Good Reading for a Rainy Day

or even an unseasonably hot day:

Maybe we will all be lucky and the Kochs and Cato will bump each other off:

Lately, however, Cato has not been sufficiently political for the Koch boys, who want to mesh its policy work directly into their Republican machine. Indeed, despite taking some $30 million in funding from the Kochs, Cato's president, Ed Crane now insists that this toy is not theirs, but a wholly-independent component of the greater laissez-faire cause.

_____

It is almost a requirement these days that sociopaths become "conservative" politicians.

I haven't read Dean's book, so the notion of "double highs" is new to me. It is an interesting concept:

There is, however, another—and exceptional—type of authoritarian. When testing social dominators, scientists noticed an incomparable situation: They occasionally found persons who garnered high scores for their cold, calculating dominance, yet also gained high scores on the tests for submissive followers. How, it was asked, could the same person test high on both scales, since these traits are seemingly inconsistent? Social scientists labeled these people “Double Highs” because of their high scores on both testing scales.

Altemeyer solved this conundrum when he found that these Double Highs relate to the questions regarding submission not by considering how they themselves submit to others, but rather how others submit to them. They simply see the world as a place where they are always in charge.

_____

Obama is not the "lesser of two evils" or even the "evil of two lessers." He is simply more effective in getting evil policies implemented by undercutting traditional Democratic Party and even American values.

link

Obama has protected these Wall Streeters from what should be the most righteous wrath of Black folks. To take a riff from Shakespeare’s Othello, “Obama has done Wall Street a great service, and they know it.” He has proven to be fantastically effective at serving the Supremely Evil. Don’t you dare call him the Lesser.

He is the More Effective Evil because Black Folks – historically, the most progressive cohort in the United States – and Liberals, and even lots of folks that call themselves Marxists, let him get away murder! Yet, people still insist on calling him a Lesser Evil, while he drives a stake through Due Process of Law.

I have not spoken much about the second half of Obama’s first term in office. That is the period when the Left generally becomes disgusted with what they call his excessive “compromises” and “cave-ins” to Republicans. But that is a profoundly wrong reading of reality. Obama was simply continuing down his own Road to Austerity – the one he, himself, had initiated before even taking office. The only person caving in and compromising to the Republicans, was the Obama that many of YOU made up in your heads.
The real Obama was the initiator of this Austerity nightmare – a nightmare scripted on Wall Street, which provided the core of Obama’s policy team from the very beginning. That’s why Obama’s so-called Financial Reform was so diligent in making sure that Derivatives were virtually untouched.