Month: September 2010

Trainwreck Strategery

by digby

Oh Dear God. We are so screwed. I can’t make heads nor tails out of this so-called strategy on the Bush tax cuts, no matter which way you slice it. But one thing seems obvious to me: the glee over Boehner speaking out of turn is wildly overblown. If they decide not to hold a vote in the House, his comments give cover to those GOP candidates in districts where extending the cuts is unpopular and the rest of them “holding the line” gives cover to those in conservative districts who want to extend them. And holding a vote will expose all those cowardly deficit Blue Dogs who run yipping into the corner with their tails between their legs whenever they are faced with any right wing opposition at all, so I doubt very much we’d see one. (This is a particularly egregious case since they all like to preen and pose about fiscal responsibility.) So, as I said, there’s no margin in trying to be “strategic” on this since the Democrats don’t have a good play except to do the right thing.

Certainly,whatever they decide to do, Democrats should not try to get too fine with this. They aren’t just bad at 11 dimensional chess, they can’t even play checkers. They should just make the right arguments to their constituents and leave it to Ben Nelson to filibuster everything.

Greg Sargent writes today that the Republicans are saying that they think they win if any discussion of taxes come up at all. Even the sound of the word is toxic:

After talking to strategists involved in charting the GOP’s midterm game plan, I’m convinced the answer is this: Republicans are gambling that any argument about taxes — details aside — feeds the larger story they’re trying to tell, about a Democratic majority that has gone off the rails with spending and government overreach, with nothing to show for it.

I happen to know that Democratic strategists agree with them. I wrote about it last week:

Poor Greg Sargent is trying valiantly every day to show that the Democrats don’t have to back off their promise to let the Bush tax cuts expire. He’s got the data, he’s got the arguments, he’s got everything you need to show that the majority of Americans, including most of the vaunted independents, aren’t losing any sleep over the wealthiest one percent having to kick in a few more bucks in taxes.

But I think Gregg is missing the reason the Democrats are doing this. It’s not that they think the people are against it. They see the numbers. They are afraid of even having a conversation in which the subject is raised. The logic is that if the word “taxes” even come up in the debate at all, Democrats will lose.

I happen to know that candidates are getting this advice from DC strategists, and many of them are rushing to take this issue off the table. They truly believe they will lose if they don’t back tax cuts for millionaires even as they are being hammered on deficits. I think we can see where this all leads, can’t you?

As I said before, if progressive taxation is now a dead issue like gun control and the death penalty then there’s nothing more to argue about. It’s over.

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Barbour’s Ole Miss-takes

by digby

I think the boldest rewriting of history I’ve heard recently (and gawd knows I’ve been hearing a lot of it) is Haley Barbour’s contention that it was the Republicans working for Nixon in the south who led the way on civil rights. A generous reading of that fantasy would say that means the people who enacted the Southern Strategy feel culpable for their opportunistic race based politics and are trying to assuage their guilt. (A less generous reading would say they are just liars.)

But this story provides a fascinating glimpse into the reality that the deluded guilt ridden or fantastic liar Barbour is unable or unwilling to admit. Barbour claimed to recall a black student at Ole Miss in the late 60s who was so successfully integrated that nobody even gave it a second thought. They were so friendly, she shared her notes with him:

“When I became a Republican in the late ’60s, in my state and probably some other Southern states the hard right were all Democrats,” he said. “They didn’t want to have Republicans because, in their words, ‘It split the white vote.’ And young people were more likely to be Republicans than our grandparents.”

That’s when he brought up Bailey.

He said she was “a very nice girl” who “happened to be an African-American, and, God bless her, she let me copy her notes the whole time. And since I was not prone to go to class every day, I considered it a great — it was a great thing, it was just — there was nothing to it. If she remembers it, I would be surprised. She was just another student. I was the student next to her.”

Bailey, reached by phone, reacted to Barbour’s story with surprise that bordered on confusion.

“I don’t remember him at all, no, because during that time that certainly wasn’t a pleasant experience for me,” she said. “My interactions with white people were very, very limited. Very, very few reached out at all.”

Bailey is now the principal of an elementary school in Beaverton, Ore. While she may have seemed like just another student to Barbour, history hasn’t viewed her that way. For her role in the civil rights movement, she was inducted into the Ole Miss Alumni Hall of Fame and has a scholarship named after her.

She’s sometimes asked to speak to groups about her experience. Her recollections are filled with details of pain, humiliation, isolation and courage.

She left Mississippi at 24, following her brother to the more liberal Pacific Northwest. It seemed beautiful and welcoming. She worked in Seattle, and eventually was recruited to Oregon. She got a master’s degree, began a doctoral program.

She’d go back to Mississippi to visit her parents. Her father was a prominent local civil rights leader who didn’t share Barbour’s view of Republicans as enlightened on the issue. Both her parents are deceased.

Barbour left Ole Miss before he finished his bachelor’s degree to work for the Nixon campaign, then came back to earn his law degree. Bailey said she finished her undergraduate degree in three years, not because she was a great student, but because she wanted to get out of Oxford, Miss., as fast as she could.

She recalled dancing in Oxford Square once with another black student at a school celebration when a crowd of whites began pelting them with coins and beer. “It was just an awful experience. I just saw this mass of anger; anger and hostility. I thought my life was going to end.”

A campus minister, one of the only whites she remembers showing her kindness, took her by the hand and led her to safety. She said the minister was ostracized.

During her undergraduate days, she was inundated with intimidating phone calls to her dorm from white men. “The calls were so constant,” she said. “Vulgar, all sexual connotations, saying ni**er bitches needed to go back to the cotton field and things of that nature.” She’d complain, have the phone number changed. Then the calls would start again. Funeral wreaths with what appeared to be animal blood on them were found outside her dorm.

That’s the enlightened world Barbour the Nixon acolyte inhabited, in which he sat next to “just another student .. who happened to be African American.” Again, I don’t know if he’s just delusional or lying but the fact that he’s dishonestly arguing that the Southern Strategy wasn’t consciously designed to exploit the racial turmoil of the time argues strongly for the latter. The Republicans recruited young Southern racists to carry out their plan. If Barbour wasn’t one of them, he was a rare bird. His “memories” notwithstanding, this is all well documented and Barbour has been in politics his entire adult life, so this isn’t the first he’s heard of it.

I’m sure there are people who are going to argue that Barbour’s memories are as valid as Bailey’s and therefore this is just another matter of he said/ she said. But the travails of the students who integrated Ole Miss are also well documented and anyone who argues that a black student during that era was “just another student who happened to be black” is flat-out wrong.

As I wrote before, I suppose it’s a good thing that these people have enough shame about their past that they are trying to airbrush it now. But considering that he’s also dogwhistling the birther nonsense, it would appear that old Haley’s just moved on to the newer, shinier form of right wing racism. I guess we can hope that he’ll airbrush all that too at some point. Baby steps.

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Steny’s Consensus

by digby

For those of you still yearning for some sweet, sweet bipartisanship, you may just get your wish in the House of Representatives:

But as poll results worsen and a Republican-controlled House looks more and more likely, Democrats are beginning to realize they face a top-to-bottom leadership shake-up if the powerful speaker steps aside in a Democratic minority.

For the most part, Democrats have no obvious road map, no heir apparent to the Pelosi mantle and a fairly thin bench around which to plan the future of their party. After the election, Democrats would face a power vacuum in the lower ranks — assuming current House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer takes the helm as minority leader in a post-Pelosi Democratic Caucus.

The Big Money Boyz will convince the leadership to replace Pelosi because her rabid liberal, feminist agenda is what destroyed the Democratic majority. Even though it will be right wing loser GOP lite Blue Dogs who will have lost.

Don’t expect much Democratic obstructionism. It’s all going to be left up to Obama’s veto pen. When he’s running for re-election. After a crushing loss.

Oh hell.

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Unique and Exceptional

by digby

Sarah Palin made one of her patented ignorant comments yesterday about the Statue of Liberty:

“This Statue of Liberty was gifted to us by foreign leaders, really as a warning to us, it was a warning to us to stay unique and to stay exceptional from other countries. Certainly not to go down the path of other countries that adopted socialist policies,”

Yeah, France was trying to tell the US not to adopt socialist policies back in 1870. (In fact, I’m pretty sure the Hallmark card accompanying the gift said “stay unique and exceptional or else!”)

But I don’t think that’s the weirdest teabagger Statue of Liberty thing I’ve seen today. Shakespeare’s Sister brought up an interesting point about the cover of Glenn Beck’s novel The Overton Window:

It looks like the Statue of Liberty has either really been taking steroids in anticipation of competing in a body building contest or she had sex reassignment surgery.

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Voices Of Reason

by digby

Ben Smith notes that George Packer and Andrew Sullivan are lamenting the irrationality of the right and he posits that liberals are going to be increasingly relying on this argument the more we lose.

He might be right about that. But I would love to know where people have been the last decade or so. The right impeached a president over sex, they stole and election, they invaded a country that hadn’t attacked us and they created a bizarroworld media which purposefully misinforms its audience. This isn’t new.

In fact, the dirty hippies like me have been talking about “epistemic relativism,” “PoMo conservatism” (terms I coined to annoy wingnuts) for years now, and long before the serious people noticed “epistemic closure“. A very famous (and fat) politician even wrote a book about it called The Assault on Reason. It’s just a little bit late in the game for for our intellectual betters to take notice of something that’s been going on for quite a long time.

But it’s not confined to the right anymore. It has lately manifested itself on the left as well, as Packer demonstrates here:

This is why Obama seems less and less able to speak to and for our times. He’s the voice of reason incarnate, and maybe he’s too sane to be heard in either Jalalabad or Georgia. An epigraph for our times appears in Jonathan Franzen’s new novel “Freedom”: “The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”

Yes, let’s all pretend that Obama is the Voice Of Reason Incarnate and that the problem is that those who believe in freedom are prone to puerile tantrums when they don’t get their way. Meanwhile let’s ignore the fact that the VORI promised shallow, pie-in-the-sky, post-partisan utopia, with ponies and unicorns for everyone, and his followers are now disillusioned and apathetic because it was utter bullshit. Different side of the same coin, I’m afraid.

That the VORI and all of his worshipers among the intellectual elite fail to acknowledge (or even notice) the radicalism of his opponents is just as much of a problem as the radicalism itself. They have enabled it all along the way. In fact, I would have to say that it’s also a form of “epistemic closure” at this point. Anyone who is writing about the unreasoned radicalism of the right wing as if it just manifested itself out of nowhere has been in denial for well over a decade and a half.

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Dinesh and Newtie Tickle The Lizard Brain

by digby

I know that racism is dead and all and that the right wing attitudes to Obama can in no way be attributed to it, but this latest salvo from Newtie and Dinesh (which I wrote about yesterday) sure does sound like it’s a teensy bit racist. Even to David Frum:

With the Forbes story and now the Gingrich endorsement, the argument that Obama is an infiltrating alien, a deceiving foreigner – and not just any kind of alien, but specifically a Third World alien – has been absorbed almost to the very core of the Republican platform for November 2010. Rush Limbaugh has been claiming for almost 2 years that President Obama is bent upon “redistribution” and “reparations.” Following D’Souza, Gingrich has now stepped up to suggest that this redistribution is motivated by anti-white racial revenge. If Obama wants to expand health coverage, tighten bank regulation, and create government make-work projects it’s not because he shares the same general outlook on the world as Walter Mondale or Ted Kennedy or so many other liberals, living and dead, all of them white and northern European. No, Obama wants to do what he does because he thinks like an African, and not just any kind of African but (in D’Souza’s phrase) “a Luo tribesman.” It is to vindicate this African tribal dream that Obama wishes to raise the taxes of upper-income taxpayers and redistribute money away from these meritorious individuals. D’Souza contends that Obama is acting to vindicate his father’s supposed dream of overthrowing the global order and ending the global domination of the white race over other peoples.Prepare yourselves: at his deepest personal level, what Barack Obama really wants to do is strip white property owners of everything they possess…As for the underlying D’Souza article that inspired Gingrich, what is there to be said? When last was there such a brazen outburst of race-baiting in the service of partisan politics at the national level? George Wallace took more care to sound race-neutral.

I’ve written about this fear of the slave revolt phenomenon for years. It is one of the deepest, motivating impulses of white racists. (You don’t have to be a psychologist to figure out why that would be…)It manifests itself when the social order breaks down (as it did during Katrina) or when black Americans they believe to be threatening to white privilege assume positions of power. And they find a million different ways to illustrate and justify it.

Here’s Limbaugh during the 2008 election campaign:

Limbaugh: We know that technological advancement is going along at light speed. And yet during this period of time, whether it be the last 57 years or be it the last 20 years, it seems that a majority of the black population has remained angry, frustrated, and behind. They’ve been left behind. They are acting like they’ve been left behind, and of course we’ve heard that this is because of racism, natural systemic institutional racism in America, that we are unfair, that this country is just horrible and rotten.

…The federal government became the father. The father didn’t have to hang around in order for the kids to be okay, depending on how you define okay. But as you study more and more of this ACORN stuff, you find that it has been part of an entire movement that has been going on for two, maybe three decades, right under our noses.

We thought that it was just liberal welfare policies and all that that kept blacks from progressing while other minorities grew and prospered, but no, it is these wackos from Bill Ayers to Jeremiah Wright to other anti-American Afrocentric black liberation theologists with ACORN, and Barack Obama is smack dab in the middle of it, they have been training young black kids to hate, hate, hate this country, and they trained their parents before that to hate, hate, hate this country. It was a movement. It was a Bill Ayers, anti-capitalist, anti-American educational movement. ACORN is how it was implemented, right under our noses. It has been a movement, it has been a religion, and Obama and Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers were all up to their big ears in it.

D’Souza and Gingrich have put a psuedo-intellectual spin on this by calling it Obama’s “Afro-Centric anti-colonialism” But it all adds up to the same thing: the angry black man is rising up and coming after good god-fearing white people.

Frum says that Gingrich is doing this in order to appear to be the most ferocious right winger in contention for the presidency after having already established the trust of the business community on their issues. And then he claims that it will backfire because conservatives are not racists and will resent being covered in this slime. I think he right about the first. Gingrich is certainly vying for the title of King of the teabaggers. But it remains to be seen as to whether or not it will backfire among his target audience. (Judging from the various rallies over the week-end, I doubt it.) Certainly, many of the intelligentsia are uncomfortable with this sort of thing, as Frum demonstrates, but I think there’s little doubt that Gingrich knows his audience and believes has found a crude enough dog whistle to get through to them.

As Frum illustrates, Gingrich may be a bad politician, but he’s always been a very, very good propagandist. And his specialty is tickling the lizard brains of the right wing. He knows very well that the main motivation behind white working class loathing of liberalism is its alleged agenda to take their honest hard earned money and give it to the “wrong” people. He’s worked that angle his entire career.

Amanda Marcotte explains why D’Souza’s academic approach is particularly useful:

What’s interesting to me is that Gingrich and D’Souza are clearly filling a need in the wingnut masses for this pseudo-intellectual nonsense. It’s an article of faith in the wingnutteria that pointy-headed college professors don’t have common sense and aren’t worth listening to. And yet, despite this stereotype, they still have this strong need to have even their craziest beliefs (in this case, Birtherism) validated by something that they can convince themselves is pointy-headed academic analysis. D’Souza’s whole purpose in life is to give an elitist gloss to right wing populism and racism, and that’s basically all this is. It’s about giving the wild-eyed Birthers reassurance that their particular brand of nuttiness is acceptable in the halls of academia, and therefore not nutty at all. Of course, they’re lying to their people about this, but illusions, as I’m sure you know, matter more than facts ever could.

(She goes on to discuss how Nixonland‘s great theme of the Franklins vs the Orthogonians explains their psychological need for elite validation.)

Frum quotes Byron York lamenting this latest turn of affairs:

“Say you’re a GOP leader. With elections approaching, the public prefers your position on major issues of the day.” “Your Democratic opponents are suffering massive self-inflicted wounds. So what do you as a GOP leader do?” “Attack Obama’s ‘Kenyan, anti-colonial’ worldview, of course.”

That’s utter nonsense, of course. The public doesn’t prefer their position on the major issues of the day, they are merely punishing the people in power for failing to fix their problems. But it is worth pondering why anyone would think more overt racism is a good idea. Unfortunately, there’s really no mystery. It’s what Frum himself wrote: it’s about appearing to be the most ferocious right winger out there and vying for the tea party voters. And in this toxic political environment aspiring right wing leaders have to up the ante on hate and fear every single day to stay ahead of the zeitgeist. That’s what makes them so formidable — and potentially dangerous. History shows this kind of thing can get way out of hand.

Frum thinks that the likes of Byron York tut-tutting this means that it’s being rejected by conservatives. But I don’t think the tea partiers care what National Review thinks. They care what Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh thinks. (I have my suspicions that they will validate this premise without a second thought, but we’ll have to wait and see what they say.) If they validate it, then nothing Byron York or David Frum or any of the standard conservative movement elites say will make a difference. The Tea Party is operating outside that framework now, and although they crave a certain kind of intellectual elite validation, they have created their own: they call Glenn Beck “the professor.” And he was one of the first to posit publicly that Obama hates white people.

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The Insurgency

by digby

I think I’ve lost count of how many tea partiers may wind up in the Congress next January, but it’s an alarming number. Luckily, this latest phenom from Delaware, is unlikely to win the general election, but it’s instructive that such a crazy candidate can get so close. Christine O’Donnell is a tea partier, Christian taliban edition. (Her main claim to fame is promoting sexual abstinence, which includes masturbation… )

Here’s Howie from last Friday (and subsequently, a poll has found that she’s got a very good chance of winning.):

There’s a chance– a small one– that the Tea Bag Express could take out mainstream conservative corporate shill Mike Castle (a major Wall Street darling) and replace him with someone on a Sharron Angle/Rand Paul level, Christine O’Donnell. In fact, a friend of mine described her as “like a less polished Sharron Angle.” Chew on that!

Short version: O’Donnell is another extremist and radical far removed from the American mainstream, almost like Joe Miller. Her latest tactic is to question Mike Castle’s sexuality and imply that he’s a closet case– a possible Lindsey Graham, Larry Craig or Mitch McConnell type of character. That’s the rumor… ha, ha, ha. Any proof? Conservatives usually attack Democrats with the smears and they’re used to not bothering with proof. Now they’re turning it on their own. (Not that Castle hasn’t fought back– with a website painting O’Donnell as a crook and a kook, who plays fast and loose with her campaign contributions.)

O’Donnell’s got Castle so scared that he’s spending money hand over fist in a primary he never thought he would have to spend a nickel on. And the Tea Party Express is putting their money into the race. Both sides are being financed by shady financiers of right-wing causes, Wall Street in Castle’s case, power-mad and dangerous plutocratic families in O’Donnell’s case, the same families that just replaced mainstream conservative Lisa Murkowski with lunatic fringe Joe Miller in Alaska. In fact, Sarah Palin has weighed in on O’Donnell’s side against Castle, who voted– twice– for Bush’s no-strings-attached Wall Street bailout (TARP) and for all the horrible trade policies that have sent U.S. jobs overseas. Yesterday the NRA also endorsed her.

The GOP establishment (what’s left of it) is apoplectic because O’Donnell can’t win the general election. Even the right wing blogosphere is up in arms over this one, fighting among themselves. After all, this was supposed to be an easy GOP pick-up. But this is what happens when you empower a radical fringe. They start to think they don’t have to do what they’re told any more.

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Traditional Values

by digby

What would Norman say?

I guess I’m officially old fashioned.

Total rip-off of Strange Apparatus

Fareed Is Juuust Right

by digby

Judging from Fareed Zakaria’s intro to his show today, as I predicted he’s taking some serious flack for his column saying that the US overreacted to 9/11. He said:

Yesterday was of course the ninth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. For me, these anniversaries have always been times of remembrance and mourning — I lost a friend in the twin towers — but also of reflection. And I’ve tried to reflect on how far we’ve come as a country since that day and whether we are safer now than we were then.

My answer is unequivocally yes. Look, al Qaeda flourished when governments the world over treated it as a minor annoyance rather than a major national security challenge. Since 9/11, cockpit doors are now sealed so planes can’t be used as bombs. Other simple security measures that focus on travel have made open societies much less vulnerable.

Al Qaeda terrorists and their ilk are being chased around the mountains of Afghanistan. They are being bombed in Pakistan. Their money trails are being tracked the world over.

It’s very tough to plan major terrorist attacks in that environment. So smaller, local groups inspired but not directed by al Qaeda have found ways to attack easy, open targets like cafes, nightclubs, train stations.

But the result is they kill locals rather than Americans or Brits or foreign soldiers. And, of course, this means that Islamic radicalism loses public support in all these countries. Think of Saudi Arabia as the perfect example.

The poll numbers on this are stunning. Islamic radicalism has been losing public support in every Muslim country over the last nine years. The result: al Qaeda is a much weakened enemy militarily, economically, politically. In the last nine years it has been able to put together scary videotapes, but it has not been able to mount a single terrorist attack.

Now is surely the time to evaluate soberly what has worked and what has been overkill in our reaction to al Qaeda. It’s clear to me that the massive expansion of the national security state, the Homeland Security Administration, the hundreds of billions of dollars spent, 17 million square feet of new office space for bureaucrats, the equivalent of three Pentagons, the code orange alerts, have all been an overreaction. Now is the time to begin rethinking the balance between security and liberty and re-balancing somewhat.

Now, here’s the scary part. I’ve made every one of these points before, but when I say it today, it seems controversial, and that tells you something about the polarized, dysfunctional political atmosphere we are living through right now.

And then, naturally, he comes up with this:

I think it has something to do with the fact that the right wants to maintain an atmosphere of fear and, therefore, accuses me of being cavalier about security. And the left can’t stand the thought that George W. Bush might have done a few good things after 9/11.

Does “the left” disagree with what Zakaria says? I don’t think so. Sure, the added global attention to Al Qaeda after 9/11 — inevitable I might add — has succeeded in dimming their prospects for more attacks. We might disagree as to which methods accomplished that, but the fact that it’s happened isn’t disputed by the left as far as I know. And we certainly agree that the obscenely expensive national security state that’s bankrupting the country was unnecessary overkill. (He doesn’t mention the massive waste of Iraq, of course — and how much better things might have been if we hadn’t done that ridiculous adventure.)

But let’s not let that stop Zakaria from putting the left in the same category as those who are right now ginning up a religious/culture/race war for their own profit and personal satisfaction. Everyone knows we are morally equivalent and anyway it would be very shrill for him to call a spade a spade and call out the right alone for its hideous exploitation of bigotry, fear and hate. Certainly, it would be rude to mention that that this militarization of our government is making a whole bunch of people wealthy and will likely lead to repression and authoritarianism if these people succeed in turning the country inside out. That wouldn’t be wrong — and would imply that Very Serious people in the middle of these two equally crazed poles aren’t the only people anyone should ever listen to. We can’t have that.

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It Ain’t All That Much Money

by digby

As we head into the debate about the Bush tax cuts expiring, with well-heeled TV celebrities like Jack Cafferty again declaring that “200k ain’t all that much money” it’s a good idea to check out how these tax cuts expiring on schedule will play out in real dollars compared to what they were when Bush pushed them through. The NY Times did that a few months back and it’s instructive:

Given the progressive nature of the federal income tax system, in which tax rates increase with income, even the richest households would continue to pay the four lower rates on up to the first $250,000 of their income, under the approach being pushed by Mr. Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress. The president has vowed to extend the tax cuts for individuals with less than $200,000 in annual taxable income and couples with less than $250,000 — about 98 percent of American households. About 315,000 households report adjusted gross income of $1 million or more. Taxpayers with income of more than $1 million for 2011 would still receive on average a tax cut of about $6,300 compared with what they would have paid under rates in effect until 2001, according to the analysis, which was prepared by the Joint Committee on Taxation at the request of the Democratic majority on the House Ways and Means Committee. That compares, however, with the roughly $100,000 average tax cut that households with more than $1 million in income would receive under current rates. Filers with taxable income of $500,000 to $1 million would still get on average a tax cut of $6,700 compared with pre-2001 rates, according to the data from the tax analysts. But that compares with roughly $17,500 if the top Bush tax rates were maintained. If the president gets his way, in 2011 the top two income tax rates — now 33 percent and 35 percent — would revert to the levels before the Bush administration, 36 percent and 39.6 percent, respectively. But the four lower rates would remain 10 percent, 15 percent, 25 percent and 28 percent. For some taxpayers earning up to $250,000, the top marginal rate would remain 33 percent.

These wealthy people will still be paying less than they did during the go-go years of the 90s so it’s a little bit disingenuous to say that the economy will crumble if they are forced to go back to it. I know they all feel that they are above paying taxes, but it’s the patriotic thing to do.

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