the world.

That’s about the best I can come up with…mostly because this is exactly the same expression I would have on my face if that was me and I had just sprayed a goodly amount of Liquid Ass on my way down the stairs.  If we photoshopped in a bunch of panicked, fleeing Japanese people, it could be Gingrichzilla.  There’s something literally cartoonish in the image of Gingrich.  The Shite Man Cometh?  Glengarry Glen Gingrich?  Newt Descending a Staircase, not to be confused with this Marcel Duchamp masterpiece? 

Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)

America's Ugliest Prostitute™, David Brooks

Bobo is simply gushing like a schoolgirl over Rep. Paul Ryan’s deficit reduction plan, which actually increases the debt through the first 10 years and then takes another 40 to bring it into line…assuming that our moribund economy can achieve and maintain a 2.8% unemployment rate.  That’s only slightly less likely to happen than for the band of happy monkeys who have taken up residence in my ass suddenly deciding to fly out of it.

Sayeth Bobo:

…The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes. Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president’s passivity. The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate.

His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion. It will become the 2012 Republican platform, no matter who is the nominee. Any candidate hoping to win that nomination will have to be able to talk about government programs with this degree of specificity, so it will improve the G.O.P. primary race.

The Ryan proposal will help settle the fight over the government shutdown and the 2011 budget because it will remind everybody that the real argument is not about cutting a few billion here or there. It is about the underlying architecture of domestic programs in 2012 and beyond.

The Ryan budget will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.

I’ll agree that Ryan’s Randian wet dream of a “plan” is comprehensive, in the sense that it more shamelessly spells out Republican ideals in a single document than anything we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes.  There aren’t any new ideas here, but back in the Reagan era and through the 90s, the GOP was always more careful to decouple screwing the proles from giving the wealthy a nice Invisible Handjob.  Reagan cut income taxes, and then turned around and raised FICA taxes – which of course meant that the wealthy paid less while the rest of us paid more.  These days, they don’t even bother to try to cover up the shell game.

As for reframing the debate, try this one on for size, Bobo:  FDR gave us the New Deal during this country’s last period of economic crisis…today’s GOP is promising to give us a Raw Deal. 

If by “seriousness” you mean believing in the fantasy that the debt can be eliminated while taxes on the wealthy are cut even further, then…I do not believe that word means what you think it means.  And I don’t know what GOP you’ve been watching when you claim that the party’s eventual nominee will have to be able to discuss the budget with a great degree of specificity, because the rest of us watching have noticed that no one gets out of that clown car alive without embracing Birtherism, racist dog-whistling, and constantly lying their ass off.  Actually knowing jack shit about anything ceased to be a Republican litmus-test for high office 30 years ago.  These days, it’s a handicap.

But the rubber really meets the road in the bolded paragraph.  Having already asserted that Ryan’s proposal will reframe the debate, Bobo goes in for the kill:  it naturally follows, then, that what we have is “unsustainable” because, of course, asking wealthy people to pay taxes is not an option.  Therefore, if you want to be considered “serious”, you have to have “a new vision,” preferably one that includes making it impossible for old, disabled, and poor people to get health care and if at all possible, food or shelter.

Problem there is, this isn’t a new vision.  Charles Dickens presented this vision over and over and over again – literally in serial format – over 150 years ago.

Pieces like this remind me why I hate David Brooks.  He’s a slimy jerk who typically starts from a premise that he’s pulled out of his ass and which oddly enough always favors the interests of the social and economic class to which he belongs; then he builds his pile of shit ever higher with the presumption that his premise is the only starting point a “serious” person would work from.  This op-ed alone should eternally secure his place on Dickipedia. 

I saved the best – his closing, or money shot, as it were - for last:

Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.

Uh…I don’t know what Paul Ryan has in his hands, Bobo, but look down…reality is not what you’re tugging on there.

Let me close by being serious, since that’s the most important thing:

Go fuck yourself, Mr. Brooks, you fucking wanker.  Seriously.