In A Nutshell

Feb 1st, 2013

Quote Of The Day

Jan 31st, 2013

"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes."

-- William Gibson

The Truth Finally Gets Its Pants On...

Jan 31st, 2013
3:00 pm CST

Mark Twain was right...

As is always, depressingly the case, it took the truth a lot longer to get its pants on before a lie went around the world...


NO, Obama is NOT tearing down Reagan's "childhood home" to "put up a parking lot."

Quote Of The Day

Jan 17th, 2013

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."

-- Carl Sagan

Quote Of The Day

Jan 15th, 2013

My, how things have changed...

"I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."

-- Karl T. Frederick, head of the National Rifle Association in 1934

In A Nutshell

Jan 15th, 2013

Image via

Calling For Rational Gun Control Is Not A Secret Code

Jan 14th, 2013
by F. Grey Parker

When I argue that we must close the so-called ‘gun show loophole’ and subject every gun sale to the same rigorous background checks, it is NOT secret code for ‘I want the government to take your guns.’

When I suggest that every firearm sold should be titled and insured for liability in the same way that automobiles are, it is NOT secret code for ‘I want the government to take your guns.’

Quote Of The Day

Jan 14th, 2013

"Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him."

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Worth A Thousand Words

Jan 14th, 2013

Image Via

Worth 1000 Words - Obama Re-Election Edition

Nov 7, 2012

Sleep tight, kids.

A Final Thought

Nov 5th, 2012

Image Via

Look, everyone who knows me knows where I stand.

I've blogged, I've argued, I've pleaded and I've explained.

I've fought steadily for what are basic progressive principles.

I slept in Zuccotti Park Liberty Square, for Christ's sakes.

That said, I've also backed many former GOP positions for years such as the health care mandate.

Watching the very party which birthed that fine idea use every means at their disposal to popularly pervert it into some allegedly "socialist scheme" is a testament to just how close our nation might be to the very end of a truthful exercise in Republican Democracy.

We are, as I have probably said often enough, through the looking glass.

After writing about politics nearly full time here at the Hand for three years, I don't have a lot to add.

I will simply say this...

Conflating the two parties, much as some very smart people I know insist upon it, is some seriously smug, destructive, self-serving and elitist horseshit.

I know many good Republicans.

For the most part, they're all smart enough not to be voting for the Republican Party this time around.

The reason for this is simple and obvious;

The contemporary GOP is a den of festering proto-Fascism in thrall to Dominionists and currying favor with tyrants who would have us all grovel while giving thanks for the privilege of dying at work punching holes in sheet metal for slave wages.

Period.

Obama is still a deeply flawed President, but he possesses greatness and has achieved much.

Romney is still a sociopath.

We haven't recovered enough from the Imperial trappings claimed during the Bush years to give the highest office in this country to a man so plainly monstrous.

There you have it.

I'm voting tomorrow and every other citizen should, too.

It's not a privilege.

It is my right.

It's also my responsibility.

The future of this nation depends greatly on the outcome of this election.

Whether or not, or perhaps in what manner, I continue this site remains to be seen.

See you on the other side.

-- Grey

The Mittiot Cometh

Nov, 1st 2012

There really has never been a candidate like this. For anyone to say that they know what he truly believes is sheer lunacy. Chait is right:

"The different iterations of his career differ so wildly, yet comport so perfectly with his political ambitions of the moment, that it is simply impossible to separate his panders from his actual beliefs, the means from the ends."

The following video drives home the point in a fashion that would be hilarious were the stakes not so damn high. 

Via

Wake Up. There's A Connection.

Nov 1st, 2012

Higher top marginal tax rates correspond to higher GDP and they always have.

Worth Repeating

Nov 1st, 2012

Image via

"If the 1994 or 2003 version of Mitt Romney were running for president, I may well have voted for him..."
-- New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg from his just released endorsement of President Obama

Mitt Watch: What Sandy Tells Us About The Candidate And His Party

Oct 31st, 2012

UPDATE 4pm CST 11/1/12: In this piece, I made mention of Gov. Christie's very public praise of the President's management of the disaster response. The GOP has begun to savage him for it. That didn't take long.

Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath are perfectly legitimate political issues. That anyone would argue otherwise is ridiculous.

Chait puts it best:

"What you are going to see over the next week is an overt effort by Democrats to politicize the issue of disaster response. They're right to do it. Conservatives are already complaining about this, but the attempt to wall disaster response off from politics in the aftermath of a disaster is an attempt to insulate Republicans from the consequences of their policies."

The GOP has directly targeted our national disaster response mechanisms, having gone so far as to threaten a total government shutdown last year while seeking a nearly forty percent cut to first responders. The outright elimination of FEMA has become a central position among the party's leadership.

Worth Repeating

Oct 26th, 2012
Note: I have changed the "Quote of the Day" to "Worth Repeating." Daily posting has become difficult do to my ongoing issues with my eyesight. Thank you. -- Grey

"Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits."

-- Thomas Jefferson

Quote Of The Day

Oct 17th, 2012

"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction."

-- Erich Fromm

Quote Of The Day - Here And Now Edition

Oct 15th, 2012

Image via

"Walsh is an insecure bully who needs to point out that Duckworth is more of a woman than he is to overcome the fact that she's also more of a man than he is."

-- Columnist Edward McClelland on the notorious Rep. Joe Walsh (deadbeat dad, lunatic) and his tactics against his challenger, Tammy Duckworth (war veteran who lost both legs in an act of heroism).

Quote Of The Day

Oct 14th, 2012

"You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance."

-- W. Somerset Maugham

Bringing Back The Journeymen

Oct 14th, 2012

Responding to a personal charge in Shawn Gude's interesting if overly floral argument on how we might reach "full employment" and what that would actually mean for the American worker's relationship with management, Matt Yglesias writes:

Much as consistently applied full employment policies will achieve many liberatory aims without employing especially radical means, centrist elites ought to consider that matching workers with in-demand job skills really ought to be the kind of thing a market economy can do reasonably well. Rather than skills-mismatch explaining high unemployment, it's the absence of full employment that explains skills-mismatch. If you want workers to learn to do something, you try to teach them to do it and if necessary pay them more money. 

Long story short: Full employment policies are great and we ought to be demanding them from our macroeconomic stabilization policymakers rather than accepting excuses about how it's hard. 

When the U.S. was actually creating jobs in far greater abundance, it was due neither to a massive distribution of diplomas nor to the stimulative effects of public spending alone; it was because job growth was largely a product of on the job training.

Indeed, what has happened to the journeyman path? One of the repeated explanations offered by our elites in explaining the stagnant job numbers is that we just don't have a qualified workforce for as many as three million open positions. What's never discussed is the fact that the managers who cannot fill these positions always blame someone else for the situation.

Everyone knows that the current metrics in our tax code richly reward outsourcing and off-shoring. Recent attempts to reverse these policies were, of course, filibustered by the GOP. In part, this opposition might be because we simply have to sweeten the pot enough for the lobbyists to get other marching orders. If our central policy makers were proposing benefits even a fraction as attractive as those received by, oh say, our petrol giants, a movement towards fuller employment might have more traction.

The again, maybe not. Gude's arguments key off of a radical 2010 essay written by Micael Kalecki the implications of which demand that we ask whether or not America's private power brokers aren't perfectly happy with the way things are?

It's not necessarily that macroeconomic policy isn't addressing this, as Yglesias argues. It's an ugly truth but the general stagnancy in our labor force and the desperation it has spawned are regarded as plainly beneficial to management.