Read Krugman today. And copy your Congressperson if he, she or it is a Republican. In a nutshell:

…But a funny thing happened on the way to economic Armageddon: Iceland’s very desperation made conventional behavior impossible, freeing the nation to break the rules. Where everyone else bailed out the bankers and made the public pay the price, Iceland let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net. Where everyone else was fixated on trying to placate international investors, Iceland imposed temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to maneuver.

So how’s it going? Iceland hasn’t avoided major economic damage or a significant drop in living standards. But it has managed to limit both the rise in unemployment and the suffering of the most vulnerable; the social safety net has survived intact, as has the basic decency of its society…

Need to get that sweet taste out of your mouth after our group gloat about Libya, democracy’s newest cradle? Pepe Escobar’s got you covered:

To the winners, the spoils. They all did it; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Pentagon and the TNC. From the minute a United Nations resolution imposing a no-fly zone over Libya became a green card to regime change, plan A was always to capture and kill him. Targeted assassination; that’s Barack Obama administration official policy. There was no plan B.…

As the top four BRIC members knew it even before the voting of UN Resolution 1973, it was about NATO ruling the Mediterranean as a NATO lake, it was about Africom’s war against China and setting up a key strategic base, it was about the French and the Brits getting juicy contracts to exploit Libya’s natural resources to their benefit, it was about the West setting the narrative of the Arab Spring after they had been caught napping in Tunisia and Egypt.

Welcome to the new Libya. Intolerant Islamist militias will turn the lives of Libyan women into a living hell. Hundreds of thousands of Sub-Saharan Africans — those who could not escape — will be ruthlessly persecuted. Libya’s natural wealth will be plundered. That collection of anti-aircraft missiles appropriated by Islamists will be a supremely convincing reason for the “war on terror” in northern Africa to become eternal. There will be blood — civil war blood, because Tripolitania will refuse to be ruled by backward Cyrenaica…

We also know that change the world can believe in will be the day NATO enforces a no-fly zone over Saudi Arabia to protect the Shi’ites in the eastern province, with the Pentagon launching a Hellfire carpet over those thousands of medieval, corrupt House of Saud princes.

Hints that we may not be total savages after all show up so seldom that they ought to be passed along. So, from the Associated Press and McClatchy:

AMARILLO, Texas – The last of the nation's most powerful nuclear bombs — a weapon hundreds of times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — is being disassembled nearly half a century after it was put into service at the height of the Cold War.

The final components of the B53 bomb will be broken down Tuesday at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, the nation's only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility. The completion of the dismantling program is a year ahead of schedule, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, and aligns with President Barack Obama's goal of reducing the number of nuclear weapons…

From The Acquisitive Society, by R.H. Tawney (1920)

All these rights — ground-rents, monopoly profits — are “Property.” The criticism most fatal to theml is not that of Socialists. It is contained in the arguments by which property is usually defended. For if the meaning of the institution is to encourage industry by securing that the workman shall receive the produce of his toil, then precisely in proportion as it is important to preserve the property which a man has in the results of his own efforts, is it important to abolish that which he has in the results of the efforts of someone else.

The considerations which justify ownership as a function are those which condemn it as a tax. Property is not theft, but a good deal of theft becomes property. The owner of royalties who, when asked why he should be paid £50,000 a year from minerals which he has neither discovered or developed nor worked but only owned, replies, “But it’s property!” may feel all the awe which his language suggests. But in reality he is behaving like the snake which sinks into its background by pretending that it is the dead branch of a tree, or the lunatic who tries to catch rabbits by sitting behind a hedge and making a noise like a turnip. He is practising protective — and sometimes aggressive — mimicry. His sentiments about property are those of the simple toiler who fears that what he has sown another may reap. His claim is to be allowed to reap what another has sown…

In countries where the development of industrial organization has separated the ownership of property and the performance of work, the normal effect of private property is to transfer to functionless owners the surplus arising from the more fertile sites, the better machinery, the more elaborate organization…

It is the foundation of an inequality which is not accidental or temporary, but necessary and permanent. And on this inequality is erected the whole apparatus of class institutions, which make not only the income, but the housing, education, health and manners, indeed the very physical appearance of different classes of Englishmen almost as different from each other as though the minority were alien settlers established amid the rude civilization of race of impoverished aborigines.

How dumb can the GOP get? How dumb ya got? How about this, for example, from McClatchy Newspapers:

WASHINGTON — In a move aimed at improving national security, House Republicans want to give the U.S. Border Patrol unprecedented authority to ignore 36 environmental laws on federal land in a 100-mile zone stretching along the Canadian and Mexican borders.

If the legislation is approved, the Border Patrol would not have to comply with the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act and 32 other federal laws in such popular places as Olympic National Park, Glacier Park, the Great Lakes and the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area…

Charles P. Pierce writes:

Empires make me nervous. Imperial policies — even the gentler ones, even the purely commercial ones, even by proxy, and even when they result in the death of one of the few indisputable madmen on the modern scene — make my skin itch. (It’s the Irish in me.)

As to the blessings of globalization in Africa, well, that continent has been globalized out of most of its wealth and more than a few of its people since long before people invented the hedge fund. Will they do better under Goldman Sachs than they did under the Belgians? (The Nigerian precedent is not encouraging.) Free trade is not democracy, and the latter is in no way an inevitable consequence of the former. I don’t see the arrival of consumer goods and/or the modern financial markets as doing much for the average Ugandan.…

Iraq and Afghanistan aside, we fight our wars by automation, hurling thunderbolts from beyond the horizon, like Jove. There’s something scarifying about that, especially when it’s aimed at an American citizen, and it kills his teenage son, and the people who threw the thunderbolts don’t even try to show us why these people had to die. For a long time, we had people who said that the reason we were sending the Army all over the world was because there wasn’t any draft. One of the most apt criticisms of the “war on terror” was that it was being conducted without engaging the entire country in the effort. Now, not only is the combat removed from the citizenry, it’s increasingly removed from soldiers. Some guy at a console in Kansas City is making war on Pakistan. That makes me nervous.

Why say it, when JollyRoger at Plutocrat has said it for me? I’ll only add that as we do unto foreign heads of state, foreign heads of state may one day do unto us.

It bothers me to no end to see “leftists” cheering about us having gotten this guy. From a practical perspective, cheering about Qaddafi’s death is no different from cheering about Saddam’s. Qaddafi getting killed doesn’t solve one problem I’m facing.

But, it might give me problems to face later.

Whenever we cheer on simply killing people, rather than lamenting that these people never had a day in Court, we are simply making it easier for Governments to kill off people they find to be irritating. The Government, once given a green light for this kind of behavior, will simply broaden the scope of those it finds reprehensible enough to kill, until the day when Government tries to kill anyone it finds to be irritating.

I far prefer the manner in which we conducted ourselves after World War II. While we made the Nazis and Japanese face the consequences of their activities in Court, Stalin simply murdered millions of German POWs. We established our system as a just system, and our philosophy as one that demanded that even the worst elements among us must be brought before the bar, and prosecuted, so that the whole world would be aware of why it was that we went after these people. We afforded some of the most vile people who ever lived strong defense lawyers, the right to face their accusers, and an opportunity to tell their own stories.

We worked pretty hard to catch people ALIVE back then, just to make sure that we COULD demonstrate to the world that we were dedicated to the cause of justice.

When I was a young reporter at the long-defunct Washington Daily News, I was contacted by a group of county employees from the Maryland suburb — whistleblowers, as we didn’t yet call them. They wanted us to expose their supervisor’s use of county equipment and workers to improve his home. I told them that they would lose their jobs if the story ran. They said they didn’t care. I wrote the story. They lost their jobs.

That is what happens to government whistleblowers almost a hundred percent of the time. (I suspect you could drop the “almost” when it comes to the private sector.) In the real world any bureaucrat with an I.Q. in the double digits is smart enough to figure out how to violate the Whistleblower Protection Act without getting punished.

So I admire Carolyn Lerner and wish her well in her lonely fight against human nature. Maybe this time…

There’s been something special lately about the Office of Special Counsel.

It’s doing its job.

OSC is an independent federal agency with a long and well-deserved reputation for failing to protect federal whistleblowers, although part of its mission is “to safeguard the merit system by protecting federal employees and applicants from prohibited personnel practices…”

Carolyn Lerner gets the credit. She was sworn in as special counsel in June.

Her “tenure is very young, but she hit the ground running and appears to be fearless,” said Thomas Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower advocacy group…

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

It’s estimated that there are between 200 to 400 hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 billion galaxies in the the universe. It’s helpful to keep this perspective in mind, provided you can do so without sinking into psychotic despair. I’ve always taken comfort in our insignificance. I find it humorous and liberating. At any rate, it helps my self-esteem: No matter how ridiculous we appear to be, odds are there is another species somewhere behaving just as badly. What a relief!

Someplace out in the Crab Nebula, there might be another globular mass of carbon and hydrogen pushing its own 9-9-9 plan, or exhorting its followers to go and slaughter another bunch of similarly composed masses of hydrogen and carbon, or indulging in some of the other violent buffooneries that have reached their apotheosis here on planet earth. Whatever. It’s probably safe to say that we are not alone. Whew.

This doesn’t seem to have made it from the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times into the MSM, so I guess I’ll have to step in. For the latest in libertarian cosmetology, by all means go here. Laugh if you like. Or cry.

Click image to enlarge

Last week my daughter told me about her boyfriend’s aunt, uncle and cousin. They are moving to Los Angeles from Texas. Uncle has been out of work for some time. Aunt was recently laid off, and has lost her health care. She is a cancer survivor, so it is a safe bet that she won’t be getting coverage to replace that anytime soon. Cousin has recently graduated from college. She can’t find a job. She can’t afford her rent.

So, Joad-like they are all moving to California. Why, you may ask, do they think it will be better here? I asked that very question of my daughter. Can you guess the answer? I bet you can. I’ll give you a minute....

“They’re going to move in with Tom’s grandfather,” was my daughter’s reply.

I pointed out to my daughter that there is something terribly, horribly wrong with this country when two people in their 40s have absolutely no options but to move in with a parent. And the fact that we were talking about two generations being forced to take refuge like this is that much more appalling.

Turns out I didn’t have to point that out to her. She had already figured it out.

Who knew that the People’s Republic of San Francisco would be more advanced than New York in the sweet science of rousting protesters? Martha Bridegam of Lodging in Public, that’s who.

San Francisco Police Department and Department of Public Works are using the same tactics toward the protest encampment that they do toward all encampments: property sweeps, second-day cleanup property sweeps, repeat property sweeps wherever the “swept” people next set down, all punctuated by actual or threatened citations for offenses like littering and lodging in public…

I don’t find it “mystifying” at all why San Francisco’s municipal attitude toward the “occupy” protesters is meaner than in, say, Los Angeles or Seattle. It’s because San Francisco is institutionally accustomed to cleansing the appearance of disorder from all of its public spaces. This isn’t about politics, or rather, it’s not about party politics though it is political in a deeper sense. The city has just put its usual cleansing machinery in operation. The particular people being cleansed today are organized, at least partly middle-class, and intentionally making a political a point. That, and I suppose the scale of the rousting, are the only differences from every other damn day of the year…

SFPD reportedly took the Occupy SF demonstrators’ tents and sleeping bags last night. When the police were beginning to bear down, the demonstrators put out a call on #OccupySF to the public to express concern. I was one of, apparently, many who called. The officer on the line at Southern Station was unfailingly polite but also clearly busy with other calls. He was very much aware that the station’s phone number had “been tweeted.” As he got me to admit, it’s true SFPD is better than many police forces when it comes to crowd control.

But—

The demonstrators report the police really did take all of their camping gear, even, they say, homeless people’s possessions. And we were between rainstorms at the time. We had torrential rain all the earlier part of this morning after daybreak. Also, briefly, hailstones.

If you happened to catch Jeffrey Immelt on 60 Minutes Sunday night, you saw a perfect distillation of the kind of blinkered, self-centered corporate thinking that dominates this country and has brought the world to the disastrous state it’s in.

Immelt, you’ll recall, is the CEO of General Electric and the chairman of Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, or the “jobs czar” as he’s called in the glib vernacular of our journalistic and political elites. I assumed he would be speaking in the latter capacity but he really didn’t, except to offer up the familiar stinky bile about lowering taxes and deregulating industries. In reality the segment was a commercial for the dynamic wonder that is General Electric and its swell and peppy CEO. He was surprisingly candid about where his true priorities lay. This is from an exchange between Immelt and interviewer Lesley Stahl:

Stahl: Shouldn’t American corporations — don’t they have some kind of civic responsibility to create jobs? No?

Immelt: My name is not above the door. I work for investors. Investors want to see us grow earnings and cash flow. They want to see us be competitive. They want to see us prosper.

Obama’s job czar works for investors, not you. His primary allegiance is to GE and its bottom line, not improving the US economy. The shareholders want to see them prosper, they want cash flow. If that means moving operations to China and Brazil, so be it. This is the man that Barack Obama handpicked to head a panel designed to create jobs in the United States.

The whole thing was a pornographic display of everything that is most myopic and destructive about the corporate mind. So GE opens more plants abroad than in the US? That’s just the world we live in. Sixty percent of GE’s business is done overseas? Well, that’s where the customers are. GE hasn’t been paying any taxes? Hey, we’ve had an extraordinary couple of years — we were able to write off $32 billion during the financial crisis! GE sells technology to China that puts US companies at a competitive disadvantage? Don’t be afraid of China, they’re a big market. “I’m a complete globalist,” he says. “I think like a global CEO.”

At one point, we see Immelt giving a pep talk to some of his workers at a plant in Brazil:

I want you to get up everyday and want to beat Caterpillar. I want you to hate the color yellow and do everything you can to make sure we’re winning and beating the competition.

Read that again. It’s the chairman of Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness actively rooting for an American company to do poorly.That’s the character of public service in a corporate state.

…Read on

Kerry Trueman at AlterNet explores the question of why those irritating Danes go around smiling all the time:

KT: Denmark is famous for having so much less income inequality; do kitchen workers in Danish restuarants make a decent salary?

TH: Yes, a dishwasher in Denmark gets $25 an hour.

KT: Do they get sick days and benefits, too?

TH: Yes, and a pension, and health care, and maternity leave. To me, the more equal your society is, the better it is for everybody. It’s not right for a country as rich as yours to have so many poor people. This thing with Americans and taxes, I don’t understand it.

I make quite a lot of money, I pay 67% tax on much of it, and I don’t mind. I like the idea that the girl who’s sitting next to my daughter, whose mother is a cleaning lady, has exactly the same opportunity to get an education that my daughter has. I don’t think that’s socialism. To me, that’s human decency. That girl didn’t choose her parents, why shouldn’t she have the same opportunities?

…from the Wichita Eagle:

Where to begin?

Rep. Ritch Workman, R-Melbourne, filed a bill this week to bring back “dwarf tossing,” the barbaric and dangerous barroom spectacle that was imported from Australia and thrived briefly in Florida before it was outlawed in 1989.

“I’m on a quest to seek and destroy unnecessary burdens on the freedom and liberties of people,” Workman said. “This is an example of Big Brother government.

“All that it does is prevent some dwarfs from getting jobs they would be happy to get,” Workman said. “In this economy, or any economy, why would we want to prevent people from getting gainful employment?”

I suppose there are the obvious observations: In the midst of what is a Depression in all but name, this is what a (nominal) public servant decides to focus on??? Just how many jobs does Workman think this move is going to create? Are there a lot of little people clamoring for this particular remedy? Did it not perhaps occur to Mr. Workman that maybe — just maybe — the “jobs they would be happy to get” are the same jobs the rest of us would be happy to get? Y’know — the ones that pay decently and offer benefits, like our parents’ jobs generally did in a bygone age?

But apart from the WTF quality of this particular proposal, there is something deeper. Namely that Mr. Workman and his fellow Republicans consistently see “freedom” in terms of the crassest exploitation. That Terrible Horrible No-Good Very Bad government is preventing the free market from exploiting dwarfs! Surely there is no other word for this but Tyranny. And just as surely it must be as beneficial to dwarfs to be exploited as it is for those who would exploit them!

Or children, for that matter — as the various state-level proposals from our Republican friends to do away with child-labor laws demonstrate.

So dwarfs opting to be tossed — that’s Freedom! Of course, if these same individuals were to decide to congregate outside Mr.Workman’s office to demand decent jobs and real economic fairness, I have no doubt that he would waste no time in denouncing them as un-American. Such is the compassion of today’s conservatives.

I learned something new today. Bufonophobia is a fear of toads, and Bolshephobia is a fear of Bolsheviks. Venustrophobia is a fear of beautiful women, which I used to suffer from but don’t anymore, and dipsophobia is a fear of drinking, which I most definitely have never had (unfortunately). I discovered these and lots more at the Phobia List, which isn’t a bad way to kill a few minutes on a slow Saturday morning, particularly when, due to my pronounced lack of dipsophobia, I had a hangover. “But I’m not an alcoholic, I’m a drunk,” said a funny old tippler I once knew. “Alcoholics go to meetings.” I was going to write something about politics, but I’m sick and damn tired of being angry and depressed. Is there a phobia for that?

Indeed there is, Angrophobia.

But the best one, in my opinion, is Defecaloesiophobia, which is a fear of painful bowel movements. Yet another possible side effect of paying too close attention to politics.

I don’t have much to say these days (as you can see, ha ha), because I’ve been sort of media fasting. There are times when I burn out and just have to turn it all off. The relentless barrage of noise, advertisements, celebrity gossip and general insipidity is damaging to one’s mental health. It’s all just uninteresting people doing uninteresting things uninterestingly, particularly those witless clods running for president, all of whom, with the possible exception of Ron Paul, can be described as either crazy, stupid, or evil.

But you just can’t escape it. I can’t even check my email without headlines popping up about some person named Amanda Knox. I do not know who this person is. I do not want to know who this person is. I do not give a fuck who this person is. But for some strange reason, influential media outlets insist that I do. Worse, they want me to care. So bits and pieces of information get electronically pipelined into my brain, a snatch here, a smidge there. Vague impressions form, and the intended narrative gradually penetrates the fog of my hungover mind: INNOCENT AMERICAN ABUSED BY WICKED FOREIGNERS!

Well, at least the Italians rectified their error; we just ignore our mistakes. We resolve all ambiguities with violence, a lethal injection or, in my home state of California, gas pellets.The judicial system in some states just can’t bother with reasonable and humane ideas like, uh, a shadow of a doubt. That kind of fastidiousness might trick people into thinking they’re civilized. The Supreme Court, which regards corporations as individuals, can’t be troubled to review the case of a real flesh and blood individual who was probably unjustly convicted of murder and executed. I can clearly see that wicked bully “Nino” Scalia and the self-loathing Clarence Thomas shrugging their shoulders over lunch at the country club and saying, “Aw, fuck it. The nigger had to have been guilty of something.”

The conservatives on the Supreme Court would have been right at home in eighteenth century England, when a judge ruled that it was okay to beat your wife with a stick provided it was no thicker around than your thumb, which is where the phrase “rule of thumb” comes from.

I often used to speculate about what the long term effects of constant advertising would be on the American psyche, or our national character or whatever, but, of course, the evidence is already in. One need only take a look around. While we were busy wasting our essence on mindless consumption, driving SUVs, staring at our iPhones, gaping at celebrities, marveling at athlete’s salaries, swallowing Zoloft, and engaging in two of the most deplorable activities of our gadget-ridden era — tweeting and texting — our country morphed into a full-fledged plutocracy that is constantly at war.

And guess what, there isn’t a goddamn thing you or I can do about it. They’ve got us by the balls and they know it. Just how tightly do they have our ball sacks? This tightly: people are ordering food for the Wall Street protesters with their credit cards. The banks are making a profit off the people who are protesting their greed!

Fuck it. I’m taking the dog for walk.

Number 219 from Chuck Lorre’s Vanity Care Archives.
You will of course have immediately recognized Chuck Lorre as the television producer who fired Charlie Sheen.

On a recent trip to Las Vegas I watched a grim, beer-bellied man row a gondola filled with tourists through the “canals of Venice.” This was his job. At some point he had to have filled out an application and undergone an interview process to determine if he had the necessary skills to be a pretend gondolier eight hours a day, five days a week.

As he glided past me I found myself imagining him walking into his house at the end of a long day, tossing his keys into the cheap ceramic bowl by the front door and sadly calling out to his wife, “I’m home.” To which she would cheerfully respond, “How was work today, sweetie?” But instead of saying “fine,” which was how he answered that question every other day, he paused and considered the days’ events, and all the events that had led him to this point in his life.

Then he crossed to the hall closet, took down a shoe box from the hat shelf, removed a small caliber pistol that he’d bought for home protection, and immediately blew his brains out all over the badly framed photograph of him rowing Barry Manilow. Waking from my brief reverie, I found myself suddenly filled with compassion and respect for this stranger of the inland sea. Compassion for his quiet desperation. And respect that he chose not to take his cheerful wife with him.

I don’t know about you, but Vegas always does this to me.

Generals are said always to be fighting the last war. In a similar vein, I wonder if we’re not on the verge of discovering that the political powers still think the previous world order, which to many seems to be collapsing, is just in a slump and will come roaring back with all the benefits of another speculative bubble. All it takes to put things right, whispers power to itself, is a little nudge here and tweak there; the machine’s in fine condition, it just needs a tuneup.

The current Democratic version of this delusion seems to be that all Obama needs to do to be re-elected is strike some fighting postures and anoint himself once more the champion of the 99% in resistance against the 1% who’ve financed his entire political career.

The sad thing is, it’s probably an accurate view, if only because the opposing field comprises such a sorry bunch. To my mind it’s a loss that Bachmann is falling out of contention, because a prolonged visit to the big stage would have made her quite an entertaining figure. But the Republicans continue to find entertaining characters to parade before America’s television cameras, distracting attention from the serious business of frustrating the business of the country.

So in a way you can understand how it came to pass that Harry Reid decided to employ what might be called the atomic option, a sort of mini-nuclear option. The nuclear option, you recall, was originally the threat back when the GOP held the Senate to eliminate the filibuster, which the Democrats occasionally used to stop or delay bills they didn’t like for whatever reason. Once the Democrats took over, their traditional instinct to compromise away the store kicked in, led by the Compromiser-in-Chief without doubt but ably assisted by Majority Leader Reid-in-the-Wind. And of course the Republicans discovered a new-found delight in the fairness of the filibuster, and began to employ it at every opportunity. Thus, again, the Republicans argue for silly bullshit, and the Democrats meet them half way. So they do it again, and get another half. And so on. Any time now the Republicans will decide they’ve got enough.

Now, with the 2012 election season nearly upon us, Obama and Reid need to find some nifty tricks to re-engage the constituents they’ve lost over the past three years of shirking Constitutional duties. So Obama decides to pose like a fighter after years of being begged to take that role, in a situation carefully chosen for political effect immediately before the election. Reid, blowing along, uses majority rule to overturn a Senate convention that everyone knows the Republicans will exploit to the hilt the next time they take the Senate, with the rather limited object of avoiding a vote that would likely reveal Democratic disunity. A couple of years ago, in the flush of the Obama victory, this sort of maneuver with the object of moving some socially valuable legislation such as a real jobs bill would have seemed risky but bold and forward-looking, a hopeful sign. Today, employed to prevent a political embarrassment, it seems weak, calculated, and ineffective, no more than a political ploy that will inevitably backfire with much greater consequences than whatever benefit its use engenders.

What we need is to fight for our positions in the world and to democratize our country. It may just turn out that we are witnessing the first realistic possibility of it; and the old order, rapidly changing though it is, can’t keep up. Perhaps we’ll look back in a few years at the Arab Spring as the beginning of a world-wide movement to take power back from the oligarchs and return it to the hands that actually own it: ours. Eric Cantor’s increasingly concerned about he calls the mobs occupying Wall Street? Well he oughta be, because it’s the front man who always gets it first in the movies, and Occupy Wall Street is coming for the people Cantor fronts for.

Jim Fallows led me to this chart from Mother Jones. Click to enlarge it into legibility.

The point, which Teddy Roosevelt was the last Republican president to grasp, is that the natural and inevitable result of “free market” competition is not efficiency, invention, a level playing field, personal freedom, or the greatest good for the greatest number. It is monopoly.

This is what the Republican small government types would fear if they had a clue. Not government regulation. Ask anyone for his or her worst experiences with unresponsive, uncaring, indifferent, and rapacious bureaucracies. The answer will seldom be the Post Office or the Social Security Administration or even the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Nine times out of ten it will be a bank, an insurance company, a giant utililty, a cable provider. You can’t vote the rascals out. There is no congressman to complain to. You haven’t got a hope of successfully suing them. Corporate decisions are unappealable, mercilessly and mindlessly enforced by courts and bill collectors.

You can’t even get past the phone tree to speak to anybody in actual authority. Such people must exist, but they are faceless and unaccountable. You are in Kafka country. Just ask any of the poor bastards defrauded and evicted in the great mortgage swindle that blew up the economy for everyone but the bankers responsible.

This is the “big government” the useful idiots of the Tea Party ought to fear. Instead they are speeding its arrival. Perhaps it has already arrived. Look at the chart.

The only thing capable of standing in its way is the regulatory authority of the “big government” that the boobies have been taught to fear. Indeed it may already be too late. The Citizens United decision and the corporate-owned Congress and Obama’s economic team may have seen to that.

In which case God bless us all, and Tiny Tim Geithner.

It was probably not a great idea for Rick Perry to rent a hunting camp once called Niggerhead. Not that Rick minds offending blacks — he questioned President Obama’s patriotism, didn’t he? — it’s just that sensibilities have changed in the past fifty years in ways that the Texas Governor may not have noticed.

He has called Hispanics in his state “Josés,” as in, “The Josés will sue you at the drop of a hat.” He has implied that President Obama, while lacking any true feeling for the country, is also a coward. Likewise he has said that the head of the Federal Reserve Bank, Ben Bernanke, is “almost treasonous” if he orders more money to be printed before the election. He has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. He thinks Medicare is a socialist conspiracy and will bankrupt the country. He says government is the problem and the best place to create jobs is in the private sector. To make his point, he cites the large number of new jobs in Texas during his tenure and doesn’t mention that most of them are government jobs.

Even if this latest blow-up on the tough-talking Texan’s yellow brick road is just another dust devil, does it suggest that in his case the N-word might have a different meaning? Nitwit, perhaps? Do you get the feeling that soon enough we won’t have Rick Perry to kick around any more? The cowboy governor’s campaign is reeling.

Yesterday, it was stammering performances against the likes of Michelle Bachmann, Newt and the Mitten. Today it’s the hunting camp; tomorrow, who knows? Pick your favorite gaff, stumble, screw-up, but whatever the reason, the ‘charismatic’ governor is falling fast in the polls and nowhere more precipitously than among those of a tea-party persuasion.

Apparently the tea partiers are disillusioned with Ricky because he’s started to tone down some of his best attention-getting positions. They liked him better when he was completely irrational, like them. Now he’s beginning to sound more like the other Republican candidates, except they’re better at grammar than he is.

Politicians are forever blathering about how canny the American electorate is: “The American people are too smart to be taken in by empty promises,” they say as they make yet another empty promise. Of course, to be fair, when your choice eventually comes down to two candidates, both of whom are running on a platform constructed entirely of empty promises, what are you supposed to do?

Still, there is little evidence to suggest that ‘smart’ is a good word to describe the American voting public. ‘Smarting’ might be better. ‘Fed up’ is good. But ‘smart?’ We elected George W. Bush, not once but twice. Was that smart? Look where it got us. Thousands dead and maimed and trillions of dollars spent, a huge increase in the national debt, and nobody can say for what. Nobody except, of course, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who chant, “We won. We won.” Won what? What did we win? Halliburton won enormous defense contracts and Cheney and Rumsfeld both won fat book contracts. Maybe that’s what they meant.

So now we’re in for another whole year of political bluster and bombast. A lot of us may be disappointed in Obama’s leadership but we can at least be thankful that we will be spared any serious challenge to his candidacy and all the misstatements, cheap posturing, and flatulence that would entail.

The Republicans will have to carry the burden for most of the year and we can all take comfort in the obvious talents they bring to the party. There are lots more N-words to draw on. Yes, N is for nitwit, but that’s not all. N is also for nothing, nada, nil, not, nonentity, nowhere, nobody home, nausea, numskull, nincompoop, none, no one, and no, no, no.

From the New Mexico Independent:

Though medical marijuana is legal in New Mexico, the drug is still regarded as an illegal scheduled substance by the federal government. Given the federal government sets the rules on who can own guns, medicinal marijuana smokers of this state and 15 others are barred from owning guns.

The point was reiterated in a late September letter written (PDF) by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and sent to federal firearms licensees. Owners of gun stores are instructed to withhold the sale of arms or munitions to anyone suspected of having an interaction or addiction to scheduled drugs, including marijuana. The letter specifies individuals known to have a medicinal marijuana card can be reasonably assumed to be an abuser of a controlled substance and gun shop owners must refuse purchase.

Moreover, the letter affirms the illegality of a medicinal marijuana smoker purchasing weapons. Already, those who seek to purchase firearms or ammunition must fill out ATF Form 4473. Question 11.e. specifically asks: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?” Answering ‘yes’ legally bars the individual from purchasing guns or ammunition.

The ATF letter several times referred to marijuana as an addictive drug. According to a summary of the book The Science of Marijuana (2008) in Psychology Today, a person’s risk of developing an addiction to marijuana is roughly 9 percent, compared to 33 percent for tobacco users and 15 percent for alcohol users.

Bear in mind that these are the same clowns who brought you the Waco massacre and armed the Mexican drug cartels in the “Fast and Furious” insanity.

This is from a letter written in 1973 by one famous socialist to another (now deceased). In it, an American is trying to induce his European pal to come over for an extended stay in the US, but the latter is reluctant to do so. He just had surgery and didn’t want to leave the excellent health insurance he enjoyed in Europe. He’d previously lived in the United States for a full ten years, and seemed keenly aware of the risks of “falling ill away from home.”

Not to worry, says the American …

“You may be interested in the information that we uncovered on the insurance and other benefits that would be available to you in this country. Since you have paid into the United States Social Security Program for a full forty quarters, you are entitled to Social Security payments while living anywhere in the Free World. Also, at any time you are in the United States, you are automatically entitled to hospital coverage.”

… “In order to be eligible for medical coverage you must apply during the registration period which is anytime from January 1 to March 31. For your further information, I am enclosing a pamphlet on Social Security.”

So just who were these two, anyway? The answer might make George Will a bit clammy, but that’s Charles Koch writing to F.A. Hayek. He wanted Hayek to come serve as distinguished senior scholar at his eerily named Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian think tank dedicated to dismantling the welfare state.

You have to invent a brand new vocabulary, a whole array of new concepts, to capture the full dimensions of their hypocrisy. The tools we’re currently working with are insufficient.

So I guess there’s a new lesson in right-wing doublethink for us all to learn. If libertarians pay into Social Security, it’s right and proper, moral even, for them to collect when they are eligible. For the rest of us it’s not. Check.

Thank you, sir, may we have another?

Read the whole article at The Nation.

Here’s Anwar al-Awlaki on page 1 of Saturday’s New York Times:

…the American-born cleric whose fiery sermons made him a larger-than-life figure in the shadowy world of jihad…

…the leader of external operations for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula…

…taken “the lead role in planning and directing the efforts to murder innocent Americans…”

…inspired militants around the world and helped plan a number of terrorist plots, including the December 2009 attempt to blow up a jetliner bound for Detroit…

…Internet lectures and sermons inspired would-be militants and led to more than a dozen terrorist investigations in the United States, Britain and Canada.

And here he is, tucked away on page 14 of Sunday’s New York Times where only news nerds go:

“…A dime-a-dozen cleric…”

“…I don’t think your average Middle Easterner knows who Anwar al-Awlaki is…”

“…It seems totally irrelevant to how Arabs view the world right now. They don’t care about Awlaki…”

…In a region transfixed by the drama of its revolts, Mr. Awlaki’s voice has had almost no resonance…

“…It seems totally irrelevant to how Arabs view the world right now. They don’t care about Awlaki…”

“…When the Obama administration and the U.S. media started focusing on him, that is when Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula pushed him to the fore. They were taking advantage of the free publicity, if you will. And any stature he has now in the Arab world is because of that…”

“…The U.S. focus on Awlaki was a function of his language abilities and their understanding of his role as a recruiter and propagandist. If recent events can be said to further marginalize violent rejectionists such as Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, then there is very little room for a virtual unknown such as Awlaki to command any serious attention…”

…he is not unique in his role as the American voice of Al Qaeda recruiting. United States counterterrorism officials say there are as many as 100 English-language sites offering militant Islamic views.

Yesterday, just past eleven in the morning, a large glowing object appeared in the sky over West Cornwall, Connecticut. The villagers rushed outside, much alarmed, and ran about praying to their gods. After a quarter of an hour the strange object disappeared and the blessèd rains returned.

Jamie Dimon has put a down payment on his own police force:

JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation.

The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center...
“These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe,” Dimon said. “We’re incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.”

I thought us li’l old taxpayers were supposed to pay for those things. So that the police would, you know, protect all of us.

Silly me. That would be socialism...

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words:

(h/t Politics in the Zeros)

The Marquis de Sade wrote 120 Days of Sodom in hopes it would be “the most impure tale that has ever been written since the world exists.” He failed, of course. The Old Testament remains unchallenged as the most vicious, cruel and evil book of all time. Just a taste, this one from Leviticus 21:

And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying,
Speak unto Aaron, saying, whosoever he be of my seed that hath any blemish, let him not approach to have of the bread of his God.
For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or brokenhanded
Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken…
Only he shall not go into the vail, nor come nigh unto the altar, because he hath a blemish; that he profane not my sanctuaries: for I the Lord do sanctify them.

…in this case from The American Conservative:

…The Sailer analysis is ruthlessly logical. Whites are still the overwhelming majority of voters, and will remain so for many decades to come, so raising your share of the white vote by just a couple of points has much more political impact than huge shifts in the non-white vote. As whites become a smaller and smaller portion of the local population in more and more regions, they will naturally become ripe for political polarization based on appeals to their interests as whites. And if Republicans focus their campaigning on racially charged issues such as immigration and affirmative action, they will promote this polarization, gradually transforming the two national political parties into crude proxies for direct racial interests, effectively becoming the “white party” and the “non-white party.” Since white voters are still close to 80 percent of the national electorate, the “white party” — the Republicans — will end up controlling almost all political power and could enact whatever policies they desired, on both racial and non-racial issues.