Virtually Speaking Tuesdays featured Dave Johnson and Natasha Chart, something I'd been looking forward to, but I'm not sure they took the full meaning of Stuart Zechman's point in his most recent Z-Files:
Z-Files, 02/28/2012 "Extremists"
I'm Stuart Zechman, and I've heard something that really disturbs me.
I've heard that the Republican Party is now populated with wild extremists, right-wing lunatics who are completely divorced from reality, and so, like never before in American history, the GOP is now totally unreasonable and insane, and, if they get into power in Washington, the will enact the most dreadful, terrible, awful policy...ever.
Have you been hearing this, lately, too?
See, I thought that the Republican Party has always advocated the worst kind of policies and agenda.
Since, like, as far back as the 1990s, I remember Republicans being in favor of all kinds of anti-Bill of Rights, pro-endless war, anti-New Deal and pro-big corporate monopoly proposals, and performing all of these crazy political hostage-taking maneuvers to try to get that horrifying agenda through the government.
I vaguely --really vaguely-- remember way back when that Christian fundamentalist and televangelist fraud Pat Robertson actually ran for President as a Republican, I think that was in the 1980s, actually.
I remember, in the late 90s, when Congressman Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, was so freaking nuts that he actually staged a supposed "re-enactment" of how Hillary Clinton murdered a White House staffer named Vince Foster, by shooting a pumpkin in his back yard, and telling reporters to imagine that this was Foster's head. I remember when he said things like "If I could prove 10 percent of what I believe happened, he'd [Clinton] be gone. This guy's a scumbag. That's why I'm after him."
Just to give you some idea of what I'm talking about, Dan Burton, I swear to you, once proclaimed in a 1995 House hearing on the War on Some Drugs, that
"the US military "should place an aircraft carrier off the coast of Bolivia and crop dust the coca fields." It was later pointed out to him that a) Bolivia is landlocked and has no coast (Burton was chairman of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee); b) the Bolivian coca fields (in the yungas and Amazon lowlands) are beyond the reach of any carrier-borne crop-duster, being separated from the nearest coastline (the Pacific coast of Peru and Chile) by the 20,000+ feet high peaks of the Andes; and c) F-18s cannot crop-dust." [Link]
I'm telling you, this is well-documented. The Republicans from the 1990s were like this. If you listened to talk radio, like I did, or had enough time on your hands to watch the Christian conservative religious broadcasters, like I did, you were more than likely to hear Hillary Clinton referred to as a secret lesbian murderess. I'm not kidding. They literally told people that Clinton was Satan. These guys made today's "War on Religious Freedom" hucksters look like college Democrats. It makes Romney's references to Obama as a "European-style socialist" look like an endorsement.
And then they were so suicide-bomber insane, that they actually impeached a sitting president over a blow-job. Bob Livingston, the Speaker of the House to be actually resigned when he was caught having an affair, so that they could more easily go after Clinton, they were that kamikazi. (His successor was a straight-shooter from Louisiana named David Vitter.) I'm not making this up. You think that the debt-ceiling debate was Republicans at their craziest? I'm telling you, back in the 1990s they stopped the whole government, held a trial in which the now Very Serious Lindsey Graham got up on the House floor to carefully consider the nature of semen stains. This was the Republican Party of the 1990s...totally f-ing crazy. [Link]
And in the policy realm, it was unbelievable...their policy agenda, the policy proposals that came out of conservative think tanks like Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, was even worse for America than all the phony investigations, and fake scandals and even the blow-job impeachment.
These guys, these Republicans, actually proposed things like turning Medicare into a "premium support" system kind of like the Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage we got that exploded drug prices when the crazy GOP controlled all three branches of government, and proposed --get this-- creating this vast, privatized health insurance scheme where, state-by-state, the private health insurance monopolies would sell people junk insurance who were forced by law to buy their crappy coverage. It would all be means-tested and funded through HHS, so the federal government would end up actually paying insurance companies to say in business, and only the deserving poor would get any help. And this regime would somehow make health care "affordable care." Yeah, I know. Crazy, isn't it? [.pdf]
Or, talk about nuts, they proposed repealing the New Deal laws that stopped savings banks from becoming investment banks and even financial insurance companies. They basically said that the government needed to get out of the way of the giant banks gambling with all of our money, and should essentially let these geniuses create whatever debt they felt like making and selling, and then insuring themselves against default. [Link]
Now that's insane.
You really can't get more out of touch with reality than this, folks.
And they were just as crazy in the 2000s, too. You had best-seller books, like Ann Coulter's "Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism" or Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror."
I mean, how do you reason with people like this, people who want to, say, institute a massive program to infiltrate Muslim mosques with law enforcement agents, and put grade schools for African-American Muslim kids under constant state surveillance? [Link]
Remember when they said that the President had the power to do virtually anything to "keep us safe," and we just had to basically trust that he wasn't going to abuse that virtually unlimited power?
What kind of lunatics believe that this sort of due-process-less regime is somehow compatible with small-d democratic government? It's obviously the path to oligarchy and tyranny, right?
It's like we might all have to pack up and move to Canada, if extremists like that ever got into power.
So, when I was reading the New York Times the other day --you know, they're so much more reality-based than Fox News, despite the whole Judy Miller/Iraq war thing-- anyway, and I saw Paul Krugman say that the party of American conservatism is divorced from reality, quote:
How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!
"The truth, of course, is that he was not a "severely conservative" governor. His signature achievement was a health reform identical in all important respects to the national reform signed into law by President Obama four years later. And in a rational political world, his campaign would be centered on that achievement." [Link]
And I thought: wait a second...Krugman is openly declaring that Heritage Foundation health care policy, the policy that flowed from those same insane, pumpkin-shooting Republicans in the 1990s, is an "achievement."
The argument in elite, big-D Democratic circles seems to be that the scary Republicans are scarier than ever before, so scary, with their Tea Party and their conservative media, that they make the Republicans of the late 1990s look reasonable.
So reasonable, in fact, that conservative Republican policies from the late 1990s, policies that are completely at odds with the philosophy of the New Deal, a functioning government, a federal state that doesn't spy on anybody it feels like, and a free and fair market for everybody, policies that reject everything that movement liberals stand for are now considered to be "achievements" when enacted into law by today's centrist Democrats.
Now, if you think about it, that is, itself, quite detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality. And, it was not always thus.
But it does seem to be the argument that national Democrats are using to win over people like Dr. Krugman.
How could it be that the passage of policy identical in all important respects to conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation's, policy we movement liberals would have recognized in 1998 as an obviously, deeply unpopular non-solution, the product of bankrupt ideological premises regarding the superiority of "markets", certain to bring tragic consequences to the people of our country, and discredit to the party which promoted it, how could this be ever be rationally called an "achievement?"
It can't be. Not unless one jumps through extraordinary intellectual hoops to rationalize voting for a Democratic politician whose own "signature achievement" is Mitt Romney's health care policy.
And that's what this line is about, folks. We movement liberals are being told from on high that the reason why centrist Democrats' failures are actually achievements...is because the Republicans of today are super-scary.
And that's just not true. The movement conservatives are just as frighteningly wrong today as when Ann Coulter became a millionaire writing a book entitled "Godless" about liberals, and when Ramesh Ponnuru wrote "The Party of Death" about Democrats a few years ago. Quote-unquote "market-oriented" policies from the 1990s and 2000s are just as bad for America today as they were back when the majority of Democrats actually opposed them, instead of arm-twisting "progressive caucus" members into shilling for them.
So when you hear this line, that Republicans of today are like Congressional Ahmadinejads because they won't vote for Newt Gingrich's old agenda when it's proposed by Democrats, just remember: it's pretty likely that you're going to read Dem-leaning pundits in the Washington Post consider how reasonable Newt Gingrich's old agenda actually is, compared to the new Newt Gingrich's agenda.
And then ask yourself: is the political price that you're being asked to pay to protect yourself from these terrifying new Tea Party-style Republicans that you now have to vote for old, Dan Burton-style Republicans' agenda, and...
...what did FDR say about "fear itself"?
I'm Stuart Zechman, and this has been the Z-Files.
* * * * *
There are all kinds of evil things that this administration was against before they decided they were okay after all. Here's an expensive example from 2009 that Stuart recently brought to our attention:
[T]oday the President announced the administration's strong support for repealing the antitrust exemption currently enjoyed by health insurers. At its core, health reform is all about ensuring that American families and businesses have more choices, benefit from more competition, and have greater control over their own health care. Repealing this exemption is an important part of that effort.
Today there are no rules outlawing bid rigging, price fixing, and other insurance company practices that will drive up health care costs, and often drive up their own profits as well.
Julian Assange interview on Newshour - if Iran's nuclear program was already destroyed by Israel, what's the real reason behind the war drums?
I think the cold was slightly less horrible today than it was yesterday, but I'm not exactly feeling like a bright spark right now. But the weather is warmer, and I actually felt up to paying attention to the garden, so that can't be bad.
Michael Hudson tells a fascinating story: "2,181 Italians Pack a Sports Arena to Learn Modern Monetary Theory - The Economy Doesn't Need to Suffer Neoliberal Austerity [...] Stephanie Kelton (incoming UMKC Economics Dept. chair and editor of its economic blog, New Economic Perspectives), criminologist and law professor Bill Black, investment banker Marshall Auerback and me (along with a French economist, Alain Parquez) stepped into the basketball auditorium on Friday night. We walked down, and down, and further down the central aisle, past a packed audience reported as over 2,100. It was like entering the Oscars as People called out our first names. Some told us they had read all of our economics blogs. Stephanie joked that now she knew how The Beatles felt. There was prolonged applause - all for an intellectual rather than a physical sporting event."
David Dayen on The Broken Regulatory State: "If anything, the foreclosure fraud settlement has shown a breakdown in the ability of regulatory agencies to deal with the aftermath of fraudulent conduct. They simply have no ability to offer a regulatory response that's commensurate with the behavior." Maybe it should be addressed in criminal law, then.
One reason I dismiss arguments for paying teachers by "merit" is that it's almost impossible to assess actual merit that finely. You occasionally find teachers of manifest brilliance, and you occasionally find teachers whose performance is so bad - or egregious - that you really need to fire them, but by and large you basically just have people trying to convey stuff to a bunch of students and performing as well as can be expected in the circumstances. You can't have a universal standard for them because all classrooms are not equal, all communities are not equal, all schools are not equal. And, in addition, there's always a lot of politics in any workplace, in any district, in any state, that can adversely affect not just individual teachers, but whole schools and even entire educational systems. And that's just one little thing. Of course, this applies to more than just teachers and schools, and it goes well beyond that. What do people mean by "achievement"? What's "productive"? Even the decisions over what is "good performance" and what isn't start with certain assumptions that can be, essentially, political. But people like to believe in meritocracy, as Yves Smith notes: "When it comes to bias, it seems that the desire to believe in a meritocracy is so powerful that until a person has experienced sufficient career-harming bias themselves they simply do not believe it exists." (And, I submit that people who play the lottery can do the math just fine. If you are in no position to get rich by bright ideas and hard work, even if you are bright, able, and very hard-working, as so many people are, the math is simple: Your only chance at getting rich is to play the lottery. End of story.)
Paul Abrams says Wall Street is now supporting tax hikes on the wealthy, with even Jamie Dimon saying, ""I would tax dividends and interest income higher and capital gains. "Have a higher tax rate. If you said there'd be a certain percent rate for people making over a million dollars and a higher percent rate for people making over $10 million, no problem with me. I don't think people should be able to pass unlimited amounts on to their kids." David Waldman @KagroX tweets: "Because the tax rate at the end of a pitchfork is 100%."
Warren Buffett says high corporate taxes are a myth, and that we did fine when we had much higher taxes on corporations. And even though he's no great public speaker, he's able to articulate this simple thing that, y'know, we don't even hear most of the time, even though it's true.
I suppose you could say Ezra Klein is manfully trying to debunk a silly idea that's floating in the NYT, but he's using all the misleading language and bizarro rationales of the blitherati in Washington. Here we find him getting it wrong on Simpson-Bowles, which he forgets many important things about. Like the fact that nobody wanted a "deficit commission" in the first place because it was a stupid idea, and that it never issued a report at all because no one could agree on it, and that Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles wrote their own "report" that didn't propose anything that would genuinely reduce deficits because reducing deficits isn't what they actually care about. They care about convincing the world to kill Social Security, which you'd never do if you really wanted to be fiscally responsible. Jan Schakowsky, a member of the commission who, unlike Bowles, was actually elected, also produced her own report - one that completely disagreed with Simpson and Bowles and was, of course, more to the point. Yet no one in Washington is talking about why Obama has ignored that plan, even though it's Schakowsky, and not Simpson and Bowles, that Obama has actually been rejecting. Oh, yeah, that's the other thing that's entirely wrong with Ezra's piece - it starts with the false assumption that Obama has failed to embrace the non-existent Simpson-Bowles "commission report" that isn't a commission report, and that just isn't true. Obama has been trying to embrace Simpson and Bowles' plan to wreck Social Security since before he was even elected, and that's the very reason he forced this stupid commission on a public and Congress that had already rejected it. Ezra does note that Obama has actually moved to the right of Simpson and Bowles' recommendations, but he still doesn't seem to know that they were not "the commission report" and that this isn't 11-dimensional chess, it's just Obama pursuing right-wing programs. Dean Baker caught the NYT selling the same misleading take, and debunks one of the main lies in the scam: "The piece also misled readers when it asserted that, 'benefits for an aging population soon would increase deficits to unsustainable levels.' In fact, the main problem is rising private sector health care costs that were projected to make Medicare and Medicaid unaffordable. The increased costs due to aging alone are quite gradual and affordable." What's making them unaffordable, as Schakowsky suggested in her report, is that the government refuses to negotiate them down, despite the fact that doing so would save us $270bn. (PS. Why does Ezra hate democracy?)
Jake Tapper actually pressed the White House spokesbeing Jay Carney about the contradiction in the White House's alleged support for tough reporting and it's war on whistleblowers, Glenn Greenwald notes in one of his Various Matters posts, quoting Tapper: "How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistleblowers to court? You're - currently I think that you've invoked it the sixth time, and before the Obama administration, it had only been used three times in history. You're - this is the sixth time - you're suing a CIA officer for allegedly providing information in 2009 about CIA torture. Certainly that's something that's in the public interest of the United States. The administration is taking this person to court. There just seems to be disconnect here. You want aggressive journalism abroad; you just don't want it in the United States." Also from Glennzilla: "Both Scott Lemieux and Jeralyn Merritt have good commentaries on Elena Kagan's joining with the five right-wing Supreme Court Justices to dilute the protections of Miranda. One thing I found fascinating is to read how many commenters to this Daily Kos post about the ruling are actually defending the Alito/Thomas/Roberts/Scalia rationale (though the majority are criticizing Kagan). How many of them would be defending the Court conservatives this way had Kagan not joined them in their opinion diluting Miranda? My guess - on which I'd place a fair amount of money - is: zero. Had it been only the five right-wing Justices voting this way, I strongly believe that not a single one of those commenters would be uttering a peep of support for it." Glenn's original response to the decision is here, and you can read what Bmaz had to see here. The verdict seems clear: Obama's replacement for Justice Stevens (who was, you recall, a Republican appointee), moves the court further to the right.
Here's this fairly decent article about ALEC pushing voter-ID laws, but you know things have gone beyond stupid when you see a paragraph like this:
With little proof of cheating many Democrats say it's really all about Presdient Barack Obama. They believe that voter ID rules will probably keep a lot of the young and the poor from voting, both groups were big Obama backers last round. Opponents say that's where this secretive group of powerful conservatives comes in.
It's all about Obama. A project the right-wing has pursued for my entire lifetime is all about Obama. ALEC has been around since 1973 pushing this same agenda and it's all about Obama.
I was sufficiently out of it Tuesday that I forgot to mention that Lambert and I were doing Virtually Speaking Tuesdays, and a bit traumatized by the resulting failure of my communication skills, but you can go ahead and listen to it if you want to. At the very least, listen to Stuart's Z-Files, which is at the top, and certainly and worth your time.
Nice post from Jay Ackroyd about Tort, and making the system work, and Hot Coffee: "The way the civil lawsuit thing is supposed to work is that people hurt by negligent actions get compensated for what it cost them, and then also receive punitive damages--money intended to discourage the defendant from doing the same thing to other people."
Watching Buddy Roemer talking about the corruption in both parties - and, not incidentally, defending unions and pointing out that it's management that's damaging the companies - almost made me want to vote for him.
Officials try to claim that they are meeting the needs of the very poor, but of course, that's a lie: "He said, 'Oh, I'm not eating dinner because it's my brother's turn tonight. Tomorrow is my night."
A losing strategy: "A searing new report says the environmental movement is not winning and lays the blame squarely on the failed policies of environmental funders. The movement hasn't won any 'significant policy changes at the federal level in the United States since the 1980s' because funders have favored top-down elite strategies and have neglected to support a robust grassroots infrastructure. Environmental funders spent a whopping $10 billion between 2000 and 2009 but achieved relatively little because they failed to underwrite grassroots groups that are essential for any large-scale change, the report says." Not just environmental groups, of course.
Cultural referents: "There are schools within a bike ride of here that have kids whose lives make yours look like goddamn paradise. There are people lining up at food pantries whose kids you walk by the in hall every day. Our politics is about to criminalize being girls, we're still at war even though we're pretending we're not anymore, and in an hour's drive you can be in a neighborhood that looks like something out of Blade Runner. You want to talk about morality? Let's talk about the morality of having a full metal freakout over kids touching each other to songs about 'booty' while all of THAT is going on. What on earth are we teaching teenagers when we teach them that?"
Item 1: I still have the thing that's going around and makes me feel all limp and full of aches and befogged. Item 2: It seems that I somehow accidentally saved the archive page differently from how I usually do it. The extra code didn't work, but recreating the page did, so at least that issue is solved.
This week, Virtually Speaking Sundays will feature Marcy Wheeler and David Dayen - at a much earlier time because of the Oscars - so check the post to find your time zone and listen live or later (stream or podcast). These two together should be red-hot and hugely informative.
On Virtually Speaking A-Z, Jay started off with a proposition I still completely disagree with, and Stuart didn't seem to be accepting it, either: That the corporate income tax isn't useful. But the first thing on their references page for the show is this: "U.S. Federal Tax Receipts - Fiscal Year 2011: The increase in taxes needed to support the war effort in the 1940s saw total (corporate and individual) income taxes rise to prominence as a source of Federal receipts, reaching nearly 80 percent of total receipts in 1944. After the war, the total income tax share of receipts fell from a postwar high of 74 percent in 1952 to an average of 64 percent in the late 1960s. The growth in social insurance taxes (such as Social Security and Medicare) more than offset a postwar secular decline in excise and other non-income tax shares. The combination of substantial reductions in income taxes enacted in the early 1980s and the continued growth in social insurance taxes resulted in a continued decline in the total income tax share of receipts. By 1983 the total income tax share had dropped to 54 percent of receipts, and it remained in the 53 to 56 percent range until the mid-1990s. Since 1994, the total income tax share of receipts has increased, reaching 60 percent in 2000, before dropping back to 52 percent by 2003 and then increasing to 58 percent in 2006 and 60 percent in 2007. As a result of the recession and tax reductions enacted as part of the stimulus packages in February 2008 and again in the spring of 2009, the total income tax share dropped to 57 percent in 2008 and dropped even further, to 50 percent in 2009. In 2010 the income tax share of receipts rose slightly to 50.4 percent." (I think Jay hasn't shaken loose from a lot of right-wing politicized "economics" theory. It's not a unique infection; even Krugman suffers from it. But you don't get this idea of untaxed corporations from people who can see how things work and have worked throughout history. Economic models are all "Look at the math!" But math doesn't explain how people really behave. If it did, the people would already have risen up and killed their elite masters in their beds before they sucked us dry.)
Below that, on the same page, Stuart's own hot topic is the fact that Rick Santorum is beating Romney with a message that sounds like it should be coming from someone else: "Ann Romney and her husband grew up here, but Santorum is now tied or leading him in recent polls in the state. Mitt Romney is touting his hometown roots while Santorum is pushing his blue collar background and a populist message." In fact, Republicans are doing well by talking about families and jobs and attacking elites. And the Democratic leadership and their handmaidens all act like they have more important things to talk about. So the right-wingers are winning with the rhetoric of liberalism, and the best the Democrats can do is keep the culture wars up front and offer people like this? Please, please, make it stop!
"Voting Rights Act under siege: An intensifying conservative legal assault on the Voting Rights Act could precipitate what many civil rights advocates regard as the nuclear option: a court ruling striking down one of the core elements of the landmark 1965 law guaranteeing African Americans and other minorities access to the ballot box."
In case you're wondering, Shaun Donovan is the Secretary of HUD who was originally appointed precisely because he opposes the mission of HUD, and as a result he has done a strategically awful job. He should have been replaced a long time ago but no one seems interested in doing it. And David Dayen notes that the story of how he scammed Schneiderman is right there in The New York Times. "Wow. This is on the record, with Miller saying that the release only looks like it was tailored to Schneiderman's specifications. Miller, by the way, was announced today as one of President Obama's re-election campaign co-chairs."
Atrios seems grumpier and grumpier, a feeling I certainly understand as we watch our giant intellects continue on the path to doing everything completely wrong. "Light Some More Money On Fire" (and help re-institute slavery under a modern guise). "Extraction" (when the skimmers reach the peak of laziness). And so on.
Juan Cole, "How the FCC Can Take the Money Out of Politics [...] The Federal Communications Commission should forbid television broadcasters from charging for campaign ads, and we, the public, should peacefully demonstrate outside the FCC offices at 445 12th Street SW, in Washington, D.C., until it does so." That'd be a nice start, but what about the non-stop campaign that is run on behalf of right-wing ideology all over the airwaves in the not-campaign-ads material?
Chomsky, "Anniversaries From 'Unhistory'" - We are not observing the 50th anniversary of a disastrous decision our leaders made, and you have to wonder if we will even celebrate the 900th anniversary of Magna Carta in a few years' time.
One reason I'm so sick of the attempts to drum up the daily Ten Minute Hate against Republicans or self-identified conservatives is that I'm pretty sure that at least half of the Republican electorate is - and, indeed, feels - entirely unrepresented by their party leadership, and not because that leadership is "too liberal". But the other reason is that I'm pretty sure that if we can just get rid of all the damned tribalism, there are plenty of registered Republicans who would get on board with a push to restore the Constitution and the project of promoting the general welfare. The trouble is that for 30 years the GOP leadership and, more importantly, it's rich funders and savvy operatives, have pushed the party membership to see liberals as people who hate them, and liberals have obligingly complied by hating on them non-stop. It's a waste of time. And I can't help thinking back to that little political map Stirling Newberry presented us with a couple of years ago that was actually much more meaningful than the ones everyone else always comes up with.
Meanwhile... I'm pretty sure the entire purpose of the Phelps family is to get people so annoyed that they do something stupid that can end up in a lawsuit that gets your money to them. For the record, I'd consider it a badge of honor to have them show up at my funeral, and I think the thing to do if they show up at your own event is to cheer, take pictures, and just generally behave like you won the lottery. Alas, there is the possibility that they won't show up at your event, but you can use this handy green-screen photo to paste them in! (Of course, if you're high-profile enough, they might do it for you and save you the trouble. Seems having them there is becoming indistinguishable from not having them there.)
That's what I already had before I started to notice that all of my efforts to avoid anyone who has whatever's going around failed. So, I feel like crap and don't really want to think.
Also, I'm experimentally adding a piece of code to the archive page, but I have no reason to think it will work. For all I know, it could make things worse! Please report soonest.
This week on Virtually Speaking Sundays, the panelists are Stuart Zechman and Joan McCarter. The rest of the week's VS schedule can be found here, and also contains the video for the Z-files episode quoted in the previous post.
In my continuing series of ways to get other people to write my posts for me, there's this item I found over in comments somewhere at Eschaton (but I seem to have mislaid the correct link) from regular commenter DWD:
Last night I posted this: my own political agenda.
Off the top of my head, ten changes that would make life better for mostly everyone (probably not the richest of the rich but who cares?)
1. Nationalize our communication systems. Telephony, cable TV, and data transmission need to become the people's. If we stopped sending a great deal of our money into the coffers of a few corporations that have so much cash that they continue to expand their control, we would have more money for other things like education. If France can offer the big three communication needs (phone, internet, and television) for a fee roughly 1/3 of what we are paying, we should follow their example.
2. Immediately institute regulations on the amount of interest that can be charged on credit accounts. Make it the prime rate plus 10-20% - enough to make them money but not so much as to continue to fleece the population.
3. Regulate severely or nationalize the use of debit cards and force businesses to discount for cash commensurate with the fees that they are paying for using these electronic transfers.
4. Separate the banks from speculation and traditional banking. By allowing our banks to become addicted to gambling they are no longer serving the public's interest but theirs.
5. Immediately institute a transaction tax of less than 1% on each transaction. The only effect that people would ever see is when they sell a stock and have to pay this fee out of their proceeds. What this would do is stop the manipulation that major players in the market can perform to bleed money out of the system.
6. Immediately cease the speculative trading of commodities. As I have often stated if you want to buy oil or grains then you must have the facilities to actually accept delivery of such commodities. If you cannot then you have no business in this market.
7. Immediately treat all income the same whether from salaries or capital gains: treat everyone the same as far as the taxes in our society are concern. Let them contribute to the social security and medicare systems as well pay their fair share of the burdens we all should share for living in a modern society.
8. Break up the media conglomerates. There is no reason that all of our news should be filtered through corporations like Disney or Rupert Murdoch's Media Empire.
9. Treat our trading partners in exactly the way we are treated. Japan can export as many automobiles as we can sell in Japan. China the same. As is stands now all this type of trade is doing is stealing bread off our tables.
10 Stop the damned revolving door that spins riches to those who worked in government service regulating the same industries that enrich them. Forbid anyone working in a senior position in government from working for a private firm in the same area for a period of time no less than five years and have this same restriction apply to family members.
Do these things and the world could change.
Discuss.
* * * * *
Isn't it puzzling that legislators are supposed to be improved by being paid more money, but teachers aren't?
Forget everything else Santorum said - let's talk about his attack on mainline Protestants. I think it's time they stood up and attacked back, m'self. Santorum and his fringe Prots have been promoting an attack on the teachings of Jesus for decades and someone needs to say so. Meanwhile, Catholic bigshots once again miss the point of that whole Good Samaritan thing. Who is my neighbor?
Bruce Springsteen: 'What was done to my country was un-American': "At a Paris press conference on Thursday night, Bruce Springsteen was asked whether he was advocating an armed uprising in America. He laughed at the idea, but that the question was even posed at all gives you some idea of the fury of his new album Wrecking Ball."
No, I haven't changed any of my code, but something seems to have changed somewhere, and I don't know how to fix it. I have not updated the page since I originally loaded the last post, and yet in the days between then and now, people who could click the permalinks and see the archive page can no longer see it. But there was at least one person who was having the problem before I uploaded that post, while no one else complained about it. And it's not everyone - some people click the permalink and see the page fine, and some see a bunch of code instead. And some people have reported they had the problem but then it went away. This may have been something to do with an update of Webkit (for Chrome and Safari), but I don't know.
Panelists on Virtually Speaking Tuesdays,Susie Madrak and David Dayen, with Stuart Zechman (who informs me that it was Jay, not him, who did the graphics for the last Z-Files). Stuart has been asking why we needed the Robo-Settlement - or, rather, why the White House wanted it so urgently. It's possible that he has found the answer:
I'm Stuart Zechman, and I've got three questions for you:
First question: What's not to love about the robo-settlement?
You know, the just-announced immunity settlement that grants the five biggest banks in America immunity from prosecution and investigation in 49 states for the mass-forgery they committed in their haste to foreclose on as many American families' homes as possible? The "robo-signing" deal?
If you're a liberal Democrat, aren't you pretty darn happy about the whole thing?
You're not?
Well, I was just reading the Washington Post the other day, and the decidedly Democratic-voting Ezra Klein had this to say about the robo-settlement:
"The agreement won't end our housing troubles and it won't end the banks' legal troubles. But it will help a bit on housing -- it should lead to principal reductions, refinancings, and even checks for millions of homeowners -- and help a lot in protecting banks from lawsuits. Given that many in the market are already turning bullish on housing, this could be the push many need to begin reinvesting in the sector." [Link]
Now when Ezra says "checks for millions of homeowners" in the midst of a catastrophic 8 percent national unemployment rate, and "the push many need to begin reinvesting," this whole deal started to sound like something else...
Hmm..."checks for millions of homeowners," "push many need to begin reinvesting"...sounds kind of like...a tiny economic STIMULUS plan, doesn't it?
Sounds like the Administration basically wants economic stimulus, and they're using the bank settlement to get it.
Now, obviously this would be --at least according to economists that correctly predicted the housing collapse-- a totally inadequate stimulus that also dubiously depends in large part on inspiring "confidence" and reducing "uncertainty" in the beautiful minds of our cash-hoarding corporate giants...but that pretty much sounds like every economic measure proposed by this Administration, right?
So now their awesome recovery program this election year includes the seemingly indefinite, Social Security-ruining payroll tax holiday, AND a check for up to $2,000 cut at some point over the next three years to over 700,000 people out of 4 million families potentially illegally foreclosed upon between 2008 and 2011. Yep, sure sounds like this Administration's idea of "stimulus."
The genius of it is that they don't even have to spend a single cent of that $30 billion dollars of Home Affordable Modification Program money that Treasury still won't make directly available to homeowners --they can use that to pay down the deficit. Isn't it fantastic?
Why, just yesterday, Reuters reported that the cash poor Federal Housing Administration will be likely to receive a billion dollars from the settlement, instead of having to borrow from Treasury. Imagine that! These five giant, money center banks that took 9 trillion dollars in near no-interest, no-recourse loans from the Federal Reserve are now basically giving their money to the FHA, the federal insurer and guarantor of mortgages, so that the Obama Administration can claim some deficit reduction in an election year. (Come to think of it, why not just cut out the middleman, and replace the FHA with some enormous, federally-guaranteed, private insurance corporation, and have them insure the money center banks' mortgages against default, like AIG...oh, wait. Never mind.) [Link]
And how about the news that at least three states, Maine, Wisconsin and Missouri, are already planning on using large portions of their settlement dollars to patch those states' general funds, for budget-balancing. Hey, when the Administration signed off on those automatic cuts from their debt-ceiling deal, they had to plan on something to offset the disastrous effect on the states, right? Why not send down a little cash without doing so in a way in which Republicans and Meet The Press' David Gregory can possibly blame the Administration for spending job-creators' money? [Link]
It's perfect. In an election season following 4 years of an economic policy that has produced 4 million foreclosures, 13 million unemployed people and record profits for money center banks, the Administration can still blame Congress, some people get $2,000 checks to hold up in front of news cameras, JPMorgan's CEO can reconsider contributing to the Obama 2012 campaign, the establishment press will talk about investor confidence...if you want Obama to have a shot at winning in November, what's not to love?
[.pdf]
Can you see why the Administration wanted this settlement so badly?
Along with the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits, it's their 2012 "stimulus package."
So, second question:
If this settlement will maybe be the difference between an economic number ticking up or a number ticking down before November, isn't immunity for banks that have stolen people's homes and wrecked the economy a small price to pay to make sure that Obama gets elected to a second term in office?
Which is more important to you: a working system of elite accountability in America, or Obama's reelection?
Because, inevitably, whether I'm right about immunity being traded for minuscule private-sector stimulus or not, this settlement will be described by the Obama campaign to liberal Democrats as something that Obama simply had to do, in order to have the best chance of reelection.
Well, don't you want Obama to do whatever he has to in order to get reelected...whatever it takes?
Or --and here's the final question-- are there some things that are more important than the reelection of a Democratic president, some things without which our country can't be successful, and our people can't have the nation that we deserve after these long years of failure and stupidity and avarice and corruption on the part of our government, banks, giant industries, institutions...our elites?
Are there some things that simply can't be sacrificed on the altar of Barack Obama's reelection campaign?
If things keep going the way they're going, we're going to have to choose one way or the other. Movement liberals are either going to be a movement primarily about accountability for everyone in America, or we're going to remain pawns on an 11-dimensional chess board for the foreseeable future.
If you find that there's not much to love about robo-settlement, then ask yourself 1) what does it say about what's wrong with our country at this moment in our history, 2) what won't you tolerate to see Obama in the White House for another four years, and 3) isn't long-overdue accountability what America needs most right now to put us on the path to a just and sustainable future? Or just ask yourself one thing: What are you willing to lose...to win?
I'm Stuart Zechman, and this has been...the Z-Files.
Plergb. (I had just gotten off of a phone call with Stuart in which we argued, again, about the meaning of "conservatism" when I read this, so it seemed to be particularly, um, apropos.) (And this Irish sf series looks kinda neat.)
I wonder if anyone will be reading this today from the Bed-in in Washington Square. Yep, it's time to Occupy Valentine's Day.
Making you pay: The canard is that "forcing" organizations to provide contraceptive health coverage means forcing them to pay extra for it. Of course, the reverse is true - policies that omit contraceptive coverage cost more than policies that provide it, because pregnancies cost more than contraception. And that means that what the no-contraceptive-coverage crowd really wants is to force people to pay extra for an exception that nobody needs. There's a similar canard related to the whole idea of forbidding funds for abortions for welfare recipients - it's cheaper for the state to fund it than not to fund it, so the rest of us are having to pay the costs of not funding it. This is, of course, a consistent theme with right-wing policy. Fully-funded, WIC programs used to save us $45,000 for every $100 spent, but they kept cutting down until it saved not nearly that much, and yet it still saves us money, though every cut means it saves less again. And so on. (And my thanks to The Raw Story for providing a clip from The Daily Show that I can actually watch.)
"30,000 drones in American skies, civil liberties in jeopardy: Washington- A bill passed last week allocating more than $63 billion to the Federal Aviation Administration would increase the existence of drones in civilian airspace across America and is expected to be signed into law by President Barack Obama." (via)
I'm assuming Stuart is responsible for putting the graphics together for the useful video of the Z-Files I quoted below.
"Where is Kropotkin When We Really Need Him? [...] Kropotkin honored Darwin's insights about natural selection but believed the governing principle of natural selection was cooperation, not competition. The fittest were those who cooperated. [...] He spent the rest of his life promoting that concept and the theory of social structure known as anarchism. To Americans anarchism is synonymous with a lack of order. But to Kropotkin anarchist societies don't lack order but the order emerges from rules designed by those who feel their impact, rules that encourage humanly scaled production systems and maximize individual freedom and social cohesion." (via) (Also, Fred Clark on rewriting the Bible to suit sexist politics.)
"Should Israel be classified as a state sponsor of terrorism?: That question is being debated in the wake of a story that NBC News broke late last week. Citing unnamed US officials, NBC reported that Israel has used an Iranian opposition group to carry out those much-publicized assassinations of Iranian scientists. The group in question is the M.E.K. (Mojahedin-e Khalq, or People's Mujahedin of Iran), which since 1997 has been designated a terrorist group by the United States because of its alleged assassinations of US citizens."
David Swanson says, "27 of 35 Bush Articles of Impeachment Apply to Obama. When Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush on June 9, 2008, the 35 had been selected from drafts of nearly twice that many articles. President Obama has accumulated his own massive list of high crimes and misdemeanors that were unavailable for Bush's list (thing's like openly murdering U.S. citizens, launching massive drone wars, selectively and abusively prosecuting numerous whistleblowers as spies, holding Bradley Manning naked in isolation, attacking Libya without so much as bothering to lie to Congress, etc.). Nonetheless, it is instructive to review the 35 Bush articles in the Obama age. It quickly becomes apparent that Obama has either exactly duplicated or closely paralleled most of the 35."
It's turkeys all the way down - I don't usually quote science like this because I can't for the life of me figure out how it can be true when liberals keep falling for the same old crap. (Am I the only one who finds it worrying that Chris Hayes has gone all happy talk, by the way? It's even got John Sarbanes rhapsodizing about public-private partnerships, ffs!) Meanwhile, Digby and Corey Robin talked about The Reactionary Mind and all that stuff on Virtually Speaking Sundays.
But then it seemed it was more like this: "49-State Foreclosure Fraud Settlement Will Be Finalized Thursday." (And Jesus Christ, Ezra, why on earth is it good news that this deal will "help a lot in protecting banks from lawsuits"? These people stole people's homes, and you think a check for a couple of grand is some kind of compensation? If you get caught selling a lid of grass they confiscate every damn thing you have, but if you steal someone's house you just pay pocket change in compensation out of billions you made from cheating people? That's really nice for you - if you're a banker. But, you know, we don't need bankers like that! And we need to put those banksters in jail so they won't do it again - and doing more of it seems to be just what they have in mind, thanks to this deal.)
1) Create a hostage population dependent on the outcome of successful negotiations between the government and a giant industry
2) Negotiate with the industry on the basis of a shared agreement that all parties are best served if the issue were to be put behind them
3) Negotiate with external actors to defuse risks to the consensus outcome, by offering prominent, careerist roles inside the Administration
4) Declare victory, sell the outcome to interest groups
The Counter-factual:
Imagine if this pattern had been applied to
Trust-busting
The Emergency Banking Act of 1933
The Premises:
1) Look forward, not backward
2) The system must be preserved
3) Trust the institutions involved
4) The enemies of progress are partisan and political, not economic and structural
5) We know what we're doing better than you
The Path to Progress:
1) Accountability must become our movement
2) Stop negotiating with hostage-takers
3) Demand the truth, above all
4) Be smarter than them, without the hubris
Synopsis: This latest settlement with the giant money center banks can be viewed by movement liberals as part of a broader malignancy within the government and big-D Democratic national politics, which we might refer to as "Robo-settlement" (a play on the fraudulent practice for which the settlement grants effective immunity) which is the tendency we've seen (in examples like the SEC's proposed settlement with Citigroup) to follow a pattern of political dishonesty and manipulation in pursuit of the reconciliation of structural issues to industry satisfaction.
"Why Obama should be worried" - Yeah, it's Politico, but Obama's policies sure aren't charming the pants off of the electorate, are they? Maybe that's because he doesn't even seem to know what they are.
Alan Moore has an article over at Auntie Beeb's place, "V for Vendetta and the rise of Anonymous" [...] "At the time, we both remarked upon how interesting it was that we should have taken up the image right at the point where it was apparently being purged from the annals of English iconography. It seemed that you couldn't keep a good symbol down. [...] Our present financial ethos no longer even resembles conventional capitalism, which at least implies a brutal Darwinian free-for-all, however one-sided and unfair. Instead, we have a situation where the banks seem to be an untouchable monarchy beyond the reach of governmental restraint, much like the profligate court of Charles I. [...] Today's response to similar oppressions seems to be one that is intelligent, constantly evolving and considerably more humane, and yet our character's borrowed Catholic revolutionary visage and his incongruously Puritan apparel are perhaps a reminder that unjust institutions may always be haunted by volatile 17th century spectres, even if today's uprisings are fuelled more by social networks than by gunpowder. "
I'm Stuart Zechman, and I'm about to say something about a big 2012 campaign issue-to-come that may sound confusing to some folks.
Ready?
OK, here goes: Medicare is NOT primarily a "social safety net" program.
Got that?
Here's another one: Social Security is NOT primarily a "social safety net" program.
Now I know what you're saying, you're saying "Hold on just a minute there, Stuart Zechman, I've heard my entire life that these are safety net programs, which is why liberal Democrats have to support them!"
But bear with me, and I'll try to make what I mean clear, OK?
Alright.
So, when we say "social safety net," we mean a program that acts like a net, that catches people plummeting to their deaths...well, that prevents individuals from falling into total financial ruin, right?
It means that sometimes life doesn't go as planned, or we make the wrong choices, or end up in unexpected --or expected-- financial hardship. Or, we started out in hardship, and just never had the opportunity to get ahead in life to the point where we could live without some kind of net to hold us up at the end of the day.
Have you heard this before?
A "social safety net" means that some people can make mistakes, or be unlucky, or (frankly) make bad choices, and the rest of us will gladly --or not so gladly, depending on who you are-- step right in with our charitable contributions in the form of taxes, to help save these poor unfortunate people from being destitute at the end of their lives. If you didn't manage to put away a nickel your entire life for your old age, we'll help you --there's Social Security for that. If you weren't able to get a job that guaranteed private medical insurance in your retirement, we'll help you --there's Medicare for that. It's about helping those who can't help themselves.
So when we say "social safety net," what we mean is: welfare for people who are poor enough to depend solely on these programs as a last resort, once their meager savings are all gone, if they ever had any savings to begin with.
And --back to the confusing part-- I'm saying that Social Security and Medicare are NOT primarily social safety nets. I'm saying all that stuff I just said involving "helping those who can't help themselves" is NOT what Social Security and Medicare are primarily about.
Somehow, over the course of many decades, the significance of these brilliant, New Deal-era policies got changed in people's --even many liberal Democrats'-- minds, but they're NOT primarily social safety nets, they're something else.
Social Security and Medicare are primarily PUBLIC INSURANCE. Not "safety net," but "public insurance."
Let me explain:
In March, 1933, as FDR took the oath of office, state governors had closed every single bank in the nation; nobody could cash a check or get at their savings.
Now imagine that for a second.
You've worked your whole life, you've diligently saved your whole life, you've done everything as you should have, you were responsible, you put off today's pleasures for tomorrow's security, and you've done the most routine and non-risky things possible with your money: you've put your life savings into a savings account at a bank...but suddenly you can't get to your money.
You can't draw upon your savings, because it's effectively gone: your bank has gambled your money away. It lent its money to the bigger banks, which lent their money to even bigger banks, and the masters of high finance lost big at the casinos one day, so you're out of luck.
Due to no fault of your own, you, like tens upon tens of millions of Americans, are now as broke as the big banks.
Your fortunes rise and fall with their fortunes at the back-room investment tables. You're dependent on the 1% and the success of their schemes in order to get by in your old age.
Unless...you have insurance. But not just any insurance, not private insurance which probably invested all your premiums in the big banks' gambling schemes, no no --you need to have PUBLIC INSURANCE.
And that's what these programs are: public insurance against the geniuses in high finance gambling with your money.
It means independence. It means freedom for ordinary people. It means that, when the guys with top hats and monocles come to your democratically elected federal government for their social safety net in the form of federally guaranteed recapitalization loans, they come to the People's House with their hats--instead of a gun and hostage demands-- in their hands. Social security is a public option; a piece of security and freedom that can't be taken away from us by complex credit card contracts or shady "reverse" mortgages sold by former Senator (and actor) Fred Thompson on FOX News Channel.
When the banks lost all our money (the first time) in the Great Depression, this country learned one of the biggest lessons about advancing freedom since the 13th Amendment: that we the people can't truly be free, unless we use the federal government to establish independence from big, powerful, private interests like money center banks, who tend to hold us and the entire American economy hostage when things go badly for them.
So when you're 65, and you can't pull your money out of your "Health Savings Accounts" insured against default by AIG, and your HMO invested everyone's premiums into Bear Stearns recommended stocks, you've got something that those geniuses can't touch: Medicare. You've got independence from the captains of finance and industry. You've got freedom. You've got pubic insurance.
And it's not just you, it's every ordinary American. Economic crashes don't just happen to poor people, they happen to everybody. And that's why everybody needs Social Security and Medicare, whether we're low income or middle income or even above average income. These programs are NOT primarily safety nets for "the most vulnerable," they're what keep all of us from being vulnerable to the 1%. Instead of depending on them, we can depend on ourselves, knowing our life's savings are safe. Along with the guarantees in the Bill of Rights, New Deal-era public insurance is what keeps we the people free.
So how did we ever, after all of that New Deal success keeping our nation safe, independent, and free for all of these years, end up in a situation where our cherished public insurance options are routinely described on MSNBC as "social safety nets"? How did this happen? Who benefits from wide acceptance of this odd notion that our public pension insurance and public medical insurance are somehow welfare for some of us, and not independence for all of us? Whose idea was this "social safety net" thing, anyway?
Hmm...
I think that movement liberals like us need to ask ourselves these things, especially as we start to hear more and more of the big Parties' plans for "shared sacrifice" and "entitlement reform" this election cycle.
When you hear that Romney's concerned about "the 90-95 percent of us" and not "the very poor" who "have a safety net" he says he's going to fix...what exactly is he talking about?
When you hear the President say that he "will veto any bill that changes benefits for those who rely on Medicare but does not raise serious revenues by asking the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to pay their fair share. We are not going to have a one-sided deal that hurts the folks who are most vulnerable," what exactly is he talking about? He will "only" change Medicare, our successful public insurance program, if...if he also gets taxes restored slightly on millionaires?
What are these guys talking about? It sounds like they're talking about welfare reform, kind of, except...they're talking about all of us, this time. They're talking about "reforming" our independence, our freedom...our public insurance.
So, if you're a movement liberal like me, but you've gotten really used to hearing our New Deal public insurance programs --the ones you've been paying premiums into your whole working life-- as "entitlements" or "social safety nets" by politicians in either party, I think it's time to declare our independence from any candidate who is willing to negotiate away our hard-won freedoms in business-as-usual capital deal-making over budgets. That means Republicans and that means Democrats, and that means making our voices clear on the difference between "safety nets" and our independence --before this election is over, and they're back to lame-duck Grand Bargains on how to pay for the 1%'s "social safety net," once again.
I'm Stuart Zechman, and this has been the Z-Files.
* * * * *
Billy Moyers interviewed Jonathan Haidt, and the discussion of moral thinking, demonization, and language, was pretty interesting and a bit scary. Here's some background in Language: A Key Mechanism of Control - Newt Gingrich's 1996 GOPAC memo - but it's about much more than that. Oh, and just who was Saul Alinsky?
"David Graeber's Debt: My First 5,000 Words" - Because Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a big book, Aaron Bady wrote a big review. Via PNH, who called it "magesterial". (And Patrick's band also finally put out an album, too.)
I'm a day late to this (snow always gets me so excited!), but this week we commemorate the Day of Shame, or perhaps that should be Days of Shame, as there have been so many. (And, hell, they haven't even bothered to gin up any good theater about Iran - we just seem to be having the war without the traditional warm-up hate-fest and fake "evidence".)
Finally! For years, I've been griping about the fact that all those rich liberals keep giving their money to things like MoveOn.org and other relatively trivial (yes, relatively trivial) projects instead of putting it where it could do some real good, which would be in broadcast media. Even when Air America was launched, it sounded from the very beginning like it wasn't actually motivated to be a real liberal station. And, as it turned out, it was really run by crooks who just wanted to exploit the clear desire of liberals to have broadcast media of our own - crooks who had no intention of actually making it work, but just of getting in, sucking up some cash, and getting out. In the radio business, this has tended to mean you take an underperforming station, turn it liberal long enough to start picking up some serious listening figures, and then get an offer of a buy from some right-wing money so they can turn it into a Christian station. That's always been part of the plan, you know - buy out media that doesn't echo the right-wing machine so that there is nothing out there that contradicts the right-wing megaphone. They have done this so successfully that even in Washington, DC, there has been nothing but right-wing radio speaking to a public that is largely repelled by it. But now that's changing, right in Washington, DC.
Finally, a high-profile voice takes the liberal stand against austerity - and it's Newt Gingrich.
Ian Welsh on The Blindingly Obvious About Obama, 2013, Europe, Iran and so on: "If Obama wins he will stop pandering to progressives and liberals. Since he never has to be reelected again, he will be even worse than he was 2009-2011. If you want anything from Obama, anything, get it before the election, do not believe promises, do not accept promises, accept cash only. If Romney or Gingrich wins, well, it's not going to be any better. SOPA and PIPA will be back in 2013 in some form, so will the pipeline enviros think they've killed." And more.
"Catholic bishops fight to deny health care to the 98 percent: The 98 percent, that is, of American Catholic women who use contraception. [...] Catholics are not opposed to contraception. Catholics are not morally opposed to contraception. Catholics are not theologically opposed to contraception. Contraception does not trouble the conscience of Catholics. Nor should it. All of which means that it is simply not accurate in any meaningful sense to say that opposition to contraception is a 'Catholic' position." (via)
Mitt Romney is a good example of what inheritance taxes are meant to prevent. I flag this post from Brilliant Jill for David Cay Johnson's explanation of how these people can game the system so that hundreds of millions of dollars can be transferred to children to prevent any semblance of meritocracy in America.
"Anonymous ready to dump 2.6GB of Haditha docs: A group of Anons are about to dump a torrent 2.6GB of email containing "detailed records, transcripts, testimony, trial evidence, and legal defense donation records" about the Haditha massacre, in which 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women and children were killed by the USMC."
Did I miss an announcement that malt has become too rare to waste on Malteasers? And what happened to the malt in Shreddies? And why can't you get a malted at Ed's Easy Diner? I don't get it.
Stuart Zechman flagged a post from a Republican talking about how Mitt Romney's "gaffe" wasn't a gaffe and Democrats only hurt themselves by treating it as one. That was introductory to a point he was making on Virtually Speaking A-Z in which he developed his theme that we need to be smarter about how we react to the political theater we are watching. But that show is most worth listening to for a little story Stuart told about watching wrestling, and I heartily recommend it to you. It tells you something that a lot of people really need to learn.
I had some problems with some of the things Richard Wolff said in his speech, but if you start here, it's a reminder that Americans - yes! even Republicans! - have a lot of agreement with movement liberals on some crucial issues. Instead of railing against Republicans, it's time to learn to talk to our countrymen.
There are so many interesting discussions going on in the comments, and you should read them, but I wanted to pull a bit of one (to the previous post) from BDBlue: "...New Deal was largely ideas being pushed by those hated, useless third parties (in this case the Socialists, Communists, etc.). What a waste it was to support those parties since they never won the presidency! But, yeah, someone who can't seem to recall history that occurred during her lifetime (e.g., MLK did not march for "more and better Democrats"), sure isn't going to "remember" stuff that occurred in late 1800s and early 1900s. She's more than happy to spread the dreaded tale of Nader, however. Oh and if our future depends on winning the trench warfare in the hallowed halls of Congress then we are royally screwed. All you have to do is read that Yves Smith post to know that. And that, of course, assumes there actually is any "warfare" going on other than a concerted effort by Congress against the rest of us and, no, electing Darcy Burner isn't going to change that. Not that electing Darcy Burner is a terrible thing, but it's kind of like cheering on the Lilly Ledbetter law while Obama bails out Wall Street." I do find it worrying that some otherwise smart people tend to operate as if it's still all about Democrats vs. Republicans. It's a losing game. It's not that we shouldn't vote, but we now have a continuous election cycle in which the only thing that changes is that for a few months right before the election, candidates try to sound a little more liberal (yes, liberal!) than they normally do, as if they don't actually plan to keep destroying our country. And it's simply stupid to pretend that "We have to beat the Republicans" is a sufficient strategy. What if we don't? What if a Republican wins the election? If you're only answer is, "It doesn't bear thinking about," or maybe, "That will be a disaster!" - well, I've got news for you, because the disaster is here and now, not later. Unless you can elect a Congress that will impeach at least a couple of Supreme Court justices and any president who fails to serve the people, partisan electoral politics is just one big distraction. Obama should be afraid to do the horrible right-wing things he is doing. What have you done to make him afraid?
And, gosh, the NYT actually had a story the other day on how the S.E.C. Is Avoiding Tough Sanctions for Large Banks. (But these stories always cut two ways - is it a story of corruption that needs to be cleaned up, or is it just another element in the "government is bad" arsenal? Who you are may determine how you read that headline. But the SEC used to work. If you remember that, all those "libertarian" arguments just sound like so much gibberish.)
Yes, one bad Apple can spoil the whole bunch, and evil practices - anti-employee control fraud, some might call it - are part of the poison that is killing our country. (It's a relief that lately no one says, "You could have bought a Mac," to me anymore. I think that's partly because none of them can afford a Mac anymore, but, whatever. To me, there is little that could be more uncool than someone trying to convince me that having a Mac is somehow cooler than having a PC. You might as well be arguing over the virtues of the Electrolux versus the Hoover.)
I suppose a counselor could specialize in areas that have nothing to do with sexuality - say, agoraphobia, and maybe even anorexia - but if you can't deal with clients who are gay or don't share your religious beliefs about reproductive rights, maybe you shouldn't have that job.
Since I didn't see this dashing picture of dashing Tesla in time for his birthday last month, I thought it'd be better than a picture of a groundhog.
I keep forgetting to mention Virtually Speaking Science, but Alan Boyle is actually pretty good not just on science, but the issues around it, and the politicization of science. Tonight's Virtually Speaking line-up will feature Stirling Newberry following Stuart and Jay on the week in liberalism.
From Naked Capitalism: Yves Smith on "Yet More Mortgage Settlement Lies: Release Looks Broad, Not Narrow; Other States Screwed to Bribe California to Join [...] "It is hard to fathom how any responsible attorney general can agree to this deal not knowing what they are getting for their constituents. It is particularly bizarre that Pam Bondi of Florida has been pushing so hard for California to join the deal rather than do her best to secure terms at least as good as those offered to California for Florida homeowners. And the same question can be asked of Schneiderman. Why has he gone from pushing for a better deal or no deal to sitting on the sidelines? This brave talk of investigations is all well and good, but this settlement agreement is being finalized now, and all the PR related to his new Federal role seems to have taken him off his day job responsibilities at a critical time. Yves again, on how Gingrich created the Pay-to-Play Congress: "Our Polarized and Money-Driven Congress: Created Over 25 Years By Republicans (and Quickly Imitated by Democrats) [...] The extent of corruption may surprise even jaundiced readers. Both houses have price lists for committees and sub-committees. Ferguson delineates some of the many mechanisms for influencing political outcomes; they extend well beyond campaign donations and formal lobbying. Even though many are by nature hard to quantify in any hard or fast way, he does categorize them and has developed some estimates (see The Spectrum of Political Money, starting on p. 23, and see also his summary on p. 42). Finally, Ferguson goes through conventional explanations of why politics has become so polarized (such as changing cultural attitudes) and shows why they don't stand up. (More on Gringrich's crimes against the US government at The Nation.)
In the wake of the tenth birthday of Guantanamo Bay a few weeks back, The Talking Dog has gone back to doing interviews about this continuing outrage with those most familiar with it, this time Kristine Huskey, Director of the Anti-Torture Program of Physicians for Human Rights, and an adjunct faculty member in national security law at the Georgetown University Law Center and counsel to a number of current and former detainees at Gitmo, and Col. Morris Davis (USAF, Ret.), the Chief Prosecutor for the Guantanamo Bay military commissions who resigned from that post in 2007 in protest of political interference in prosecutorial functions.
I have been trying to point out for a long time that the scam about Social Security is based on the fallacious notion that the former largest generation in history, the post-war Baby Boomers, represents a bulge in the population that was followed by a fall-off in the number of offspring available to pay for the retirement of their elders. (We'll leave aside for the moment the fact that this is irrelevant anyway, since the Boomers actually paid not just for their parents' retirement, but for their own, in advance.) This story about how the Boomer generation is too big to pay for is a lie. The Boomers had kids, who had kids (and some of those kids have already had kids). As the Boomers have begun to approach retirement, an even larger generation has already entered the workforce. This isn't even a secret - look, for example, at the first paragraph of this article.
At Eschaton: Isn't it about time someone admitted that there's a word for what MF Global has been up to? No, I don't just mean theft, I mean a very specific kind. If one guy did this and just put the money in his own pocket, he'd be arrested for embezzlement. Make it company policy and suddenly they want to pretend it's something else, but, you know, it really isn't. This is what it means when people talk about only using various social safety net programs to help "the truly needy" - pit the poor against the poorest. But the issue should never be whether "the truly needy" should get aid from the government; rather, it means giving everyone the resources to make sure they never have to be poor.
As the fourth year of the Obama presidency begins, Bruce Dixon at Black Agenda Report says, "Black America Paralyzed, Powerless, Irrelevant [...] If the black misleadership class has its way, the only political role for black America is to be the solid black wall around the president, the wall that does not insulate him from Wall Street or the energy companies or the warmongers. They're inside the wall. Our job once again will be to protect Barack Obama from any semblance of accountability to his supposed base. To us. Afraid of weakening him before the Republicans, we weaken ourselves instead."
What Bill Clinton told Charlie Pierce and Mark Warren: "I had a fascinating meeting with Bob Inglis the other day. Bob Inglis was an extremely conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina. He was a three-term-pledge guy in the nineties.... So he came to me and he said, 'I just want you to know, when you got elected, I hated you. And I asked to be on the Judiciary Committee in 1993, because a bunch of us had already made up our minds that no matter what you did or didn't do, we were going to find some way to impeach you. We hated you. You had no right to be president.'"
The inappropriately named Americans United for Life has pressured a right-wing Congressman to investigate Planned Parenthood, and suddenly the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which contributes funds to PP's mammogram operation, has invented a whole new rule that requires them to withdraw any association with the organization that gives mammograms to millions of women who otherwise couldn't get them. Take off your pink ribbon and give to Planned Parenthood instead. I have to rely on TBogg for useful news on this front, since The Washington Post is in the habit of getting it wrong Meanwhile, Charles Pierce reports on Oklahoma's continuing war on women.
Echidne really went to town on the crap science behind the phony abortion=breast cancer story as well as the latest from Charles Murray, who rears his ugly head every now and then to try to put a new shine on racist science. This time his science is still bad, but he has one thing right: The elites are now so far away from everyone else that they don't have a clue. Marcy Wheeler was on Virtually Speaking Tuesdays talking about that bubble.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the first time E.J. Dionne has earned Atrios' Wanker of the Day award? I had no idea he was an idiot on birth control. Hey, E.J., it's not like it's Canon Law or anything, you know...
We usually drink at the Rugby Tavern these days (Larger image).
Tonight's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays will be Digby and Stuart Zechman. Thursday on Virtually Speaking A-Z, Stuart Zechman and Jay Ackroyd discussed a fascinating new emission from the Disney Studios, a song by Joy Division, and the horrors of SOPA and our entire disgusting, authoritarian, tyrannical "intellectual property protection" regime - well worth a listen. They were joined in the second hour by Olivier Knox of Agence France Press.
Another linky post at Pruning Shears, which also has some good stuff on SOPA and our existing draconian "intellectual property" laws, along with the traditional quoting from Econned, alerts us to these stories: Oakland: "This is an attempt to keep people from participating non-violently. It's instilling fear." Unsurprisingly, MSNBC gets the story wrong. David Dayen sees hopeful signs from Schneiderman's appearance on the Maddow show, including the possibility that the IRS will be involved in helping to go after the banks for tax fraud. Even Matt Taibbi is sounding hopeful after Schneiderman discussed his focus on origination/securitization: "The securitization offenses were massive criminal conspiracies, identically undertaken by all of the big banks, to defraud investors in mortgage-backed securities. If you're looking for an appropriate target for a massive federal investigation, one that would get right to the heart of the corruption of the crisis era... well, they picked the right target here." But: "The question is, how real of an investigation will we get? The fact that Schneiderman's co-chairs are Lanny Breuer and Robert Khuzami make me extremely skeptical. I'm actually not sure that both men, in an ideal world, wouldn't be targets of their own committee's investigation." (And based on Yves Smith's assessment, I'm sticking with my initial judgement: This is just more typical Obama campaign kabuki. It's probably working - there was a lot of bad PR when Schneiderman was suddenly removed from the settlement committee with what I imagine was more public notice than was expected, and this has the smell of damage control, giving a high public profile to the appearance of the administration giving Schneiderman a better position to work from, but leaving him hamstrung by having to depend on two criminals to do the right thing, which they won't.)
Dean Baker wrote an interesting piece on "Loser Liberalism" and why the whole argument about "redistribution of wealth" is BS: "Anyone trying to understand the role of the government in the economy should know that whatever it does or does not do by way of redistribution is trivial compared with the actions it takes to determine the initial distribution. Rich people don't get rich exclusively by virtue of their talents and hard work; they get rich because the government made rules to allow them to get rich. To take an obvious example, according to the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services, we spend close to $300bn a year on prescription drugs. If drugs were sold in a free market, without government granted patent monopolies, we would spend around $30bn a year. The difference of $270bn a year is more than five times as much money as is at stake with extending the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy." And then there are the laws that create a huge imbalance in the power of corporations over unions. And then there are things like valuation of the dollar... Baker points out that as matters of pure policy, these are huge compared to tax policy. But, it has to be said, tax policy is still important, because the very fact that the rich can now keep all their money and pass it on to the next generation of their dynasties, and corporations don't have to invest back into their companies because there is no strong tax incentive to do it, is why they have the power to buy our government and make sure that all of the other laws and policies unfairly weight the game in their favor. Sam Seder talked about all this last week on The Majority Report.
Darcy Burner points out that we could make a lot of useful changes by just getting rid of the new rules Gingrich imposed when he took control of the House in 1995.
Really? None of these Smart, Successful Business Leaders and Politicians were bright enough to see this coming? They made a huge deal to trade American jobs for cheap Chinese goods and didn't know what the price tag would be? Or did they know all along what would happen?
Oh, this is good. I was working in the swaps department of an international bank in the late '80s, it was all the rage - but Larry Summers apparently didn't hear about all those swaps going on until after Clinton left office. How mysterious that he did not notice all this serious money being burned.
@downwithtyranny says, "We've been looking for a progressive to run vs Blue Dog Jim Cooper. What about his neighbor Nanci Griffith? And she's got a new song to add to my extremely restricted list in the countrified section: "Hell No, I'm Not Alright."
Yeah, the "Affordable Care Act" isn't really all that affordable. When it turned out Susie was eligible for the program, she was really relieved, but it still put her into debt, and then she still has that premium to keep on paying. So, yeah, give if you can. (And check out that video included in the latter post, which is really what liberalism is supposed to be about, not just taking care of "the truly needy" or whatever it is Obama seems to think makes him more virtuous than the Republican delegation. It's not virtuous to make people poor and then pat yourself on the back because you threw them a few crumbs. You keep them from becoming poor so they can take care of themselves.) Also from or via Susie: The United States of unemployment Pierce on Obama's SOTU campaign speech "Citigroup Replaces JPMorgan as White House Chief of Staff." Mortgage settlement kabuki - it looks like Schneiderman may have been bought off or otherwise sidelined. "Schneiderman isn't chairing anything. He's Co-Chairing. That's a huge difference. If he's Chair he's in charge. If he's Co-Chair he needs consensus. And who is he Co-Chairing with? Lanny Breuer. That's unacceptable." It's not just New York - the LAPD has been coordinating with the CIA on "terrorism" as well. Slave labor is good for business.
Sam Seder talked to David Dayen about Obama's SOTU and what it means that Schneiderman is suddenly taking a gig that appears to neutralize his strength, on Wednesday's Majority Report.
War on Whistleblowers - This administration is so opposed to prosecuting serious crimes that they treat honest citizens who report crimes as if they were committing the worst crime of all.
My thanks to Edinburgh Eye, whose complaints about Labour are so, so much like the ones I have about the D-crats, led to the provision of this fine quote from my hero, Aneurin Bevan: "Referring to Mr. Churchill's 'set-the-people-free' speech, Mr. Bevan said that the result of the free-for-all preferred by Churchill would have been cinemas, mansions, hotels, and theatres going up, but no houses for the poor. 'in 1945 and 1946,' he said, 'we were attacked on our housing policy by every spiv in the country - for what is Toryism, except organized spivery? They wanted to let the spivs loose.' As a result of controls, the well-to-do had not been able to build houses, but ordinary men and women were moving into their own homes. Progress could not be made without pain, and the important thing was to make the right people suffer the pain." Always remembering that the "pain" of the rich was more of an inconvenience than the very real pain the rich would prefer to inflict on the rest of us.
Man, it sure doesn't take much to be a class traitor to the rich these days. I mean, what Soros is saying here isn't special, it's just a matter of not wanting to kill the golden goose. Except that Soros still believes in democracy, and if Soros is worried about deflation and depression, he's worried about democracy, and, yeah, that makes him a class traitor. (More on this from Digby.)
No-brainer: "The results are clear: high marginal rates correlate with broad-based economic prosperity and an expanding middle class. Low marginal rates correlate with extreme income inequality, reduced prosperity overall, and ultimately, economic catastrophe."
Jay Ackroyd and McJoan mostly talked about Republicans on Virtually Speaking Sundays, and Digby did the same on The Majority Report with Sam Seder. It was entertaining, but I think people spend too much time talking about the Republicans, and I'm a bit annoyed by the effort involved in, say, unpacking Ron Paul, worthy effort though it may be, when there is the much larger issue of restoring liberalism at stake. Talking about Ron Paul's connections to the Koch brothers is all very well, but if you're ignoring the Democratic Party's own ties to some of the most right-wing funders in America, you are missing the larger point, which is that our entire political apparatus has been hijacked by these people. Electing Democrats no longer means building and promoting liberal policies, it just means we don't fight as hard to do it because we're supposed to be protecting and defending Democrats - even Democrats whose "strategy", apparently, is to sabotage their own party. But if the Democratic leadership is manifestly unliberal, as it certainly is, why would we want to defend them? What is the point of electing Democrats whose sole purpose is to help the Republicans slip their own hideously right-wing policies by us without our fighting back?
Remember, George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, but he failed, and he failed because people - with liberals leading the charge - fought back, to the point where even registered Republicans realized what was going on and called their GOP Congresscreeps and let them know they'd never get another vote from them if they signed on to this outrage. Now Obama is trying to wreck Social Security, and where are those people? Well, they're not telling people to call their Congressmen, because they are still too busy telling us how awful the Republicans are, as if only the Republicans were doing anything outrageous. (The rest of the Virtually Speaking schedule for this week can be found here.)
And, meanwhile, "conservative" thinkers are starting to notice that their Pollyannaish euphoria over the fall of the Soviet Union might have been premature, as William Greider observes: "Just as candidate Newt condemns 'crony capitalism' and Perry denounces 'vultures,' historian Francis Fukuyama has abruptly rescinded the happy talk that made him famous twenty years ago. At the end of the cold war, Fukuyama's book The End of History and the Last Man declared that left-right ideological conflicts were over. Liberal democracy had won. It would henceforth prevail around the world. Hold that prophecy. The professor has issued a sort of retraction (he might say 'correction'). His essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, explained that 'some very troubling economic and social trends, if they continue, will both threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood.' Yikes. What trends are those? Global capitalism, he said. Free-trade doctrine and new technology, along with the steady offloading of American jobs, are destroying the middle class - the necessary foundation for democracy in advanced economies. [...] His alarming observations were picked up by other conservative commentators and treated respectfully, a sign that these anxieties are widely shared. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, longstanding advocate of globalization, embraced Fukuyama's argument. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote with sympathy for the struggling white working class. It votes Republican and gets hammered by corporate capitalists in return." Greider also notes that Fukuyama doesn't recognize his as the liberal critique laid out long before by people like Robert Kuttner and himself, but then, Fukuyama probably doesn't see it that way. What he might imagine is that he is still a bright young conservative thinker who is seeing past the errors of his elders - exactly the way Obama appears to see himself in comparison with "out-dated" liberal New Deal thinking. In which case, Fukuyama is a lot closer to the truth.
Right on the heels of the news that the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, is one of the big culprits in the mortgage mess (gee, no wonder he doesn't want to prosecute anyone!), we see a seasoned union-buster promoted to White House Chief of Staff. As Pruning Shears suggests, we're seeing a pattern. Pruning Shears also has another good quote from Econned talking about just how our overlords protectors made the whole financial crises worse. Whose idea was that, anyway?
If you wanted to read some well-written unpacking of SOPA/PIPA, you couldn't do better than what Patrick Nielsen Hayden put up at Making Light over the last week. from the first announcement that ML would go dark - and why, and a short post later reminding everyone that this isn't going away, and one a couple of days later going into more about what the issues are and who is lying ("The MPAA and RIAA would love to see everybody frame these issues as nothing more than a spat between 'industries.' But the tens of thousands of writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers who spoke out yesterday against SOPA and PIPA aren't the 'tech industry.' They're creators - actual content creators - who know perfectly well that censorship is a greater threat to their livelihood than piracy, and that a world with a crippled internet and a no-appeals, guilty-until-proven-innocent copyright-enforcement regime would be a world in which they would be unable to do their work and survive."). (And, while you're there, Abi Sutherland has a good post about the way rape is used in fiction - to get a particular rating in films, to create motivations for female characters, to tell you the rapists are scumbags - and what lessons are unfortunately taught as a result, "Can't you hear beyond the croaking?.")
So, the evil censorship was defeated? Not really, says Glenn Greenwald: "Critics insisted that these bills were dangerous because they empowered the U.S. Government, based on mere accusations of piracy and copyright infringement, to shut down websites without any real due process. But just as the celebrations began over the saving of Internet Freedom, something else happened: the U.S. Justice Department not only indicted the owners of one of the world's largest websites, the file-sharing site Megaupload, but also seized and shut down that site, and also seized or froze millions of dollars of its assets - all based on the unproved accusations, set forth in an indictment, that the site deliberately aided copyright infringement. In other words, many SOPA opponents were confused and even shocked when they learned that the very power they feared the most in that bill - the power of the U.S. Government to seize and shut down websites based solely on accusations, with no trial - is a power the U.S. Government already possesses and, obviously, is willing and able to exercise even against the world's largest sites..." In other words, once again, we see that the game is to further codify powers that the government already claims to hold. That's something Obama has been making a practice of: They are already doing bad things, then they propose new laws to try to nail down what they are doing, and "progressives" get to "win" a fight when they occasionally manage to "beat" those new laws back, even though it may be only for a month or two or the administration finds some new way to do it through a backdoor (e.g., the "Deficit Commission" Obama couldn't get Congress to give him so he made one himself and treats it as if it is every bit as legalistically solid.) This is pretty much what Dahlia Lithwick has been saying about Obama's tendency to make sure George W. Bush's excesses are given a more solid legal framework.
"Obama to use pension funds of ordinary Americans to pay for bank mortgage 'settlement': Obama's latest housing market chicanery should come as no surprise. As we discuss below, he will use the State of the Union address to announce a mortgage 'settlement' by Federal regulators, and at least some state attorneys general. It's yet another gambit designed to generate a campaign talking point while making the underlying problem worse."
The other night on Virtually Speaking A-Z, Jay and Stuart discussed the idea that the dog-whistles coming out of the mouths of people like Newt Gingrich aren't aimed at the general voter or even at unreconstructed racists, they're aimed at us, and "progressives" keep falling for it. Atrios keeps pointing out that they do and say things "just to piss liberals off," and I suspect he's more right than he knows, and I think a lot of prog bloggers really need to give this some thought, because I believe Stuart is absolutely right - they say things that get liberals to react and that works for them in ways "the left" seems to be entirely unaware of. I don't just mean that it's a distraction; I mean that we're doing their PR for them. People are worried about their jobs. Gingrich talks about jobs, and instead of talking about jobs, progressives react with partisan defenses and accuse him of dog-whistle racism. But ordinary people don't hear racism when Gingrich says he wants to give people paychecks rather than welfare checks, because ordinary people are worried that maybe a welfare check is all they can hope for anymore if things keep going the way they're going. Obama himself has been telling people that we can't have good jobs anymore, we can't have 4% unemployment and a healthy economy anymore, but we'll try to protect "the most needy" - which means the only way you'll get any help from the government is after they have made you too poor to help yourself - and you'll never be able to help yourself again. It doesn't matter that Gingrich is lying about his intentions to create jobs, since no one is actually offering jobs. What matters is that instead of acknowledging that the jobs situation keeps getting worse, liberals sit around crying racism. And racism really isn't the issue.
And in the second half of the Thursday line-up on Virtually Speaking, Matt Stoller came in to discuss his point in the article I was remiss in not linking directly at the time, "Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals" - an article that caused rather a large fuss. This is not about presidential politics, but about the real intellectual knot that is created by the relationship between war policy and domestic socioeconomic policy - and the fact that these mechanisms that were being used to create liberal domestic policies aren't working anymore, and they aren't working anymore because our government has been thoroughly hollowed out and corrupted. We have reached the point where crucial areas of government don't even contain people who know how to do what is supposed to be their job. For example, Tim Geithner, unlike anyone who was walking down their street looking at local housing prices and realizing they were too expensive for people to pay for, did not notice - even laughed at the idea - that we were in a housing bubble. Apparently, it wasn't so much that he was trying to cause another Depression as that he simply didn't recognize what was as plain as the nose on my face. Even more frightening is the kind of lawyering that's now on display at Justice, where those who actually know how to prosecute criminals have been pushed aside in favor of people who think their job is to rubber-stamp whatever criminal conduct big corporations engage in, and wouldn't know how to run a prosecution even if they thought they should do that. And, for some reason, there don't seem to be any real liberals left in government who actually know how to write legislation. So, it looks like the arch-conservative project of turning good government into bad government has succeeded pretty well, and we have more than a simple course-correction on our hands; we will need to rebuild from the ground up. (But, should we wonder why someone who is a professional political operative is saying this now?)
Stuart Zechman alludes from time to time to a scam that's being run in collusion between our government and the health care industry that could be described as "price-fixing". It's something that not many people are really aware of, and Stuart is one of the few who've actually done the work of researching it, so I asked him if he had anything he could post that helps explain it. The gist is that, though Medicare itself keeps costs down, it is also a vehicle for setting prices for medical treatment - and sets them higher than they need to be. He dug up one of his comments to a post at Swampland that delved into just this question. Have a look at "PPACA: The Third Way To Lowering Health Care Prices?" and incorporate that into your thinking on the subject.
Sam Seder's interviews this week including one with Cory Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Garlin Gilchrist of MoveOn about SOPA and the blackout, and Rick Pearlstein (about his his Rolling Stone article, among other things). He also had his usual live coverage of the Occupy movement, this time focused on Occupy DC.
So, after the big fat blackout by major sites, Obama claims he won't support SOPA, which I suppose means he wants to wait until no one's looking to sign it. The lobbyist with "the best job on K Street", doing what the entertainment industry wants, shook his head. Cenk presents Chris Dodd, former pretend protector of Constitutional rights.
David Dayen doesn't appear to have faith in the "more aggressive" stance Obama claims he'll be taking after his prior wimpy performance on the foreclosure crisis. Nor, for that matter, in the recovery.
I haven't thought about this in a long time, but I stumbled on the introduction to David Loftus' book while looking for something else and thought I'd share. A long, long time ago I responded to claims about what men were really thinking when they looked at pornography by pointing out that no one had done any research on the subject and what we had seen so far was projection by some women of what they feared men were thinking about sex. Eventually, thanks to the internet, I stumbled on Loftus, who had decided it was time to at least make a start at that kind of research. Lacking the resources for a full study, he interviewed as many guys as he could (as he acknowledges, a self-selecting group), to find out what men were able to say about their own experience looking at pornography. If that piques your interest, look here.
My friend Yves just posted his sonata at YouTube, and it's lovely.
Dan at Pruning Shears has another quote from Yves' Econned and says: "This model highlights a tradeoff ignored (at least until recently) by most economists. All the arguments for deregulation were those of greater efficiency, that less government intervention would lower costs and spur innovation. We'll put aside the question of whether any gains would in fact be shared or would simply accrue to the financier class. Regardless, risks to stability never entered into these recommendations. But if we put on our systems engineering hat, stability is always a first order design requirement and efficiency is secondary." I guess that depends on the question of: "Efficency of what?" If markets are seen as a means to extract resources for the few at the top, they did a fine job. As the system destabilizes, the only thing they have to worry about is whether their private armies and gated communities can keep the rabble out until after their own deaths.
Most of us have heard by now that someone is murdering Iranian scientists, and pretty much everyone figures it's Mossad, probably with the approval and possibly in concert with the United States. I don't know anyone who approves of it, but I hang out in that kind of crowd. And yes, it was a bit shocking, a few years ago, when Glenn Reynolds advocated doing this very thing. But the problem, you see, is that it's not shocking anymore. By now, so much is so wrong that this is just one little item on a long list of horrific things being undertaken under, most shockingly of all, a president who was clearly elected by people who believed he would put a stop to the United States government's outrageous behavior toward both other countries and its own people. Now, Glenn Greenwald may be right that there's something suspicious about the silence about this coming from the left blogosphere, even among people who condemned Reynolds on the subject of assassinating civilians. And sure, maybe there is an element of people not wanting to go after someone whose side they are on, but I'm no Obamapologist and I haven't written about it, either. That's mainly for the usual reason I haven't posted something yet, which is that I haven't gotten around to it. But there's also the fact that this administration just decided to run around assassinating American citizens, and after that, well, having them connive in the murder of Iranian scientists seems like pretty small beans, and not even a little surprising. Sure, it's outrageous, it's indefensible - but, you know, almost everything is, these days. I don't know why anyone else hasn't written long screeds about it, but for me, I'm tending to narrow my view to things that are closer to home, these days, because until we can figure out what to do about these people, it's almost pointless to rail against one more outrage abroad. We don't have to use the models we're using. We could have a better country - and a better world - if we had made different policy decisions. Stupid, short-sighted, or nasty people have worked hard to close off other avenues, but if there is anything to be done, it won't start merely with saying we shouldn't assassinate Iranian scientists.
Thanks to Atrios for posting this Will Rogers clip. Oh, and this certainly sums up the Labour Leadership. As opposed to America, where it's, "Same policies, but just not foaming at the mouth."
Culture of Truth and Digby are tonight's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays. On Virtually Speaking Tuesdays, Susie Madrak talked to Mike Patterson and Stuart Zechman about #J17, Congress, Election 2012, Occupy Congress, being an undecided voter - and the potential for a bloody revolution if certain individuals do not pull themselves together and start behaving sensibly. On the last Virtually Speaking A-Z, Jay and Stuart tried their hand at explaining why socialists, libertarians and what Lambert describes as "benevolent Democrats" are not different forms of "liberals." (God, I'm sick of people who think this is just about taking care of the poor. The point is to keep people from having to be poor in the first place!) Here's the schedule for the next week of Virtually Speaking.
The big news of the week was that the NYT public editor asked readers if reporters should verify facts. No, I'm not making that up. Greenwald: "The New York Times' Public Editor Arthur Brisbane unwittingly sparked an intense and likely enduring controversy yesterday when he pondered - as though it were some agonizing, complex dilemma - whether news reporters 'should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.' That's basically the equivalent of pondering in a medical journal whether doctors should treat diseases, or asking in a law review article whether lawyers should defend the legal interests of their clients, etc.: reporting facts that conflict with public claims (what Brisbane tellingly demeaned as being 'truth vigilantes') is one of the defining functions of journalism, at least in theory." Indeed. It's why the press even has a first amendment right - to cut through the bull. In a day when you can read the Congressional Record, the White House press gaggle, and impending legislation on the web, as well as watch the idiots talk out of their own faces in online videos, newspapers become utterly irrelevant if they are just going to repeat their lies uncritically. There's a reason why people who do things like reading The New York Times turned out to be more misinformed than people who do not follow the news at all.
Listening to Sam Seder interviewing Rocky Anderson the other day, I figured he still sounds much better than the other guys and if he's on my ballot, I might just vote for him. It's not as if Maryland isn't likely to go for Obama, in any case, so there's no guilt, there. I just want to be able to register a vote for someone who isn't any of these other bastards.
You know, I'd almost forgotten Santorum's attempt to get taxpayers to pay a private company if they want to read the weather info online that they'd already paid to collect with their taxes - a service that is currently provided free by the US government, because you pay for it already. Interestingly, listening to the news spot on the Hartmann show when Sam Seder sat in, I noticed that Darrell Issa is trying to pull the same crap with medical information collected thanks to NIH, in a similar kick-back scheme - with the help of a Democratic New York Congresswoman, of course.
Dean Baker notes that the guys who were and are running the Fed were and are utterly incompetent: "btw, as noted in the article, many of the people at these Fed meetings are still in top policy making positions. This shows that the U.S. economy still produces good-paying jobs for people without skills." (via)
Today's Voice of Socialism is, of course, Newt Gingrich, filmmaker. Well, his PAC, anyway, and he seems to be distancing himself a bit from alleged errors or overstatements in King of Bain. But the half-hour video about Mitt Romney's company points the finger at Mitt Romney and Bain in terms that might have been expected to come from the left, a critique of modern capitalism (the version of capitalism Newt once championed) that condemns Gordon Gekko's impact on America's economy - and, especially, on its workers and families. Of course, Romney didn't make this happen all by himself, and there's no one running things who would stand up and say, "This is wrong," and make it stop. Robert Reich addressed this point the other day, and Sam Seder, sitting in for Thom Hartmann Friday, talked to Reich on this subject in the first hour. (Sammy also talked to Dahlia Lithwick later in the show, about Citizens United and the Montana court that decided to ignore that decision to protect its own elections - as discussed in here piece here.) But Romney's Bain Capital has been a profound source for evil in our country, and still is. These welfare cheats also own the airwaves.
Marion in Savannah has an episode of Bobo versus Krugman, discussing the entire "job creation" myth. I'm not sure it's really accurate, however, to say that shutting down companies doesn't actually destroy jobs and only means the new jobs available aren't as good as the old jobs. My experience is that the number of jobs available also contracts as employers feel free to load their employees up with longer hours and harsher conditions, overworking them in lieu of simply hiring an adequate workforce.
Looks like Colbert is running on the RepubliDem platform: "At least some establishment figures are worried that Colbert might cause an upset in the Romney coronation. CNN has a blistering anti-Colbert opinion piece pointing out that Colbert's platform is a travesty, calling for more unemployment, more wars, more inequality. In other words what George W. Bush wanted to do and did and what George W. Romney and George W. Santorum and George W. Gingrich want and plan to do." And Obama, don't forget.
Angelides to lead distressed mortgage firm: "The company, Mortgage Resolution Partners, claims its strategy of using "legal and political leverage" to acquire the loans could generate a 20 percent annual return for investors. The company intends to purchase mortgages at a steep discount and re-work them to enable the homeowners to continue making payments, with the firm collecting the proceeds." I have no idea what to make of this.
Today, Sam Seder is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Bread & Roses strike on Majority Report, with Robert Forrant.
I guess now we have to put all our energy into protecting programs for the extremely poor, since the plan is to make sure we are all in that category. I look at it, however, as a reason to take your money out of banks and hide it all in a box in the ground so they won't know you've got it.
Bruce Schneier has a round-up of the TSA's top ten good catches of 2011. But my favorite is the butter knife confiscated from the pilot of the plane - you know, in case he wanted to hold himself hostage and hijack the plane. Although a teenage girl's purse with an embroidered handgun design was another great one, since we all know how much damage you can do with embroidery. He also features expert predictions of terrorist attacks, most of which were wrong. Of course, they were all wrong, since the attack on the WTC was so successful that no other attack was necessary. Bush made sure that the terrorists won. Bruce also has some links from himself and EFF on protecting your security at the borders. I'm lately coming to the conclusion that carrying your laptop with you may be more trouble than it's worth if you are crossing the US border. I'll probably just take my (dumb) cell phone with me if I go home for a visit - and a back-up of the piece of paper with vital phone numbers on it that I always carry when I fly.
'Wild Old Women' Close San Francisco Bank Of America Branch - You know, there's a reason why they want to kill older people off as fast as they can. One big one is that these people remember what life used to be like before the "Serious" people took over. (So do the older Boomers, which is why they hate them even more, since they aren't dying fast enough.)
Charlie Pierce, in "Pain: The David Gregory Solution", doesn't mention how often it is that we hear White House policy from Gregory's lips (don't we all remember him, just after this administration took office, insisting, in his "balanced", non-opinionated way, that something has to be done about entitlements?), but I enjoy watching his target practice on the man who won Atrios' The Worst Person In The World award Monday.
Well, thank goodness the Democrats have protected your reproductive rights, yeah?
Are you sure? "'We must leave the Holocaust and its symbols outside the arguments in Israeli society,' said Moshe Zanbar, chairman of the main umbrella group for Holocaust survivors in Israel. 'This harms the memory of the Holocaust." Yeah, let's freeze it in amber and not think about what it means.
In almost every case, the definitive version of a Beatles song is by the Beatles. However, when I heard this, I immediately felt that it was the way it was intended to be performed. And this is just lovely.
Listening to Culture of Truth on Santorum, I caught myself thinking, "Sometimes ya gotta admire their chutzpah," and then I realized, no, actually, you don't.
Thursday's Majority Report covered Obama's recess appointments and the Occupy action in Grand Central Station on the NDAA.
Whenever I see the latest news on how the Occupy movement is being suppressed, I remember all those people who kept insisting that we were lucky America was a free country, because we'd be arrested if we tried to protest in a real dictatorship. Well, Americans are getting arrested for trying to protest. Are we a real dictatorship, yet?
By now it's clear that there is no shortage of people with advanced technical education, skill, and experience in the United States (and Britain) - home-grown geeks of every kind who could easily be employed by the very companies that are moaning about the lack of availability of such people. A considerable number of those people are among the growing numbers of the unemployed. They aren't unemployed because the work doesn't exist or the money isn't there to pay for them - it does, and it is - but because the companies they can no longer find work with are hell-bent on driving down wages and working conditions for employees, and it's easier to do that to foreigners. For example, it's illegal for foreigners on work visas to go on strike in the United States. Employers who want to be able to treat their employees with contempt enjoy that sort of thing. I really wish we could hope that candidates would be pressed to answer questions on their views on giving away Americans' jobs to foreigners. Not that I'd trust anything any of them - especially Obama - said, but Romney would have his work cut out for him. Oh, wait, I forgot - reversing positions is something of a signature for Romney. Um, and for Obama.
This is being described as "new", but "benefit corporation" is just a new name for what used to be perfectly normal - corporations that were not allowed to put share earnings above all other considerations. And when I say "normal", I don't mean there used to always be companies like that, I mean it used to be that companies had to be like that.
Robert A. Gattis is not denying that he murdered a woman. But are we any better if we kill him on January 20th?
Pro editors and journalists finally figure out that SOPA is bad. Sort of. (via)
Gary Johnson, dropped out of the Republican Party and running as a Libertarian, is for reproductive rights, which makes him more libertarian than Ron Paul, but is he a better anti-war candidate? (But is he better than guys who do this?)
Yes, as we have all pointed out, Ron Paul's position on the drug war isn't that these drugs should be decriminalized, it's that there should be no federal laws against those drugs, and the states should be able to make their own indefensible laws about them. Be that as it may, it would still mean that the endless supply of money and clout of the federal government would not be available to states that want to be draconian about drugs. We'd actually be in much better shape now if that had been the case for the last 30 years, because we would have had nowhere near the coast-to-coat militarization of the police that we've had during that time. And, in the meantime, states that want to legalize medical marijuana would not have to worry that the licenses they grant would not protect doctors and providers from being arrested (and robbed and murdered) by the Feds. States that wanted to decriminalize drugs, or reschedule them, could do so. That's still better than what we have now. (Ian Welsh has thoughts on why there seems to be Ron Paul Hysteria.)
I guess I need to clarify that when I say that Ron Paul is the only one who seems to have any sensible policies on anything at all, I mean "gives the appearance of" rather than "seems to me". The fact that Paul can give the appearance of someone who understands that military aggression against foreign countries and the War On (Some People Who Use Some) Drugs are stupid policies that should be stopped is what people hear. Whether I, personally, trust that his policy statements on those issues are (a) genuine or (b) coming from the same place as mine is another, and irrelevant, matter. Because it actually takes some attention to get a grip on where Ron Paul or any other public voice is coming from, and right now almost no one is allowed to suggest anything sensible on television. And yet, Ron Paul is running around saying we should withdraw from stupid wars, including the incredibly destructive and wasteful drug war. Those are, by themselves, excellent ideas.
Withdrawing ground action from foreign countries just so we can simply drop nukes on them, of course, would not be consistent with what most people who want to stop the stupid wars abroad want from such withdrawals, and is not a good idea, but it could be what Paul is really thinking - which is beside the point, because it is not, as yet, what he is saying. Stopping the federal war on drugs only to allow states to impose their own drug wars individually is also not quite what Paul sounds like he means most of the time, even thought it actually is what he means.
But we're dealing with an age in which people who watch the news on TV and read the papers think they aren't low-information voters, even though they are actually being wildly misinformed. Those people don't spend a lot of time doing further research on who the misinformers are, where the money is coming from, what the connections are between, say, Ron Paul and the Koch brothers and the John Birch Society, or the funders of the Heritage Foundation and the funders of the Democratic Leadership Council/Third Way bunch that is allegedly to their left in the fantasy "center". It's been a long time since most of those people have even heard a real liberal argument on TV, either from pundit/operatives or from elective officials themselves. Most of them have no clue that virtually everything they are seeing and hearing is a right-wing argument for right-wing goals. In fact, if we are to believe Jay Ackroyd, it is quite possible that the President of the United States himself does not realize that the stuff that comes out of his own mouth is just a pack of right-wing lies made up to serve right-wing goals - and I'm sure Obama doesn't think of himself as a low-information voter.
Nevertheless, we have a situation in which it is fair to say that:
The Republicans and the Democrats want to reduce or eliminate your ability to get redress in court against corporations or employers who sell you poison, wreck your environment, or treat you like slaves, under the guise of "tort reform".
The Republicans and the Democrats want to bust unions so that wages can be driven down and workers rights can be a forgotten relic of a quaintly sentimental age that is no more than a nostalgic dream.
The Republicans and the Democrats want to reduce the number of ordinary employees of the federal government who try to make things work and then go out and spend their paychecks in the real economy.
The Republicans and the Democrats want to privatize our public health and unemployment insurance programs that will cease to be useful to the public but still cost us even more money while killing even more people from lack of affordability.
The Republicans and the Democrats want to essentially privatize the school system, again reducing the educational capabilities of the schools while costing taxpayers more money.
The Republicans and the Democrats want to restrict (or eliminate) the public's access to the internet as a multi-directional communication tool.
And the only discernable distinctions between the two parties seem to be that:
The Republicans want to eliminate reproductive choice for women, while the Democrats aver that they sympathize with the (alleged) feelings of anti-choice campaigners but don't actually care about the issue except where they think it will win or lose them votes, and maybe not even then, but they are certainly willing to bargain reproductive choice away as fast as they can if it will buy them some illusory victory on the political playing field as defined by Big Media pundits.
The Democrats think overt racism and homophobia are unseemly and the Republicans don't, but the Democrats will sell out their "minority" constituencies if they can do so covertly in order to buy them some illusory victory on the political playing field as defined by Big Media pundits.
The Republicans and the Democrats want to continue our wars abroad and our ruinous Israel-right-or-wrong policies - except for Ron Paul.
The Republicans and the Democrats want to continue a federal war on drugs which not only imposes its laws against the individual states against the wills of both the voters and the leaders in those states, but also against other countries who try to weaken or reconsider their own part in the drug war - except for Ron Paul, who, remarkably, seems to be the only major political figure who has even noticed its racist enforcement and ruinous effect on the black community.
The Republicans and the Democrats are happy with treating whistleblowers like terrorists while letting the criminals the whistle is blown on carry on their crimes, except for Ron Paul, who says Bradley Manning is a true patriot.
The Republicans and the Democrats are happy to have the president simply decide to assassinate American citizens and the elimination of due process - except for Ron Paul.
(Here's Matt Taibbi writing about the meaningless sideshow of the electoral process as it currently stands, and he talked to Sam Seder about it, and what Ron Paul's real positions are, Wednesday on The Majority Report. Note that Sammy has no illusions about Paul being genuinely libertarian on any personal freedom issues.)
Jay and Stuart talked about this, and the fuss it's created in the blogosphere, last night on Virtually Speaking A-Z, and covered a lot of ground, but I'd say there's more to cover.
My beef is that it's unforgivable that Ron Paul, of all people, is the only person on the national stage who is making any case for what should be liberal positions, and indefensible that people who call themselves liberals or progressives persist in making excuses for the lack of such a case coming from Obama, and even the fact that he most often makes the case for the opposing positions.
And until we get some national voices making the case for the genuinely liberal approach to those issues - and being heard - we will be in big trouble, because the only person who even makes something that, on the surface, sounds a bit liberal, is a crazy and dangerous right-wing crackpot named Ron Paul.
* * * * *
Yves wants us all to read Amar Bhide's article in the NYT about a need to return to boring - and responsible - banking: "To prevent the next panic, it's not enough to rely on emergency actions by the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. Instead, governments should fully guarantee all bank deposits - and impose much tighter restrictions on risk-taking by banks. Banks should be forced to shed activities like derivatives trading that regulators cannot easily examine." Ah, the way it used to be.
Krugman: "Look, economic policy matters. It matters for real people who suffer real consequences when we get it wrong. If I believe that the doctrine of expansionary austerity is all wrong, or that the Ryan plan for Medicare would have disastrous effects, or whatever, then my duty, as I see it, is to make my case as best I honestly can - not put on a decorous show of civilized discussion that pretends that there aren't hired guns posing as analysts, and spares the feelings of people who are not in danger of losing their jobs or their health care."
At Suburban Guerrilla: - So ICE doesn't even bother to determine the citizenship of people who are obviously American teenagers before they deport them to Columbia. - Russ Baker, "Obama: 'Yes, I'm in a Can' [...] The essence of Obama is to make gestures that will please everyone, but to do it without genuine enthusiasm or pleasure - and therefore please no one. Ordinary people feel he cares not a whit about them, and the moneyed class resents his occasional populist-firebrand rhetoric. It is a mark of cynicism to operate like this. It is also not necessarily a winning formula for a politician. And for a country, it is a disaster." (Orwell called it.) - Occupy broadcaster evicted: "Earlier this morning, Global Revolution Studios was ordered to vacate from their building by the NYPD in conjunction with the building department. It took three separate departments visiting 13 Thames to finally come up with a reason to remove the Global Revolution team with a posted notice despite having all applicable paperwork for the department of buildings in order." - Mole - I just can't believe that Obama has never lifted a finger to put Spakovsky in jail where he has belonged for years, rather than leave him to continue to damage our country from within the United States government. - Jay Rosen on the Iowa caucus coverage. - The real reason they are called Liar's Loans. It wasn't the home-buyers who were the liars. - I can only agree with Susie's Deep Thought.
RIP Ronald Searle, who returned from captivity by the Japanese to create the St. Trinian's cartoon series (which became a series of movies), and become the most famous cartoonist in Britain. (And, of course, we know who Flash Harry grew up to be...)
And once I got on that theme, I found this, which is fun.
It's that time of year again (actually, it was that time of year last month, and the people who got theirs done on time have their posts listed here) when tradition calls for a round-up of the best of my own blog posts of the year we've just survived. Dan nominated this post, which I must admit is a pretty good post, but it's sad to think I haven't written anything else up to that standard for a year. He could be right.
And I guess looking back at that post, we're looking at what has increasingly become a major theme here, which could roughly be summed up as, "Globalization is not new, just metastasized by corporatist government policies." It is precisely what our Founding Fathers saw as an intolerable threat to freedom and caused them to foment and fight a revolution against the Crown.
Which makes me go back again to the conversation Jay and Stuart had last week in which Jay made the case that the Centrist Democrats actually believe the crazy, wrong, inconsistent ideology and factoids they keep spouting about the economy.
Which means that they think the speed of the internet is so significant that it can change the fact that everything else - all the real, physical stuff that in the end is what matters - hasn't suddenly been changed. You may be able to move certain "intellectual property" like books and music at rapid speed, but you still can't send a pair of socks or a car or a basket of fruit itself by electronic means, despite the fact that you can order one that way.
Ships don't travel that much faster than they used to when I was a kid, and neither do planes. The turnaround time on an exchange of physical letters across the Atlantic is about two weeks, same as when I was born - when, by the way, we already had phones. We're not talking about putting products on a transmat and sending them instantaneously, we're talking about sending documents faster. The possibility of reducing all of the world's labor to subsistence level was always there and often the reality for a considerable proportion of the world's workers (hence Ricardo's Iron Law), it's just that we chose not to do it. We made that choice in 1776, and we made it again with the New Deal. We could do that again, because Keynes was right. And yet the Democratic leadership honestly seems to believe that there is nothing we can do. And that's not just a local phenomenon. (Jay posted some background material for his discussion with Stuart here.)
Pierce: "And, of course, we must never make the perfect the enemy of the good. But you know what else is the enemy of good? Timidity is the enemy of the good. Cruelty is the enemy of the good, and so are selfishness, bigotry, and ignorance. Why perfection is the only enemy of the good that ever seems worth fighting is a good question with which to launch the new year."
It's now almost permanent election season, which means that we always have to be in partisan mode and never discuss actual issues. We can never acknowledge that maybe a guy on Our Side is promoting bad positions because to do so would give aid and comfort to the Bad Guys on The Other Side. Almost from the moment he got into office, we've been told we can't criticize Obama because it would help the Republicans. We also can't ever admit that someone who isn't a Democrat might actually have a better position on some issue than Obama does. We can't be honest about what's really going on because it might help the Republicans. But it's true that, no matter how wrong and repugnant (and dishonest or stupid) he is on many other important issues, Ron Paul is the only one who seems to have sensible positions about the war and secrecy regime. "Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform - certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party - who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote - Barack Obama - advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil." Sure, his "libertarianism" seems to be limited to a "states rights" fallacy (it's okay for individual states to destroy your freedom, it's just not okay for the federal government to do it) and then only on certain issues (obviously, not reproductive freedom, a fairly crucial one), but then, I haven't seen any evidence that Obama and his cadre of money-grubbing warmongers care about those freedoms at any level. And while Paul advocates ghastly economic policies, so do the people who currently occupy the White House. And yet, while Obama's supporters would draw the line at raping a nun on live TV (sorry, Glenn, but that's in the "dead girl/live boy" category), they are still happy to support him despite the fact that he is deliberately dismantling the American economy and every feature that might have saved you and yours from various kinds of slavery and unnecessary death. (And, you know, though I can tell you from experience that being raped is seriously unpleasant, it really isn't the worst thing that can happen. I mean, be honest: Given the choice between watching your children die because Obama managed to derail the creation of a decent health care system or seeing Obama rape a nun on live TV, which would you rather have him do?) But, you know, what really burns is that the only person saying these perfectly sane things about stupid wars is a right-wing crackpot, because there is no one in the allegedly liberal leadership saying it. And for that alone, those people deserve to be locked up someplace where they will feel forced to scream about their civil liberties and rights as Americans.
"TransCanada Inspector: Keystone Pipelines Not Safe: Writing an opinion piece for the Lincoln (NE) Journal-Star, civil engineer Mike Klink calls TransCanada's predecessor Keystone XL pipeline, for which he was a construction quality inspector, a 'lemon' and a 'proven loser.' Klink was fired from his job and is seeking Department of Labor whistleblower protection. His entire plea is worth reading."
On the bright side, it's nice to have anti-choicers like Retaliban Rick actually saying what they mean so people like me don't get called crazy when we point out that it's what they really mean.
Occupy: It's really hard work, but it's the work worth doing.
In honor of the 75th anniversary of the first science fiction convention, a report on the 1937 Leeds convention, complete with unseen photographs of attendees like a very young Arthur C. Clarke.
One reason I'm so sick of the attempts to drum up the daily Ten Minute Hate against Republicans or self-identified conservatives is that I'm pretty sure that at least half of the Republican electorate is - and, indeed, feels - entirely unrepresented by their party leadership, and not because that leadership is "too liberal". But the other reason is that I'm pretty sure that if we can just get rid of all the damned tribalism, there are plenty of registered Republicans who would get on board with a push to restore the Constitution and the project of promoting the general welfare. The trouble is that for 30 years the GOP leadership and, more importantly, it's rich funders and savvy operatives, have pushed the party membership to see liberals as people who hate them, and liberals have obligingly complied by hating on them non-stop. It's a waste of time. And I can't help thinking back to that little political map Stirling Newberry presented us with 
I wonder if anyone will be reading this today from the 
Since I didn't see this dashing picture of dashing Tesla in time for his birthday last month, I thought it'd be better than a picture of a groundhog.
