Early readers of this blog may recall that I've spent a lot of time looking at the issues raised by discrepancies in the election results we saw in 2000 and 2004 (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and with growing alarm, here and here.). And that I keep trying to tell people that this is important, for a number of reasons, including the fact that if you don't know who won those two elections, you cannot properly analyze the political terrain around succeeding elections.
For example, there is a great deal of fantasy that it was Ralph Nader who cost Gore the election - a foolish evaluation in light of the fact that many times the number of votes Nader received simply disappeared in an instant from Gore's recorded totals in Volusia County. That didn't happen because a few thousand people voted for Nader, it happened because Jeb Bush was making sure that his brother didn't lose.
I'm not talking about the tiny number of votes by which, according to the NORC count as reported by The New York Times, Gore really won the election. I'm talking about many thousands of votes that were flipped, eliminated, or simply not reported throughout Florida because of deliberately tweaked machines that were programmed to undercount Gore votes and in at least one case that we know of reprogrammed mid-election night to delete at least 16,000 votes in a single Florida county - and that isn't counting the other states (including Tennessee) where quite a few curious events seem to have depressed Democratic votes.
The truth is that it never mattered how many people voted for Nader, because the GOP machine in Florida was going to make sure that Gore's votes always appeared to be fewer than Bush's. And the conservative machine going all the way up to the Supreme Court stood ready to make sure that Bush was installed in the White House. The fact is that if conservatives decide it's time for their people to win, their people are going to win unless the rest of us work very hard and with great vigilance and diligence to prevent it from happening. We haven't. We waited for Al Gore or Jesse Jackson to tell us to do something in Florida instead of getting out there and refusing to accept what was going on. Leading progressive bloggers actually banned discussion of the astonishing numbers in 2004 (despite the fact that far fewer people voted for Nader and yet Bush still "won"). And we pissed our chance away in the last election because we got distracted by the shiny object that is currently in the White House, and we will keep right on doing it unless we stop being scared off by Nader Derangement Syndrome.
It's time to stop quivering in our boots over the possibility that if we start fighting back for real we will elect someone slightly more right-wing than the current crop of right-wingers leading the Democratic Party. There is no substantive difference between Bush's policies, McCain's stated policies, and the Democratic leadership's actual policies, so you might as well step up and admit that, you know, just because you're on their side doesn't mean they're on your side.*
* * * * *
David Dayen on how HAMP Is Hurting Liberalism explains that all the excuses some people make for Obama simply doesn't apply to this program that was supposed to help ordinary home-owners who were facing foreclosure but in fact only extends their debt before the axe falls. "The Administration designed this entirely on their own, using money already appropriated. And they designed it terribly. In fact, they lied right from the beginning, according to Sen. Jeff Merkley, who was also on the panel. He was told that the White House would devote $50-$100 billion in TARP money to homeowners and that they would fight for cramdown (what he would rather call lifeline bankruptcy) when it came up in Congress. These were the conditions under which Merkley voted to release the second tranche of the TARP money. And neither of these two things really came to pass. The White House stood mute as cramdown failed, and though HAMP is supposed to have $75 billion in backup, they've spent less than one-half of one percent of it. " It's the perfect program to hold up as an emblem of Reagan's claim that nothing is worse than having the government "help" you.
Kunstler: "This compressive deflationary collapse is not the kind of cyclical "downturn" that we are familiar with during the two-hundred-year-long adventure with industrial expansion - that is, the kind of cyclical downturn caused by the usual exhalations of markets attempting to adjust the flows of supply and demand. This is a structural implosion of markets that have been functionally destroyed by pervasive fraud and swindling in the absence of real productive activity." We really are screwed, you know. Permanently.
Apparently, if one more person clicks on that ad to the right and buys a 2L4O T-shirt and tells them I sent them, I win a prize or something. And for those who prefer to be called "left" rather than "liberal", you can now choose a Too Left for Obama T-Shirt.
Jay Ackroyd and Watertiger were pretty good on Virtually Speaking last night, you should give it a listen.
I see via Atrios that Megan McArdle has set her inaccuracy filters on Elizabeth Warren, but fortunately I don't have to link to her to get a little debunking out of it.
At Netroots Nation, Obama sent a surprise video full of hope and change. Just reading the write-up made me want to slap his face, so I didn't watch it.
(And, personally, I think the Democrats just invented this woman to make Harry Reid look good.)
Of course, if you really want to solve serious racial problems in America, it wouldn't hurt to look at the area that has had a devastating effect not just on people of color and the black community, but our entire legal structure: The War on (Some classes of people who use some) Drugs. Like this case, for instance. But it's amazing how many people just want you to forget the issue. Or we get such "reasoning" as that marijuana is dangerous to users because it "contains bacteria and fungi that put users at risk for infection." I mean, seriously. And you might even be surprised at some of the people who are prepared to defend the administration's lack of interest in reversing the odious Drug War policies that have done so much harm.
Krugman notes that Karl Rove is all ready to rehabilitate Bush in the same way the GOP earlier did with Reagan. And, you know, it works - why, a couple of years ago both Krugman and I were observing that the wonderful things Obama believed about Reagan were utterly false. Now the GOP wants us to believe that the economy was really great because of Bush's policies.
Susie thinks Bernie Sanders is a bit late when he says, "While the middle class disappears and poverty increases the wealthiest people in our country are not only doing extremely well, they are using their wealth and political power to protect and expand their very privileged status at the expense of everyone else. The United States must not become an oligarchy in which a handful of wealthy and powerful families control the destiny of our nation." Um, yes, they already do. That's what you can expect when you stop having confiscatory taxes at the top margin - you let them get rich enough to buy off the government.
Meanwhile, also from Susie on Consumer Protection and Chocolate Salty Balls: "Geithner and Bernanke et al have constructed a large and fragile house of cards that rests on the notion that we will all pretend that the banking system is fine - until it actually is fine, and then it'll all be fine! In other [words,] for Warren to do this job as she sees fit, she'd have to acknowledge the financial instability of the banks, and they're not going to stand for it. Nope. In other words, they're doubling down on the strategy that's destroyed our economy."
Bruce Dixon: "From the established civil rights organizations like the NAACP to legions of elected Democrats and preachers and even people like our good friends at Color of Change, the main activity these days is an endless circling of wagons around the president, defending him against the flood of racist bile that spews daily from the likes of Fox News, the Tea Partyers and naysaying Republicans. But is that really where so much of our energy and creativity should be going?" Glenn Ford: "For the corporate media, which virtually invented the Tea Party, the NAACP's resolution demanding that the various Tea Party outfits disassociate themselves from racists, was the big news of the NAACP convention. [...] But, in the case of the Tea Party, my question is this: at what point will Black folks be able to say, We beat them? Will it be when the Tea Partyers go back to using racial code words instead of loud and rowdy redneck-talk? Is that all it would take to arrange a truce with racists, that they be more polite about it?"
The real war, as Glenn Ford notes, is much bigger than the Teabaggers: "Before Barack Obama had even taken the oath of office, in January of 2009, he promised to put all of the so-called "entitlement" programs "on the table," for cutting. There was no reason to doubt that Obama really planned to go after Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and other programs despised by the rich. After all, he had just been elected to a four-year term in a landslide and was, therefore, as secure as any politician can be. Obama was telling everyone who cared to listen that he was would certainly not stand in the way of gutting what's left of the American social safety net. Rather, Obama was telling Big Business that he agreed with them, that the poor and the elderly were sucking up too much of the nation's wealth, and there must be a day of reckoning. [...] In April of this year, Obama once again reminded everyone that everything is and has always been "on the table," as far as he's concerned, including Social Security. His so-called "deficit commission" is stacked with rich sociopaths sharpening their knives to carve up, sell off or otherwise doom Social Security. It is a battle that safety net defenders thought they had won against George Bush. Barack Obama has picked up Bush's marbles and put them back into play. He is the right wing's most potent weapon, the one before which liberal Democrats throw up their hands in surrender without the dignity of a fight. Obama, working in plain sight over the past 18 months, has constructed and rigged a deficit commission to render a kind of death sentence to the foundational program of Roosevelt's New Deal."
Steve Clemons warns Shirley Sherrod to kick the tires of the fancy new job Vilsack is offering, because it probably comes with less real power to be effective than the job she had before.
You know, I really don't want to hear how there's no money in newspapers anymore. It's always been a business with a high profit margin and it still is, so stfu, you whining crybabies.
A death in the family - In Georgia there's a stretch of Interstate 285, from I-20 to the Cobb County line, named in honor of Billy McKinney, an activist who later served in the state legislature and never stopped standing up for the people. On July 19th, his daughter Cynthia spoke at his funeral about his courage and love.
CNN actually has a fairly clean recounting of the debacle in their story about Vilsack's apology to Shirley Sherrod after she was forced to resign (including the fact that Breitbart's "correction" isn't much of a correction). Only problem is that it looks like it was the White House that really wanted to force her out without bothering to investigate first.
He spoke to Sherrod earlier Wednesday and said he asked for her forgiveness, which she gave. Vilsack also said he offered Sherrod another job in the department, and she was taking a few days to think about it.
[...]
Vilsack noted that "with all that she has seen, endured and accomplished, it would be invaluable to have her experience, commitment and record of service at U.S.D.A.," adding, "I hope she considers staying with the department."
Which is fair enough, although perhaps simply tearing up the resignation and then letting her decide would have been a better move. And, of course, none of the excuses being made for incredibly bad behavior of the administration, including Vilsack, rise much above The Dog Ate My Homework. You simply don't destroy the long career of a formerly anonymous employee without even investigating a charge that came from a known fabricator of libelous attacks on black people who are merely trying to do a good job of helping Americans.
And no points to the NAACP for jumping on the bandwagon without knowing what was going on, either. If they haven't noticed by now that the right-wing is in all out war mode against anyone who shows the least sensitivity to racism, they aren't exactly helping their own cause, are they?
The only appropriate response to any of this stuff has always been, "We'd like to find out what actually happened before we comment on any charges that come from people who are, of course, trying to destroy civil rights in America."
For example, no one who has any regard for civil rights goes out of their way to "expose" ACORN. Anything in that vein should have automatically spurred resistance from every part of the civil liberties community. And after that outrage, anything Breitbart had to say needed to be taken with a barrel of salt. "Let's see, a known right-wing operative who is in the habit of racist fabrications is trying to gin up fears of 'reverse-racism'. I wonder what could cause that?" That's how you treat this kind of bullshit if you have any brains.
Which, of course, leads us to the question of just what kind of brains are operating in the White House. Why is the administration in such a hurry to treat these things that deserve nothing but derision with such seriousness? What is it about Obama that nothing seems to fit in his comfort zone like screwing decent people?
Charles Pierce was Bob McChesney's guest on his NPR show Sunday, talking about Charlie's book Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, and you can hear the stream or download the .mp3. (You also might want to listen to the archived show where McChesny's guest was Howard Zinn.)
Krugman: "The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn't do that. Maybe he couldn't have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn't even try." Krugman wants to say the Republican strategy of obstruction is working, but that would only be the case if Obama and the Democratic leadership had made the case for something worth obstructing and whipped their own caucus to support such policies. They didn't; in fact, they agreed with Republican arguments and whipped the Democratic caucus to kill any more liberal approaches.
White House announces it's open season on government employees: "But I also have to wonder if they know what the optics of this are. If two-bit sociopathic wingnuts can scare them to this extent with obviously doctored videos, what happens when they see a real threat? Are they going to flap their arms like penguins and run around in circles screaming "they're coming to get us, run for your lives!!?" At this point, that doesn't seem entirely ridiculous." (Details at Mother Jones.)
It is always good to take any opportunity to debunk zombie lies about Social Security: "No, life expectancy at age 65 has not changed all that much, and those changes were anticipated. No, the beneficiary/taxpayer ratio is not an important issue. No, you can't do better investing the money in private sector funds (and people wouldn't do it anyway. 25-year-olds do not save 15% of their gross for retirement)."
You won't believe how bad Megan McArdle is at simple arithmetic. But it's not just that she can't do the math, but that she hasn't the imagination to see that dividing stimulus money up by every single person in the country is not the most efficient way to use $75bn. Of course, that's what we expect from people who think that allowing extremely rich people to skip out on their obligations to society is a worthier cause than creating millions of jobs and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. Normally I wouldn't link to a McArdle article at all, but most of her commenters are a lot smarter than she is and let her know the virtues of, among other things, having a calculator. (Not that you need a calculator when you are working with big round numbers like that - what you need is the ability to count the number of zeroes that go into your figures. She went for "none".) (via)
This Week in Tyranny, there's still plenty of lawlessness, unaccountability, violation of civil liberties, and lies in general, and if you think you see any light at the end of the tunnel it is probably an oncoming train. So, no change there, then.
The former head of MI-5 says the invasion of Iraq increased terrorism: "Giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry, Baroness Manningham-Buller said the action 'radicalised' a generation of young people, including UK citizens. As a result, she said she was not 'surprised' that UK nationals were involved in the 7/7 bombings in London. She said she believed the intelligence on Iraq's threat was not 'substantial enough' to justify the action."
As Anna observed to me, Tom Tomorrow is still spot-on, but it's a lot harder to laugh.
Noctilucent clouds are so high they glow in the dark. The pictures are pretty, but they might be telling us something more. (via)
Via Atrios, who reminds us that food stamps are actually very good stimulus, this horrifying nugget from David Obey: "We were told we have to offset every damn dime of [new teacher spending]. Well, it ain't easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps." Note: He is not talking about the Republican leadership, he's talking about the White House. Those monsters who want to take food out of people's mouths aren't just Republicans.
The White House is apparently delusional, but they know who to blame. Don't blame me, you jerks, you ran around telling everyone you were going to change things and you just did more of the same. Nobody cares if you are bipartisan or post-partisan or whatever you call it. No one cares if you reach across the aisle, no one cares if you are "modern", no one cares about deficits. People care about whether they can get decent jobs and feed their kids and afford doctors' bills. If you want to stop bleeding money, stop spending it on wars and start spending it on feeding the real economy. You betrayed the people who voted for you, and you think they are disappointed because of bloggers? Who the hell do you think bloggers are? They're American citizens who are sick of being played and betrayed.
As we've all noticed, the prevailing wisdom in the news media is that everything bad or dangerous or reckless or foolhardy is liberal. Obama, for example, is "far left", what with his corporatist love of banksters and allergy to job-creation. No wonder no one even knows what it means.
Digby says we may have someone making the case that it's time for the security state to tighten its belt, in the form of a Dana Priest and William Arkin feature in the WaPo on the Top Secret hidden branch of government. Digby posts an internal National Intelligence Memo anticipating the feature and suggesting a PR campaign will be necessary to counteract the "unfavorable light" the feature is likely to cast on their institution of a police state. She says, "I will be very interested to see what this turns up. I don't know if it includes Homeland Security, but if it doesn't I suspect another investigation should be done there. This gravy train has taken on sacred status as the right has managed to morph the "support the troops" mantra into a "support the Military Industrial Complex," which is just another way of maintaining the police welfare state for connected white guys. If there's belt tightening to be done, this is the place to start." Atrios: "I knew someone who went back to school after the military-industry complex (aerospace mostly) in Southern California dried up a bit. He always joked that it was 'welfare for rich white people.' The secondary point of the WaPo story is that the intelligence-industrial complex has largely set up shop in the DC area, and it's sucking away all of our precious bodily fluids to make everybody in it RICH RICH RICH, or at least more comfortable than many in the Great Recession." And here: "Whatever the initial thoughts behind any of this stuff, it's a tremendous waste of money and resources which, as I said below, can't possibly, in the net, be useful. It serves to transfer money and power to elites while cementing the existence of a giant and extremely opaque patronage system. One with surveillance capabilities." When I was a child they used to frighten us about the evil commies by telling us that the USSR did all the things we are doing now. Ironically, they did not tell us that at least the Soviet police state provided job and a roof over your head if you kept your mouth shut. We're doing all the bad stuff without even making sure you are housed. They call that "freedom".
Last night's Virtually Speaking Sundays episode with Cliff Schecter and Stuart Zechman, on the news, who these idiots are, and what the hell they are doing. (podcast)
Sucking the oxygen out of the room and then wondering why no one can breathe: The only thing I know about Dylan Ratigan is this amazing moment in which my fantasy comes true - someone on TV telling the truth, even confronting one of the "respectable" people who wants to force us to eat catfood and calling his right-wing talking points a lie. Of course, it's just one clip from MSNBC, but oh, man, that was gratifying to watch. "Congratulations, and thank you for nothing." Whooo!
Chris Hayes: "Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about austerity - about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis. Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." So there you have it." And not just there; it's a total system failure.
Axelrod is saying Elizabeth Warren is definitely a candidate to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but you and I both know that no one in the administration wants her there, especially Tim Geithner, who Obama has appointed to make that decision. I think Axelrod is just there for cover, so that still-in-denial progressives will waste time thinking there's a chance for her and pushing her, and then at the last minute Geithner and Obama will show the Villagers how cool they are by spitting in the dirty hippies' faces. Because that's exactly how they have done everything else all along, and there is no reason to think they will suddenly change course. I hope I'm wrong; I suppose it's possible. But I know that they are not here to restore American government, they are here to take it away. Bstrds.
I see from comments that even fairly astute observers have not cottoned on yet that the term "neo-liberal" (or "neoliberal") has nothing to do with liberalism and is in fact a "modernized" term for disguising a thoroughly right-wing economic agenda. CMike helpfully provides your signposts: "Broadly speaking, neo-liberalism seeks to transfer control of the economy from public to the private sector, under the belief that it will produce a more efficient government and improve the economic health of the nation. The definitive statement of the concrete policies advocated by neoliberalism is often taken to be John Williamson's "Washington Consensus", a list of policy proposals that appeared to have gained consensus approval among the Washington-based international economic organizations (like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank)" In other words, they want to reneg on America's obligation to its people and give all our resources to a small number of rich and powerful creeps.
In American war, we only see some of the faces. In real war, the story is a little different. We used to see more of that story, but those days are gone.
I wonder if Netroots Nation will actually ask Reid and Pelosi any meaningful questions. I don't expect to hear any meaningful answers, although it's possible they will trip up and say what they are really thinking. I expect, however, that this is all just a sop to try to lull a few progs into thinking these people are not determined to sell us all out.
Wolcott has a neat bit slamming Laura Ingraham and the hacks who treat her like she is worth paying attention to, but he also says that he has lost patience and taken HuffPo off his blogroll, reminding me that I still had it on mine, and though I will probably still look at it sometimes, I don't think it needs to take up valuable real estate there, either.
In UK news, The courts recently made an interesting decision against The Times in a defamation case, apparently saying that online news stories that suggest someone is a suspect in a crime should be updated to reflect that the person was cleared. The Times had argued that "the Reynolds responsible journalism defence" protected them, but. "The court also rejected The Times's appeal against the judge's finding that web publication of the same story was not protected by Reynolds privilege after the date when the newspaper knew Det Sgt Flood had been cleared by an investigation because it failed either to take the story down or add a note making clear that the situation had changed since the original publication." Lord Neuberger said, "The nature of the information contained in the allegations is of considerable public concern in that it involves police corruption, but the weight to be given to that point is very severely reduced by the fact that the information is contained in the allegations, which, as the journalists knew, were largely unchecked and unsupported." My friend Mark Stephens disagrees with the decision, but to me it looks awfully like newspapers are having their hands slapped for printing material that is little more than gossip without verification, and I can't help but concur. However, I think there's a difference between a major newspaper like The Times, which can afford to label and revisit articles in its archives and, moreover, ought to be more careful about implying more than they know. SwanTurton Solicitors have a different view of Reynolds from Mark's: "The recent deployment by The Times of the Reynolds defence in defending the claim against it by Detective Sergeant Flood well illustrates the chilling effect that this defence has on both truth and justice. It also illustrates the practical consequences of any defence which transfers the risk of publishing false and defamatory material from the multi-nationals who do so for profit to the individuals who are the subject of those publications, such as innocent serving police officers." Having watched newspapers destroy lives based on what turned out to be utterly false allegations, it's hard to take issue with that view.
That title being one of the many suggestions from Tuli Kupferberg's book 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft. Okay, I didn't expect him to live much longer, but still, I'm sad, and I'll continue to treasure the little things he sent me. Tuli was raunchy and funny and playful, and so people often forget that he was also a kind man who wished us peace. Farewell, Tuli.
And farewell to Harvey Pekar, who surprised many of us when we saw that first copy of American Splendor and couldn't stop reading.
I'm tempted to quote the whole first paragraph of Alterman's article on Kabuki Democracy, but I'll settle for the last bit: "Indeed, if one examines the gamut of legislation passed and executive orders issued that relate to the promises made by candidate Obama, one can only wince at the slightly hyperbolic joke made by late night comedian Jimmy Fallon, who quipped that the president's goal appeared to be to 'finally deliver on the campaign promises made by John McCain.'" I'd have said, "laugh bitterly at the painfully accurate joke made by Jimmy Fallon," but I think Alterman gives Obama too much credit. While I agree that the right wing has a formidable media machine, that Bush and Cheney did devastating damage to our government, and that undoing that damage was always going to be hard going, much of it would not have been impossible if we had elected a liberal president. But the simple fact is that Obama really always was and is what is now sometimes called a "neoliberal" and used to just be called right-wing. The fact that he doesn't appear to have foam-at-the-mouth right-wing "social policies" (and watch out for the elasticity of that phrase), doesn't change things: Someone who spouts Reaganite economic rhetoric and appears to believe in the attendant policies, whatever his reasons, is not interested in restoring the American form of government. (Oh, and by the way, let's stop letting people get away with pretending to be "socially liberal but economically conservative". An economic liberal is someone who wants the economic environment to be one in which private individuals can have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That includes blacks, gays, women, and, yes, even people who don't share your religion. Right-wing economics quickly forecloses on individual freedom. That's why right-wingers hate liberal economic policies. It has nothing to do with "efficiency" or fiscal "responsibility" or anything else. This should be obvious to anyone who has noticed how utterly profligate and inefficient conservative economic policies are at everything except sucking the blood out of the real economy. While it is possible that Obama has so far been too stupid to notice this, there is no reason to believe that he will notice it and realize it is a bad thing if he is re-elected - another thing Eric is more certain of than I am.)
When a corporation damages your property, well, that's yourresponsibility. I realize right-wingers like to pretend that protecting private property is important, but they don't really mean "private property", they mean the property of the rich and powerful.
Some people still believe the fiction that the Chamber of Commerce is pro-business. But to be genuinely pro-business, you have to promote an environment that supports smaller, local businesses and promising new businesses, and they don't. In fact, they do the reverse: They support the stranglehold of giganti-business.
"House Democrats: Nancy Pelosi Tricked Us: Nancy Pelosi tricked her own caucus into voting for a bunch of crap they did not know about, and now she's running some bullshit campaign to blame the Republicans for wanting to do the very thing her own deception made possible: cut Social Security benefits. [...] She's turning into Tom DeLay in a skirt."
At The Washington Post, a funny thing happened on the way to "balanced" reporting - they treat a Wall Street equity strategist as a disinterested party but Paul Krugman as someone with an axe to grind.
It's funny, the Fed's brief is to maximize employment in the United States, but they seem to think they have some other job, and they are pretty happy with the current "pace toward ‘maximum employment" even though it seems to be going in reverse direction. (I will say I am delighted to know there is a blog called Economists for Firing Larry Summers.)
Ethics waivers for golf. Of course, because that's more important than whether you can feed your kids or get medical treatment.
Only 529 donors? Can we stop talking about this woman now? I'm sure more people want Bernie Sanders to be president than would vote for Sarah Palin.
I refuse to link to a Fox story that a "study" by a right-wing "research" group found that the votes of convicted felons may have helped elect Al Franken, but I will note that only two states permanently remove the right of convicted felons to vote, and Minnesota is not one of them.
Sara Robinson says we are losing the fight because we've let the right-wing steal our words, and now we need new ones. But I don't want new ones - I want to ditch words that now stink of rhetoric and replace them with plain language of the sort people actually use. I want metaphors and similes that people can grasp instantly. I want things brought down to the level that people actually live with. Like, for example, simple flyers that you can stick through doors and pass out at church that say things like,
You worked hard and played by the rules, and now people in expensive suits who sat in offices recklessly gambling with other people's money want to stop you from being able to retire.
They exported jobs to other countries and made it harder to start new businesses to create new jobs. They slashed government spending to the point where even schools are closing. They failed to honor contracts that said they would put money into your pension fund, and now there is no pension fund. And now they want your unemployment insurance so they can gamble that away, too.
They say you need to tighten your belt to pay for their mistakes.
Well, why should you?
You paid for insurance to protect you from this. Demand what you paid for.
Social Security: You paid for it. We have the money. You earned it. You deserve it. And they don't.
Or something like that.
RJ Eskow: "The War For Financial Independence: Calls to Surrender: There's a new conventional wisdom forming in Washington, DC this July 4th, one that transcends party lines and the usual classifications of "left" and "right" as they're understood in that city. It's only being recognized now, because it deals with a number of different economic issues, but the underlying theme is the same: The American dream of financial independence and security is gone. The sooner you accept that and raise the white flag the easier it will be, so stop struggling. They're saying the ideal of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is dead. Deal with it." Another way of putting it, of course, is that the Revolutionary War is over, and we lost to the Tories.
It's funny, I've known all my life that high income inequality leads to macroeconomic crisis, and Krugman himself is still working it out. But surely it's obvious that if you squeeze the rest of the population, the lazy rich people who think that financial "innovation" is the only kind that's interesting are not going to be the people who invest in creating an environment where real innovation can flourish. The truth is that since economic "conservatives" have taken over running our economy, there hasn't been any real innovation at all. And that stands to reason, since this environment is one in which the ordinary people who do things for themselves and do the real work - and are therefore the most likely to be inspired to real innovation - are simply not in a position to put their ideas into practice, to bring them forward. The very rich do not like real innovation because it destabilizes their order, it makes change possible - change that could weaken their position, or make the behavior of the masses less predictable. They like us to be predictable. But now, here we are, in a situation where we have allowed a few people to amass most of our nation's wealth and refuse to spread it around where it can do some good, and, well, bad things happen to unequal people. But of course, the remedy, we are told, is to apply leeches to stem the blood loss, and if you haven't stopped losing blood, bleed you some more.
Dan at Pruning Shears: "I started 'This week in Tyranny' as a leftover link roundup from my Thursday posts with the point of documenting our slide towards a police state culture. Sometimes I feel self-conscious about the title, maybe thinking it's a little too hyperbolic (and God knows the teabaggers have been gleefully hurling it around for the last year and a half for entirely different, specious, reasons), but stuff like this truly is indicative of an authoritarian environment where dissent is stifled. If that's not tyrannical I don't know what is. (Oh, and also see the almost comically creepily-titled Perfect Citizen program.)"
Someday I hope to hear Paul Krugman examine the question of why our elite movers and shakers and babblers believe things that are so obviously untrue. Nobody cares about deficits. If they cared about them, they would have cared about them just as vigorously during the previous decade when Bush was spending like a drunken sailor. They only care about them when there is a threat that public money will be used to actually serve the public - then, all of a sudden, they are the soul of frugality. What do you think causes that? (More on that from Atrios.) I mean, they really believe stupid, stupid things, or at least purport to. Maybe they have to, so they can sleep at night, secure in the knowledge that if their policies are destroying the lives of tens of millions of people, it's just not their fault. It can't be helped. Sorry. And yet, even some conservatives are beginning to notice. (Also: Krugman says the real-time debate between Hayek and Keynes is "A spectacular find", which it is.)
Health "insurance": The right to spend three hours arguing with your insurance company over a percentage of one (1) penny while you are being treated for leukemia. Isn't that how you define "freedom"?
In comments to the previous post, CMike tries to work out which presidents really had the worst unemployment records.
All those lazy, something-for-nothing loan-defaulters? They're rich people.
The Democratic leadership is determined to ignore the thing that really matters, and they apparently think they can win by bragging about their crap policy "wins" and pointing at the scary Republicans: "As it happens, though, Republicans are considerably more energized; noting the 'enthusiasm gap' Steve Benen warned: 'The awakening next January will likely be a rude one - intractable gridlock, endless and pointless investigations, and a progressive policy agenda brought to an immediate halt. Hell, presidential impeachment might even find itself on the table.' Such dire warnings seem to be part of the messaging about what might happen if the GOP gets control of the House or the Senate. The problem is, 'be afraid, be very very afraid' is not terribly motivating. Republicans spent two election cycles warning voters about Nancy Pelosi bringing her San Francisco values to the heartland, and it did not work out too well for them. More importantly, it ignores the elephant in the room." (And I'm amused that Steve thinks the progressive policy agenda hasn't already been brought to a halt. Anyone who thinks jobs aren't important is not interested in any kind of progressive policy agenda, unless you mean the progressive immiseration of the populace.)
A considerable part of the graft and corruption in Afghanistan can be blamed on graft and corruption in America that allowed corporations to stiff people they make contracts with, at every level. At home, your promise of a pension plan is a fantasy, your promise of health coverage is a fantasy, and so on. In Afghanistan, the promise to pay a local company for services rendered is also a fantasy. The fish rots from the head, in other words.
The G20 was an arrest orgy, and CathiefromCanada has been tracking the stories. (via)
Really, the only explanation I can find for this is that the entire Democratic leadership are actually stealth Republicans. Or they are just more stupid than I can credit.
I thought I'd posted a link to Kindra Arnesen's GulfEmergency testimony, but I suppose it might have been a victim of the recent tech hassles. And anyway, it's at Shakesville with a helpful summary, here.
One way the rich can control you is to make communication too expensive for the people who have the most to tell us. Like, for example, cutting off phone service for Elizabitchez. Because The Red Queen foolishly spent her money on food. Maybe you could help her out.
Atrios keeps hammering this point over and over, and I keep remembering that Republicans attacked Carter for the fact that we had an unemployment spike in the Carter years that supposedly "proved" that runaway capitalism is oh, so much better than, say, the unemployment problems of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Britain. I have heard this refrain repeated even today, and I remember that even while Margaret Thatcher was vastly decreasing the number of jobs available to Brits with her conservative policies, this kind of thing was being said. And then I remember that in neither of these cases was unemployment as bad as it is now in the United States. And it's this bad because we continue to have leaders who are firm believers in Reagan/Thatcherism.
Also from Atrios, who points out that the foreclosure crisis is not a thing of the past: "The big myth is the crisis was "averted" because the financial system was "saved." The reality is that they saved the banksters, but left the unemployment and foreclosures crises in place." Barry Ritholtz: "However, Banks were not allowed to suffer the fate that all insolvent businesses are supposed to. This was a terrible error, the greatest financial tragedy of the 21st century. That they were allowed to survive mostly intact is the result of the excess influence they have on a corruptible congress and a misguided Federal Reserve." (Thanks, as is so often the case, to CMike for pointing out that those two posts go together.)
Glennzilla on Rules of America's rule of law: "I hope those rules are clear because, as this all shows, Justice is Blind and We're All Equal Before the Law. In America -- clearly -- these are not mere slogans. WikiLeaks said today, and I agree, that "if the charges against Manning are true, he will be the Daniel Ellsberg of our times." Ellsberg himself has said the same. Perhaps Manning should have tortured people or criminally eavesdropped on Americans as he leaked these documents; then he could have availed himself of that sweet Presidential protective shield. As was true for Ellsberg, the issue isn't that Manning is being prosecuted; the issue is the extreme disparities in how such decisions are made and what that reveals about the objectives and priorities of those responsible for these decisions."
Glennzilla on Adventures in media transparency: "The eagerness of journalists to find new ways to conceal, rather than expose, the secrets of the powerful seems boundless." Meanwhile, in the BP/Government police state, those journalists who do try to expose the incompetence and illegality of what's going on in the gulf face an astonishing extra-legal force. Or, as ql phrased it: "It's now official. Reporters and photographers going pretty much anywhere BP doesn't want them can face criminal charges and/or fines of up to $40,000. While the big news corporations may be willing to bring it to court, this new rule will certainly stifle smaller, independent news outfits that don't have deep pockets. So much for that freedom of the press thingy." Of course, the big news corporations don't look all that much like they are eager to bring it to court, either. As Glenn says, "The very idea that government officials are acting as agents of BP (of all companies) in what clearly seem to be unconstitutional acts to intimidate and impede the media is infuriating. Obviously, the U.S. Government and BP share the same interest -- preventing the public from knowing the magnitude of the spill and the inadequacy of the clean-up efforts -- but this creepy police state behavior is intolerable. In this latest case, the journalists were not even focused on the spill itself, but on BP's other potentially reckless behavior with other refineries, and yet there are DHS agents and local police officials acting as BP's personal muscle to detain, interrogate, and threaten a photographer. BP's destructive conduct, and the government's complicity, have slowly faded from public attention, and there clearly seem to be multiple levels of law enforcement devoted to keeping it that way, no matter how plainly illegal their tactics are. After all, there is a price to pay for being politically incorrect.
In fact, The Washington Post has been so vapid, so conservative, so politically correct, that this is right on the mark.
Helen Caldicott talking to Pat Buchanan et al. those many years ago, Part 1 and Part 2. I can't even imagine a conversation like this today on television.
So I opened a link at the Torygraph to a page that said, "Your Freedom: Nick Clegg calls on public to help repeal bad laws," and had a big empty white page under it. I chuckled a bit before I opened a different browser so I could see what was really there. I note that the three categories of laws are: Restoring civil liberties, Repealing unnecessary laws, and Cutting business and third sector regulations. Of course, I could spend many days telling them what to get rid of in the first two categories (nearly everything that's been passed since Thatcher was elected), but in that final category, I'd be more interested not in what regulations we should cut, but which ones we need to restore and enforce.
Meanwhile, I somehow doubt that the people involved in the New Threats to Freedom project would agree with me that billionaires are a bigger threat than anything on their list.
Michael Moore was a guest for a long interview on Democracy Now!, where Amy Goodman mostly just let him talk, and he reminded us of how things were on the day he collected his Academy Award. (Should be archived here when it's posted.)
CMike says this is the clip from the Kagan confirmation hearings that is worth watching. I actually think I like Al Franken better as a Senator than as a comedian.
I've always been able to choose whether to go to google.com or google.co.uk, but when Anna told me I gotta see the 4th of July logo (which obviously was not playing at google.co.uk), google.com redirected me to google.co.uk. Apparently, you needed to use a proxy server to see it from outside the US. Thankfully, some kind soul posted it on YouTube.
Ken Silverstein brings you a taste of Kevin Baker's Barack Hoover Obama: "The comparison is not meant to be flippant. It has nothing to do with the received image of Hoover, the dour, round-collared, gerbil-cheeked technocrat who looked on with indifference while the country went to pieces. To understand how dire our situation is now it is necessary to remember that when he was elected president in 1928, Herbert Hoover was widely considered the most capable public figure in the country. Hoover - like Obama - was almost certainly someone gifted with more intelligence, a better education, and a greater range of life experience than FDR. And Hoover, through the first three years of the Depression, was also the man who comprehended better than anyone else what was happening and what needed to be done. And yet he failed. [...] It is impossible not to wish desperately for his success as he tries to grapple with all that confronts him: a worldwide depression, catastrophic climate change, an unjust and inadequate health-care system, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing disgrace of Guantanamo, a floundering education system. Obama's failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable - indeed he will refuse - to seize the radical moment at hand."
The White House is pretending we're seeing the green shoots of a labor recovery, but that's bollocks: "652,000 left the work force this month. Only 82,000 private sector jobs added. This is unbelievable nonsense from the White House. And to no avail. No one believes it. The White House's delusions on the jobs issue is a clear and imminent threat to the political prospects of the Democrats, in 2010 and 2012." Not to mention the prospects of millions of Americans ever to be able to find another job.
Johann Hari on How Goldman gambled on starvation: "As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period - but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows that speculation was "the main cause" of the rise. So it has come to this. The world's wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. Their Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?" (via)
I suppose you might actually believe Glenn Beck's nonsense if you knew nothing about Thomas Jefferson. It's not simply that he never planned to say it, it's that he wouldn't have said it, since it is completely inconsistent with everything else he did say. It's like suggesting that Martin Luthor King originally intended his "I have a dream" speech to advocate for slavery.
I'm glad other people read Kathleen Parker so I don't have to. I'm sorry, you really have to bend into a pretzel to suggest that Obama is in any way more like a woman than a guy. And we hate his speeches because what little content they have is usually either lies or stuff he plans to do that he shouldn't be doing. If he was a housewife and he knew he had to do a little deficit spending to feed the kids, then by god he'd do some deficit spending. But he's the president, and he doesn't care if other people's kids starve. When a woman is concerned about a situation, she doesn't say, "There is a great concern about the 8 million jobs that we lost in the course of this last two years," she says, "I am concerned that we're hemorrhaging jobs and Congress has not yet passed a jobs bill that actually has any real prospect of helping Americans get back to making a decent living. So I'm proposing a jobs bill that actually puts the nation back to work. I expect Congress to pass it or answer for their criminal negligence at the polls." Obama talks like someone who doesn't want to own up to being the person who is concerned about those jobs, because it might offend his corporate masters.
I blame this on CMike, but (a) he didn't get where he did without talent, and (b) I never feel that my time is wasted listening to Gershwin.
Poor Michael Steele put his foot in it again, getting caught telling the truth about how we should not be in Afghanistan. Of course, he pretends that this moronic policy was given to us by Obama rather than Bush, but the fact is that Obama is now making sure he gets to keep giving it to us, and it's still a destructive and costly policy. So, of course, the DNC has to attack him. The DNC does not attack Republicans who say really odious things, such as that people everyone but them and their rich patrons have to make sacrifices so that the rich can keep getting richer - on, no, they agree with that stuff! But criticize their stupid continuation of Bush's illegal, outrageous, murderous, and unpopular policies, and then you're in trouble! "But this is more pernicious than mere tactical error. The DNC's behavior is bolstering the poisonous, manipulative premise that to oppose an American war is an "affront" to the Troops and their families and the by-product of a cowardly desire to "walk away from the fight" with the Terrorists. When the DNC, a front page Daily Kos writer and Bill Kristol all join together to smear someone with common language for opposing a war, it's clear that something toxic is taking place." (Also: Bill Keller's defense of the NYT using Bush administration-mandated language to describe torture is some pretty weak tea.)
Giving you the finger: "The most important job news of the days was not the June jobs numbers. It was a mostly ignored vote in the House of Representatives last night. By a vote of 215 to 210, the House passed a "budget enforcement resolution" setting discretionary spending levels and making it almost impossible to imagine that any job-creation measures will pass in 2011."
Digby: "You can't help but wonder if the Democrats have decided that having the votes of "liberals, African-Americans, self-described Democrats, moderates and those living in either the Northeast or West" just aren't worth having so they are going to fight the Republicans for every last one of those John McCain voters. How else to explain the ongoing derision of their rank and file? ("They look like absolute idiots" is the quote that comes to mind.)" Or the ongoing push to carry out destructive long-term Republican policy goals? (Also, I just love being quoted by Digby.)
Ian Welsh explains How bailing out the rich created the Depression: "The trillions of dollars spent attempting to bail out the banks weren't just wasted, by keeping zombie banks alive they made the situation worse. Further by not wiping out the wealth of banks and those rich folks who made foolish investments which wrecked the world economy, they created a political problem: to whit, as Durbin said - the banks still own Congress. (Along with the military industrial complex, pharma and various other monied interests). Because monied interests still own Congress, they have made it impossible to fix America's structural problems. Six percent of GDP could have been saved by doing health care reform properly, but that didn't happen. The current "financial reform" bill under consideration is so week that I don't know of one credible outside analyst who thinks it is sufficient to make sure there isn't another financial crash, and on and on. Historically speaking periods of high concentration of wealth only end when the rich lose it in a huge crash."
Five years later, I feel a bit naive about this, because of course, it doesn't matter who wins elections if both teams have the same policies. Now we know. (I expect part of the takeover plan involved putting their most plausible candidates into the Democratic Party to make sure they were there to prevent actual liberals from getting in there, and also to negate the opposition.)
I think Jay would like it if I told you that they've put together some T-Shirts for Virtually Speaking Sundays for all us talking heads, and you can buy 'em at Cafe Press. (An enlargement of the legend for my shirt is here, but the black ones with the VS logo are much cooler.)
Glenn Greenwald says it's the media's servitude to government: "Nor is this an accident, but is quite deliberate: media outlets such as the NYT, The Washington Post and NPR explicitly adopted policies to ban the use of the word 'torture' for techniques the U.S. Government had authorized once government officials announced it should not be called 'torture.'" But Adam Serwer thinks it's the media's false "objectivity: "Of course, this attempt at 'neutrality' was, in and of itself, taking a side, if inadvertently. It was taking the side of people who supported torture, opposed investigating it as a crime, and wanted to protect those who implemented the policy from any kind of legal accountability. Most important, it reinforced the moral relativism of torture apologists, who argued that even if from an objective point of view, waterboarding was torture, it wasn't torture when being done by the United States to a villain like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, but rather only when done by say, a dictator like Kim Jong Il to a captured American soldier." And I think it's that the media spend all their time hanging out with right-wingers so they talk like right-wingers.
Obama: "There is a great concern about the 8 million jobs that we lost in the course of this last two years." (There certainly is great concern - but not, as far as I can tell, in the White House or the Democratic leadership.) Anne helps him elaborate: "We are so concerned, in fact, that we've decided to cut the immediate safety net of extended unemployment benefits and the COBRA insurance subsidy, and are hard at work on ways to cut the long-term safety nets of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Here's our thinking on this: if you're not working, either because there are no jobs for you, you're old, or you're sick or disabled, we just can't afford to keep you around. And the best way to speed up your demise is not to prolong your - and our - agony, but to just cut you off from as many sources of survival as possible, as quickly as possible."
Check out this YouTube video of this excerpt from Gerald McEntee's keynote address at the AFSCME convention in Boston, which Digby says was, "a real barn burner". She also posted on the astonishing Villager liberalism of Jonathan Alter, and on the state of play last night for the war supplemental. Needless to say, this bites.
But smart people can get all carried away with what should be no more than a back-room joke - uttered guiltily, for that matter. When everyone gets together to attack a public figure for saying something wrong, I really wish everyone would stop and examine what they actually said before jumping on the bandwagon. You know, like when Jimmy Carter pushed for solar power and energy independence, it was a bad idea to jump on the bandwagon to deride him for a word he didn't even say. In a more recent example, a public figure stands up and says things like, "Government can and must play an appropriate oversight role. Such oversight is in the best [interest] of our nation and the public and industry, because the only way the public will trust industry to develop our resources is if they can prove that they can do it safely, ethically, responsibly. ... So how dare BP put the Gulf victims through such a thing? We have to make sure that BP will not do this, will not do what Exxon did to Alaskans all those years ago." And how do we respond? We make fun of her. Bob Somerby reports.
Laura Logan is a "journalist" who thinks it's her job to call people liars when they say things that, by her own admission, are absolutely true. The thing about "off the record" is that if they don't say it out loud, it isn't off the record. The "unspoken" assumption that you will protect public figures who are the subject of your assignment is not professional or honest, it's abdication of your job of keeping the public informed. Matt Taibbi: "Anyone who wants to know why network television news hasn't mattered since the seventies just needs to check out this appearance by Logan. Here's CBS's chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that's killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag."
Alan Grayson: "We are such a great nation that the worst things that ever happen to us are things we do to ourselves."
I don't know how I missed the story of Viacom posting its own material on YouTube for promotional purposes (see? Even they know that having your stuff on YouTube is good promotion rather than theft) and then suing Google for their "stolen" content. My favorite part was the emails from Viacom creeps talking about how they wanted to own YouTube. But perhaps the most interesting item was that Viacom actually wanted YouTube to eliminate private videos because, as Cory Doctorow put it, "because these movies -- often of personal moments in YouTubers' lives -- can't be inspected by Viacom's copyright enforcers." But the essence of Viacom's "interpretation" of the law was to destroy any possibility of private individuals ever being able to upload anything, because internet providers would be required to review all material before it went up.
I had a lot of fun talking to Digby on Virtually Speaking Sundays (podcast). I always have fun, but I had been particularly looking forward to being on with Digby ever since I browbeat Jay into asking her to be part of the show. I was not disappointed.
Of course, I study in advance at The Bobblespeak Translations so I know what's been going on at the fabulous Sunday TV Talkshows, and to my amazement, Barbara Lee - you remember Barbara Lee, the evil vile Democrat who actually didn't support the president and was the only one with the guts to vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF)? - yes, that Barbara Lee was allowed to talk about the war on Press the Meat with Dancin' Dave. But everyone's focus is on CIA Director Leon Panetta's visit to Jake Tapper, in which he explained that we need thousands of troops in Afghanistan to go after a handful of guys who they think might be there, because then they might get a "foothold" in Afghanistan, or something.
Digby talked about that earlier at Hullabaloo, as well as the other subject that we thought was worthy (though Tapper and Gregory did not) - the economy, also known as the austerity and kill the middle-class programs, not forgetting the important Catfood Commission (Part 1, Part II, and more).
And as we chewed on that subject, we were delighted when Susie Madrak of Suburban Guerrilla called in because she'd actually been at the Peterson Catfood PR bash and blogged the good news that, despite a slick sales-pitch from the Catfood Commission (and a bit of cheating to make it sound like people liked their ideas), Americans were not fooled and came down in favor of no benefit cuts - and, by the way, we want single-payer. People just aren't that dumb: "You know what most of them wanted to do? Soak the rich - and cut defense spending. (Are you listening, President Obama?)"
And then we were talking a bit about what we do about the fact that there doesn't seem to be any way to get our elective officials to stop damaging the country, and Digby has been writing about that, too:
People keep asking where "the left" is and why they don't take to the streets in light of these neo-liberal policies wreaking havoc on working people everywhere. Where is the populist uprising from the left and why there isn't more direct confrontation of the corporatist mindset. It's a good question, but you have to wonder why we never cite these regular protests and why we don't bother to comment on the tactics that are used against them. Are we on the American left really not part of this? Do we philosophically disagree with the critique, even now, after everything that's been revealed during this economic crisis? Are these people wrong?
And who should call in but Driftglass of Driftglass.
You might want to listen to Drifty and BlueGal explain what makes a good liberal, and Susie Madrak was on Nicole Sandler's Radio Or Not earlier; I haven't listened to it yet, but I will. (I'm told Nicole got really good once she broke loose from Air America Radio.)
Krugman finally admits it: "It's a Depression: So I don't think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times."
Did McClatchy misquote Chris Dodd? "After great debate we have reduced a strong Wall Street reform bill that will change the way our financial services sector is regulated."
It's Digby and Avedon Carol guesting on Virtually Speaking Sundays tonight at 5:00 PM Pacific, but if you click the link it will show the time in your own time zone, as far as I can tell. (At least, it does for me.) You can stream it there live or later when it's archived, or download the podcast.
The conservative Washington Post had libertarian Dave Weigel covering their "conservative" beat (as opposed to the rest of their conservative beat), and he was criticial of someone conservative, so they all screamed and got him fired. Atrios: "Ezra Klein writes for the Post. He's on the liberalish side of things. But if someone released some private emails in which he said mean things about Supreme Commander Markos, Paul Begala, and Rachel Maddow, no one at the Post would have batted an eye. Probably they would have seen it as evidence that he was a great hire for his willingness to Stand Up To Powerful Liberals. [...] But apparently the Post needs its "conservatives" to be conservative hacks, and not hurt Matt Drudge's feefees." Roy Edroso: "The problem with covering conservatives is: There's no way to do it without being offensive -- at least in the bar after work, or its email equivalent. Which is apparently a resignation-accepting offense at the Post. They've run this country for most of the past thirty years. I don't see why we should continue to treat wingnuts like special needs children who have to be shielded from criticism."
"As Americans and Europeans face deficits and drastic government cuts, Canada's economy is recovering from only a mild recession. One reason is more stringent control of banks that meant they never had the housing boom-and-bust, but another reason is that when things got tight, they wrote those stimulus checks.
Face to Face With Polished Wall Street Psychopathy: "The more I pulled on these threads, the more I discovered that much of what I thought I knew was based on things that weren't really true. And by that I don't mean assumptions about housing prices, I mean information people like me had been provided about specific deals by other parties to those transactions. While many of the failings of the structured credit market were due to unsound reliance on historical data, some were not mistakes in judgment but were the result of bad actors, misinformation and wrongdoing."
ACORN Goes To Court Thursday, and, with Rachel Maddow's help, Susie makes a good suggestion: "If you're in New York this Thursday, here's something useful you can do. As you probably already know, ACORN is appealing this cutoff as an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder (the kind of thing the constitution-lovin' Republicans would ordinarily protest, except that they demanded this one). But it's more than the legal issues. Liberals have to stand up for our allies, and few groups have done more to help the party base than ACORN. Show your support, either by attending the hearing, or by making a donation."
I don't understand why Harold Meyerson, who is actually right as well as honest about these things, is still being published by the conservative Washington Post - I mean, haven't they usually fired anyone who's telling the truth? But, anyway, he's there, telling the truth about "centrist" deficit-hawk BS, or as Adam Bink has it, the Underpants Gnomes theory on jobs/deficits. (I actually think that, while he's certainly right on the economics of it, Krugman is wrong on the intellectual difficulty of the issue. It's not difficult. If you starve the economy you depress jobs, and people who don't have jobs don't pay taxes, and then the treasury doesn't get that money. Congress doesn't have trouble spending money, they are just against spending it where it will do any good. The question to address is why they feel that way. Although asking it might just be what gets them kicked off the pages of The Newspapers of Record.) Via Atrios, who agrees that some of these creeps will probably lose their jobs as a result of their deficit-hawkery, and reckons it's the silver lining to their refusal to save the economy.
In the Department of Conservative Personal Responsibility, we have Jeb Bush saying it's "childish" to hold his big brother accountable for the mess he made as president. Of course, that's wrong - but: The ball is in Obama's court, now, and he's refusing to do what needs to be done to fix the mess. It's no longer just the mess Bush made, it's the mess Obama volunteered to clean up and he's just making it worse.
I guess Mike Huckabee is running for president again, since he's making the pilgrimage again. Yeah, yeah, he just love Jews. (The author of the article makes the mistake of believing the lie that the anti-abortion movement was an organic reaction to Roe v Wade, but of course that's not true - like everything else, it was orchestrated by rich right-wingers as part of their ongoing program to polarize society.)
Remember Kwame Kilpatrick, the mayor who bankrupted Detroit? Well, the Feds are even more pissed off at him.
Center/Center-Right Talking heads in endless brawls, Fellating the same old pols, With eyes that skim the world and could not care less. This is now our nation's press: Fields of empty men in Savile Row While the legacies of Tarbell and Murrow, Lie crushed and forgotten beneath Fox News.
I've had a couple of days of strange technology events and also, um, our 25th wedding anniversary (omg! - I thought all the gay marriage stuff was supposed to put an end to that sort of thing!), so I haven't been able to blog so much and also I had more links but then my computer went very strange and they are locked up in a dark corner somewhere, but I hope you enjoyed your Solstice while I was enjoying mine.
"Blackwater Snags $120 Million Contract In Afghanistan: The latest: the Obama Administration has awarded Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, with a $120 million contract to provide security for U.S. consulates in Afghanistan. The contract could last as long as 18 months."
I don't think it's actually possible to kill zombie lies, but I do think people should start asking the anti-Social Security people just exactly why they believe baby boomers are going to live forever, which is the presumption of the calculation that all those boomers are about to spend the fund into oblivion. This only make sense if you think people who are in their 50s and 60s now are going to live another 40 or 50 years at minimum, and that none of them had children. (And that's just leaving aside the fact that, of course, the money is already there.)
Nobody really wants to talk about why this judge recused himself from a Gitmo case after the Gitmo hostage's lawyer asked about a suspicious conversation between the judge and the government's lawyer...
Here's a lovely meme for you: "Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, is expected to leave his job later this year after growing tired of the 'idealism' of Barack Obama's inner circle." Yeah, right, 'cause the rest of 'em are a bunch of little lefties. Or, as Susie put it: "The tone, of course, is that Rahm is the "bad" guy and the rest of the inner circle are the "good" guys. I don't think it's that simple. I think Obama's choices reflect his own philosophies, and you simply can't pin everything on Rahm. We have a Democratic president who's trying to gut public education, Social Security and Medicare and who refuses to deal with the national tragedy of long-term unemployment. Are we supposed to believe Rahm tied the president to a chair and hypnotized him? I'm not buying it." Me, neither. I think Rahm is taking his retirement package, which will probably be a really cushy job in the financial sector that, y'know, pays a lot more than government work.
In a short post called "The Great Shirk", Atrios says, "I fear the war on the unemployed is just heating up." He's quoting Rand Paul on the fabulous idea that unemployed Americans should consider taking "less desirable jobs" instead of collecting unemployment (as if no one has been doing this already), but it's actually an idea that Republicans have been kicking out there for a while. I mean, who can forget John McCain's fantasy suggestion that Americans would not do manual labor for $50 an hour? (Also: Um, just where has Matt Yglesias been while the rest of us have been recoiling in horror at the games the World Bank has been playing?)
I thought this post would have been much more useful if it had worked it's way up the chain of other influential sociopaths - right up to that guy who appointed a commission to "save" our economy filled with people whose only interest is in cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. People like this liar. (And what's this crap about?)
Speaking of sociopaths, who is the fount of compassion who had the bright idea to shoot pain waves at people? And how soon can we expect to see it in use in the US (and probably the UK)?
Krugman has That '30s Feeling after trying to get "deficit hawks" to face the real numbers. No one is listening. They are just into pain - for others. Regardless of the facts.
Atrios: "Once upon a time the major media outlets were called 'the establishment media.' After years of strategic badgering by the right, that somehow morphed into 'the liberal media.' It's time to bring back the term 'establishment media.'" And, also via Atrios, the fantasy that the public cares more about the deficit turns out to be a lie. Surprise!
Ed Schultz: "The middle class, where the greatness of this nation is rooted, is under siege by an increasingly unethical system, managed by economic vampires who are sucking the lifeblood out of the American family and ripping the heart out of democracy itself. From mortgage scams to credit card predation to health insurance hustles, greed is killing our country." From reviews of books by Schultz and Bill Press. at Daily Kos.
They've screwed-up everything. So: "Let no point go. Let no lie pass. Let no banker off the sharpened hook. Let no insult go unanswered and no fatuous ass go unmocked. Go. don't let ennui become your normal state. Go forth and be a ferocious, mouthy defender of your and your children's future. Go."
At the other end of the spectrum, an early member of Feminists Against Censorship, Jo Opie, cared a great deal about the least of us. She died recently, and I'm pleased that the Guardianpublished an obituary from another FAC member. (In other FAC news, I was interviewed at length by the Evening Standard about some local madness, and of course they didn't use a single interesting quote.)
Regular readers know I've written before about the possibility of government intervention in the stock market. I'll explain shortly why this issue just became more urgent. For now, here are some of the reasons this matters. The details of any intervention would determine the degree to which these apply, but conceptually these are the main implications:
1. It would reward the speculator class at the expense of the investor class. The former includes high-frequency traders and algorithmic, program-oriented, and momentum players. The latter prefers to buy stocks at favorable valuation levels, incrementally and over a period of time. This becomes harder when intervention prevents stocks from finding their natural levels.
2. It would constitute a backdoor bailout of Wall Street, which obviously depends in many ways on rising stock prices.
3. It would essentially make the stock market a giant money laundering mechanism for corporate insiders, with public funds used to buy stocks and keep the market inflated while insiders sell.
4. It would affect the perception of risk across the entire asset spectrum (not just stocks) and encourage the same malinvestment and misallocation of capital that contributed to the credit bubble. (As a former trader on one of Wall Street's top sell-side desks, I've seen how belief in the existence of a backstop influences the perception and tolerance of proprietary risk.)
5. It would create the potential for abuse if a Wall Street firm is involved in the scheme. This would include frontrunning the orders before they are executed or tipping off other parties to the activity. If the scheme involves a government promise to backstop the Wall Street firm against losses, insufficient controls would allow the firm to claim losses greater than what it incurred.
6. It would have various political implications, including the ability to boost the stock market before an election, after an important presidential speech, or during or after high-profile testimony by Federal Reserve or other economic officials.
And, curiously, answers from officials about whether a proxy has been operating have been increasingly...evasive.
Jay Rosen has a long and interesting post on the actual ideology of the American press that I think tracks closely with Stuart Zechman's view that the process by which they move to the right is an ideology in itself rather than simply "right-wing". I think that's wrong in that it overlooks the fact that, first and foremost, these ideological twists deprioritize the essential Constitutional obligation to provide liberal government - that is, government by, of and most emphatically for The People. But I think both Stuart and Prof. Rosen have a good grasp of the process and details. The professor notes, for example, that among the press corps, "True Believer" is a term of contempt - thus, believing in, stating, or proposing something for any reason other than that it fits the into the media's real priorities is craziness. (To me, this is just a matter of kids trying to look cool to their peers and therefore trying to look like they don't care too much about anything of substance, much as we often see among teenagers. I believe it was the author of Media Whores Online who noted that this behavior was all in line with trying to become one of the Kool Kidz - or perhaps it was Atrios - but it was a good insight then, and it still is.) The thing is, all of this is happening within a context that is already right-wing, so I'm not sure it's appropriate to try to separate it from the right-wing as a whole. But it is certainly instructive to examine the process. I found that link via Glennzilla, who is talking about The media's understanding of its role, and, not incidentally, quoting Stuart. (Jay Ackroyd, who pointed me to Glenn's article yesterday, posted about it later at Eschaton.)
And Atrios also notes that the White House apparently thinks that they did "research" before giving the go-head to the giant oil geyser - er, I mean offshore drilling. It's interesting that they didn't notice the horrendous oil eruptions that have been happening all along. (Also: "Work Until You're 80.")
In a comment to this post below, CMike disagreed that John Lanchester had "demystified" the credit crunch, and offered to take a crack at it himself:
Washington required taxpayers to rescue American Insurance Group with $160 billion so that claims owed to giant corporations in the financial industry by AIG would be paid-in-full for losses related to US residential real estate mortgages. To put that in perspective, come this July, the population of the United States will be at 310,232,863. If each of us, infants included, chipped in $3.22 that would total $1 billion. Therefore it would take $515.74 from each of us to match that $160 billion amount--again.
Alternatively, the U.S. per capita income was $46,400 in 2009 so, in the year following the meltdown, it took the combined average annual income of 21,552 Americans to add up to $1 billion. The $160 billion that Bush, Obama, Reid, Pelosi, and Paulson agreed to drain from the Treasury equaled the total 2009 average income for 3,448,275 Americans.
If you start around the 50-minute mark, you can watch Norman Solomon on Washington Journal making the case for pushing Obama in a more liberal direction.
It's all very well for Anthony Weiner to say reps from BP are lying - which they are - but what was that business about "British accents"?
It seems like debtors' prisons may be making a come-back after all... "Reader bill clued us in that people who fall behind on debt payments are being incarcerated in six states. While this is generally short-term, it is nevertheless a troubling development, since these are all involve private contracts and look to be an abuse of the court system.
Couldn't help but notice that both the NYT and WaPo have room to print rubbish by rich people saying the rest of us want too much, and then saw this: "A Small Note Regarding Our Future: Our elite and their servants are trying to tell the poor that they should not want to be rich. Of course, they should be telling the rich that they should not want to be rich. Whether or not we will undergo economic collapse, we must get away from the financial vampires that are trying to suck us dry for our own physical and mental health."
Matt Yglesias falls in love with another hot new "modernizing" concept: colonialism.
Dean Baker, noting some tripe on Social Security: "I often think it's too bad that Social Security isn't a private company. If it were, it could sue Marketplace Radio for libel for this sort of reporting. Does Marketplace's host have any idea what she is talking about when she says: "Social Security is in such a sorry state"? According to the Congressional Budget Office the program can pay all benefits for the next 34 years with no changes whatsoever and even after that can pay more than 75 percent of benefits indefinitely. The program is in much better shape in this respect than it was in the 40s, 50s, 60s, or 70s. So what on earth is this person talking about? Can Marketplace Radio pay all its expenses for the next 34 years?"
Yglesias has a useful post on The Corporate Court: "One thing that's been frustrating progressive lawyers for a few years now, but increasingly so over time, is the belief of the public and the press that the federal judiciary is primarily a venue for tackling 'hot button' issues like abortion and the death penalty. In reality, the bulk of federal litigation has to do with businesses suing each other, workers or consumers suing businesses, or businesses trying to fight off regulators. The Constitutional Accountability Center has a new study out (PDF) that takes a look at this issue through the lens of the US Chamber of Commerce, the premiere group that can be found arguing that corporate executives should be able to get away with doing whatever they want. Here's how often different justices sided with the Chamber's position on cases the Chamber weighed in on [graph showing a fairly sharp divide] We can see that this is a substantial divider between the court's five conservatives and its four non-conservatives. The gap between Kennedy and Souter is much larger than the Kennedy-Alito gap or the Souter-Ginsburg gap. And a look at the close cases decided by 5-4 votes is even more telling...."
IOZ: "The expansion of the surveillance state, the destruction of privacy, the erosion of individual human autonomy, the destruction of the rights of the accused, the essentially superlegal status of police and military forces, and the project to create a population of placid, uninformed instruction-followers via a carefully designed program of national mediocrity are all joint endeavors."
Sue Arnold does the audiobook reviews for the Grauniad, and she has a nice one of John Lanchester's Whoops!: Well-meaning friends with financial savvy have tried explaining what leveraged buy-outs are, and securitisation, or why AIG was basically screwed by CDSs on CDOs and had to be bailed out by the Bush administration for $160bn, but it's no good. I can't get my head round those sorts of numbers. What does a billion dollars actually look like? Would it fit into one of those attaché cases the Lavender Hill mob used to ship their loot? What immediately endeared me to Lanchester's hugely informative and entertaining book about the causes of the global financial meltdown that everyone but Goldman Sachs employees is going through at the moment is his demystification of all that monetary bafflegab. OK, he says, try this. First, how long do you think a million seconds is - just a quick guess, don't work it out - and then a billion seconds. The answer (no, you won't have got it) is just under 12 days and almost 32 years. Now apply that to pounds, dollars and euros, and you start to understand the seriousness of the credit crunch (and to get the size of bankers' bonuses - Lanchester has got it in for bankers - into perspective)."
I've tried to keep an eye out for David Baddiel ever since he became the first male celebrity in Britain to frankly say he liked porn and tall about the subject as if he wasn't a sniggering 12-year-old. Normally, you get intellectuals talking about porn and hinting they they've looked at it in this weird, guilty-jokey way that makes you want to hurl, but David, perhaps because he was a professional comedian, didn't do that - he was just honest and intelligent. I was charmed. Of course, this also meant I ended up doing some TV and radio with him (it wasn't particularly funny, unless you count the anti-porn woman who apparently believed that you could buy hard-core snuff porn in Tesco's and that women were worse off in the late 20th century than they were 100 years earlier when we weren't even allowed to keep our own money), but it was a lot better than the usual crap on TV and radio whenever they talk about porn. Anyway, he's doing a World Cup thing and got the 60 Second Interview Friday:
Any favourite bits of World Cup trivia?
One of my favourite things happened at the last World Cup when Luis Aragonés, the Spanish manager, was accused of racism. He responded by saying: 'No, I have friends from many countries: Africans, Japanese... I even know someone whose job it is to tell the sex of chickens.' I don't understand why he said it but for me that was a great World Cup.
Were you proud of being named the 'world's sixth sexiest Jew'?
Not really because Alan Sugar came fifth. I've never got over being one below Alan Sugar in 'sexy Jew' terms.
CMike notes in a comment below that Krugman is beginning to question free-traderism (and about time, too!), noting that the things he thought didn't have to be worried about have to be worried about. Alas, he still comes down on, "And a return to protectionism would just have too many negative effects." The thing is, Paul, a lack of protectionism is already having way too many negative effects. (I wonder if he has ever considered the possibility that the same testosterone poisoning that generates austerity gospels could be a culprit in Free-Traderism, too....)
Hall & Oats join Shakira, Tenacious D, Kanye West, Sonic Youth, Carlos Santana, Massive Attack, Rage Against the Machine, Willie Nelson and others in music boycott of Arizona.
Myra MacPherson, in "Helen Thomas and the (So-called) Correspondents at the White House," says much the same thing I did: "She was an embarrassing trouble maker with her 'out of line' toughness." Yes, she showed them up for the pathetic shills they were when they behaved like guests at a private function though they were ostensibly there to drag public officials and their actions into the light. We know why Helen had to go.
While watching the hyenas eat Helen Thomas alive, Arthur was struck by the stunning parallel between the Israelis and blacks in America. (All the "sensible" people saw them.)
Apparently, the trouble with Social Security is that it replaced debtors' prisons, according to the people who Obama chose to run his Let Them Eat Catfood commission. (via)
A few days earlier, Dan of Pruning Shears noted in my comments that any day now we'd be hearing bleatings about how BP has to be protected because hurting them will hurt the pensions of all those Britons whose pension funds have been invested in BP, and sure enough I saw Boris on my TV bleating about that and bemoaning the fact that Obama kept calling them "British Petroleum" when they haven't used that name in years. It's all a plot against the British, now, apparently. Digby: "I'm surprised it took the damage control experts (the real professionals --- PR, not oil spill) to get to this argument. "By coming down hard on BP you are destroying old people's pensions." It's one of the most important reasons the Big Money Boyz pushed for 401ks and social security privatization --- so they could always argue that what's good for Rapacious Corporations is good for grandma." Digby also made the observation that the love-fest for Obama seems to be over, although, as we have seen, fear of crazy Republicans has made far too many progressives reflexively defend him anyway. Yes, it's true that the right-wingers are saying crazy things about Obama, but right-wingers have always said crazy things about Democrats and yet Democrats still overwhelmingly routed the GOP in the last election cycles, suggesting that if we had actually elected liberals instead of mere Democrats, we'd have had a serious win. The country has had enough of corporatist oligarchy, whatever feathers it wears.
Something I have long found depressing is that there are actually people who listen to Mankiw. His rubbish is actually taught in economics classes all over the country. (I was just going to write, "Something I have long found depressing is that Gregory Mankiw," but I was afraid people would think that was an incomplete sentence.) Fortunately, if you haven't had the misfortune to read Mankiw (or even if you have), there is "Mankiw's 10 principles of economics, translated for the uninitiated", by Yoram Bauman.
It's a Rent party - and it doesn't seem like we can stop what's happening, so the question is how to create the possibility of the future...somewhere down the road. "The idea of "happiness" is very important. Rent seeking behavior brings happiness to nobody (not even our corrupt and perverse elites). Do you want to keep being unhappy? Why?" (Ideas like this are no longer being treated as left-wing silliness. Even in The Wall Street Journal.)
Fred Clark on what's really in the Bible ("The Bible is not a book about homosexuality and it will not allow itself to be treated as a book about homosexuality. Nor is the Bible a book about sex. But the Bible is, in fact, very much a book about wealth, possessions and the poor. That is not the central theme, but it is a massively important theme that pervades every portion of the book. If you don't agree with that then I don't know what it is that you've been reading, but it surely wasn't a Bible." - oh, and check out the comments!), and The Single Greatest News Lede Of All Time, both (via).
Maybe Rahm just flushed the union vote down the toilet when the White House fought vociferously against the union-backed candidate and then sneered that, "Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet on a pointless exercise" in their (nearly successful) attempt to primary out Blanche Lincoln. The administration thinks unions should support Blue Dogs who are trying to keep Americans unemployed - to help out the White House. The AFL-CIO response was right: "If that's their take on this, then they severely misread how the electorate feels and how we're running our political program. When we say we're only going to support elected officials who support our issues, when they say we should have targeted our money among some key house races among Blue Dog Democrats - that ain't happening. Labor isn't an arm of the Democratic Party." And for more than a year it's been looking like labor already wasted their money when they supported Obama.
Even our Founding Fathers warned you against the money-lenders. James Madison, for example, said, "History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance." What they now have the power to do is nothing less than High Frequency Terrorism: 9/29/08 proved that when you have so much power concentrated in the hands of a few, you can manipulate a computer algorithm and make the market and economy go whichever way you want it to go. So on 5/6/10, just as the power of the big banks was again threatened on the floor of the Senate and a deal on auditing the Federal Reserve was being negotiated, in came a sudden and unprecedented ten-minute 700 point market drop, a precision-guided High Frequency Trading (HFT) attack to show Congress who's boss. [...] Other than the two major operations carried out on 9/29/08 and 5/6/10, we must also recall a smaller attack on January 21st and 22nd of 2010, when Obama had a press conference and came out in favor of the Volcker Rule, which would have limited these HFT and 'proprietary trading' schemes. At that time, the market dropped 430 points. Soon after this attack, all follow-up talk on the Volcker Rule faded away and this reform has not been seriously addressed by Obama since then.
HTML Mencken on driving out Helen Thomas and the kind of people who helped do it (that Yglesias quote is a humdinger); Glenn Greenwald on the double standards ("As for the Helen Thomas condemnation fest and subsequent resignation today, the central issue -- as both my Salon colleague Gabriel Winant and The American Prospect's Adam Serwer adeptly document -- is not the perception that she's guilty of bigotry, but the wrong kind of bigotry."); and Jurassicpork on the same subject.
Blackwater Prop Shops: Where tough guys can strut their stuff. Also, Ms. Palin is apparently a born-again regulator who says, "Unless government appropriately regulates oil developments and holds oil executives accountable, the public will not trust them to drill, baby, drill." And the so-called debt commission is "unlikely" to do anything to fix the deficit, because the conservatives on the commission don't want to.
We're supposed to organize to get Obama to do what he's not doing, we're told - put public pressure on him. Gosh, it would make a nice change from putting pressure on liberals not to put pressure on Obama, even if it still won't work.
"I am here today because of a conversation I had last June when I was voting. A woman ... asked me, "Do you believe in equality for gay and lesbian people?" I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her, ' What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach?'" (via)
The dentist decided that preserving that wisdom tooth was a lost cause. Oh, well...
Sorry, but Helen Thomas said somethingnot nearly as offensive as the crap the WaPo and NYT and the various other Big Media "news" vehicles spew every day. And as long as these news organizations continue to host the words of people who speak as if people who were born and raised in America, sometimes going back many generations, are not "real" Americans because they don't happen to be Aryan, well, they can put up with Thomas. Except, they can't, because she embarrasses them by being much better at reporting and analyzing the news than they are. So, the people Bob Somerby refers to as "career liberals" joined in with the right-wing chorus (who hated her throughout the Bush years for failing to fall on her knees for their guy) to bring the old lady down. And congratulations, boys, you did the job. I'm restraining myself from typing those two more words.
Tristero: "Now that the fellow who, allegedly, gave Wikileaks all those combat videos has been arrested, when will they get around to busting the people who leaked Valerie Plame's identity to Novak? Oh, that's right, I forgot. They're Too Big To Jail." (Also, Digby on the George W. and Richard Bruce Mengele.)
Culture of Truth did his usual liveblog of This Week, which actually had both Arianna Huffington and Markos Moulitsas on it at the same time (thus breaking the rule against having more than one suspected liberal in the room.) It was funny enough that I almost wish I'd seen the actual show. Then he and Watertiger talked about it on Virtually Speaking Sundays.
If I read Chris Bowers correctly, he's saying that the liberal blogosphere is dead because we don't need it anymore since some of its biggest stars have turned into pod people. I was so disturbed, I actually left a comment. (via)
Someone mentioned "Monster" in the comments, and other comments were arguing about whether the Obama administration still has time to turn into the Roosevelt administration, so I was going to write about how documenting the atrocities is all very well (information is important), but the frustration of not being able to come up with a coherent response aside from telling people to organize (think about how vague that sounds: What does "organize" mean?) just made it hard to write. I may be somewhat hampered in my ability to form plans by the fact that I don't expect to be alive long enough to see any such plan come to fruition. My own generation just didn't see the developing threat from the right-wing coming - or rather, those of us who did see it coming were not in a position to do anything about it, no matter how much we kept warning people about media consolidation (which, don't kid yourself, has a paramount place in all this). We should all have been buying radio and TV stations or something, I don't know, but the wingers did it instead, and now here we are. I don't think we can rely on the internet as our sole organizing tool, and I think too many people do. I'm not saying it's not good to make use of the internet, I'm just saying there's not really a good way to focus information to specific audiences who wouldn't otherwise look for it when the net as it currently stands is a melee and there's a very strong chance that our owners are going to stop that by not letting us continue to participate in it with the freedom we have had so far. I still think people should do what I've been saying they should do for the last ten years: When you see something you wish your neighbors understood, make a flyer, print it out, and distribute it on doormats and through mailboxes, at church picnics, or wherever you can place them. It's what our Founding Fathers did, after all....
It was bound to happen. Once the British bobby was immunized against having his criminal abuses of civilians recorded on camera, you could expect American police to demand the same protection against having their obnoxious and criminal behavior exposed. Interestingly, laws meant to protect private citizens against intrusions into their private business are being used - with the connivance of the courts - to hide the activities of public servants performing public business on the public dime.
I haven't finished reading Matt Taibbi's "Wall Street's War", but: "It's early May in Washington, and something very weird is in the air. As Chris Dodd, Harry Reid and the rest of the compulsive dealmakers in the Senate barrel toward the finish line of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act - the massive, year-in-the-making effort to clean up the Wall Street crime swamp - word starts to spread on Capitol Hill that somebody forgot to kill the important reforms in the bill. As of the first week in May, the legislation still contains aggressive measures that could cost once-indomitable behemoths like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase tens of billions of dollars. Somehow, the bill has escaped the usual Senate-whorehouse orgy of mutual back-scratching, fine-print compromises and freeway-wide loopholes that screw any chance of meaningful change. [...] Then reality set in."
Noted in the latest issue of Ansible: "Diana Wynne Jones, after much consultation with her husband and specialists, has decided to abandon chemotherapy (which is serving only to make her feel very ill indeed) and resign herself to whatever may follow. Her senior oncologist fears she has 'months rather than years', but we all hope that - as once or twice before - Diana can still surprise the medical profession. May the good luck return." (In less depressing news, kinky libertoonian author J. Neil Schulman is apparently suing the US government for plagiarizing his plots. Um.)
Joke Line exposes the agenda of career "liberals": "The truth is, the Administration has a mixed record at the moment. It has achieved historic success with its economic responses to the Great Recession, including the stimulus package, and is about to win a big Financial Reform bill. Its health care plan is a step in the right direction that will need some fixing down the road (especially in the areas of tort reform and the need to shrink or eliminate Medicaid by moving recipients into market-oriented health care exchanges)."
That works in tandem with this recommended reading from Dean Baker: "Steven Pearlstein hits a homerun with his column today. He notes the efforts of the Blue Dog Democrats to increase payments to doctors under Medicare. These are the same folks who have gained notoriety in recent days for opposing the extension of jobless benefits and funding to support state Medicaid programs." And the White House just loves to cultivate those Blue Dogs. As Pearlstein notes, "None of this would be particularly outrageous but for the fact that, at the same time the House was scraping together the $22 billion to pay for another "doctor fix" last week, it could not find $7 billion to continue providing subsidies to help those who had been laid off keep up with health insurance premiums under the COBRA program. Without those subsidies, premium payments for a family policy will typically consume 80 percent or more of a worker's unemployment check, according to Families USA, a liberal advocacy group. "
There's one thing that's really changed dramatically since I started this blog, and that's the fact that it is no longer impossible to discuss flaws in Israel's policies without being completely hammered for antisemitism by otherwise rational people. I can remember having huge arguments with friends who did not get that some of the prime movers behind "support" for Israel were right-wing antisemites who actually want to foment a war in the Middle-East that would annihilate Israel; they simply did not see that Israel's increasingly immoderate policies were laying the groundwork for an escalation of hostilities in the region. Most of them no longer stomp on questions about "support" for Israel or criticism of Israel's policies. Now, they, too, want questions answered about why the US continues to encourage Israel's suicidal approach. But, as is so often the case, Americans are way ahead of our "progressives" in Congress.
It's interesting to me that China has adopted the exclusionary rule, a necessity of civilization. Of course, the United States doesn't need stuff like that anymore, since "9/11 changed everything" and all that. China is emerging into the mid-20th century. I wish America was.
I'm really pleased to see that my suggestion early last year that if financial organizations claim they can't find the paperwork to a home they are trying to foreclose on, they should not be allowed to foreclose, has become legitimized as an approach - and is even a business for some homeowners' lawyers. (via) (Also, this is cool. More here.)
What amazing luck Goldman Sachs has - they got out of BP just in time.
Really, a federal indictment for writing angry e-mails to a member of Congress? And, really? A clause in the defense appropriations bill directing the DoD's inspector general to harass ACLU lawyers? (via)
I found it very odd that BP's managing director went on television to do the PR last Sunday and did such a pathetic job that he even made Dancin' Dave Gregory and Liberal Fake Jake Tapper look good. (What Dudley doesn't want to say, of course, is that the reason they haven't just capped the spurt yet is that they don't want to - they are still trying to pull oil out and if they cap it, they can't do that.)
As I have long observed, the fundamental message of the GOP's meme on government is that we are Can't-Do America. I'm glad some others are picking up the theme. Of course, we used to just be able to do stuff - sure, not everything, and not perfectly, but we used to at least try and sometimes even succeed. (Why, our Founding Fathers even invented the US Post Office - and it worked!)
I'm not always comfortable with the way people talk about fear as if it is in itself always a bad motivator. The problem isn't fear, it's fear of the wrong things (e.g., scary swarthy foreigners or people who look like them) rather than the right things, such as Malefactors of Great Wealth wrecking our lives.
A frankly insane bit of "emergency preparedness" generated this thought from Digby on our armchair cowboys and their lust for violence in the name of security: "Sadly, I'm beginning to think all this craziness is the natural result of emotionally stunted conservatives having a mid-life crisis. They pretended to be adults their whole lives, but never actually grew up. So now we have a whole bunch of frustrated, middle aged adolescents running things with no sense of morality or limits." (On the other hand, note to Tristero; The Who are a lousy example of how a good band operates. I've worked with good musicians who really can jam beautifully and spontaneously and make it sound tight. It is by no means impossible, my experience tells me, to reach inside and find the true emotions that make a song into magic. The criticisms of Obama may just be classic right-wing talking points, but the fact of the matter is I don't believe Obama cares about what's really going on, anymore than I believed GHW Bush when he said, "Message: I care." He doesn't care.) (And a note to Digby: Filibusters are always bad when Democrats might use them, such as when the Villagers think Republicans may be about to regain control of Congress. But if people really thought Filibustering is bad, they would start by attacking the way Reid has let the GOP "filibuster" by merely expressing a whim to do it. Unless they actually do it, it's not even a filibuster. This meme about changing the filibuster "rules" has nothing to do with the rules - it has to do with cementing the idea that what Reid is doing is following the rules, even though he's just making up "rules" to avoid forcing the GOP to filibuster.)
I read this article by Krugman last week and all I could think was, "Hope springs eternal." I mean, isn't it a bit late in the day to still be talking like Obama might turn into FDR?
