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Dinky Hocker shoots smack!

… down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin at the trump White House

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Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

I personally stopped the public option…

Everybody saw this coming.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

How do you get liars to care about the truth?

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You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Glibertarianism

Glibertarianism

Late Night News of the Weird: In Some Areas, 2019 Never Disappoints

by Anne Laurie|  March 6, 20192:32 am| 14 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Glibertarianism, Open Threads, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All

Coinbase says it accidentally hired a group of mercenaries, who sold cyberweapons to Saudi Arabia and Sudan, and is now firing them https://t.co/EaWbOHmWS3

— Mark Milian (@markmilian) March 6, 2019

Apparently totally free markets are not without their pitfalls! I don’t pretend to fully understand it, but here’s an update from Gizmodo:

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has acknowledged it made a major mistake when it bought Italian blockchain analytics firm Neutrino, whose senior management staff included several members of infamous Italian firm Hacking Team—which has reportedly sold powerful hacking and surveillance tools to oppressive governments.

A 2015 report by Motherboard found that Hacking Team sold software to “Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sudan and many others,” matching the findings of research by Citizen Lab. A cache of documents stolen from Hacking Team servers by hackers and leaked to media showed that it had faced a United Nations inquiry into whether the sale of its Remote Control System spyware to Sudan violated embargoes imposed over its government’s numerous human rights abuses, which include allegations of slavery, child soldiers, persecution of dissidents, and war crimes.

Hacking Team sold its tools stateside to the Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI—something also not likely to go down well with the cryptocurrency community, which tends to lean heavily libertarian.

Per Bloomberg, Coinbase users as well as blockchain-focused publication Breaker Mag quickly clued onto the fact that many of Neutrino’s executives were Hacking Team alumni. In a blog post on Medium, Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong said the onboarding of Hacking Team staff was due to a “gap in our due diligence process” and that the decision was not properly evaluated “from the perspective of our mission and values as a crypto company.” Armstrong added that those individuals will be leaving Coinbase…

According to crypto industry publication CoinDesk, Coinbase director of institutional sales Christine Sandler had previously justified the acquisition of Neutrino by stating their previous analytics provider had been “selling client data to outside sources,” spooking some customers further.

However, on Tuesday, a Coinbase spokesperson told Coindesk it had “never shared our customers’ personally identifiable information with any third-party blockchain analysis vendors.” Some users characterized the Neutrino acquisition as another privacy violation, CoinDesk wrote, with one writing, “It’s really frightening to think who has gained access to Coinbase customer data over the years.” …

Late Night News of the Weird: In Some Areas, 2019 Never DisappointsPost + Comments (14)

All-Too-Thrilling Adventures Read: Crypto-Anarchists, Anarcho-Capitalists, and Old-Fashioned Drug Cartels

by Anne Laurie|  February 9, 201911:00 pm| 79 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Glibertarianism, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All

I’m surprised there hasn’t been more written about this incident, although it may just be that my dark-web access skillz are less than subpar. As reported here, it sure sounds like an example of the old truism: Just because ‘the cops’ are your enemies doesn’t make ‘the crooks’ your friends. From the Washington Post, last Monday, “An American ‘crypto-anarchist’ fled the country. He was just killed in Mexico’s ‘murder capital’”:

Bathed in the sunlight of Mexico’s dry season, his dreadlocks tumbling down his back, a man who went by the name “John Galton,” an apparent nod to the hero of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” observed almost two years ago, “There’s pockets of freedom all over the world if you’re willing to live in freedom.”

Galton paid a high price for that freedom. He was gunned down Friday by a band of men who stormed his home in Acapulco, where he and his girlfriend had found safe haven from drug charges in the United States, as they explained in a March 2017 video interview with the conspiracy site Press for Truth.

Joining a community of like-minded expatriates, Galton had sought to build a life as a self-made man. He advocated drug liberalization and taught classes on cryptocurrencies. He was set to be featured in a documentary called “Stateless.”…

His girlfriend, Lily Forester, nodded. Defending the once-glamorous Pacific Coast city now considered Mexico’s “murder capital,” she said, “It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than anything I’ve experienced in the States.”

On Friday, she was left pleading for help after the rampage left her boyfriend dead and another man, Jason Henza, injured…

Guerrero State police said in a statement Saturday that the survivors reported armed men showing up at a “cannabis greenhouse” and targeting Galton. The attorney’s office, which confirmed that Galton had been killed, said in a statement Sunday that it had found a marijuana laboratory on the premises, including white lights and gas tanks. No suspects had been named, and a motive for the killing remained unknown.

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An email to the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs wasn’t immediately returned. The Associated Press reported that Galton was in his 20s and that Forester is, too.

In a statement to CoinSpice, a cryptocurrency news site, Forester said, “I will release a statement when it is safe for me to do so. The news is wrong, but I have to wait to tell my story.”…

They crossed the border with $50 in cash. Once in Acapulco, they found odd jobs in the tourism industry, while also amassing followings on Steemit, a blogging and social networking site. Forester built a business blowing glass into pipes. Among their projects were organizing “Meat Ups,” which advocated a carnivorous diet, and creating “an uncensorable Wikipedia.”

They were founders of Anarchaforko, an anarchist conference and spinoff of the more well-known Anarchapulco, which brings 3,000 people to Acapulco each year for discussions about ways to “live unchained.” Both were to take place this month…

The Daily Beast has more on the Pied Piper of Anarchapulco:

… Galton was part of a small community of fellow anarcho-capitalists formed by Jeff Berwick, who promised a drug-friendly haven and hosts the annual “Anarchapulco” festival. Berwick says Galton and Forester should’ve known what they were getting into.

“They started up a competing conference to Anarchapulco, called Anarchaforko and John continued to be involved in one way or another with the production or sale of plants,” Berwick told The Daily Beast in an email. “Unfortunately, that is the one thing that is very dangerous to do in Mexico as the drug cartels will attack anyone they see as competition and that appears to have happened to John.”

Anarchapulco will go on as scheduled next week and might be even bigger due to the murder, Berwick says…

Berwick is a Canada-born anarcho-capitalist podcaster, who moved to Acapulco part-time in 2009 and became known for a hard-partying lifestyle. In 2015, he launched Anarchapulco, a festival for anarcho-capitalists, some of whom relocated to Acapulco full-time…

A former member of the community told The Daily Beast the community’s membership fluctuates, but is likely around 50 to 60.

This year’s Feb. 14-17 Anarchapulco promises a nudist pool, psychedelics, sex counseling, and sessions on radical homeschooling—as well as big-name Republican figures like former presidential candidate Ron Paul and Fox News personality Judge Andrew Napolitano.

The conference is located in a ritzy Acapulco hotel. Attendees will have shelled out $545 for tickets, with options to pay an additional $495 for an “investment summit,” $255 for the “Infinite Man” summit with a pickup artist, $140 for “De-Mystifying the Occult,” and $250 each for various drug ceremonies like “Jaguar Vision,” an hour-long DMT experience.

Anarcho-capitalists (“ancaps”) believe in dismantling the state and allowing unchecked capitalism to govern the world in its place. Even within the small anarchist world, ancaps are fringe. Anarchists typically describe their movement as inherently anti-capitalist. Their philosophy describes anarchy as the rejection of hierarchical structures, which they say capitalism enforces. Anarcho-capitalists, meanwhile, see money as a liberating force. They promote a variety of libertarian causes like using cryptocurrency, legalizing all drugs, and privatizing all public institutions like courts and roads. The movement reveres the novelist Ayn Rand, whose work outlines a philosophy of radical selfishness and individualism…

“After the first Anarchapulco, quite a few people moved down there, which became the core of this community. They were a mix of varying idealists, anarchists, heavily into drugs and partying and all that. That was the core of the group,” Mike said. “You don’t get a particularly nice, functioning community. Over time, the community’s broken up and splintered off about a dozen times.”

Mike said he grew worried about his physical safety. The city was notorious for murders; armed robbery and cartel extortion were a fact of life, he said. But Berwick and others make frequent reference to the ease of living in the city.

“At one point quite a large crowd came, but they were extremely naive,” Mike said. “Jeff was always saying publicly that Acapulco’s not dangerous, that you can do anything, nothing will happen to you. People believed him.”…

Anarcho-capitalists who complained of robberies or street corner assaults faced ridicule, Mike claimed.

“Because this is a very ideological group, everything Jeff says is dogma,” he said. “If you said anything contra to the dogma, you’d be ostracized and in some cases doxxed. I know people who moved there and got robbed… However, when they publicly state this, the whole community turns against them and treats them as some kind of informant or spy.”…

Anarchapulco, meanwhile, is still proceeding as scheduled. After the tragedy, the conference is more important than ever, Berwick said.

“Anarchists understand that the government’s prohibition of plants and substances cause these problems and if anything it just makes events like Anarchapulco even more important in order to change the world and get rid of the violence and chaos caused by government,” Berwick said.

I’d be only too pleased if there’s some kind of happy ending, or even lessons-learned conclusion, here… apart from the obvious ‘spokesman/entrepreneur accused of leading cult members into criminal lifestyle’, of course.

All-Too-Thrilling Adventures Read: Crypto-Anarchists, Anarcho-Capitalists, and Old-Fashioned Drug CartelsPost + Comments (79)

Rococo ‘Conservatism’ Open Thread: The Ultimate Ross Doubthat Column

by Anne Laurie|  July 22, 20187:05 pm| 151 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Glibertarianism, Grifters Gonna Grift, Open Threads, Assholes, Clown Shoes, Our Awesome Meritocracy

As someone who was actually educated by the Church, Doubthat’s “I’m a devout Catholic, but defend libertarianism, because freedom!” makes as much sense to me as would “I’m a strict vegetarian, but I defend cannibalism, because long pig is so delicious!” But this *particular* divertissement should be preserved under a glass vitrine, as an exemplar of how “American Thought Leadership” collapsed at the beginning of the new millenium:

… Like most interesting churches, libertarianism is a diverse and fractious faith, and FreedomFest brings together all its different sects: the think-tankers with their regulatory-reform blueprints, the muckraking journalists taking on government abuses, the charter city backers and Burning Man attendees, the Ayn Rand fans wearing dollar signs on their lapels, the eccentric-genius businessmen and pot legalizers — and the converts eager to tell you how everything changed when I got really into gold.

In principle I am not a libertarian: The teenage nerd enters conservatism through either Atlas Shrugged or Lord of the Rings, and between Tolkienists like myself and the Randians a great gulf is often fixed. But even if libertarianism seems an insufficient philosophy of human flourishing, its defense of individuals and markets can be a crucial practical corrective to all manner of liberal and conservative mistakes…

Just a little while ago journalists were talking about a “libertarian moment” in American politics, with Rand Paul as its avatar — an entitlement-cutting, prison-reforming, drug-legalizing, intervention-opposing, drone-strike-filibustering politics that was supposed to build bridges between Republicans and millennials. But then Paul, like other Republicans, was steamrolled by Trumpism in 2016. So what exactly happened to his moment?…

How could that fun guy, Rand Paul, allow himself to fall under the wheels of some trash-talking newbie like Donald Trump? SAD!

To Ross, politics is just another fantasy role-playing game — a gang of enthusiasts sharing the fun of theoretical world-building and weekend bullshit sessions. There are those who make a nice career out of their chosen fantasy… writing the fanfic, making the cosplay accessories, running the LARPs… even graduating into the professional tier, working for Hollywood or a big gaming company… but the Savvy among the crowds never forget that it’s all just performance. They may resent the ‘mundanes’ who don’t understand how *fun* their little societies can be, but they save their real contempt for the losers who actually believe it makes a difference whether Team Red or Team Blue wins an election, like those sad basement-dwellers who obsess over Boba Fett or ST:OS vs ST:NG.

It’s not as though Ross, or the people Ross socializes with, are ever going to be affected by this ‘politics’ stuff; they’ll never have to worry about getting deported, losing their liberty, being jailed or beaten for the color of their skin or their choice of partners (although they can dream up some very vivid fanfic scenarios). Their version of ‘economic anxiety’ is not being able to find a decent-sized apartment in the “right” zip code. The worst punishment they can imagine is being ostracized on Martha’s Vineyard, and there’s plenty of other places to get a good cocktail on a summer weekend. Why must some people suck all the fun out of the game?, Ross asks his fellow NYT opinioneers, as they nod in agreement…

Rococo ‘Conservatism’ Open Thread: The Ultimate Ross Doubthat ColumnPost + Comments (151)

Lest We Forget Open Thread: Paul Ryan — Bad Man, “Good” German Republican

by Anne Laurie|  April 16, 201810:21 am| 138 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Glibertarianism, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Ryan Lyin' Weasel, Assholes, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?

(Jim Morin via GoComics.com)
.

GOP of Paul Ryan: Perpetuate racism to destroy voting rights and the social safety net.

GOP of Donald Trump: Destroy social safety net and voting rights to perpetuate racism. https://t.co/UslkastxJG

— Zeddy (@Zeddary) April 15, 2018

Paul Waldman, at the Washington Post, “A scam of a party says goodbye to its top fraud”:

… The proximate cause of Ryan stepping down is that his party looks increasingly likely to suffer an electoral disaster in November’s midterm elections. He is facing an unusually strong challenge from Randy Bryce, the likely Democratic nominee in his Wisconsin district, so he probably calculated that there were two realistic outcomes for him. The worse one would be that he is defeated while his party loses the majority, as happened to then-speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) in 1994. The better one would be that he holds on to his seat while Republicans lose the majority, which might not be better at all. Being speaker may have meant plenty of headaches for Ryan, but being House minority leader is a total drag; you still have to manage your unruly caucus, but you have no real power and can’t make any progress on your agenda…

For years, Ryan has presented himself as someone deeply concerned with fiscal discipline, committed to getting America’s books in order. As anyone with any sense realized, this was a scam: Like all Republicans, he used the deficit as a bludgeon against Democratic presidents, then forgot all about it while a Republican was in office.

At the same time, Ryan — a lifelong admirer of Ayn Rand, the philosopher of selfishness — dreamed of destroying the safety net, eviscerating Medicaid, privatizing Medicare, slashing food stamps, and generally making life in America more cruel and unpleasant for all those who aren’t wealthy.

But as Paul Krugman observed, Ryan failed at both his pretend goal and his real goal. He will leave office after setting the deficit on a path to exceed $1 trillion in 2020, and yet, he failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and didn’t even bother to wage an assault on Medicare, almost certainly because he knew how disastrous it would be for his party.

So what does he mean when he says “I have accomplished much of what I came here to do”? He can only mean the tax cut Republicans passed last year. In other words, engineering a giant giveaway to corporations and the wealthy was enough for Ryan to say “My work here is done.”…

The press gives Paul Ryan way too much credit. He is as responsible for the current state of the Republican Party as any person walking the planet. He repeatedly chose to co-opt the nativism in the party instead of confront it. https://t.co/KmfGG1liRx

— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) April 15, 2018

Osita Nwanevu, at Slate, on “The Wolf in Wonk’s Clothing”:

… [I]t’s worth revisiting now, as Ryan prepares his exit from politics, the thrust of the argument that the tale advanced—that, in general, the 20 million children in this country who receive free lunches have parents who clearly don’t care about them and that in providing food to those children, the government enables bad parenting. That sweeping judgment is impossible unless one considers poverty and economic hardship themselves personal failings. For about a decade now, Ryan has demonstrated that he believes precisely this—that those who have trouble making their way in the world are personally defective, that those immiserated by circumstance have willingly surrendered their lives to dysfunction, and that the best remedy society can offer to those who lack is to deprive them, in cuts to already meager social programs, of even more.

Shaping that dogmatism into pseudo-wonkery has taken years of wild and reckless obfuscation. Most of the analyses of where Trump “came from” have sought and found precedents for his open xenophobia, conspiracymongering, and boorishness in the rhetoric and behavior of Republican politicians in the recent past. But his mendacity and the constant consequence-free dissembling of his administration still baffle all those who’ve wondered aloud, over the past year and a half, how we so suddenly entered a new age of “post-truth” politics. We haven’t, really. Paul Ryan understood, like Trump, the extent to which the norms governing conventional political journalism have always been poorly equipped to handle naked and persistent dishonesty and disingenuousness. His speech to the 2012 Republican National Convention was littered with blatant lies…

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Ryan showed, too—long before Trump was taken seriously—the political possibilities available to those brazen enough to openly call large swaths of the population leeches. It is scarcely mentioned, even in criticisms of Ryan’s proposals, that his ideal policy regime, like Trump’s, would upend the lives of millions of minorities or that the project of welfare reform, which Ryan, by his own admission, signed up enthusiastically for in his youth in the late 1980s and early 1990s has historically been animated by straightforward racism. All told, Ryan’s most lasting legacy may be his role in helping the conservative movement launder its messaging against anti-poverty programs—once freighted with obviously coded tall tales about welfare queens—into tidier, more superficially respectable rhetoric…

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
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Paul Krugman, “The Paul Ryan Story: From Flimflam to Fascism”“:

…I do have some insight into how Ryan — who has always been an obvious con man, to anyone willing to see — came to become speaker of the House. And that’s a story that reflects badly not just on Ryan himself, not just on his party, but also on self-proclaimed centrists and the news media, who boosted his career through their malfeasance. Furthermore, the forces that brought Ryan to a position of power are the same forces that have brought America to the edge of a constitutional crisis…

Look, the single animating principle of everything Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. Can anyone name a single instance in which his supposed concern about the deficit made him willing to impose any burden on the wealthy, in which his supposed compassion made him willing to improve the lives of the poor? Remember, he voted against the Simpson-Bowles debt commission proposal not because of its real flaws, but because it would raise taxes and fail to repeal Obamacare…

So how did such an obvious con artist get a reputation for seriousness and fiscal probity? Basically, he was the beneficiary of ideological affirmative action.

Even now, in this age of Trump, there are a substantial number of opinion leaders — especially, but not only, in the news media — whose careers, whose professional brands, rest on the notion that they stand above the political fray. For such people, asserting that both sides have a point, that there are serious, honest people on both left and right, practically defines their identity.

Yet the reality of 21st-century U.S. politics is one of asymmetric polarization in many dimensions. One of these dimensions is intellectual: While there are some serious, honest conservative thinkers, they have no influence on the modern Republican Party. What’s a centrist to do?

The answer, all too often, has involved what we might call motivated gullibility. Centrists who couldn’t find real examples of serious, honest conservatives lavished praise on politicians who played that role on TV. Paul Ryan wasn’t actually very good at faking it; true fiscal experts ridiculed his “mystery meat” budgets. But never mind: The narrative required that the character Ryan played exist, so everyone pretended that he was the genuine article…

Paul Ryan somehow denies this, but he routinely normalized Trump and enabled his takeover of the GOP. It played out right in front of all of us. https://t.co/BAsGpI3M9L pic.twitter.com/ynltB4PpvZ

— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) April 15, 2018

Matt Yglesias, at Vox, “Donald Trump sold out to Paul Ryan, not the other way around“:

I’m not a big Paul Ryan fan, but one particular kick in the pants the speaker of the House is getting on his way out the door is unfair. It’s simply not the case that he sold out to Donald Trump or compromised his principles in any way. If anything, it’s just the opposite — Trump abandoned his stated views on a wide range of policy issues in order to bring himself into close conformity with Ryan’s ideology and policy agenda…

… On substance, Trump has embraced Ryan’s vision of lower taxes on the rich and a stingier welfare state, even though he campaigned promising the opposite. Ryan has indulged Trump on a personal level without abandoning any of his longstanding policy views. It’s true that Ryan has had limited success in enacting his agenda, but the impediments there have uniformly been in the United States Senate, not the White House. If anything, the Trump administration is quite loyally plugging away at Ryan-esque goals that the president never articulated as a candidate.

But while it’s unquestionably true that the self-presentation of the GOP in 2018 and beyond looks a lot more like what Trump was doing in 2015 than what Ryan was up to three years ago, the policy agenda of the GOP hews much closer to Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” blueprint than to anything Trump said as a candidate.

The critique now, ironically, is rooted in the same style-over-substance pathologies that led so many journalists to overrate Ryan for so long — an inclination Ryan was shrewd to exploit…

(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
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Bess Levin, at Vanity Fair, “Poverty Scold Paul Ryan Retiring at 48 to Join the Ranks of Idle Rich”:

…[W]hile Ryan is leaving town after setting the Treasury on fire—something he pretended to care about under Barack Obama, when tax cuts weren’t on the line—his personal financial situation is about to get quite rosy.

Bloomberg reports that upon leaving politics, Wisconsin’s first son will have no trouble adding to a current net worth estimated at slightly more than $6 million, given the wide range of corporate boards probably already banging down his door. “The kind of board that he would go after would probably pay between $250,000 and $300,000 a year and he could probably get three or four of them,” Fred Foulkes, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, told Bloomberg. “There would be dozens that would like to have him, particularly companies that have part of their business in key relationships with certain parts of government.” While Ryan will have to abide by a rule that says representatives must wait one year between working on Capitol Hill and lobbying work, there are no such rules about joining companies’ boards. One imagines that plenty of the Speaker‘s corporate donors, now saving millions on their tax bills, would be happy to have him.

There’s some irony in the fact that Ryan, who famously called poverty a “culture problem” of “men not even thinking about working,” who said the social safety net is a “hammock that lulls able-bodied people into complacency and dependence,” and who extolled the virtues of children seeing their father working, will be quitting his job at 48 in order to do less work for more money. Corporate board seats are famously cushy gigs that involve, typically, attending a meeting every few weeks, max. By the Boston Globe’s estimates, board members usually work fewer than five hours per week per board. The positions are so lucrative and coveted that critics say some people are discouraged from raising questions about C.E.O. pay or other issues for fear of losing their seats, which we’re sure will never been an issue for the deeply principled Ryan.

While Ryan spent much of his career railing against benefits for public-sector employees, he’ll also enjoy a hefty pension package when he heads back to Janesville—a golden parachute that will be further inflated if Ryan hangs on until the end of the year, as he has said he will do…

(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
.

When it came out that Trump pressured Comey to drop the Flynn investigation and then fired him when he didn’t, @PRyan excused it all saying “he’s new at this.”

Now @chucktodd asks him whether Comey is honorable, Ryan refuses to answer even on way out. He’s corrupted to the core.

— Jesse Lee (@JesseCharlesLee) April 15, 2018

But Ryan’s still got one last dream:

Paul Ryan Vows To Make Boomers Pay For Retiring By 'Fixing Entitlements' https://t.co/NCpRzEBuR6

— #TheResistance (@SocialPowerOne1) April 15, 2018

Lest We Forget Open Thread: Paul Ryan — Bad Man, “Good” <del>German</del> RepublicanPost + Comments (138)

Why’s Everything That’s Supposed to Be Bad Make Me Feel So Good

by John Cole|  April 11, 20181:03 pm| 229 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism, Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver, Assholes

What’s your addiction? Is it money? Is it girls? Is it weed?
I’ve been afflicted by not one, not two, but all three.

Ahh, McSuderman:

No Republican was more vociferously opposed to the build up of public debt than Rep. Paul Ryan, the GOP speaker of the House who announced this morning that he would not run for reelection. For years, Ryan has served as the frontman for the GOP’s fiscal crusades, a role that helped elevate him into the upper echelons of party leadership.

Ryan repeatedly lambasted the fiscal policies of President Obama and the Democratic party. He charged that Obama “dodged the tough choices necessary to confront the threat of runaway federal spending,” and criticized the president for ignoring the recommendations of the bipartisan fiscal commission that he helped create. Under Obama, Ryan said in a 2011 op-ed, “Democrats have simply done away with serious budgeting altogether.” Ryan was serious about the deficit. Obama and the Democrats were not.

Repeat after me. Paul Ryan was never fucking serious about the budget. Let me clarify- he was never serious about deficit and debt. He may have talked all the time about them, but that’s the “confidence” in con artist part (I haven’t seen it in years, but House of Games is my favorite con artist film, from before when Mamet lost his shit. I wonder how it has aged.) They talk and talk and talk, and while they are talking, they are reaching into your back pocket.

Paul Ryan was serious about the budget in one sense- in shifting who benefited. He didn’t care about the overall size, he just wanted to take from the untermensch and give to the noble Randian superclass. That’s why he didn’t so much as flinch pushing the Trump tax giveaway, but had to be pulled over broken glass to reauthorize CHIP (even though it saved money in the long term) because it meant his precious going to the poors.

Democrats, to be sure, have not exactly been icons of limited government. But under Clinton, the deficit turned into a technical surplus. During his first term, discretionary spending actually dropped; it wasn’t until the second term, with Republicans in control of Congress, that it began to increase again.

Stop right fucking there:

Fucking google something, McSuderman.

Deficits ballooned during President Obama’s first term, and from day one of his presidency, Republicans were swift to blame Democrats for a lack of fiscal discipline. But the rapid increase actually started under Bush. Depending on how you run the numbers, it is possible to make the argument that most of the Obama-era deficits were caused by Bush-era policies.

NOT ONLY IS IT POSSIBLE, BUT IT IS THE ONLY WAY TO RUN THE NUMBERS. You might have heard of the crash of 2007 in between attending Arcade Fire fanfests.

Obama’s second term was marked by still large but shrinking deficits that Republicans, since taking over, have grown again.Who ran congress during that period and what signature legislation was passed (and paid for) that helped lead to those shring When Paul Ryan noted that Obama ignored the recommendations of the bipartisan committee on fiscal responsibility, he was right. But what Ryan didn’t say was that Ryan himself was on that committee—and he voted against its recommendations.

HE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT THE DEBT OR DEFICITS. HE CARES ABOUT WHO GETS THE MONEY YOU ASSHOLE.

I do not mean to suggest that Democrats are actually the party of good budgetary sense.

Fuck off.

In the long term, the largest drivers of the debt are Medicare and Social Security, and Democrats have, for the most part, been resistant to structural reforms.

No. Medicare and Social Security are fine and will be fine if YOU AND REPUBLICANS stop looting America, starting trillion dollar wars of choice, and spending 800 billion a fucking year on a bloated defense budget. And the only reason they want to “fix” both of them is because they want to privatize them, looting both for the benefit of their financial betters, which will no doubt make both of them worse and far more costly. But again, the actual cost is not what matters to Ryan. What matters is who gets the loot in this bust out.

Is there anything more addictive than the narrative that Democrats are bad for the economy and bad on fiscal matters?

Why’s Everything That’s Supposed to Be Bad Make Me Feel So GoodPost + Comments (229)

Late-Night Lightweights Open Thread: Five Pounds of Manure in A Ten-Pound Sack

by Anne Laurie|  March 29, 20182:31 am| 48 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Glibertarianism, Open Threads, Assholes, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Our Failed Media Experiment

"If conservatives don't get high profile gigs, racism and misogyny may be marginalized in our discourse. A true dystopia opens before us."

— Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat) March 28, 2018

The GOP has spent the last 30 years at least doubling down on racism, homophobia, sexism, and authoritarianism. Conservativsm is bankrupt, and its proponents in the US today are at best dupes for, but mostly apologists for, bigotry and bile.

— Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat) March 28, 2018

But instead of having a moment where we actually rethink the worth and virtue of conservatism, Trump has been a moment where everyone is suddenly like, "whoa, those leftist are super intolerant! Why aren't they open to our ideas which gave us the fascist?"

— Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat) March 28, 2018

The Atlantic has hired Kevin Williamson away from the National Review, in further display of how Trumpism has exposed the bone-deep corruption of “conservative thinking” just as Trump has exposed the rot of modern Republicanism. For all his swashbuckling words, Williamson would never personally lynch a woman who’d had an abortion (or even her doctor) — for one thing, he hasn’t the ability even if he had the guts — but he’s diligently polished his persona as A Thinker Who Is Willing to Make the Bold Arguments…

Rob Beschizza, at BoingBoing:

… I had a hunch: I thought (and said as much) that Williamson was hired explicitly because of what he had written about women, black kids and the poor. To well-off center-leaning liberals,[*] Williamson is the perfect post-Trump conservative: superficially literary, ostentatiously nasty, profoundly disgusted by the weak, yet (and this is super-duper important) opposed to the current president.

Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg explained… why he hired Williamson. Nailed it! Not only was Goldberg and The Atlantic aware of Williamson’s writing, they love it: “I recognized the power, contrariness, wit, and smart construction of many of his pieces. I also found him to be ideologically interesting”. Moreover, Goldberg was party to Williamson deleting his Twitter account, to ease his transition from the reactionary right to columnist at a liberal-ish magazine.

Goldberg’s rationale also makes clear something else, though: they (rather sanctimoniously) think that Williamson has “grown” beyond his National Review persona, and that his willingless to do so is part of why they hired him…

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Goldberg implies that the things Williamson wrote were a kind of ideological clothing, flourishes that say nothing sincere about the man. His attitude will change as easily as a pair of socks–at least when the right foot is put forward under their masthead.

In other words, they simply don’t take what Williamson has said seriously…

[*]This is where I disagree with Beschizza: The Atlantic hasn’t been any kind of a “liberal” magazine since at least the Reagan era. It’s center-right when it’s not explicitly libertarian, and that, IMO, is why Goldberg hired Williamson. Of course they don’t take Williamson’s ideas seriously — neither does Williamson — but they like his style.

The wealthy right-leaning Media Village Leaders who fund the Atlantic (and its lesser cousins, from NRO down the feeding chain to Breitbart and Drudge) prefer their bigotries nicely worded, and their ugly prejudices prettily dressed. And Williamson is more than happy to give them the pretty!

Five pounds of manure in a ten-pound bag isn’t value for money… unless the purchaser wants very badly to keep from actually touching the shit they’re buying. For that, one wants plenty of slack in the packaging.

imagine being one of the nation's most insightful writers on race — a distinction belonging to several people at The Atlantic — and then finding out your new deskmate is a guy who described a black child as three-fifths snoop dogg and then tried to argue that it wasn't racist

— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) March 27, 2018

We have sunk so low that the head of a national magazine is explaining to staff that arguing to execute 25% of the female population in America is just a "controversial aspect" of someone's writing. pic.twitter.com/Sp0QmbulaV

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) March 27, 2018

Yes to everything Jessica says here. Especially this: men can say a quarter of women should be hanged and they can enjoy plum columnist positions. Women say men who want to hang women should be unemployable and it costs us jobs and opportunities, because now we’re difficult. https://t.co/l7I2A2Z8fE

— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) March 27, 2018

Late-Night Lightweights Open Thread: Five Pounds of Manure in A Ten-Pound SackPost + Comments (48)

We Can Always Use Some Bitter, Cynical, Gallows Humor, So Here’s A Kudlow Post

by Tom Levenson|  March 14, 20185:27 pm| 109 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Fables Of The Reconstruction, Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Glibertarianism, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You, Tax Policy, The Party of Fiscal Responsibility, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?

Larry Kudlow is the pure distilled essence of a Trump appointment, the type specimen of the breed, and the perfect expression of the state of Republican “thinking” on not just economics, but any matter in which actual knowledge and a respect for empiricism might help.

Via Wikipedia, we find he is barely educated, at best, in the fields in which he now works:

Kudlow graduated from University of Rochester in Rochester, New York with a degree in history in 1969. Known as “Kuddles” to friends, he was a star on the tennis team and a member of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society at Rochester.

In 1971, Kudlow attended Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he studied politics and economics. He left before completing his master’s degree.

I’ll admit that Kuddles is kinda cute, but an unfinished masters degree in a policy school is not one you’d usually associate with economics acumen.

He went on to a stellar business career, managing to get fired repeatedly for substance abuse on the job, including a claimed $10,000/month cocaine habit that got him canned from Bear Stearns in 1994. (It’s interesting to note that a frantic effort is underway today to diminish such inconvenient truths on Kudlow’s Wikipedia page.)

Fortunately for Kuddles, he cleans up well, dresses nicely, and can tok gud. So he was able to revive his career as a TV gasbag, with a series of appearances and then shows on CNBC, the network that figured out the markets could be covered like sports teams.

Unfortunately — for the rest of us, if not for the ever-failing-up Kudlow — he’s been wrong about almost every key economic call since Methuselah was in diapers.  He is a Laffer disciple, a supply-sider whose faith that there is no tax that is too low, no plutocrat whose needs must not be served, is impervious to any test of reality.

Consider this:

In 1993, when Bill Clinton proposed an increase in the top tax rate from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, Kudlow wrote, “There is no question that President Clinton’s across-the-board tax increases … will throw a wet blanket over the recovery and depress the economy’s long-run potential to grow.” This was wrong. Instead, a boom ensued. Rather than question his analysis, Kudlow switched to crediting the results to the great tax-cutter, Ronald Reagan. “The politician most responsible for laying the groundwork for this prosperous era is not Bill Clinton, but Ronald Reagan,” he argued in February, 2000.

And this:

Kudlow firmly denied that the United States would enter a recession in 2007, or that it was in the midst of a recession in early to mid-2008. In December 2007, he wrote: “The recession debate is over. It’s not gonna happen. Time to move on. At a bare minimum, we are looking at Goldilocks 2.0. (And that’s a minimum). The Bush boom is alive and well. It’s finishing up its sixth splendid year with many more years to come”. In May 2008 he wrote: “President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country” in his “‘R’ is for ‘Right'”.

And this:

When Obama took office, Kudlow was detecting an “inflationary bubble.” That was wrong. He warned in 2009 that the administration “is waging war on investors. He’s waging war against businesses. He’s waging war against bondholders. These are very bad things.” That was also wrong, and when the recovery proceeded, by 2011, he credited the Bush tax cuts for the recovery. (Kudlow, April 2011: “March unemployment rate drop proof lower taxes work.”) By 2012, Kudlow found new grounds to test out his theories: Kansas, where he advisedRepublican governor Sam Brownback to implement a sweeping tax-cut plan that would produce faster growth. This was wrong. Alas, Brownback’s program has proven a comprehensive failure, falling short of all its promises and leaving the state in fiscal turmoil.

The reviews are coming in. Via the BBC:

David Stockman, Mr Kudlow’s former boss during the Reagan administration, told the Washington Post in 2016 that Mr Kudlow’s prediction that tax cuts would lead to growth was “dead wrong”. Instead, he said the cuts led to budget deficits.

More recently, he has warned that Mr Kudlow would not be able to rein in the president.

“As much as I love him … Larry’s voice is exactly the wrong voice that Donald Trump ought to be hearing as we go forward,” he told CNBC.

Liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been sharply critical, noting that Mr Kudlow missed signs of the housing bubble and recession.

“At least he’s reliable — that is, he’s reliably wrong about everything,” Mr Krugman tweeted.

Indeed in December 2007 – just as the recession was beginning – Mr Kudlow wrote in the National Review: “There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong. It’s not going to happen.”

It is interesting that Kudlow himself doesn’t seem to disagree with his predecessor on the issue that got Cohn out. From a quick take bylined by him, Laffer and Stephen Moore (another stellar, always-wrong econ public intellectual) here he is on Trump’s tariff announcement:

Tariffs are really tax hikes. Since so many of the things American consumers buy today are made of steel or aluminum, a 25 percent tariff on these commodities may get passed on to consumers at the cash register. This is a regressive tax on low-income families.

I wonder how that squares with the new job. ETA: I know how it squares. It’s already been forgotten. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

But that’s just SOP in the circles in which Kudlow travels:  intellectual rigor doesn’t actually matter.  He’s under no obligation to be consistent in any of his pronouncements, and he certainly doesn’t have to be right about anything as long as he provides cover for the true Republican (n.b.: not just Trumpian) policy goal: the transfer of more and more of our society’s wealth to those who are already wealthy — and hence, in the GOP/Rand/Sociopath view of the world, those who are virtuous enough to deserve such riches.

For all of you who’ve wondered why the US can’t be more like Kansas — we may now we get to find out.

Image: Thomas Shields Clarke, A Fool’s Fool,  c. 1887.

We Can Always Use Some Bitter, Cynical, Gallows Humor, So Here’s A Kudlow PostPost + Comments (109)

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