Current msnbc.com home-page headline:

While U.S. did nothing about USS Cole attack, bin Laden read a poem about it. Exclusive: Declassified documents show frustration of top White House counterterrorism officials after they urged Presidents Clinton and Bush to strike at al-Qaida in wake attack on American warship.

Current article headline:

U.S. failure to retaliate for USS Cole attack rankled then — and now

Ooooh, pass the popcorn. I bet we'll be reading about the more and more:

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. (KABC) -- A battle over a foreclosed home is shaping up in Simi Valley.

A family claims they were illegally evicted, and Saturday, they broke the locks and started moving back in even though the home has already been sold.

Jim and Danielle Earl, along with their nine children ranging in age from 3 to 23, returned to their house of nine years on Mustang Drive.

The family was evicted from their home in July after they fell behind on payments.

Their bank, GRP Financial Services, foreclosed on the home, but since then the house has been bought by an investor, remodeled and sold to someone else.

Common name: Blackberries

Genus: Rubus
Correntian ohio sends in an instructional story about how she made peace with a damaging and dangerous invasive plant -- Himalayan blackberries -- and then went one step further by learning how to make something useful from it:
 

The genus Rubus is believed to have existed since at least 23.7 to 36.6 million years ago and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of species.

According to Mary Robson, an Area Extension Agent:

Moe Tkacik. Go read.

Americans aren't the only bigoted people in the world, and alphadesigner's web project allows people from different countries to explore their own inner bigot. Born Imperialist? Divide a Continent!* Here's Europe as seen by a German bigot:

Via E blogs

*All tongue in cheek of course. "Titles like Unleash your Bigotry! Become an Idiot!" are the tell....

Paul Jorian (an infrequent blogger) has written a new book "The Price"which looks at price determination through a new lens, having found supply and demand not predictive. He modestly calls it a theory of pricing:

truth and price- exhibit an identical structure; the only difference between the two of them is that truth is expressed with words and price with numbers.

I just know there are a lot of readers here who'll love this. Dance your PhD to explain it? Meh. Been there, done that hat tip Chester, Markus, Asa, Kris and Ben. I own that pole at [Chicago club of note], people. But seriously, as a concept, I really can take it quite seriously. What's the saying? "If I can't dance at your Revolution, I'm not coming." That's me, fer shore.

It's a silly project, but at the same time, one I can think about and value. In my case? I actually have "the dance" of my PhD studies. I translated them, after all! The Sumerian women who defined their culture and society of those ancient days? All about dancing! They knew, as I do: if you want to control people and shape their opinions, nothing works better than young women, funky music and rhythmic chanting and mythological epic narrative all wrapped up in skimpy clothing and feasting/drinking/smoking stuff. Followed by somewhat hidden kinky/gay/intergender sexual encounters that the rubes/worshippers don't get to see or participate in, but the "cool" or "saved" or "enlightened" people do. Heh. Ask any of the bartenders at any well-known gay club mecca. Yes, most of us here are atheists, having been kicked out of our religions if we ever had one. No, we don't miss it, because Saturday night at Crow Bar or the Eagle in the old days? Better than any Sunday morning anywhere.*

Despite being a blogger who blogs about politics, I actually know more about Sumerian grammar than I do about American political history, and I readily admit that. So this comment by reader Joe really intrigued me:

By the way, I think the filibuster issue is one of Corrente's major blind spots. I don't think the degree to which filibuster abuse has completely altered our system of governance can be overemphasized.

Do you agree, Corrente? If so, why? If not, why not? Is the 'debate' about 'what (Democrats) [or] (Republicans) can/should/would do with the filibuster' important, or distraction?

Hoss is wondering how responsible people like Beck are for individual expressions of eliminationist violence, and to me that's not even an interesting question. It is just for that purpose that Beck in on TV, to better encourage his viewers to violence. It's as old as the Nazi Playbook and one of the reasons I'm very strict about not exposing myself or anyone in my care to that sort of filth.

What does interest me is if I have any neighbors like this. I know my neighbors pretty well, and even the Republicans on my block are laid back people who smoke dope and like to take naked hot tubs at midnight. If they watch a lot of FOX and the like, it doesn't show up in more than occasionally repeating some of its more innocuous lies when we shoot the shit around the mailbox. I don't think that even if my Republican neighbors experienced some dreadful economic upset and were told directly to blame me, they'd come over here with a shotgun looking to blow the ACLU card out of my hands.

But I wonder... The continuing decline of the economy (not to mention things like health care and educational standards) along with the deliberate increase in violent rhetoric in the SCLM: how powerful do you think they are, in terms of creating more gun-toting would-be "revolutionaries?" The guy in the Media Matters link was going to San Francisco to kill people in the ACLU and some foundation Beck hates. But what about killing regular brown people, or gay people? It's not a stretch to say those groups are being blamed and targeted by the likes of Beck daily, too.

How worried are you about your neighbors, and have you ever been threatened with violence by someone for political reasons?

But then, we are talking about the Obama administration. If the Ds had ever been serious about the hopey changey they were selling in The Crapfest That Was 2008, they would have done at least two things in January 2009:

1. Used the nuclear option and ended the filibuster. Because if the Rs are as lunatic as the Ds claim they are, that's the first thing they're going to do whenever they regain the Senate. So why not get in first? A question that answers itself, when asked.

Some Nobel Peace Prize winners get the good news in person, over the phone from Norway (and, I add snarkily, while sitting in their Oval Office).

Others don't find out until their wives come to visit them days later in a remote Chinese prison.

When Liu Xiao Bo found out about his Nobel on Saturday he broke into tears and dedicated the prize to all who died at Tienanmen Square in 1989.

In China, the political fallout from the prize has been immense, and not good. The Chinese government has placed Liu's wife under house arrest as of this morning.

For an excellent analysis of what Liu's award means, from the Chinese government's perspective, see this.

One of the reasons I love reading essays is because I write them for a living. And I just found out this morning that this one won a modest prize in my profession.

So forgive me for kvelling, but I wanted to share the good news with my Corrente family!

Note: the topic is time, (dis)employment and money...wonder what C list blog I got those ideas from?

In what is absolutely no surprise, the Obama Administration is signaling that it's taking the banks' side in the foreclosure debacle - see here and here, which nicely mirrors the industry's shilling here.

Be sure to vote Democratic in November!

With two new posts!

I've been in Anglachel withdrawal, so this was a welcome surprise!

This is another edition of What Digby Said but with modifications. I love her work like everyone else, but I smell a little middle class privilege here. Bottom line: if they want to, the cops will kill you, for no reason, because they can. Digby is basically saying "don't resist; your life is at stake if you do" and she's not wrong. But I had to add this comment:

even being completely passive isn't enough. just so you know. have you ever heard of the needle trick cops do sometimes? here's how it works. some sadistic (racist/homophobic) cop really, really wants to put the beat down on you. he lives for that shit, and he hates dirty fucking hippies/niggers/eco activists/whatever with a roid-driven passion second only to his love of gay bathhouses and leatherbars. so one day, you're walking down the street, and duly pissing him off, so he decides to arrest you. you recognize that there's little you can do to resist, so you don't, but that's not enough for him; he *needs* to beat something down, right now. so after you've sank to your knees, laid on the ground, and put your hands behind you, this is what happens. as he cuffs you, he takes a needle hidden between his fingers, and pokes you in the finger with it. obviously, most of us would react, physically and vocally. but because the camera on his cruiser won't record something as small as a needle, and up to this point he's been all official and correct, it looks like *you* were the one resisting arrest. he gets to whip out the taser, the baton, his partner gets in on the fun... it can go on and on, until you're dead, even.
i'm a fan of peaceful resistance. but the other side does play dirty, and they don't need an excuse to tase people. they do it whenever they want, including when they just don't like the look of your face.

We're on a collision course with technology. Free speech is being killed in order to save it.

Something is always boiling up that involves free speech. Cartoons are drawn of the "wrong" person, somebody is jailed for speaking out and gets the Nobel prize, there are plans to build a mosque in the "wrong" place. And some people picket funerals to gloat.

All of these things are a step too far for some people. Others insist that we can't draw any lines without sliding down a slippery slope of more and more lines until there's no free speech left.

The dilemma doesn't actually seem intractable to me. Try a thought experiment. You're in a huge room with 10,000 other people. Nobody can say anything. There's total silence except for the occasional suppressed cough. Is there any freedom of speech?

Now you're in the same room, but anyone can speak and anyone can say anything. Everybody's talking -- shouting, really, to make themselves heard. You can't even hear yourself speak. Is there any freedom of speech?

Govt: No call for Social Security increase in 2011. Yeah, yeah, lots of technical reasons for no COLA increase, but since when did this administration care about regulations or the rule of law? This is politics:

Chris Hedges, March to Nowhere. Hedges explains why the left will never be able to rally the masses so long as they remain wedded to the rotting hull of the Democratic Party. (h/t Montana Maven)

emptywheel, Remember Cramdown? emptywheel takes apart "anonymous" WH officials on the mortgage crisis so I don't have to. (via Atrios)

The deposition of a foreclosure mill employee in Florida. As a commenter somewhere else pointed out (wish I could remember where), Bill McCollum has done us all a favor by using civil depositions instead of a grand jury. Depositions don't have to be kept secret. (via Yves Smith)

Barry Ritholtz, Here Come the Clawbacks. I (heart) Sheila Bair.

Also from Ritholtz, a roundup of charts re the employment data. Was "Recovery Summer" good for you?

The Onion, The American People Hire High-Powered Lobbyist to Push Their Interest in Congress.

A Simple Guide to Writing Literary American Fiction. I'd rather poke my eyes out with knitting needles than read another book by Jonathan Franzen. (via Ioz).

I was reading an op-ed article today on the case of Chiranuch Premchaiporn, the webmaster of a popular Thai internet site who has been arrested twice for publishing material allegedly defaming the King of Thailand, and this paragraph really struck me:

[Thai] authoritarianism is "soft" because it is tailored for the globalisation age where domestic legitimacy and international credibility matter more than in past eras of outright military-authoritarian rule. This decidedly nuanced and disguised authoritarianism thus revolves around a necessary hybrid of a civilian democratic facade with a military spine.

Is "soft" authoritarianism a Thai innovation? I don't think so. Over the last ten years, the US government also has

White Hinterland - The Destruction of the Art Deco House:

Vampire Weekend gets hyped for having literate lyrics, but it comes off as a little contrived to me. WH comes off as both literate and authentic. For instance, here is how this song begins:

They’re knocking down that Art Deco house
The clawfoot tub is cracked and crushed

This picture: Lilium lancifolium / Lilium tigrinum

Tiger lily

To conclude our series of quotes from Paul Street’s The Empire's New Clothes: Barack Obama and the Real World of Power, here are notable Obama-administration quotes that are featured in the book:

Barack Obama: “I can’t tell you how many foreign leaders who are heads of center-right governments say to me, I don’t understand why people would call you socialist, in my country, you’d be considered a conservative.”

Barack Obama: "I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business. They provide a legitimate service, and employ a lot of our friends and neighbors."

Rahm Emanuel: “[The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is] very similar to the bill Republicans advocated in '93. And, if you look at Mr. Frum's piece, former Bush speechwriter, he noted, which is some of the things I have said before even to this show and others, that this is very similar to policies advocated back in the '90s by Republicans, not individual policies, the basic approach, which is a free-market, market-based-system approach.”

Read Vastleft’s interview with Paul Street here.

On October 7, OpenLeft ran a most charming piece by Mike Lux, Obama comes through on foreclosure issue: what's next?

But then, that most delightful and rare of Washington moments happened: the system worked. Consumer advocates started raising hell on the blogs and in traditional media, the White House started looking more closely at the issue, and literally within a matter of hours, Obama announced that he was not going to sign the bill ... As soon as the issue was raised, the White House team focused on it, and made the right decision quickly ...

But I think it is fair to ask ourselves what happens next and how the progressive community should respond to it ... The question now is how progressives respond if Obama does start to move in a more progressive direction ... progressives should be ready to move to meet the President halfway and work with him in the areas where he does move our direction, and we shouldn't always assume the worst. We should keep our healthy skepticism, push hard when we need to push, but be ready to engage when a door is opened to us to engage on.

In other words, the entire episode is a validation of the incrementalist, cooperative liberalism that has brought the progressive forces to the sorry state we are now in. More tactically, it is a plea for us now to go full steam with the Democratic GOTV operation.

I probably won't be able to blog much tomorrow, so this is premature Sunday Atheism blogging. But if you are a non-believer, why is that? What made you decide to shed your faith, or why haven't you ever adopted one? We've done this kind of posting here at Corrente before, but I'm trying to be a viral-slut here, and pick up some of the confessory energy of the IGB project. It's time to Come Out, atheists. Over and over again, if necessary. Just as there are too many gay teens contemplating suicide, there are too many non-believers who are willing to stay closeted for a little comfort, at the expense of great freedom. Tell your story, please.