With John Howard’s defeat in Australia, now’s a good time to look back at the shameless lies he told about Iraq and WMD. I’ve put the details over at Mother Jones.

Farewell, John Howard. Say hello to history’s scrap heap for us.

I’m researching this year’s “incomplete and subjective” year-in-review cartoon(s) — see previous examples here and here — and it occurs to me that I ought to toss it out to all of you as well. What particular highlights, lowlights, absurdities, stupid quotes, inane punditry, and whatever else from 2007 stand out for you so far? Suggestions welcome, and eagerly solicited — tomtomorrow (at) ix (dot) netcom (dot) com. (Not that I’m asking you to do my work for me, I’ve put in many long hours on this one so far — but there’s always going to be some wonderfully stupid moment I’ll overlook or forget …)

Off to join the throngs of holiday travellers soon, because that’s just the kind of American I am. Light posting likely for the next few days, at least from me.

An “information wants to be free” pioneer issues a mea culpa:

INTERNET idealists like me have long had an easy answer for creative types — like the striking screenwriters in Hollywood — who feel threatened by the unremunerative nature of our new Eden: stop whining and figure out how to join the party!

That’s the line I spouted when I was part of the birthing celebrations for the Web. I even wrote a manifesto titled “Piracy Is Your Friend.” But I was wrong. We were all wrong.

Like so many in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, I thought the Web would increase business opportunities for writers and artists. Instead they have decreased. Most of the big names in the industry — Google, Facebook, MySpace and increasingly even Apple and Microsoft — are now in the business of assembling content from unpaid Internet users to sell advertising to other Internet users.

There’s an almost religious belief in the Valley that charging for content is bad. The only business plan in sight is ever more advertising. One might ask what will be left to advertise once everyone is aggregated.

How long must creative people wait for the Web’s new wealth to find a path to their doors? A decade is a long enough time that idealism and hope are no longer enough. If there’s one practice technologists ought to embrace, it is the evaluation of empirical results.

* * *

Affordable turns out to be much harder than free when it comes to information technology, but we are smart enough to figure it out. We owe it to ourselves and to our creative friends to acknowledge the negative results of our old idealism. We need to grow up.

Amir Taheri, the Iranian royalist who brought us the tale of Tehran’s plan to make Jewish Iranians wear special yellow badges, turns out to have made up other things too…things which Norman Podhoretz and Michael Ledeen repeat as real. I’ve stuck the details over at Mother Jones.

It’s this kind of bald-faced lying that makes me respect Taheri. Even the most egregious propagandists usually can’t bring themselves to fabricate things out of whole cloth. Instead, they’ll misrepresent what people actually did say, or cite facts selectively. It’s just how our monkey brains work.

This often leads monkey-brained hacks to behave in preposterous ways, as they go to incredible lengths to consciously mislead people while not exactly “lying” (see a funny recent example here). I always look at their exertions and want to ask: since you clearly have no moral scruples, why not just make things up?

But clearly this is something we will never have to wonder about Taheri. And he is the bigger man for it.

What is the problem with friendly dictators? During a discussion on Fox this week about Musharraf, William Kristol explained:

KRISTOL: They are sending Deputy Secretary Negroponte over there earlier this weekend. This is the Marcos moment, I think, where we tell our ally, the friendly and decent dictator, that his time has passed.

The problem with these friendly dictators is they end up wanting to hang on, they like being dictators beyond when it is in their country’s national interest, and beyond when it is in our interest.

I think this actually manageable. I do think Musharraf is going to have to go.

This is why we need experts like William Kristol. Unsophisticated people might think the problem with friendly dictators is the “dictator” part. In particular, individuals whose testicles the friendly dictators have hooked up to electrodes often focus on this to the exclusion of what actually matters, which is whether or not the dictators are effectively serving the needs of William Kristol and his friends.

Then there’s the dictators themselves. They often are concerned with the way the lifespan of ex-dictators tends to be short. What they don’t understand is that they should be happy to die if that’s convenient for their employer, the United States. Just as William Kristol doesn’t worry about what happens to his maids after they’ve outlived their usefulness, why should he worry about his dictators?

Consumers Union has created another funny video with a song by the Austin Lounge Lizards. This time it’s about America’s hilarious lack of food and product safety inspections. You can watch it, and get involved in the Consumers Union campaign on inspections, here.

If you enjoyed that, be sure to watch this previous video, from their prescription drug campaign in 2005. I would like to meet the woman who does the voiceover at the end, and sing her a tender song.

Atrios catches some anti-WGA strike bias on CNBC, a network that prides itself in catering to “business executives and financial professionals that have significant purchasing power”. The chyron reads :

WHAT ARE THEY FIGHTING FOR?

4,434 Hollywood guild writers worked full-time last year.

Average salary: $204,000

Many earned $1 million or more

Well, to answer CNBC’s question, they aren’t fighting for “significant purchasing power”. They’re fighting for the financial security that would allow their members to remain in the middle class.

Middle class? Two hundred grand sounds like a good deal, but remember that’s the average salary. This number was chosen specifically because CNBC and the studios on whose behalf they’re arguing want you to believe that most writers are spoiled brats whining about their six-figure incomes. But in a case like this in which a deliberately-vague “many” WGA members earn over $1 million, the “average” income is misleading. A much more important measurement of writers income is the median.

For a good illustration of the difference between “average” and “median” incomes, let me refer you to this graph from the classic book “How to Lie With Statistics” (used without permission. go buy it now!) :

If you add up all of the salaries and divide it by the number of employees, you come up with an “average” that is a poor indicator of an ordinary worker’s income. After all, Mr. Moneybags at the top brings home more than twenty times what the dozen peons at the bottom of the graph make. And this “average” income is only earned by one person, who earns more than 20 of the 24 employees on the chart. While the “average” in this case is mathematically correct, it doesn’t represent the typical income. Or to use an oft-cited example, if Bill Gates walked into a homeless shelter, the “average” income would skyrocket, but it wouldn’t change the fact that everyone else is poor.

Now let’s go back to the WGA strike. Thanks to our friends at CNBC, we know that the “average” WGA member makes $200K, but what’s the median income? According to an LA Times op-ed written by a WGA board member :

“The median income of screen and television writers from their guild-covered employment is $5,000 a year, in part because almost half our members don’t work in any given year.”

Five. Thousand. Dollars. Now keep that figure in mind when you see these CEOs gush about how much money they’ll be making :

CNBC wants to know “What are they fighting for?”. Well, considering that writers aren’t even being paid for this “golden era”, the WGA is fighting to keep their five thousand dollars from being taken away in the future. Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Here’s Hillary Clinton in the debate last night, responding to Obama’s proposal to raise the payroll cap for Social Security:

CLINTON: I do not want to fix the problems of Social Security on the backs of middle class families and seniors. If you lift the cap completely, that is a $1 trillion tax increase.

This is why my strategy is to hate all leaders, at all times, in all circumstances.

First, Obama uses right-wing talking points to tell us how we must be VERY VERY WORRIED about Social Security, so he can portray himself as a BOLD TRUTH TELLER.

Then, Clinton uses right-wing talking points to attack him for proposing a MASSIVE TAX INCREASE so she can portray herself as NOT A DIRTY TAX-RAISING LIBERAL.

In reality, there’s no reason to fret about Social Security or change it at all now. Obama is trying to scare us by thinking there is.

But if we have to change things in the future, the changes necessary would be minor. Clinton is trying to scare us by throwing around huge numbers most people don’t understand. The $1 trillion tax increase she’s talking about would be over 75 years, during which time the U.S. GDP is projected to be $600 trillion. It would also only affect the best-off people in America. (Moreover, Clinton’s numbers are wrong; eliminating the payroll cap would be more like a $4 trillion tax increase, depending on how you measure it. I suspect she lowballed it in order to make her fearmongering more credible.)

So hand in hand, Obama and Clinton each endorse one-half of the right-wing story, adding up to one gruesome whole. Here’s Sean Hannity, speaking to you during the recession of 2012:

HANNITY: How can you criticize Republican proposals to privatize Social Security, when even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton agree we should be VERY VERY WORRIED and that the only alternative to privatization is a MASSIVE TAX INCREASE?

AND: This is yet another example of the Iron Law of Institutions.

(Thanks to Dean Baker for help with the specific numbers.)

If you’re in the Washington, D.C. area, you might want to check out Robert Parry, one of the greatest investigative reporters in the United States, speaking about his new book Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush this Saturday in Arlington, Virginia:

Robert Parry, author of Neck Deep
Saturday, November 17th, 4 p.m.
Busboys and Poets
4251 South Campbell Avenue
Shirlington Village, Arlington, VA
(off I-395 at the Glebe Road-Shirlington exit)

Note this is not the Busboys and Poets store actually in Washington. More information, including directions, is available on the Busboys and Poets site.

Even if you’re not in Washington, check out Parry’s new article, “How False Narratives Work”, for background on some genuinely shocking Republican/media lies that almost no one knows about. It involves Scooter Libby before he got famous.

If I were Viacom, it would be worth a lot of money to me to get them to stop making fun of me this effectively:

…and not to get all political on you, but there’s a sense in which “paying them a lot of money to stop making fun of Viacom” is exactly what the Daily Show is. It brings a ton of very talented people together, and pays them to produce something which—while extremely insightful about the media—really can’t deal with something even deeper and more important: corporate power and commercial culture. Once the show’s back on the air, it won’t be featuring anything like this.

MORE: Steve Bodow, the Daily Show’s head writer, on the strike. And since he mentions Clifford Odets, here’s S.J. Perelman’s parody of Odets’ play “Waiting for Lefty,” “Waiting for Santy.”