Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Noted here : "He could have saved middle-class homes with a New Deal-style mortgage bailout, dramatically reducing economic inequality, but further enriched the 1 percent instead." Right: our great "egalitarian" president had a choice (given he was going to bail out someone!): Bail out mortgage holders: the banks would survive, and struggling people would keep their homes. Bail out the banks, and let them seize the homes of the people whom they had duped into taking on ridiculous mortgages. And, my friends, which option did our great "man-of-the-people" choose? The large number of counties that swung from supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012 to supporting Trump in 2016 didn't do so because these voters, who had supported a black man for president against a white man, had suddenly turned "racist" and... backed one white candidate against another white candidate? Nope: they realized that Obama had completely sold them out to keep th...

I happened to have to research the famous "you didn't build that" quote; I was stunned once again by how the right-wing punditry deliberately distorted what was the obvious meaning of that speech. Here is a good summary of the "controversy" (aka smear campaign) with a great clip from Jon Stewart -- make sure you watch the Obama-Romney mash-up at the end.The bottom line: when you best campaign strategy was to generate bat-shit crazy misinterpretations of your opponents statements ("grade-school Marxism"!), you really have no campaign of which to speak.

Andrew Sullivan does a great job describing the utterly radical nature of the Netanyahu-Romney foreign policy regime-that-would-be. That regime is simply neo-Trotskyite world revolution ideology updated for the 21st century. I have lots of complaints about Obama. And I have no doubt that Romney himself is no radical: he is simply hungry for power. But to get it, he is perfectly willing to sell his soul to these radicals.

In today's Republican Campaign Support Journal , Bret Stephens writes an "op-ed" column that is so blantantly a GOP campaign ad that it is stunning that even the supine editors of the Journal let it run. (The link will probably point to his next column soon, but I don't see a permalink.) Stephens basically tries to blame Obama for every single thing in the world that didn't go America's way over the last four years. (Perhaps Obama should have launched drone strikes against the International Olympic Committee when they didn't award Chicago the 2016 Olympics, hey Bret?) What he conveniently never mentions is the great, shining success of the Obama administration: it did not totally, disastrously f*&k up America's position in the world the way the previous administration did. This column calls out for a good Larisoning. UPDATE: Daniel found it before I did .

I had read the transcript, but I had not seen the whole talk, and now that I have, it is utterly, utterly obvious that Obama was saying that your business success, besides relying on your efforts, also relies on infrastructure others built. "That" obviously refers to the roads and bridges. For those who want to deny that, because it implies Obama made a grammatical mistake : you are being absurd. Perhaps you have never made a public speech in front of many people under pressure before, but mistakenly using "that" instead of "those" is an error trivially easy to make in such a situation. Listen to him: it is obvious he is talking about the roads and bridges. Or, better yet, let Jon Stewart give you a grammar wedgie: The Daily Show Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes , Political Humor & Satire Blog , The Daily Show on Facebook

Rush Limbaugh makes a fool of himself : "The villain in the Dark Knight Rises is named Bane. B-A-N-E. What is the name of the venture capital firm that Romney ran, and around which there's now this make-believe controversy? Bain. The movie has been in the works for a long time, the release date's been known, summer 2012 for a long time. Do you think that it is accidental, that the name of the really vicious, fire-breathing, four-eyed, whatever-it-is villain in this movie is named Bane?" As Adam Serwer notes , this villain was created in 1993. This was some far-sighted conspiracy! Aslo of note is that Limbaugh claims that the name of the villain is named "Bane." Ah, but what is the name of the villain called?

Several people on Facebook went ballistic when Obama gave his recent speech on how no person has succeeded entirely due to their own resources. There were remarks that his speech was socialist, and claimed that individuals don't accomplish anything. But look at this line: "The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together." See that: Individual initiative. Stop acting like asses, OK? (Thanks to Daniel Kuehn for posting more of this speech than the FB fear promoters.)

I am seriously puzzled by the terror which arises in some conservatives at the prospect of a second term for Obama. Just peruse the posts at Postmodern Conservative to see what I am talking about. Now, these are intelligent folks, mostly academics, who  generally  appear to be fairly sane. But they seem to regard a second Obama term as being roughly equivalent to the presidency of a modern Vladimir Lenin. Now, I am no Obama fanboy. Unlike Daniel Kuehn, I would not eagerly tongue bathe Obama clean. (Just kidding, Daniel: I know you'd use a sponge.) But really, the guy has had a very middle-of-the-road first term. Yes, on some issues, like health care reform and abortion, he has certainly been to the left of where a Republican president would have been. But so would almost any Democrat. And I don't suspect for a moment that the bloggers at PMC are racists, unlike Appalachian Democrats, where I believe their lack of enthusiasm  for the man is mostly racial . So what do...

I've got plenty of complaints about what he's done since he's been in office -- although, as I said to my friends who knew him back from the day in the Chicago hood, I don't expect we could have hoped for better, given the state of our polity -- but it really disturbs me to see the lengths to which many "conservatives" will distort reality in order to discredit Obama. For instance, the "meme" that Obama uses the word "I" more than any previous president has been thoroughly debunked, by simple computer analysis, over at the Language Log many times now. And yet, even a columnist of the stature of George Will (whom I usually expect to be at least a little better that the Fox News miscreants), continues to repeat it . Has the entire "right" totally lost their minds over Obama? The possibility leaves me with mixed feelings: On the one hand, if even such a moderate rightist like Will has so lost touch with reality as to have no con...

Every once in a while, I read a post from FoxNews, to remind myself that I should go easier on LewRockwell.com. Today, it was the smirking Michael Goodwin , with this complaint: President Obama’s team put out an ad praising him for sending in Navy SEALs to kill Usama bin Laden and doubting whether Mitt Romney would have done it. To further exploit the one-year anniversary of Bin Laden's death, he gave an interview to NBC in the Situation Room, from where he observed the raid. And The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Obama campaign has an enemies list, a group of Romney donors it singles out by name on a Web site while declaring some got rich “at the expense of so many Americans.”  As outrageous as those breaches of decency are, they are merely the latest extension of Obama’s polarizing presidency You see, no Republican president would ever exploit military adventures for political advantage . No Republican politicians would ever stage a press conference at a site impor...

In response to a very sensible proposal , our leader blathers: 'In an interview with the Grupo de Diarios America, an association of leading Latin American newspapers, Obama said Washington would not "legalize or decriminalize drugs because doing so would have serious negative consequences in all our countries in terms of public health and safety."' 'The US leader added that legalizing or decriminalizing drugs "would not eliminate the danger posed by transnational organized crime."' Yes, and cutting out binge drinking followed by driving will not eliminate the danger of dying in a traffic accident. But it sure would lower it.

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