Posted 9:00 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Timothy Noah asks supposedly principled conservatives why thye don't denounce voter suppression efforts.  Here's one of the more thoughtful insights from the comments section:

It's curious that while the conservatives are excoriating Obama for wanting to introduce European-style "socialism," their anti-voter fraud laws assume that the demography and social environment in the U.S. is like the Netherlands or somewhere. You just pop down your nearest office a few streets away and hey presto!

There are a lot of parts of this country that are geographically remote, in which people don't have a car, in which public transit is sparse or non-existent, in which many people only have a high-school education at the most, in which they may not have standard documentation of birth etc, where they aren't following the news every day, and so on. In the South in particular, this can be a situation in which both blacks and whites find themselves, but blacks are more likely to sense (rightly or wrongly) that the system is against them.

One could accept the legitimacy of the laws more readily if it was obvious that there was also a bona-fide attempt to get IDs to people who need one.

Posted 1:59 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Matt Taibbi, "This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close"

These people represent everything that ordinarily repels the American voter. They mostly come from privileged backgrounds. Few of them have ever worked with their hands, or done anything like hard work. They not only don't oppose the offshoring of American manufacturing jobs, they enthusiastically support it, financing the construction of new factories in places like China and India.
They've relentlessly lobbied the government to give themselves tax holidays and shelters, and have succeeded at turning the graduated income tax idea on its head by getting the IRS to accept a sprawling buffet of absurd semantic precepts, like the notions that "capital gains" and "carried interest" are somehow not the same as "income."

The people in this group inevitably support every war that America has even the slimmest chance of involving itself in, but neither they nor their children ever fight in these conflicts. They are largely irreligious and incidentally they do massive amounts of drugs, from cocaine on down, but almost never suffer any kind of criminal penalty for their behavior.

That last thing I would say is probably appropriate, except for the fact that hundreds of thousands of poor (and mostly black and Hispanic) kids get tossed by cops every year (would you believe 684,000 street stops in New York alone in 2011?) in the same city where Wall Street's finest work, and those kids do real time for possession of anything from a marijuana stem to an empty vial. How many Wall Street guys would you think would fill the jails if the police spent even one day doing aggressive, no-leniency stop-and-frisk checks outside the bars in lower Manhattan? How many Lortabs and Adderalls and little foil-wraps of coke or E would pop out of those briefcases?

For all this, when it came time to nominate a candidate for the presidency four years after the crash, the Republicans chose a man who in almost every respect perfectly represents this class of people. Mitt Romney is a rich-from-birth Ivy League product who not only has never done a hard day of work in his life – he never even saw a bad neighborhood in America until 1996, when he was 49 years old, when he went into some seedy sections of New York in search of a colleague's missing daughter ("It was a shocker," Mitt said. "The number of lost souls was astounding").
He has a $250 million fortune, but he appears to pay well under half the maximum tax rate, thanks to those absurd semantic distinctions that even Ronald Reagan dismissed as meaningless and counterproductive. He has used offshore tax havens for himself and his wife, and his company, Bain Capital, has both eliminated jobs in the name of efficiency (often using these cuts to pay for payments to his own company) and moved American jobs overseas.

The point is, Mitt Romney's natural constituency should be about 1% of the population. If you restrict that pool to "likely voters," he might naturally appeal to 2%. Maybe 3%.

If the clichés are true and the presidential race always comes down to which candidate the American people "wants to have a beer with," how many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife's name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing "entitlements" like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it's paying its bills to him on time?

Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema: he's Gregg Marmalaard from Animal House mixed with Billy Zane's sneering, tux-wearing Cal character in Titanic to pussy-ass Prince Humperdinck to Roy Stalin to Gordon Gekko (he's literally Gordon Gekko). He's everything we've been trained to despise, the guy who had everything handed to him, doesn't fight his own battles and insists there's only room in the lifeboat for himself – and yet the Democrats, for some reason, have had terrible trouble beating him in a popularity contest.

Posted 1:43 PM by Scoobie Davis

Read my Review of Ann Coulter's Mugged
Click here and give postive or negative feedback.

Posted 3:00 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Joe Conason, "Tax Avoidance, Government Dependency, And Romney’s Boca Raton Host"

Posted 9:28 AM by Scoobie Davis

Playboy's "Girls of the Big Ten" Pictorial
The October 2012 Playboy is the college issue.  In the "Girls of the Big Ten" pictorial:

Posted 9:24 AM by Scoobie Davis

Blast from the Past!
Mitt Romney's top drug advisor, Mel Sembler, ran the notorious cult-like Straight, Inc. drug treatment centers.  I first found out about Straight, Inc. in the 1990's when I read a chapter on it in Arnold Trebach's book The Great Drug War.

Posted 9:27 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read and Must view
Krugman on workers and Homer votes for Romney:

Posted 9:38 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Zachery Pleat and Remington Shepard, "How The Right Wing Media Built Mitt Romney's 47 Percent Line."

Posted 10:44 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Reads from Salon.com about Anti-intellectualism
"Just the Right Kind of Stupid" and "Conservatives Killed the Liberal Arts"

Posted 1:22 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Article on Mitt Romney and Monsanto.

Posted 1:00 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Post on the Sun Myung Moon Blog
Click here

Posted 12:58 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Robert Parry, "A Test for the Right's Machine"

Posted 10:01 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must View
Jon Stewart on Fox News

Posted 8:23 AM by Scoobie Davis

New Posts on the Sun Myung Moon Blog
Since Moon just died, I updated the blog.  Click here.

Posted 8:14 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship on Ralph Reed's comeback. What a piece of work:

Which brings us to that curious Mariana Islands minimum wage plank in the Republican platform. Some years ago, our government made an effort to clean up sweatshops on the islands — including Saipan — that have been under the control of the United States since the end of World War II. . .

Chinese women were brought over to the islands to work under awful conditions — subject to forced abortions and prostitution and paid pennies for producing garments labeled “Made in the USA.”

Corrupt local officials hired the firm of infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff — for more than four million dollars — to try to stop the reforms proposed back in Washington. Abramoff, in turn, hired Ralph Reed and his political direct mail company, Millennium Marketing, to conduct a phony grass roots campaign urging Alabama Christians to write their local congressman to oppose the reforms.

Of course, Reed didn’t tell those Christians he was being paid to help keep running sweatshops that exploited women. Instead, he told them the reforms were a trick orchestrated by the left and organized labor. Limits on Chinese workers would keep them from being “exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ.” His company explained it was just trying to encourage “grass roots citizens to promote the propagation of the Gospel” and that many of the workers were “converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand.”