Consider this:

Nearly two decades after Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his fractious Supreme Court confirmation hearing, it remains unclear who was lying�

Really? Consider this, then:

Lillian McEwen, a retired administrative law judge who said she dated Clarence Thomas from 1979 through the mid-1980s, told The Washington Post: �The Clarence I know was certainly capable of not only doing the things that Anita Hill said he did, but it would be totally consistent with the way he lived his personal life then��

And most of all, consider that at the time of his confirmation hearing in 1991 nobody but those with a political reason to do so believed Clarence Thomas for a New York minute. This is because his denials so obviously flunked the Pubic Hair Test, first described in the literature by me in January of 2001, which I now repost as a public service:

Fans of political theater will recall that Professor Anita Hill had charged her former boss with a pattern of sexual harassment which included showing her a Coke can with a pubic hair sticking to it. Judge Thomas swore, no doubt truthfully as the truth is vouchsafed unto him, that he had never in his life done such an ungentlemanly thing.

God knows whose pubic hair that was, or what the future Supreme Court justice thought its presence on a Coke can signified, or what made him imagine that his weird performance might be seductive, but the incident plainly happened pretty much the way Professor Hill said it did.

From Chris Floyd, further thoughts about those undisciplined socialist frogs:

While the Europeans protest for jobs and dignity, Americans pour out into the streets in angry demonstrations against the very idea of helping the poor and the economically devastated, or putting the slightest restraint on the rapacious super-rich.

The Europeans protest actual policies, while our American �dissidents� froth and rant about a fantasy world of �socialist� programs that only benefit shiftless darkies and sneaky, border-crossing Messicans � and, of course, the devil-worshiping Muslims, who are plotting every hour to poison the precious bodily fluids of real Americans and take over the country from within.

The American protesters vociferously denounce the healthcare �reform� bill � not because it is actually a gargantuan corporate boondoggle deliberately crafted to kill off the chance for any genuine reform of the system for generations, but because they believe it is communist Muslim atheist Nazi socialism, and because a few slivers of the boondoggle might possibly trickle down to help a few of those darkies and Messicans. (Although in fact it will imprison them in an inhumane system of corporate control.)

They protest against the laughably anemic �financial regulations� that the Administration has meekly proposed for its masters on Wall Street � PR measures, tissue-paper thin, that fall miles short of the kind of mild regulations that operated during America�s greatest periods of growth and broad-based prosperity.

From the Washington Post:

When the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade arrived in Afghanistan, its leader, Col. Harry D. Tunnell IV, openly sneered at the U.S. military�s counterinsurgency strategy. The old-school commander barred his officers from even mentioning the term and told shocked U.S. and NATO officials that he was uninterested in winning the trust of the Afghan people�

Some soldiers have since told investigators that their company commander became furious after learning that the platoon had killed a second unarmed Afghan in January. But rather than referring the incident up the chain of command, he demanded that soldiers find evidence that would justify the shooting.

In March, the platoon�s first lieutenant and sergeant were removed from their posts because their soldiers had been caught shooting at dogs, according to Army investigative records. In contrast, no disciplinary action was taken after platoon members shot and killed four Afghan men � who were allegedly unarmed � in as many incidents. (Three of those shootings are now the focus of murder investigations.)

PARIS � Protesters blockaded Marseille's airport, Lady Gaga canceled concerts in Paris and rioting youths attacked police in Lyon on Thursday ahead of a tense Senate vote on raising the retirement age to 62.

A quarter of the nation's gas stations were out of fuel despite President Nicolas Sarkozy's orders to force open depots barricaded by striking workers.

Gasoline shortages and violence on the margins of student protests have heightened the standoff between the government and labor unions who see retirement at 60 as a hard-earned right�

This sort of thing could never happen in America. We are a docile people, easily fooled and easily led.

There�d be a place in a Dicken�s novel for this kind of villain, but he would be too boring to read about:

For Americans, the foreclosure crisis has wiped out fortunes, bringing destitution and homelessness. For Florida attorney David J. Stern, it has brought mansions, a Bugatti sports car and a luxury yacht.

Florida has the third-highest residential foreclosure rate in the U.S., and Stern, 50, has made a fortune off the bust. His foreclosure-processing business has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue preparing documents for the cases that his law firm brings on behalf of lenders seeking to reclaim homes from borrowers who can�t pay their mortgages.

[�]

Stern owns a $15 million mansion on an island in Fort Lauderdale, a $6 million beachfront condominium in the city, and a $6 million home in nearby Hillsboro Beach, according to property records. The mansion includes an adjoining property he bought in 2009 to make room for a tennis court and parking spaces, according to building records.

Cars registered under Stern�s name in Florida include three Ferraris, four Porsches, a Rolls-Royce, a Cadillac and the Bugatti, according to the state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. He also owns a yacht, Tew said [Stern�s attorney].

His yacht is named �Misunderstood,� which prompts the question: Is the inclination to self-pity a necessary requirement for entry into America�s ruling class?

His lawyer says Mr. Stern is a picture of the American dream. He worked his way through school and reached the pinnacle of his profession by dint of intelligence and hard work, �acumen� in the attorney�s words. Fair enough. I guess it�s irrelevant that he made his fortune through fraud and that his wealth is based on human suffering. If he’s at all funny or eccentric or telegenic, there�s an appearance on Dancing With The Stars or a reality TV show waiting for him him at the end of his jail term. He�ll be able to seamlessly merge with the carnival freak show of American pop culture and become, at least for a few months, a star, his wealth and future intact. He may even receive an honored place among the tea partiers, and we�ll get to see the spectacle of people whose houses he foreclosed on screeching that he is the victim of injustice, a martyr at the hands of Obama�s socialist America.

It�s difficult to imagine a more shallow or vacant form of life than what this man represents. After scratching and clawing his way into a multimillion dollar fortune, what does he do with it? He buys things, lots of things, mansions, sports cars, yachts. That�s it. It�s as if he he can envision no higher purpose, no more elevated state of existence, than the empty, almost compulsive accumulation of material objects. He wasted his entire life in the single minded pursuit of money and now he has it. Congratulations, now what? Buy another Ferarri? Go brood on the deck of the �Misunderstood� while your wife stays home and fucks the pool boy? Build a tennis court that nobody will ever use? Maybe run for office.

A field of cow manure is more enlightened. At least it fertilizes the soil and nourishes life. He just stinks. He’s literally worth less than shit. It�s pathetic.

It�s almost enough to make you feel sorry for the wretch.

I said almost enough, but not quite.

This is from a study (download file) by Larry M. Bartels at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs:

In addition, senators seem to have been quite responsive to the ideological views of their middle- and high-income constituents � though, strikingly, not to the views of their low-income constituents.

Whether we consider the three Congresses separately or together, the data are quite consistent in suggesting that the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution had no discernible impact on the voting behavior of their senators. (The point estimates are actually negative, but in every case the standard error is large enough to make it quite plausible that the true effect is zero.)�

The apparent responsiveness of senators to the views of high-income constituents was even greater, despite their somewhat smaller numbers; the pooled parameter estimate of 4.15 implies a shift of .39 in a senator�s W-NOMINATE score in response to an equivalent shift in high-income constituency opinion.

These results imply that responsiveness to the views of middle- and high-income constituents account for significant variation in senators� voting behavior � but that the views of low-income constituents were utterly irrelevant�

The roughly linear increase in apparent responsiveness across the three income groups, with those in the bottom third getting no weight and those in the middle and top thirds getting substantial weight, suggests that the modern Senate comes a good deal closer to equal representation of incomes than to equal representation of citizens�

The results for the vote on raising the minimum wage reflect the political plight of poor constituents in especially poignant form. Those results suggest that senators attached no weight at all to the views of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution � the constituents whose economic interests were obviously most directly at stake � even as they voted to approve a minimum wage increase.

Many of you have written to ask how long the world�s longest cat is. The world�s longest cat is 48.5 inches long.

From the New York Times coverage of an academic conference about �elites.� (The quotation marks are mine, and indicate skepticism as to whether the word is properly applied to people whose only distinction is that they have somehow got their hands on a lot of money. The photo was taken by Weegee in 1943, on a fire escape outside the Metropolitan Opera House.)

�If you look at the poor as a problem, you�ll be angry at elites or you�ll expect them to come up with a solution,� said Mr. Venkatesh, who took the most pragmatic line. �You have to come in accepting that there will always be poor people in society and there will always be wealthy people in society, and neither of the two reached that status by their own efforts��

Ezra Klein with Cliff Notes on the wacky, wonderful world of high finance:

Plenty of transactions between professional investors and banks were based off information asymmetries. That�s the process at the heart of the now-infamous Abacus deal, the trade in which Goldman Sachs and John Paulson unloaded some truly toxic mortgage packages on a hapless German investment bank.

What�s important to understand about these information asymmetries, however, is that they�re features, not bugs. We�re not looking at an accidental byproduct of the finance sector. Rather, information asymmetries are how the finance sector makes money.

Consider that the sector�s huge profits should be, essentially, impossible. In a working market, competition pushes profits down to almost nothing. To get around that rule, you have to break the market somehow.

The pharmaceutical industry does it through patents: It secures temporary monopolies on the sales of its innovations. The financial sector does it through information asymmetries: If you keep your product from being standardized, and you keep your customers from knowing too much about the product, the very complexity of the thing you�re selling can give you a temporary monopoly against your competitors, and a massive advantage against your customers. That increases your profits, even as it harms the market and makes it nearly impossible for regulators to do their job�

Just a suggestion for all you book lovers, from The Guardian. Where should we re-shelve Karl Rove�s new book, Courage and Consequence? And it�s not too early to start thinking about Bush�s and Cheney�s forthcoming somebodyelsedunnits. Under True Crime? Self Help?

Blair�s nomination is not the first time that his autobiography has been classified as fiction, as bookshops have reported customers with anti-war sympathies repeatedly reshelving the book into the crime section, following a Facebook-led campaign.

Like, check out the way some of these elites on Wall Street talk. Don’t they sound a little bit, like, teenagers or whatever?

A former member of the Goldman Sachs management committee was not so sure. �Don�t you think, out of 10 million data points, there will be 500 unbelievably screwy examples? It�s a little bit so what,� he said on Tuesday. �I don�t get it. It doesn�t feel like this is fraud. Maybe there is sloppiness, but at the end of the day, people took out mortgages they can�t pay back. Now I worry that if anything, the government is making something that is just a clerical error into something that would be nefarious or whatever.�

�It seems a lot about it is, like, notaries,� the Goldman source said. �I didn�t know anyone even focused on what a notary did! It almost struck me as some kind of anachronism that must have had some value in the past�which I don�t understand.�

Dude, like who pays attention to what notaries do, anyway? Isn�t that totally old or something? Who cares about what people used to do in the past? I don�t get it.

We aren�t ruled by our superiors. We�re ruled by spoiled teenagers, greedy little ignoramuses who are morally undeveloped and have childishly narrow mentalities. The fact that they use slick terms like �data point� or �compensation-to-revenue ratio� isn�t much different from the fact that a seven-year old can download songs onto an iPod or master a video game. Here�s a couple of them throwing around a few ideas about how to solve the mortgage-fraud crisis:

�The question to me is not do you foreclose or do you not foreclose. The question is when and with what philosophy you foreclose,� the man on the bank restructuring team said. �If you want to reduce the amount of leveraged homeowners you have, you need to ultimately kick them out of their homes.� A colleague walked up: His recommendation was to burn houses. It would lower the supply.

Kick them into the street and burn their houses down. That would be so totally awesome!

We�ve peacefully given power to an obscenely rich uber-class of rotten kids whose thoughts and morals are no more sophisticated, or evolved, than that.

If it wasn�t so tragic, it would just be fuckin� embarrassing.

Or whatever.

Forget what mama told you, crime does pay. From the Wall Street Journal:

Pay on Wall Street is on pace to break a record high for a second consecutive year, according to a study conducted by The Wall Street Journal.

About three dozen of the top publicly held securities and investment-services firms�which include banks, investment banks, hedge funds, money-management firms and securities exchanges�are set to pay $144 billion in compensation and benefits this year, a 4% increase from the $139 billion paid out in 2009, according to the survey. Compensation was expected to rise at 26 of the 35 firms.

These guys must be doing something right. After all, doesn�t simple economics tell you that pay is related to performance? The better you are, the more you make. To the top earners go the spoils. The Wall Street Journal itself is the most faithful exponent of this principle there is. But apparently this just isn�t always the case. Normally, compensation is directly tied to revenue. Higher revenue equals higher pay, but �

The opposite is true at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp., where analysts project revenue will be down, but compensation will be up, according to the survey.

Goldman�s revenue is expected to decline by 13.5% this year to $39.1 billion from $45.2 billion in 2009. Compensation remains projected higher than last year, up 3.7% to $16.8 billion, from $16.2 billion in 2009, according to the Journal survey. Through the first half of 2010, Goldman Sachs set aside 43% of its revenue for compensation. Goldman�s ultimate payouts could change drastically. In 2009, for example, it withheld revenue for compensation in the fourth quarter, dropping the overall ratio of revenue to compensation.

What a mystery. Evidently, the iron laws of economics that keep the rest of shackled like galley slaves don�t apply to the gods on Olympus. I guess the invisible hand is too busy strangling us to pay attention to what the boys at Goldman and Bank of America have been doing. But it might catch up to them yet. If revenues continue to fall short, we are informed, �analysts and experts expect that Wall Street will lay off employees in order to keep bonus pools high.�

Yes, Saturn will eat his own children to keep his bonus high.

Both the Rude Pundit and I watched last night�s debate between Sharron Angle and Harry Reid, but only he had the wit to call it an inarticulate tortoise fight, and to caption the picture below
�Photos That Make the Rude Pundit Wonder if Parents Can Be Aborted.�

So I�ll spare you my reactions and refer you instead to his obscene, pornographic, scatalogical, thoroughly tasteless and absolutely dead-on coverage here.

�if you live in Guam. From the New York Times:

And even when banks did begin hiring to deal with the avalanche of defaults, they often turned to workers with minimal qualifications or work experience, employees a former JPMorgan executive characterized as the �Burger King kids.� In many cases, the banks outsourced their foreclosure operations to law firms like that of David J. Stern, of Florida, which served clients like Citigroup, GMAC and others. Mr. Stern hired outsourcing firms in Guam and the Philippines to help.

From Larry Beinart�s political thriller, The Librarian:

They had two prophets. The first, of course, was Jesus Christ. Scott claimed to have been saved, and the hard core of his support were Jesus people�

Their second prophet, and to Hagopian their real prophet, was Adam Smith, the eighteenth century economist and philosopher who had coined the phrase �invisible hand� to describe the surprising, unplanned, and unlooked-for effects of each individual pursuing his own domestic plans for gain.

To the intellectual mind, that was a simile, an �as if,� but to the believer mind it was God and God wanted us each to pursue profit to our utmost and then His �invisible hand� would combine those efforts and guide them to the true good.

Adam Smith had also said, �Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.�

Hagopian thought that was true.

If Scott�s people were men of vice, merely greedy, there would be limits to what they might do. If they were men of virtue, there were no limits, no point at which they would stop. There was no lie they would not tell, no fraud they would not perpetrate. No murder they would not commit.

Christopher Hitchens:

Populism imposes its own humiliations on anyone considering a run. How many times can you stand in front of an audience and state: �I will always put the people of X first�? (Quite a lot of times, to judge by recent campaigns.) This is to say no more than that you will be a megaphone for sectional interests and regional mood swings and resentment, a confession that, to you, all politics is yokel.

More news from the swill kings who caused the present depression. (Don�t tell me this isn�t a depression; I have eyes.)

However, while Paulson has been criticized, unfairly or not, because $12.9 billion of the bailout money went to Goldman, he�s drawn little scrutiny for what he did in his first 18 months in office, during the final frenzied stages of the housing bubble.

In his eight years as Goldman�s chief executive, Paulson had presided over the firm�s plunge into the business of buying up subprime mortgages to marginal borrowers and then repackaging them into securities, overseeing the firm�s huge positions in what became a fraud-infested market.

During Paulson�s first 15 months as the treasury secretary and chief presidential economic adviser, Goldman unloaded more than $30 billion in dicey residential mortgage securities to pension funds, foreign banks and other investors and became the only major Wall Street firm to dramatically cut its losses and exit the housing market safely. Goldman also racked up billions of dollars in profits by secretly betting on a downturn in home mortgage securities.

�No one was better positioned . . . than Mr. Paulson to understand exactly what the implications of his moving against the (housing) bubble would have been for Goldman Sachs, because he knew what the Goldman Sachs positions were,� said William Black, a former senior thrift regulator who delivered the harshest criticism of the former secretary.

Paulson �knew that if he acted the way he should, that would have burst the bubble. Then Goldman Sachs would have been left with a very substantial loss, and that would have been the end of bonuses at Goldman Sachs.

Hey, gang, Team USA is Number 15! Here�s yet another infrastructure outrage for you:

Since 1991, the telecom companies have pocketed an estimated $320 billion � that�s about $3,000 per household.

This is a conservative estimate of the wide-scale plunder that includes monies garnered from hidden rate hikes, depreciation allowances, write-offs and other schemes. Ironically, in 2009, the FCC�s National Broadband plan claimed it will cost about $350 billion to fully upgrade America�s infrastructure.

The principal consequence of the great broadband con is not only that Americans are stuck with an inferior and overpriced communications system, but the nation�s global economic competitiveness has been undermined.

In a June 2010 report, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ranked the U.S. 15th on broadband subscribers with 24.6 percent penetration; the consulting group, Strategy Analytics, is even more pessimistic, ranking the U.S. 20th with a �broadband� penetration rate of 67 percent compared to South Korea (95 percent), Netherlands (85 percent) and Canada (76 percent). Making matters worse, Strategy Analytics projects the U.S. ranking falling to 23rd by year-end 2010�

I know as much about broadband as I do about the Emperor Hadrian, but I have a mole planted deep within a giant telecom company. She reports as follows:

Well, the news that we are way behind much of the world in connect speeds is right, but I don�t understand many of the other claims. The telcos definitely grab whatever they can get from deals with the PUCs, but from what I can see, that usually does not amount to that much.

What a lot of confusion and inefficiency arises from is that the PUCs will require the telco (in exchange for some rate break or something) to build out their infrastructure such that some number of folks are *able* to order a broadband connection. There is never a requirement to actually *sell* the service.

The telco will then plow in fiber, deploy equipment, etc., to fulfill their obligation to offer service to some god-forsaken county in the middle of New Mexico with 10,000 people in it. Then, 83 of them actually sign up for service. So, assuming that the rate break or other incentive actually did result in more telco revenue, a lot of it has to be spent on the buildout to service those 83 people.

Nobody walks away a winner. The PUC is mad that the hicks are still not online, the telco is shaking their heads saying �I told you nobody would buy it! We�re gonna have to keep that crap running for years!�, the 9,917 folks that still have no broadband still can�t see their YouTube, and everyone is sad that we are another step behind in the race to connect everyone.

So, it really is not some gift to the telcos. Neither is it money well spent in connecting folks to broadband. It is the worst of both worlds � little extra broadband penetration, no telco windfall, and only a bunch of aging equipment deployed with little chance of ever being used. It is really just an inefficient regulatory effort to accomplish something with not enough information or control.

Probably the only way to fully connect the boonies is to re-regulate and force the issue that way. It is just too expensive to do it otherwise.

More good sense from Daniel Larison. Worth reading in its entirety:

As much as we can appreciate and honor the support our NATO allies have provided, we shouldn�t drag them into conflicts that have never really been their concern. �Out-of-area� missions will just keep happening again and again as the alliance looks for new conflicts to enter to provide a rationale for its existence. European nations are clearly tired of it, and at present they can�t afford it, either. The need for fiscal retrenchment has been forcing European governments, even the new coalition government in Britain, to make deep cuts in their military budgets.

Making NATO into a political club of democracies in good standing is also no solution to the Alliance�s obsolescence. As we saw in the war in Georgia two years ago, proposed expansion of NATO has been more of a threat to European peace and security than dissolving it. Once again, this is something that most European governments understood at the time, and which Washington refused to see. Without the belief that Georgia was eligible for membership and would eventually be allowed to join, it is unlikely that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili would have escalated a conflict over its separatist regions and plunged his country into war with Russia. That conflict was a good sign that the Alliance had outlived its usefulness. If it isn�t disbanded, it may start to become a menace to the very things it was supposed to keep safe.

America doesn�t need and shouldn�t want to perpetuate an outdated alliance. The creation of NATO was an imaginative solution designed to respond to the security conditions of the immediate aftermath of World War II, and it was an enormous success. But it is time for Americans to begin thinking anew about the world. A first step in doing that is letting go of an alliance neither America nor Europe needs�

This just in from Santa Fe (h/t to Everett). We are all doomed.

SANTA FE � Students in Santa Fe have to wear ID badges to class, complete with a built-in tracking device.

The Smart Badge program started this school year, and is getting mixed reviews from parents and students. Patrick Mann is a senior and said he feels like he�s in prison. �Normally, the only people you would track are say prisoners or somebody that�s done something very wrong,� Mann said.

All students at Santa Fe Junior High and Santa Fe High School have to wear the radio frequency IDs. The sensors are in the ceiling on campus, but Mann said they keep tabs of you off campus too�

Me and my friends always make fun of sports coverage because most of it is so stupid. You have these hyperactive thyroid cases in two thousand dollar suits making jackasses out of themselves by dispensing �expert� analysis that amounts to little more than this:

�You know, J.B., if Drew Brees has a good game and New Orleans can stop the run, I think the Saints have a good chance to win.�

�I agree one-hundred percent, Howie. On the other hand, if the Falcons can disrupt Drew Brees� passing game and establish the run against that tough Saint�s defense, they have a good chance at pulling off the upset.�

In other words, if the Saints have a good game, they just might win. If they don�t, they just might not. On the other hand, if the Falcons have a good game, they just might win. If they don�t, well, they just might not.

Expert analysis, see? And it�s squished between hours and hours of the crassest, most vulgar commercialism under the sun.

But let�s not be too hard on our jock brothers and sisters. After all, in the last analysis (pun intended), they at least provide entertainment. But what about those Atlases on Wall Street who get paid the big bucks to forecast trends in the economy? Are their analyses any more sophisticated than some no-neck loudmouth on FOX Sports or ESPN? Let�s go straight to the top � Goldman Sachs � and see:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said the U.S. economy is likely to be �fairly bad� or �very bad� over the next six to nine months.

�We see two main scenarios,� analysts led by Jan Hatzius, the New York-based chief U.S. economist at the company, wrote in an e-mail to clients. �A fairly bad one in which the economy grows at a 1 1/2 percent to 2 percent rate through the middle of next year and the unemployment rate rises moderately to 10 percent, and a very bad one in which the economy returns to an outright recession.�

Things are going to be fairly bad or very bad. Somebody give that man a bonus. Goldman Sachs can�t afford to lose that kind of talent to a competitor.

I�m no expert, but that forecast strikes me as a little less than, um, percipient. I know laid-off electricians and carpenters who could have told you that. Hell, I could have told you that, and the only financial market I�m an expert at predicting is my own dwindling bank account. Our analysis is just as keen as Mr. Jan Hatzius�, but we don�t get six, seven, or eight figure salaries and a chance to go on CNBC to receive virtual fellatio from Maria Bartiromo. I know people who have lost their homes and have been forced to live in their cars. Others have resorted to camping out in the woods. A friend of mine just had to go on food stamps for the first time in his life (and he had to go through all the horrors of bureaucratic hell for that). These aren�t welfare cheats and slackers. These are people in skilled trades who�ve worked their entire lives. Now they are literally destitute. Do you know what they tell me when I talk to them? �Things are partly shitty with a chance of fucked up.�

Or, in the more genteel language of Mr. Hatzius, �fairly bad� or �very bad,� like sports analysis or economic forecasts.

Funny isn�t it? Wall Street bankers sit back and look at our shitty economy as if it�s the result of some unpredictable natural process, the ineluctable will of God. They certainly didn�t have anything to do with it. They�re just passive observers. Things might get fairly bad or very bad, who knows? Shrug. But threaten to raise their taxes and impose regulations on them, and suddenly they become the omnipotent masters of the universe. They invest in the economy and create jobs. The whole world depends on what they do. Even Lloyd Blankfein himself thinks that Goldman Sachs does God�s work. You can�t seriously propose regulations or tax hikes, can you? That might topple the entire structure of civilization itself, you ninnies! In fact, they�re so important they deserve million dollar bonuses.

I see two main scenarios here. Either these guys are fairly mediocre to very bad, or they�re just plain full of shit.

I�ve finally finished Jimmy Carter�s White House Diary, and will get back to dropping nuggets from it:

May 25, 1977 � In the evening I went to the annual Senate and House fund-raising dinner and made a so-called humorous address to them. These have been the major kinds of speeches that I have to perform since I�ve been president. They would be better off electing Bob Hope president as far as public statements are concerned, since that seems to be the heaviest demand on a president�s speaking time.

I was the poor sucker detailed to write these kinds of speeches, and I enjoyed it every bit as much as the president did. Once I endeared myself to my betters by telling the New York Daily News that being President Carter�s so-called humorist was like being FDR�s tap dance coach.

�at Motherhouse on Sunday.

This is from The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer:

But research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and � to top it all off a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic. These seven deadly shortfalls of authoritarian thinking eminently qualify them to follow a wouldbe dictator. As Hitler is reported to have said, �What good fortune for those in power that people do not think��

Intrigued, I gave the inferences test that Mary Wegmann had used to two large samples of students at my university. In both studies high Right Wing Authoritarians went down in flames more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:

All fish live in the sea.
Sharks live in the sea..
Therefore, sharks are fish.

The conclusion does not follow, but high RWAs would be more likely to say the reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they would likely tell you, �Because sharks are fish.� In other words, they thought the reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right.

The Vatican just can�t seem to help being silly:

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) � The Vatican kept up its attack on the Nobel committee on Tuesday for giving the medicine prize to in-vitro fertilization pioneer Robert Edwards, saying he had led to a culture where embryos are seen as commodities.

For the second straight day, it gave the thumbs down to the choice of Edwards, whose success in fertilizing a human egg outside of the womb led to �test tube babies� and innovations such as embryonic stem cell research and surrogate motherhood�

As I�m sure you�re all aware, the US Government acknowledged on Friday that it engaged in a little Josef Mengele-esque fun in Guatemala in the 1940s. It seems we deliberately infected 696 Guatemalan mental patients, prisoners, and hookers with syphilis in order to test the effectiveness of penicillin. In some instances, we had guys actually sleep with infected prostitutes in order to contract the disease. Those less fortunate had it injected straight into their veins. Talk about getting all the grief and none of the gravy. They must have drawn the short straws.

The doctor who headed this experiment, Dr. John Cutler, was also involved in the Tuskegee study in the 1960s, in which unwitting dark people were again injected with syphilis, this time right here at home. We can�t waste all of our bounty on foreign soil. Here was clearly a man of vision, a man who was totally unwilling to let old-fashioned concepts of morality get in the way of his passion for infecting people with VD. Do you think the Postal Service will give him a stamp? No. They reserve that honor for goody two-shoes types like Jonas Salk, the cowards.

You may be wondering, why didn�t they just test penicillin on willing volunteers who had already contracted syphilis, right? But that�s missing the point. The US just can�t resist screwing over dark-skinned poor people. Ask any Central American, they�ll tell you. If you take that part out of the equation, you take away all the fun. Curing syphilis was the broccoli; fucking with brown people was the ice cream. This kind of thing should be automatic knowledge to any sentient American in 2010. The fact that we have a black president doesn�t change the general principle. See Pakistan, Drone Strikes, Obama Administration, 2010 �

Well, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have dutifully condemned the experiments and apologized. I�m sure it wasn�t difficult. Just another day in the life of an American official. The ability to mouth phony apologies is a necessary prerequisite to high office in this land. It�s just as important as pretending to be happily married or pretending to believe in God. It goes with the job. Besides, the apology is already pre-written. All you have to do is replace �Afghan civilian� and �errant missile strike� with �Guatemalan mental patient� and �syphilis� and you�re half way home. You give a statement, make a phone call or two, promise to conduct a full and thorough investigation, and then it�s off to lunch with Robert Gates to figure out a way to start a war with Iran.

The Guatemalans are already clamoring for compensation, but the US isn�t making any promises. I swear, it�s all about the money with those people. We should stand firm on this one and draw the line. It�s not like we ever did anything really bad to them, like, say, overthrow their government and impose a military dictatorship on them, right?

Turns out the Greeks had a word for what ails the Republican Party�� Anosognosia. To explore this disorder on its home turf, go to a Tea Party rally armed with official budget figures, agreed upon by economists of both the Keynesian and the Friedman schools, which prove beyond the shadow of a mathematical doubt that the Republicans are, historically, the party of high deficits. Now try to convince any random demonstrator of this simple historical fact.

The thing can�t be done, because the poor devil suffers from anosognosia. It is what allows him to cry out �Keep your government hands off my Medicare� without his head exploding.

Here�s a dictionary definition of what keeps his head together:

Anosognosia is a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability.

For more, go here.

First, appearances are everything. To be a good Republican you have to look like a good Republican. Which is not so easy these days. It used to be that a good Republican looked like a small-town banker � an agreeable Kiwanian with a prosperous paunch, dressed in a dark gray suit, a white shirt and a red tie drawn at the neck into a carefully constructed knot. If he had an adventurous bent, the banker might essay a triangular Windsor knot. Winter or summer, he always wore a hat.

The Windsor knot, by the way, is said to have originated with the Duke of Windsor, whose only other contribution to the world was to demonstrate just how thin royal blood could get. Before the war started, the newly minted Duke and Duchess made nice with the Nazis on one of their endless trips to nowhere, and were eventually shuffled off to the Bahamas by an exasperated British government. The Duke spent the war years perfecting his knot and studying the tango. Had he been an American citizen, there is no doubt the Duke would have been a Republican.

Republican women used to look like the banker�s wife, who was considered a style trendsetter and a model of sensible, plump American womanhood. She subscribed to family values before the phrase was invented. She was chairwoman of the annual bake-off fund-raiser for the hospital and wore a silver fox stole in the winter. She also wore a hat with some sort of bird feather in it and thought New York City was the home of the Devil. She was an enthusiastic Republican because her husband was an enthusiastic Republican. That�s all there was to it. She would have thought the Tea Party was inhabited by dangerous lunatics with terrible manners, sort of like the Hell�s Angels.

But all that was a long time ago, before everything got so confusing. Now where does a good Republican look for inspiration and guidance? Where once there was Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater and Dwight Eisenhower, all earnest and boring and utterly unsurprising, now we have John McCain, Michelle Bachmann, John Boehner, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich? Oh, what a rich choice! But first�

No matter how you knot your tie, as a good Republican you will want to keep your eye on the donut. You will want to embrace the essence of Republicanism, the spirit of conservatism; you must long for the way things used to be, or at least say you do, before Big Government came along and ruined everything. You will want to have at hand a few phrases about fiscal responsibility, self-reliance and the American Way, even if you don�t quite know what the American Way is. If you happen to have one of the old GOP handbooks, go through it and cross out Communism wherever you see it and substitute Terrorism with a capital T. Cross out Roosevelt and insert Obama. Cross out New Deal and replace it with Bad Deal. Make sure you�ve got the words of the �Pledge of Allegiance� and �God Bless America� down pat and memorize the First Amendment.

Now you�re ready to adopt the GOP style that suits you. Which do you like best? Boehner or Bachmann, Palin or Gingrich? And don�t forget the Old Pilot. Maybe the bolts have popped out of his wings but he�s still flying the plane, more or less. How about Orrin Hatch? Now there�s a guy knows how to knot a tie. He can do it one-handed while the other hand is busy wielding the scalpel. How about Mitch McConnell? Isn�t he cuddly cute? Nobody said this was going to be an easy choice.

Perhaps it would be easier to make a selection from a list of GOP adjectives and construct your very own Republican persona. Here are a few descriptive words to help you: smug, hypocritical, selfish, greedy, hawkish, myopic, negative, reckless, stupid.

And, finally, let�s not forget wrong.

It�s worth reading Matt Taibbi�s whole article in Rolling Stone on the tea party. This tiny sample contains a particularly fine specimen of snark � one that will ring true to anyone who has attempted communication with these muddled patriots.

Hardcore young libertarians like Koch � the kind of people who were outside the tent during the elder Paul�s presidential run in 2008 � cared enough about the issues to jump off the younger Paul�s bandwagon when he cozied up to the Republican Party establishment. But it isn�t young intellectuals like Koch who will usher Paul into the U.S. Senate in the general election; it�s those huge crowds of pissed-off old people who dig Sarah Palin and Fox News and call themselves Tea Partiers. And those people really don�t pay attention to specifics too much. Like dogs, they listen to tone of voice and emotional attitude.