Mitt Romney was caught on video complaining that 47% of us don't make enough to pay taxes, believe they are victims, are dependent on government, etc. The right question is why do so many of us make so little?

Moving Jobs To Places Where People Don't Have A Say

You often here that competition due to "globalization" means that we have to accept lower wages and fewer benefits, because people "over there" make so much less. What has caused the pressure, however, is "free trade" agreements that allow companies here to close factories here and open them over there, and then bring the same things they used to make here to sell in the same stores. The only "trade" involved in this transaction is trading who does the work.

Note to Mitt Romney: This is what happens when you run for president on the back of Fox News and embrace the dark anti-Obama conspiracies that fuel the right-wing media.

On Monday, the Republican nominee was forced to hold a rare, late-night press availibility to respond to Mother Jones' report on a video of Romney taken surreptitiously at a closed-door Florida campaign fundraiser in May where the candidate tells donors that "there are 47 percent who are with [President Obama], who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it."

— from AlterNet

Team Romney's biggest problem continues to be Mitt Romney. It's tough to build a campaign around a cartoonish 1-percenter whose CPU doesn't appear to be programmed for human empathy and who lacks an effective filter between brain and gums.

Will his 47 percent moment prove to be his undoing? Probably not in the short-term; an unusually high number of voters are already locked in, and as Cornell University's Suzanne Mettler's research has shown, a lot of Americans receiving benefits from the government have no clue that they are, so people who should be personally offended by Romney's crass remarks may instead think he's talking about “undeserving” blacks and lazy welfare cheats.

“You cannot be serious.”
—John McEnroe

One of the many challenges of John McCain’s campaign four years ago, besides the past-due expiration date on the candidate himself, was Sarah Palin’s IED of a mouth. If the campaign wasn’t finished before her nomination, she doomed it. The biggest challenge for Mitt Romney, among too many to flip-flop through, is Mitt Romney’s mouth: what were IEDs in the McCain campaign are now suicide bombings in Romney’s, with Romney the Groundhog-Day bomber: he self-destructs, and comes back for more. Maybe Mormons have more in common with Buddhist notions of reincarnation than we knew.

Why would I even ask that question? I've been trying (with virtually no success) to get everyone to drop the election obsession and focus on activism designed around policy changes, not personality changes. I want those policy changes to include stripping presidents of imperial powers. I don't see as much difference between the two available choices as most people; I see each as a different shade of disaster. I don't get distressed by the thought of people "spoiling" an election by voting for a legitimately good candidate like Jill Stein. Besides, won't Romney lose by a landslide if he doesn't tape his mouth shut during the coming weeks? And yet . . .

What’s the point in Stars and Stripes flying full staff anymore? What joy or pride is there in looking up at the American Flag when it seems that each week it is lowered for this and that death, current or past? And knowing that over the last three decades or so, most of those deaths and sacrifices would turn out to be at the altar of dismal failure (except for those promoted or who profited in stock and US dollars).

One day the US flag is down by half in remembrance of September 11, 2001, another day it is downed for those murdered in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and yet another day for an ambassador killed in action in Libya, and yet another day for college students killed on a campus in Virginia. Inevitably it will be lowered for former presidents President George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter and who knows who else.

Is there anything less threatening than a morbidly obese cop on motor scooter?

Okay, 25 morbidly obese cops on motor scooters--that’s even more unthreatening. When I’m out in the streets chanting, “Show me what a police state looks like! THIS is what a police state looks like!” I think I have a right to be oppressed by proper storm troopers who have spent enough time at the gym to bristle instead of sag. They don’t have to be television actors or anything, but as a taxpayer, am I getting my money’s worth when I’m being beaten and arrested by a parade of fried dumplings?

The situation in the Middle East has reached a dangerous point, to be sure, but there are also signs that a sea change may be taking place here in the US which could herald a whole new relationship between the US, Israel and the rest of the Arab and Islamic world.

The problem is that so much is in flux at the moment, with a civil war building in Syria, a confrontation looming between Israel and Iran, and with hot-heads in many Islamic countries attacking US embassies in the region, that the deeper change is not easy to see. There are also many opportunities for things to blow up in the next few weeks or month.

Mitt Romney has taken some heat for comments made at a Republican fundraiser disparaging “47 percent” of the American people as leaches who get government benefits and “believe that they are victims.” But perhaps even more troubling was his claim that he would be better off politically if his father were Mexican.

The comment suggests that the GOP presidential nominee has no idea the challenges faced in the United States by immigrants and people of color, compared to the advantages that he enjoyed being the son of a wealthy white auto executive who also had a successful career in politics, becoming governor of Michigan.

Honest elections are the foundation of (a) representative government. We support State efforts to ensure ballot access for the elderly, the handicapped, military personnel, and all authorized voters. For the same reason, we applaud legislation to require photo identification for voting and to prevent election fraud, particularly with regard to registration and absentee ballots. We support State laws that require proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration to protect our electoral system against a significant and growing form of voter fraud.

Over the past couple of years, a movement has arisen in this country to endow embryos with certain entitlements, such as the so-called right to life. There has been a cry for a "personhood amendment." This measure argues that human life begins at fertilization as do certain constitutional entitlements. A big proponent of the bill is Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, and it has also received a nod from vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan. The Personhood Amendment was derailed by voters in Mississippi, and didn't even make it to the ballot in Colorado.

Similarly, in 2010, the Supreme Court gave corporations certain constitutional rights, including the right to free speech, in its historic Citizens United ruling. After all, as the Republican presidential nominee has said, "corporations are people, too."

I am usually tempered; I'll come loose now with the new Romney video. He does not even want to ask nearly half of the Americans to vote for him? He said he does not count on 47% of those Americans; do I want him to be my president? Hell no, he is president for his own buddies and not for Americans.

Those investors listening to this divisive talk will write big checks, with a clear intention of doubling on their return on the investment. You buy Romney now; he will offer tax cuts should he become president of the United States. Romney is smart and they are too… but who gets screwed? It is you and I who cannot buy him with big checks.

Romney will sell America. The man is secretive on taxes, money in Swiss banks, and now scheming and carrying on secretive conversations. Should we trust secretive presidents?

— from Truthout

When the history of this age is written - if there are people left to write it, and if there is technology left to hold it - it will speak of a generation on the brink. Financial calamity combined with economic collapse combined with endless warfare and bottomless greed united to create a beast with hot breath and blood-red eyes that stares us dead in the face. It is an age on the edge of doom, and yet we persist in the suicidal madness of deliberate ignorance. If that history is written, the first line will be, "They were fools."

That history will remember Occupy, and a year when a chance was held forth to seize on the idea that this looming collective calamity can be sidestepped. History will remember Occupy as having offered one last, best chance to be more than we are, to see the beast for what it is, and to slay it once and for all.

Pollsters keep telling us that the public wants action on jobs, a higher tax rate for millionaires, and protection for Social Security and Medicare. Our best economists keep reminding us that job creation should be government's top priority.

So why is the Administration talking about replacing Treasury Secretary Geither with a wealthy banker who wants to cut Social Security and Medicare, would lower taxes on his fellow rich people, and is trying to impose European-style job-destroying austerity on this country?

It’s not all that surprising – given that they had no other place to go – that after months and months of “soul-searching,” Mitt Romney finally has received his official acceptance letter from conservative Christian leaders. And although the letter, which was delivered Friday September 7, is focused on support for the Republican Party’s platform (titled “We Believe in America”), it should also be read as an overt endorsement of Romney’s candidacy.

A week or so after the Republican Party Convention, more than two-dozen top-shelf Christian conservative evangelical leaders, putting aside whatever theological differences they might have with Romney’s Mormonism, sent him a letter congratulating him for a Republican platform “that most clearly defines your principles, and those of your party, on a wide range of topics.”

With the November elections right around the corner, the millions of unemployed and under-employed have little reason to care. Aside from some sparse rhetoric, neither Democrats nor Republicans have offered a solution to job creation. Most politicians seem purposefully myopic about the jobs crisis, as if a healthy dose of denial might get them through the electoral season unscathed.

In reality, the jobs crisis continues unaddressed, and threatens to get worse after the election. The post-election "fiscal cliff" of social cuts — "triggered" by Obama's debt commission —will pull the economy below the current treading-water phase, drowning millions more workers in America in unemployment and hopelessness. In addition, two million more long-term unemployed — those lucky enough to still receive benefits — face the very likely possibility of having their benefits ended due to the trigger cuts.

Any cop will tell you that the most dangerous calls they respond to are seldom the robberies in progress, or the fist fights. The most dangerous calls, the ones where officers get hurt or killed, are domestic disputes. There's nothing quite as dangerous as trying to restore peace within an extended, dysfunctional family.

When one of those kind of families "goes off" it's Katie-bar-the-door time. No amount of trying to "make sense" with them works. Separating the arguing parties only provides time for both sides to rest up for the next round. And stepping in between them while the stuff is flying, is a near-certain ticket to the emergency room.

That is a pretty simple and important question. Unfortunately most voters are likely to go to the polls this fall without knowing the answer.

If the backdrop to this question is not immediately clear, then you should be very angry at the reporters who cover the campaign. One of the items that continuously comes up in reference to the budget deficit is President Obama's support for the plan put forward by the co-chairs of his deficit commission, Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson. On numerous occasions President Obama has indicated his support for this plan.

“This is the first time in American history when we have used our military power to prop up and possibly put in power a group of people we literally do not know.”
-- Nicholas Burns, Bush-era undersecretary of state, writing in March 2011 about U.S. support for anti-Qaddafi forces in Libya

“It could be a very big surprise when Qaddafi leaves and we find out who we are really dealing with.”
-- Paul Sullivan, professor of political science at Georgetown University specializing in Libya, March 2011

Well surprise, surprise, everybody! Especially you warmongers, neocons, “liberal interventionists,” congressional cowards, and slavish press! Your efforts to shape and exploit the Arab Spring have stirred up hornets’ nests.

— from TomDispatch

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was unequivocal in her condemnation. “We have confronted the Russians about stopping their continued arms shipments to Syria,” she said in remarks earlier this year. “They have, from time to time, said that we shouldn’t worry; everything they’re shipping is unrelated to their actions internally. That’s patently untrue.”

In the wake of brutal attacks on civilians and the torture of activists in the Assad regime’s prisons, Clinton called on the Russians to suspend their military sales to their key Middle Eastern ally and, a month later, Russia pledged to do so. It was an American act that Syrian rebels were no doubt pleased about. It’s a pity that Clinton’s counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, didn’t look out for Bahrain’s protesters in a similar fashion.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement is being negotiated in secret. Well, not exactly secret -- our trade negotiators know what is being negotiated, other countries know, heads of the huge multinational corporations get to know, but members of our Congress and We, the People don't get to know. We don't get to know because if we did know it would make us sick.

The TPP is a trade agreement between the United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. It is meant to be a “docking agreement” that other Pacific Rim countries including Japan, Korea and China can enter into later. When completed and enacted the TPP would be the largest Free Trade Agreement in U.S. history.

As the Coalition Against Nukes prepares for a series of events in Washington, D.C., September 20-22, including a Capitol Hill rally, a Congressional briefing, a fundraiser at Busboys and Poets, a ceremony at the Museum of the American Indian, a rally at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), a film screening, and a strategy session, the time seems ideal to take in the wisdom of Gar Smith's new book, Nuclear Roulette: The Truth About the Most Dangerous Energy Source on Earth.

Most dangerous indeed, and most useless, most inefficient, most destructive, and dumbest. How does nuclear energy make the human species look like the stupidest concoction since the platypus? Let me count the ways:

A review of:
NOT THE ISRAEL MY PARENTS PROMISED ME
By Harvey Pekar and J.T. Waldman
With an epilogue by Joyce Brabner
Hill and Wang, 2012
$24.95. $14.67 on Amazon

Harvey Pekar, who died in 2010, was a major player in the elevation of comics into a respectable medium for telling human stories. His famous American Splendor comic featured Pekar as an existential everyman/curmudgeon finding stories in chance meetings in the grocery line, in his mundane, day-to-day life as a file clerk in a Cleveland VA office or in his celebrated appearances on the David Letterman show. His image has been drawn by dozens of cartoonists in a range of styles, most notably by the famous R. Crumb. A feature film was made about Pekar's life and work called American Splendor. The hybrid narrative/documentary film won an Oscar for its screenplay.

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Obama’s attorney general announced that the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone for the murders of CIA detainees during the Bush years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, despite this and Guantanamo, most Americans still think Obama is likeable -- a key factor in this year’s campaign.

photo: dctourism/flickr

This is a true account of wedding customs in a rural Missouri farming community prior to WWII, as told by Letty Owings, age 87. The account is limited to the small geographical area. Customs may have been different, twenty miles down the road.

The Shivaree and Farming Community Wedding Customs Prior to WWII

Most country weddings in our community took place in the home. The bride and groom dressed nicely, but there were no bridal shops or wedding dress makers. A preacher would come to the home to perform the wedding. Even if people were not churchgoers, the preacher would "marry and bury." At the wedding ceremony, someone, usually a couple, would stand up as witnesses for the couple being married.