Beaker Boogies

Who knew?

Muppets get Farked...

Preserve, protect, and defend

Much has been written about the crimes of the Bush administration, and the emerging Washington consensus, predictably, is to let sleeping criminals lie, and move on. Given how many people who comprise that consensus are complicitly involved in some of the aforementioned crimes, it is little surprise they want the rest of us to forgive, forget, go forward.

Paul Krugman reminds us why we cannot allow that to happen.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

Teh stoopid, it spreadz

"Academic freedom".

Heh heh.

"Teach the controversy".

HAHAHAHAHA!

Oklahoma was one of the few states that went more Republican in the latest election (McCain pulled his highest vote percentage in any state here), with the Retro-dumbass party securing both houses for, I believe (correct me Jim, if I am wrong) the first time in state history.

And right out of the gate, they fail to disappoint.

Creationism by every other name.


Living in the reality based community is fraught with difficulties. One of them is not taking the bait when legislation like that is proposed. I suppose it is my fault for believing that the entire creationism debate as it relates to public schools is settled law. It is, but apparently that doesn't matter to the forces of know-nothingism.

The anti-evolution legislative pushes are particularly annoying because they are, at heart, so profoundly dishonest. In the guise of presenting a legitimate alternate scientific theory to challenge the enormous body of work that makes up Darwinian theory we get proposed laws that would enforce a religious orthodoxy on school children. It is obviously done in the service of a wider effort to subvert public institutions in the name of a Christianist political attempt to remake our country in their likeness. Legislators who engagfe in this sort of behavior are, to my mind, wholly illegitimate.

It is cowardly. If those Christianist ideas are so valid, then come out in the open, propose legislation that really endorses those views, that this country ought to be ordered on principles conceived primarily through a ridiculously selective, literalist reading of the bible. I recall reading a Catholic writer some time ago saying, and I paraphrase, "the Bible is the Word of God, not the words of God". If a government that rigidly follows a specific reading of the bible is so right and just, then package that legislation appropriately, and let's have the discussion they want to have and do so out in the open. Advocate for theocracy, state the case, have the debate.

It would bring this nonsense to a very quick close. Which is exactly why we have this sort of clumsy, but frightening thought control legislation instead, because its proponents know they have a losing argument otherwise.

To The Gallows!

As money is that which Americans worship most fervently, why are crimes against it not eligible for the death penalty?

Failing that sort of radical, outsize (and dubious) remedy, here is Michael Lewis with a pair of fine articles detailing where the failure points are, and how to repair them:

THERE are other things the Treasury might do when a major financial firm assumed to be “too big to fail” comes knocking, asking for free money. Here’s one: Let it fail.
Not as chaotically as Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. If a failing firm is deemed “too big” for that honor, then it should be explicitly nationalized, both to limit its effect on other firms and to protect the guts of the system. Its shareholders should be wiped out, and its management replaced. Its valuable parts should be sold off as functioning businesses to the highest bidders — perhaps to some bank that was not swept up in the credit bubble. The rest should be liquidated, in calm markets. Do this and, for everyone except the firms that invented the mess, the pain will likely subside.
This is more plausible than it may sound. Sweden, of all places, did it successfully in 1992. And remember, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have already accepted, on behalf of the taxpayer, just about all of the downside risk of owning the bigger financial firms. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve would both no doubt argue that if you don’t prop up these banks you risk an enormous credit contraction — if they aren’t in business who will be left to lend money? But something like the reverse seems more true: propping up failed banks and extending them huge amounts of credit has made business more difficult for the people and companies that had nothing to do with creating the mess. Perfectly solvent companies are being squeezed out of business by their creditors precisely because they are not in the Treasury’s fold. With so much lending effectively federally guaranteed, lenders are fleeing anything that is not.
Rather than tackle the source of the problem, the people running the bailout desperately want to reinflate the credit bubble, prop up the stock market and head off a recession. Their efforts are clearly failing: 2008 was a historically bad year for the stock market, and we’ll be in recession for some time to come. Our leaders have framed the problem as a “crisis of confidence” but what they actually seem to mean is “please pay no attention to the problems we are failing to address.”

The entire thing is worth reading, and part two can be reached from the end of part one.