Category Archives: Wingnuts Being Wingnuts

Brett Whozits Update: Rightie Blogger Arrested

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Remember I was saying that Brett Kimberlin had filed a request for a peace order against a rightie blogger named Aaron Walker? And the hearing on the request was this morning? Well, RS McCain reports that after the hearing the judge had Walker arrested.

Entire rightie blogosphere to go batshit postal in 5 … 4… 3 … 2… 1 …

The judge became “increasingly hostile” to Walker in the course of the hearing, McCain says.

Just going by McCain’s account, this is all very screwy. According to McCain, Kimberlin’s beef was that Walker continued to blog about him after Walker had obtained an earlier peace order. I’m certainly no lawyer, but I question whether a court can order somebody not to blog about somebody else as long as the contents of the blog posts don’t constitute libel, and if you stick to documented facts you can probably argue it’s not libel.

In an update, McCain says that Kimberlin claims to have received death threats as a result of Walker’s posts. What was Kimberlin’s argument that alleged death threats were directly connected to Walker’s blogging? No way to know.

The peace order conditions I found online and blogged about yesterday suggest that a peace order only prohibits one party from contacting or harassing the other. The rightie blogosphere insists Kimberlin is trying to stop them from discussing his criminal past, which is already in the public record and has already been discussed in Time magazine and a book issued by a major publisher.

One suspects we’re not getting the whole story. One also suspects the judge, whom McCain names, is about to learn the meaning of “blogswarm.” I doubt this will help Walker much, though.

Update: A copy of the court order issued today. Apparently the recent blogswarm against Kimberlin was one factor that caused the judge to rule in Kimberlin’s favor.

Update: Some Gateway Pundit commenters are certain the judge was acting on orders of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. Samples:

So now the judges rule according to what the government wants, not what the actual laws are.

Hello Banana Republic.

For good or ill, arresting someone who disagrees with this administration is now legal precedent. No longer does there need to be even a figleaf of someone being a suspected terrorist to be snatched and incarcerated without trial.

This is tyranny of the first water.

Good times. I still don’t know what Walker was arrested for, specifically, or if he was charged with something like violating a previous peace order. I suspect the latter, and I suspect he’s already out on bail by the time you read this. If so, that doesn’t exactly constitute a violation of habeas corpus.

I’m getting all information about this from right-wing blogs; I have no idea if Kimberlin or any associate of Kimberlin has posted his side of the story. Someday we may learn what’s being not said.

Kimberlin Update

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I learned from R.S. McCain — blogging from an undisclosed location, I assume — that there will be a court hearing Tuesday regarding a peace order requested by Brett Kimberlin (background) against one of the rightie bloggers he allegedly has been terrorizing. I take it a “peace order” is something like a restraining order.

The part of McCain’s post that jumped out at me was the claim that Kimberlin’s alleged attempts at terrorism were intended “to suppress the truth about his violent criminal past.” This is the same criminal past prominently discussed in a 2007 Time magazine article.

In the belly of the voting-reform movement is a man who personifies this paradoxical lack of credibility in the service of a credible cause. Brett Kimberlin was convicted in 1981 of a series of bombings in Indiana. By his own account, he dealt “many, many tons” of marijuana in the 1970s. Most famously, he is the man who from his prison cell alleged that as a law student Dan Quayle bought marijuana from him. Quayle repeatedly denied the charge, and it was never substantiated. In e-mails and Web postings from Kimberlin’s two organizations, Justice Through Music and Velvet Revolution, he intersperses occasionally useful pieces of information about the problems of e-voting with a hefty portion of bunk, repeatedly asserting as fact things that are not true. Kimberlin, in short, is an unlikely candidate to affect an important issue of public policy.

So the criminal record wasn’t exactly hidden.

Time goes on to say that Kimberlin had been instrumental in the movement to stop Diebold electronic voting machines from being used in elections, and that Brad Friedman (of BradBlog) and Kimberlin had co-founded a “netroots voting-reform website VelvetRevolution.us.”

Kimberlin may very well be as unhinged and dangerous as the righties are making him out to be. Or not. I don’t know the man at all. I haven’t seen anyone on the left blogosphere speak up for him, including Brad Friedman. This suggests that either he isn’t that well known in blogging circles (again, I don’t recall I’d ever heard of him) or that those who know him think he may be guilty as accused.

However, I noticed that commenters have been calling out Friedman’s alleged ties to Kimberlin for several years. For example, this is from 2008:

Search engine for Brett Kimberlin. Why no story on him, Brad? You don’t want your readers to know you are partners with a bomber and admitted drug dealer? He even had his own little tinfoil 15 minutes of fame when he said he used to deal pot to Dan Quayle.

This all suggests to me there was nothing hidden about Kimberlin’s criminal record. After Kimberlin was paroled in 1994 and until the current accusations against him there’s no indication I could find that he was doing anything illegal, which begs the question why it was so all-fired important to stir up hysteria about Kimberlin in 2012.

And the answer is that he got involved in leftie political movements and organizations, which means he can be connected by association to all kinds of people on the Left who hadn’t done anything wrong.

Essentially Breitbart et al. were waging a defamation campaign against anyone who could be tied to Kimberlin, directly or indirectly, through any leftie organization he was associated with. This is right out of Joe McCarthy’s old playbook and a blatantly unethical thing to do. It doesn’t justify violent retribution, but it certainly isn’t blameless.

Two other names that keep coming up in the word-salad ravings are Ron Brynaert and Neal Rauhauser. Google their names and you get page after page of right-wing blog posts accusing these two of terrorism and attempted murder (example). Otherwise, I have no idea who these guys are and what the evidence is against them. [Update: It appears that last November Rauhauser was promoting the Occupy movement.] They may indeed be very dangerous guys, or they may have done nothing more than speak up for Kimberlin. It’s a mystery to me.

But this all begs the question why these alleged terrorists’ victims are not the ones seeking restraining orders against Kimberlin et al. instead of the other way around, and why the criminal justice system isn’t being otherwise called upon to investigate and prosecute the alleged perpetrators and protect the allegedly innocent. Lynch mobs, even virtual ones, make me queasy.

A Terrifying Glimpse Into the Rightie Brain

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If you’ve been monitoring the rightie blogs today, you’d notice they’re all raging about some guy named Brett Kimberlin. Some of them have been going on about Brett Kimberlin for the past few days, and for the life of me I couldn’t make out why they were so enraged about Brett Kimberlin. One blog post after another was just a weird word salad mingling George Soros, Barbara Streisand, Bill Ayers, Mumia Abu-Jamal, world Marxism, various progressive organizations, and the left generally, to this guy Brett Kimberlin.

Here’s one example, picked up from Steve M —

Read all of the incredible, sick-making story — which includes some perfectly typical and disgusting bile spewed by some of the violence-supporting left-wing animals who think things like this are just peachy — and gird your loins. Because it’s going to come down to shooting with these vermin eventually, if we’re to retain any rights at all. Patterico wouldn’t like me saying that, I’m sure; I don’t much like having to say it myself. But it’s a mere acknowledgment of current reality: we are in a cold war with neo-Marxists who are trying to steal our country, have already done enormous and probably permanent damage to it, and will stop at nothing –absolutely nothing — to see to it that our voices are silenced. That war must inevitably go hot, unless we’re willing to surrender to them.

This is fairly typical. The right blogosphere is screaming its head off about someone trying to silence them and how they’re going to have to shoot it out with us, i.e., anyone who isn’t them, and Barbara Streisand. And oh yeah, Brett Kimberlin. And no, I’d never heard of Brett Kimberlin either. I waded through one right-wing blog after another and never got a clear idea what Brett Kimberlin did that set them off.

John Cole, from a couple of days ago:

I’m so far removed from the online wingnut community that I no longer speak their language or know all the code words, so when I tried to read Captain Ed, all I could make out was that some jackass was threatening people. Given who we are dealing with here, I am sure this is all the fault of Obama, Holder, Jimmy Carter, Rosie O’Donnell, every Democrat in the country, and George Soros, but has anyone been following this and know what exactly is going on?

I was relieved to know that I wasn’t the only one who was confused.

From this article, I take it Kimberlin was convicted of a series of bombings in the 1970s. While in prison he gained some notoriety when he claimed to have sold pot to Dan Quayle. He was paroled in 1994. Since then apparently he has associated with some liberal causes, although I’m not sure how or which ones. (Here’s a 2007 Time magazine article about Kimberlin’s opposition to electronic voting.) His primary association these days was with an organization called Justice Through Music.

But then Andrew Breitbart found out that this guy convicted of bombings had connections to liberal activism, and tweeted:

The article linked above continues,

Stacy McCain began to dig into the Justice Through Music Project looking into donations, donors, its tax exempt status, etc…

He even wrote a detailed article about why members of the Left would associate with a convicted felon and even donate money to Mr. Kimberlin’s organization and named some names.

It is at this point that Stacy McCain felt he needed to go into hiding.

As we said earlier… nobody knows exactly why and this fact should raise suspicions amongst the level headed.

Mr. McCain appears to be keeping a tight lip about it all. Were I a Liberal I’d scream “cover-up” or “frame job.”

However, since I am not an ideologue I will only say there is more unknown than known about Mr. McCain’s actions and that something is going on regarding Mr. Kimberlin’s desire to remain as anonymous as is possible for somebody convicted of setting off bombs, saying he sold pot to a Vice President, and having had a book written about him.

We will keep you posted.

And, might I add, Barbara Streisand has a lot to answer for.

Anyway, allegedly Kimberlin retaliated, although it’s not clear to me how, and RS McCain felt compelled to take his family and go into hiding. I picked up from Steve M that blogger Patterico claims Kimberlin SWATted him — “you spoof a phone number, call as the person you’re targeting, say you just killed someone at your house, then the SWAT team shows up and maybe arrests the target … or opens fire. Patterico says it happened to him (and he was taken into custody) last year.”

Now, that’s a terrible thing, and one would think it’s something law enforcement ought to vigorously investigate and prosecute. Rightie bloggers are talking about other incidents of harassment, although it’s not clear to me exactly what they are. But, as Steve M. says, if Kimberlin is behind this he deserves to be denounced for it, as well as prosecuted.

But the weird thing is that rightie blogger after rightie blogger isn’t discussing what Kimberlin allegedly did to Patterico or McCain. They are calling for jihad on the entire Left. Everyone who has expressed even a mildly progressive opinion over the past 150 years is behind the Vast Conspiracy to silence the Right through intimidation (which, of course, bears no resemblance to what Breitbart and others were trying to do to Justice Through Music. [/sarcasm].) And so post after post rants hysterically about George Soros, Barbara Streisand, Bill Ayers, Mumia Abu-Jamal, world Marxism, various progressive organizations, and the left generally. Oh, and Brett Kimberlin.

I sincerely hope everybody stays safe, and that eventually they will calm down enough to string coherent sentences together.

Obama Behind Plot to Blow Up His Own Headquarters!

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You’ve probably heard that a sting operation caught three young men who allegedly planned terrorist activities to protest the NATO summit in Chicago. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the three “allegedly plotted to firebomb President Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s North Side home, as well as police stations and squad cars.”

Whether the three are guilty or not I do not know. What’s fascinating to me is the way this little issue is being portrayed by bloggers.

At Firedoglake, we read:

The NLG [National Lawyers Guild] attorneys representing the arrestees have not been shown any police records on any “month-long investigation.” The details I have been able to gather from speaking to arrestees personally make it seem like the police have, in the past 48 hours, fabricated all of these details about having some investigation in progress. Yet, the press get to see the records on arrestees so that the police can be sure people take the charges against the activists seriously and do not suspect police abuse or repression of activists. …

…It is important to recall that back in 2008, prior to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, eight activists were preemptively raided and ultimately charged with “conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism.” The national security state has a script, and when it comes to “National Special Security Events,” they stick to that script pretty well.

So that’s one perspective, which I neither endorse nor dismiss. Certainly there is a long history of police-state tactics targeting demonstrators, especially around large conventions and summit meetings. There’s more than a whiff of entrapment in this story.

Of course, there’s also a long history of hot-headed young men who want to blow stuff up. I’m making no assumptions here.

Rightie bloggers have another view, which is that the three indeed are deranged terrorists working on behalf of the Occupy movement. Per the Sun-Times article, the three found each other through an Occupy Chicago housing board. In the simple world of James Hoft, that makes them “#Occupy NATO terrorists.”

Hoft doesn’t mention the three alleged terrorists were allegedly planning to bomb Obama campaign headquarters. However, commenters brilliantly deduced Chicago + terrorism = Bill Ayers (example).

The Breitbrats also forgot to mention that the alleged terrorists were going to firebomb Obama campaign headquarters and Rahm Emanuel’s home. But the commenters wasted no time in deciding that Obama himself was behind the plot:

Hold on to your butts. Ask yourself, “Why did they decide to have NATO in Chicago, anyway?” Ya all are gonna have a knee-jerk reaction to these kids. “Stupid hippies,” and i don’t disagree. They’re responsible, yes, yes, of course, but THEY ARE ALSO BEING PRODDED TO VIOLENCE AND PROTEST BY THE INVISIBLE HAND. Obama cannot have his revolution without division, chaos, and flame.

Just another way for the Obama admin to launder (our) money for his homeys in Chicago.

Here you get the best of both worlds — it’s police oppression creating false terrorists, and the Obama Administration is behind it:

So, now our federal government has given up on the muslim terrorists and are going to create fake domestic terrorists at home? And you’re right!!! Why even have this in Chicago in the first place? Have you ever heard of “FALSE FLAG?” Just wait… something crazy is going to happen and Obama is going to try to emerge as the HERO to give himself an election boost… The fix is in for this NATO Summit. I’m so sick of this crap! These people (the feds) are so predictable!

BTW, I find the video highly annoying. There’s nothing productive about yelling the “F” word at a police station.

The “get a brain, moran” award has to go to the commenters at Weasel Zippers. Here at least the blogger headlines the part about blowing up Obama headquarters, and the commenters still think Obama was behind it. Sample:

thank you barak insane obama,
mmmm, mmmm, mmmm
you and ayers are great leaders
teachers, or terrorist tactics
jackass

The Weasel Zippers crowd are not famous for eloquence. All the comments are pretty much on that level.

See also Cannonfire.

Games Republicans Play

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Since the country apparently has no real problems that Congress needs to be addressing, Republicans in Congress have invented a game called “let’s defeat Obama’s budget.” Here’s how it works —

Every few months, to fight the boredom, some Republican will crank out some farce legislation and submit it for a vote as “President Obama’s budget.” Be clear that the legislation is not, in fact, President Obama’s budget, but a Republican concoction inspired by those crazy copy-and-past 5,000-word emails you get from your wingnut uncle. As near as I can tell, the “budgets” are created by taking top line numbers from the President’s actual budget and leaving out about 1,944 pages worth of details, including revenue enhancements. The result is a monstrosity that the White House wouldn’t vote for, either.

For example, the here’s how the White House responded to the most recent gag budget, introduced by Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of MississippiAlabama —

Thus, a White House official said, the Sessions proposal was a “shell that could be filled with a number of things that could hurt our economy and hurt the middle class,” a White House official said. “For example, rather than ending tax breaks for millionaires his budget could hit the revenue target by raising taxes on the middle class and rather than ending wasteful programs, his budget could hit its spending target with severe cuts to important programs.”

Jason Linkins explains further:

This vote, on a Potemkin “Obama Budget,” is not intended to be taken seriously. It’s a stunt designed to get a slag into the newscycle, and they tend to work. What happens is a Republican legislator presents a “budget proposal” that’s designed to be a satirical presentation of an “Obama budget.” Democrats don’t vote for it, because they recognize that it bears no resemblance to their budgetary preferences.

Good times! Anyway, the Republicans then put the “President’s budget” up for a vote, and because it’s such a joke no Democrat votes for it, either. Then the Republicans send out press releases saying that the President’s budget was unanimously defeated. And that Democrat-controlled liberal media cranks out amusing headlines repeating the charge about the unanimous defeat. The news stories often leave out the detail about how the defeated budget actually was a joke, which makes it all even funnier. And then wingnut bloggers write posts about it like this one:

It’s Hope and Change we can believe in as Obama proposes legislation that sweeps to unanimous votes in the House and Senate:

President Obama’s budget suffered a second embarrassing defeat Wednesday, when senators voted 99-0 to reject it.

Coupled with the House’s rejection in March, 414-0, that means Mr. Obama’s budget has failed to win a single vote in support this year.

It’s great to see Obama uniting Washington and developing some momentum. Especially as that momentum seems to be carrying him to the exit.

Of course (wink, wink) the legislation that was voted down was not what President Obama proposed, but what a Republican imagined the President would propose if he were as demented as they are. But it’s great to see so many people keeping their sense of humor through all these trying times of not having anything else to do.

Update: See also What It Means That The ‘President’s Budget’ Went Down 99 To 0 In The Senate

Update: Some are complaining that the Democrats haven’t introduced a budget lately. Jason Linkins writes,

But if you want to divine what another famous character of the stage termed the “method in the madness,” look at the latter half of Stephens’ statement, and the complaint that the Democrats have not put forth a budget. That’s fair, but it invites a trip into the weeds. There are reasons why the Democrats haven’t done so: 1) they know that any real “Obama budget” is a legislative nonstarter in the current climate of obstruction, and 2) the Democrats hold that the conditions created by the Budget Control Act are their de facto budget. This does not cover the lack of a budget in 2010 and 2011 — those didn’t happen because of the aforementioned obstruction, and some off-year election Democratic Party theories that failed votes would be more costly at the polls than no vote at all. (The results of the 2010 elections suggest that this was, perhaps, too clever by half.)

Let’s face it; Republicans would go ballistic and vote NO NO NO NO if Obama submitted so much as a deli menu. Even so, Dems might as well submit the real budget, which would get a majority of Dem votes. Call out the game-players.

Freedom and Feudalism

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Today’s conservative is someone who confuses freedom with feudalism. Or, put another way, he is someone who wears a “liberty or death” T-shirt while marching in support of oligarchy.

Michael Lind points out in “Why Do Conservatives Hate Freedom?” that historically conservatives have always opposed individual liberty and supported authority. Yet today’s conservatives have adopted the conceit that they are the ones who favor “freedom” while liberals — historically, the champions of individual liberty — are cast as quasi-totalitarian “statists.” The meanings of words are turned on their heads.

If you look deeper, though, you see that the iconic imagery and language of the American Revolution represents something profoundly reactionary to today’s conservatives. These icons speak to the mythic origins of American national identity, developed in 19th century textbooks and handed down in popular fiction and Disney movies. That the myths bear only superficial resemblance to what actually happened doesn’t register with them.

American mythos congeals into a kind of tribal identity in the rightie mind. It is this tribal identity that prevents them from seeing anyone who doesn’t look and think like them as “real Americans.” The protection and preservation of the tribe is the beating heart of today’s American right.

To a wingnut, “freedom” doesn’t mean “slavery,” exactly. But it does represent a kind of unquestioning allegiance to the 21st-century version of feudal lords — the Koch Brothers, Christian institutions, corporations and the wealthy generally. These are their tribal elders, after all.

The reactionary Right has not only claimed exclusive rights to patriotic icons like the flag and tri-corner hats; they also have adopted the language of the Left about rights. But “rights” to a rightie are not about standard civil liberties, but about their childish desires  to deny equal rights to “others” who are different from them. So they call for the “right” to discriminate as they see fit.

Righties also favor the rights of institutions and authorities over those of individuals. For example, they champion the “rights” of pharmacists to not fill birth control prescriptions. They want employers to have the right to deny birth control coverage to employees. All in the name of liberty.

This takes us to the libertarian fallacy. Libertarians have been allied with conservatives for decades now. On the surface, this makes no sense. However, modern libertarianism began mostly as a backlash against Brown v. Board of Education and court-imposed school desegregation orders. So, again, it comes back to a “right” to not be compelled to do anything you don’t want to do, including respecting the individual liberties of others.

Libertarianism actually is anti-democratic, because government of the people, by the people, and for the people can become coercive. We, the People, can use government to make coal mine owners install expensive ventilation systems to protect the miners, for example. That’s coercive. Nine times out of ten, libertarians will take the side of ruthless mine owners over miners. After all, if a mine is unsafe, the miners can just quit, right?

So, while libertarians and liberals do converge on some issues — warrant-less surveillance, mass arrests, etc. — any liberal who assumes libertarians care about civil rights is a fool.

Michael Lind writes,

What would America look like, if conservatives had won their battles against American liberty in the last half-century? Formal racial segregation might still exist at the state and local level in the South. In some states, it would be illegal to obtain abortions or even for married couples to use contraception. In much of the United States, gays and lesbians would still be treated as criminals. Government would dictate to Americans with whom and how they can have sex. Unions would have been completely annihilated in the public as well as the private sector. Wages and hours laws would be abolished, so that employers could pay third-world wages to Americans working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, as many did before the New Deal. There would be far more executions and far fewer procedural safeguards to ensure that the lives of innocent Americans are not ended mistakenly by the state.

But to a rightie, that’s what “freedom” looks like.

GOP: Let Grandma Eat (Cold) Cat Food

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They were so outraged that Grandma might be denied a heart transplant by President Obama’s completely fictional death panels. Now a Republican-contolled House panel has voted to cut Meals on Wheels.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Well, there are priorities, see.

The heartless GOP, led by Private Ryan in the House, wants to cut $260B in domestic spending to shield the Pentagon from automatic budget cuts at the end of the year. Those programs include food stamps, Medicaid and the child tax credit.

Even the GOP cheerleader Wall Street Journal today reported the severity of the slashing, pointing out that Ryan’s plan would strip funding from the “Meals on Wheels” program. Geez, that’s way over the top.

The rampage continued today as the GOP blocked a Democratic bill to prevent the doubling of interest rates on student loans. Without Senate action, the interest rate will rise to 6.8 percent on July 1.

Hey, bedridden old folks are unlikely to vote, especially if they don’t have a proper voter ID.

Right’s Idea of Bias: Any News That Might Reflect Well on Obama

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In an article called “Spin of the Times: Bias cloaked as Front-Page News,” Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit complains that the New York Times runs news stories that are biased in favor of “Democrats and leftish ideas.”

His example of this is a recent article called “In Hopeful Sign, Health Spending Is Flattening Out.” The article looks at the fact that health care costs in the U.S. have risen much less sharply than expected in the past couple of years, which of course is good news to anyone who cares about, you know, American citizens and the American economy.

Is the story biased toward “Democrats and leftish ideas”? Here’s the weird part — Reynolds does not show that the article misrepresents or leaves out facts to make the article appear to be favorable to the Left. He quotes the article itself to argue that some of the cost slowdown is because of the recession, not because “Obamacare” is working.

The article is full of caveats and to-be-sures like this: “The growth rate mostly slowed as millions of Americans lost insurance coverage along with their jobs. Worried about job security, others may have feared taking time off work for doctor’s visits or surgical procedures, or skipped nonurgent care when money was tight.” Or this: “Some experts caution that there remains too little data to determine whether the current slowdown will become permanent, or whether it is merely a blip caused by the economy’s weakness.”

But, we’re told, “[M]any other health experts say that there is just enough data to start detecting trends — even if the numbers remain murky, and the vast complexity of the national health care market puts definitive answers out of reach.”

At this point, an editor might have spiked the story, commenting that all we’ve got are dueling experts who admit that they don’t really know what’s going on amid their “murky” numbers.

But the story is that health care costs in the U.S. have risen much less sharply than expected in the past couple of years. This is from the article:

In 2009 and 2010, total nationwide health care spending grew less than 4 percent per year, the slowest annual pace in more than five decades, according to the latest numbers from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. After years of taking up a growing share of economic activity, health spending held steady in 2010, at 17.9 percent of the gross domestic product….

… The implications of a bend in the cost curve would be enormous. Policy makers on both sides of the aisle see rising health care costs as the central threat to household budgets and the country’s fiscal health. If the growth in Medicare were to come down to a rate of only 1 percentage point a year faster than the economy’s growth, the projected long-term deficit would fall by more than one-third.

That’s a significant bit of data. Just because the data don’t clearly show why it’s happening doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

If you read the New York Times story — which Reynolds doesn’t link to, of course — you see that it provides a number of possible reasons for the slowdown in cost increase, some of which reflect well on the Obama Administration and some of which do not. And it provides the “bad for Obama” possible reasons first, before going on to the “maybe Obama’s policies have something to do with this” reasons. Reynolds quotes those “bad for Obama” reasons with approval and then complains the article is biased because … well, why? Because it then goes on to provide some “good for Obama” reasons as well?

What Reynolds is saying is that this bit of news must be suppressed until someone can show decisively that it’s really a bad thing that is all Obama’s fault.

And what makes this even more hysterical is that Reynold’s piece is published in the New York Post, one of the nation’s foremost purveyors of pure, old-fashioned yellow journalism. For example, in today’s Post there’s an article by a guy named Glenn Reynolds with an alarming headline about spin and bias at the New York Times, but if you read the article it’s just a highly biased piece about a Times article that really isn’t biased at all. Reynolds just doesn’t like it because it isn’t anti-Obama enough for his taste.

War on Youth

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Paul Krugman makes the point that rising education costs are strangling the future —

Let’s start with some advice Mitt Romney gave to college students during an appearance last week. After denouncing President Obama’s “divisiveness,” the candidate told his audience, “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”

Oh, sure. Go to college. Start a business. Mom and Dad will just lend you the money.

This reminds me of the English twits who withheld aid from Ireland during the Hunger, telling themselves that deprivation would teach the lazy good-for-nothing Irish to take some initiative and learn to work. Really, some of them said that. There’s a good article on British policies during the Irish Famine at the BBC that makes those twits sound just like today’s Republicans.

Krugman points out Mittens’s famous cluelesses, then goes on to point out that getting an education isn’t necessarily helping young people today —

There is, however, a larger issue: even if students do manage, somehow, to “get the education,” which they do all too often by incurring a lot of debt, they’ll be graduating into an economy that doesn’t seem to want them.

You’ve probably heard lots about how workers with college degrees are faring better in this slump than those with only a high school education, which is true. But the story is far less encouraging if you focus not on middle-aged Americans with degrees but on recent graduates. Unemployment among recent graduates has soared; so has part-time work, presumably reflecting the inability of graduates to find full-time jobs. Perhaps most telling, earnings have plunged even among those graduates working full time — a sign that many have been forced to take jobs that make no use of their education.

College graduates, then, are taking it on the chin thanks to the weak economy. And research tells us that the price isn’t temporary: students who graduate into a bad economy never recover the lost ground. Instead, their earnings are depressed for life.

Of course, as Krugman goes on to explain, conservatives are doing everything possible to make the situation worse instead of better. They keep voting to shrink the economy instead of grow it. Nothing I’ve seen recently says “We Are Idiots” more clearly than Club for Growth’s call to vote “no” on student loan subsidies. They should change the name to Club for Stunting.

Sore Losers

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John McCain, whose success in life came to him because he is a former POW who married money, has gone ballistic because the Obama campaign had the bad taste to remind everyone who killed Osama bin Laden. Yeah, and who was that guy who promised to do that and then quit? Oh, yeah …

Meanwhile, the Breitbrats are flapping about because they found a memo offering some details to the OBL operation, and they learned that the President did not design the mission and was not in charge of minute-to-minute tactical operations. Nor did he ride into Pakistan on a magic carpet and kill OBL personally. Instead, based on the tactical advice of the military, he gave the go-ahead to proceed with the mission.

Which is not news. That’s how I understood the mission all along. Are these yappers brain damaged?

Charles Johnson:

You can tell that President Obama’s successful operation to find (and kill) Osama bin Laden really eats at the right wing; the faux arguments from the wingnut blogosphere are getting more and more obtuse and absurd. Of course, they’re writing for an audience that doesn’t care, as long as they get their daily serving of rancid Obama Derangement stew.

See also Tbogg.