If there is one thing I believe, it is that we need to have balance. We need to listen to people willing to have serious conversations, no matter their political leanings. If we learned one thing from the midterm elections this year, it is that even though people voted for conservative candidates, they also voted for very progressive ballot measures. Of course, even I’m not sure what we actually learned by that, other than that balance is important.
“President Obama recently said that his day is all about politics, so in the mornings he likes to watch ESPN. So if you get the feeling he’s repeating himself every half hour, that’s where he learned it from.” – Jimmy Fallon
“The Danes are causing a bit of trouble. The kingdom of Denmark claimed the North Pole as their own. Hey, you can’t just reach out and take something if you want it, Denmark. That’s Russia’s job.” – Craig Ferguson
“President Vladimir Putin has been named Russia’s man of the year. Second place went to ‘Or else.'” – Seth Meyers
“Russia has named Vladimir Putin its man of the year for the 15th year in a row. Putin got 143 million votes and the guy he was up against got killed in a mysterious boating accident. The boat was in a warehouse.” – Conan O’Brien
“During an interview, former President George W. Bush discussed his painting hobby and said, ‘Never paint your wife or your mother.’ Then he added, ‘Because it’s almost impossible to get the paint out of their hair.'” – Jimmy Fallon
“Guess who’s running for president? Jeb Bush. Jeb was governor of Florida and he speaks fluent Spanish, which raises the question: What language did his brother speak? What was that? ” – David Letterman
“Jeb Bush announced today on the Internet that he may run for president. The next presidential election could be Bush vs. Clinton. It will be like 1992 all over again except I won’t be in rehab.” – Craig Ferguson
“I feel like Bush presidencies are like ‘Godfather’ films. You should stop at two.” – David Letterman
“What is Jeb Bush’s full name? Jebediah? Jebaroni?” – Craig Ferguson
“Jeb Bush announced on the Internet that he is exploring a 2016 bid for president. And to increase his chances, he’s going to run as just ‘Jeb’. He said, ‘My last name? It’s not important.'” – Seth Meyers
“Things were very different back in 1992. There was unrest in the Middle East, we had a gridlocked Congress, and everybody was talking about Bill Cosby.” – Craig Ferguson
“Among the top Google searches of 2014 were Ebola and the movie ‘Frozen’. One leaves you with something highly infectious that’s impossible to get out of your system. The other is Ebola.” – Conan O’Brien
“Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah. Hanukkah lasts for eight nights — unlike Christmas, which lasts for two and a half months.” – Seth Meyers
“The hackers who hacked into Sony have leaked the upcoming script for the new James Bond movie. Some of the executives said the news left them shaken but not stirred.” – Conan O’Brien
I’ve been wanting to move Political Irony to a new server for a while, and I might do it in the next few days. If I do, Political Irony will go down for a day or two while I move everything over. After that, it should run much better.
I can’t believe that I’ve been running this blog for seven years!
UPDATE: The plan is to do the update this weekend. I’ll keep posting until I start the move. You will have to log back in once it comes back up at the new location.
“Sony was the victim of a massive cyber attack from hackers presumed to be based in North Korea. In an embarrassing email, a producer called Angelina Jolie a minimally talented spoiled brat. Which makes this all seem like a high school drama more than an international act of cyber terrorism.” – Jimmy Kimmel
“Producers at Sony say that hackers have gotten a hold of a script for the upcoming James Bond sequel. Although if you really want to know what happens in the new James Bond movie, just watch every other James Bond movie.” – Seth Meyers
“Over the weekend the co-chair of Sony Entertainment broke her silence about the recent hacking scandal to apologize for some offensive emails she sent about President Obama. In response, Obama said, ‘Don’t worry. I secretly read those emails months ago.'” – Jimmy Fallon
“Today in Washington, D.C., several government buildings were left without power. Of course, the White House will be without power for two more years.” – Conan O’Brien
“New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently installed a fence around Gracie Mansion for privacy and security concerns. De Blasio wants to make sure the wrong person doesn’t get into the mayor’s mansion — while New Yorkers said, ‘Too late’.” – Jimmy Fallon
I’ve been seeing a number of comics like these lately, expressing the opinion that 2014 just totally sucked. Really? Personally, as far as I can tell most of the really bad news was completely overhyped by the media with the express purpose of scaring you into reading their websites and watching their TV “news” shows (the Ebola scare being a prime example).
By most metrics, things are going pretty well. The economy improved dramatically, healthcare is working much better, crime is down, we have fewer wars, people are accepting that climate change is real (despite massive denier propaganda to the contrary) and starting to do something about it, California is getting a little much-needed water, the price of gas is the lowest it has been in a long while, Michele Bachmann is retiring from Congress, we are finally normalizing relations with Cuba, and ten times more Americans died from lightning strikes than from Ebola. Sure, there are a few exceptions to the good news (the continued disintegration of the media being one of them).
But it is not hard to find good news if you look for it (even though you may have to dig a little). Like this fantastic message from the police chief of Nashville Tenn., responding to a letter of “frustration and outrage” over the protests.
“Joe Biden will assist in the 35th annual lighting of the National Menorah at the White House. When he heard that, Smokey Bear said, ‘Hold my calls. This is not gonna end well.'” – Jimmy Fallon
“This week Biden said that he will decide on a potential 2016 presidential campaign by the spring or the summer. Then he said, ‘Whichever comes first.'” – Jimmy Fallon
“This morning, due to a massive storm, at least 150,000 people in San Francisco were left without power. Of course, people in San Francisco without power are usually called Republicans.” – Conan O’Brien
“Golden Globe nominations were announced, but some people are upset that ‘The Walking Dead’ and ‘Modern Family’ were snubbed. It’s OK. President Obama has issued an executive action granting them all a path to a nomination.” – Jimmy Fallon
“The Justice Department ruled that Native American tribes are allowed to grow and sell marijuana on reservations. This decision was hailed as a victory by Native American leader Giggling Eagle.” – Conan O’Brien
Sometimes we are penny wise but pound foolish. Like when we “deinstitutionalized” our psychiatric hospitals and dumped all our mental patients out on the street, exacerbating the homeless problem.
But now we are finding out that kicking people out onto the street doesn’t save any money at all. A new study shows that the cost of dealing with homeless people is three times more expensive than giving them housing. That’s right, we can just give homeless people a place to live and it will save us money spent on law-enforcement officers who arrest and transport homeless people (typically for nonviolent offenses like tresspassing, public intoxication, or sleeping in parks), jail stays, emergency-room visits, and other costs.
This seems to be a recurring pattern. We cut important public programs to save money, which just causes other problems that end up costing us even more money.
I’m all for cutting the size of government and getting rid of waste. (for example, by eliminating subsidies for oil companies). But we have the General Accounting Office (GAO), which can tell us what programs work and which ones are a waste of money. Let’s use them.
The U.S. economy grew at a rollicking 5 percent rate in the third quarter. Oh, and it added 320,000 jobs in November, the best of its unprecedented 57 straight months of private-sector employment growth. Just in time for Christmas, the Dow just hit an all-time high and the uninsured rate is approaching an all-time low. Consumer confidence is soaring, inflation is low, gas prices are plunging, and the budget deficit is shrinking. You no longer hear much about the Ebola crisis that dominated the headlines in the fall, much less the border crisis that dominated the headlines over the summer.
Obama outperformed the Republicans!
Mitt Romney promised to bring unemployment down to 6 percent in his first term; it’s already down to 5.8 percent, half the struggling eurozone’s rate. Newt Gingrich promised $2.50 gas; it’s down to $2.38. Crime, abortion, teen pregnancy and oil imports are also way down, while renewable power is way up and the American auto industry is booming again. You don’t have to give credit to President Barack Obama for “America’s resurgence”, as he has started calling it, but there’s overwhelming evidence the resurgence is real. The Chicken Littles who predicted a double-dip recession, runaway interest rates, Zimbabwe-style inflation, a Greece-style debt crisis, skyrocketing energy prices, health insurance “death spirals” and other horrors have been reliably wrong.
But Americans haven’t gotten the news!
Come to think of it, the 62 percent of Americans who described the economy as “poor” in a CNN poll a week before the Republican landslide in the midterm elections were also wrong. I guess that sounds elitist. Second-guessing the wisdom of the public may be the last bastion of political correctness; if ordinary people don’t feel good about the economy, then the recovery isn’t supposed to be real. But aren’t the 11 million Americans who have landed new jobs since 2010 and the 10 million Americans who have gotten health insurance since 2013 ordinary Americans? It’s true that wage growth has remained slow, but the overall economic trends don’t jibe with the public’s lousy mood. And the public definitely does get stuff wrong. A Bloomberg poll this month found that 73 percent of Americans think the deficit is getting bigger, while 21 percent think it’s getting smaller and 6 percent aren’t sure. In fact, the deficit has dwindled from about $1.2 trillion in 2009 to less than $500 billion in 2014. My favorite part is the mere 6 percent who admitted ignorance; 73 percent are definitely sure the shrinking deficit is actually growing.
Americans should cheer up!
Six years ago, the economy was contracting at an 8 percent annual rate and shedding 800,000 jobs a month. Those were Great Depression-type numbers. The government was pouring billions of dollars into busted banks, and experts like MIT’s Simon Johnson were predicting that the bailouts would cost taxpayers as much as $2 trillion. In reality, the bailouts not only quelled the worst financial panic since the Depression, they made money for taxpayers.
Why aren’t we happier?
Let’s face it: The press has a problem reporting good news. Two Americans died of Ebola and cable TV flipped out; now we’re Ebola-free and no one seems to care. The same thing happened with the flood of migrant children across the Mexican border, which was a horrific crisis until it suddenly wasn’t. Nobody’s going to win a Pulitzer Prize for recognizing that we’re smoking less, driving less, wasting less electricity and committing less crime. Police are killing fewer civilians, and fewer police are getting killed, but understandably, after the tragedies in Ferguson and Brooklyn, nobody’s thinking about that these days. The media keep us in a perpetual state of panic about spectacular threats to our safety — Ebola, sharks, terrorism — but we’re much likelier to die in a car accident. Although, it ought to be said, much less likely than we used to be; highway fatalities are down 25 percent in a decade.
Still think we have a liberal media? What a joke. The media are only interested in money. They (and I include Fox News) would say almost anything to make a profit.
I love Tom Tomorrow’s annual year in review comics. Here’s part one:
I hope everyone had a great year, and a very merry Christmas.
The Irony. New survey polls done by The Washington Post, ABC, and CBS show that either Americans have mixed feelings about our use of torture, or else that they really don’t want to think about it.
For example, 69% of Americans consider waterboarding to be torture, but despite this, 59% think the use of torture against suspected terrorists was justified in the wake of 9/11.
And while 54% believes that the CIA intentionally misled the White House, Congress, and the American people about its use of torture and whether or not it produced valid intelligence, the vast majority of Americans still claims that our torture produced useful intelligence. This despite the Senate report that concluded that torture did not produce any actionable intelligence.
Intelligence officials continue to claim that torture (or “enhanced interrogation techniques” as they like to put it) provided valuable intelligence, and I just realized the disconnect. Study after study shows that people being tortured will tell their tormentors anything they think they want to hear to get the torture to stop. And what the Bush administration wanted to hear was that there was a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. So torture produced “intelligence” that was “valuable” to them (even if it was completely fabricated), allowing them to justify attacking a country that we now know had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. Mission Accomplished!
It gets even more interesting if you look at the responses by group. It seems like the more religious you profess to be, the more you support torture. For example, 69% of white evangelical protestants said that torture was justified, while only 40% of people with no religion said that torture was justified. That’s the Christmas spirit!
Of course, the group who supports the use of torture the most are conservative Republicans at 72%. The least are liberal Democrats at 38%.
Bottom line to me. How can anyone who claims to be an American believe that it was acceptable to sodomize children in front of their mothers (while cameras were rolling)? Are we really that depraved? Does anyone sincerely believe that made us safer?
Time Magazine published an excellent article by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar about the kerfuffle going on in New York city over two policemen who were murdered. The NY police are blaming the deaths on the people who are protesting against several high profile cases of police racism. They are also accusing the mayor of NYC and even Obama for the deaths.
Here’s just one short quote from the article. I encourage you to read the whole thing.
Police are not under attack, institutionalized racism is. Trying to remove sexually abusive priests is not an attack on Catholicism, nor is removing ineffective teachers an attack on education. Bad apples, bad training, and bad officials who blindly protect them, are the enemy. And any institution worth saving should want to eliminate them, too.
The point is, just because you protest about the actions of one (or even a small number) of policemen, doesn’t mean you are against the police. In fact, members of the NY police have certainly been guilty of other crimes.
The mainstream media is continuing its descent into mediocrity. I mean, we are told by the mainstream media that they have fact checkers, editors, and all that other stuff that means that we can trust them, right? But then something like this happens.
Greta Van Susteren of Fox News found confirmation of her suspicions that North Korea thought they were attacking Japan and not the US when they hacked Sony Pictures. Her proof came straight from the “North Korea state-owned news twitter feed” (@DPRK_News).
The only problem is that the @DPRK_News is a parody, written by a blogger.
Now comes the ironic part. Despite multiple comments to the story on her own site warning Van Susteren that her source was a parody site, and even the parody site’s author notifying her that her source was not true, she refuses to admit that she was fooled by the joke. She does admit that “some say” the feed is a hoax, but doesn’t admit that she was taken in.
Meanwhile, other major media outlets (including Slate, the Washington Post, and Newsweek), fall for the same parody twitter feed. Where are all those editors and fact checkers now? At least the others retract their stories.
Politico, which has never been particularly liberal, nevertheless has a article whose headline says it all “GOP goes on K Street hiring spree”.
As Republicans take control of Congress, they are bringing in veteran influence peddlers to help them run the show. Nearly a dozen veteran K Streeters have been named as top staffers to GOP leaders or on key committees as lawmakers prepare to take the gavel in January.
For example, the new Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell has picked for his policy director Hazen Marshall, who has spent the last ten years as a lobbyist representing telecoms including AT&T and Comcast, and energy companies like Exelon.
When Obama became president, he implemented rules that limited the number of registered lobbyists who could join his administration, even putting a slight freeze on the practice. But with Republicans taking over the Senate, one high level Washington headhunter says “The ‘Scarlet L’ is fading and it is fading rapidly”.
Even so-called Tea Party candidates, who claim to dislike the money-driven politics as usual, are hiring lobbyists. For example tea-partier Dave Brat, who ousted Eric Cantor in a revolt from the right, hired as his chief of staff Erin Siefring who previously worked as a lobbyist for big accounting firm KPMG and represented banks.
Now that campaign money is free speech, politicians are even more bought and paid for.
[excerpted from The New Yorker]
“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”
An industrious young woman neglects to charge for her housekeeping services and is rightly exploited for her naïveté. She dies without ever having sought her own happiness as the highest moral aim. I did not finish watching this movie, finding it impossible to sympathize with the main character. — No stars.
“Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory”
An excellent movie. The obviously unfit individuals are winnowed out through a series of entrepreneurial tests and, in the end, an enterprising young boy receives a factory. I believe more movies should be made about enterprising young boys who are given factories. — Three and a half stars. (Half a star off for the grandparents, who are sponging off the labor of Charlie and his mother. If Grandpa Joe can dance, Grandpa Joe can work.)
“Mary Poppins”
A woman takes a job with a wealthy family without asking for money in exchange for her services. An absurd premise. Later, her employer leaves a lucrative career in banking in order to play a children’s game. — No stars.
“Bambi”
The biggest and the strongest are the fittest to rule. This is the way things have always been. — Four stars.
“Old Yeller”
A farm animal ceases to be useful and is disposed of humanely. A valuable lesson for children. — Four stars.
“Lady and the Tramp”
A ridiculous movie. What could a restaurant owner possibly have to gain by giving away a perfectly good meal to dogs, when he could sell it at a reasonable price to human beings? A dog cannot pay for spaghetti, and payment is the only honest way to express appreciation for value. — One star.
UPDATE: And see this edition of Ayn Rand Christmas Cards. Yikes!
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