OK, Republicans, so tell me: Where are the jobs?

We keep hearing, even admidst the debt hysteria, that we have to cut taxes even further so that business will "create jobs." But when the largest companies are paying an effective tax rate of NEGATIVE 1.5%, how much more do we have to shovel into their pockets before they hire?

Today, and not a moment too soon, the non-profit Citizens For Tax Justice (CTJ) has put out their findings revealing that twelve of the nations largest Fortune 500 companies, while making $170 billion in profits during the period of The Great Recession, paid an effective tax rate of negative 1.5%.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Not only have these twelve companies paid zero in taxes for the years 2008-2010, they actually received tax subsidies that added $62.4 billion to their bottom lines.

The companies were chosen by the CTJ to represent a range of industries, including manufacturing, energy, services, transportation and high tech and include – in alphabetical order – American Electric Power, Boeing, Dupont, Exxon Mobil, FedEx, General Electric, Honeywell International, IBM, United Technologies, Verizon Communications, Wells Fargo and Yahoo.

Here are the bullet points presented by the report:

• From 2008 through 2010, these 12 companies reported $171 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But as a group, their federal income taxes were negative: –$2.5 billion.

• All but two of the dozen companies enjoyed at least one no-tax year over the 2008-10 period, despite reporting substantial pretax U.S. profits in those no-tax years.

• Eight of the twelve companies reported net tax benefits over the full three-year period.

According to the study, not a single one of these companies paid an amount even close to the 35% statutory tax rate.

In fact, the tax rate paid by Exxon Mobile, when spread over the full three years, was only 14.2% – a full 60% below the 35% rate that corporations are supposed to be paying. And if we take a look at what Exxon paid over just the past two years, it totals a mere 0.4% on their pre-tax profits of $9.9 billion.

And get this – Exxon Mobile paid the most in taxes of any of the twelve companies on the list.

Here is my favorite part – had just these twelve companies paid at the actual 35% tax rate the GOP is telling us they are chaffing under, the sum would have added a full 12% to the totals the United States of America’s treasury received through corporate taxes.

We sure could use that money.

This morning, another in the parade of GOP idiots in Congress, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, was spouting the GOP talking point about "small businesses" being the engine of hiring. John McCain was spouting this nonsense in 2008, and was debunked by Factcheck.org, which noted that when the U.S. Small Business Administration refers to about 26.8 million small businesses, it includes about 20 million "non-employer" firms -- which includes people who sell their stuff on e-bay, the couple in the town next to me who have an errand-running service, the catsitter I use when we go away for a weekend, or Mr. Brilliant charging someone fifty bucks to de-virus their PC. These "small businesses" don't hire people, and the file at personal tax rates -- which means that corporate tax cuts do NOTHING to foster hiring.

So I repeat: The tax cuts originally advocated and signed by George W. Bush have been in place for a decade. The biggest companies not only pay no taxes, but got money back.

So...where are the jobs?

Maybe this is why

I knew that we Jews have all the money and control the financial system and Hollywood. But who knew that one of our own could cause natural disasters? Has Glenn Beck ever considered that George Soros might be actually the second coming of Jesus?

I admit it. We'll miss him.

I'm so glad to see that the Republicans are focused like a laser beam on job creation.

So focused that in addition to empowering the IRS (which they used to hate, what happened?) to conduct audits of the uteri of American women, they now want to go to the mat to re-affirm "In God We Trust" as our national motto:

The US House of Representatives will have a chance to vote on a resolution to affirm the phrase "In God We Trust" as the nation’s official motto after it was approved by the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

Congressman J. Randy Forbes (R-VA), the founder and chairman of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, sponsored the legislation. It would encourage the public display of the motto in all public buildings, public schools and government institutions.

He said he introduced the bill in January because he was troubled by a pattern of omitting God from the nation's heritage.

"There is a small minority who believes America does not have the right to trust in God, who believes the United States should not affirm trust in God, and who actively seek to remove any recognition of that trust," Forbes said.

And once they do that, jobs will magically appear, right? Because all the Great White Alpha Male in the Sky wants is to have this silly motto re-affirmed, and he will create jobs.

But wait. I thought rich people created jobs. Now I'm confused....

That Woman Is An Idiot.

I don't work for MSNBC, so I can say it and Comcast can't fire me:

And they wonder where Americans get the idea that Barack Obama is a Muslim?

How about this, for example:

"That's what he says he has done." Note how Franklin Graham, who oughtn't to be regarded as an authority on ANYTHING, qualifies Obama's Christianity (and why does he even have to be a Christian) as "he says", implying "He could be lying."

Lost in the Pew Research poll that proves conclusively that Americans are incurious, willfully ignorant, bigoted, narrow-minded, xenophobic morons, is where these incurious, willfully ignorant, bigoted, narrow-minded, xenophobic morons got the idea in the first place:

Six in 10 of those saying Obama is a Muslim said they got the information from the media, with the largest portion — 16 percent — saying it was on television. Eleven percent said they learned it from Obama's behavior and words.

And every time John King gets up there to talk about the "confusion" over Barack Obama's religion, the lie gets out there again and again and again. And all it has to do is get out there to be taken seriously. The idea that the Bush Administration was behind the 9/11 attacks remained on the fringe because the media left it there. But let a black guy with a funny name get elected, and suddenly speculation based on nothing but people who want to use the word "Muslim" becuase it's not acceptable to call him a "N-----" becomes something to be discussed endlessly on cable news.

And a lie it is. It is not "confusing." It is not "misinformation". It is not a "controversy." It is not "speculation." It is not "Some say..." It is a LIE. That nice one-syllable word that even an incurious, willfully ignorant, bigoted, narrow-minded, xenophobic moron can understand.

It depends on what the meaning of "deadline" is

One of the first things I have to do when I get a new project is to come up with a timeline. The timeline is built by going backwards from a pre-set "live" date decided by people way above my pay grade. We have to deliver by that date or else it comes out in OUR reviews the following year. Yes, there are many other people who have to provide information, feedback, and approvals, but people who do what I do are the ones who have to answer if a deadline is missed.

I deliver data entry screens for clinical trials data. The development process is more complicated than it sounds, and there's a lot of people involved. I take my deadlines seriously; that's one reason for the 80-hour weeks and such.

Rahm Emanuel doesn't think a deadline is a deadline, just a "guideline" for more talk when it comes to withdrawal from Afghanistan:

TAPPER: So what exactly does the July 2011 deadline mean? Is it going to be a whole lot of people moving out, definitely, as Vice President Biden says? Or could it be more nuanced, as General Petraeus says, maybe just a couple of people leaving one province?

EMANUEL: Well, no, everybody knows there's a firm date. And that firm date is a date -- deals with the troops that are part of the surge, the additional 30,000. What will be determined at that date or going into that date will be the scale and scope of that reduction.

But there will be no doubt that that's going to happen. And I know actually -- I look at both of those, and they're not inconsistent. But remember where we were on Afghanistan policy, that war had waxed and waned. And there really hadn't been a focus on how to bring that war to -- and the effort (INAUDIBLE), even with al Qaeda and Taliban, to a point given what was going on in Iraq.

The president raised the troop level and civilian participation to 30,000. This was creating a window of opportunity for Afghanistan. We are now at that point in Afghanistan, and in fact for the first time in eight years, nine years, they're actually meeting their police recruitment requirements as well as their army recruitment requirements. So they themselves can take more and more responsibility for the security of that country.

Second is we're also -- about a half of al Qaeda has been eliminated in this last 18 months. So we're taking the pressure to al Qaeda, taking the pressure to the Taliban. And we're making progress as it relates to, as you know, after the president's meeting with President Karzai, went back to Afghanistan, held a peace jurga.

There is also progress being made on that side. All of this has been predictable in the sense that we knew once we created this window of opportunity, we were going to focus on what are the resources that are necessary, where are we going to be making progress. But the July '11 date, as stated by the president, that's not moving. That's not changing. Everybody agreed on that date. General Petraeus did. Secretary Gates did. As also Admiral Mullen agreed.

And the goal is to take this opportunity, focus on what needs to get done, and then on July 2011, is to begin the reduction of...

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: But it could be any...

EMANUEL: ... troops.

TAPPER: But it could be any number of people.
EMANUEL: That's what you'll evaluate based on the conditions on the ground. That is -- but what had to happen prior to that was having a date that gave everybody, the NATO, international forces, as well as Afghanistan, that sense of urgency to move.

I wonder what would happen if next time I miss my deadline, I said to my boss that I don't regard deadlines as deadlines; just a "eense of urgency to move."

Perhaps this is why Rahmzilla is rumored to be leaving soon.

If you were planning to buy an iPad to read the New York Times, don't bother

I mean, do you really need to spend 500 bucks on a gadget to read insightful "news" like this:

Asked to Declare His Race, Obama Checks ‘Black’

It is official: Barack Obama is the nation’s first black president.

A White House spokesman confirmed that Mr. Obama, the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, checked African-American on the 2010 census questionnaire.

The president, who was born in Hawaii and raised there and in Indonesia, had more than a dozen options in responding to Question 9, about race. He chose “Black, African Am., or Negro.” (The anachronistic “Negro” was retained on the 2010 form because the Census Bureau believes that some older blacks still refer to themselves that way.)

Mr. Obama could have checked white, checked both black and white, or checked the last category on the form, “some other race,” which he would then have been asked to identify in writing.

There is no category specifically for mixed race or biracial.

Nothing quite like the Great Gray Lady, the same Liberal New York Times whose headquarters in New York Ann Coulter had said she wished Timothy McVeigh had bombed, devoting space to an article which boiled down to its essence says nothing but this:

If this is the false packaging they use now, imagine if they actually get her elected

The need to fabricate the public image of Sarah Palin is so strong that Fox News tried to resort to using old interview footage of L.L. Cool J and passing it off as hers to show that the Republican Party and the teabaggers aren't racist:

Here's a chapter in the culture wars that no one saw coming: Sarah Palin and Fox News facing off against '80s rap star and actor LL Cool J.

Popular conservative blogger Allahpundit tweaked liberals who accuse Tea Party supporters of racist sympathies, saying they'll be "shocked to find the alleged Grand Dragon of the tea-party movement making chitchat with a hip-hop legend."

The problem is that no such chitchat was produced for the Palin show. LL Cool J, star of "NCIS: Los Angeles," tweeted Tuesday night: "Fox lifted an old interview I gave in 2008 to someone else & are misrepresenting to the public in order to promote Sarah Palins Show. WOW."

When contacted by Yahoo! News for comment, a Fox News spokesperson explained that LL Cool J had been informed in 2008 that the interview was planned as a segment for "Real American Stories"--though of course the network couldn't have known at the time that Palin would be hosting.

And it took them two years to get the show to the air? Hardly likely.

Update: Looks like the confusion isn't limited to the hip hop genre. Toby Keith's publicist tells the New York Times that Keith has never done an interview with Palin and she had no idea he was being used in the Palin special. She believes that Fox will be recycling an interview Keith gave Fox in 2009.

Fox News is no longer even the media arm of the Republican Party; it's the media arm of a movement that's about bullying, willful ignorance, bigotry, stupidity, and false packaging.

How the Republicans Do It.

Here in New Jersey, we're facing a fiscal crisis on the scale of California. The state is reeling from lost jobs, foreclosures, a dramatic decline in the retail sector. And in strides Generalissimo Chris Christie, bound and determined to undo in the next few months decades of fiscal mismanagement, which was started by his own party under the "leadership" of Christine Todd Whitman, who can still be seen on the op-ed page of the Hackensack, NJ Record telling him to "lead" the same way that she did.

We can argue how wise it is to institute draconian spending cuts in the middle of a recession, but the reality is that Chris Christie has decided that everyone in this state is going to feel the pain. Badly. Well, everyone, that is, except the wealthy. You see, right now there is a state tax surcharge for families with incomes over $400,000/year. This surcharge expired at the end of 2009 and is not being extended. Christie is cutting $800 million in state aid to public schools. My town's school district alone, which encompasses two towns, is losing 83% of its state aid. My town has been run for nearly thirty years by a Republican hackocracy that doles out no-bid contracts to friends of the council, spends like drunken sailors on projects that enrich said friends, and harasses and intimidates people who dare ask questions.

I live in a Republican town in a Republican county. Jon Corzine squeaked by in Bergen County by only 6000 votes, largely because of the "Gold Coast" Democratic stronghold in the eastern part of the county. Here in Outer Whitelandia, it's dominated by Republicans. Given that my town has almost no services -- no trash collection (we pay private haulers) and no fire department or ambulance (it's all-volunteer), there isn't much to cut, other than crony contracts and nepotism hires, which is highly unlikely, given this bunch. So I wonder how all these good Christie voters with their John 3:16 signs on their lawns are going to react to over a million dollars in cuts in school aid.

But this post is not about Bergen County, nor is it about the town in which I live. It's about who represents us in Washington. The aforementioned eastern part of the county is represented by Steve Rothman. But out here, in the Fifth District, which is like a toup&eeacute; covering the top of the state, with sideburns extending down into Warren County, we are represented by E. Scott Garrett -- one of the worst wingnut ideologues in Congress. How, you might ask, did this troglodyte get elected, and how has he kept his seat since 2002? Well, I can't speak for Warren and Sussex Counties, but here in Bergen, I'd say it's name recognition, because he had run two unsuccessful campaigns against moderate Republican Marge Roukema before finally driving her out of seeking another term in 2002. Back then he ran on "I'm just like Marge", and since then he's been using his franking privileges to send regular carefully-worded mailings designed to hide what he really is from the busy soccer moms and softball dads who populate the county.

But even in the annals of Scott Garrett Wingnuttia, this is a new low. Yesterday, on the House floor, Ernie Scott Garrett read from the infamous "memo", purporting to instruct "Democratic health and communications staff" to avoid discussing the details of the cost of health care reform.

Surely this was the smoking gun showing the devious Democrats actively engaged in a cover-up of this budget-busting health care reform, right?

Well, actually not, as reported at TPM:

TPMDC dug deeper into the kerfuffle after Democrats accused Republicans of an elaborate plot to try and derail health care reform in the final hours before the expected vote Sunday in the House.

A Republican aide on Capitol Hill told me today in an interview they first learned about the memo at about 12:30, getting an email with the PDF attached. The aide's office decided not to do anything with the memo "without knowing where it came from or its origin," the aide said.

A Politico story describing and reprinting the memo was published soon after with a 12:46 p.m. time stamp and caught fire on the Internet, at one point being the lead item at the top of the Drudge Report.

Once the Politico story broke, it was a green light for Republican operatives. Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner, sent reporters an email just before 1 p.m. quoting from the memo. He also attached a copy of the memo, which appears to be the same PDF document that Politico posted.

A Senate Democratic aide said today their office started getting calls around 12:30 from reporters asking if the memo's claims were true. The Democratic aide's office was sent the PDF by reporters, who said they had obtained it from Republican lobbyists on K Street, the aide told me in an interview.

That aide and several Democratic staffers told us that reporters who posted the memo did not call them to check its authenticity. It appears to have been posted in the noon hour at The Washington Times and on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government Website (time stamp is Pacific time), but the Politico item received the most play on the heavily trafficked Drudge site.

Soon after we posted our initial story, in which Democrats cried foul on the memo at 2:39 p.m., Politico removed the item and memo with this disclaimer:

An earlier post in this spot detailed what was purported by Republicans to be an internal Democratic memo regarding the upcoming health reform vote Sunday. Democratic leadership has challenged the authenticity of the memo. POLITICO has removed the memo and the details about it until we can absolutely verify the document's origin.

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder posted a mea culpa about the memo this afternoon, saying he should have checked its authenticity before publishing. A reporter for The Hill tweeted the publication opted against posting the memo.

But that didn't stop Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), who claimed on Twitter and his Web site that he'd "intercepted" the memo.

By 3:40 p.m. when House Republican leaders held a press conference on the Hill, reporters were ready with questions about the memo. The leaders dismissed its importance and accused the Democrats of attempting to pull a hoax on the American people.

"The appropriate question there really is ask the reporter who wrote the article alleging that it was a hoax. I know nothing more than what I read in Politico," Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) said. Watch that moment here.

Late Update: Politico addressed the memo in a piece filed tonight, saying that it had been sent to them by "multiple Republican sources" who could not verify that it was written by Democrats.

But being the good modern-day Republican wingnut that he is, why should Ernie Scott Garrett let something as trivial as FACTS (which as Stephen Colbert has noted, have a strong liberal bias), get in the way of his ideology? So with no further ado, let's have a look at Scott Garrett, reading from an already-discredited memo, on the House Floor -- and then watch him get pwned by the great Anthony Weiner:

As great as Weiner is, however, the fact of the matter, and wingnuts from Fox News to teabaggers to the Republican ranks of Congress know that voters don't pay attention to follow-up. All they have to do is get a story "out there", where the giant gapinb maw of the 24/7 cable news cycle gets hold of it, and that's all that matters. No one will pay attention when the story is debunked, because paragraphs of debunking timetables are not effective on the reptilian brain. Original claims are: "cover-up". "budget-busting". "Democrats". Americans are too busy to filter and verify information. All you have to do is get their ear the first time and you can spout whatever horsepuckey you want. People like Scott Garrett know this. Kudos to Anthony Weiner for calling Garrett on it, but you can bet that what gets coverage in the mainstream media, and on the Sunday gasbag shows this week, will be not the debunking of the memo, but the original claim about it.
Rachel explains how it works:

And in thirteen y ears, the last birther lawsuit will be thrown out too. So what?

It doesn't matter what the ultimate outcome is...as long as you can damage the incumbent Democratic president at the time, it doesn't matter if the whole thing is horsepuckey:

"Filegate" is a term that always deserved scare quotes, because the putative scandal concerning the misuse of FBI files in the Clinton White House was so clearly, from its very beginning in 1996, no scandal at all. But the obvious absence of any credible evidence that Bill or Hillary Clinton or any of their employees or associates had ordered up such files, or committed any abuse of them, did nothing to dissuade mainstream media, right-wing outlets, or Republican politicians from hysterically promoting the pseudo-scandal.

Today it is amazing to recall how significant this nothingness was once deemed to be, with nightly coverage on network newscasts. On Capitol Hill, Sen. Orrin Hatch demanded a fingerprint analysis to determine whether Hillary Clinton had touched the files (she hadn't) while lengthy investigations got under way in the Senate, the House and the Office of the Independent Counsel led by Kenneth Starr. Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate in 1996, compared "Filegate" with Nixon's Watergate scandal and asked: "Where's the outrage?"

Yesterday the last wheeze of hype was squeezed from that old controversy, when U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth dismissed the remaining civil lawsuit against former Clinton administration officials in the FBI files affair. Brought by eccentric attorney Larry Klayman, who became a favorite of cable television and conservative funders during the Clinton era, those costly lawsuits were described in the judge's decision as essentially baseless.

Summing up his findings, Lamberth wrote: "After years of litigation, endless depositions, the fictionalized portrayal of this lawsuit and its litigants on television, this court is left to conclude that with the lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, 'there's no there there.'" A Reagan appointee once lauded by Klayman himself as "this great jurist," he showed a talent for understatement when he noted that "after ample opportunity," the plaintiffs "have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode -- about which they do have cause to complain -- was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu."

And before you ask, Royce C. Lamberth was named to the bench in 1987 by Saint Ronnie himself.

So of course the answer is simple: Lose weight until a doctor finds you attractive

From the "Gee, ya think?" file (and Melissa):

It's shocking, but it's true: Being a woman who's more than 20 pounds overweight may actually hike your risk of getting poor medical treatment. In fact, weighing too much can have surprising -- and devastating -- health repercussions beyond the usual diabetes and heart-health concerns you've heard about for years.

Recent studies have found, if you are an overweight woman you:

• May have a harder time getting health insurance or have to pay higher premiums

• Are at higher risk of being misdiagnosed or receiving inaccurate dosages of drugs

• Are less likely to find a fertility doctor who will help you get pregnant

• Are less likely to have cancer detected early and get effective treatment for it

What's going on here? Fat discrimination is part of the problem. A recent Yale study suggested that weight bias can start when a woman is as little as 13 pounds over her highest healthy weight.

Think about that. Thirteen pounds over your "healthy" weight as defined by a medical community that quite admittedly hates you. You know what my "healthy" weight maximum is for my height? 105 pounds. You know when I weighed 105 pounds? In 1983, when I was starving myself and working out five nights a week. So I guess I haven't been entitled to have a doctor treat me like a human being ever since.

More:

Doctors have long known that obese women are more likely to die of ovarian and breast cancers, but when Schneider and her colleagues recently gave a group of overweight ovarian cancer patients chemotherapy based on their actual weights, they found that the women were as likely to survive the illness as thinner patients. "Doctors aren't intentionally under-treating overweight women," Schneider says. "We're just working with limited information."

I'm not so sure I believe that. We live in a "No fat chicks" society after all, why not consign all of us to die simply because they don't find us attractive.

More

When Celina Reeder, a 5-foot-5, 185-pound woman with a torn ligament in her right knee, was told by her surgeon she needed to stop eating so much fast food before he would schedule surgery, the Woodacre, California, woman was astounded. "I left his office feeling ashamed," she recalls. "And I don't even eat fast food! The more I thought about it, the madder I got. So I switched surgeons. Anybody who thinks doctors treat heavy women the same as thin women has obviously never had a weight problem. I really felt like my doctor didn't respect me."

She may have been right. University of Pennsylvania researchers found that more than 50 percent of primary care physicians viewed obese patients as awkward, unattractive, and noncompliant; one third said they were weak-willed, sloppy, and lazy. In addition, researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston found that as patient BMI increased, doctors reported liking their jobs less and having less patience and desire to help the patient.

Whether they know it or not, doctors' attitudes may actually encourage unhealthy behavior. Feeling dissed about their weight can make some women turn to food for comfort. "Stigma is a form of stress, and many obese women cope by eating or refusing to diet," Puhl says. "So weight bias could actually fuel obesity."

Studies have also found that overweight women are more likely to delay doctors' appointments and preventive care, including screenings for cancer, because they don't want to face criticism. "It can be frustrating to treat obese patients," admits Dr. Lee Green, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of family medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "I spend most of my time treating the consequences of unhealthy lifestyles instead of actual illnesses. People come in complaining of foot or knee pain, and I'm thinking, Do you not see that you're in pain because you're 60 pounds overweight? I don't say that, of course. I try to encourage them to lose weight."

Yes, they all do that. But not one of them has any good ways of how to do it and keep it off, given the way we live today.

I always use myself because I'm the best example I know. I'm a 4'10" tall size sixteen. I don't eat fast food. I have cut extra sugary things other than the occasional square of dark chocolate and an occasional small cookie almost entirely out of my life. I don't eat fried foods. You know what I don't do much of? Exercise. It's kind of hard to carve exercise time out of your day when you leave the house at 6:15 AM, get home at 6:30 PM, and need at least six hours of sleep and preferably at least seven. The new on-site gym ought to help that somewhat, provided that a) I can get to the equipment, and b) use it during the day so that I'm not arriving home at 8 PM, eating a small dinner and then going to bed.

Every now and then you read a research study about obesity that gives tantalizing clues about how it's about more than gluttony or sitting around eating doughnuts (something I don't even LIKE). There are studies about stress as a cause. But hey, working 70 hours a week isn't at all stressful now, is it? There are studies about how exercise doesn't do much if your diet is already reasonably healthy. There are studies about ghrelin. (Funny how WebMD is sponsored by Chex Mix, isn't it?) And yet every article about these studies ends with "But if you have X sensitivity, or X tendency, you may just have to watch your diet and exercise more than other people." It never, ever occurs to anyone that perhaps being what our society calls "overweight" may in fact be normal for some people?

I recently had a dermatologist tell me to go to Weight Watchers, a company that had $4 billion in sales in 2007. If Weight Watchers is so damn effective, how come it makes so much money? Nestlé paid a bundle for Jenny Craig a few years ago. Nutri-System's food is, from all accounts, horrible; and Medifast looks like a pyramid scheme. My local newspaper's advertising is lately leaning heavily towards gastric band practitioners. Exploitation of the overweight is big business, and as a result, there is little motivation to rid the world of fat people by making them not fat. Who'd pay for all this crap otherwise?

I recently had the idea of switching to a local gynecologist who specializes in weight issues with postmenopausal women. It sounded intriguing, since most of us who reach a certain age find that the perfect sine wave we once had for a waistline has flatlined. Then I read about the protocol she follows, developed by a doctor. I picked up a copy of said doctor's book, and it sounded sensible; sort of like the Sugar Solution books, but then I found out that this protocol also involves an off-label use of the diabetes drug Metformin. Now, I'm not a big fan of prescription drugs under the best of circumstances. This particular one can cause lactic acidosis, which can be fatal in up to 50% of cases. It may be a perfectly fine drug for diabetics, but with a risk like this for off-label use, well, thanks but no thanks.

The FDA has FINALLY issued a warming about BPA, a chemical in plastics that has been linked for some time to obesity, and which is ubiquitous in most household products and food packaging. Funny how the so-called rise in obesity coincides with increased use of BPA. But especially now that corporations can buy their own Senators and Congresspeople, how likely do you think it is that BPA will be further studied and possibly banned?

Yet no matter how many studies come out that indicate overweight is not always about gluttony and laziness; it can be about the crap that is spewed into the environment and that lines our food containers; it can be about trying to survive in a society in which jobs are few and when you have one, you want to hold onto it. It can be about any number of things, and yet the so-called medical community only has one thing to say to us: Stop eating and spend your life on a treadmill. After all, millions of hamsters can't be wrong.

Among people for whom any lie told loudly enough is the same as truth, this should surprise no one

It's become part of the wingnut doctrine that it doesn't matter what the truth is, as long as you BELIEVE that something IS or COULD BE true, it's exactly the same as reality.

So it's hardly surprising that a "terrorist dry run" that seems to exist only in the mind of Debbie Schlussel and her readers once again turns out to be so much horsepuckey:

It's a little easier to understand why a Houston man who claimed to have thwarted a potential terrorist attack on a flight leaving Atlanta has not answered repeated requests to tell his story.

He was not on the plane, AirTran Airways says.

"After conducting additional research into this situation, we have verified, according to flight manifests [legally binding documents] that the individual that allegedly created a first-hand account of events on-board AirTran Airways Flight 297, a Theodore Petruna, was never actually on-board the flight," AirTran said in a statement, which the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was the first to obtain.

An e-mail from a Tedd Petruna, in which he told the AJC via a Facebook message Friday was intended only for friends and family, made the rounds online this week after a friend apparently forwarded it to others. In a matter of days, Petruna's account appeared in chat rooms and blogs and on conspiracy theorists' Web sites.

The AJC was forwarded the e-mail dozens of times this week, as readers saw Petruna's tale and noticed conflicting information between it and earlier news reports of the flight delay Nov. 17. Some readers simply asked the AJC to further investigate the matter.

But others who forwarded the message accused the AJC of participating in a politically correct cover-up.

The intriguing story made for intense fodder among bloggers.

Petruna's story appeared in a blog on the Web site for The Project 9.12, a group started by Fox News commentator Glenn Beck. A Canadian news site picked up the story. Dallas Morning News airline columnist Terry Maxon made it the subject of his blog for a second time this week on Friday. And snopes.com, a Web site that sniffs out rumors to decipher between fact and fiction, followed the story.

In its continued investigation into the incident, the AJC made several attempts to speak to Petruna about the incident. He has declined throughout the week to respond to repeated e-mail and phone attempts by the AJC to talk to him. That last request was made Saturday.

Additionally, AJC interviews with people on the plane, airline officials and federal agencies did not corroborate his story.

Not that this will change what the Glenn Beckians believe. Because it COULD be true, couldn't it? Isn't it POSSIBLE that there COULD have been a terrorist dry run on that plane just because a passenger speaking SPANISH didn't understand a request to turn off his cell phone? And like all good Cheneyites, the Glenn Beckians believe that if there is a one percent chance that something is true, you proceed as if it is true.

I realize that there are sad little men in this country who simply can't get over that we have a black Democratic president. Their little world of illusory white privilege (I say illusory because the privilege they want to hard to sustain is among people who will never, ever, ever let them into their ranks) is disappearing and they want desperately to "feel like real men." And how better to feel like real men than to regale their fellows with a swashbuckling tale of singlehandedly disarming a terrorist plot iin progress.

Now, I'm sure that Schlussel and her acolytes will tell you that this is all part of a massive cover-up by AirTran, the FAA, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ACORN, Barack Obama, The Homosexual Lobby™, and the 12 Jewish Bankers Who Run Everything. Funny how these are the kind of people who thought people like me should be executed as traitors for even suggesting that perhaps the official story we were told about the 9/11 attacks might not be true.

(h/t)

Will this lie told often enough become truth?

WTF?

Dana Perino says that we did not have a terrorist attack on this country during George W. Bush's term:

We already know that the Way of the Republican is to lie, lie, lie, and tell the same lie often and consistently: Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. No one could have anticipated the breach of the levees. Barack Obama ordered "In God We Trust" removed from coins.

They don't even try to relate facts anymore, these Republicans, they just pull stuff out of their asses and call it truth. Fox News puts it out there and because it has "News" in its name, it has credibility. So now we're supposed to believe that the 9/11 attacks happened, when? During Bill Clinton's administration? Or are they trying to erase George W. Bush entirely and make their idiotic, unthinking, willfully ignorant minions think we went right from Clinton to Obama?

So yes, let's call the Fort Hood attacks terrorism. And then let's call the killing of Dr. George Tiller terrorism as well. But don't sit there and tell me that no terrorists attacked this country on George Bush's watch. That worthless piece of shit was on vacation when he received warning of an imminent attack, and he chose to do nothing -- or worse, let it play out as planned so he could get his war with Iraq (an idea that no longer seems unthinkable as it once did). I know that a lie told often enough becomes truth these days. But this one cannot be allowed to become an "alternative view."

And oh yeah. What Jed said.

And thanks to commenter russell1958 over at Firedoglake, for compiling tbe following list of terrorist attacks that took place in this country during the Bush years:

• 9/11/01


• Anthrax letters


• DC Snipers


• Grenade blasts outside U.K. embassy in New York


• Ohio sniper attacks


• Knoxville church shootings


• Arson attack on women's health clinic in Concord, NH (5/2000)


• Catholic priest who drove his car into the Northern Illinois Health Clinic then pulled out an ax before being shot at by a security guard; (9/2000)


• Bombing of Tacoma, Washington women's health clinic (6/2001)


• Anthrax hoax letters send by Clayton Waagner to 554 women's health clinics (11/2001)


• Arson attack on women's health clinic in Palm Beach (7/2005)


• Molotov cocktail thrown at women's health clinic in Shreveport, LA (12/2005


• David McMenemy of Rochester Hills, Michigan, crashed his car into the Edgerton Women’s Care Center in Davenport, Iowa, then doused the lobby in gasoline and started a fire (9/2006)


• Package left at a women’s health clinic in Austin, Texas, contained an explosive device capable of inflicting serious injury or death (4/2007)


• Planned Parenthood clinic in Virginia Beach, Virginia, set afire (12/2007)


• 20% of all women's health clinics in the U.S. attacked during 2008

Nope. No terrorism at all during the Bush years. Nosirree.

Right-wing thuggishness triumphs again

Isn't it funny how the Republican party embraces its members who buy into the insanity about Barack Obama's citizenship, and "death panels", and the rest of the dogwhistling that is really just code for 'ZOMG THERE'S A [insert your own racial slur here] IN THE WHITE HOUSE!!!", while Democrats throw the targets of the insanity under the bus in a vain attempt to silence voices that will only be silenced when everyone is marching under their theocratic Banner o'Hypocrisy?

Now we have another casualty of the Obama Administration's craven willingness to sacrifice everything that got this president elected because the right-wing noise machine is upset. The White House Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Van Jones, has "resigned". Gawker, of all places, has a good rundown of what the fuss is all about and how the fall of Van Jones emboldens the right-wing noise machine to attempt to silence us all:

Here's the biography of Van Jones: he was a bookish black kid from Tennessee who went to Yale Law and moved to San Francisco and became a radical. Then he decided to use his law degree and smarts to clean up and make things better from inside the establishment.

He was, he openly acknowledges, a "full-on Marxist" in early '90s California. He joined a revolutionary Marxist group and protested police brutality. Then he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which combats over-incarceration, police brutality, and urban poverty and violence.

Running a civil rights group dedicated to producing real and immediate improvements in urban life will make a revolutionary Marxist a bit more pragmatic. Jones began focusing on job creation, and, with a bit of prognostic intuition that ought to put Thomas Friedman to shame, he decided, in the late-'90s, to focus on "Green Jobs." This is, you know, capitalism—he wants to create wealth, and use market forces to make the world and black communities better places!

And in 2008 he wrote a book called The Green Collar Economy, and it made the Times best-seller list, making him as much of a figure of the mainstream as Sean Hannity or Malcolm Gladwell.

So here we have a radical youth turned respectable liberal. Respectable enough to be on Time magazine listicles and win World Economic Forum prizes and everything. Respectable enough for Tom Friedman to profile him. And The New Yorker. Respectable enough for Meg Whitman, as in former eBay CEO and wealthy Republican California gubernatorial candidate and John McCain advisor Meg Whitman, to proclaim herself "a huge fan of Van Jones."

And for both his activism and his charm he was rewarded with a White House job with the Council on Environmental Quality. He was tasked with making sure stimulus money for green jobs actually went to green jobs. And he's a great person to have in this administration—he is a genuine environmentalist and the only special interest he's beholden to is poor people. He is the sort of person we were all praying Obama would bring with him to DC, instead of Larry Summers.

And that is one of the reasons he is now being ritually and savagely demonized.

To understand why and how he's being demonized, we have to look at the way information and misinformation makes it way from crazy blogs to crazy pundits to crazy citizens to, suddenly, the non-crazy regular media.

Go read the whole thing.

If you watched Countdown on Thursday and Friday nights, with Keith Olbermann's masterful skewering of Glenn Beck's tirade against the "socialist-fascist" artwork in Rockefeller Center that was commissioned by that great socialist, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, in the 1930's, you should have a good idea of what we're dealing with in Glenn Beck. The only question is whether Beck is really as utterly batshit crazy as he seems, or if Beck is the second coming of Andy Kaufman and this is all a kind of gonzo performance art that's gone completely out of control. But does it matter at this point, when the Obama White House has shown its complete willingness to dance to the tune of a party that has become now the exclusive province of racists, thugs, religious nutjobs, and other people you wouldn't want to run into on a dark country road?

Why on earth does Barack Obama care about what these people say? Is there something in the water at the White House that makes Democrats shut off their ability for independent thought and turns them into hapless slaves of Republican Mojo Mind Control? What the hell is going on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Whatever it is, it's infecting the outside world as well. I was just listening to "Morning Edition" on WNYC and heard Leann Hansen say in regard to health care reform that "There doesn't seem to be a lot of support for a public option". And this is National Public Radio, that old supposedly liberal bastion. Either Leann Hansen has joined the ranks of Laziest So-Called Journalists in America, or the corporations that help subsidize NPR have given their marching orders. Or both.

The reality is that when polls are worded with the word "choice" (because Americans are too damn stupid to know that "option" and "choice" are the same thing), support for the "public option" is at 77 percent. So is Leann Hansen saying that most Americans don't want a public option but they do want the choice of a public plan? What the hell is the difference? And why is Leann Hansen parroting this GOP talking point? Why is it that among the journalistic community, only Sam Stein, reviled by the Washington Press Weenie-Nibblers as being not a real journalist, has the gray matter in his head to point this out?

So now we have a Democratic Administration and Democratic Congress that has told its own foot soldiers to go fuck ourselves while it dances to Glenn Beck's tune.

The Grand Unifying Theory of Republican Economics

Steve Benen explains it all for you:

Just so we're clear, here's a helpful guide to the rules of market watching, as they relate to partisan politics:

When the market went down on Bush's watch before the 2008 elections, this was Bill Clinton's fault.

When the market went down on Bush's watch between November 2008 and January 2009, this was Barack Obama's fault.

When the market went down during Obama's first seven weeks in office, this was definitely Barack Obama's fault.

And when the market rallies on Obama's watch during the second week in March, George W. Bush deserves at least some of the credit.

(h/t)

This is what happens when lies get "out there" and become part of mainstream discourse

We're all familiar with the various smear e-mails about Barack Obama that circulated prior to the election. We're even now familiar with the kind of hysterical ranting to which Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have been resorting in an effort to keep their frothing minions whipped into a frenzy. The problem with this is that once an idea gets "out there", even if it's utterly false, it becomes part of the mainstream discourse and becomes simply "an alternate view." It doesn't matter if it's an outright lie or fabrication, it's "an alternate view." This kind of factual relativism is a cancer on the body politic. We all have friends who have whispered to us "I heard that he's not really a citizen" or "He's a Muslim." They've gotten the e-mails and chosen to believe them.

The other day we were treated to the lunatic ravings of Alan Keyes, picking up the kind of crap we saw in these e-mails, claiming that Barack Obama was born in Nairobi to a mother who was "too young to transmit American citizenship" -- a statement that is not only utter horseshit, but also laughably implies that American citizenship is some kind of virus, like AIDS, that is "transmitted" from mother to child:

It's one thing when a known nutjob like Keyes spouts crap like this, but once it is "out there", it becomes "truthiness" -- believed by those who want to believe it whether or not it is true.

And so we have the "Obama is a Kenyan" meme coming up again, repeated now not just by Alan Keyes, but by a United States Senator, Richard Shelby:

nother local resident asked Shelby if there was any truth to a rumor that appeared during the presidential campaign concerning Obama’s U.S. citizenship, or lack thereof.

“Well his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any birth certificate,” Shelby said. “You have to be born in America to be president.”

The birth certificate has been produced and verified, but that is not enough for these people. Because they learned under George W. Bush that facts don't matter, truth is what's in your gut. That's why Bush is able to believe that his presidency was a success and that whatever problems there are now are not because of his policies, but because of mistakes of his predecessors. They learned that if you call someone a terrorist, that means he is a terrorist, regardless of whether there is any evidence.

The Republican Party now gets its marching orders from right-wing talk radio, and the insatiable maw of the talk radio audience must be constantly filled with swill, lest the genre perish. And when a Senator gives voice to that swill, it gives it a legitimacy that swill does not deserve.

I'm with Aravosis on this one. I won't be convinced that Richard Shelby isn't a pedophile until I see something proving that he isn't.

(h/t)

Watch for Limbaugh and Hannity to turn this into an Obama scandal

Not even Yitzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma can play in 20-degree weather:

The somber, elegiac tones before President Obama’s oath of office at the inauguration on Tuesday came from the instruments of Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and two colleagues. But what the millions on the Mall and watching on television heard was in fact a recording, made two days earlier by the quartet and matched tone for tone by the musicians playing along.

The players and the inauguration organizing committee said the arrangement was necessary because of the extreme cold and wind during Tuesday’s ceremony. The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation minutes before the president’s swearing in (which had problems of its own).

“Truly, weather just made it impossible,” Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said on Thursday. “No one’s trying to fool anybody. This isn’t a matter of Milli Vanilli,” Ms. Florman added, referring to the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because the duo did not sing on their album and lip-synched in concerts.

Ms. Florman said that the use of a recording was not disclosed beforehand but that the NBC producers handling the television pool were told of its likelihood the day before.

The network said it sent a note to pool members saying that the use of recordings in the musical numbers was possible. Inaugural musical performances are routinely recorded ahead of time for just such an eventuality, Ms. Florman said. The Marine Band and choruses, which performed throughout the ceremony, did not use a recording, she said.

“It’s not something we would announce, but it’s not something we would try to hide,” Ms. Florman said. “Frankly, it would never have occurred to me to announce it. The fact they were forced to perform to tape because of the weather did not seem relevant, nor would we want to draw attention away from what we believed the news is, that we were having a peaceful transition of power from one administration to the next.”

That's because you don't listen to Limbaugh and Hannity, Ms. Florman. Because they live in a world where it's OK to take American kids into war based on lies, it's OK to conduct mass surveillance of all Americans' electronic activities, focusing particularly on journalists. It's OK to wreck the economy, it's OK to shovel $700 billion of taxpayer money into the pockets of guys like John Thain. But Yitzhak Perlman not wanting to risk one of his priceless instruments in the cold? THAT, Ms. Florman, is a scandal in Sean Hannity's America.

Wait for it. Watch for it. You know it's coming.

Let's not allow them to create their own reality

Are you getting as tired of "George Bush has kept us safe since 9/11" as I am? Why should the guy who told CIA agents who brought him a Presidential Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001, that they've covered their asses now -- and then didn't bother to look at the briefing, get a free pass for the attack that DID take place on his watch? Why should he get a free pass for sitting like a trapped rat in a third-grade classroom while Americans jumped 102 stories to their deaths rather than be burned alive?

Peggy Noonan may be making a show these days of being in lurve with Barack Obama, but her heart still belongs to the Codpiece. It's becoming clear that "Bush has kept us safe" is the first salvo in the Bush Legacy Project -- the attempt to repeat enough lies that Americans, who have the attention span of a gnat, forget what a complete and utter clusterfuck the Reign of George the Younger has been.

As Bob Cesca notes, there are many ways to attack America and our freedom:

Now, of course she's right. "It" hasn't happened again. Fact: no additional hijacked airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center towers since September 11. Why? Because those buildings were already attacked and destroyed, killing thousands of Americans after President Bush and his staff repeatedly ignored warnings from a variety of counter-terrorism and national security experts.

Noonan continued:

We have not been attacked since 9/11. Someone -- someones -- did something right.

Someones?

This is all part of a huge lie, and the lie is rapidly becoming reality thanks to various Bush apologists and dead-enders.

Perhaps it's been reignited in conjunction with the Bush "legacy project" -- an effort organized by Karl Rove to somehow fabricate a positive legacy for this awful president. If there remains any justice in this nation, let history show that the only thing this administration was actually good at was fabricating its own version of reality. They've failed at everything else and then made up stuff to obfuscate those failures. So here. I'll be magnanimous and make Rove's gig really easy by offering a suggestion: the "legacy project" is the Bush legacy. In other words, it's very likely that President Bush will be remembered for things like, you know, the "legacy project."

Nevertheless, yes, Ms. Noonan, we have been attacked on American soil since September 11 despite the Bush administration's invasions, its torturing, its illegal wiretapping and its crimes against the Constitution.

The anthrax attacks and the DC Snipers to name two. But since we don't yet know the identity of the anthrax attacker(s) -- they haven't, after all, been captured and brought to justice by the mighty Bush administration -- let's focus exclusively on terrorists John Allen Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo. More Americans were, in fact, killed by the DC Snipers (16 killed) than were killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (6 killed). Additionally, there were nearly as many people killed by the DC Snipers as were killed in the al-Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole (17 killed).

Are the DC Sniper shootings somehow less dazzling and, therefore, do they not count as actual terrorist attacks on American soil? If that's the case then there were, in fact, zero attacks during the Clinton administration. Wow, President Clinton was really excellent at keeping us safe. So much for Democrats being weak on national security, eh?

While it's tempting to join David Corn in bemoaning the fact that Barack Obama isn't assembling some kind of progressive blogosphere dream team, is that really the best use of our time, when every time Peggy Noonan opens her mouth, Joe Scarborough puts her on TV, and then Fox parrots her, and then it gets Out There -- and the rehabilitation of the Bush Legacy begins -- just in time for Jebbie to run for the Senate in Florida. It's clear that the efforts to rewrite the history of the Bush era are going to be as slickly done as the efforts that led us into a war based on lies. The Republican party has quite simply wrecked the country. There is nothing that used to be great in America that isn't a smoking ruin after they've run things largely unchallenged for the last eight years. They deserve to wander in the wilderness not just for a long time, but forever, for what they've done. I think we are far better served by making sure they stay there than by doing the Republicans' dirty work by writing off this presidency before Barack Obama is even sworn in.

How much are the Republicans paying "Joe the Plumber"?

It would be difficult for anyone other than the most committed kool-aid drinker to believe that Samuel Wurzelbacher is anything other than a paid Republican shill. I'm sorry, but plumbers from Sarah Palin's "Real" America do not have the welfare of Israel at the top of their hit parade of issues. But "Joe the Plumber" does:

The all-out effort from John McCain's presidential campaign to scare voters into backing the Republican candidate continued apace on Tuesday as McCain surrogate Joe the Plumber agreed that a Barack Obama presidency would mean the "death of Israel" and end democracy in America.

The Ohio plumber, who has no license and is actually named Samuel Wurzelbacher, spoke at a McCain campaign event in Columbus Monday. A McCain supporter asked if "a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel." JTP hardly batted an eye.

"I'll go ahead and agree with you on that," Wurzelbacher said.

The push-back against Wurzelbacher's comments began, somewhat unexpectedly, at Fox News.

The network noted that the McCain campaign seemed hesitant to distance itself from Wurzelbacher. Correspondent Carl Cameron said that the McCain campaign was going to put out an ad today criticizing Obama policies on Israel.

"Just a coincidence?" he asked. "We report you decide."

Later Tuesday afternoon, Shepard Smith pressed Wurzelbacher on his comments, reminding the woefully misinformed McCain backer that Obama has consistently voiced support for Israel. Pressed several times to explain how he could agree with the conclusion that Obama would lead to the death of the Jewish state, Wurzelbacher was unable to come up with any good reasons aside from Obama's position in favor of negotiating with rogue regimes such as Iran.

"You don't want my opinion on foreign policy," Wurzelbacher said. "I know just enough to kind of be dangerous."

You know, sort of like your average Republican....like Sarah Palin.

The more the McCain campaign trots this nimrod out to be a symbol of "the real America" (and you'd think they could come up with someone who didn't look like a neo-Nazi skinhead), the more he looks like the soul brother of Ashley Todd and the other Zombies of Endless War for Jesus who populate McCain and Palin rallies these days. Not only isn't this guy a plumber, I'll bet he's never lifted a hammer -- or at least he hasn't had to since Camp Grandpa recruited him -- a guy named "Wurzelbacher" of all things -- to try to scare elderly Jews.

The Ruin Of Many A Poor Boy

Jon Stewart, on why the current crisis sounds so familiar.