An Era Ends

(It wants to be a palindrome.  Later.)

The (former) Pan Am terminal at JFK is to be demolished.  (NYTimes article)

(Never flew Pan Am.  Might have landed there on a return flight once.  Kennedy is always under construction.)

Serious Bad News/Kafka Gets the Last Laugh

Supreme Court decision, Salinas v. Texas, from Bloomberg Law, via Better Than Salt Money.

Yes, we're in trouble.

The Supreme Court changed the rules today. Miranda, as a functional object, no longer exists. Silence is no defense against self-incrimination; refusing to speak can be used against you as evidence of guilt. One must specifically invoke the 5th Amendment to get it’s protections. That’s my takeaway (with some support) from Salinas v Texas.

First thing to know, cops don’t have to remind you of your rights if they don’t arrest you. If they can deny that you were a suspect until you slipped up and gave them something suspicious, they can ask you anything they like. Under this new ruling your silence can be used against you. If you stop talking, that’s suspicious, and can be used by the prosecution to show a guilty mind. Moreover, the only way to get out of that is to say the magic words, “I am not talking to you because I have a 5th Amendment right to avoid saying anything which might be used to incriminate me”.[Emphasis added by me.]

That 's pecunium.  There's more.  You might want to make up cards with that sentence, in case you forget.

Franz Kafka is guffawing.  As are totalitarian (and authoritarian) regimes the world over.  Why does the government hate our freedom?

"...Ever been our friend and ally!"

• Sad news:  Pam's House Blend is going away.  (via Driftglass)
  
  Now, I didn't go there much. For one thing, for many years, Safari and her net host's code were deeply antagonistic; I would go there and the browser would either freeze or crash. Not optimal, no.  On the other hand, when that stopped being a problem, there was an occasional gold nugget to be had.  And Pam's "voice" was unmistakeable.  Also, she put me onto a couple of resources for Journey.
• They're listening to your calls.  Via both Comrade Misfit and Anna van Z, who are in different ways scathing.
1. Comrade Misfit:

   Do you mind the government knowing what books you've been reading? Unless you live in a good-sized area, chances are that the neighborhood bookstores are all gone. Which means that you're buying books over the Internet or borrowing them from your library, all of which means that the government can find out what you read, what magazines you subscribe to. Maybe you like to catch up with your favorite shows using the cable company's "on demand" feature-- which means you told the cable company what you like to watch. Do you use an "affinity" card in the grocery store? Did you sign up for the rewards points at your local movie house?

2. Anna van Z:

   We got us a full-blown Stasi/Secret Police-state up in here!

ETA: Apparently CNet got it wrong and has walked back the assertions about random warrantless eavesdropping. Nevertheless, it's time for precautions.

It's not paranoia if someone is really out to get you.

You Have No Privacy

• Via the sidebar at Making Light:  "You commit three felonies a day."  (I'm a bit behind, but I was late to church this morning, and yesterday, I aborted a survey which claimed to be a quiz, but somehow all the questions were on personal details.  Uh-huh.  So I guess I'll have to find a Floridian porn website for dolphins, which is probably crossing state lines for immoral porpoises.)
• Pecunium on:
• the dangers of metadata
• the threat posed to the populace

  This shit matters because the slope to which it leads is serious, and steep. The laws we have are what protect us from each other, and from the basest aspects of our darker natures. Few of us would refrain from doing what we have to do to protect ourselves, and fear of those things against which there is no protection is a powerful appeal to the base natures of our little lizard brain.

• From ProPublica, via AlterNet:  What we don't know about NSA surveillance.  The word "unclear" appears a number of times.

Do we love Big Brother yet?

Thinkpieces

• Via the sidebar at Making Light, "How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps," with follow-up "Inequality, MOOCs and The Predator Elite." I think I like this guy.
• From the first article:

  Within one generation, in five easy steps, not only have the scholars and intellectuals of the country been silenced and nearly wiped out, but the entire institution has been hijacked, and recreated as a machine through which future generations will ALL be impoverished, indebted and silenced. Now, low wage migrant professors teach repetitive courses they did not design to students who travel through on a kind of conveyor belt, only to be spit out, indebted and desperate into a jobless economy. The only people immediately benefitting inside this system are the administrative class – whores to the corporatized colonizers, earning money in this system in order to oversee this travesty. But the most important thing to keep in mind is this: The real winners, the only people truly benefitting from the big-picture meltdown of the American university are those people who, in the 1960s, saw those vibrant college campuses as a threat to their established power. They are the same people now working feverishly to dismantle other social structures, everything from Medicare and Social Security to the Post Office.

• From the second:

  The game plan seems clear – destroy the teaching profession, then blame those educators still struggling against all odds to teach, hold them responsible for the systemic failures. Then replace a system which focused on the social good of education with a for-profit model run like an edu-factory. There is a reason that billionaires like Bill Gates have bought into education – and its the same reason that Gates owns over a half million dollars worth of Monsanto stock. Factory farming and factory-ed have the same goal: profit. And not for you or me. Certainly not for our children. But for Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates and the other 1%-ers who have muscled their way into ownership of the “education industry”. And, I will say it until I’m blue in the face (and yes that’s another Braveheart reference): Education is NOT a for-profit endeavor, any more than medicine should be. It is a social good, and must be treated as such. Teachers are professionals and know more about the complexities of educating individuals than the “Instructional Designers” and curriculum technicians who are doing their best to take over.
  
  [...]
  
  We’re all screwed. And we’ll stay screwed if we keep struggling as individuals, or as separate classes of professionals. We’ve got to come together and rise up together – all workers, across all platforms and industries – and put our talents and our multiple intelligences to use for our own benefit. Stop giving our talents and abilities away to the Predator Elite, and start working together to figure out how to use our talents for each other. If all exploited journalists stopped writing; if all exploited artists stopped creating; if all exploited educators stopped teaching — what would these exploiters have?

• Dan Baum at Harper's, suggesting that the gun control debate isn't really about gun control.
• On Robert Fletcher, recently dead, who managed the fruit farms of Japanese neighbors after they were interned in World War II.  Three newspaper articles, excerpted by Arthur Silber.

I'm on a Horse

No, not really.

• Well, we really can't pretend to be better than totalitarian/authoritarian regimes now, can we.  (And just because they claim not to be logging content doesn't mean they're not logging content. So s p e a k  s  l  o  w  l  y, your security apparatchiks are listening, and they don't get big words.)
• "Trained for Totalitarianism" takes you through the history of why there has not been a huge uproar and riots in the streets (you weren't really expecting the Tea Partiers to protest, now, were you?); this game goes way back:

  I don't think it is possible to overstate the significance of this early childhood training. Of equal significance is the fact that these issues are almost never discussed in the course of political analysis. Yet there is a profound sense in which authoritarianism (and even totalitarianism) feel right to many people -- "right" in the sense that it is very familiar, that it is the environment in which they were first made to function.

  Arthur Silber, the clearest voice we've got. Yes, the article is long. Your eyes and brain need the exercise.
• Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism presents Dave Dayen on student loans as medieval indenture and why heavy student debt is a bad idea.

  Fixing the student debt problem is not going to be easy. But student debt penury is having enough of a macroeconomic impact to be capturing the attention of policymakers and possible real economy allies, such as consumer goods companies. But the biggest wake-up call has already come in the form of declining enrollments for law schools and other programs which were once seen as sure-fire routes to a middle class or better lifestyle.

• An appreciation of Iain Banks at Vagabond Scholar (Mr. Banks has terminal cancer).  Because you deserve a short break from banality.
• South Carolina, what can one say?  (Daisy Deadhead says it.)
• Speaking of South Carolina...  (Zandar Versus The Stupid.)
• Monsanto doesn't want anyone to know food was genetically tampered with.
• Political cowardice.

  The way I see it, if you can’t look the people in the eye and listen to them then you don’t belong in public office.
  
  [...]
  
  When you don’t have a good argument for doing something, the last thing you want to do is be confronted by thousands of people asking why the hell your ass is blocking Medicaid expansion.
  
  Still, it was a shocking display of tuck tail and run.
  
  Anyhoo, the people will not be ignored.
  
  Cue Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones and his magical fantastical listening, but not to you, tour of 2013. Missourians have been following Speaker Jones all over the state in an attempt to get him to listen to them about Medicaid Expansion. By the time the tour reached Eureka, Speaker Jones was so moved that he closed an open meeting.

  [clucking noises]  If they can't face their constituents with their shiv-the-poor program, perhaps they should rethink the shiv-the-poor program.  Just saying.
• Melissa McEwan on the constant unrelenting pressure on women to have children, even when they clearly don't want to.  I have a rantlet suggesting that the abstinence-only crap is a way of trapping women into pregnancy, and that abstinence-only is prima facie misogyny, but it starts getting into mouth-frothing and spittle shortly after that.
• There is still racism.

I think that's enough for one day.

Aaannnnnd the Hits Just Keep On Coming!

• Game of Thrones as critique of the patriarchy from the privileged side.

  This observation is what I find so profound about “Game of Thrones”. Yes, patriarchy hurts men by luring them into its bullshit narrative about putting “honor” over more important things like love and human decency. But it’s not like they’re lured with phantoms. For men, the reward of upholding these unfair systems is that they are given a place of prestige and told that their lives matter—and that the other half of the human race exists solely to uphold and serve them.

  Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at Raw Story.  Spoilers for that last episode (I'm not watching, so I don't know which one it is.  "Red Wedding?"  Anyway.)
• It's not really all marketing; better euphemisms don't cut it.  "Smiling faces tell lies," as the song goes.

  Unfortunately, there’s not a “nice” way to say that you oppose someone’s basic human rights. Maggie Gallagher is showing what a farce this kind of thinking is, trying to claim that one can somehow believe that heterosexuals are better than gay people without it actually being homophobic, even though that’s the definition of homophobia.

  It's as though the they haven't caught on that Dorian Gray's painting hasn't changed, but Dorian has. Republican organs are all two sizes too small, anyway.
• Speaking of fraud, Naked Capitalism's Bill Black explains why plutocrats, opportunistic crooks, and folks out to fleece you financially are a bad combination.

  At the heart of Greenspan’s failure lies an ethical void in the brand of economics that has dominated American universities and policy circles for the last several decades, a brand known as “free market fundamentalism” or the “neoclassical school.” (I call it “theoclassical economics” for its quasi-religious belief system.) Mainstream economists who follow this school assert a deeply flawed and controversial concept known as the “efficient market hypothesis,” which holds that financial markets magically regulate themselves (they automatically “self-correct”) and are thus immune to fraud. When an economist starts believing in that kind of fallacy, he is bound to become blind to reality. Let’s take a look at what blinded Greenspan:
  

  1. Greenspan knew that markets were “efficient” because the efficient market hypothesis is the foundational pillar underlying modern finance theory.
  2. Markets can’t be efficient if there is control fraud, so there must not be any.
  3. Wait, there are control frauds! Tens of thousands of them.
  4. Then control fraud must not really be harmful, or markets would not be efficient.
  5. Control fraud, therefore, must not be immoral. As crime boss Emilio Barzini put it in The Godfather, “It’s just business.”

  As delusional and immoral as this “logic” chain is, many elite economists believe it. This warped perspective has spawned policies so perverse that they turn the world of finance into the optimal environment for criminals. The upshot is that most of our elite financial leaders and professionals have thrown integrity out the window, and we end up with recurrent, intensifying financial crises, de facto immunity for our most elite criminals, and the rise of crony capitalism.

• Recto-cranial fusion.  (Speaking of making Jughead appear a Rhodes Scholar.)
• Jimmy Carter as reincarnated Eleanor Roosevelt.

  I was struck by the fact that there are a group of people whose job it is destroy aspects of America that help keep us healthy, fed, housed and connected. Why do they hate other Americans so much? Is it because they want the Social Security money to go to Wall Street or do they also want to see others suffer? Is it because they don’t see their own connection with others?

  Warning: References Noam Chomsky.  From Spocko's Brain.
  

Enough, already!

Lunch Meat

• Le sigh.
• Charles II is disappointed in John Kerry (with update on the Rios Montt case).
• A bunch from or via AlterNet:
• Has the "Left" abandoned cheap electricity?  'Cause I missed the memo.  
• The DEA has rehired a paid perjurer because there are still drugs.  

“The DEA rehired Mr. Chambers, is using him in investigations all over the country, is again paying him exorbitant amounts of money and refuses to provide discovery about what he’s up to,” Morgan wrote in a court petition, “If Chambers were nothing more than a run-of-the-mill criminal, that would be one thing. But both Chambers and his defenders in the DEA brag that he is a con man extraordinaire.”

• Georgia Senator makes case for women combat units:
  

  Well now! For a long time, conservatives have argued that it was women who were too hormonal and irrational for combat. But Chambliss has set them straight. It’s really young men who can’t be relied upon to control their emotions and urges under pressure.
  
  It's true that Chambliss doesn’t have first-hand experience of combat because he got a medical deferrment during Vietnam, so he wasn't exactly tearing it up on the battlefield. But still, it seems like he’s onto something here. Do we really want people who are prone to violent hormonal outbreaks doing a job that requires concentration and steady nerves?
  
  I think not. Female troops have already been unofficially serving in combat for decades, and they have distinguished themselves on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan as pilots and in military police units. One hundred-fifty-two have been killed, and nearly 900 wounded. Tanya Biank, author of Undaunted: The Real Story of America’s Servicewomen, explains that women soldiers have exceeded all expectations, despite particular challenges that men don’t face, such as wearing armor that was not designed for their bodies: "They have performed phenomenally. They have done more than just pull their own weight.”
  
  Perhaps they could perform even better without dealing with the hazard of young men who can’t control their irrational impulses.

• Paul Krassner.  'Nuff said.
• Noam Chomsky prognosticates and highlights hidden history, from TomDispatch, via AlterNet.
• You know, just like male desire.  (Salon, via AlterNet)
• Andrew Sullivan flunks American Political History again.  (Driftglass)
  

Appetizing

• Southern Beale at First Draft on Megyn Kelly:  "Blind Fox News Squirrel Finds Nut."

  Megyn Kelly is no feminist. She’s just another self-centered conservative narcissist who only speaks up when she feels personally insulted. She's no hero to women. She had no problem following Fox News' marching orders during Republicans' pre-election War On Women. And a part of me wonders if this whole Erick Erickson-Lou Dobbs-Megyn Kelly thing wasn't staged and scripted from the get-go in the first place.

• Charles II at Mercury Rising on trying to find disability fraud:

  And, of course, it’s all based on baloney: made-up statistics like the claim that 8% of children are on disability, conflation of SSI and SSDI, and so on. The recession and its aftermath have made more people poor enough–not to mention desperate enough– to become eligible for SSI benefits. In other words, there is no crisis, just a desperate longing of rich people for more and more and more and more.
  
  These are really awful people who are trying to take bread from the mouths of the very most helpless. They deserve to be shunned. The world should sit shiva for people like Kristof and Klein and O’Reilly and Lane who are morally dead.

  They'll never achieve satiety.

Signed Out Too Soon

Rachel Maddow reports on a bit of pushback regarding the chair of the House Oversight Committee, who has been mentioned here before:

But the key takeaway here is the fact that Plouffe was willing to go there in the first place, as if to say to Issa, "You want a fight over honesty and ethics? That's a great idea." What's more, also keep in mind that if Democrats seriously pursue this as a line of criticism, Issa and his allies will be cautious in pushing back because they'd prefer not to have this conversation at all -- the last thing Republicans want now is a discussion about Issa's scandalous background and whether he's the best person available to lead investigations into others' suspected wrongdoing.

Seriously.

Forgot Where I Found This, Sorry

But the EPA watering down their own regs is not good news.

The PAG[Protective Action Guides]s are intended to guide the response to nuclear power reactor accidents (like Fukushima in Japan, Chernobyl in Ukraine and Three Mile Islandin the U.S.), "dirty bomb" explosions, radioactive releases from nuclear fuel and weapons facilities,and nuclear transportation accidents.

[...]

In addition, EPA admits that a nuclear power accident could far exceed the capacity of radioactive waste sites to manage waste generated from cleanups and therefore suggests allowing the waste to go to regular trashdumps, a fight the public has waged for decades in the US.

Article by Committee to Bridge the Gap at Reader Supported News.org.  Read the rest.

In Memoriam

Jean Stapleton, actress.

Housekeeping

As previously announced, any blog in which nothing has been posted for a year or more has been moved to the Archived Blogses blogroll.

Tertium Squid, which was, if I remember correctly, the successor to Real Live Preacher, seems to be gone.  Nope.  Restored to Time Insensitive.

I should probably promote some blog to the Blog 'n' Roll, but I just can't decide.

Oh well.  This is the best time of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway).                                  

Real Things in the World

• In memoriam:  Rev. Andrew Greeley, priest and writer.
• Via Mercury Rising:  "Media fact-checking organization rates Republicans as less trustworthy than Democrats."  George Mason University's Center for Media and Public Affairs studied PolitiFact.com-rated statements made by members of both political parties over a one-third year period.  (And apparently the untrue statements are sorted into "false" and "pants on fire.")  It is not that Democrats don't lie; they lie considerably less than Republicans, though.  Paging Joe Isuzu...
• Slippery legal case settled.
• ETA:  The Slacktivist expands on Southern Beale's post on Rep. Fincher of Tennessee with more Gospel.  Both essays are things of beauty.

The Dark Side (of the Force, of course)

Melissa McEwan, Shakesville, on the Republican Party and its descent into, well, fascism:

America's great tradition of conferring undeserved privilege on you won't fail. Not on our watch.

That has been the sacred covenant between the Republican Party and its straight, white, patriarchal, Christian supremacist base for a generation: Vote for us, and we'll protect you.

And so they voted. And, in the process, they gave away their standard of living, their children's education, their jobs, their civil liberties, their national security, their environment, and their economy—all in exchange for the gossamer promise of a return to a time that never happened in a country that never really existed.

Read the rest.  It's good.

In Memoriam

Jack Vance, writer.

"Ninth Time -- That Business on Cato Neimoidia Doesn't Count"

• "Why do police guys beat on peace guys?"  -- "The Pause of Mr. Claus," Arlo Guthrie
  
  The Boston Police Department believed peace activists were more dangerous than the Tsarnaev brothers turned out to be.  OK, that's a very compressed summary.  Let's open it out a little:

  In March 2010, the BPD finally responded to records inquiries made by the ACLU for info on the BRIC. Rather than turn over all requested documents, though, police attorneys only produced papers outlining the center’s procedural guidelines and policies, and neglected to hand over records that revealed specific targets of surveillance. So in August 2011, the ACLU joined 10 groups and federations—Veterans for Peace, the Boston Stop the Wars Coalition, and others—in suing the BPD, and its commissioner Davis.
  
  Under increased legal pressure, 14 months later the department released embarrassing documents showing that the BRIC had indeed been spying on peace activists since at least 2008.
  
  As assumed, they were also keeping records of their non-criminal behavior.

  and

  By that time, the U.S. government had twice been warned by the Russian government that Tamerlan had radical ties. He was also on at least three watch lists: the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) which is compiled by the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database, and a compendium amassed by the DHS’s Customs and Border Protection bureau. For what it’s worth, it also appears that Tamerlan had an Amazon wish list that included several books on how to manufacture fake IDs. Considering that, and his noted anti-peace outbursts at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Cambridge, and
  
  it’s almost like he was trying to get caught.
  
  Meanwhile, in Boston, the BRIC spent much of September 2011 monitoring Occupy protesters in Dewey Square, as well as anti-foreclosure activists and other peaceful crusaders. As such, the question now being asked of the BPD and Commissioner Davis—by the ACLU, by Congress, by an increasing number of reporters—is if police intelligence could have, should have netted Tsarnaev.

  Because, y'know, peace activists are a clear and present danger.  Not.  I have never really understood the animosity toward people who oppose war.  War is not really a good thing; it should be a very last resort, rare thing (really, don't talk to me about Iraq).
• Destroying the New York Public Library system (Nathan Tankus at naked capitalism reports):

  When the public sector divests itself of physical space en masse, the ability for it to regain control is substantially decreased. If an upswing in municipal finances occurs in the future, the enormous amounts of money it takes to purchase and develop real estate (especially in New York) for public use makes rolling back any sell-offs nearly impossible. Additionally, harming the quality of research libraries in New York has a substantial impact on the regional economy since researchers from all over the world come here to access them.
  
  On a more personal note, the New York Public Library has been indispensable for my research (including research I’ve done for this site). Public libraries are essentially the only organization that provide access to journals (both digital and physical) for those without an academic affiliation. Even for those with Academic affiliations, they have a fantastic collection of books and will even digitize selected pages and send them to you at no cost. Destroying public libraries and schools is not only a great boon to the FIRE sector, it also greatly harms [our] ability to resist and articulately criticize dominant narratives and conventional wisdom. As Orwell famously wrote in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”.

  .

The Good Stuff

• Via skippy and a year late:  What I've suspected for many years is true -- stupidity and prejudice correlate.

  In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology.
  
  A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status.

• Paid holidays, by country.  At Mills River Progressive.
• People who think they're saving a few million by postponing maintenance but end up having to spend many millions for repairs are, let's be blunt, not your friends.
• The so-called Family Policy Institute throws whoppers about a rape case in Washington state.  
• Lance Mannion administers the Vulcan mind-meld to a New York Times editorial writer about something that writer should have remembered.
• But then, "the NYTimes worships state power" (thank you, Arthur Silber).  (You might also want to read "You Say You Want a Peaceful Revolution," same author, if you want a peaceful revolution.  You won't like the other kind, you know.)

A Little Linky Love

From Welcome Back to Pottersville, klepto-bankers and wish-fulfillment.  (Yes, I see that it employs a stereotype.  Yes, I'd prefer monetary restitution plus fines of $2 million per family.  I'm not going to get that.)

Pol (No Pot)

Via digby, James Fallows' portrait of Jerry Brown the politician.

America’s dynamism and ingenuity have kept it ahead of its public-institution paralysis, so far. The same is true, barely, for California. “The idea that people are really going to move their companies to Nevada because of taxes is nonsense,” Paul Saffo, a longtime technology analyst based in Northern California, told me. “Silicon Valley has always been a high-cost place to operate and, like the state, has always been in danger of drowning in the products of its own success.” Jerry Brown told me about a Look magazine cover story from the mid-1960s, which after the Watts riots in Los Angeles and Free Speech Movement upheaval at Berkeley declared California a “failed state.” Since that time Look magazine has disappeared, California’s population has doubled, and its economy has grown larger than those of Brazil and Spain.

Still, California’s challenge is America’s: how to manage public business competently enough—collecting taxes, covering costs, educating children, fostering research, protecting the environment, maintaining order—to allow the creative carnival of its private activities to go on.

Encouraging. Maybe.

Progresssive activism, popping up all over.

We began the week prepared to focus our attention on the amazing teacher, student and community actions that were occurring in defense of schools. In Philadelphia, there was a giant walk-out of schools last Friday as students demanded their schools remain open and be adequately funded. The photos of young people fighting for the basic necessity of education were an inspiration.

That was followed by three days of protests in Chicago that were equally inspiring, students organized and communities came together to fight for education. Though corporate-mayor Rahm Emanuel’s carefully selected board voted to close 50 elementary schools and one high school (while the city funds the building of a new basketball stadium), the Chicago activists say they are not done. They are just getting started. It is that kind of persistence that wins transformation. These school battles are part of a national plan to replace community schools with corporatized charter schools. The battles of Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities are all of our battles.

There's more at the link.

In Memoriam

Ray Manzarek, the Doors.

(Skippy has video.)

Today in "Make Ugly"

• Echidne of the Snakes points to a useful article in the New Yorker about, yes, the Koch brothers and their relationship to PBS, and why this is a problem.  Echidne goes further:

  That we could get the Soviet-style Pravda and Izvestia not because of the government but because of the billionaires is something that either doesn't occur to those supporters or something they don't think matters in their own lives.
  
  But accurate information matters. It matters in deciding whether a country should go to war, it matters in how many victims cigarette industry manages to produce, it matters in deciding whether to import products from China or from India or from Pakistan or from some other country. Yet those with power and money have certain incentives not to give the rest of us accurate information.

• Via AlterNet:
• Robert Reich on larcenous corporations and xenophobia;
• "Paper terrorism;"
• The right wing has always been racist.
• Why safety is not a corporate concern.  Thanks; will not buy a table saw.
• Why I was a Mets fan back in the day; Faith and Fear in Flushing.

Goodish News

Possible medical use for marijuana--the treatment of Crohn's Disease.  The study was published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology (Pub Med link to abstract).  Full article available for purchase here after log-in/registration.

The joints were standardized.  Also, it was a small group and short term; let's see what happens with greater numbers over more time.

Traveling Notes

This year is on notice.

• Motown is 50.  (Brilliant at Breakfast)
• Comrade Misfit reports that apparently those leaked White House emails on Benghazi were misquoted:

  The White House released the real emails late Wednesday. Here's what we found when we compared them to the quotes that had been provided by Republicans.
  
  One email was written by deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.
  
  White House Benghazi email release prompts GOP to demand more
  WH releases emails showing changes to Benghazi talking points
  Complete Coverage: U.S. Consulate attack in Benghazi
  
  On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: "We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don't want to undermine the FBI investigation."
  
  But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department.
  
  It read: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation."

  Video (which continues) and transcript at link.
• We might be in for strong solar eruptions.  (Mills River Progressive)
• Phoenix Woman (Mercury Rising) on someone who is not rejoicing that Minnesota is the twelfth state to permit same-sex marriage.  ("Hissy fit" is about right.)
• Bustednuckles spotlights an interesting link to a story in the Long Island Press averring that the military has given itself power to intervene in civil disturbances.  A taste:

  For Hedges and the other plaintiffs, including Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, the government’s ever-expanding authority over civilian affairs has a “chilling effect” on First Amendment activities such as free speech and the right to assemble. First District Court Judge Katherine Forrest agreed with the plaintiffs and handed Hedges et al a resounding victory prompting the Department of Justice to immediately file an injunction and an appeal. The appellate court is expected to rule on the matter within the next few months.
  
  Another of the plaintiffs in the Hedges suit is Alexa O’Brien, a journalist and organizer who joined the lawsuit after she discovered a Wikileaks cable showing government officials attempting to link her efforts to terrorist activities. For activists such as O’Brien, the new DoD regulatory change is frightening because it creates, “an environment of fear when people cannot associate with one another.” Like Afran and Freedman, she too calls the move, “another grab for power under the rubric of the war on terror, to the detriment of citizens.”
  
  “This is a complete erosion of the rule of law,” says O’Brien. Knowing these sweeping powers were granted under a rule change and not by Congress is even more harrowing to activists. “That anything can be made legal,” says O’Brien, “is fundamentally antithetical to good governance.”
  
  As far as what might qualify as a civil disturbance, Afran notes, “In the Sixties all of the Vietnam protests would meet this description. We saw Kent State. This would legalize Kent State.”
  
  But the focus on the DoD regulatory change obscures the creeping militarization that has already occurred in police departments across the nation. Even prior to the NDAA lawsuit, journalist Chris Hedges was critical of domestic law enforcement agencies saying, “The widening use of militarized police units effectively nullifies the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.”
  
  This de facto nullification isn’t lost on the DoD.

  I'm taking it with a grain (or two) of salt for the moment. Although the possibility of a shift of power has been mentioned by Arthur Silber. Recently, even.

More Skimble-Skamble

Via Shakesville, Digby's take on "the Villagers will not be ignored."

Which is to say, they have a pot and they think they have a rabbit.  (I think the actual subject may be Benghazi, the AP, and the IRS flap an article at Politico crowing about suggesting that the President needs to get decisive about the scandalous activity in his administration.  I could be wrong.)

Apparently Digby shut off comments a while back; I hadn't noticed.

At the Daily Howler, there are four articles on Benghazi and journalism:

• What actually happened?
• "Congressional fact-finding trip"
• May not have read the assignment
• Fox "News"

Comrade Misfit has a tart response to the story of warrantlessly-searched Associated Press phone records.

All this makes me want to curl up and sleep.

Nibbled to Death by Ducks

• Centrist hogwash.

  Because unless someone can point to actual Democrats who have established an actual, y'know, record of inventing scandals by rubbing two copies of "The Socialist Worker's Daily" together...and then inflating them With Very Big Headlines wall-to-wall for weeks on end in every Liberal media outlet in America...and then point to actual cases where those artificial scandals have been transmogrified into actual Democratic congressional witch-hunts that promise to go on for months...then it seems to me that Mr. Greenwald is telling a Very Big Lie here.

• And as long as Benghazi is mentioned (Benghazi?  Wasn't he in Run For Your Life * back in the '60s?), quoted by supergee on Dreamwidth, a sentence from Public Policy Polling:

  One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal in American history is that 39% of them don't actually know where it is. 10% think it's in Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess.

  Yes, the math is off. Just a little.
  
• The student loan problem, as analyzed by pecunium.

  University endowments and teachers’ pension funds are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education, a Huffington Post review of financial documents has revealed.
  The previously unreported investments mean that education professionals are able to profit twice off the same student: first by hiking the cost of tuition, then through dividends and higher valuations on their holdings in Sallie Mae, the largest student lender and loan servicer in the country, which profits by charging relatively high interest rates on its loans and not refinancing high-rate loans after students graduate and get well-paying jobs.

In Memoriam

• Dr. Joyce Brothers, psychologist
• Barbara Salinas-Norman, author and activist

I Forgot to Mention

1. Mr. Sanford won the election in South Carolina to his old House seat.  (CNN, video included, link will eventually rot.  You are warned.)
2. Forgot it again.  Sorry.

The Usual Suspects

...probably have no clue about actual tyranny.  (Orcinus.)