Thursday, 06 October 2011
When worlds collide
Based on everything the US government itself has said, it seems pretty clear that Barack Obama knowingly and willfully had an American citizen murdered because he didn't like what he was saying. He did so without regard to Constitutional restraints against such actions - that is, this was manifestly, unequivocally, against the law. He has produced not one single item of evidence to justify this action. His answer to suggestions that such evidence must be produced is essentially that he won't tell us anything. "The official U.S. position naturally acknowledges there are strong legal limits to U.S. application of military force. We can't 'use military force whenever we want, wherever we want.' What is a key limitation? The threat must be imminent. Claims that al-Awlaki and Khan presented an imminent threat of other than posting to YouTube, blogging, speaking, and writing, seem extremely shaky, at best."
Glenn Greenwald also reminds us: "The heel-clicking, blind faith in secret, unproven accusations of the President that someone is a Terrorist is what drove support for Bush's secret War on Terror excesses, and it is now exactly the mindset driving support for Obama's killing of Awlaki. That's why - contrary to the conceit of Obama loyalists that conservatives would condemn him for the Awlaki killing - the most vocal praise has been heaped on Obama by the likes of Rick Perry, Dick and Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Bill O'Reilly, Newt Gingrich, Charles Krauthammer, and Bill Kristol. It's also why the legal justification for Obama's actions is being supplied by the likes of former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, whose views on the War on Terror and executive power led him to approve of Bush's warrantless NSA eavesdropping program and to demand detention without charges." (Glenn has video here of Jake Tapper actually pressing to get something better than "nyaa nyaa nyaa" out of the administration, to no avail.)
Jay Ackroyd will be talking with Matt Stoller tonight about Occupy Wall Street on Virtually Speaking.
Elizabeth Warren Blasts Wall Street, Scott Brown In First Massachusetts Senate Debate. But did she just fatally screw up?
Meanwhile, Obama does something right: He killed No Child Left Behind.
Joan Walsh wakes up to Occupy Wall Street, and takes a trip down memory lane.
"Washington's long con", Maureen Tkacik's article on Suskind's book, makes me think Confidence Men might very well be worth reading. And Tim Geithner sounds like even more of a creep than I thought. (via)
"96-year-old Woman Who Voted During Jim Crow Is Denied Photo ID [...] Here's a woman who has gone to her voting precinct to do her patriotic duty her whole life, even when the segregationist laws were intentionally aimed at preventing it. And now they tell her no."
And they have a message for us.
The amazing Bert Jansch has died, at the age of 67. As Derek Schofield says in the Guardian, he "had the most sustained influence, not only within folk circles, but also on the wider music scene. To Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, Jansch was 'the innovator of the time - so far ahead of what anyone else was doing'. Johnny Marr of the Smiths described Jansch's effect on his musicianship as 'massive ... one of the most influential and intriguing musicians to have come out of the British music scene'. Other artists he influenced included Paul Simon, Donovan and Neil Young, with whom Jansch toured in the US in 2010." (Other stories at Auntie Beeb, the Telegraph, more from the Telegraph, and another from the Guardian.) Many of you will recognize Jansch's "Angie" from your Simon & Garfunkel collection, as Led Zep fans will know his Black Waterside". Oddly, I couldn't find a Jansch version or Donovan's cover of "Deed I Do" at YouTube (though I could find "Donovan covers" of it by others), but you can tell he liked Jansch a lot. And then, of course, there was Pentangle.
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15:26 BST
Wednesday, 05 October 2011
There's something happening hereSam Seder did a great interview with Glenn Greenwald on Monday's Majority Report, about Obama's exercise of executive murder - and, of course, live coverage form OWS. On Tuesday, he talked to David Dayen about mortgage fraud, and to Mike Stark about radio show phone-ins. And Sam using that phrase to Tom Friedman was the funniest thing to happen in days.
The burgeoning action of OWS has "explosive potential."
The Boston Tea Party was more like OWS than like today's teabaggers.
Bernie Sanders on Ratigan says OWS is doing "exactly the right thing to do."
Occupy Wall Street versus Tea Party: a video comparison
Monkeyfister got all inspired by Ratigan's appearance at OWS.
Obama's ardor for an Infrastructure Bank is actually just a load of corruption that he knows full well will have dire consequences for increasingly voiceless Americans - for the profit of a few.
"Why don't rogue traders ever make money? [...] Does it strike you as strange that no big bank ever announces that it has made $2.3 billion in unauthorized trading? Somehow, 'rogue' traders always wind up losing tons of money; they never seem to win."
The media is starting to talk about how that trigger won't fire, and the supercommittee is just wasting time.
Jared Bernstein says it's not at all hard to figure out the message of Occupy Wall Street: "Given the facts of the income distribution, the trends in real middle-class incomes and poverty, the failure of policy to do much to change these trends, the government bailouts of the only class that's benefited from the recovery so far, the absence of clear punishment/accountability for the financial and political institutions that helped inflate the debt bubble that continues to squeeze economies across the globe, and the dysfunctionality of the current political system (they're arguing more about whether they can keep the lights on than whether they can help solve the economic problems), the more interesting question is what took so long for such protests to show up?"
Taylor Marsh thinks Obama wrong-footed here by saying that Americans aren't any better off than they were four years ago. I have a different take. Partly it's that most people who remember four years ago know things are not better, and there's no point in him saying something they don't have to do any research to know is not true. But the other is that Obama is playing his role, and that role is to lower expectations. His most optimistic message, most of the time, can roughly be translated as, "Things are tough, and we're working to try to keep them from getting worse," which means "we" are not actually expecting them to get better.
Ariel Dorfman on the shame of Cheney - and the United States
Stuart Zechman's polished snark
Giblets and Fafnir return to the issues of the day. Every time one of these is posted, you should send it to your representatives and tell them how much more insightful it is than Politico and The Washington Post. It may not accomplish anything, but I'd feel better about it.
Your steampunk keyboard
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16:10 BST
Monday, 03 October 2011
Generations at work
See the rest of these great pictures here. (via)
The 99% have something to say.
The panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays this week were Digby and McJoan, who discussed the good news from OWS. (And with the California state AG pulling out of the settlement, it looks like the case against the banks may actually go forward. And maybe OWS helped do that, too.) (podcast)
Declaration of the Occupation of New York City. Obviously inspired by TJ hisself. (And I keep meaning to say that the really nice thing about OWS is that finally there is someone aside from the Tea Party publicly making a stink about the fealty our elected officials and their underlings are showing to the financiers, and it's not just about the so-called "socialist" in the White House. This is bipartisan corruption and everyone should know it by now.)
Don't be afraid to say Revolution. After three weeks, many things are changing.
"Koch Brothers Flout Law With Secret Iran Sales" - paying bribes, deliberately cheating and stealing, and firing employees who report problems. And this story isn't from some lefty blogger - it's from Bloomberg.
Barbara Ehrenreich says, "Rich people are being 'demonized' for flaunting their wealth. Poor dears!" Wailing about tax rises that, even if they happened, wouldn't even inconvenience them. And does anyone really think they're going to happen?
Charles Pierce on credit card fees, and what Jamie Dimon charges for a hamburger.
Atrios asks, "How Does It Even Occur To You That This Might Be OK? I hear a lot about how frightened schools are of lawsuits, but when you start thinking you have more police power than the police you can't be that concerned... "
Have you visited Skippy the Bush Kangaroo lately? He's got zillions of links up.
Rick Perry Finally Talks Some Sense.
Dick Cheney demands an apology.
American Extremists: "Preoccupied"
Sign of the times
Ruth Calvo is visiting from Texas, and she spent the day at Kew Gardens yesterday. She had wanted to go up to the treetop walkway, but getting up there turned out to be a problem, so when she got back she did it on the computer instead.
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14:30 BST
Saturday, 01 October 2011
Volunteers of AmericaI keep thinking that all I do is document the atrocities - and some days, it does seem that's all I'm doing - but there really are good things that have emerged in spite of the horrors going on. What happened in Wisconsin is that the people got together and pushed back. What's happening in the actual streets of New York is people getting together to start making a larger push-back happen. That Sam Seder's listener-supported edition of The Majority Report is coming to us every weekday and bringing us important news and analysis and interviews means we aren't letting them shut us up. That you can download podcasts from Virtually Speaking with useful analysis of the difference between what's real and what we're told means you have tools you never had before. While there are flaws and weaknesses to be found in all, we're all getting smarter and better and learning to do more things, and a lot of it is starting to bleed into the public consciousness and even the establishment media. Even some of the smaller blogs make contributions that filter into a Krugman column here, a segment of MJR there, and soon a moment on MSNBC, and even the occasional NYT editorial. The point is, if you want to make a campaign work, you have to keep repeating your talking points and doing it everywhere you can. As more people do that, the possibilities increase. Watch them, listen to them, join them, support them.
At Pruning Shears, The many successes of Occupy Wall Street: "Generating attention to an issue that the Beltway wants to go away, building support among disparate groups the old-fashioned way, supporting local workers who might otherwise feel isolated, and breathing oxygen into alternative outlets. The OWS movement has been racking up some really important successes. What's not to like?"
On The Majority Report, Sam Seder has been keeping up with the news and doing interviews with people on the scene at the Wall Street occupation, so check out his shows Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
On Virtually Speaking A-Z, Jay and Stuart discussed the trap that career Obama-propagandist Melissa Harris-Perry and those like her are attempting to set for critics of Obama. It's not just that her "argument" is wrong (right up to the fact that "the left" in the form of The Nation magazine published far more criticism of President Bill than they have of Obama), it's that it's not an argument at all, but a campaign tactic that is meant to silence legitimate criticism. It's McCarthyist, it's trying to turn the camera on the critics rather than on the ghastly policies of a president. It's a distraction. But, to me, it's a distraction that is so manipulative, so shameful, and so damaging to real discussion of racial issues, that I still think it needs to be called out. To me, people who promulgate this sort of phony guilt-tripping are part of the machine that is hurting the black community every single day. You care about blacks? Stand up against the war on drugs, the burgeoning prison industry, and the economic policies - Obama's economic policies - that have been making life increasingly more miserable for black people in America. You can't persistently degrade the Constitutional rights and economic stability of 98% of Americans without hurting the black community. Ms. Harris-Perry would like us to ignore the damage those policies are doing to the vast majority of Americans, including black Americans, and pretend that it's All About Obama. It's not. She may work for Obama, but the rest of us answer to a higher calling than the fortunes of one well-connected politician who just happens to be black. Barack Obama is not Black America - he's just one guy. There are millions of black people - and white people, and people of those funny colors in between - who matter much more.
Jay also talked to Mike Stark in the second hour. And on Virtually Speaking Susie, Susie Madrak talked to columnist Will Bunch about the relationship between music and politics (which reminded me of Ahmet Ertegun talking about how they decided to add The Buffalo Springfield to their list after hearing "For What It's Worth" and how rock music was representing the news. Clear Channel made sure we can't do that anymore). This week on Virtually Speaking Sundays, the panelists will be Digby and McJoan.
"Volunteers"
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17:20 BST
Friday, 30 September 2011
Where the action isI think I like LarryE's quote from Oscar Ameringer down in comments (to this post) better than I like my own metaphor: "Money is like manure: Spread around, it helps things grow. Piled up in one place, it just stinks."
I'd like to take a moment to congratulate the Wall Street Occupiers (aka the NYC General Assembly) for doing more than a day's worth of work, for sticking it out, for hanging in long enough that even the media is starting to notice and the "progressives" who support Obama-at-any-cost are pushing back. That's already an accomplishment. As Digby notes, the NYT doesn't find the Wall Street occupation as serious as the appearance of people with tea bags on their heads two years ago, and Glenn Greenwald notes the "progressive" scorn with a clear eye:
A significant aspect of this progressive disdain is grounded in the belief that the only valid form of political activism is support for Democratic Party candidates, and a corresponding desire to undermine anything that distracts from that goal.
And yet, clearly, electing people who happen to be Democrats hasn't worked out too well. Something has to happen. When I read something like this, I am astonished at how little modern "progressives" understand about how long it takes to get some real organization going and how useful demonstrations are to seeding those organizations. (On the bright side, the commenters to that post show a lot of sense.) But Glenn is right, this isn't really sincere criticism. It's not sincere, certainly, to pretend that the message of the Wall Street Occupation is not well understood, even though the media pretend they don't know what it is. The rest of the country understands very well that something is seriously wrong on Wall Street, and something has to be done about it. Glenn, again:Most importantly, very few protest movements enjoy perfect clarity about tactics or command widespread support when they begin; they're designed to spark conversation, raise awareness, attract others to the cause, and build those structural planks as they grow and develop. Dismissing these incipient protests because they lack fully developed, sophisticated professionalization is akin to pronouncing a three-year-old child worthless because he can't read Schopenhauer: those who are actually interested in helping it develop will work toward improving those deficiencies, not harp on them in order to belittle its worth.
Yes. If you wanted something worthwhile to happen, you'd be doing it yourself. I'm all in favor of people who have the time and resources to get out there - with cameras, with bottles of water, and with ideas - and join them.Or you can just look for an excuse not to get off the couch.
* * * * *I see there are still people who don't believe that the All Opponents of Obama Are Racist tactic has been a trait of the Obama campaign all along. Then let me take you back to those thrilling days of yesteryear when Andrew Cuomo talked about campaigning in small states like Iowa and New Hampshire and said they "require you to do something no other race does, you know, and I like it, and I agree with you, it's a good thing. It's not a TV-crazed race, you know, you can't just buy your way through that race ... It doesn't work that way, it's frankly a more demanding process. You have to get on a bus, you have to go into a diner, you have to shake hands, you have to sit down with ten people in a living room. You can't shuck and jive at a press conference, you can't just put off reporters, because you have real people looking at you saying answer the question, you know, and all those moves you can make with the press don't work when you're in someone's living room." (And let me remind you that when white northerners use phrases like "shuck and jive" - and, if you're a certain generation, also terms like "dig", "hip/hep" "go to school on" and dozens of others of the same ilk - they use them not because they are southern crackers but because they learned them from their black friends and associates in the civil rights movement, who used them all the time.) But the interesting thing about Cuomo's innocuous quote is not what he said, but the way it was suddenly introduced to the wider political community. See if you can spot the difference. Yes, an entire memo was somehow magically disseminated to the world compiling supposedly racist comments from the Clinton campaign, none of which were racist - and though the memo seems to have come from an "unofficial" source (did we ever learn who?) in the Obama campaign, it did a lot of dirty work - and I do mean dirty. That memo drove an enormous spike into the progressive coalition that has never been healed. The current reiteration of that nonsense is just more evidence that what is past really is prologue. So you'd better go to school on the past.
Strangely, Marcy Wheeler does not agree with the NYT's brilliant suggestion that the protests all over the world are against democracy.
Two to read from Atrios:
"But What About The Children??"
"Anything That Lets Us Lay People Off"
Lynching fever: "Our results suggest that the death penalty has become a sort of legal replacement for the lynchings in the past,' Jacobs said. 'This hasn't been done overtly, and probably no one has consciously made such a decision. But the results show a clear connection.'"
Tweet from @maxbsawicky (Max B. Sawicky): Liberal states with lower unemployment than Texas and no oil: VT, HI, MD, MA, WI, NY, DE. #socialism Unemployment Rates for States
A great post title from Athenea.
BoonyvilleUSA on MMT.
Vibrations interview clip, Julian Bond, 1982. A more recent Jonathan Capehart interview with Julian Bond establishing that, all these years later, he's still cooler than you. Wikipedia: In 1965, Bond was one of eight African Americans elected to the Georgia House of Representatives after passage of civil rights legislation, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On January 10, 1966, however, the Georgia state representatives voted 184-12 not to seat him because he publicly endorsed SNCC's policy regarding US involvement in the Vietnam War. They also disliked Bond's stated sympathy for persons who were "unwilling to respond to a military draft".[4] A federal District Court panel ruled 2-1 that the Georgia House had not violated any of Bond's federal constitutional rights. In 1966, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 9-0 in the case of Bond v. Floyd (385 U.S. 116) that the Georgia House of Representatives had denied Bond his freedom of speech and was required to seat him. From 1967 to 1975, Bond was elected for four terms as a Democratic member in the Georgia House. There he organized the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus. Throughout his House career, his district was repeatedly redistricted [...] He went on to be elected for six terms in the Georgia Senate from 1975 to 1986." And he's still doing all sorts of stuff you should know him for.
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16:25 BST
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
And so it goesYou can download the podcast of my discussion with Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) Sunday night right here. I thought it went all right. Stuart says we should have said more about how we can look forward to another round of having our criticisms of Obama's policies dismissed as "racist" and lumped in with the Teabaggers' attacks, perhaps along the lines of the "thoughtful" manner discussed below (and here, and, notably, here). (And, apparently, I am a racist for suggesting that there have been better black leaders than Obama.) It is, as Marcy and I both said, something they have to do to distract us, because they can't answer the real questions that are being raised - they don't want to have to talk about what they are really doing, which is deliberately trying to destroy the New Deal - and the middle-class.
Ian Welsh is on the same page with Marcy and me: "Tax Increases on the Rich are not going [to] pass. Period. Obama is doing this so he can look like a liberal, because he knows it won't pass. If he wanted this sort of policy, he needed to do it in his first few months. He didn't and he doesn't, this is re-election positioning. If you are treating it as anything else, you are being played. Oh, and while I approve of the 'Wall Street Occupation' it isn't going to do a damn thing unless it costs Wall Street large amounts of money. Which would require different tactics than are being used. Still, it's a start." Indeed, if Obama really wanted to tax the rich, all he had to do is start with simply letting the Bush tax-shift expire rather than making sure it was renewed.
Of course, we were warned a long time ago when Obama "courageously" bashed poor black people. But what Obama proves today more than ever is, as Bruce Dixon says, that, "When Republicans invade new countries, global public opinion can put millions worldwide in protest demonstrations in the street. When Democrats invade, there are no demonstrations. When Republicans propose social security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts, and try to regulate unions out of existence, public outcries and near general-strike situations loom. When Democrats do the same, all is quiet. Republicans could not even pass their own bailout bills with a Republican in the White House. So between bigoted, bumbling tea party Republicans, and level-headed, competent corporate Democrats, which is the greater evil? And which is the more effective evil?"
CMike down in comments provides a little reminder of the times.
French vote against austerity - seems it's generated unprecedented support for the leftist parties. Perhaps we could take a lesson from this. Frankly, at this point, it wouldn't surprise me if the Socialist Workers Party could make inroads against the five Tory parties in the US and UK.
Looks like Obama broke his own bank - but that's okay, he's still got the corporations.
Pruning Shears notes the long non-evolution of David Brooks, among other things.
"Obama and women: Two views"
Distinguishing the Innocent Not an Easy Task
Udall and Wyden Complain About Misleading Patriot Act Surveillance Reports
From Glenn Greenwald:
When two Americans are released after "781 days in Iran's most notorious prison," the establishment media is happy to quote them on how bad their experience was, but never mentions that they talked about how America treats prisoners probably made things worse for them.
Dennis G. Jacobs: Case study in judicial pathology
The Geithner mystery solved - because, you know, it's no mystery.
More out from Charlie Savage on how Bush and Obama have expanded executive power.
The NYC police pepper-sprayed a woman who had already been corralled. Why? Arrest the guy who did it.
In today's scare-yourself-to-death news, a trader tells the BBC that Europe will collapse and governments aren't going to fix this market crisis because "Governments Don't Rule The World, Goldman Sachs Rules The World."
BDBlue asks a favor in comments: "My one suggestion is that if you must single out a GOP candidate with whom to agree on some of the issues, could you at least mention Gary Johnson (preferably instead of Ron Paul). Johnson would - like every other candidate for the presidency - destroy us economically. However, like Ron Paul, he's anti-war and along with Paul refused to endorse water boarding at the last GOP debate. He's also pro-choice (unlike Paul), for legalizing marijuana and treating drugs generally as a health problem, for the repeal of DADT and for civil unions (unlike Paul), and against the death penalty. And he doesn't have the horrible racist associations that Paul has. In other words, he's Ron Paul without the reactionary social politics. Which means, btw, that the GOP is actually scared of him (he's been repeatedly denied entrance to GOP debates even though he has more support than others allowed to participate) - he's young (so it's not his last hurrah like it is Paul's) and has the policies to appeal to the younger libertarians by being liberal on social issues. Again, he's absolutely awful on economics and the usual libertarian crap, and I'm not voting for him, but he's a much better "strange bedfellow" to point to than Ron and I wish more people on the left would, if only to make the GOP more uncomfortable." Of course, the problem with that is that since most people aren't seeing him in the debates, he's not the guy they're identifying as the one who has the right views on marijuana, waterboarding, and the war machine. But, yeah, both of them are to the "left" of Obama on drugs, torture and military adventurism.
"Nativists Shift Target to Documented Immigrants" - so, it's not "legality" that concerns them. Who'da thunk it?
Obama tells blacks to STFU.
Thom Hartmann interview with Sam Pizzigati (which happened last August but I didn't notice it until now). And here's Pizzigati's article "What would FDR Do?"
Video: Sam Seder live interview with Wall Street occupier. Interesting detail on how they are working.
Keith Olbermann's show on Countdown, 9-23-11, featured Michael Moore, discussion of the murder of Troy Davis, and the occupation of Wall Street. (I couldn't help thinking while Moore was talking about how cops feel about Wall Street that when Bloomberg manipulates the situation to get the police to harass protesters, he's trying to break that support and provoke hostility from the protesters.)
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15:55 BST
Sunday, 25 September 2011
Virtually Speaking SundaysTonight's guests on Virtually Speaking Sundays will be Avedon Carol and Marcy Wheeler.
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23:59 BST
Saturday, 24 September 2011
Equal opportunity bad presidentsStuart alerts me in comments to the post below to a piece of nonsense in The Nation by Melissa Harris-Perry that demonstrates just how far away our established liberals have drifted from reality. The title gives the game away: "Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama".
Now, if you've been paying any attention at all, you might have thought that white liberals were abandoning Obama because we spent eight years recoiling in horror from Bush's policies and are even more horrified that we elected someone we thought might be one of our own who instead acts just as smug, insensitive, callous, stupid, and creepy as the crazy white man did, but Ms. Harris-Perry thinks we suddenly object to monstrous polices like torture, assassination of American citizens without trial, war-making, attacks on the middle-class and the export of American jobs to foreign countries (because slaves can do them cheaper - complete with betraying unions so we can make life just as hard-scrabble at home as it is over there) - we object to all that, just like we have for the last decade - merely because we're just a bunch of racists:
Still, electoral racism cannot be reduced solely to its most egregious, explicit form. It has proved more enduring and baffling than these results can capture. The 2012 election may be a test of another form of electoral racism: the tendency of white liberals to hold African-American leaders to a higher standard than their white counterparts. If old-fashioned electoral racism is the absolute unwillingness to vote for a black candidate, then liberal electoral racism is the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors.The relevant comparison here is with the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Today many progressives complain that Obama's healthcare reform was inadequate because it did not include a public option; but Clinton failed to pass any kind of meaningful healthcare reform whatsoever. Others argue that Obama has been slow to push for equal rights for gay Americans; but it was Clinton who established the "don't ask, don't tell" policy Obama helped repeal. Still others are angry about appalling unemployment rates for black Americans; but while overall unemployment was lower under Clinton, black unemployment was double that of whites during his term, as it is now. And, of course, Clinton supported and signed welfare "reform," cutting off America's neediest despite the nation's economic growth.
She goes on with a list of Clinton's sins in a similar manner without reference to the facts of the times, which include the paucity of information sources and forums in which any of those crimes could be discussed, especially once it became clear that there was a full-scale attack on Clinton in progress that was based not on these really quite awful policies, but on his having done things like appoint a perfectly sane woman who said perfectly sane things about sex education. Or on things that were really the doing of his predecessor (I'm always amazed at how Clinton was responsible for Ruby Ridge even though it happened during the GHWB administration), or were planned or implemented under the Reagan or Bush-the-first administrations. Or on his having done something that most of his predecessors in the office are known to have done - i.e., get a little on the side. (Note: it used to be that it was okay to commit adultery on the side as long as you never got divorced. Apparently, it's now okay - at least, if you're a Republican - to play around all you want to and get a divorce, but any Democrat who has an affair is pretty much in the Worse Than Hitler category.) Or things that were the sheer fantasies of backwoods segregationists in Arkansas.Face it, there was no air in the room for attacking Clinton from the left while most liberals were still reeling in shock at discovering just how right-wing the "liberal" media had become. When The New Republic is promoting (to respectful appreciation from the rest of the media) a re-packaging of long-debunked racists myths in the form of The Bell Curve while the rest of us are being called "fascist" for suggesting that we'd rather not hear our neighbors referred to as "niggers", where, exactly, was this criticism of Clinton supposed to take place?
Nevertheless, plenty of us were furious at Clinton, and we said so on the rare occasion that we found a place to do it. Trouble is, most spaces for public debate were dominated more by partisanship than by appreciation of just how damaging some of his policies were, and too many people were feeling helpless in the face of that sudden ugly exposure of the now manifest right-wing nature of the media. With right-wing Democrats suddenly in charge of the party, it had become impossible even to mention single-payer, let alone decry policies that were more directly an attack on the poor and minorities. Universal government-funded healthcare was something that had wide mainstream support and yet it couldn't be talked about?
And, in an atmosphere where genuine liberal concerns could not be talked about, it left us all atomized, feeling alone, like our concerns were not shared by the many, but only by a handful of our friends. You can't get a movement going when you feel like you're the only one who sees what's going on.
And it took time for our complaints to begin to permeate. A new generation had to begin to hear the language of real progressive liberalism, and an old generation had to learn the ways of the internet, before there was even a place and time for talking about these things - and we were able to practice on Bush, who gave us plenty of reasons to look more thoroughly into those policies and understand just how urgent the promotion of liberalism had become.
And, of course, it was precisely that understanding of how much damage Clinton had really done us that put so many liberals into the Anyone But Hillary camp. All over the progressive blogosphere, people swore oaths against anyone who was connected with the DLC or anyone like them. We talked openly about the damage done by NAFTA, by the Clintons' refusal to discuss single-payer, by DADT, by the increasing militarization of our police and the direct damage these "modernizing" policies were doing to the black community, the poor, and even the middle-class - and all of the sins of Clinton. We may not have had the space to talk about those things during his presidency, but now that we did, we did not cut the Clintons much slack. Sure, Hillary had her supporters in the primary, but many of those were people who had accepted the fact that it was going to be either Clinton or Obama and they could see that Obama, though he tried to hide them (unlike Hillary, who at least was honest about them), had pretty clear connections to the DLC bunch and was the choice of the corporate media, and that he really had no liberal credentials to speak of. And it wasn't Hillary who had openly betrayed liberals by dragging the "Social Security crisis" story out of the grave we had so recently managed to bury it in through virtually round-the-clock effort to defeat that very, very serious threat. I trusted neither of them, myself, but Obama talked like a well-spoken Republican of the past - genteel compared to today's GOP, but with the same policies and goals.
If there has been a double-standard, it was the one that ignored Obama's claim that Afghanistan was the "right" war and it was okay to continue prosecuting it, the shrugging off of Obama's vote against a 30% cap (30%!) on usury, the brushing away of Obama reviving the "Social Security crisis" meme after we had worked so hard to kill it, and dozens of other pieces of evidence that Obama was contemptuous of progressive liberalism and willing to break the progressive coalition in order to get into office. The one that pretended that, while Hillary Clinton was "a monster", Obama was somehow golden.
What kind of standard was it that told us throughout the primaries and even long after he had started to show his true colors in office that the reason Obama walked and talked like a refined Tory and promoted and fought for right-wing policies was that he "had to" because he was black? (Why was it okay to say that during the campaign, but no one would have accepted the same excuse for Hillary - that she "had to" vote for the Iraq authorization because she was female, and a Clinton to boot? Nor did anyone bother to point out that the AUMF did not authorize Bush to do what he did - he did what he wanted to do regardless of the restraints written into it.) Why do we hear, over and over, that we have to put up with what can best be described as utter crap because Obama is black?
I do not believe that it was "not the time" to elect a black liberal as president. I think it would have been a terrific time to elect a black liberal as president, in fact. Yes, the right-wing would have said all the same crazy things they're saying now, but at least, if Obama had actually been one, elected with his overwhelming mandate, I believe he could have been a great president - one who actually did the work that needed doing instead of continuing to reverse us back to the 13th century. A black liberal, standing up to people who were and are hurting the nation, could have welcomed their hatred and been proud of being called the enemy of people of such caliber. A proud black liberal president could have saved the country and perhaps even earned the respect of some people who thought a black president would not help them.
But he's not. He's something else that doesn't care about the damage he is doing to this country. His actions from the very start of his political career have sent a clear message that he is not on our side, that in fact he wants to hurt us. He has won one election after another by first destroying the political careers of people who were more liberal than he is. He has been telling us pretty much to lie down and die since the moment he arrived at the White House.
I don't have an unrealistic standard I hold black politicians to. It's perfectly realistic to hold Obama to the same standard I have watched black leaders achieve throughout my lifetime.
But I'm disgusted when people like Melissa Harris-Perry sink so low as to tell me I can't expect intelligence, courage, competence and decency from a president simply because he's black. Yes, I can.
* * * * *Gallup is saying that more people are willing to vote for, or at least consider voting for, Mitt Romney than are willing to vote for, or consider voting for Perry or Obama. The good news for Obama is that more people say they will definitely vote for him than would definitely vote for either Romney or Perry - but that winning number is only 33% who are currently sure they'll vote for him. Meanwhile, only 35% say they will definitely not vote for Mittens, while 45% would definitely not vote for Obama and 44% say the same about Perry. I didn't see the question, "Would you vote for any of these creeps?" 'Cause I sure won't. (Also: a media moment when the White House and some of their friends in the media push back against Suskind - and he stands up for himself.)
I always said it was pretty easy to explain this stuff if you don't start off by convincing yourself that it's all too complicated. I'm glad to see that Krugman is getting better at this. As I pointed out a long time ago, the image of money as the blood of the economic body is an easy one to understand. It needs to circulate throughout the body for the body to remain healthy. It does not need to be leeched away so that the rich can bloat themselves on it.
Get your Lord of the Rings Pez dispensers here. (Get me some, too.)
Google is celebrating Jim Henson's birthday. (Story)
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Thursday, 22 September 2011
"May God bless your souls"The letter from Troy Davis: "As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking languages and expressing cultures and religions I could only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming, overflowing Joy. I can't even explain the insurgence of emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet again that this is not a case about the death penalty, this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice prevail." His last words were to his executioners: "May God have mercy on your souls. May God bless your souls."
The next time someone tells me how important it is to elect a Democratic president because of Supreme Court appointments, I won't forget that the Supreme Court, including the Democrat-appointed justices, unanimously agreed that it is okay to murder a man in the absence of any believable evidence of his guilt. Oh, and that our Democratic president could have single-handedly stopped this monstrous act, but couldn't be bothered.
Not In My Name
Like Susie says, Police brutality is the real reason why the cops don't want people with cell phones recording them.
"Learning Faces of Different Races: Clues to Why 'They' All Look Alike", via David Sirota.
"REPORT: Economists Shut Out Of Debt-Ceiling Debate; Only 4.1 Percent Of Cable Guests Were Actual Economists"
Victims of BofA Mortgage and Foreclosure Actions Leave BofA's Trash on Exec's Doorstep.
Gee, do you think it's possible that fracking in Lancashire caused those earthquakes in Blackpool? Sure. Do you believe that investment in fracking will create more jobs or produce more energy than investment in "green" energy? Of course not. But claiming the reverse will lure away plenty of investors' money.
The sky is falling.
Amazing nature (baby elephant included)
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Wednesday, 21 September 2011
You've heard it saidThanks to Thers for linking this overwhelming evidence that telling the truth is not complicated. And that's why Elizabeth Warren is leading in the polls, despite starting way behind Scott Brown in name-recognition. (And the secret a lot of people still don't know is that among rank and file Republican voters, Warren doesn't have the negatives you might think she would - a lot of them actually know, and appreciate, what she's been doing.) David Atkins: "And here's the little secret the Democratic consultant class either doesn't understand or willfully refuses to understand: this sort of rhetoric won't just win in Massachusetts. It will win in Omaha, too. It will win the day from Annapolis to Anchorage, from Kalamazoo to Kailua-Kona."
So, Andrew Breitbart is sounding whackier than Ross Perot (although I'm beginning to wonder about whether Perot was just hearing voices, to be honest). OK, so he wants to shoot "liberals" and thinks people like him outnumber the rest of us and have all the guns. He's wrong on both counts, there, but when you look at the kind of people on your TV and the NYT op-ed pages who represent themselves as "liberals", it's not hard to hate them. I mean, look at who is supposed to be liberal and, jeez, you almost want to shoot them yourself. Problem is, they're not liberals; they're not much different from the royalists who opposed the Constitution. (Seriously, I think everyone should listen to that clip from Stuart talking about what the "liberal" White House and their pals actually think. They come from groups like the DLC/Third Way/New Democrats that are funded by the same people who fund the right-wing spin tanks. They're right-wingers, they just have different language for the same goals.)
On The Majority Report, Sam had an interesting interview Monday with filmmaker Marshall Curry about his film, If a Tree Falls, about the Earth Liberation Front and what the introduction of destructive action did. he also talked to a rep from Occupy Wall Street. On Tuesday, he talked to Ryan Grim about Obama's pretend left turn. (Also: nominate Sammy in every category you can fit him into!) Wednesday's guest is Alan Grayson. Sam gets better and better with some really good analysis of his own, too, I recommend it.
Cenk Uygur explains Why The Young Turks are going to Current TV. And here's his new boss welcoming him.
On Countdown, Bernie Sanders and John Nichols in Wisconsin talking about Scott Walker, labor, and Obama. So, where was Keith? Oh, yeah, he was here.
Welcome Blog Hag to her new address.
"Gamers Unlock Protein Mystery That Baffled AIDS Researchers For Years: In just three weeks, gamers deciphered the structure of a key protein in the development of AIDS that has stumped scientists for years. According to a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, the findings could present a significant breakthrough for AIDS and HIV research. Using an online game called Foldit, players were able to predict the structure of a protein called retroviral protease, an enzyme that plays a critical role in the way HIV multiplies. Unlocking the build of the protein could theoretically aid scientists in developing drugs that would stop protease from spreading." Damn, I still can't figure out how to walk up a spiral staircase in Second Life.
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Tuesday, 20 September 2011
So much to do, so little timeI admit, I haven't pored over the internets looking for it, but none of the stories I've seen about Obama's current proposal mention the term "flat tax". You remember the flat tax, don't you? The one floated by billionaires on the premise that the rich pay too much and should have to pay no more than anyone else? No one has asked why that idea disappeared, but of course that happened because billionaires finally realized that a flat tax would actually mean they'd pay more than they do now. So when Obama advocates a tax that would mean millionaires would have to pay no less than everyone else, he's essentially advocating a flat tax at the top, isn't he? And, of course, still on the backs of the ailing and elderly at a level that should make people scream. So much for the math.
I have a dream where the Democrats bow to the real political reality and draw up a plan that is utterly FDR and not even a little bit BHO, campaign on it with vigor and win both houses with overwhelming liberal progressive dominance, and then pass their single-payer, tax-the-rich, rebuild-the-infrastructure, protect-American-jobs bill with a veto-proof majority. But, as long as I'm having impossible dreams, I might as well have President Michael Moore sign it. This, I suppose, is better than what everyone expected, but it's so typical of Obama to go out of his way to leave the door wide open to screwing up Social Security and Medicare. If he meant to protect them, he'd simply refuse to offer them up, period. (via)
Oh, yeah, Ralph Nader is looking for a primary challenger. "The letter was endorsed by 45 'distinguished leaders' and included Princeton professor Cornel West, who has been highly critical of President Obama as of late."
If there's one thing we learn from history, it's that we don't learn nothin' from history.
Digby has a piece at Al Jazeera on Vote suppression and the legacy of William Rehnquist, and the current GOP plan to stop you from voting.
Athenae on Surrendering in Advance: "None of these inevitabilities, none of these political realities, is a naturally occurring phenomenon. We didn't wake up one day to a world in which this is the case. It's not some kind of Politics Pandemic where people touch each other and get infected, and therefore talking about it requires something more than a Daley-esque shrug about getting screwed and oh well gosh darn life sucks. It requires being willing to say okay, but there has to be something that can be DONE about it. There's always something to be done. There's always a way out. [...] My worst fear, though? That we're right. That we are better than this. That we can do more. That we can give more. That political reality is what we make it, that inevitability is nothing but the limit of our sight, and that we are allowing ourselves to be talked out of all our glorious possibilities by people whose interests lie in convincing us that this is the best we can do."
"If not us, then who?"
I gather that either things changed while I wasn't looking and then changed back, or things haven't changed much at all. Way back when I wrote my earliest papers about women in media back in college, I noted that "good" women continued pregnancies even when it threatened their lives and everyone who cared about them was trying to talk them out of it. Although there have been exceptions over the years (e.g., the dramatic moment in A Raisin in the Sun when Ruth Younger refers to the doctor as "she" - ah, but a very different context), this was it. But I've been away - did I miss all the TV shows and movies where women got abortions and it wasn't a big deal? Or is it still progress if the option is mentioned at all?
It's not my fault that I didn't post the Virtually Speaking A-Z link from the week before last, reacting to Obama's speech, until now. (It's Stuart's fault.) The more recent episode is here. Stuart also paired with Culture of Truth this week on Virtually Speaking Sundays.
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Sunday, 18 September 2011
Just a bunch of linksBlackout: CNN, Fox, and MSNBC Ignore Thousands Of US Day Of Rage Protesters. (via)
Can't we just have a primary campaign putting Obama against this guy?
Brooks redefines sin; Ezra agrees? (via)
Hacking: Met use Official Secrets Act to demand Guardian reveals sources (via)
Alien space bats - or, if only the peak oil field were like science fiction fandom (Thanks to Lambert for the tip, and for the one for Mark Thoma's article distinguishing Social Security from a Ponzi scheme - sort of, because it doesn't really explain just how different a Ponzi scheme is and why it's illegal, and there are clearly people who need to have this hammered into their heads. And it turns out that the math on how vile it is to raise the Medicare eligibility age is even worse than Lambert thought.)
Atrios on The Worst Idea In The World: "Raising the Medicare eligibility age isn't just a bad idea because squishy liberals like me think life should be easy for older people, or a bad idea because it's stupid fucking politics, it's a horrible idea because it will increase overall costs and mess up our already fucked up health care/health insurance markets more. Also, too, it will make life horrible for older people. Mucking with Social Security is bad, mucking with the Medicare eligibility age is bad AND stupid. So it's probably the likeliest outcome then."
Why do right-wingers think government is always wrong, except when it decides who to kill? (via)
Judge rules in favor of your First Amendment rights.
Judge argues against your First Amendment rights. (Well, no surprises on who that judge was.)
Civil OBEDIENCE Will Kill Us If We Let It. (via)
Protesters!
Wikileaks: U.S. Wanted Venezuela's Equivalent Of "Larry The Cable Guy" To Challenge Hugo Chavez.
"Go big."
William F. Buckley's guest is Huey P. Newton.
Bernie Sanders on picking winners and losers - and the government's mission to make solar power a loser.
Yesterday in labor history
Cool old pictures of New York in the '40s
1920s ad poster art (via)
Time-lapse crop circle formation
Nasa's Kepler telescope finds planet orbiting two suns.
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Friday, 16 September 2011
Too much stuffI don't know if your newspaper showed you this story, but the view of America from abroad gets less pretty every day. Although, quite honestly, living in a make-shift shelter in the forest must have its advantages over having to hustle in to work every day to make rats rich.
Cliff Schecter and Jay Ackroyd on Virtually Speaking Sundays discussed a decade of shame (ref.Cliff's article cited below and this post from Krugman). Stream or podcast at this link.
I was actually pretty angry that Mother Jones published an attack on Paul Krugman for telling the truth about how 9/11 marked the beginning of a decade in which our government encouraged us to cave in to fear and hatred. On the grounds that, of all things, it was said on "a day when Americans of all stripes should have been giving thanks to both President Bush and President Obama for doing whatever it is they do that has protected us from a tragic repeat of the events of September 11, 2001." "Whatever it is they do"? Whatever have they done to make us safer? Unless you count letting the terrorists win as a good way to keep them from needing to attack us again. (Michael Moore, a long time ago, pointed out the significant fact about Osama bin Laden: He was rich. Protect us from the goddamn rich, and then I'll be grateful. But not before.) But I won't link to the fatuous post at MoJo, so click on Glenn Greenwald's take-down. And, speaking of protecting Americans, see Glenn on How a normal, healthy government behaves when a foreign government murders its citizens. (Meanwhile, once again, Americans come to their senses while the creeps and nitwits in DC lose theirs, and no, we don't need to give up our rights to be safe. Quite the contrary.)
Here's Sam Seder's interview with Eliot Spitzer. And, on Monday, he talked to RJ Eskow about raising the Medicare eligibility age, on Tuesday Spencer Ackerman about Palestinian statehood (and about the weird cheer for death during the Tea Party debate); on Wednesday, he played his interview with Bobby Kennedy Jr.. Sam's Thursday show had Sam covering a lot of important news stories that your TV didn't bother to report or unpack for you. (And remember, you can order your fair trade coffee at a discount off Sammy's page, too.)
Sam Seder guest-hosting on Countdown Friday: here (with Allison Kilkenny about how they're trying to rip-off and kill the US Post Office, ref. her article here), here, and here.
Thom Hartmann talks to Ari Berman about the War on Voting.
Like Susie says, the wingers had fun with "Obama's unhelpful advice", but you really can't blame them this time. For all I know, there used to be civil servants who did this stuff, but you can't work this hard to make government unresponsive and then tell people to ask the government to help - oh, wait, I get it.
And Fallows, he's been hearing from people saying, "People Are Close to Revolt," because "creative destruction" is destructive. Even if you have a Harvard degree.
Also: The infrastructure privatization bank, or how Obama's proposed infrastructure bank would privatize public works - and privatize taxpayers' cash;
Ian Welsh's three-point plan to solve Europe's financial crisis;
The real threat to Social Security is in Obama's payroll tax cut, which even right-wing Democrat Ben Nelson recognizes as an ugly scam: "I wish I could (support it),' he said. 'But all you're doing is taking money that otherwise would help Medicare and Social Security.'" And even Pete Sessions - yes, a right-wing Republican - called the payroll tax cut "a horrible idea"! So, yes, Obama is actually more right-wing than Pete Sessions!.
And: Scott Walker's staff raided by FBI! No, Really!
Not Safe for Work.
OBL is making sense!
No, I didn't turn it on.
Here's some sensawonder from Cassini.
Wonderful punk and post-punk era photographs by David Arnoff (via)
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16:30 BST
Saturday, 10 September 2011
The more you see, the less you understandThere's an almost perfect post at The Big Picture called "Clash of The Clueless: Friedman v. Santelli", and it's comedy gold. And as I write this, there is one comment, and it's from a nitwit who thinks that Social Security really is a Ponzi scheme. Of course, as Bob Somerby has been pointing out on his new actual blog (!), this confusion is predictable since no one ever bothers to explain the difference. No one even bothers to mention that, no, Social Security is an insurance plan, let alone that it could only be a Ponzi scheme if (a) people stop having children and (b) our owners ship all of the jobs to China.
Digby: "How interesting. It turns out that normal people (i.e. those who don't pay attention to the gibbering of the Village) have an instinctive understanding of what's going on while those who absorb the misinformation don't. Whodda thunk? This shouldn't surprise me, I guess. It takes a lot of work to sort through the political bullshit we read and see everyday. If you don't hear it at all, you are almost surely better off than if you just follow the news cycle superficially. Maybe these so-called "low information" voters aren't so low information after all. Or perhaps it's just that many of the rest of us are "wrong information" voters." (Also: right-wing Christianists vs. even righter-wing Christianists, Drug-testing the unemployed - another solution to a non-problem - and how our transformational president brought us another economic 9-11.)
Much as I hate to give hits to Politico, but there's actually a Joseph Stiglitz article there called "How to put America back to work".
Thom Hartmann TV - It's funny, but Dave Ettlin, who is rarely political, is saying the same thing: "We need to reward economic patriotism, and punish the alternative. We need to see folks in the halls of government point fingers at companies that gave away American jobs and fail to reverse course and bring them home. Label them unpatriotic. For the most egregious, label them traitors." And Susie Bright, not talking about sex this time, may just get my vote for president with this jobs plan. (And thanks, D, for tying those together for me.)
"The Changingman"
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16:57 BST
Isn't it time to eat the rich?If I were a more ambitious person I would do individual posts on each of The Golden Laws of Prosperity.
From Rolling Stone:
Ari Berman on The GOP War on Voting - and here's Ari talking about it on TV.
Matt Taibbi: "Why Rick Perry's Social Security Stance Will Sink Him"
By the way, you could lose your job from being on the wrong side of the war on voting.
Here's a rare, sensible discussion of our outrageously costly, ineffective, and punitive sex laws, "Sex Offenders: The Last Pariahs", by Roger N. Lancaster from Sunday's NYT.
Occupy Wall Street.
Atrios, linking to a pernicious piece of recasting at Bloomberg, says that Democracy Is Not The Problem, and he's right: "European leaders weren't elected to bail out banks and punish their population, the Euro and the economic/political integration of Europe was always an elite project with marginal public support, and while here in the US the tea partiers squawk about spending, they don't actually care about it." Voters keep trying to throw the bums out, only to find that their pre-selected choices have been limited to just another set of bums. That doesn't let the voters entirely off the hook, though - it means that something has to happen before we cast our ballots that isn't happening, and the only people who can do it is us.
This was a great Labor Day post from Digby: "Stuck in the pink collar ghetto". (And another one.)
From the No One Could Have Predicted files at A Tiny Revolution, "The Obama They Elected".
Get your ass down to the White House fence, Al!
I remember thinking "Reichstag fire" almost immediately. This is it; they'll use it to do everything they've wanted to do for more than half a century. Some people forget that we were already in a state of emergency, that a president had been placed in the White House publicly, with no push-back to speak of, without the ballots having been counted. What Cliff says (via) is true and beautiful, but more than my worst fears on that clear September day have come to pass. Even more than my worst fears after the Selection. I think, until the last couple of years, I still had my faith. Not faith in God, of course, but in something I no longer have a word for that I think used to call "America", although I knew it was much bigger than that - not a country, but an idea.
The 10 unanswered questions of 9/11
I tried to look for the supernova but it rained on me instead.
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01:30 BST
Monday, 05 September 2011
Signs of the timesI hear that the American Google page for today has a lame and insulting little flag, which isn't a doodle and is of course not exactly symbolic of the holiday we are supposedly commemorating. I don't know why they didn't skip it altogether and give the US the same doodle they gave the rest of the world.
Sam Seder celebrates labor with some inspirational words.
E.J. Dionne: "Let's get it over with and rename the holiday 'Capital Day.' We may still celebrate Labor Day, but our culture has given up on honoring workers as the real creators of wealth and their honest toil - the phrase itself seems antique ' as worthy of genuine respect."
What high-profile figure spoke up against crony capitalism from both parties? You'll never guess.
Quote: "Of course, it's unfair to compare child molesters and murderers to Goldman Sachs. Not even the most prolific serial killers have managed to do as much widespread damage as Goldman Sachs and crew have managed. Also, as individuals theoretically capable of conscience and transformation, murderers have at least the potential for actual rehabilitation, while Goldman Sachs is accountable only to its corporate charter. So it's really not a fair comparison at all."
Astroturfing scientific papers - one editor resigned after publishing a "scientific" climate denial paper. But most of them won't.
More reasons to get Alan Grayson back into Congress: He still wants to go after war profiteers. (Also: More on the right-wing Get Rid of the Vote effort.)
Yes, yes, the Republicans are crazy, but let's not forget how hard Obama has to work to enable them.
God forbid they should pay them enough to live on.
CBS officially joins the GOP.
Conservatives still not cool.
San Francisco in toothpicks ♪ Rollin' with my baby ♪ by the Frisco Bay! ♪
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Friday, 02 September 2011
Stops on the infobahnOddly, the US Justice Department has decided to sue to block AT&T's takeover of T-Mobile, as if antitrust law still mattered. Some people wonder if they mean it, or if they are just running for the same kind of gravy train that follows those who pretend to be investigating banks and somehow get lots of campaign cash from banks. In any case, Schneiderman seems to be on the side of the angels in this one, too. If I were him, I wouldn't fly anywhere, and I definitely wouldn't have a sex life. (Conveniently, Stuart Zechman and Jay Ackroyd discussed this issue on Virtually Speaking A to Z last night.)
"WikiLeaks site comes under cyber attack [,,,] 'Dear governments, if you don't want your filth exposed, then stop acting like pigs. Simple,' the group posted on Twitter."
"Dept. of Interior Recommended Federal Charges vs. DADT Protesters - 3 Hours Before They Demonstrated [...] LaChance said he first learned of the protest from an email written by the Secret Service and forwarded to him prior to November 15. LaChance said he was told 'there were people who were going to chain themselves to the White House fence.' But organizers of the demonstration said they did not publicly disclose anyone would be chaining themselves to the White House fence prior to the demonstration, so it's not yet known how the Park Police came by that information."
Horse-race calculus: "2012 is not decided yet" - despite what some may say. For one thing, Obama's "major overhaul of health care" is nothing of the kind, and a lot of his once-supporters are angry about it. His non-supporters were already angry. And that's before seeing it in action. And, anyway, the Republicans are making sure that it's harder than ever for Democrats to vote. Yes, yes, Bush wrecked the economy and the Republicans are trying to keep it wrecked, and everybody knows it, but the best thing Obama has going for him is that most people don't realize how much he could have done to fix it and has consistently refused to do.
David Dayen reports on another AG who needs to be careful: "Nevada AG Catherine Cortez Masto Destroys BofA in New Lawsuit: Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto's amended complaint in a lawsuit against Bank of America has so many interesting nuances, I think I need a new Internet to catalog them all. But let me start by saying that this complaint is a stick of dynamite to the foreclosure fraud settlement, exposing it as a useless whitewash that won't deter banks from their criminal practices. Masto joins other skeptical AGs here in not acceding to such a dereliction of duty, and instead she lays out a thorough case of systematic fraud, in this case by Bank of America, at every step of the mortgage process. [...] So much else to say here. Masto's lawsuit is as much about the current settlement talks as it is about the 2008 Countrywide settlement. She is saying, in no uncertain terms, that you simply cannot trust the banks to actually abide by settlement terms. As Masto says in the complaint, Bank of America's 'misconduct cut across virtually every aspect of the Defendant's operations,' and they 'materially and almost immediately violated the Consent Judgment' agreed upon in the settlement. At the time, Jerry Brown, then Attorney General of California, said that the settlement would 'be closely monitored and enforced in the months ahead.' It clearly wasn't. BofA didn't wait for the ink to dry before violating the terms. And Masto has not only the accounts of borrowers to back this up, but also testimony from Bank of America employees. Knowing this, seeing it fully documented in Nevada, how could there still be any negotiations on a settlement with the same people? The negotiation should be about whether there will be a public or private perp walk for BofA executives."
"N.Y. billing dispute reveals details of secret CIA rendition flights."
CMike supplies a reminder of earlier FBI activities that should have alarmed people, with some discussion from Noam Chomsky that begins here and continues here. (CMike also reminds us that Nancy Pelosi is a troll.)
Super-insects and super-weeds are a side-effect of using Monsanto products, but for some reason it doesn't seem to be hurting their stock prices.
Machiavelli did warn against the use of mercenaries...
Cenk thinks the White House is simply deluded about how they look to the public. I think Obama doesn't actually want a second term all that much. The sooner he gets out of office, the sooner he can start making the real money. Okay, he has help.
"Everything wrong with American politics in one Politico article"
The Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) Primer
Hm, there's a progressive radio station in Chicago that's also webcast for free. I haven't listened to it but looking at the schedule it appears I can hear Hartmann for free if I listen live. Unfortunately, it's on air at a time of day when Mr. Sideshow and I have other plans.
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Wednesday, 31 August 2011
What is past is prologue
I think I finally got a close approximation of the actual color of these roses. I don't know why this shot wasn't orangy like the others, but it actually looks deep red.
The coolest thing I saw last night was this clip showing poor people with their own solar light bulbs made from, well, rubbish.
On Tuesday's Majority Report, Sammy spoke to Dahlia Lithwick about the war on the National Labor Relations Board and to Greg Mitchell of The Nation about some strangely unpromoted images, as discussed in his article "Press Censorship: Spiking a Famous Reporter - and Hiding the Truth About the Nagasaki Bomb."
In comments to this post, CMike helpfully types out passages from Selling Free Enterprise, the Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism 1945-1960 by Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, about the mass re-education program conducted by the business community to change the way Americans think: "During December 1951, half of the adult population of the industrial town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, took regular breaks from work to study economics on company time. Employees from nineteen firms gathered in small groups to watch a series of films and to participate in discussions that focused on the values and symbols associated with the American way of life, including patriotism, freedom, individualism, competition, and abundance through productivity. That these firms halted production and pulled workers off the shop floor and out of offices for such a purpose was not an anomaly; in the years after World War II, millions of workers participated in similar corporate-sponsored economic education programs."
From Suburban Guerrilla
Nancy Pelosi's theory on why the rich are Tying people down with debt
Income inequality - Americans still believe we have better upward mobility than in most countries, but it's actually a lot easier to "better yourself" in Europe than in the good old USA.
Terrorists for the FBI: "The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic terrorist attack. But are they busting plots - or leading them? That's the question addressed by a year-long investigation in Mother Jones magazine. It suggests FBI informants are not only busting terrorist plots, they are actually leading them so the FBI can later claim victories in the so-called "war on terror.""
Yet more evidence of Tony Blair's collusion, and one more reminder that Obama is only making it worse.
Emergency relief
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15:28 BST
Tuesday, 30 August 2011
Mystery tourIn the last few days I've been hit by the Wayback Machine in some interesting ways, like this from Digby: "The NY Times featured an amazing story this morning about famed union man, Joe Hill. Seems there's some proof that he didn't commit the murder for which he was executed after all. This seems all the more poignant and relevant considering the current crusade to kill off the labor movement once and for all."
And then there's this: Dag Hammarskjöld: evidence suggests UN chief's plane was shot down.
Digby has been getting into that Pew poll that shows, among other things, that registered Democrats and Dem-leaning Independents don't want Obama to "compromise" with the Republicans. In fact, those Dem-leaning independents - the ones Obama is allegedly courting with all his compromising, "want Obama to fight the GOP harder.". So it seems the only people who really want Obama to "compromise" with the GOP are the far-right Republicans. (More from Suburban Guerrilla.)
Seven "charitable groups" provided $42.6m to think tanks that promote Islamophobia between 2001 and 2009. Keep an eye on those names. (via)
Matt Stoller: "In positions of power, the best expression I heard is that 'up there the air is thin'. That is, you have enormous latitude, if you want to use it. Power can be wielded creatively and effectively on behalf of whatever it is the wielder wants. Now of course there are constraints, plenty of them. Smart politicians spend their time working to maximize the constraints they want to impose and weakening the ones they want to overcome. But the basic Reaganite liberal argument defending supplication towards Obama these days is that Obama is 'disappointing'. In this line of thought, powerful corporate interests and Republicans are preventing him from enacting what his real agenda would be were he unfettered by this mean machine. Eric Schneiderman, who is in a far less powerful position as New York Attorney General, shows that this is utter hogwash. Obama is who he is, and anyone who thinks otherwise is selling something."
And more and more, the evidence suggests that Obama doesn't want to be a two-term president. He just wants to destroy the Democratic Party and the liberal-progressive coalition and retire to collecting huge speaking fees, perhaps as a member of the Carlyle Group. I mean, what is this?
I have always wanted to slap Kristof for being so urgent about problems in foreign lands that we can't do anything much about (at least the way we are doing things generally), and his inability to see that enormous tragedy is happening right in his own country that needs to be covered seriously. The big news this week at the NYT is that, apparently, Kristof just discovered America: "I've spent a chunk of summer vacation visiting old friends here, and I can't help feeling that national politicians and national journalists alike have dropped the ball on jobs." What's not news is that Thomas Friedman still hasn't discovered reality: "So there we have it, Thomas Friedman once again letting his poor grasp of economics and arithmetic invent grand problems where there are none. What would [we] do without him?"
Senator Bernie's plan to actually fix Social Security: "Get the money from where the money went: So because much of the real Social Security problem is that so much income is now going to just a few at the top, this gets the money to fix the problem from those top-level incomes."
At BTC News, a small overnight epiphany - that if Obama runs on his record, he's toast. And that's just what he seems to be doing, and his supporters think he's president James Bond, Gandhi, MLK,and Mandela.
Yes, of course, when they want to sell you something you wouldn't want if you knew the truth (e.g. war), they claim it creates jobs. I've heard that as long as I can remember. Well, now they're making the claim for Tar Sands.
Democrats' Cameras seized by police at Chabot Town Hall Meeting - another data point in the continuing series of activities where Republicans use public facilities (including the police) to enforce rules that only apply to Democrats and violate the very idea of democracy and a redress of grievances.
They're not going to do anything to help the public, but maybe something will happen to help ripped-off investors. But that would have to work really, really well before it would reach the rest of us.
GOP told don't come to Labor Day Parade.
What Atrios said. Again, as I recall I.F. Stone himself pointing out when he spoke at the first Earth Day, your individual bits of lifestyle change are not what protecting the environment is all about. (And this, too - even if Obama can't pass anything, his plan is still crap, and thus so is his messaging.)
Susie seems to be okay after her trip to the hospital, but remember, she is one of our best bloggers, which means, of course, no health insurance. Chip in if you can.
Also: Amateurs!
Brilliant Jill provides your weather music.
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Friday, 26 August 2011
Hot wordsI think Stuart and Jay really got the formula right on Virtually Speaking A to Z last night in their discussion of what really happened with the whole bankster defraud-and-steal scam, and Stuart had me laughing out loud. Oh, Stuart, you are a rock star!
One of the things A&Z talked about last night was how Obama wants to make a deal to get the banksters to dribble a bit of money back on some of their victims - at least the ones who haven't already lost everything, I guess - in exchange for total immunity from an investigation of their (continuing!) crimes. Strangely, Obama had also been promising some relief himself with money he was handed to help out bankster victims, but he hasn't done it yet and apparently he is now letting on that he has no intention to do so.
Great show Thursday from Sam Seder, featuring John Amato, the weird story of how the FBI uncovered a CIA-backed domestic spy operation by the NYC police spying on Americans in New Jersey, Tar Sands, and the anniversary of the memo that started the most successful attack on the United States in history - and The Powell Memo segment is also posted on YouTube from the Sammycam. (Pass that on.) On Wednesday's Majority Report, Sammy talked to David Dayen about the Schniederman story, and to Amanda Terkel about progressive state ballot initiatives. (And check out Chris Hayes on the teevee talking about the Schniederman story.)
Remember that Goldman Sachs VP who changed his name so he could work for Darrell Issa without anyone noticing? "Revealed: Former Goldman Sachs VP Turned Issa Staffer Supervised Scheduling Of Elizabeth Warren Incident: [...] According to Flavio Cumpiano, a congressional liaison for the CFPB, Haller reportedly changed the time of the hearing at the last minute, then misled Warren staffers by promising to end the testimony by 2:15 pm that day. In the emails, Haller denies ever agreeing to 2:15. But, Haller had been informed that Warren could not go beyond 2:15:" And then she was publicly accused during testimony of lying about having to leave at 2:15 .
"Corporations pushing for job-creation tax breaks shield U.S.-vs.-abroad hiring data [...] Apple, by the way, is at the top or close to the top, in recent profits. GE has deceased its per centage of US workers from 54% to 46% in the last decade. Few contenders in the presidential elections or Congressional elections make this notion a part of their campaigns. The debate in regular media usually stops at words like 'protectionism'. The next time you read about tax cut money flowing to create jobs, hold in mind global trade demands that companies actually respond to, and do not think US jobs are a priority. The rhetoric merely implies a vague ideal...not company policies."
Little by little, Austerity kills. "Austerity and the failure to provide decent public services (street cleaning and drain maintenance) helped kill those four people on Friday."
It may very well be the end of the world as we know it, the way things are going.
Eschaton:
Atrios: "Raising the Medicare eligibility age would increase health care costs. So, you know, lowering it would... decrease health care costs. Shhh. Don't tell anyone"
Jay Ackroyd: "Periodically, Krugman reminds us that Kenneth Arrow showed that market-based systems can't work efficiently as health care delivery mechanisms. Over at the Great Orange Satan, Mcjoan gives an object lesson. For Medicaid, and the health care system as a whole, a key element in cost control is minimizing ER admissions. For private sector hospitals, ERs are a profit center."
Jay Rosen: "So this is my theme tonight: how did we get to the point where it seems entirely natural for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to describe political journalists appearing on its air as... 'the insiders'? Don't you think that's a little strange? I do. Promoting journalists as insiders in front of the outsiders, that is to us, the viewers, the electorate.... this is a clue to what's broken about political coverage in the U.S. and Australia. Here's the way I would summarize it: Things are out of alignment. Journalists are identifying with the wrong people. Therefore the kind of work they are doing is not as useful as we need it to be." Too right.
Charlie Savage has been tweeting heavily about little nuggets found in the NYT dig into Cheney's memoir.
It looks like another Conservative MP is trying to break the internet again. There's always time to make a submission, I suppose.
Ettlin's eye-witness earthquake report from his couch.
Stuart Zechman's other life
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Wednesday, 24 August 2011
Get a good job with good pay and you're okayOn Tuesday's Majority Report, Sam interviewed Don Peck, author of "Can the Middle Class Be Saved?"
I'm not sure which is more remarkable - that the conservative New York Times has suddenly realized that these financial criminals should be prosecuted, or that they waited until it was too late in the game to say so. (I understand they eventually agreed that the Iraq invasion may have been in error, too.) There's a front-page, banner headline-worthy scandal happening right now, first with news that the Obama administration has been leaning on AG Schneiderman to let their financier cronies off the hook, and now Schneiderman has been kicked off the probe committee: "The email announcing Schneiderman's dismissal from the states' executive committee was sent just after noon to more than 50 people by Patrick Madigan, a top lawyer in the Iowa Attorney General's Office. It read: 'Effective immediately, the New York Attorney General's Office has been removed from the Executive Committee of the Robosigning multistate.'" Because the White House was unable to derail his objections to letting these criminals walk. Our poor, "weak" president, of course, could have had nothing to do with this. Really, he belongs in jail with the lot of them.
And then there's Alexander Keyssar's opinion column at the conservative Washington Post explaining that the Real Grand Bargain - the one that made America so rich and actually served the public - is being systematically dismantled. "These changes have happened piecemeal. But viewed collectively, it's difficult not to see a determined campaign to dismantle a broad societal bargain that served much of the nation well for decades. To a historian, the agenda of today's conservatives looks like a bizarre effort to return to the Gilded Age, an era with little regulation of business, no social insurance and no legal protections for workers. This agenda, moreover, calls for the destruction or weakening of institutions without acknowledging (or perhaps understanding) why they came into being." Oh, they understand. That's why they hate them. Via Atrios.
For those who clicked on the link in this post and just got the Blogger homepage, it's Dean Baker's "Alan Greenspan Insists That He Knows Nothing About the Economy.".
At The Hill, there's a bit of a statement of the obvious going on - it appears that Elizabeth Warren's campaign fundraising could be hampered by the suspicion that corporate donors may not be able to bribe her into screwing the public. On the other hand, a smart campaign committee might make generous use of her opponent's reputation as the man Forbes called "Wall Street's Favorite Congressman". Or maybe an independent group could make that ad - you know, the one that looks almost like it's a campaign ad for Scott Brown, praising his cozy relationship with Wall Street and his willingness to screw the public on their behalf. I'd kick in a few bucks to pay to make that and air it in Massachusetts - wouldn't you?
Over at A Tiny Revolution, John Caruso unpacked the 11th Circuit's decision and called it Another Victory For Universal Healthcare. The court held that since the individual mandate is termed a penalty in the legislation itself, it doesn't fall under Congress' power to tax, but: "We first conclude that the Act's Medicaid expansion is constitutional. Existing Supreme Court precedent does not establish that Congress's inducements are unconstitutionally coercive, especially when the federal government will bear nearly all the costs of the program's amplified enrollments." In other words, they can tax people and then pay for medical care for all of us out of those taxes (which they already collect anyway, and cover some of us, while they spend the rest on shoring up the commercial healthcare industry), but they can't just force us to buy commercial insurance. (Also: Thanks a lot.)
"Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called Tuesday for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to enforce a law limiting excessive speculation in oil markets."
Right now, Obama is polling poorly at the moment, but that isn't necessarily fatal. After all, the Republicans could try to impeach him for being liberal and thus get a whole load of people to support him who right now can't be bothered - but first he'd have to actually do something liberal.
It's hard to dispute this prediction about the outcome of the next presidential election, alas.
Some notes on a long, hot summer: "The funny thing about media blackouts is that you don't know they're happening, unless you happen to know about something crazy that's happening and can bear witness to the silencing that the Main Stream Media works so feverishly to create."
How to survive: "What happened next was extraordinary. The belief that citizens had to pay for the mistakes of a financial monopoly, that an entire nation must be taxed to pay off private debts was shattered, transforming the relationship between citizens and their political institutions and eventually driving Iceland's leaders to the side of their constituents. The Head of State, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, refused to ratify the law that would have made Iceland's citizens responsible for its bankers' debts, and accepted calls for a referendum. [...] In the March 2010 referendum, 93% voted against repayment of the debt. The IMF immediately froze its loan. But the revolution (though not televised in the United States), would not be intimidated. With the support of a furious citizenry, the government launched civil and penal investigations into those responsible for the financial crisis. Interpol put out an international arrest warrant for the ex-president of Kaupthing, Sigurdur Einarsson, as the other bankers implicated in the crash fled the country." (Er, update.)
Dave Johnson: "Rich Guy 'Deeply Resents' Helping Pay For Democracy: Hey here's a real dog bites man story for you: a really, really rich guy says to readers of billionaire Murdoch's Wall Street Journal that he "deeply resents" paying taxes and whines about how the government does things he doesn't like. This in response to Warren Buffet's call to ask billionaires to at least pay as much in taxes as their secretaries. Seriously, it wasn't in The Onion."
Kevin Drum seems to realize he is watching bad things happen, but I'm waiting for signs that he knows who could have stopped it and that he didn't even try.
I'm not allowed to see the video (but it might be this, which I didn't want to see anyway), but the text says Adam Serwer has a new job, at Mother Jones.
"There was just a 5.8 earthquake in Washington. Obama wanted it to be 3.4, but the Republicans wanted 5.8, so he compromised." - @TheTweetofGod (Alert from Watertiger - and Anna.)
Baby elephant
Pink Floyd, live
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Tuesday, 23 August 2011
They wrote the songsSince there's nothing I can say that you don't already know, I was just going to post a bunch of YouTube vids, and dug some up before I ran into the Rolling Stone obit, "Songwriter Jerry Leiber Dies at 78", which has a nice clean audio tribute at the bottom (and photos).
One of the things the obit mentions is that Leiber and Stoller wrote "Hound Dog" for Big Mama Thornton, and Leiber wasn't happy with the way Elvis changed the words, but they didn't complain too loud about having an enormous hit. Of course, they have the hit version at RS, but YouTube provides.
Stand By Me
I Who Have Nothing
Tell Him
She Cried
Ruby Baby
Chapel of Love
Jailhouse Rock
On Broadway
Smokey Joe's Cafe
After all that, I find out Nick Ashford died as well. You all know this one.
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Monday, 22 August 2011
Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no goodMarcy Wheeler on 2 Funny Things about Obama Administration's Effort to Pressure Eric Schneiderman, those being that administration officials think the New York state Attorney General should back off of holding the financiers accountable so they can pretend to help people, even though the administration has had the ability to do both all along. And, um, it looks like even the "public's representative" at the New York Fed is pimping for an out of state bank. There's another deal on the table - or, as Stuart Zechman put it on the Twitter machine: "Telecom immunity all over again." As the NYT gently explains, "An initial term sheet outlining a possible settlement emerged in March, with institutions including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo being asked to pay about $20 billion that would go toward loan modifications and possibly counseling for homeowners. In exchange, the attorneys general participating in the deal would have agreed to sign broad releases preventing them from bringing further litigation on matters relating to the improper bank practices." "Improper" is a nice way to say "criminal and fundamentally treasonous".
Busted: Jane Hamsher, Scarecrow, Lt. Dan Choi, Bill McKibben, and others jailed for Tar Sands protest. Because this one is all on Obama. (via) And here's why these actions need to be bigger. School's out - it should have been.
David Dayen spots the real deficit: "In short, there is no deficit that cannot be plugged except for our political deficit. It sustains the defeatism of years of no growth, stagnant wages, high unemployment. The political tendency toward right-wing and corporatist policy ideas over the past 30 years, tied up with the cost of running campaigns, the failure of traditional media, the conservative movement's public relations machinery, has widened that political deficit between what government can provide and what it will provide." Thereisnospoon: "But let's say the defenders of the Administration are right on the political realities of the situation. That doesn't mean the President had to embrace austerity with open arms. He could just as easily have laid out his jobs program and his desire to put America to work, while warning about the effects austerity would have. He could have called out House Republicans for taking the country hostage, and made clear that he was signing austerity measures under duress. He could have demanded real concessions in exchange for the austerity measures put in place. [...] But the Administration didn't do that. It chose to embrace austerity. Even if austerity was inevitable, the embrace of austerity was an unnecessary slap to the face of the progressive base, of intelligent followers of Keynes' economic ideas, and of working people everywhere, while doing little to shore up the President's credibility with independents or feed the confidence fairy in the markets." Like I said ten years ago, if the big question is whether the president is corrupt or whether he's just stupid and incompetent, the answer is that he has to go. Can't we find one competent liberal to run against Obama?
If the professional media is so much better than us granola-eating bloggers, how come they've never heard of dominionism, Christian Reconstructionism, or the New Apostolic Reformation? "Its bad enough that Miller hasn't heard of such a major movement in evangelicalism and so presumes that no one else could have either. What's worse is that she writes that the recent stories in The New Yorker, The Texas Observer and The Daily Beast "raise real concerns about the world views of two prospective Republican nominees" -- and then spends the rest of the piece telling us why we should not be concerned. Her main point is that not all evangelicals think like that. True. But no one said that they do." So, gosh, when presidential candidates hold the view that the Constitution should be overthrown in favor of a form of government that is repugnant to most Americans (including traditional evangelicals), we shouldn't remark on it.
I wonder when Brad DeLong first noticed that Hippie-Punching was actually higher on the agenda than jobs. I guess now upwards of 70% of the country classifies as Hippies, at this point, because everybody hates Obama's policies. Atrios hopes for better (well, so do we all!), but doesn't expect it, and neither do I.
Dan at Pruning Shears says, among many other things, that Roubini has been reading The Sideshow, that Karl Rove may be starting to regret his enlistment of culture warriors into the cause, and also points to a useful post by Adam Serwer on why the Obama campaign suddenly started worrying about ill-treatment of immigrants - because his poll numbers among Latinos are slipping. "Republicans are crying "amnesty." But they were already doing that anyway. At least now, the administration is actually being responsive to the concerns of one of its key constituencies, rather than saying one thing, doing another, and having their political opponents attack them regardless." Clearly, there are more constituencies that need to stop telling pollsters they will vote for Obama.
"Obama bans war criminals. Very funny [...] Hentoff's piece reminds us of the difference between 'disappointing' and 'disastrous.' Some people look at Barack Obama's record - his collapse on the debt ceiling issue, betrayal of organized labor, expansion of the war in Afghanistan, extension of the Bush tax cuts, refusal to push for jobs programs, failure to push for prosecution of Wall Street crooks and possible war criminals, and so on - and say his presidency has been disappointing. Others look at Obama's record thus far and say it is disastrous. I don't think historians will have a hard time making the right call on this one." (via)
Susie Madrak quotes a bit of Howard Zinn from Paul Street on Wisconsin: "Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. ....The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties." (Also: Want to make a more efficient solar array? Ask this 13-year old.)
How much respect can you have for a newspaper that claims the people protesting cuts in social programs are "anarchists"? Even Cato is smarter than the WaPo.
"My First Gay Bar" - Susie Bright's aunt Molly opened a legendary gay bar in Berkeley, but she never had gay pride. (May not be work-safe).
Offer Solutions
2011 Hugo Award Winners.
HDR photography tutorial, and some really nice shots.
"When the Levee Breaks"
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Saturday, 20 August 2011
Little wheel, spin and spinThursday, Sam Seder interviewed Matt Taibbi about his scoop on illegal activities at the Securities and Exchange Commission, "Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?" ("But in evidence he presented to the SEC's inspector general and three congressional committees earlier this summer, the 13-year veteran of the agency paints a startling picture of a federal police force that has effectively been conquered by the financial criminals it is charged with investigating. In at least one case, according to Flynn, investigators at the SEC found their desire to bring a case against an influential bank thwarted by senior officials in the enforcement division - whose director turned around and accepted a lucrative job from the very same bank they had been prevented from investigating.") And Friday, Cliff Schecter pretty much declared Obama's campaign apparatus to be incomprehensible.
Isn't it fraud to change your name to disguise who you are when doing business? "Goldman Sachs VP Changes His Name, Goes To Work For Issa Protecting...Goldman Sachs! [...] In July, Issa sent a letter to top government regulators demanding that they back off and provide more justification for new margin requirements for financial firms dealing in derivatives. A standard practice on Capitol Hill is to end a letter to a government agency with contact information for the congressional staffer responsible for working on the issue for the committee. In most cases, the contact staffer is the one who actually writes such letters. With this in mind, it is important to note that the Issa letter ended with contact information for Peter Haller, a staffer hired this year to work for Issa on the Oversight Committee. Issa's demand to regulators is exactly what banks have been wishing for." But then, Issa is a guy with a long history of bad practice, with more coming to light every day.
Stockman still doesn't quite seem to understand that in a prosperous nation, the government isn't afraid to spend money on the public in order to keep the country healthy, but at least he has something right: "The second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40 percent of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970. This debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts. [...] The third ominous change in the American economy has been the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector. Here, Republicans have been oblivious to the grave danger of flooding financial markets with freely printed money and, at the same time, removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation. [...] The fourth destructive change has been the hollowing out of the larger American economy." Unfortunately, the Democratic leadership seems to be embracing this approach, too.
Atrios on Fringe Views: "It really doesn't matter all that much whether the economy, according to somewhat arbitrary criteria, has another "recession." I think the true fringe view, where fringe means outside the Village, is that unending 9.0%+ unemployment is horrible and requires an appropriate policy response. The point is we never got out of the last recession, and whether GDP growth is barely positive or barely negative doesn't matter all that much." Which reminds me, I think it's time someone did a new version of the famous New Yorker map of the country, only with the White House, K Street, and Capitol Hill as "the country", and everything else as "the fringe". Or is that idea so obvious that someone has done it already>?
Krugman responds, "Soylent Green Is Corporations! [...] So Romney's remark may not have been as stupid as it sounds, but it was deeply wrong all the same." Except, no, it's as stupid as it sounds. Corporations aren't people, they're a mechanism that protects individual people from the consequences of their decisions.
The GOP is so far gone I normally don't even bother to talk about them, but even for a Republican member of Congress, expressing a desire to shoot his colleagues is a little weird. Pretending that Obama got where he is today because of unnamed social programs rather than because he had well-to-do Republican grandparents sending him to private school and making sure he got into the right schools and met the right people - well, that's just par for the course. He's black, he must've been an AFDC baby who got through on Affirmative Action.
Oliphant on Obama, and on his friends.
And the big wheel turn around.
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Thursday, 18 August 2011
Stuff I sawAtrios flagged an interesting story this morning about how foreign students on J-1 visas have walked off the job at Hershey's, part of a program that is supposed to provide cultural exchange but is really just a massive rip-off. Hershey's seems to be implying they aren't responsible for the lousy conditions and poor pay the students have had to tolerate because it's all run by subcontractors, apparently. Interestingly, the kids, under this program, are also being gouged for rent far above what their neighbors are paying. Gosh, when I was a student, programs aimed at us included lower costs for housing and travel. Now it's a special way to get low-waged workers into overpriced housing.
Pruning Shears: "Um, no. There are plenty of options. It only looks like there aren't many if you happen to be locked into rigid, discredited and wealth-privileging neoliberal fairy tales. You know, the ones that have captured the imaginations of those who have properly insulated themselves from the widespread misery those odious policies cause. More stimulus is an option. Jobs programs are an option. Lowering the Social Security eligibility age (for those who are now too old for the job market) is an option. Taxing the rich is an option. There are loads of options, and it's a measure of how eager the press is to tell policymakers that they are helpless to do anything that they would blandly report something so obviously false." (And a take-down of Drum and Chait, a pointed quote from Athenae, and another useful quotation from Econned.
Sam Seder talked to Dahlia Scheindlin on Monday's Majority Report about the protests in Israel, and to Michelle Goldberg Tuesday about the Christian Dominionist plot to overthrow the United States.
"Obama Campaign Staffer Sends Out Email Bashing Paul Krugman And The 'Firebagger Lefty Blogosphere'." This kind of "it's just one person and it's nothing to do with Obama" trick helped him win the primaries, but I don't think it has the power it once did. People aren't suddenly going to discover they are more economically secure just because the White House pretends to distance itself from views it has already expressed in both word and deed. "But the Administration is seriously whistling past the graveyard at this point. They are reaching a tipping point. If folks like Marta Every and I are ready to hop off the train, it's not just angry cheetos-munching bloggers they're going to lose. They're going to lose the activist base that powered them to victory in 2008. If they think it's going to come back just out of fear of Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry, they're sorely mistaken." (Also: Obama's sexist metaphor is characteristically inapt, and he's apparently still bragging about his poor negotiating skills. Oh, and veterans' benefits are on the table. Don't you love the way we "support our troops"?)
We may not be more popular than Jesus, but at least we're more popular than the Tea Party and the Christianist Right: "Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well among the public these days. But in data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about - lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like 'atheists' and 'Muslims.' Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right."
The Plot to Kill the Post Office...And Its Union Contracts
6 of 7 Fracking Evaluators Are on Industry's Payroll: "Last spring, President Obama asked Energy Secretary Steven Chu to assemble an advisory board to review the practice of hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as 'fracking,' which is used to extract natural gas buried deep underground. Rather than critically evaluate the dangers of fracking, however, the panel sought to appease an angry public with scant suggestions about how to make extraction as safe as possible. Ruling as 'unsafe' a practice that has caused more than 1,000 documented cases of water contamination and sickened people across the country was never a possible outcome of the review. That's no surprise, considering that six of the advisory group's seven members are on the oil and gas industry's payroll."
Bruce Schneier is working on a book to be called Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together, due out in February, but back when he started, it was going to be called "The Dishonest Minority", a title which doesn't mean quite what you it sounds like: "The term 'dishonest minority' is not a moral judgment; it simply describes the minority who does not follow societal norm. Since many societal norms are in fact immoral, sometimes the dishonest minority serves as a catalyst for social change. Societies without a reservoir of people who don't follow the rules lack an important mechanism for societal evolution. Vibrant societies need a dishonest minority; if society makes its dishonest minority too small, it stifles dissent as well as common crime."
Two men get 4 years in jail for Facebook riot jokes; one to appeal.
"Taser used a number of times on Dale Burns before death [...] Pepper spray was also used when Cumbria Police attempted to arrest a man at a flat in Hartington Street, Barrow, at 18:30 BST on Tuesday."
The trouble with horrible stories like this one is that they fill us with astonishment and outrage even though, when we think about it, we know that this kind of thing is routine at every level of pretty much any institution or even any large social group.
If you've been missing Keith Olbermann, try this (and last night's show had Janeane Garofalo, looking pretty chirpy).
Now that was a transformational president! "Face-melting awesomeness"
Fiction list:
If you're a fan of the Phoenix Guards/Vlad Taltos books, you'll like Tiassa, the latest from Brust. I did.
It's been a long time since I read H. Beam Piper's lovely classic Little Fuzzy, but I had no trouble at all enjoying John Scalzi's return to the story in Fuzzy Nation.
I haven't yet finished Vernor Vinge's The Children of the Sky, the sequel to the wonderful A Fire Upon the Deep, but I'm having a lot of trouble tearing myself away from it.
I loved this one.
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Tuesday, 16 August 2011
Assorted linksYou wouldn't have known, in those days, listening to the way Britain was referred to by the American media, that it was a nation with full employment and universal literacy. But then along came Thatcher, and then her children Tony Blair and David Cameron, and now, Thatcher's grandchildren. It's the natural result of proclaiming that, "There is no society."
Remember when George Bush lost an election in Texas because he came across as being "too smart", so he vowed he would "never be out-dumbed again"? A lot of liberals just can't understand that kind of thinking because if there's one thing we can't stand, it's to be thought of, or treated, like we're stupid. But it worked for Bush, didn't it. And it sure seems like something much like it has been the Obama strategy, only with its own special slant: he's an incompetent negotiator, he's weak, he seems to have no core beliefs or morality - and can they really be this stupid? " How brilliant a strategist is the strategist who makes himself look like a ragdoll devoid of intelligence or principle?"
How much does the Democratic Party leadership hate democracy? "On July 30th the Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party passed a resolution proposing that a primary challenge be offered to Obama next year. The Progressive Caucus's certification expired at the same time, and while other caucuses were routinely recertified that day by the state party, the Progressive Caucus (I'm told by its chair, Karen Bernal) would not have been, had a vote been held. So the recertification was tabled, and the Progressive Caucus is in limbo. It no longer exists, but it may yet continue existing."
I know I linked already to a section of Barbara Ehrenreich's new afterword to the tenth anniversary edition of Nickel and Dimed, but you really should go over and read (and watch the video).
Dan at Pruning Shears agrees with me that what happened in Wisconsin was good news.
Sarah Jones: In the last two months we've been exposed to an extreme radical agenda by far right Republicans, many of whom ran as moderates. In order to more fully explore the dynamics of religious extremism and far right politics, I interviewed Dominionist expert Leah Burton, who explains the dangerous infiltration of radical religious extremism into modern day American politics; specifically the relationship between many of these leaders' religious beliefs and the economic and social extremism we're seeing implemented by them.
Richard Clarke: "offers an incendiary theory that, if true, would rewrite the history of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists were on U.S. soil - terrorists who went on to become suicide hijackers on 9/11." Via a post full of links (the rest of them on our more usual subjects lately, including some of our favorite econ writers), from Digby.
Via Digby, Steven Pearlstein's rant in The Washington Post at the business community for their complicity in wrecking everything. (Unmentioned, of course, is the complicity of The Washington Post.)
Also from Digby, an incoherent traitor who could be our next president.
But why do I get the feeling that whoever is running the show isn't supporting Rick Perry? This is The Wall Street Journal, not some lefty rag, and I don't think they normally mind crony capitalism at all. (On the other hand, it looks like David Gregory may be getting that old tingle up the leg....)
Architects of Fear! Paul Krugman says a fake alien invasion would cure the economy. (Of course, David Icke already thinks the world is being run by alien lizards. Icke is rather amazing - an awful lot of his analysis is rather good until you get to the lizard part. It's so good that people think he's being metaphorical about the alien lizards, but, alas, he's not. It's like he was invented to discredit an entire line of inquiry. "Oh, yes, just tell them there's an oligarchic takeover coordinated by the characters from that sci-fi show V - the original one, with the gay lizard decorator and the ceremonial mouse.")
"David Cameron's net-censorship proposal earns kudos from Chinese state media: UK prime minister David Cameron (who is reported to have rioted himself and then fled police while at university) has proposed a regime of state censorship for social media to prevent people from passing on messages that incite violence. This proposal has been warmly received by Chinese state media and bureaucrats, who are glad to see that Western governments are finally coming around to their style of management."
"Facing Ninth Deployment, Army Ranger Kills Himself. 'No Way' That God Would Forgive Him For What He'd Seen, Done, He Told Wife. More U.S. soldiers and veterans have died from suicide than from combat wounds over the past two years."
This kind of thing makes me want to tear my hair out. Why would you even write this except as partisan pumping for Obama?
Mark Thoma, "White House Debates Giving Up on Helping the Economy: "Apparently one of the things holding up a push to put people back to work is worries that the GOP might chant "tax-and-spenders," and the administration's demonstrated inability to respond or defend itself in response would harm Obama's reelection chances. In any case, the administration promised it would put doing what's right ahead of doing what's best for reelection. This is how you convince yourself that your reelection rather than, say, job creation is the most important thing to focus on."
Tony Auth on the economy
"Phone hacking: News of the World reporter's letter reveals cover-up: Disgraced royal correspondent Clive Goodman's letter says phone hacking was 'widely discussed' at NoW meetings"
"Coincidentally, a corset's job is to make things that are bigger on the inside look smaller on the outside."
Make your own ricotta cheese in five minutes.
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16:36 BST
Saturday, 13 August 2011
And was Jerusalem builded here...The best way to rob a bank is to own one. Umair Haque explains: "The bedrock of an enlightened social contract is, crudely, that rent-seeking is punished, and creating enduring, lasting, shared wealth is rewarded and that those who seek to profit by extraction are chastened rather than lauded. Today's world of bailouts, golden parachutes, sky-high financial-sector salaries - while middle incomes stagnate - seems to be exactly the reverse. Perhaps, then, our societies have reached a natural turning point of built-in self-limitation; and this self-limitation is causing a perfect storm to converge."
Stirling Newberry is also pretty good on the London riots, but would someone please kick his ass until he edits it to complete the last sentence of paragraph 5?
A funny thing happened to Motown on the way home from work the other day. (This almost makes it sound like the police had cordoned off the area to let the looters loot in peace.)
Dave Johnson of Seeing the Forest and a lot of other things usually seems so measured, but on Virtually Speaking Susie, talking about the economy, he let it rip, to my surprise.
Central Planning and The Fall of the US Empire - When you let a small number of people control your economy, it doesn't matter whether you call it "the free market" or "communism", you get the same decay. (But, I really wish people wouldn't say "entitlements" when what they mean is a fixed medical cost-evaluation system that ends up grossly over-charging you whether or not you are on Medicare.)
Sam Seder's interview with Bruce E. Levine, whose Alternet article "8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance," is worthy of your attention. Returning to student grants rather than student debt would go a long way to energizing protest.
"Has the U.S. Turned Against Consumers? The Federal Reserve, the government, and Wall Street are all bleeding the consumer - and nothing is being done to stop it, writes Ed Wallace"
From Suburban Guerrilla:
Steve Forbes is a lying moron (but at least Dean Baker was there to disagree);
SugarHouse Casino workers trying to unionize;
Barry Ritzhold on Ratigan, in a straightforward discussion of the great national destruction and a leadership's "marriage to bad ideas" and evasion of doing things that work;
McCain's town hall meeting in Tucson and Rep. Betty McCollum (D) in the Twin Cities got a dose of mainstream and liberal feeling this time, and it wasn't praise for administration policies;
A civil resistance simulator;
It's up to us to save ourselves
Applying for welfare is a lot like being booked by the police;
Christianist Sharia Law
For a change. someone who really deserves it got sent to the slammer: "Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. was sentenced Thursday to 28 years in federal prison for taking $1 million in bribes from the builder of a pair of juvenile detention centers in a case that became known as 'kids for cash.'".
An unusual terrorist
Ari L. Goldman revisits the big story he worked on for The New York Times 20 years ago, "Telling It Like It Wasn't [...] Over those three days I also saw journalism go terribly wrong. The city's newspapers, so dedicated to telling both sides of the story in the name of objectivity and balance, often missed what was really going on. Journalists initially framed the story as a 'racial' conflict and failed to see the anti-Semitism inherent in the riots. As the 20th anniversary of the riots approaches, I find myself re-examining my own role in the coverage and trying to extract some lessons for myself and my profession."
Stuart is down in comments pointing out that Superman supports the New Deal.
Photoshoplooter
Whovian perfume (Not me, boss, I stay away from anything that says "patchouli" in the ingredients.)
...among those dark satanic mills? (But this seems more appropriate.)
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16:11 BST
Wednesday, 10 August 2011
They're not very sensibleBack when Ross Perot was running for president, I marvelled at his apparent belief that all we needed was for someone to go to Washington and, I don't know, put LSD in the water so everyone would love each other and get along? Really, his entire governing strategy, as he explained it, seemed to be, "I'm going to go there and make 'em all shake hands and get some real work done." No recognition of the huge ideological gulf between the two sides, just this bizarre Woodstock Nation kind of philosophy that even in the '60s you couldn't have sold to a bunch of stoned hippies. But people who look kindly on Obama seem to think that he has the same weird, Sunshine Acid kind of thinking, as if it was all about needing his own special personality to make the flower-wreathed fairy circle emerge. Obama is "weak", they say, because he didn't anticipate that real idiological differences could create real acrimony, let alone that blood-and-guts partisanship was so natural to the GOP because they opposed our very form of government. Michael Tomasky seems to be following this line when he calls Obama "The Untransformational President," neglecting to note that Obama has indeed been transformational beyond his wildest dreams, eliminating all meaningful distinction between the two parties and their policy goals, and ripping the mask of democracy from the face of America once and for all. No president, not even George Bush the Lesser, has done so much to show his contempt for the American people. And, for all his fine words about the hero he apparently doesn't know anything about, Abraham Lincoln, there is no evidence that Obama is compromising on policy - he has never believed in liberalism and he doesn't fight for it because he thinks it's stupid.
Alternatively, there's "The Sanity Defense".
Robert Reich, "Why the President Doesn't Present a Bold Plan to Create Jobs and Jumpstart the Economy: I'm told White House political operatives are against a bold jobs plan. They believe the only jobs plan that could get through Congress would be so watered down as to have almost no impact by Election Day. They also worry the public wouldn't understand how more government spending in the near term can be consistent with long-term deficit reduction. And they fear Republicans would use any such initiative to further bash Obama as a big spender. So rather than fight for a bold jobs plan, the White House has apparently decided it's politically wiser to continue fighting about the deficit. The idea is to keep the public focused on the deficit drama - to convince them their current economic woes have something to do with it, decry Washington's paralysis over fixing it, and then claim victory over whatever outcome emerges from the process recently negotiated to fix it. They hope all this will distract the public's attention from the President's failure to do anything about continuing high unemployment and economic anemia." The stupid-or-evil battle is over. We can see how callous such a calculation would be, and no "explanation" - including electoral calculous - justifies such behavior. If Obama wanted to improve the economy, he could fight for it, he could get up and tell the public what is really needed. He doesn't want to because, at best, he doesn't care that much. That lack of regard for the public welfare is evil whether it's stupid or not. The only question is whether they can actually be this stupid.
Monkeyfister points out in comments to the post below that, "In re: U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit... That particular Circuit green-flagging the suit is really big. Do have a look at the make-up of that court.. This is a HEAVILY-LOADED Conservative court. Only three of the 10 seated Judges were appointed by Democratic Presidents.."
Here's video of Sam Seder and Ari Berman on Ring of Fire talking about the economy. Sam also talked to Chris Hayes on Majority Report Tuesday.
Wisconsin: Republicans appear to have lost two seats, the minimum Dems needed to take to have more pull in the state senate. Three would have meant the Republicans lost their majority altogether, but that doesn't appear to have happened. Of course, no one thinks Kathy Nickolaus hasn't done some GOP vote-fixing again. Remember, these fights were all in Republican districts, but the battle over Scott Walker's recall will be state-wide, and if his agenda can lose in even two of these districts this week, it doesn't bode well for his future in elective office. Greg Sargent: "Whatever ends up happening, Wisconsin Dems and labor have already succeeded in one sense: They reminded us that it's possible to build a grass roots movement by effectively utilizing the sort of unabashed and bare-knuckled class-based populism that makes many of today's national Dems queasy. Their effort - whether or not they take back the state senate - could provide a model for a more aggressive, populist approach for national Dems in 2012."
Science news (with thanks to Natasha Chart's tweets):
Weeds acquire genes from engineered crops.
Study: antibiotic resistance plunges when poultry farms go organic.
Kaiser Chiefs
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16:09 BST
Tuesday, 09 August 2011
We're not gonna take itAs far as I can tell, rumors that my street was set on fire last night are, at best, premature. I went out for a walk this afternoon and saw no fire damage, although I did notice that a few of the shops still have their security grills out, even though they are undamaged and open for business. An unusual number of shop-owners do seem to be out on the pavements chatting with each other and keeping an eye out, but all seems otherwise peaceful. Have some analysis from Lenin's Tomb.
Atrios: "BBC News keeps bringing people on to ask them why the rioting in London is happening, and when they try to answer the question and provide an explanation (with any validity or not, who knows) the newscasters chastise them for justifying the violence." Yes, it's classic.
Sam Seder is saying he thinks S&P's downgrade was a political ploy to encourage The Grand Bargain. He interviewed Jeff Madrick, author of Age of Greed, The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970-Present Monday, as well as Laura Clawson of DKos's labor blog about what's really going on with the Verizon strike, and discusses the enormous protests in Israel, where 300,000 have taken to the streets. We need to see the equivalent in the US - think twelve million people in the streets would make them think twice?
Ian Welsh clearly is on the same page with Sam, and thinks it's it's a sick joke: "As everyone is pointing out, the idea that S&P, who rated all the subprime trash as AAA, has any credibility, is a joke. However, Obama and Democrats refused to destroy S&P when they had the opportunity and every reason to do so. The subprime crisis could not have been nearly as bad without S&P and the other rating's agencies rating trash AAA so that investors who must buy AAA by law could do so. To put it simply, S&P engaged in systematic fraud. They, like everyone on Wall Street and in the major banks, have not been indicted for this. The choice to not indict is policy. Obama's policy. If Obama did not want this to happen, it would not happen."
Of course, there is another way to look at this issue. As Sam says, a downgrade means there is an expectation that the debtor will not repay its debts. And no one thinks the US will default against commercial holders of US Treasury bonds. But: Any discussion of cuts in Social Security is a discussion of defaulting against the public bond holding - and that is what Obama clearly wants to do. So, it actually does appear that the United States is planning an intentional default on US Treasury bonds. They're just not planning to default on rich people or the Chinese.
Meanwhile, it looks like a few leadership Dems are trying to burnish their "liberal" credentials by opposing Obama on his attack on Medicaid. Leaving aside the fact that I don't trust anything that involves Harry Reid, I don't see any opposition to Obama getting anywhere on anything unless, you know, he wants it to.
"U.S. Court of Appeals Allows Torture Case Against Rumsfeld To Go Forward: Upholding a federal judge's ruling from last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit cleared the way today for a lawsuit filed against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the use of torture. After facing detention at the hands of U.S. military forces, two Americans sued Rumsfeld and unnamed others for 'developing, authorizing and using harsh interrogation techniques in Iraq against them' in violation of their constitutional rights. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have opposed the case, but the appeals court allowed the case to move forward, holding that the 'plaintiffs have alleged sufficient facts to show that Secretary Rumsfeld personally established the relevant policies.' A Washington district judge already ruled earlier this month that an American contractor could bring a similar torture suit against Rumsfeld."
"Why Unions Matter: The Numbers [...] In other words, deunionization has allowed income inequality to rise partly because unions are negotiating wages for fewer people than they used to, and partly because unions no longer have the power to force the political system to pay attention to the needs of the middle class. But if income inequality has to be reduced in order for middle class wages to grow - and it does - and if robust middle class wages are a key driver of the liberal project - and they are - then we're all in big trouble. Mass unionization is gone, and it's not coming back. This means we still need something to take its place, and we still don't have it. Until we do, the progressive movement will continue to tread water."
Stuart just tweeted that Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" is The Honeycombs' "Have I The Right?"
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16:40 BST
Sunday, 07 August 2011
The sky is cryingTonight on Virtually Speaking Sundays, it's Avedon Carol and Digby. Listen live at 9:00 PM Eastern or later (stream or podcast), all at the link.
Cliff Schecter sounded downright depressed on Friday's Majority Report. Thursday's show was an interview with Digby, and he's also posted video of his stint hosting The Young Turks.
I think it may have been Stuart who pointed out this thread in which a bunch of liberals try to figure out what the hell Obama is up to. It's the usual veering around between "he means well" and, y'know, he's evil. I liked this one: "Thaddeus Russell: I am struck again and again by how closely Obama's rhetoric and policies adhere to Kristol's and Podhoretz's founding documents of neoconservatism: imperialism, cultural homogenization (e.g., his 'post-racial' discourse and especially Race to the Top), and the dismantling of the welfare state. So, to me, this explains his 'willingness' to sacrifice SS and Medicare. Also, the elitist attitude toward policy-making, which the neocons got from the original progressives."
Michael Moore on The Day the Middle Class Died: "From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, 'When did this all begin, America's downward slide?' They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated. Young people have heard of this mythical time - but it was no myth, it was real. And when they ask, "When did this all end?", I say, 'It ended on this day: August 5th, 1981.'"
People really need to understand that Obama is an extremely powerful man who is doing any evil thing he feels like doing.
Moody's and Standard & Poor's raided in Milan.
Media Ignores S&P Attack On Republicans: "Have you seen, anywhere, in any media, or even heard reported or repeated on NPR, the following sentence? 'We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.' It's right there on Page 4 of the official Standard & Poors 'Research Update' - the actual report on what they did and why - published on August 5th as the explanation for why they believe Congress - and even the Gang of Twelve - will be unable to actually deal with the US debt crisis." Of course, S&P didn't acknowledge that cuts in entitlements and other domestic spending will actually depress revenues rather than reducing costs. Most "cost-cutting" measures in social programs really raise costs. No one wants to admit this anymore, but those programs were able to pass in the first place precisely because they reduced costs. (WIC is a great example of this.)
5 NOPD officers guilty in post-Katrina Danziger Bridge shootings, cover-up
BB King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Albert King, and Paul Butterfield, live
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22:48 BST
Saturday, 06 August 2011
This post was delayed by Kells SyndromeVirtually Speaking A-Z and Virtually Speaking with CW Anderson was Stuart on fire, doing the first hour largely by himself in Jay's absence, discussing a curious statement by an unnamed senior White House creep who patronizingly explained the rest of the country is not like "the left" that refuses to accept that the New Deal was an aberration in American history that has to be corrected. And then he and CW talked about why the media behave the way they do, and it was refreshing NOT to hear someone try to explain it all in terms of trying to get more viewers and giving the unwashed masses "what they want". (We also got lots of articles mentioned, so here are some:
Americans Decry Power of Lobbyists, Corporations, Banks, Feds;
Independents agree with GOP that federal government has too much power,
How President Obama plays media like a fiddle,
Critics Still Wrong on What's Driving Deficits in Coming Years; Economic Downturn, Financial Rescues, and Bush-Era Policies Drive the Numbers,
Schism brews in Coffee Party and Response to report on "Coffee Party schism" in Politico
The Onion's Obama: Debt Ceiling Deal Required Tough Concessions By Both Democrats And Democrats Alike.
Oh, and someone in the chat mentioned The Dreyfuss Initiative.)
Glenn Greenwald on The myth of Obama's "blunders" and "weakness"; "But it is absolutely false that he did not want these brutal budget cuts and was simply forced -- either by his own strategic "blunders" or the "weakness" of his office -- into accepting them. The evidence is overwhelming that Obama has long wanted exactly what he got: these severe domestic budget cuts and even ones well beyond these, including Social Security and Medicare..."
Sirota on Obama's anti-jobs agenda: "For months, polls have reported that reducing unemployment is Americans' top political priority -- and certainly a much bigger priority than reducing the deficit. This makes economic sense because of the connection between the two issues. As any Economics 101 course shows, creating new jobs is one of the best ways to reduce a nation's long-term deficits, because creating jobs generates tax revenues and grows an overall economy, thus shrinking debt both in real terms and as a percentage of GDP. Somehow, though, Americans' top priority is Washington's lowest. That's not what you hear, of course. On Tuesday, President Obama insisted to great fanfare that he's completely focused on creating new jobs. But a look past the spin and to actions shows that the rhetoric is the typical up-is-down Orwellian nonsense that has come to define the Obama era. What we are in fact witnessing is the final epic inverse of the New Deal and Great Society, as Washington openly declares war on American jobs." That whole "pivot" to jobs the White House claims is now on their agenda? Well, now that they've given us a "budget deal" that will certainly increase deficits and reduce jobs, they're doing these wonderful trade deals to pretty much kill what's left of our economic base. Win the future for whom, again?
"The most terrifying result of the debt ceiling crisis is not the deal itself - with its tight discretionary caps, its special joint committee that Republicans already are saying they won't allow to raise any revenues, and its potential for arbitrary across-the-board cuts. Instead, it's the precedent that Republican congressional leaders say the crisis has established. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared on the Senate floor today that this 'creates an entirely new template for raising the national debt limit.' As he explained on CNBC last night, 'In the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling, it will not be clean anymore.'"
The "progressive" blogosphere - by which I mean the bigger blogs that are more insidery than, you know, our blogs - seem to be having a little war over how wonderful Obama is. In some quarters, you're just not allowed to admit that Obama got exactly what he wanted and has been terrible for his party and the country. In some quarters, you're allowed to say that Obama is a terrible president but you also have to pretend it's only because he's an inept negotiator. The latter is apparently an argument that he's not evil, so I guess we're supposed to vote for him on the grounds that he means well even though his results are evil, but at least he's not actually evil like the Republicans. Personally, I think he doesn't mean well and is even more evil than the Republicans, but never mind. I found I lost enthusiasm for reading Aravosis during the primaries when he went a bit Obamamaniac, so I'm not entirely certain what route he took to get to this point of doing his piece taking issue with the brilliance of Obama's leadership, "Barack Obama: Best. President. Ever", but given the history, it's remarkable that he has written this at all.
The Sacramento Bee reports some rumblings: "The California Democratic Party's Progressive Caucus marked the commander-in-chief's 50th birthday by releasing a resolution that supports exploring a potential primary challenge in 2012 to the first-term Democratic president."
Now more than ever, you should buy and promote the 2L40 T-shirt (and button, and coffee mug!) and make sure everyone sees it - especially if you are in DC or near a state capitol.
Froomkin: "Obama U.S. Attorney Nominee David Barlow Is Tea Party Senator's General Counsel."
TARP would have died without Obama, but it was necessary to ensure that horrible people who had been robbing the country blind weren't inconvenienced, so he actually interrupted his campaign to rush back to Washington and bring it back to life (against the will of the American people). However, for some reason, union members had to take a hit even though bankers didn't, so GM had lots of strings attached to their bailout, none of which impacted the people who had made all the bad business decisions that had hurt American automotive manufacturers. Also, Obama promised to push Card-Check but brushed it aside pretty quick. Wanna know why? Well, if it was my mission to destroy the Democratic Party, it's one of the main things I would do. I'd also enact austerity policies and make attacks on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Even if you're purely a partisan Democrat, you should be eager to get rid of this guy just to save the party. And that's just leaving aside the fate of, you know, the country, and 98% of Americans.
In The Nation, "The Hidden Casualty of the Debt Deal, A CNN poll conducted after the deal shows that a whopping 77 percent of Americans believe that elected officials acted like 'spoiled children.- The yawning gap between the mindset of decision-makers in Washington and the daily reality of most Americans is a grave threat to what organizers call 'little-d democracy.- This is about neither the Democratic Party nor the procedural machinery by which our nominally democratic government operates. 'Little-d democracy- is the basic idea that ordinary Americans, regardless of rank or stature, can have a voice in shaping our own destiny."
Jon Stewart on the debt deal, Scott Bateman translates Obama on the debt deal, and Ralph Nader supports a primary challenge.
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15:17 BST
Wednesday, 03 August 2011
Only YOU can save America
Olbermann's Special Comments are usually all over the blogosphere, but this time they are strangely silent though it may be his best yet:
"The betrayal of what this nation was supposed to be about did not begin with this deal and it surely will not end with this deal," Olbermann continued. "There is a tide pushing back the rights of each of us and it has been artificially induced by union bashing and the sowing of hatreds and fears and now this evermore institutionalized economic battering of the average American. It will continue and it will crush us because those that created it are organized, and unified, and hell-bent. And the only response is to be organized, and unified and hell-bent in return.""We must find again the energy and the purpose of the 1960s and the 1970s, and we must protest this deal and all the goddamn deals to come in the streets. We must rise, nonviolently, but insistently. General strikes, boycotts, protests, sit-ins, non-cooperation, takeovers. But modern versions of that resistance, facilitated and amplified by a weapon our predecessors did not have: the glory that is instantaneous communication."
"First you've got to get mad!" he exclaimed. "I cannot say to you meet here at this hour or that one, and we'll peacefully break that back of government that exist merely to get its functionaries re-elected. But I can say that the time is coming for the window for us to restore the control of our government to ourselves will close, and we had damn well better act before then because this deal is more than a tipping point from where the government goes from defending the safety net to gutting it. This is wrong!"
Greenwald sums up the Democratic leadership: "Three days ago, Democratic Rep. John Conyers, appearing at a meeting of the Out of Poverty caucus, said: 'The Republicans -- Speaker Boehner or Majority Leader Cantor -- did not call for Social Security cuts in the budget deal. The President of the United States called for that." (video here, at 1:30) [...] How can the leader of the Democratic Party wage an all-out war on the ostensible core beliefs of the Party's voters in this manner and expect not just to survive, but thrive politically? Democratic Party functionaries are not shy about saying exactly what they're thinking in this regard...In other words: it makes no difference to us how much we stomp on liberals' beliefs or how much they squawk, because we'll just wave around enough pictures of Michele Bachmann and scare them into unconditional submission. That's the Democratic Party's core calculation: from "hope" in 2008 to a rank fear-mongering campaign in 2012. Will it work? The ones who will determine if it will are the intended victims of that tactic: angry, impotent liberals whom the White House expects will snap dutifully into line no matter what else happens (even, as seems likely, massive Social Security and Medicare cuts) between now and next November."
Taibbi: "The Democrats aren't failing to stand up to Republicans and failing to enact sensible reforms that benefit the middle class because they genuinely believe there's political hay to be made moving to the right. They're doing it because they do not represent any actual voters. I know I've said this before, but they are not a progressive political party, not even secretly, deep inside. They just play one on television. For evidence, all you have to do is look at this latest fiasco. [...] We probably need to start wondering why this keeps happening. Also, this: if the Democrats suck so bad at political combat, then how come they continue to be rewarded with such massive quantities of campaign contributions? When the final tally comes in for the 2012 presidential race, who among us wouldn't bet that Barack Obama is going to beat his Republican opponent in the fundraising column very handily? At the very least, he won't be out-funded, I can almost guarantee that.And what does that mean? Who spends hundreds of millions of dollars for what looks, on the outside, like rank incompetence?"
Of course, Obama already had a blueprint if he hadn't wanted the debt ceiling to be "held hostage": How Clinton foiled Republican extortion over the debt ceiling.
What could have caused our National Man of Mystery to attack the New Deal, drone-bomb six countries, hound whistleblowers, and insist that he is allowed to assassinate American citizens? Can't imagine.
Stoller: "So why, if his Presidency has been such an unmitigated disaster, is he continuing to pursue this reckless course. My theory is that the key to the Obama administration's political strategy is not compromise or incrementalism. It is, quite simply, fooling liberals. When you look at Obama's governing role, he is clearly a servant of American oligarchs. But obviously he can't explicitly tell liberals this (unlike Republicans, who are explicit in saying they favor 'job creators'), because liberals like to think of themselves as favoring economic justice. So how do you acquire support from liberals, as he did in the primaries in 2008 and will need to do again in 2012, while pursuing oligarch-friendly policies? You do it by ensuring that liberals only focus on the ceremonial non-governmental aspects of the Presidency. You do it by making sure that they focus only on the televised aspects of the Presidency."
You say Obama did all this to win re-election? "Democratic lawmakers are openly questioning whether they can trust President Barack Obama to cut future deals with Republicans, while disappointment among party activists is raising doubts about their investment in his 2012 re-election campaign. 'Come on, got any other jokes?' cracked Representative Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat, when asked if Obama bargained hard in negotiations with congressional Republicans." Obama's approval rating is below 50%. Is this really supposed to work?
Everyone seems to agree that Obama (like Blair did), has somehow created a situation in which no one seems to be a viable - or even willing - presidential candidate. We have no one who will challenge Obama in the primary, much less someone with sufficient name-recognition and following to get the job done. The trouble is, no one wants to vote for Obama. Some will say we have to vote for the lesser evil, but now I'm completely on board with the dictum that that just means you're voting for evil. I would really like to have someone to vote for. It would make a refreshing change. (Of course, if that can't happen because no one will take the job, the only option I can see is if everyone who is disgusted with Obama registers as a Republican and takes over their primaries. An actual liberal running as a Republican and decrying Obama's giveaways to banksters and saying, "He cut your Social Security and Medicare!" probably won't even set off alarm bells in the Tea Party itself - after all, Republicans are going to say that stuff anyway, aren't they? If you don't actually say you're a liberal, you might even win!)
Meanwhile, I note with interest that our resident friendly Obamapologists has been strangely silent, no longer producing little talking points direct from Obama HQ to my comment threads to explain away Obama's latest attack on America. Now we are left with only right-wing crackpot Tom Harrister calling us communists (communists!) for daring to critique The One.
Tuesday, Sam Seder learned that the Devil is in the details.
More police terrorism caught on camera.
Tom Tomorrow with Thomas Friedman, Private Eye.
More reasons to love Matt Damon (don't miss the bit at the end with the cameraman), an interesting way to improve your local economy (if enough people do it).
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14:00 BST
