dumb and dumber -- no, dumber than that. a lot

[realthog]

Wanna know the breathless latest about Sarah Palin's interview with Glen Beck? Simon Maloy's got the poop, if you can swallow it, on the excellent Media Matters:

I'm watching the Glenn Beck interview of Sarah Palin, and it's really leaving me speechless that two people who are so woefully and determinedly uninformed have such an impact on the national discourse.

Beck just asked Palin if she'd heard about the Federal Reserve's record profits for last year, and then bemoaned that "nobody's having hearings on the Fed, nobody is looking for a windfall profit tax on the Fed, we can't even open the Fed's books." Palin responded by thanking Beck for "bringing this to light," adding: "I don't know anybody else who is."

There's a very simple reason why no one else is talking about taxing the Fed's profits or having hearings or even discussing this -- because people who care to know what they're talking about already know that 100 percent of the Fed's profits go to the Treasury. Every single cent. There is no talk of a windfall profits tax because it's already effectively at 100 percent.

Indeed, so wonderful are our rightwing media and punditocracy that FOX News is largely ignoring the earthquake disaster in Haiti, Pat Robertson is blaming the disaster on the Haitians themselves for incurring the wrath of God (they made a literal pact with the Devil, you see, in order to get rid of their French overlords), and Rush Limbaugh is advocating that none of us send any aid donations because ". . . we've already donated to Haiti. It's called the US income tax" -- part of perhaps the most disgusting piece of propaganda in billionaire Scumbaugh's long career of racist, neo-Nazi hatemongering.

I subscribe, for research reasons, to a bundle of faux-Christian rightwing organizations as well as a few more moderate ones. Today I've been bombarded with exhortations to donate funds by appallingly godless secular organizations (e.g., Alternet, MoveOn, Care2, Color of Change) and by out-and-out accursed rationalist/atheist ones (notably the Center for Inquiry, which has a subdivision, SHARE, precisely to funnel funds to Medecins sans Frontieres in emergencies like this). Moderate sites (e.g., Religion Dispatches) are at least putting links online to the aid charities.

Meanwhile, however, from the Christian rightists (e.g., the AFA, Focus on the Family, OneNewsNow) there's been an absolute bloody deafening silence. I find it impossible to reconcile this with their repeatedly bellowed claims that by definition atheists and agnostics -- indeed, anyone outside their own particular little cult -- lack the very possibility of a moral compass. Are they themselves so entirely devoid of moral values that they cannot recognize a correct course of action when it's standing there right in front of them?

By contrast, those disgusting secular degenerates at The Nation have mounted a useful resource page for those seeking the best way to send funds: it's here.

ETA: I'm not a huge Keith Olbermann fan, but sometimes -- as in this comment on the Robertson/Limbaugh obscenities -- he hits the nail right on the head.

Comments

[calizen.livejournal.com]

Good heavens! And I thought California schools were bad!

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Oh, they're worse. The ongoing bitter joke in the state is "At least our schools are better than Mississippi's!" It's bad enough that every damn year, the school finance budget is declared unconstitutional because the kids in overwhelmingly white and privileged areas such as Highland Park and University Park get so much more money per capita than the kids in the Rio Grande Valley. (Highland Park and University Park are cities that are completely surrounded by Dallas, but keep themselves separate in the way that Beverly Hills is separate from Los Angeles. It's for the same reason, too: among other factors, this way the Highland Park schools don't become part of the Dallas system, with the horrors of Highland Park's elite snowflakes having to go to the same schools as the kids of the lawn crew.) What's worse is that we have a system where every little podunk town in the state has its own "Independent School District", so half of that money gets sopped up in administration. (The Dallas ISD, for instance, is notorious for getting a new supervisor every few years, and s/he brings in nothing but paid toadies who are then set with a job for life. I won't even get into the horrors in Houston.)

The really sad part is that any efforts to improve the situation are immediately scuttled thanks to one pet obsession: high school football. Several times in the last thirty years, the Texas Legislature has offered proposals to combine all of those ISDs into six mega-districts and save millions in administrative costs. Every time this happens, the people who like things just the way they are start squawking "So how will this affect high school football?" Immediately, every legislator in Austin is overloaded with incoherent and angry calls from Jukes and Kallikaks screaming that they'll kill everyone in Austin if anyone even thinks of messing with high school football programs, and the legislators back off. I have to admit that it's a great system, especially for producing more students whose concern for education in the state begins and ends with sports programs. (I myself went to a high school in Lewisville, a hellpit just north of Dallas, where the head football coach was making $60k at a time when the head English teacher was making $15k. It's only gotten much worse since I escaped in 1984: I'm regularly hit up to contribute money to allow teachers to buy essential school supplies, while the district pumps well over a million dollars per year into its high school and middle school football programs.)