There's just one thing I want to say about S&P's bond-rating downgrade -- then I'll turn the floor over to Andy Borowitz and Ian Welsh

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, explaining his decision to hold onto his current post: “I didn’t want to look for a job -- it’s fucking scary out there.” (See "Bonus Andy" below.)

BOROWITZ REPORT



Predator Drone Seen Hovering over Standard & Poor’s Headquarters

Company Could Be in for Downgrade of its Own, Experts Say



WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) -– Just days after downgrading the credit rating of the United States, Standard & Poor’s was on high alert this morning after an unmanned Predator drone was seen hovering over its headquarters in lower Manhattan.



While the mission of the Predator was unclear, some insiders speculated that S & P might be in for a downgrade of its own.



The Predator appeared in the skies above the company's headquarters minutes after it was rumored that S & P was about to downgrade the United States to the same status as Pluto.



As a so-called "dwarf nation," the U.S. would no longer be accorded the same respect as a recognized country like France or Brazil, one S & P source said: "Basically, the United States would be considered a social network with parking."



At the White House, President Obama offered no comment on the Predator’s mission, saying only, “The Predator is an effective weapon against the enemies of the United States of America.”



He did offer apologies for what he called “an accidental Predator missile strike” over the weekend at a golf course in Virginia which narrowly missed Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA).

by Ken



So, on the first day of trading after the Standard & Poors U.S. bond downgrade, "Stock market plummets after historic downgrade of U.S. credit rating" -- a 5.6 percent drop, Wall Street's "worst day of trading since the 2008 financial crisis as investors reacted to the historic downgrade of U.S. credit by selling so heavy that it wiped out $1.2 trillion of stock market wealth Monday."



There are a number of things that could be said about the bond downgrade, most of them silly -- and there's been no shortage of people saying them. I have just one point to make. For how long now has the Tools of the Oligarchy Right been warning that all sorts of catastrophic mayhem will result from our catastrophic debt catastrophe, including the collapse of the financial markets. The chief threat always has been that the bond market will punish us for our fiscal recklessness. And for how long have people like Paul Krugman been pointing out that bond interest rates showed no sign of going up, that apparently the dreaded bond market had no shortage of confidence in the U.S.'s financial stability. Bond buyers were only too happy to buy all the treasuries put on sale, at historically low interest rates.



This has to have driven the Pete Peterson Doom Via Debt prognosticators absolutely batty. Here they were trying to scare the bejeezus out of us with their phony-baloney "crisis," and the damned bond buyers were too dense to provide the chills the plutocrats' doom scenario called for.



Well, glory be, the bond buyers have suddenly had their confidence shaken, and bond interest rates will go up -- meaning that the bond-buying oligarchs not only have the "crisis of confidence" they've been threatening, but some nice new profits too!



Now here's Ian Welsh's take:

Comments on the S&P Downgrade



by Ian Welsh



Aside from hysterical laughter, here are the key points:



1. Obviously the US isn’t even close to insolvent. The gold in Fort Knox is held on the books at $37/ounce, for example. Most Federal lands are held on the books at 19th century valuations. Not to mention that the US’s debt is denominated in its own currency, which means it could simply be printed, and that the US government has a lot of unused room to tax, should it ever deign to use that on people with money, as opposed to those without.



2. As everyone is pointing out, the idea that S&P, who rated all the subprime trash as AAA, has any credibility, is a joke.



3. However, Obama and Democrats refused to destroy S&P when they had the opportunity and every reason to do so. The submprime crisis could not have been nearly as bad without S&P and the other rating’s agencies rating trash AAA so that investors who must buy AAA by law could do so. To put it simply, S&P engaged in systematic fraud. They, like everyone on Wall Street and in the major banks, have not been indicted for this. The choice to not indict is policy. Obama’s policy.



4. If Obama did not want this to happen, it would not happen. Could you imagine what LBJ, Nixon or Truman (or, hell, Bush Jr.) would have done if a rating’s agency tried this? The President has the necessary tools to utterly destroy S&P and every senior analyst working for them. You could use terrorism statutes or RICO, just as two examples. Send the FBI into their offices, seize all the assets of both the company and everyone working for it, and then got through their records. I guarantee, as absolutely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning, that there is enough evidence of fraud in those records to put them away for life. In the meantime, RICO laws are used to seize all the assets of everyone involved, meaning they will be using public defenders (don’t like a bad law? Use it against real people.) When S&P informed the White House they were going to downgrade, the White House could have quietly let them know what the consequences would be.



5. The US has effectively unlimited drawing rights from the IMF. Those drawing rights mean that if any of the core economies have an AAA rating, in effect, so does the US. (ie. if Germany is AAA, so is America.)



6. S&P knows all this. They are doing this because they know the President and Congress and the real people in the oligarchy want it done. Remember, a downgrade increases rates, and that is a direct increase to their income. And they know the US can pay, they aren’t fooled by idiotic talk about a default. The US may default at some point, but that will be a political decision.



7. This is another manufactured crisis, on top of the original manufactured debt ceiling crisis. The oligarchy wants the opportunity to buy federal assets at dimes on the dollar. They believe they don’t need the poor or middle class anymore, so they are good with getting rid of SS and Medicare. And Obama is, as he always has been, onside with this.



These people, are, however, playing with fire. Just because it’s a crisis that didn’t have to happen, a crisis, that is manufactured as another looting opportunity, doesn’t mean that it won’t have real consequences.

BONUS ANDY



In today's outing, I would say that the "other" jokes appended to the Borowitz Report are actually funnier than the report.

In other financial news:



-- In an effort to find a safe haven, rattled investors fled the dollar today and moved their money into Groupons.



-- In one rare bright spot on Wall Street, manufacturers of red ink posted record profits.



-- And finally, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner explained his decision to remain at the U.S. Treasury: “I didn’t want to look for a job – it’s fucking scary out there.”

#

Breaking News: "Obama, Boehner Come to Agreement That Cantor Is Douche" (The Borowitz Report)

Hot, hot, hot. Not a fun weekend weather-wise, especially for those of us who participated in the New York Transit Museum's Coney Island Nostalgia Tour on Saturday (traveling on authentic restored 1930s IND cars), and then came back today to venture a Municipal Art Society tour with star tour leader Francis Morrone to the posh Manhattan East Side enclaves of Beekman Place and Sutton Place. So I think I'll just pass on this breaking report from the Borowitz Report. -- Ken

JULY 24, 2011
Obama, Boehner Come to Agreement That Cantor Is Douche
Could Be First Step Toward Debt Deal

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – In what members of both parties are hailing as an important first step on the road to a deal on raising the debt ceiling, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner today came to an agreement that Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) is a douche.

Mr. Obama and Rep. Boehner made the dramatic announcement in the East Room of the White House late Sunday afternoon.

“Speaker Boehner and I have come to an agreement that Eric Cantor is a douche,” the President said. “We’ll see if we can build on that.”

The breakthrough reportedly came Sunday morning, but both sides spent several hours hammering out the language before agreeing on the word “douche.”

“Boehner had been pushing hard for ‘dickwad,’” said a source familiar with the discussions. “He was concerned that using a like ‘douche’ could be alienating to his base because it’s French.”

While skeptics cautioned that agreeing about the douchiness of Eric Cantor is still a long way from agreeing on raising the debt ceiling, a new poll shows that Messrs. Obama and Boehner have broad public support for their position on the congressman from Virginia.

According to a new poll of likely voters, 56 percent agreed that Mr. Cantor is a “douche,” 32 percent agreed that he is a “asshat” and the remainder characterized him as a “dickhead,” “cocksucker” or “motherfucker.”

“With all the partisan bickering in Washington, the American people should rest assured that we all agree on one thing,” said Rep. Boehner. “And that is, Eric Cantor is one irritating mofo.”

One theory: Eric Cantor's career has been secretly concocted and promoted by sinister deep-pocketed forces who want to build him up to help foment a resurgence of cutting-edge anti-Semitism in America.


UPDATE: Eric Cantor the shonda fur die goyim

In the comments, Michael Takiff shares a link to a Salon piece, "Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda," in which he asks, "Am I the only Jew in America who finds the House majority leader deeply embarrassing to our people? Am I the only tribe member who considers this smarmy yutz today’s numero-uno shonda fur die goyim?"

No, Michael, I assure you you're not.

When a Jew is publicly bad -- especially publicly really bad -- large numbers of the rest of us Jews cringe. That Jew becomes a shonda fur die goyim -- a disgrace for the non-Jews, an example for the gentiles to latch onto as evidence that every one of us is out to control their banks, run their newspapers, and make matzoh from the blood of their children.

Yes! As I wrote in reply:

It hadn't even occurred to me that Cantor is Jewish until my friend Peter asked. Peter's father, I might note, was a refugee from Nazi Germany who read the New York Times religiously every day of his American life and was wont to ask, anytime a Jew committed what he considered a public embarrassment, whether this was "good for the Jews."

#

You can't have a bitchin' "austerity" movement without an International Conspiracy of Dunces -- meet Our Davy Brooks

Once upon a time, Doonesbury's Roland Hedley went spelunking in Reagan's brain. Would anyone have the courage to attempt the same quest in Our Davy Brooks's brain?

by Ken

I expect many of you have already seen this, but I don't think you'll mind looking at it again. (Sorry I can't provide a link. Somehow as of this writing it still doesn't seem to have been added to the Borowitz Report website. Well, there's a link!)

BOROWITZ REPORT
June 17, 2011

Greece Offers to Repay Loans with Giant Horse
Steed Wheeled Into Brussels at Night

BRUSSELS (The Borowitz Report) – In what many are hailing as a breakthrough solution to Greece’s crippling debt crisis, Greece today offered to repay loans from the European Union nations by giving them a gigantic horse.

Finance ministers from sixteen EU nations awoke in Brussels this morning to find that a huge wooden horse had been wheeled into the city center overnight.

The horse, measuring several stories in height, drew mixed responses from the finance ministers, many of whom said they would have preferred a cash repayment of the EU’s bailout.

But German Chancellor Andrea Merkel said she “welcomed the beautiful wooden horse,” adding, “What harm could it possibly do?”

I've intentionally led off with a light moment because, as promised, we're about to descend into the murky, incomprehensible depths of DavyBrooksWorld.

Just this morning on the radio I heard some pompous economic semiliterate, commenting on the Greek crisis, saying that we know how to deal with their debt problem but now we just lack the political will to do so. Of course what he means is that we know the forced-austerity technique, which transforms the ill-gotten gains of the financial players who've made out like bandits in the runup into a price to be paid by people who've gotten no benefit from it.

The "serious" people who tut-tut about the Social Security "crisis" tut-tut in exactly the same way. We know what has to be done; we just lack the political gumption to do it. Or the state budget crises raised to toxic proportion by the economic meltdown: Hoodlums like the new governors of Wisconsin, Florida, and Ohio know how to deal with it -- and they've got the political gumption to do what has to be done: "solve" the problems on the backs of people who didn't cause them, thereby protecting the movers and shakers who did, and in many cases got rich, or I should say richer, doing it.

I suppose if you just wanted to pick on Our Davy Brooks, you could equally well deconstruct every pile of manure Our Davy shovels onto the NYT op-ed page. The levels of stupidity and dishonesty are really that predictable.

I can think of several reasons why I've glommed onto the column he wrote last week, hailing an astonishing discovery, the most important discovery since the discovery of sunshine: that the economic meltdown was caused by . . . Freddie Mac! (Or maybe Fannie Mae, I forget which.)

First, I had a moment of instant revulsion when I noticed the blurb for that column (for which, on principle, I'm not going to provide a link; that seems to me just encouraging him) on the day's NYT e-newsletter. It didn't take a particularly keen olfactory detector to smell a turd. It looked to be, only three years late, yet another assault on the best scapegoat the Far Right has come up with to deflect blame from the class of movers and shakers whose private parts they live to lick.

Maybe too I was primed because I once made the mistake of allowing a wingnut commenter to drag me into his inexhaustibly "sourced" conviction that the true cause of the economic meltdown was the Community Reinvestment Act of 2008, by which the government held guns to the head of scrupulously honest bankers and forced them to lend money to vile scum of the criminally poor class (not very hidden subtext: overwhelmingly people of inappropriate skin pigment) for the purpose of sinking the economy. Of course those inexhaustible citations, if you look at them, turn out to be either just plain bogus or twisted-beyond-recognition distortions, all to buttress the ideological delusions they've made up in their head, all of which are totally impervious to facts, which the Far Right has come to consider its deadliest enemy.

Now my point here, and the reason I bring it up, is that this is exactly the way Our Davy Brooks works. His trick -- and I'm not equipped to say whether it's a stroke of genius or a stroke of luck -- is to wrap his ideological rigidities in a veneer of "centrism." But he practices "journalism" the way David Brock -- as he reported in Bllinded by the Right -- discovered was the standard practice of the Far Right pseudo-journalists he'd attached himself to, among whom he had made himself the shiningest star. It occurred to him rather belatedly that where actual journalists set out to find out what the story is, his people started out with the story fully written in their heads and then went out in search of anything they could find, or more likely twist, to seem to support it.

THE POINT IS NOT THAT FANNIE
AND FREDDIE ARE BLAMELESS

To start with, it appears that that book Our Davy read, well, he doesn't seem to have actually read it, just glommed onto the part that fits his ideological fixation. I'm told by people I trust a lot more than Our Davy that he ignored substantial parts of the book that dealt with the Fed, Wall Street, and nonbank financial parties.

More to the point, though, he's just got the Fannie-Freddie story wrong. Which is not to say that Fannie and Freddie don't deserve brickbats. Here's economist Dean Baker's take:

The trillions of dollars that the geniuses at the private investment banks funneled into the housing market were the force that inflated the bubble to its 2006 peaks. Fannie and Freddie were followers in this story, jumping into the subprime and Alt-A market in 2005 to try to maintain market share. They were not the leaders.

Just to be clear, Fannie and Freddie were serious bad actors. They are both huge companies that do nothing else but deal with housing. It is incredible that they did not recognize the housing bubble and take steps to try to deflate it, and protect themselves, before it grew to such dangerous levels.

Suppose that Fannie and Freddie started demanding appraisals of rental values and refused to buy any mortgage where the ratio of sale price to annual rent was higher than 20. This action by itself likely would have shaken some sense into the housing market. I said this back in 2002, when I first warned of the housing bubble and predicted the collapse of Fannie and Freddie. I also frequently criticized Fannie and Freddie in public forums, including debates with their chief economists. Unlike Brooks, I wasn't worried about non-issues as economic disaster loomed on the horizon.

However:

As much as Fannie and Freddie deserve blame for incompetence and corruption, no serious person can make them the main culprits in this story. The Wall Street crew made hundreds of billions on pushing fraudulent mortgages. Furthermore, if we had competent economists running the Fed, they would have been shooting at the housing bubble as early as 2002 also. This does not mean raising interest rates in an economy that was struggling to recover from the collapse of the stock bubble. (I'll say that again, since people have a hard time understanding "do not raise interest rates." The Fed should not have raised interest rates.)

If Greenspan had paid attention to the economy he would have had the Fed's staff devoted full-time to document the evidence for the housing bubble and he would have used every public appearance (e.g. congressional testimonies, public speeches, international forums) to warn of the risks posed by the housing bubble. He also would have used the Fed's full regulatory authority to police the mortgage issuing practices of the banks under its supervision. He also would have prodded other regulators to use increased scrutiny for the institutions under their control. (Greenspan was never shy about making suggestions to others.)

My guess is that these actions would have by themselves crashed the bubble and done so long before it grew to such dangerous levels. They would be essentially costless, so it is difficult to see why a vigilant Fed chair would not have followed this route.

It is difficult to believe that these actions would not have been sufficient to deflate the bubble. After all, the David Brooks of the world can ignore Dean Baker warning of the housing bubble, they cannot ignore the Fed chair issuing such warnings, backed up by endless Fed papers documenting the case.

But Our Davy has found his narrative, and restored the earth to its rightful axis. And people continue publishing and reading his gibberish.

#

Without Weinergate, would this bunch of pols be any more likely, or more able, to deal with real-world problems?

"Big numbers are thrown around -- Sen. Jon Kyl said Tuesday that Republican agreement to raising the debt ceiling would require $2.5 trillion in spending cuts -- with little inquiry as to how such reductions would affect actual people, future economic growth or our capacity to invest in ourselves. Ah, but trying to answer such questions would distract us from the Weiner story.

"Okay, most of us will always pay attention to sex stories, and apocalyptic fears are usually a form of paranoia. But we’re a superpower with big economic problems. We’re acting like a country that has all the time in the world to dance around our troubles by indulging in ideological fantasies and focusing on the behavioral fantasies of wayward politicians -- who, by the way, keep creating opportunities for distraction."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column today,
"Anthony Weiner and the tweet road to oblivion"

"Obama knows -- and, indeed, has stated as much -- that if we continue along our present path we’ll guarantee our children a much more dangerous future. Taking the steps that would reduce the risks of climate change is not going to be politically popular, which is why it is the President’s obligation to press for them."

-- Elizabeth Kolbert, in a New Yorker
"Comment" piece this week, "Storms Brewing"

by Ken

It happens every election cycle. Serious people wail about candidates' failure to engage with real issues. Yet the infotainment noozemedia devote roughly 99 percent of their attnetion to mindless sound bites, sensationalism, and horse-race prognostication, leaving any poor sap of a candidate who fantasized about "running on the issues" to face the fact that approximately nobody gives a damn.

Case in point: I don't know how anyone could run a more issues-rich or issues-intelligent campaign than then-Rep. Joe Sestak did last year in the Pennsylvania Senate race, against a candidate who is a pile of pure garbage, a cynical rich-guy opportunist who ran on a platform that said basically: "I'm betting that enough Pennsylvanians are rich opportunists, low-life slimeballs, or garden-variety morons." It turned out to be a winning bet, and I don't suppose we should be surprised.

But I digress. I know I promised last night ("Confidential to Anthony W. of Brooklyn -- you twit!") that "barring unforeseen circumstances" we would be talking tonight about the results of New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff's online quest for a viable universal cartoon caption -- suitable, for example, for the magazine's much-cherished weekly cartoon-caption contest. I don't know if you could call the developments that have developed since then exactly "unforeseen." Did anyone foresee the circus surrounding Congressman Anthony W. of Brooklyn fading into the night.

True, there is one "unforeseen development." No, I don't mean the tacky disclosure that Mrs. Weiner is pregnant with the couple's first child, which you'd like to think was pretty much their affair. (It was interesting to note, though, that there wasn't any steadfast "little woman" at Anthony W.'s side as he continued blundering his way through his mess.) No, I mean the still-unconfirmed report of the congressman's resignation -- to run for premier of Italy.

BOROWITZ REPORT
June 9, 2011

Weiner Resigns: Will Run for
Prime Minister of Italy

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) - Embattled congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) sent shockwaves across the political landscape today, resigning from his seat in Congress and announcing a run for Prime Minister of Italy.



“Today is bittersweet for me,” he said in a resignation speech on the floor of the House of Representatives.  “But it is time to say goodbye to the past and buongiorno to the future.”



Mr. Weiner said that before resigning his seat, he briefly considered running for Prime Minister of Italy while still serving in the House: “I’ve shown that I’m good at multitasking.”



But instead, Mr. Weiner decided to devote himself wholeheartedly to his new campaign: “I’m very excited about this, as all of my followers on Twitter can see.”



Mr. Weiner hit the ground running this morning, blasting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for his use of prostitutes: “As Prime Minister of Italy, I will bring with me a much more fiscally prudent approach.”



According to early Italian polls, Mr. Weiner is appealing mainly to women in the 21 to 22 demographic.



“That’s a group that Berlusconi has totally ignored,” said Italian pollster Donatello Bibbo.  “He considers them too old.”



BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS . . .

"Now, I am always wary of those who do what I’m about to do next: Take a tawdry sex scandal that people read about because we like to read about tawdry sex scandals, and use it to make some larger point."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in the above-cited column

It's easy enough to understand E.J.'s wariness, but I find that the people you usually have to worry about are the ones who aren't wary about such dangers.

What's got E.J. down isn't the Weiner story itself, but its place "at the end of what Thomas Jefferson might call 'a long train of abuses.' You really don wonder what's happening to our democracy and those who serve it."

[T]he Weiner episode marked the culmination of several months during which other sideshows involving outrageous male behavior -- John Ensign and John Edwards come to mind — dominated news coverage at a moment when our country’s future really is on the line. (Bill Clinton’s scandal played out when we were in very good shape, which is one reason he survived.)

Add to this the political media’s tendency to prefer covering personalities that the media created in the first place (Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, above all) to those taking the trouble of running for president and thinking through what they want to say. It’s another case of politicians being reduced (or, maybe, reducing themselves) to celebrities.

I have no particular sympathy for the political views of Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty or Rick Santorum, but at least the three of them are doing the hard work that democratic politics requires. Thus: Palin’s unusual comments about Paul Revere got far more attention than did Pawlenty’s economic speech this week. It fell to policy bloggers such as The Post’s Ezra Klein to take Pawlenty’s ideas apart. Thus: Palin’s bus trip to the New Hampshire seacoast got at least as much attention as Romney’s announcement of a real, live candidacy.

"But it’s not all the media’s fault," E.J. says,

and this is not just about politicians who conduct themselves badly in their personal lives. Much of what passes for debate consists of irritable ideological gestures. The recent disappointing economic news has not changed the set-piece Washington deficit debate one bit.

Big numbers are thrown around -- Sen. Jon Kyl said Tuesday that Republican agreement to raising the debt ceiling would require $2.5 trillion in spending cuts — with little inquiry as to how such reductions would affect actual people, future economic growth or our capacity to invest in ourselves. Ah, but trying to answer such questions would distract us from the Weiner story.

The cruel fact is that we now have a politics that is almost totally divorced from real-world problems, except insofar as those problems can be mangled beyond recognition by pols who behave as if their brains function at a barely pre-kindergarten level. (The game of figuring out whether they're too stupid to understand or merely too demagogically cynical or opportunistic has long since lost its charm.)

In this week's (June 13) New Yorker Elizabeth Kolbert has a timely "Comment" piece called "Storms Brewing," in which she writes:

For decades, climate scientists have predicted that, as global temperatures rose, the side effects would include deeper droughts, more intense flooding, and more ferocious storms. The details of these forecasts are immensely complicated, but the underlying science is pretty simple. Warm air can hold more moisture. This means that there is greater evaporation. It also means that there is more water, and hence more energy, available to the system.

What we are seeing now is these predictions being borne out. If no particular flood or drought or storm can be directly attributed to climate change—there’s always the possibility that any single event was just a random occurrence—the over-all trend toward more extreme weather follows from the heating of the earth. As the cover of Newsweek declared last week, “weather panic” is the “new normal.” The larger problem is that this “new normal” won’t last.

The evidence continues to accumulate, Kolbert writes, that we're running out of time to get any kind of control over these developments. She points out that Barack Obama 'appointed some of the country's most knowledgeable climate scientists to his Administration, and it seemed for a time as if he might take his responsibility to lead on this issue seriously. That hope has faded."

Of course, it almost goes without saying at this point that the President’s potential opponents next November are all worse on the issue. Tim Pawlenty, who, as governor of Minnesota, took some commendable actions on climate change, has now renounced them, saying that everyone “has got some clunkers in their record.” Much the same holds for the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, minus the commendable actions. National Journal has summed up the situation this way: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe.”

E. J. Dionne Jr. extrapolates from the "Weiner circus":

Social networking has taken us where human nature always threatesn to go: downward. Do we want to give politicians incentives to limit their thinking to 140 characters?

And he concludes toady's column:

Britney Spears, appropriately enough I suppose, has a catchy song out with the refrain “Keep on dancin’ till the world ends.” Forgive me for wondering whether her song will provide the soundtrack for some future documentary on our national decline if we don’t get very serious, very soon.

Meanwhile Elizabeth Kolbert concludes her "Storms Brewing" piece:

[N]ow that the immediate crisis has passed, the President needs to stop asking the kind of questions that can’t be answered and start addressing those that can. Obama knows—and, indeed, has stated as much—that if we continue along our present path we’ll guarantee our children a much more dangerous future. Taking the steps that would reduce the risks of climate change is not going to be politically popular, which is why it is the President’s obligation to press for them. It may be beyond our power to control the climate, but we can determine it. This is precisely what we’re doing right now, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Republican Culture of Death Reeling from Kevorkian Demise

Forget Dr. Kevorkian's old-fashioned technology.
Paul Ryan and the House Republicans are bringing
elder-population control into the 21st century.

by Noah

What's a party to do when it has nothing but a clown parade of candidates and so many of its biggest idols, role models, and icons keep dying or going to jail? Think about it. Mengele, Bundy, Pinochet, and now, Dr. Death himself, Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Kevorkian is dead -- of natural causes! Who will now step forward?

Fear not! While Kevorkian broke some laws, he claimed he was only ending suffering and helping those in severe pain and affliction go on to the next world a little before their time. According to comic Andy Borowitz, the Republican Party has an answer to pull from their tiny little bag of ideas, and that answer is none other than Paul Ryan. Ryan is a man who longs to push the envelope further by killing off Medicare, a program that foolishly actually helps keep people alive! Kill Medicare. Kill Grandma!

BOROWITZ REPORT
JUNE 3, 2011

Paul Ryan Vows to Continue Kevorkian’s Work
Medicare to be Replaced with 'Kevouchers'

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) -- In a somber Congressional ceremony, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) eulogized the late Dr. Jack Kevorkian today, vowing to "honor his legacy by continuing his good work."



"Dr. Kevorkian tried to ease the transition of seniors into the great beyond," an emotional Rep. Ryan told his colleagues in the House of Representatives. "Here in Congress, we have the opportunity -- one might even say the obligation -- to continue Kevorkian's work on a grander scale.”"

As a first step to memorialize the work of Dr. Kevorkian, Rep. Ryan said that his new budget plan would replace Medicare with a system of so-called "Kevouchers" that could be redeemed for cyanide pills, nooses and bullets.



In other political news, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) suffered another setback today, in the form of these harsh words of criticism from former President Bill Clinton: "In my day, we'd show it to 'em in person."



The avalanche of ridicule suffered by Rep. Weiner in recent days finally drew some pushback from a member of the congressman’s staff.



"It is time for all of these babyish 'wiener' jokes to stop," said new Weiner spokesman Hugh G. Rection.



Elsewhere, a new study shows that when you talk on your cell phone everyone around you can hear every fucking word you're saying.

In the Repug mind, the synergy is beautiful! Why even wait till those final days when you can preemptively strike before the suffering even begins? Talk about government interference! I fully expect Ryan's well-publicized End Medicare Plan to soon be part of a new book for the Republican best-selling reading list. I hear it will be called Bursting the Baby Boom Bubble: Paul Ryan's Common Sense Solutions to Overpopulation.

Final solutions, at that.

#

Unlike the real Paul Ryan, Andy Borowitz's version at least grazes up against reality

Ryanomics masquerades as "fiscal prudence," another reminder that way more pressing than our Deficit Problem is our Reality Gap (aka Truth Crisis), which would make it impossible to actually deal with deficits even if we weren't still in a depression.

"Speaker of the House John Boehner, appearing alongside Rep. Ryan, offered these words of praise for the Wisconsin congressman: 'Preachers like Harold Camping go around predicting the end of the world, but it’s guys like Paul Ryan who do the hard work of making it happen.'”

-- from today's Borowitz Report

"'The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons. ... Republicans: The No. 1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb, and dangerous."

-- Garrison Keillor, from "We're Not
in Lake Wobegon Anymore"

by Ken

My friend Paul circulated the above, and while it sort of rang a bell, I didn't have any reason to think it was anything but Garrison K nailing it once again. In fact, he explained, it was written in 2004, and appeared in adapted excerpt from his book that was published as "We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore," in which he pondered the question "How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?"

Some of the ellipsized matter would have given the piece's age away. Here's the full paragraph:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

That is some kind of writing, and even if you read the piece way back when, I think you'll be exhilarated reading it again.

I don't suppose Garrison would have encouraged to think that the passage of seven years would make things much better, but I wonder whether even he would have expected them to get this much worse. In the interim the Greed & Selfishness Republican pulled the plug on the economy ("Just 'Cause We Can!!!"), managing magically to further enrich the superrich proprietors of the Greed &Selfishness Movement. And the American public, thanks to those decades of carefully engineered under- and mis-education, joyfully embraced the role of Rich People's Stooges under the guise of teabaggish "fiscal prudence." They've even anointed their own intelleckchul profit, the halfwit Paul Ryan.

Of course none of the Magnates of Greed & Selfishness have the slightest interest in fiscal prudence. Their only concern is pushing our already staggering level of income equality to ever-higher heights. All in all, what we have is much less a Debt Crisis than a Truth Crisis, now that the Economic Inequalizers have broken completely from any obligation to truth or reality. This calls for further discussion, but not today. For tonight we turn the floor over once again to the man with his finger on the funnybone of Ryanomics is Andy Borowitz.

Republicans Propose Replacing Social Security with Groupons
Plan Would Offer Deep Discounts for Cat Food, Surgery

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – Presenting what he called a revolutionary plan to slash the nation’s mountain of debt, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) today proposed eliminating the Social Security program in its entirety and replacing it with Groupons.

“Instead of waiting each month for a check from Social Security, America’s elderly will receive valuable Groupons for everything they need, from Ramen noodles to cat food to caskets,” Mr. Ryan said in an appearance on Fox News.

Adding that Groupons would also help provide for elders’ medical needs, the congressman illustrated his point by holding up a Groupon offering 30 percent off on open-heart surgery in Cincinnati.

Moving on from Social Security, Mr. Ryan also proposed replacing Medicare with a new program in which seniors are shot at by Predator drones.

Additionally, Mr. Ryan said, in his new budget so-called “friends with benefits” would lose their benefits.

“If they’re really friends, they should be satisfied if the evening ends with a voucher,” he said.

Speaker of the House John Boehner, appearing alongside Rep. Ryan, offered these words of praise for the Wisconsin congressman: “Preachers like Harold Camping go around predicting the end of the world, but it’s guys like Paul Ryan who do the hard work of making it happen.”

The only difference between this and any actual Paul Ryan proposal is that this one contains just a whiff of . . . well, not sense, but at least reality (I mean, there really are such things as Groupons, which is more than you can say of anything that appears in the real Representative Ryan's jibber-jabber), that fearsome no man's land where no right-winger dares to tread.

#

Is everyone ready for "The True Story" of the demise of Osama bin Laden? Take it away, Tom Tomorrow!

The True Story
By TOM TOMORROW

[Don't forget to click on the strip to enlarge it.]

"In what some see as conclusive proof that Osama bin Laden is dead, Dick Cheney appeared on Fox to take credit for it."

-- from yesterday's Borowitz Report

by Ken

As Howie pointed out this morning, there seems no end in sight to newer and better tales of the demise of Osama bin Laden. Of course it might have helped if the Obama team hadn't put out a story that has had to be "corrected" in nearly every particular except the apparent fact that O.b.L. is no more.

Now who do we know who used to make a regular habit of dumping phony stories on the American public? That's right, the Bush regime! And really, it seems only fair that we hear from the regimistas of the wartime-peacetime president, the decider, the man who trained his relentless, implacably mission-accomplishing will on the capture of Osama. And remember, it all makes sense in the 32nd century!

Now I know there's still an insatiable demand for more bin Laden backstory. So here's Andy Borowitz's most recent offering:

THE BOROWITZ REPORT

Bin Laden Invested Millions in Company That Makes 3-oz. Bottles of Liquids and Gels

Seized Computers Yield Shocking Discovery

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – In a shocking revelation gleaned from computers seized in his compound in Pakistan, Osama bin Laden spent millions of dollars investing in a company that makes 3-ounce bottles of liquid and gels.

According to CIA director Leon Panetta, Mr. bin Laden’s fervor for investing in the tiny bottle company, Trav-L-Size Inc., may have dwarfed his passion for jihad.

“We haven’t found anything in the computers that indicate Osama bin Laden wanted to rule the world,” Mr. Panetta said. “However, it is clear that he wanted to corner the market in 3-ounce bottles.”

In addition to Mr. bin Laden’s passion for 3-ounce bottles, seized computer files portray a man bent on controlling the world’s supply of slip-on shoes and loafers.

“Over the last nine years, Osama bin Laden had poured millions of dollars into a company called Reid Loafer Inc., founded by the so-called ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid,” he said.

Mr. Panetta said that the CIA still has much to learn about Mr. bin Laden’s years as a fugitive, but said the fact that he lived in Pakistan for six years without phone service “suggests the involvement of AT&T.”

In other bin Laden news, Mr. Panetta said Mr. bin Laden’s dying words were, “On the plus side, this is going to totally screw Trump.”

Elsewhere, a Pakistani military spokesman denied any connection with the fallen al Qaeda leader, stating, “We were just Facebook friends.”

And in what some see as conclusive proof that Osama bin Laden is dead, Dick Cheney appeared on Fox to take credit for it.

#