Kvatch's Kocktail Hour - The AT&Tini

Yes my friends it's been quite a while since our last 'Kocktail Hour', but today we have to lift our glasses to a group that never met a lobbyist they didn't like, for whom no payoff is too small, and who have no trouble throwing a posh soirée for those lucky lawmakers who granted them immunity.

So here's to the Telcos!

The AT&Tini

— 2 oz. Bombay Sapphire Gin
— Hint of vermouth
— A float of Cristal

Cost: 1 Billion Dollars!

TAGS: Kvatch, satire, AT&T, Lobbying

Milestone

We've hit 100,000 visits!

Not much by big blog standards I know, but still... it makes us happy. The unruly mob would like to thank each and every one who opted to click on our humble site. We know how many quality sites there are out there, and how hard it is to visit a fraction of them. So it means a lot to us that you want to hang out with us.

Byt the way, here's the proof:


UPDATE: I don't see a link to us there, but sitemeter says that the 100,000the visitor was referred here from this YouTube video:

NOFX - Wolves in Wolves Clothing

(So be it. You know it totally fits.)

TAGS: Milestones

Authoritarianism Is A One Way Street

- Yep.
Read this story.

An account from the comments section of that story:

I was there! Just taking pics, but I decided to gtfo when somebody yelled 'GAS!!', and I saw a cop holding said gas canister.

Basically the protesters went into the street in front of the City & County building and the cops weren't keen on it, so they started lining up and telling everyone to get back on the sidewalk, at which point somebody hit the deck in
the street (pepper spray perhaps?) and a mob sort of formed from there. It was
about that point that I whipped out my camera and at the same time my boyfriend
and I both got shoved by a couple of riot cops for doing nothing more than
standing there. We would have moved if they said so, but you know Denver cops,
violence for no real reason. From there the protesters bolted across the park,
past the Seal Fountain, across Colfax and started heading down 15th. Some kid
pulled one of the road closed signs into the middle of the intersection of 15th
and Colfax and the mob made it about a block or two before the cops cut them off
and they sort of got cornered against a building. It was soon after that I heard
somebody yell gas and to run, so I joined a small herd of people in running
cause getting pics is one thing, getting gassed...not so keen on it.

Contrast that story, where the cops motivation is to keep the street open, with my eyewitness account of what happened on the 16th Street Mall earlier in the afternoon.

I was on the Mall Shuttle, heading down to Wyknoop where the "Big Tent" is located. Many powerbloggers like Kos, Greenwald, the crew from FireDogLake and so forth are down there and I wanted to see if I could catch any of them. Well, the Shuttle stopped and there was this huge ruckus.

Notice that the cops didn't pepper spray the hateful fundies. Nope they protected them, and let them block the Mall for a good 20 minutes! One person was arrested at this incident - and you guessed it, he wasn't one of the fundie whack jobs.

Also, after this pepper spray ruckus in front of the Civic Center, the cops asked RTD to shut down the Mall Shuttle for an extended period:

Police officials asked RTD to shut the 16th Street Mall bus shuttle service shortly after 7 p.m., said RTD spokesman Scott Reed. The mall service resumed
around 9:30 p.m

So it's abundantly clear to me that the cops interest was not the free flow of traffic.

If you wish to agitate or protest in accordance with the right wing agenda, no matter how extreme, you have the blessings of the authoritarians. If you wish to agitate or protest against that right wing, you get pepper sprayed and taken to jail.

Freedom of Speech - it's a one way street my friends.

TAGS: DNC, Protesters, Freedom Of Speech, Authoritarianism

Putting The 'Con' In Convention

As the Democrats meet in Denver to render unto Obama what is Obama's, ask yourself this question:

What is the god-damned point?

It's been over 50 years since there was a contested Democratic convention (even longer for the Republicans). And in that time, these scripted extravaganzas look more and more like award shows—Oscars for the politicians—a chance for our leaders to pat each other on the back and say to the electorate, "Look how f*cking awesome we are! Don't you just want to buy our brand of America?"

In reality though, modern nominating conventions are about two things and two things only: Boatloads of media exposure and unrestricted influence peddling. In fact, conventions are one of the few places left where access to the powerful (or the soon to be powerful) is available to anyone who can afford the price of admission. Why for a mere $250,000, a "sponsor" can buy their way into numerous private events, and for a cool $5M? VIP treatment, access to exclusive skyboxes, and an invitation to the host committee party.

In 2004, $250M was spent on the Republican and Democratic conventions, and although the price tag this election season may not approach that stratospheric number, keep in mind that almost $100M of the cost isn't the rich buying their way into the nominee's presence. It's the Feds using your tax dollars to put together the basics: The facilities, the security, and the infrastructure. That's right...even though there will be no floor fight, not the slightest chance of surprise in the outcome, you're paying a huge chunk of change just so corporations and well-heeled donors can legally get up close and personal with politicians who are supposed to have your concerns at heart!

Imagine all the great things we could do with that kind of money if we weren't wasting it on these glitzy spectacles. Now imagine that it will never, ever happen. Guess that's why it's called a 'Con'vention.

TAGS: Elections, DNC, RNC, Conventions

Until Something Ruder or Better Comes Along, Look At This

The Live streaming of protests, or whatever the hell might happen during the DNC in Denver's Civic Center Park.

TAGS: DNC, Civil Liberties, O No, There Goes Tokyo OH No GODZILLA!, Hey hey hey

Open Thread

Let's see, what's happened in the last 48 hours on the campaign trail:

McCain can't remember how many houses he has (at last count, through Cindy, he has 12)

To be rich in McCain's book, you have to make over $5 million per year (through Cindy, he's worth over $100 million)

The reduction in troops in Iraq McCain railed against will happen, with an agreement inked by his buddy George W. to pull troops out by 2011.

McCain's rejection of additional troops in Afghanistan lost out to his buddy George W. who ordered an additional 11,000 sent there ASAP.

And Denver will be plugged up tightly all week next week for the DNC. I'd have bought a DNC bike jersy today but wasn't willing to pay the $60 it cost.

Let us thread openly and revel in McCain's campaign jumping the shark.
TAGS: McCain Campaign, 12 Houses, $4.9 Mil/Year is Middle Class, Open Thread

A Few Campaign Notes For The Obama Campaign

Dear David Plouffe -

Since I know you read my blog religiously and can't wait to hear what my opinion is about how to run BO's campaign, I thought I better get to it and give you my invaluable insight about what you should have on your to-do list between now and the end of the Convention.

- Announce the VP candidate on Thursday afternoon, say around 2 or 3 Eeastern time. You'll dominate the news cycle through Friday night and into Saturday when all the media is going to be congratulating themselves on how wonderful they are at the media kick-off in Denver at Elitch's. After that it's "All Convention All The Time" mode, and all together you'd end up with about 7 days of free national media.

- And about the VP. No sitting Senators, please. Biden, Bayh and Clinton all need to be right where they are in the Senate. You need all the Dem senators and more to be able to actually execute any actual governing. And if you're still really about change, dump the white dudes and I still think you should pick a woman, and there are two pretty good ones available.

- People have mentioned Sibelius, but how about Janet Napolitano? The fact that since she used to be a US Attorney General and was the lawyer for Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas SCOTUS nomination farce, she would be perfect in the OVP to help clean up whatever land mines Cheney has left, not to mention a very good overseer to help clean up the Department of Justice. She has the added benefit of acting like a dagger through McCain's Arizona heart; he'd lose his home state if you picked her.

-Speaking of political daggers through hearts; enough of this bi-partisan/post-partisan talk. Are you frikking DUMB? Listen to me, at a time when 75-80% of people are saying "country going in wrong direction" you need to forcefully REPUDIATE these jerks who have lead us to where we are. All you've got to do is articulate what the people are thinking. It goes kinda like this:

"Damn, things suck, particularly my finances. The Bush administration and it's cronies have damn near wrecked the country by spending all this money on that dumb war, which they lied about to get us over there. And they want MORE of it with Iran? They're probably lying about THAT too.

They need to GO! Their policies stink and have gotten us in this fucking debt-hole with the Chinese and not to mention the shitty Oil Countries. Might as well buy milk to drive your car; same goddamn price per gallon and it's hard to afford either."

So David, understanding what every day people are thinking, do you think that people REALLY want to hear about BI-FUCKING-PARTISANSHIP? No way. People don't want these Republican clowns anywhere near their lives. You don't need to get all nuance-y and professor-ish with the people. To get the people totally on your side just call it what it is. For instance:

• When McCain/Media throws out that "Obama ain't quite 'Merkan" business, you respond with "McCain is a grumpy old man, who doesn't mind killing the children YOU send to Iraq to protect his oil buddies. He doesn't mind doing it at all, and that makes me sick."
• When McCain/Media freaks out because you picked somebody who is not a sitting senator and they start throwing around "inexperience," you respond with "Yeah, look where Bush and your so-called experience got us - in the toilet, buddy, and everybody knows it."

All in all David, I'm just saying why don't you START the fights? Given McCain, Rove and the Media conditions, you're gonna end up fighting anyway, whether Obama likes it or not, so you may as well control the turf. And every fight needs to contain the element "McCain = Bush." It makes McCain so mad, he'll eventually lose his cool in public and everyone will go "Yep - grumpy old war pig. No Way."

So get busy and get with it.

TAGS: 2008 Campaign, Obama, David Plouffe, Put yer dukes up, Republican thugs!

FOX Accidentally Tells The Truth

...Woman Reports Georgian Aggression

FOX "news" was trying to catapult the propaganda of Russian aggression with an interview of a 12-year-old girl from the San Francisco area and her mother, who were caught in the war zone. Check out the reaction from the FOX bobblehead when they lay the blame squarely on Georgia's Prime Minister Mikheil Saakashvili.

12 Year Old Girl Tells the Truth about Georgia

In the description of this vid at YouTube it says that FOX had just come off a commercial break two minutes earlier. As soon as the woman puts the blame for the war on Georgia, not Russia there's a sudden and urgent need for another break. After the break the woman is allowed only 30 seconds to complete her thought. That's fair and balanced for ya'.

h/t Global Research.ca

TAGS: FOX "news", Media Bias, War In Georgia

More Kool-Aid from the Right

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen"
Hebrews 11:1, King James Bible

I've mentioned faith a number of times in my discussions of the Right, generally followed by a hyphen and the word "based." The Right takes a good deal of their ideology on faith: Drilling brings down prices. Government is bad. We are God's country. But little does the Right take on faith to a greater degree than the mantra, "Tax cuts create jobs."

I beg to differ and there is objective evidence called history. Let's start with some data from the Economic Policy Institute.

In fact, employment has dropped following tax cuts every time they've been cut. Here's Nosy's hypothesis: Taxes are always immediately spent by the Government and mostly domestically. Result is that people are employed by the Government (estimate is that a billion in Government spending is 32,000 jobs), they spend money to employ people elsewhere, the money is re-injected into the economy and transformed into things like roads and bridges (that don't fall in for lack of maintenance).

On the other hand, cutting taxes shrinks Government (the real reason the Right loves tax cuts so much). Fewer people earn wages, more Wal-Marts get built to provide more Chinese goods to the underpaid and the economy generally suffers.

If you also take it on faith that Government is by definition bad, you probably don't mind that jobs are lost when the Government loses revenue. Nothing I can do about it except, again, refer you to Hebrews.

TAGS: Taxes, Employment, Conventional Wisdom, Republican Lies

If It's Such a God-Damned Good Idea....

...then why didn't it work?

According to BO (Big Oil) and the Religious Right (Faith-Based economics, among others), drilling domestic supplies wherever they may be found is going to save us from all having to drive Priuses (and thereby bankrupting Detroit who can't figure out how to get 40 MPG). Well, there happens to be a test case and guess what, I'm living in it.

Colorado, it seems, gets very nearly all of its oil from domestic production and Canada. You would think, given the press McCain and Big Oil are giving the potential for vast reductions of the price of oil price through drilling everywhere and adding supply equal to 1% of US demand to the world market, that Colorado fuel would be dirt cheap. After all, the oil we're refining at Suncor in Commerce City comes from here, it's domestic supply (with a nod to Sad's Canadianness). Well, during the great oil price runup, we weren't much below the national average, despite the luxury of not having to import our oil (again with a nod to our neighbors to the north). Here in Denver we were a few cents below the national average, probably because the refinery is ten miles from here and transportation costs are very low but nothing to compare with the promises BO (Big Oil) McCain promises us if we'd only do the 'Murkan thing and drill what we have. Aspen and Summit County blew the national averages away with their $4+ prices for regular.

Turns out his common sense is just another way of saying conventional wisdom. Once the oil produced at the expense of our beaches and wilderness goes into the Big Bathtub, as does ours and Canada's, the price isn't all that much affected by a piddling increase in domestic production.

Like tax increases costing jobs, this right-wing hypothesis, one repeated so often it's accepted more places than the Gospel of Mark, doesn't survive contact with reality.
TAGS: Big Oil, McCain, Reality Check, Domestic Production

Nothing Wrong, Eh?

While chatting in the studio with Olympics host Bob Costas, President Bush had the temerity to object to Costas's premise that our country has it's own problems (h/t AmerikaGulag, Think Progress has the video).

COSTAS: This past week, you restated America’s fundamental differences with China. But given China’s growing strength, and America’s own problems, realistically, how much leverage does the U.S. have here?

BUSH: First of all, I don’t see America having problems. I see America as a nation that is a world leader that has got great values.

Today I walked through my local grocery store and I saw a woman at the customer service counter talking about how tight money had gotten for her and her family. As I passed out of earshot the last thing I heard her say was, "I'm one of the assholes with the adjustable rate mortgages."

After hearing each of these statements a chill went up my spine. I think it's clear which of these two people are the asshole. It's not the lady with the ARM. It's the man the American people have allowed to tell them nothing is wrong for eight years while he set about the task of making sure that for most Americans, lots of things are wrong.

So much so that what it means to be an American has changed. That's what Bob Costas was trying to tell the President. He was trying to tell him that the world is gathering for fun and games in a country that commits outrageous atrocities routinely while our deranged "friend" Putin sent his army to rough up one of it's democratic neighbors and we can't really say anything to either of them, can we? That's what "America's own problems" means.

TAGS: President Bush, Economy, Human Rights, Russia

Oil Arguments

To drill, or not to drill, that is the question that preoccupies us....

Okay, I left a few Pounds at Shakspeare's birthplace not long ago so I claim the right to parody the Bard. It seems at this point in time that our enemy McCain is drubbing our friend Obama on the question of whether to drill remaining domestic oil reserves. On the surface (about the deepest most Americans go), it seems like a great idea. I mean, if we're getting it from off the coast of Florida, it's domestic, right? It's ours, right? We own it and we should be using it, right?

Well, to say that drilling Alaska and Florida would increase domestic supplies is correct, somewhat. To claim we would benefit disproportionately from it belies either an ignorance of world oil markets or a will to mislead. Or both.

Oil is sold on a world market. Crude currently delivered from oilfields in Alaska or Texas or Colorado costs just as much as crude delivered from the Middle East (again misleading - we get only a small fraction of our oil from the Middle East). What would happen if you could magically increase production of Prudhoe Bay? Would American gas prices suddenly decrease vastly due to the increase in domestic supply?

No. Some of the oil that was currently being delivered to the US could now go to pollute the Olympic air over Beijing or to accelerate climate change but the price of oil would not change appreciably. Oil is traded on a world market. Prices depend on world supply and demand, hence a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico raises prices in Europe although their supplies are not affected. On the supply side, increasing production through drilling more oil would simply make more world supply available, lowering prices in China and leading to more inefficient use of it in US SUVs. The company who wins the bid for the field owns the oil. They will sell it to the refiner who bids highest, be they in Houston or Hamburg. And we will see little to no benefit from the increased oil production since by the time the wells would come into production, demand would have increased more than enough to offset the increased supply.

Some day we will drill the ANWAR. Some day the oil fields off Florida will be exploited. We have to face the inevitability of that. Our goal should not be to protect the fields at all cost but, as Obama has suggested, to use the fields as bargaining power to get what we want. When Obama proposes allowing drilling as a part of a comprehensive energy package, he's being smart. Unfortunately not many of his countrymen appreciate reasoning these days or McCain would be running about the same numbers as Bush's popularity.

A bit more (truth, in short suply these days) about the dreaded tire gauge (should be measuring the pressure on McCain's Brain):

From Popular Mechanics:

The average consumer could improve gas mileage by 3.3 percent by simply keeping his tires inflated to the proper pressure. For the average driver in the U.S. and his 15-gal. fuel tank, that's a savings of about $2.00 on every fill-up. Figure in the increased tire life from those correct pressures, and this is beginning to add up to a handy sum. Of course, if you—or your mechanic—have been diligent about keeping tire pressures set correctly, you won't save anything, which sounds like rewarding lazy people and penalizing the careful ones to me. But that's life....

According to the Department of Energy, underinflated tires alone cost the country more than 1.25 billion gal. of gasoline annually—roughly 1 percent of the total consumption of 142 billion gal. According to the Annual Energy Outlook 2007, published by the Energy Information Administration, offshore drilling would increase domestic production of crude oil by only about 1 percent.

We opened this discussion with Sen. Obama's assertion that we can offset the need to reopen offshore drilling—and save money at the pump—by keeping our tires inflated properly. He's right

TAGS: Big Oil, Tire Gauges, Energy Policy, ANWAR