I'm not sure what to make about Gov. Chris Christie's recent public appearances.

On the one hand, he's been pretty vehement and forthright in his declarations that he will not seek the nomination in 2012. On the other, he played it rather coy last night in his speech at the Reagan library. When asked point blank to consider running, he prefaced a rather quick comment with a long diatribe about how someone would have to be pretty egotistical not to consider it when so many people are asking about it.

So, elites our are on record calling for less democracy. Not days after they do the New York Times writes an article that in many ways delegitimizes public, peacefull assembly and protest:

Hundreds of thousands of disillusioned Indians cheer a rural activist on a hunger strike. Israel reels before the largest street demonstrations in its history. Enraged young people in Spain and Greece take over public squares across their countries. Their complaints range from corruption to lack of affordable housing and joblessness, common grievances the world over. But from South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street, these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over.

They are taking to the streets, in part, because they have little faith in the ballot box.

Excuse me, but I was brought up to believe, even here in America that the right to assemble was an essential adjunct of democracy. Read the rest of the article. It's very interesting in its use of innuendo, in the sly way it identifies protest as anti-democratic and they way it asserts that "that liberal economics combined with democratic institutions represented the only path forward."

It's the essence of neo-liberalism at work and the Davos-type elites are getting concerned.

Addendum: A correspondent makes an important point I missed. The article also reframes acts of true non-violence as violent:

While the Spanish and Israeli demonstrations were peaceful, critics have raised concerns over the urge to bypass representative institutions. In India, Mr. Hazare’s crusade to “fast unto death” unless Parliament enacted his anticorruption law struck some supporters as self-sacrifice. Many opponents viewed his tactics as undemocratic blackmail.

Hundreds of thousands of people turned out last month in New Delhi to vent a visceral outrage at the state of Indian politics. One banner read, “If your blood is not boiling now, then your blood is not blood!” The campaign by Mr. Hazare, 74, was intended to force Parliament to consider his anticorruption legislation instead of a weaker alternative put forth by the government.

It is such acts of non-violence and others highly targeted to induce pain to elites that frighten them the most. They have power, but they do not have the moral suasion to counteract something as potent as protests like these. Make no mistake, the effectiveness of protests such as Hazare's terrify elites. It is crucial to note that the effectiveness of such tactics and the moral high ground they occupy is what terrifies elites like Orzag. When someone is starving themselves in protest, or blocking critical traffic hubs peacefully in protest to the very neo-liberal policies Orzag espouses the Davos-types have no answer. They have no counter-narrative and thus do what they can to delegitimize what's happening. Sometimes they can do it by criticizing the beards and long-hair and clothes. At others they reframe non-violence as violence. They are the only tools remaining of a bankrupt, literally and morally, elite.

Telegraph UK

Yum!

Gareth Porter | Washington | Sept 22

IPS - The U.S. threat last week that "all options" are on the table
if the Pakistani military doesn't cut its ties with the Haqqani
network of anti-U.S. insurgents created the appearance of a
crisis involving potential U.S. military escalation in Pakistan.

But there is much less substance to the administration's threatening
rhetoric than was apparent. In fact, it was primarily an exercise in
domestic political damage control, although compounded by an emotional
response to recent major attacks by the Haqqani group on U.S.-NATO
targets, according to two sources familiar with the policymaking
process on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

One source close to that process doubted that there was any planning
for military action against Pakistan in the immediate future. "I'm
sure we're going to be talking to the Pakistanis a lot about this,"
the source told IPS.

Despite the tough talk about not tolerating any more high-profile
attacks on U.S. troops, the sources suggested, there is no expectation
that anything the United States can do would change Pakistani policy
toward the Haqqani group.

N.C. Aizenman, | Sept 27

WaPo - Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance continued to escalate this year even as the share of workers getting less generous coverage reached a new high, according to survey data released Tuesday.

In 2011, for the first time, half of workers at small firms with individual policies faced annual deductibles of $1,000 or more. In 2006, that figure was 16 percent. At large firms, the share has grown from 6 percent to 22 percent over the same five years.

and it gets worse

Vampire movies and television programmes may be all the rage right now, but not one of them has anything on a good old-fashioned audience of Republican debate watchers.

In a rather shocking - yet sadly, not surprising - display of the bloodlust and viciousness usually reserved for members of law enforcement pulling over a driving-while-soused Mel Gibson, the so-called "party of life" has seen its most ardent adherents at the past few GOP debates belching out blood-curdling cheers in favour of untimely death and boos for soldiers serving-while-gay. All of which tells you a little something about who these theoretical human beings are, and what they stand for - and it has does not have much to do with traditional small government conservatism.

So FEMA wasn't in any real danger of running out of funds, apparently.

Interesting. So what possible purpose was served by introducing this bill and making a stink over it?

There's only one answer that makes sense. This is "another day."

Finally.

You noted over the weekend that Barack Obama stepped up his rhetoric about the Republican presidential contenders. He also took a hunk out of his base's complacency, too, and in the one forum he could do it where he knew he'd get unconditional support: at the Congressional Black Caucus conference.

Kay Ryan is a former national Poet Laureate who has had a pretty good year. In April she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Last week she was announced as one of 22 winners of $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grants" for 2011. Like a lot of us who know nothing about her work, I dug backward for a look. Among the poems I found is this one, published in 2005:

Home to Roost

The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small —
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

– Kay Ryan

I'm floored. A stock trader that tells the truth:

Any Questions

I keep hearing from the media and even a lot of progressives that all the Occupy Wall Street and US Day of Rage folks are all neo-hippie, bearded, Che t-shirt wearing punks. But I've watched more than a dozen videos so far and they all look like pretty normal twenty-somethings. So, dear readers, why don't we collect videos of hippie, bearded, Che wearing clowns? How many really do exist?

Maybe I'll get called out for being patriarchal. So be it. But this I just don't get: why would a policeman mace harmless, peacefully protesting women? Why cage them up and then mace them? It's just outrageous.

It's thuggish, boorish and brutish behavior. If you watch the video you will be disturbed. It's like there is an epidemic of police brutishness in this country. And this is the kind of behavior, if it was seen widely enough on TV that causes people to give up on non-violent protest and pick up a molotov cocktail.

Addendum: Take a look at the first photo in this post and wonder: was the Popo afraid of their leaflets, their flyers or their water bottles? It's just outrageous and their is no excuse at all for this kind of police behavior. But of course, we know crowds like this never have agents provocateurs in them?

Update: An eyewitness account from a pro-police journalist:

Just for the record, I love cops. I do, my mother worked in the justice system for 30 years, and I’ve known a lot of really good cops, really good honorable people just doing their jobs. I’ve never agreed with the sentiment “Fuck the Po-lice,” and I still don’t. But these guys are fucked up. There was an anger in those white-shirt’s eyes that said, “You don’t matter.” And whether they were just scared or irrational or looking for a target for their rage, there was no excuse for their abuse of authority. I had always thought that people who complained about police brutality must have done something to provoke it, that surely cops wouldn’t hurt people without a really good reason. But they do. We were on the curb, we were contained, we were unarmed. Pepper spray hurts like hell, and the experience only makes me wish I’d done something more to deserve it.

Read it all.

This may seem a rather peaceful, edenic-looking photo. Trust me, it's not. This pond is withering away rapidly. I've never seen it this low my entire life. It's easily three or four times lower than it should be. It's highly saline and the spoonbill feeding in it is a stressed animal, which should normally have a relatively different color set this time of year, a brighter, almost magenta hue to it's pinkish wings.

This is going on all around the Coastal Bend this year. Salt levels are three hundred percent higher than normal in the bays (think of them as giant estuaries). Blue crab populations are collapsing. Oyster catches are falling and on and on. A large fight is shaping up between environmentalist and chemical companies. There is so little fresh water flowing into the bays--much of it being used for fracking, refining and very necessary agriculture upriver that the survival in the wild of the last flock of Whooping Cranes is once again being called into question.

In an average year a visitor should see at least twenty to thirty different species of birds in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. I was exceptionally lucky to have seen only ten. There should be kites and kestrels and caracaras all along the roads, perched on the telephone poles hawking field animals running around in the cotton fields. But not this year. Cotton yields on the Coastal Bend are well below normal and the crop was harvested a month early. There should be swarms of orioles, both Bullock's and Baltimores in the trees eating the abundant early fall berries. There should be herons and egrets and pipers and all other manner of shore birds. There should be warblers galore: Nashville Warblers, Prothonotary Warblers, Black-and-Whites, Canadians etc. . There were few, if any.

Of course, one benefit to the deep plowing farmers are doing (they plow and turn over the soil deeply to catch the meager rains when they come) are the bugs which leads to a lot of flycatchers. But other than that? Nothing. What happens once all those bugs have been eaten?

Destroy the bottom of the foodchain and you also destroy the top of it.

Cattlemen in the Coastal Bend are deeply culling their herds. We saw few cattle and the ones we did were drought stressed, thin and the absence of cattle egrets was palpable. The drive from Rockport to the Refuge was a surreal concatenation of dried marshes, brown reeds and bone dry creek beds, normally full of water and meandering languidly down to the bays. Sure, it was humid. But it was also 104* degrees there Sunday. That's simply too hot this time of year, with a strong wind coming in from the Gulf every gets dried out even more. Everything is dying.

I was in no way prepared for what I saw down there this year. It was brutal and gut wrenching.

What few photos I managed to take can be found here.

So it's come down to this:

House Republicans have passed a bill that cuts spending elsewhere to offset some of the increased disaster relief aid. Democrats oppose offsets for emergency aid, saying disaster relief for Americans in need should be unencumbered. The Democratic-led Senate rejected the House measure on Friday by a 59-36 vote.

The package would fund the government for the first seven weeks of the new fiscal year that starts Saturday.

For the third time in six months, a partial government shutdown is possible if the Republican-led House and Democratic-controlled Senate fail to agree on the short-term spending plan by Friday -- the end of the current fiscal year.

Sunday evening, September 25, 2011

Hopefully today will be the last day this year of 100 degree plus weather (today we had 101). Last week the place I live on received an inch of rain, but the other places I care for didn’t fare so well (a tenth of an inch or less). The sell-off of cattle at local auctions continues.

By my estimation even if it started raining today it’s too late to grow any hay, but we’d still have a chance of getting some winter wheat or oats in for grazing. The ten day forecast gives us 20% chances for scattered thundershowers Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of next week. Where I irrigated ground for sorghum hay, we had army worms: I am relatively sure we’d have an outbreak if young tender grass began to grow at this late date.

Nir Rosen | Sept 24

Al Jazeera - Journalist Nir Rosen discusses armed struggle with army officers who have defected to join the opposition.

Editors note: Al Jazeera special correspondent Nir Rosen spent seven weeks travelling throughout Syria with unique access to all sides. He visited Daraa, Damascus, Homs, Hama, Latakia and Aleppo to explore the uprising and growing internal conflict. In the first article of his series he meets with leaders of the armed opposition in Homs. Names of some of the indivduals quoted have been changed to protect their identities.

Nathan Schneider | New York City | September 23

Truthout.org - A lot of what you've probably seen or read about the #occupywallstreet action is wrong, especially if you're getting it on the Internet. The action started as an idea posted online and word about it then spread and is still spreading, online. But what makes it really matter now is precisely that it is happening offline, in a physical, public space, live and in person. That's where the occupiers are assembling the rudiments of a movement.

More than demanding any particular policy proposal, the occupation is reminding Wall Street what real democracy looks like: a discussion among people, not a contest of money.

Inspired by the Arab Spring, and modeled after the successful massive protests in Spain, there are now occupy movements springing up across the nation is cities such as San Francisco, New Orleans, Boston, Portland, and Seattle. The MSM is strangely silent, with the notable exception of CBS News (kudos!) The NYT has tried to characterize it has a misguided and failed attempt of a few dozen people. Not so. A dozen cities in the US alone. Thousands of people, including dozens of experienced protesters. In Seattle, the Labor Council is getting in on the movement, the first inkling that labor will back the protests.

Moscow | Sept 24

MSNBC - Vladimir Putin said Saturday he'll run for Russia's presidency in 2012, almost certainly ensuring he'll retake the office he previously held and likely foreshadowing years more of a strongman rule that many in the West have called a retreat from democracy. If Putin wins two presidential terms in a row, he will have been atop the Russian hierarchy for almost a quarter-century.

In nominating Putin on Saturday, his United Russia party also approved his proposal that President Dmitry Medvedev take over Putin's current role as prime minister. Putin took over the premiership after serving as president from 2000-2008, bowing to term limits. But he was always the more powerful figure, with Medvedev viewed as a caretaker president.

Oh man, who ever did this is an idiot.

In the United States this year we have experienced the following natural disasters that are clearly associated with rising global temperatures: tornados, floods, hurricanes, more floods, blizzards, massive wildfires, intense unrelenting drought and now red tide is showing up along the Texas Gulf Coast. Is it due to the BP oil spill or the drought playing havoc on our estuaries, who knows?

Let's go through that again: five massive tornados. Two wicked floods along the Mississippi basin. A terrible blizzard. Irene. Drought in the Southwest. Fires in New Mexico and Texas in the Spring. Then again in Texas in the fall. And now red tide in the Gulf Of Mexico.

Munich Re calculates there have been 98 disasters in the United States in 2011. Double the average in the 1990s.

The cost: $35 billion dollars.

Tack that on to last year's disasters. Tack that on to all the disasters in the previous several years, including Katrina.

Lots and lots and lots of people warned this was going to happen: that the pitch and amplitude and frequency and intensity of natural disasters would increase. And that the expenses would begin to pile up.

They are now doing so with a vengeance.

But hey, Jesus rode a dinosaur, so nevermind.

. . . to interrupt an Israeli spokesman or -woman in the United States of America.

Fuck it, man, let's just annex Israel and legislate a new form of Lese Majesty.

. . . an active duty soldier in Iraq because he was gay last night. Can you imagine the utter, mind-altering paroxysms of apoplexy in the media had a Democrat booed an active duty soldier?

That's some liberal media you got there.

Also, they've cheered the execution of an innocent man and cheered for the uninsured to die. Where are the Democrats on this? Where are leaders who will highlight this and repeat it every day until the election? Who is going to shout down tEh fucking crazies in our midst?

Seriously, these have been perfect opportunities for people of morality and ethics to castigate the swines in our politics and no one, no one has done so.

Mark my words: silence is consent.

I'm not sure what to make of Suskind's claim that Timmy Geithner disobeyed a direct order from Obama about re-organizing Citigroup. When I first heard it I had very mixed feelings, but ultimately thought it was strange. Obama's behavior during the entire financial crisis and its aftermath has been pro-bank, pro-Wall Street. There is no way around that. And Geithner is still Secretary of the Treasury. Cabinet members serve by pleasure of the president.

I thought when I read about Suskind's claims that this was some kind of backhanded Tsarism thing. You know, "we love the Tsar, we love the Tsar, it's his evil ministers who are oppressing us."

I prefer to examine actions, not words, so ultimately it's kind of moot: Obama's a neo-liberal, has followed neo-liberal policies that have in no way promoted the common good. The rest is noise.

This is kind of a random free association comment, but hey, it's a blog so why not?

A couple of months ago, as you know, I read John Graves' book, "Goodbye To A River." One aspect of the book I liked the most were his tales of the Comanches along the upper Brazos River. The tales he tells in an oh-so Texas idiom are well worth reading on for their stylistic value. But more importantly I had not realized until then that many of Texas' modern pathologies can be traced directly back to the brutal warfare between white pioneers and the People, as they called themselves. While the memories of the brutal plains warfare are only in books now, my father has told me tales about his Grandfather who as a child had lived with the very real fear of the Plains Indians, although he never experienced it. The tales were within living memory to my grandfather. But I digress.

Up until reading Graves I had zero interest in reading about the Comanches, but as the intellectual process is a strange, tangential affair I picked up Fehrenbach's history of the Comanches and a history of the Texas Rangers. Finally, I've been reading "Empire of the Summer Moon" about Quanah Parker, the last Comanche chief. As a boy growing up in Texas Quanah was often used as the "boogey man" is used in other places to terrify the young. More important: to the Texas settlers the land was theirs, made manifest by destiny. But the Comanches were born unto the land. Thus it was foreordained one group would lose everything. The two could never coexist.

The other day after reading about a particularly brutal episode of Comanche-settler violence I made the connection: the mindless violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Settlers and the tribal vengeance is very, very similar. There is a very real analogue between what the Israelis are doing with the Settlements and what the white settlers in Texas did to the Comanches.

Make of it what you will.

. . . with almost blowing up the world financial system during the debt ceiling debacle, Congressional Republican radicals are seeking a mulligan!