What will be the next Occupy Wall Street?

Some months ago, when I first started on this blog, I asked how progressives could take control of the agenda from the GOP.

Occupy Wall Street has demonstrated one answer to that question: Get out into the streets and do something the establishment media never expected.

So what do we do next? Does the rest of the Progressive movement just sit back and let OWS do all the work? How do the rest of us contribute?  Feel free to leave your thought in the comments (you'll see a link to the comments under my byline above). Read the rest of this post...

GOP Debate: Are the Koch brothers being very clever or very stupid

I cried uncle on the GOP debates weeks before John did. What else do we need to know about the candidates? Bachmann, Perry and Cain are all so clearly out of their depth it is impossible to tell if the next stupid thing they say is a real policy position or just something they made up on the spot to bluff their way out of a difficult question. Romney is a transparent fraud who simply says whatever it will take to make him popular with whatever audience he is speaking to. Gingrich? What needs to be said?

With a field this bad, is the rise of Newt or Cain's ability to weather the allegation he is a serial sexual harasser really so surprising? It is not just progressives who find the GOP field to be an uninspiring lot.

Surely the Koch bros and the other 1%-ers could find some better standards bearers for their alleged $200 million investment in the 2012 election. Can't they see that their efforts to push the GOP beyond the hard right to the lunatic fruit-bat crazy right has made their party unelectable?

Well maybe they can and maybe they don't care because every time the GOP has shifter to the right, the Democrats have followed. It wasn't the GOP that ended 'welfare as we know it', that was Bill Clinton. And now the 1% is licking its chops at the idea of turning our pensions into their tax cuts they know that their only chance to get it through Congress is if Obama does their work for them. Read the rest of this post...

Can the US stop Iran going nuclear?

At last night's 'event', Romney claimed that if Obama is re-elected 'Iran Will Get A Nuclear Weapon'. He also claimed that if he is elected Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.

Now granted, this is a Romney pledge and so there is every chance Mitt will have decided he is for Iranian nukes by the time of the election. But how on earth does Romney believe he can make that guarantee?

If all it took to prevent Iran getting a nuclear weapon was for the US or Israel to perform a bombing run the Bushehr reactor would already be rubble. Obama was busy bombing Libya while Romney thought he was being too aggressive. Now granted this is not the only position Romney has held on Libya, (Jake Tapper counted five but that was last month so by now it may be six), but one thing Obama cannot be faulted on is his willingness to use the full array of US power when it appears that doing so might actually have the intended effect.

Just like they did with the Iraq war, Republicans are selling the idea of a war with Iran on false claims of both the consequences of inaction and the cost of action. There is in fact no reliable evidence that Iran is doing anything other than completing the civilian nuclear plants started by the Shah.

There have been plenty of sensationalist reports, most recently the IAEA claim that Iran had contacted a 'top Soviet nuclear scientist' which collapsed last week after it turned out that the scientist in question is not a nuclear scientist at all. And yes, Iran was given good reason to build a nuclear weapon when George W. Bush gave notice of his intention to invade Iraq, Iran and North Korea in his 'axis of evil' speech.

Rather less attention is being paid to the fact that Iran is a theocracy and the Supreme Leader has pronounced a fatwa against nuclear weapons. Juan Cole has an excellent piece on this. In brief the problem for the Supreme Leader is that his power is based on his moral authority which in turn is based on a thousand years of tradition.

Cole suggests that what Iran is really interested in is developing a 'latent' nuclear capacity similar to that which India and Pakistan had for over a decade. The aim being not to assemble an actual weapon but to have the ability to do so on short notice should a future George W. Bush threaten to invade.

I see the nuclear program as a part of the ongoing power struggle between Ahmedinejad and Khamenei, a struggle that recently escalated as Khamenei proposed eliminating the post of President as part of a scheme to consolidate power in his own hands. Ahmedinejad's best chance to remain in power is to provoke a war with Israel or the US.

The consequence of an attack would be the same in either case: Any attack that does not result in regime change is only going to accelerate the Iranian nuclear program and strengthen the reactionary elements in the regime.

Stopping Iran going nuclear is much more difficult than simply ordering a bombing raid. The real world is so much more complex than the one in which Romney's sound bites work. Read the rest of this post...

Why is nature more beautiful than it needs to be?

A fascinating discussion by John Horgan at Scientific American:

If there really is no God, if the world was not in some sense designed for us, why is it so heartbreakingly lovely?

Dawkins never adequately explained why nature evokes such a profound aesthetic response in us. His fellow biologist Edward O. Wilson gave it a shot. Wilson suggested that natural selection might have instilled in us a “biophilia,” or reverence for nature, that benefits both us and those creatures with which we enjoy mutually beneficial relationships. But why do we respond to so many things—butterflies, starfish, rainbows, sunsets—from which we extract no tangible, utilitarian benefit?

Another famous atheist, the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, eloquently explained his lack of belief in Dreams of a Final Theory (Vintage, 1994). Weinberg had no complaints about his own life. He had been “remarkably happy, perhaps in the upper 99.99 percentile.” But he had seen “a mother die painfully of cancer, a father’s personality destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease, and scores of second and third cousins murdered in the Holocaust.”

Weinberg rejected the proposition that evil is the price we pay for our God-given free will. “It seems a bit unfair for my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for the Germans,” he noted, “but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors?” Good questions. But then Weinberg added this line, which, like Dawkins’s recollection of how he disillusioned his daughter, made me smile: “I have to admit that sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.”

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Perry and Cain dropping in the polls

MSNBC's First Read:

In the national NBC/WSJ poll (conducted Nov. 2-5), Cain and Romney were essentially deadlocked in the race for the GOP presidential nomination. And among these 102 Republican respondents, Cain was the first choice of 28 percent of them, while Romney, the former Massachusetts governors, was the choice of 27 percent. They were followed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 17 percent, Texas Rep. Ron Paul at 10 percent and Perry at 8 percent.

But in the re-survey of these 102 Republican respondents, Romney’s support jumped up to 32 percent, Cain’s dropped to 27 percent and Gingrich’s increased to 22 percent.

And Perry fell to just 4 percent.

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