politics

If you want to dismiss any sort of protest, you do the following:

• First off, play down the numbers. Both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the population. The participants never ever hold a majority popular opinion.
• Find the wing-nuts in the crowd, and give them the most attention, misspelled protest signs a plus.
• Make sure that you point out any involvement of any organized group or prominent individual to imply a shadowy conspiracy directing the activity; call it “AstroTurf” as opposed to “grass-roots.”
• And of course, dismiss the participants as ignorant fools who have no idea what they’re actually protesting.

Works for anything, really, from a Million Man march to a WTO protest.

Seen the above a lot today, especially with Mr. Marc Cooper of the LA Times who makes himself look like a desperately frightened little twit shoving his fingers in his ears going “LALALALALALALA.”

Shall we talk of Mr. Cooper? (more…)

This is not a post about politics, per se. This is about criminal malfeasance, the sucking undertow of corruption in Washington D.C. that is shortly to drag the country down with it.  If you’re wondering where the respect for the Constitution and the rule of law went, well our congress hasn’t had it for a long long time. We have created a self-entitled, self-important, self-aggrandizing political class that swear allegiance to nothing but their own position of power. They are a true ruling class, one to whom the rules of the common people do not apply. Perhaps you suffer from scandal fatigue, but think about this:

There are 435 seats in the House, 100 in the Senate. That is 635 people. Now take any random workplace in the country (assuming it’s a legal enterprise paying everyone above the table) having the same number of workers. How many of those people do you think engage in, say, real estate fraud? One? Two?

Ok, in the Congress we have Reps Pete Stark (D, CA) and Eliot Engel (D, NY) who both tried to skirt tax law by claiming their million-dollar Maryland residences as their permanent address. Then you have Charles Rangel’s laundry list of issues around real-estate, including forgetting to report 75K of rental income over a period of three years.  Then we have Chris Dodd who has been desperately trying to blame the administration for language he put into the stimulus bill that seemed tailored explicitly to allow the AIG bonuses everyone’s in an uproar about, making almost everyone forget those wonderfully choice Countrywide perks he got back when there was no real-estate bubble.  (Funny thing, AIG donated over a quarter million to Dodd’s campaign fund, but that’s probably just a coincidence.) And just to throw some republicans in the mix, we have California Rep. Gary Miller who’s being investigated by the FBI for trying to avoid a 31% tax on $10 million dollars worth of real estate transactions. We also have Arizona Republican Rick Renzi who has graduated from investigation to indictment last year, on 35 counts connected to land deals.

(more…)