If you have cable or satellite TV you are captive behind a virtual iron curtain. That's right. You're a prisoner in an electronic gulag. You can leave, but only if you move to another electronic gulag. There is no escape. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

With all the fussing and moaning from Tea Party types about the American government going all socialist on us, it's amazing how the same people can go home, turn on their cable TV box and not notice the cable-commie shackles snapping closed around them.

I have Comcast. Poor me. But the other cable and satellite providers are cut of the same commie cloth. While they tout their companies on Wall Street as models of capitalist profitability, they are, in fact, as authoritarian and anti-freedom as any latter day Stalinist.

For a movement that started with one strategy and a couple of slogans, Occupy has preformed brilliantly. Having based itself on the examples of Egypt and Wisconsin, the Occupy Movement has raised the political consciousness of millions and created a large layer of new activists. But the uninterrupted string of successes of Egypt and Tunisia haven’t materialized for Occupy. We're in a lull period. Next steps are being considered and some tactics are being re-thought.

This is where revolutionary theory comes into play: a set of ideas that help guide action. Sometimes theory is learned unconsciously, where it resembles a set of non-ideological "assumptions" about movement building and politics. Occupy's theory began mostly with assumptions, many of them true.

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Despite a crashing economy and angry liberals, Barack Obama runs unchallenged in the 2012 Democratic Party primaries.

The Obama White House continues to push for a settlement that would let bankers avoid being punished - or even investigated - for a wave of mortgage-related crimes that includes perjury, tax evasion, and several types of fraud.[1]

Despite the President's new-found populism - rhetorically, anyway - officials in his Administration continue to push an unfair deal designed to conceal the financial Crime of the Century.

The Financial Times reported on new details of the proposed settlement, whose stated purpose is to punish banks and reduce the amount of money owed by underwater homeowners. But it's increasingly clear that the deal wouldn't help homeowners very much and wouldn't punish bankers at all.

— from TomDispatch

Last week, the president made a rare appearance at the Pentagon to unveil a new strategic plan for U.S. military policy (and so spending) over the next decade. Let’s leave the specifics to a future TomDispatch post and focus instead on a historical footnote: Obama was evidently the first president to offer remarks from a podium in the Pentagon press room. He made the point himself -- “I understand this is the first time a president has done this. It’s a pretty nice room. (Laughter)” -- and it was duly noted in the media. Yet no one thought to make anything of it, even though it tells us so much about our American world.

Well, the New Hampshire primary results are in, and I just know that you have to be counting the days until our exciting Michigan Republican primary, which is coming Feb. 28.

Yessiree, if you were too busy standing in line at the soup kitchen, our fiscally prudent Republican Legislature last year happily voted to spend $10 million to hold this presidential primary, which is expected to help anoint favorite son Mitt Romney.

True, others might have wasted that money by instead trying to, say, keep part of our broken promise to our kids by funding the now-canceled Michigan Promise Scholarships.

I wouldn't want to be Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the 28-year-old former US Marine just recently sentenced to death by a court in Iran after being convicted of being an American spy.

Hekmati, who was born in Arizona to Iranian exile parents, and who grew up in Michigan, is being defended by President Obama, whose White House spokesman Tommy Vietor, declared, "Allegations that Mr. Hekmati either worked for, or was sent to Iran by the CIA are false." The White House, not content with that denial, went on to trash the Iranian government and legal system, with Vietor adding, "The Iranian regime has a history of falsely accusing people of being spies, of eliciting forced confessions, and of holding innocent Americans for political reasons."

New York Times political reporter Katharine Q. Seelye, who famously misquoted Al Gore during Campaign 2000, has now bent over backward to shield Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum from a real quote in which he disparaged "black people."

Santorum has been running from his quote since he was caught on video discussing food stamps with a group of white voters in Sioux City, Iowa, on Jan. 1 and telling them "I do not want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."

The comment won Santorum a round of applause from his white audience - and may have helped him rally right-wing Iowans as he surged to a virtual tie with front-runner Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses two days later. But the former Pennsylvania senator began coming under criticism for his racially charged remark, which was replayed on MSNBC, CNN and other news networks.

President Obama will host a forum on insourcing jobs Wednesday. The forum will feature leaders of several companies who have already shifted jobs back home and are encouraging others to do the same. According to the White House,

On Wednesday, January 11, 2012, President Obama and Vice President Biden will host an "Insourcing American Jobs" forum at the White House focused on the increasing trend of companies choosing to "insource" jobs and invest in growing in the United States.

They’ve barely begun counting the votes and it already looks inevitable. Mitt Romney, the Republican Republicans love to hate, is going to be the Republican nominee for President.

How did it come to this? Mitt Romney generates less excitement in the GOP base than charity. He’s as authentic as John Boehner’s tan, and about as sexy. Bob Dole could give this guy charisma lessons.

Romney’s big pitch is that he’s the most electable Republican in the race. This says a couple of things about him, neither flattering.

The Presidency is supposed to be a means. A means to make changes in the way the nation works and what it stands for. A place where one can turn one’s core beliefs into history.

Scientists figured out years ago that there was nowhere near enough matter in our Local Group of galaxies to create enough gravity to keep them from flying apart. Our Local Group consists of our own Milky Way Galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, and several dwarf galaxies. They reached the same conclusion regarding all of the galaxy clusters in the observable universe.

Realizing that something must be holding them together, they deduced the existence of a form of invisible matter and called it dark matter. There must be a lot of it because, to account for the stability within galaxy clusters, approximately 73% of the universe must be dark matter. Think of it as a kind of matrix or web within which galaxies form and develop.

You've got to give him credit. Newt Gingrich doesn't just read Gideon's bible when he stays at the Marriott, he also reads poetry.

Like the line in a poem by legendary Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, the former House speaker heeds the admonition not to "go gently into that night, but rage against the dying of the light," and raging he is. Newt Gingrich is raging so much that by the time this whole affair is over, the state will instead be named: Newt Hampshire.

While the latest polls out of New Hampshire show frontrunner Romney down by four percentage points, Newt is nowhere near second place. He's in a tie with Rick Perry for fourth place. Ron Paul is polling second to Mitt Romney while Romney is holding on to a double digit lead.

Do T-shirt pirates make $ on teams, concerts and bookstores?

In order to frame the topic of the exploitation of sports fans let’s outline an impossible hypothetical situation: Would citizens of California agree to use their tax dollars to subsidize the building of a new stadium in Perth, in Western Australia, for the West Coast Eagles? NFW! No way, Jose!

Would tax payers in San Diego and Los Angeles agree to let the state subsidize a new football stadium in San Jose? Not bloody well likely, eh?

I’ve been thinking about commentaries. Actually I’ve been thinking about Metternich, New Hampshire, the media, newspapers, opinions, the primaries, what is said, and more importantly what is not said. Everybody has an opinion. In truth, everybody has multiple opinions which may or may not be in conflict with what they already claim to believe. Opinions change over time, or as the 19th Century Austrian foreign minister Metternich once said: “The public holds the opinion of the last person to which they spoke...” If the person you listened to holds little credibility in your estimation, your opposing opinion may be reinforced. In either case, the person last speaking has considerable impact on their listeners, one way or the other. Whoever has the last word impacts us more than we might TH*NK. Speak often, but speak last to have the greatest of impact…

"I feel stupid," someone said the other day. "I consider myself well-informed, but I have no idea what the term 'austerity economics' really means."

Actually it's not that complicated, and most of the lesson plan can be found in today's headlines.

We'll explain austerity to you in six steps, and we promise it it won't take more than 900 words. Since adults read an average of 250-300 words per minute - and we know all of you are above average - our little course shouldn't take more than three minutes.

— originally published at WhoWhatWhy

New York Times boss Arthur Sulzberger Jr. [source]

Recently, New York Times staffers boldly confronted their institution. In a near outright insurrection, published December 23 as an open letter to their boss, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., 561 staffers and a few retirees signed a declaration of frustration.

We've got our own declaration to those Times folks--a way out of this mess.

But first, here's the text of that open letter, in its entirety:

Two political candidates walk into a bar. The first one is a liar. The second one is not. Which one would you vote for? Neither. The second one doesn't exist.

Elections are still over ten months away yet the 2012 campaign season is in full swing with a 24/7 flood of candidates and pundits alike telling us all what it will take to win. They'll say it will take money, face-time, endorsements, registration drives, debates, money, positive commercials followed by the ("because they work") negative commercials, and of course, more money. What you won't hear about is what could be the wild card...

Satire.

Mitt Romney seems ready to wield his version of birtherism as a major weapon in the fall campaign against President Obama. In his standard stump speech he tells audiences that President Obama wants "to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society." According to Romney, this means a European-style welfare state that redistributes wealth and creates equal outcomes regardless of individual effort and success.

That's pretty strong stuff, but of course this doesn't sound anything like the President Obama who many of us have come to know and criticize. After all, this is the guy who got the top Wall Street bankers and told them that he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks. And, according to Ron Suskind, he assured them that he would hold his ground.

Last month I wrote about a bill before Congress that would both help fight the offshoring of call-center jobs and protect consumers. Now the countries where we have been sending those jobs are organizing a lobbying campaign to fight the bill.

The Bill

There is a bipartisan bill before Congress, The U.S. Call Center Worker and Consumer Protection Act, that would let the public know which companies are engaging in sending jobs out of the country, let customers ask to use an American call center instead, and ban federal grants or guaranteed loans to American companies that move call center jobs out of the US. In Call-Center Bill Would Let Customers Ask To Talk To Americans, I wrote about some of the specifics and the reason the bill is needed,

Iran has a creative opportunity to slow the cycle of deteriorating relations with the U.S. by reconsidering the death sentence of a former Marine it just convicted as a CIA spy.

Amir Hekmati, 28, received special training and served at U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan before entering Iran for his alleged intelligence mission, Al-Jazeera wire service reports.

The former military translator was born in Arizona to a family of Iranian origin and graduated from high school in Michigan, where his father, Ali, is a community college professor in Flint.

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Why won’t Republican candidate Mitt Romney release his tax returns? What is he hiding?

Junk science and the charlatans for sale who rely on it while masquerading as objective experts above the fray of litigation constitute a serious and continuing problem to the fair administration of justice in our legal system.

The Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) distinguish between ordinary witnesses and expert witnesses. With a few exceptions, such as whether a person appeared to be intoxicated or how fast someone was driving, ordinary witnesses are supposed to restrict their testimony to facts they perceive through their five senses. Experts are permitted to express opinions that are typically expressed to a "reasonable scientific (or medical) certainty." A major part of the problem for indigent and poor plaintiffs is lack of sufficient funds to hire sufficiently qualified experts. Plaintiffs personal injury lawyers usually advance the costs of such witnesses and reimburse themselves out of a favorable money judgment. In practice, this means that they will not agree to take a case unless they are virtually certain they will win. It also means that the lawyer or firm that takes the case must have a big war chest and there are not very many who do. Meanwhile, corporations and insurance companies have virtually unlimited funds available to retain multiple experts and they routinely subject plaintiffs to delays and hurdles to leap until money runs out and they settle the case for less than it is worth or they drop out.

The Friday, December 23rd Money Section of USA Today ran a full page article 'As crisis drags on, Greeks see bleak future.' We learn that around 100,000 businesses will shut down in the coming months as 1 in 4 small and medium size business owners say that they will declare bankruptcy in the New Year. This will translate into a further loss of perhaps 320,000 jobs in a country with a population (11 million) less than that of New York City and its suburbs. The unemployment rate for Greeks, ages 18 to 35, is up to nearly 40%! Was it the 99% of Greeks who caused this economic depression? Or was it, as in the US, the work of greedy investment sharks and corrupt or incompetent public officials? Either way, what has happened in Greece can happen here as well. Remember the words of Gordon Gecko in the first Wall Street film: 'Greed is good'... .

The CEOs of some of the businesses you shop at or do business with:

Since the days of Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy," the Republican Party has wooed angry whites with coded messages designed to play to racial prejudices - and that pattern has come back strong in Campaign 2012 as the GOP seeks to rid the White House of a black Democrat.

Usually, the dog whistle comes in appeals to "states' rights" and allusions to "welfare queens," but sometimes the implicit becomes explicit, as occurred when former Sen. Rick Santorum blurted out, "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."

Enduring question for 2012: why were the Bush-Cheney political corpses from 2008 never fully interred, but allowed to live on as undying, ever-dangerous vampires? It wasn’t for lack of widespread scorn (to this day) towards this conspicuous, evildoing duo, but because no empowered heroes effectively planted the right wooden stakes.

Certainly, Bushism, extending Reaganism, live on because both share the rightwing gang’s willful denial of reality. Second, and more critical, because skittish, spineless Obama Democrats devoid of killer instinct squandered the opportunity of a lifetime – to dramatize W.’s manifold failures and thus shift our political ground of being. The first is predictable; the second, an ongoing tragedy.