Laugh to keep from cryin'

This Week in Rick Perry Lies

-- Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott -- together with other bureaucrats in the TEA -- falsified test scores through a complex scoring system so that failing students and schools would appear to be 'exemplary'. Governor Rick Perry (the guy who appointed Scott to his job) bragged about one Houston school's "success".

The truth is that the dropout rate in Texas is a "rock-hard disaster".

-- Texas Forensic Science Commissioner John Bradley -- the guy Rick Perry appointed  to whitewash the investigation of whether the state of Texas executed an innocent man -- is proving to be nothing but a barrier to the investigation. Gee, I wonder why. Update: The governor has even lost Paul Burka.

--Slightly older than a week: Rick Perry said on FOX News that he "frankly, never had a call" from the Obama administration. False. As in: "you lie".

From decrying stimulus funds even as he accepted them in order to balance the state's budget, to claiming vast success in enforcing the border with Mexico, to his feverish notion that Houston is "approaching bankruptcy" -- the Texas incumbent governor and the facts have a very tenuous relationship.

Sunday Funnies

Goodbye, Middle Class

The 22 statistics detailed here prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace. ...

Here are the statistics to prove it:

•    83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
•    61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
•    66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
•    36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
•    A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
•    24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
•    Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
•    Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
•    For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
•    In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
•    As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
•    The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
•    Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
•    In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
•    The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
•    In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
•    More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
•    For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
•    This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
•    Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
•    Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
•    The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income. 

But the conservatives in America cry "socialism", unemployed Americans and those on food stamps are "feeeloaders", and it's all Obama's fault.

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

This must be the fault of labor unions. If you believe FOX News.

The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker 10 times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool.

What do most Americans have to offer in the marketplace other than their labor? Not much. The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. But today, U.S. workers are "less attractive" than ever. Compared to the rest of the world, American workers are extremely expensive, and the government keeps passing more rules and regulations seemingly on a monthly basis that makes it even more difficult to conduct business in the United States.

So corporations are moving operations out of the U.S. at breathtaking speed. Since the U.S. government does not penalize them for doing so, there really is no incentive for them to stay.

What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about six unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of "chronically unemployed" is absolutely soaring. There simply are not nearly enough jobs for everyone.

God DAMN that Obama. Where are all the jobs he promised?

Many of those who are able to get jobs are finding that they are making less money than they used to. In fact, an increasingly large percentage of Americans are working at low wage retail and service jobs.

But you can't raise a family on what you make flipping burgers at McDonald's or on what you bring in from greeting customers down at the local Wal-Mart.

The truth is that the middle class in America is dying -- and once it is gone it will be incredibly difficult to rebuild.

We've got to get the Republicans back in there so they can fix this. It's their highest priority.

So who got Breitbarted the hardest?

Pretty much all of us. (Not that I'm feeling sorry for FOX ...)

Chef Vader (at Comic-Con)

Yes, I'll have a little slice or two of Binks-bacoa, thanks.

See also the Geek Wiki of attendees. Absolutely hilarious. Personally I fall somewhere around Fringer/Social Geek.

The difference between Andrew Breitbart and Lois the Corpse Flower

I was preparing a lengthy post around the unholy alliances connecting Breitbart, Drudge, FOX (particularly Hannity), the conservative contingent of online steerage passengers who sop up every utterance from the preceding like white bread does greasy gravy, the Coalition of the Snookered -- including the NAACP, Tom Vilsack and several others in the Obama administration -- and the remaining corporate media that allows itself to be led by the nose by the conservative media previously cited ....

... but others have smacked them down enough. KO, taking a work break from his vacation for last night's Special Comment, can suffice.



So there's nothing left here to do but some mocking humor.

Answering the query in the header:

One is five feet tall, purple around the edges, coming out in style and smells like carrion.

And the other is Lois the Corpse Flower.

Update: Breitbart and FOX are BFF, just so you know.

Todd Staples' broadband scam breaks out

It's now into the mainstream.

At an unveiling last month, the Texas Department of Agriculture touted its map of broadband Internet availability as the first step in closing a "digital divide" that denies rural Texans critical services.

But a political divide has opened instead, as critics question the tool's accuracy and Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples' relationship with the organization that created it.

Staples' Democratic rival, Hank Gilbert, and a handful of local providers, consumer groups and mapping organizations say the agency tailored the application to fit Connected Nation, the nonprofit selected by the department and the Texas Public Utility Commission to create the map. The Agriculture Department and the company defend the process, while their critics contend that the map will direct federal stimulus money toward major telecommunications companies at the expense of smaller Internet providers.

Last month we wrote about this here. I'm going to bring that excerpt forward for its background, because this is a difficult and tightly-woven scandal to understand.

(Hank) Gilbert lately exposed the incumbent for shady dealings regarding broadband internet access for rural Texans. Here's the press release from Connected Nation and Staples.

Connected Nation is well-connected, all right: to Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T. The company is first in line to collect federal stimulus dollars -- $4 billion -- earmarked for the massive project of determining where broadband access will go in the hinterlands of America. Staples, on behalf of of the state of Texas, has outsourced a $3 million dollar contract to CN despite serious questions about the company's work in other states, questions about the bidding process (Staples got $60,000 from the Texas Farm Bureau, whose former president is listed as a 'national advisor' of CN), and even questions about CN's business model. Read more about that here, and also at the Wall Street Journal. And when Staples' office started getting media attention about his relationship with CN, the Texas Department of Agriculture directed reporters to the Staples re-election campaign, which then regurgitated their previous negative attacks on Gilbert.

The Chron managed to do a drive-by (on what they consider the race for agriculture commissioner to be: an aggressive tit-for-tat). That sadly reflects the continuing decline in in-depth political coverage there. But The Texas Tribune picked up the item over the weekend, noting the smoking gun: that the Texas Agriculture Commission's first and continuing response was to hand all media inquiries over to the Staples 2010 political branch, which then directed reporters to a specifically-designed smear website against Gilbert. There simply would not be this kind of misdirection and obfuscation if there wasn't something rotten hiding.

Again, Texas progressive blogs have been talking about the entire scope of the issue for the past month; besides Burnt Orange's report in the excerpt above, Texas Kaos has been following the story, and Dos Centavos, and Off the Kuff as well.

And the DMN, who together with their Trail Blazers blog is working harder and faster than any other corporate media outlet in Texas this election cycle, finally gets it.

"It's a scandal, a total scandal," said Art Brodsky, communications director of Public Knowledge, a public interest group that follows digital culture. A longtime critic of Connected Nation, Brodsky has tracked the nonprofit since Kentucky officials accused it of overestimating broadband availability several years ago. The agency that grew into Connection Nation started there in 2001.

Brodsky said nondisclosure agreements make it difficult to see who really benefits from the mapping process.

Forget for a moment the beautiful payola scam that is Connected Nation. It's a story all its own, with similar iterations of incompetence and corruption appearing in every state in which they "operate". Let's just focus on what's going here in Texas.

Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples has used various Republican connections interwoven throughout interest groups like the Texas Farm Bureau and the biggest player/vendors in the telecommunications industry to grant -- with essentially only the slightest semblance of competitive bid -- a multi-million dollar contract, and reap the benefits. Not just politically, but financially for himself as well. And then used the power of incumbency in concert with his political machine not to address public concerns, but to viciously attack his electoral rival when questioned about it. In this respect (minus a few zeroes) he's just aping Rick Perry -- the Trans-Texas Corridor, the late Ric Williamson, and Cintra come immediately to mind, but the more recent example would be Merck, Mike Toomey, and the HPV vaccine -- and the gold standard for corruption of this ilk, Dick Cheney (Halliburton, Iraq).

Don't we have enough of this sleaze to mop up as it is without extending the shelf life of a wannabe like Todd Staples?

Right-wing unleashes frenzy of race-baiting

Far beyond the "Barack Hussein Obama" business, miles past Glenn Beck's feverish rants and Rush Limbaugh's run-of-the-mill slathering, the Conservative Noize Machine is throwing race cards in every direction like a drunken game of 52-pickup.

Last week it was the New Black Panther affair and the Mark Williams "letter to Lincoln".  This week it's the manipulation of videotape by the infamous Andrew Breitbart that implies Shirley Sherrod, formerly of the USDA, made a statement about "white farmers" that was -- using the newest word in the Sarah Palin Dictionary, Constantly Revised -- 'refudiated' by the white farmer family themselves.

Conservatives en masse are taking the white robes and pointy hats out of the closet, twisting up the nooses, and soaking the wooden crosses in kerosene.

Latinos have had to take a back seat to the old-style stoking of racial hatred that still simmers from the '60's. The War on Ill Eagles and the frothing about the Arizona immigration law is still making plenty of headlines, and in the minds of mental midgets like Lamar Smith will keep doing so, but TeaBaggers and Republicans (read: ultra-conservatives and conservatives) lately just feel more comfortable wearing the old bigotry. What's different this time is the subtlety is gone. Gone are the code words, the winks and nods, the dog whistles. Conservative media are openly and aggressively trying to revive old fears and coax them into something menacing. You can chalk it up to bad habit, political desperation, the heat wave or the summer doldrums; the fact is that they're going down a road from which there is no turning back, and it's only going to get worse as summer rolls on.

It's not a presidential election year, but you get the feeling Lee Atwater's Ghost has been reincarnated in CNN's (and RedState.com's) Erick Erickson, who is busy looking for a 2010 version of Willie Horton.

Update: Abby Rapoport at the Texas Observer adds some calmer perspective.

Don't call them racists

Joe Biden says they're not racists, after all. And I trust him. Still, this development was... ah... troubling...

Mark Williams, the tea party leader who wrote a blog post this week calling the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) racist, has been "expelled" from the National Tea Party Federation.


Williams wrote the blog post on Thursday in response to the NAACP's Tuesday declaration accusing the tea party movement of tolerating racist elements in its midst (see The Upshot's rundown on the week of attacks and counterattacks here). It was written as an imaginary letter to President Abraham Lincoln and accused the NAACP of being racist for using the word "colored" in its name. When some reacted to it in outrage, Williams deleted it from his website, declaring it time to "move forward."

The National Tea Party Federation apparently decided to move forward without Williams. Spokesman David Webb said on Face the Nation (Sunday) morning that Williams and his Tea Party Express had been pushed out because Williams' posting was "clearly offensive."

You can read his deleted blog post here. Williams says he's done talking about the matter.

Really though, it's important to distinguish 'being a racist' from 'making racist statements'. Or any other variety of false and offensive public statements. Or even anonymous answering-machine threats of violence. After all, who can see inside another man's heart? Let's review.

Step one: NAACP calls on tea partiers to get their act together and repudiate racist elements within the tea party movement.

Step two: Sarah Palin mocks the NAACP on Twitter for suggesting that "liberty-loving, equality-respecting patriots" are racists.

Step three: Fox gets outraged that NAACP would suggest that there any racists in the tea party to repudiate; links NAACP to made-up New Black Panther Fauxtrage.

Step four: The National Tea Party Federation kicks tea party leader Mark Williams out of the tea party...for racism.

So here's the question: If there weren't any racist leaders in the tea party, then why did the National Tea Party Federation expel Mark Williams? And will the rest of the tea party "movement" join the National Tea Party Federation? And what about Sean Hannity, who like others on Fox had a special affection for Williams?

Everybody who has ever listened to Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" understands how tough it is to go from staging a protest to becoming a movement, after all.