Great Lexicon!

It's a long read, but a good one: maybe break it into chunks?

Click here.

Galbraith, Churchill, Mill, Moyers

J.K. Galbraith:  "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

Winston Churchill:  "Many forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

John Stuart Mill (1866):  "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."

Bill Moyers:  "We don’t need a third party. We have a center right party, and a crazy party. Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital... What we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren’t being served by the Democrats."

Bill Moyers Again (3:16 Video Clip)

"We are so close to losing our democracy to the mercenary class, it's as if we were leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon, and all that's needed is a swift kick in the pants -- look out below! The predators in Washington are only this far from monopoly control of our government. They bought the political system -- lock, stock, and pork barrel -- making change from within impossible."


The above clip is an excerpt from a speech Moyers gave recently at the Brennan Institute. Click here for an excellent post on Daily Kos by teacherken. He links to an edited version of that speech. Another excerpt:

Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do. Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality.

Bill Moyers on the Social Contract

Here's an excerpt from Bill Moyers from an article, Covering Class War, at TomDispatch (from Crooks & Liars):

The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. “The abuse of buying and selling votes,” he wrote of Rome, “crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.”

We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class.  

We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, “Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.”

We don’t have emperors yet, but we have a House of Representatives controlled by the far right that is now nourished by streams of “dark money” unleashed thanks to the gift bestowed on the rich by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case.

We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities, and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.

Writing in The Guardian recently, the social critic George Monbiot commented,

“So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics… When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians [of the main parties] stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?”

Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do.  Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality. Listen!  That sound you hear is the shredding of the social contract.

Dogs Terrified Of Walking Past Cats (And More)

When it's finished, click on some of the others!

NSA Intelligence-gathering Overload

Bitcoin Explained

Click here for an article by Startup Boy entitled Bitcoin – The Internet of Money, written in July 2013 for Wired magazine.

No, MLK Jr. Was Not A Republican.

Click here for an article at Think Progress, "No, Martin Luther King Jr. Was Not A Republican — But Here’s What He Had To Say About Them."

The southern Democrats -- "Dixiecrats" -- were solidly racist and segregationist until Lyndon Johnson shepherded passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At that time, they deserted the Democratic party en masse and moved to the Republican party, where they were welcomed by Richard Nixon with his "Southern Strategy."

Some key quotes from the article:

The Republican Party geared its appeal and program to racism, reaction, and extremism. All people of goodwill viewed with alarm and concern the frenzied wedding at the Cow Palace of the KKK with the radical right. [On the 1964 Republican National Convention.]

[Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater's] candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.

The article says:

King barnstormed the country on behalf on Johnson in 1964, “maintaining only a thin veneer of nonpartisanship,” according to biographer Nick Kotz. King called Johnson’s win a “great victory for the forces of progress and a defeat for the forces of retrogress.”

And here is MLK Jr.'s opinion of Ronald Reagan:

When a Hollywood performer, lacking distinction even as an actor, can become a leading war hawk candidate for the Presidency, only the irrationalities induced by a war psychosis can explain such a melancholy turn of events.

Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds," October 30, 1938

The original broadcast (51 minutes, 15 seconds). Interrupting the sounds of Ramón Raquello and his orchestra. Click here for the transcript (from sacred-texts.com, a site well worth examining).

Some excerpts:

PHILLIPS: Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed . . . Wait a minute! Someone's crawling out of the hollow top. Someone or . . . something. I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous disks . . are they eyes? It might be a face. It might be . . .
(SHOUT OF AWE FROM THE CROWD)
PHILLIPS: Good heavens, something's wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it's another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing's body. It's large, large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face, it . . . Ladies and gentlemen, it's indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate. The monster or whatever it is can hardly move. It seems weighed down by . . . possibly gravity or something. The thing's raising up. The crowd falls back now. They've seen plenty. This is the most extraordinary experience. I can't find words . . . I'll pull this microphone with me as I talk. I'll have to stop the description until I can take a new position.

*****

ANNOUNCER TWO: Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been handed a message that came in from Grovers Mill by telephone. Just a moment. At least forty people, including six state troopers lie dead in a field east of the village of Grovers Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition. The next voice you hear will be that of Brigadier General Montgomery Smith, commander of the state militia at Trenton, New Jersey.
SMITH: I have been requested by the governor of New Jersey to place the counties of Mercer and Middlesex as far west as Princeton, and east to Jamesburg, under martial law. No one will be permitted to enter this area except by special pass issued by state or military authorities. Four companies of state militia are proceeding from Trenton to Grovers Mill, and will aid in the evacuation of homes within the range of military operations. Thank you.

 *****

CAPTAIN: This is Captain Lansing of the signal corps, attached to the state militia now engaged in military operations in the vicinity of Grovers Mill. Situation arising from the reported presence of certain individuals of unidentified nature is now under complete control. The cylindrical object which lies in a pit directly below our position is surrounded on all sides by eight battalions of infantry. Without heavy field pieces, but adequately armed with rifles and machine guns. All cause for alarm, if such cause ever existed, is now entirely unjustified. The things, whatever they are, do not even venture to poke their heads above the pit. I can see their hiding place plainly in the glare of the searchlights here. With all their reported resources, these creatures can scarcely stand up against heavy machine-gun fire. Anyway, it's an interesting outing for the troops. I can make out their khaki uniforms, crossing back and forth in front of the lights. It looks almost like a real war. There appears to be some slight smoke in the woods bordering the Millstone River. Probably fire started by campers. Well, we ought to see some action soon. One of the companies is deploying on the left flank. An quick thrust and it will all be over. Now wait a minute! I see something on top of the cylinder. No, it's nothing but a shadow. Now the troops are on the edge of the Wilmuth farm. Seven thousand armed men closing in on an old metal tube. Wait, that wasn't a shadow! It's something moving . . . solid metal . . . kind of shieldlike affair rising up out of the cylinder . . . It's going higher and higher. Why, it's standing on legs . . . actually rearing up on a sort of metal framework. Now it's reaching above the trees and the searchlights are on it. Hold on!
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. The battle which took place tonight at Grovers Mill has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by any army in modern times; seven thousand men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. One hundred and twenty known survivors. The rest strewn over the battle area from Grovers Mill to Plainsboro, crushed and trampled to death under the metal feet of the monster, or burned to cinders by its heat ray. The monster is now in control of the middle section of New Jersey and has effectively cut the state through its center. Communication lines are down from Pennsylvania to the Atlantic Ocean. Railroad tracks are torn and service from New York to Philadelphia discontinued except routing some of the trains through Allentown and Phoenixville. Highways to the north, south, and west are clogged with frantic human traffic. Police and army reserves are unable to control the mad flight. By morning the fugitives will have swelled Philadelphia, Camden, and Trenton, it is estimated, to twice their normal population. At this time martial law prevails throughout New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania.

*****
More beneath the break.

Right-Wing States Reject Medicaid Expansion

Click here for an article in The American Prospect entitled The Cruelty of Republican States in One Chart, by Paul Waldman.

Obamacare was never intended to cover the poorest people; it was expected that those would be covered by Medicaid. Eligibility for Obamacare doesn't kick in until 133 percent of the poverty level, $31,321 for a family of four. However, individual states define eligibility for Medicaid very differently.

In more liberal states, these levels are fairly high; for instance, Massachusetts gives Medicaid to families up to 133 percent of poverty, New York up to 150 percent, and Minnesota up to 215 percent. But in conservative states, the levels are far stingier; as someone in the Times article says, "You got to be almost dead before you can get Medicaid in Mississippi."

So the liberal states already cover people whose income doesn't rise to the level where Obamacare kicks in; conservative states, not so much.

For instance, in Alabama, you can't get Medicaid if your income exceeds 23 percent of the poverty level, or $4,500 for a family of three. Just think about that for a second. Do you think you could find a place to live, pay your bills, and feed your family on that income? But the state of Alabama says if you're that rich, you can afford to buy health insurance. In Texas ... only families under 25 percent of the poverty level, or $4,894 for a family of three, will be eligible for Medicaid. I'm guessing that's about what Rick Perry spends on boots every year.

Obamacare offered the individual states help by paying the Medicaid costs for those people left in limbo -- with incomes too low to qualify under the federal Obamacare rules, yet not covered by state Medicaid rules -- by funding Medicaid for those people 100% for the first three years, with the states picking up more of the cost thereafter, on a sliding scale, until several years from now, when the federal government would pay 90%; the state would never have to pay more than 10% of the cost of making these millions of low-income people eligible for Medicaid.

Click here for an article on america.aljazeera.com entitled States' refusal to expand Medicaid leaves millions uninsured:

According to data analysis released by The New York Times Thursday, as many as 8 million people will remain outside of health care coverage envisioned under the terms of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, because they live in states that have refused extensions to Medicaid, the national health insurance program for the poor.

Currently, 26 states — all with Republican governors or Republican-controlled legislatures — have thus far declined Medicaid expansion, leaving the health care situation of millions of uninsured people unchanged.

By contrast, in the 24 remaining states (plus Washington, D.C.) that are going ahead with Medicaid expansion, more than 8.7 million people are expected to be newly enrolled, according (PDF) to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

I find it inconceivable that states would refuse such generous amounts of federal assistance to make 8.7 million poor people eligible for Medicaid, but apparently it is more important to these conservative states that they hinder and impede the implementation of Obamacare, and make it less effective, than it is to cover millions (1.8 million, in the case of Texas) of their poorest citizens.

Anyway, check out the graph in the story in The American Prospect which shows which are the cruelest Republican states.

Government Shutdown Planned Long Ago

To casual observers, the government shutdown engineered by Ted Cruz and his henchmen in the House of Representatives may appear to have come out of nowhere. Not so. It was planned from the early days of Obama's second term as a way of sabotaging the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which was signed into law on March 23, 2010.

Click here for an article in the New York Times exposing the concerted attack on the Obama administration by a group of rich conservatives (including the Koch brothers, of course) and influential politicos, headed by ultraconservative Ed Meese, Reagan's attorney general, who met in Washington, D.C., early in Obama's second term with the objective of blocking the implementation of the ACA by forcing a government shutdown.

Republican Hostage-Taking

Click here for an article -- in the Washington Post, of all places; how can a solidly mainstream publication like the WaPo allow such poisonous rhetoric? -- by Marc Thiessen. He was a speechwriter for W; I guess that tells you all you need to know.

He starts off by saying the Dems are unconcerned about the political consequences of shutting down the government, and that the Republicans are inflicting damage upon themselves and paying the political price for a shutdown; there's some truth to that. The Dems would prefer that the government be funded and that things proceed smoothly, but if Republicans choose to impose a shutdown, they have little leverage over the administration to get things rolling again.

But one of the first things they teach you in Hostage Taking 101 is that you have to choose a hostage the other side cares about saving.

Then Thiessen moves on to his next point:

By contrast, when it comes to the debt-limit showdown, they do have leverage; while Obama can let the government close and blame the GOP, he cannot allow the United States to default.

So what's the answer, Marc? Simple:

As former treasury secretary Timothy Geithner explained during the last debt-limit standoff, the effects of default would be “catastrophic,” resulting in the “loss of millions of American jobs,” and would have an economic impact “potentially much more harmful than the effects of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.” Obama will not permit an economic crisis worse than 2008-09 and the “loss of millions of American jobs” on his watch. He has no choice but to negotiate with GOP leaders and cut a deal to avoid a government default.

So what’s the smart move here, Republicans? Simple: Pass a clean, short-term continuing resolution to keep the government operating at current levels and then attach your demands to legislation raising the debt limit.

There's the Republican philosophy in a nutshell. You can't win elections on your platform, but don't waste time and effort trying to achieve your goals by threatening the dog; threaten the kids. As Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell admitted the last time around:

I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting, Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.

Do the Republicans have any concept of the notion of "loyal opposition"?

Focus Group Study: The Republican Mindset

Click here for a pdf document describing the results of a focus group session where participants were Evangelical, Tea Party and moderate Republicans. This is a truly eye-opening document from Democracy Now researchers Carville & Greenberg. It demonstrates that a fearful Republican party sees Obama and the Democrats as having won the political battle; the only option they see is for Republicans to resist at all cost the implementation of Obama's socialist agenda.

Simpsons Movie: McBain

The Simpsons episodes contain different pieces of a movie starring Rainier Wolfcastle, which can be spliced together as follows: (The clip cuts off the first few words: "Senator Mendoza is one of the most respected citizens in this state, McBain ...)

Beatles: Isolated Tracks

During recording sessions for Abbey Road

Obama: Read Your Own Speech (2002)

The following is the text of a speech given by Barack Obama, U.S. Senator from Illinois, in 2002:

Good afternoon. Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don't oppose all wars.

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain. I don't oppose all wars.

After Sept. 11, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again. I don't oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism.

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Now let me be clear — I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the president today. You want a fight, President Bush? Let's finish the fight with bin Laden and al-Qaida, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings. You want a fight, President Bush?

Let's fight to make sure that the U.N. inspectors can do their work, and that we vigorously enforce a non-proliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe. You want a fight, President Bush?

Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells. You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair. The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not — we will not — travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.

The Simpsons Do Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad: Pilot Episode Summary, Plus

Here's a short summary of the pilot episode of Breaking Bad.

Click here for the AMC website that has summaries of more (all?) Breaking Bad episodes.

William F. Buckley, Conservative Icon: Another View

Click here for "Joe Scarborough skips the dirty parts," by Digby at Hullabaloo. I used to read William F. Buckley's articles in the '80s. I mostly disagreed with him, but his elegant writing kept the dust off my dictionary.

Scarborough sings Buckley's praises for being, among other things, the guy most responsible for making the John Birchers unwelcome in the conservative movement. But Digby points out a whole lot of disagreeable things about Buckley that I didn't know.

The CIA Coup, Iran, 1953

Click here for an article at Daily Kos entitled "An unhappy 60th birthday: The CIA coup of 1953 still resonates in Iran. Operation Ajax remembered."

George Orwell, 1984

Click here for an article at The Daily Beast, George Orwell’s Letter on Why He Wrote ‘1984’.

My Name Is Ozymandias, King Of Kings ...

Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert....
Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Breaking Bad - Hypnosis

"You will recommend Breaking Bad to everyone you know. Breaking Bad is the best show you've ever seen, except maybe The Wire. You will never stop talking about Breaking Bad or The Wire."

Larry Summers, Next Fed Chairman?

A Digby article on Hullabaloo tells of how Larry Summers, apparently Obama's favored choice to replace Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Fed, reacted to Enron's criminal manipulation of the California energy market:

In his book about Enron, Conspiracy of Fools, Kurt Eichenwald describes Summers’ role in the early stages of the California energy crisis when the state was suddenly faced with power shortages and energy costs that were soaring up to 20 times normal levels. Then-Governor Gray Davis, convinced that Enron and others were manipulating the market, begged the federal government to intervene.

Even as blackouts shut down dialysis machines and traffic lights from Sacramento to San Diego, Summers and the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, decided to take a few moments to teach the California governor a lesson or two about free markets. In an emergency meeting the day after Christmas 2000, Summers and Greenspan, responding to the governor’s complaints about corporate tampering, lectured the governor that price manipulation was only possible because California had improperly regulated its markets. They urged the governor to take it easy on Enron and the other power companies because, in effect, being too critical of them might make them reluctant to do business in California. Summers and Greenspan pressured the governor to remove state caps on consumer rates.

A second meeting took place a few weeks later, via video teleconference, with Summers, California’s governor, and energy providers —including Enron’s Ken Lay. This time, Summers not only called for consumer rate increases, he also urged the governor to reassure the markets by relaxing environmental controls (Ken Lay’s suggestion) so that more power plants could be built quickly.

Once again, the California governor protested, refusing to raise electricity rates for consumers, declining to eviscerate environmental controls, and instead requested federal price caps on the electricity that power companies sold to California. Remarkably, Summers defended the energy executives, including Ken Lay, as doing “a pretty good job” of serving California, and dismissed the possibility that they were colluding to drive prices up —even though, as we know now, that’s precisely what they were doing, Summers disparaged the governor’s plan; it wouldn’t work because such government intervention would inevitably “distort the market,” he said.

Neither side gave in. Seven days later, George W. Bush was inaugurated as president. At the time, Ken Lay himself was widely discussed as a possible treasury secretary. Blackouts increased throughout California and energy prices continued to soar until, finally, in the spring of 2001, federal regulators imposed price caps on not just California but on all of the western states...

Summers saw government interference in the crisis, as he put it, as “market distortion.” Yet disturbingly, Summers remained relatively unconcerned about the “distortion” caused by the market power of companies like Enron who, through collusion and predatory behavior, caused prices to soar.

Indeed, he may have been blind to the possibility. After all, in pure economic models, there is no room for manipulation because all information is known. But one thing we have learned in the early days of the recent economic meltdown is that Wall Street —like Enron —has found enormous profits in muddy markets of loan bundles whose very architecture is designed to hide the truth about their risk.

StePhest Colbchella '013

Very talented guy! Colbert turns MTV lemons into Daft Punk lemonade with a song-and-dance number involving, among others, Henry Kissinger.

Today's Tea Party - Yesterday's Federalists?

Click here for an article in The New York Times by James Traub entitled "The Tea Party's Path to Irrelevance."

The article contains a number of insights into premodern American politics. While I consider myself reasonably well informed on current American politics and history dating back to at least the Kennedy administration, my understanding gets increasingly hazy moving from Eisenhower to Truman to FDR to Hoover to Coolidge to Harding; by the time we reach Wilson, my knowledge of U.S. involvement in World War I is again, I think, reasonably good. However, when it comes to U.S. domestic politics in those days, my knowledge could be fairly described as paltry; from Wilson back, it's practically nonexistent.

This article describes Jefferson as a strong proponent of the concept of limited government; Jefferson belonged to the Republican party of the day, which bears no resemblance to the Republican party of the present. His opponents were the Federalists, advocates of a strong federal government. They wanted a federation of states, which presupposes a strong federal government; Jefferson and others wanted a confederacy of states, where state power was predominant and federal power much less.

The Federalists claimed to represent the interests of the entire country, but actually their power structure was centered on the New England states, and they firmly opposed what they saw as Jefferson's "coup": the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.

Looking at it from a present-day perspective, it seems absurd that a national political party could be so short-sighted as to oppose the enormous expansion of American power and influence attained by the Louisiana Purchase. Nevertheless, the Federalists opposed it -- because they saw it as an enormous dilution of New England's power over the entire nation. There would be a great shift in political power as the new territories (in a slave-owning part of the country) demanded their fair representation in government.

“The people of the East can not reconcile their habits, views and interests with those of the South and West,” declared Thomas Pickering, a leading Massachusetts Federalist.

So the Federalists pursued their futile attempt to resist the imperatives forced upon them by demography:

Fearing that Irish, English and German newcomers would vote for the Jeffersonian Republicans, they argued — unsuccessfully — for excluding immigrants from voting or holding office, and pushed to extend the period of naturalization from 5 to 14 years.

The Federalists finally collapsed in the fall of 1814 when a convention they called split on the question of whether or not to remain in the Union. Jefferson's political descendants, on the other hand, were swept along on the wave of history resulting from the Louisiana Purchase, allying themselves with the immigrant settlers who represented the interests of the agrarian South.

Their standard-bearer in 1828, Andrew Jackson, favored tariffs and “internal improvements” like roads and canals, the big-government programs of the day. The new party, known first as the Democratic-Republicans, and then simply as the Democrats, thrashed Adams that year. (Adams’s party, the National Republicans, gave way to the Whigs, which in turn evolved into the modern Republican Party.)

Traub draws a parallel between the Federalists' futile resistance to inevitable change and the opposition of Tea Party conservatives to the wave of immigrants the U.S. must deal with today. Today's immigration problem is a situation that cannot be described as "unfortunate": It's a situation that was forced by decades of failure to deal with immigration reform. Reagan's amnesty of 1986 should have been an irresistible wake-up call for reform; the opportunity was lost by the political cowardice of those who preferred the head-in-the-sand approach.

The problem is that the Tea Party is not a party, and its members are quite prepared to ride their hobbyhorse into a dead end. And many Republicans, at least in the House, seem fully prepared to join them there, and may end up dragging the rest of the party with them.

The example of those early days shows that American political parties once knew how to adapt to a changing reality. It is a lesson many seem to have forgotten.

"Anyway, We Delivered The Bomb."

The great Robert Shaw in the "USS Indianapolis" scene from Jaws:

What's Wrong With The American Economy? Four Graphs

Click here for an excellent article in Business Insider by Henry Blodget. It presents four simple graphs, accompanied by the following text:

CHART ONE: Corporate profits and profit margins are at an all-time high. American companies are making more money and more per dollar of sales than they ever have before. Full stop. (Remarkably, some people are still saying that the problem with our economy is that companies are suffering from "too much regulation" and "too many taxes." Maybe little companies are, but big ones certainly aren't. What they're suffering from is a myopic obsession with short-term profits at the expense of long-term investment and value creation.)

CHART TWO: Wages as a percent of the economy are at all-time low. Why are corporate profits so high? One reason is that companies are paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP. And that, in turn, is one reason the economy is so weak: Those "wages" represent spending power for American consumers. And American consumer spending is "revenue" for other companies. So our profit maximization obsession is actually starving the rest of the economy of revenue growth.

CHART THREE: Fewer Americans are employed than at any time in the past three decades. Another reason corporations are so profitable is that they don't employ as many Americans as they used to. This is in part because companies today regard employees as "costs" and "inputs" instead of human beings who are dedicating their lives to the organizations that, in turn, are supporting them and their families. (Symbiosis! Imagine that!) As a result of frantic firing in the name of "efficiency" and "competitiveness" and "return on capital," the U.S. employment-to-population ratio has collapsed. We're back at 1970s-1980s levels now.

CHART FOUR: The share of our national income that is going to the people who do the work ("labor") is at an all-time low. The rest of the income, naturally, is going to owners ("capital"), who have it better today than they have ever had it before.

Blodget sums up the situation as follows: 

In short, the religion of "maximizing profits" that has developed in America over the past 30 years has created a business culture in which executives dance to the tune of short-term traders and quarterly financial reports, instead of investing aggressively on behalf of employees, customers, and long-term owners.

That's not what has made America a great country. It's also not what most people think America is supposed to be about. And, by contributing to ever-growing inequality and economic malaise, it will only lead to more problems for most Americans going forward.

So it's probably time to rethink our current business philosophy.

Specifically, we might want to make the goal of our corporations be to create long-term value for all of their constituencies (customers, employees, and shareholders), not just short-term profit for their shareholders.

FreedomWorks To Young People: Burn Your Obamacare Card!

Stephen Colbert has a great takedown of FreedomWorks' nonsensical campaign to thwart Obamacare: Have young people burn their Obamacare cards! You know, like the protest movement of the '60s, when young people burned their draft cards? One problem: There's no such thing as an Obamacare card. That doesn't stop FreedomWorks, though. They plan to design such a card and put it online so that people can "burn it, tear it up, mark on it." Colbert points out that they can do this after they download it, print it, cut it, and laminate it.



If FreedomWorks (Koch-sponsored "godfather of the Tea Party movement") want to appropriate the imagery of popular protest movements from the past, here's Colbert's helpful suggestion:

FreedomWorks is opening up a whole new world of fighting symbols of injustice that don't exist. You know what? They should rent a bus, order themselves to sit at the back of the bus, then refuse to sit at the back of their own bus! Fight the power!

War On Illegal Immigrants!

Now that the Iraq war is over and Afghanistan is winding down, it's time for a peace dividend! Right? Billions formerly required for military expenditure can be diverted to spending on schools, hospitals, infrastructure repair. Great!

Or maybe not.

Instead, it looks like the war machine will be powering up on the Mexican border. John McCain is salivating at the prospect of a virtual war zone:

As Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy put it, this will be the “Christmas wish list for Halliburton,” and the border security industry, as at this year’s Border Security Expo, is visibly licking its chops. Senator Marco Rubio laid out the following list or, as the trade magazine Homeland Security Today called it,"treasure trove" of products that it expected to be ordered if the bill passed: 86 integrated fixed towers, 286 fixed camera systems, 232 mobile surveillance systems, 4,595 unattended ground sensors, 820 handheld equipment devices, 416 personal radiation detectors, 104 radiation isotope identification devices, 62 mobile automated targeting systems, 53 fiber-optic tank inspection scopes, 37 portable contraband detectors, 28 license plate readers, 26 mobile inspection scopes and sensors for checkpoints, nine land automated targeting systems, and eight non-intrusive inspection systems.

In addition, Rubio said, the immigration bill would include "four unmanned aircraft systems, six VADER radar systems, 17 UH-1N helicopters, eight C-206H aircraft upgrades, eight AS-350 light enforcement helicopters, 10 Blackhawk helicopter 10 A-L conversions, five new Blackhawk M Model, 30 marine vessels, 93 sensor repeaters, 90 communications repeaters, two card-reader systems, five camera refresh, three backscatters, one radiation portal monitor, one littoral detection, one real-time radioscopy, and improved surveillance capabilities for existing aerostat."

The reform package calls for “persistent surveillance” and 24/7 drone flights, although the areas of these flights are not specified. Even before the Senate reform bill came into view, San Diego-based General Atomics was awarded a contract that would add 14 more drones to the current fleet of 10 used by Customs and Border Protection (CBP, the parent agency of the Border Patrol). CBP plans to have 18 drones in flight by 2016 and 24 in the years to follow patrolling US skies over cities such as San Diego, Tucson, and El Paso—not to speak, in the north, of Seattle, Detroit, and Buffalo.

More great news for defense contractors: The wonderful technology they're developing for use against potential invasion by Mexican nannies and gardeners can be exported! There are trouble spots all over the world where these wonderful new toys can be deployed -- starting with Israel. Coming soon: militarized borders everywhere! Good times!

Read more: Creating a Military-Industrial-Immigration Complex at The Nation.

The Surveillance State

From Digby at Hullabaloo. Link to the article here.

Senator Ron Wyden is not an Obama hating emo-prog. He is a US Senator with Top Secret clearance and he knows all the details of these NSA surveillance programs and understands the implications of them in a free society. It would be advisable for those who think that this story can be discounted because you think Edward Snowden is a traitor or Glenn Greenwald is a twitter asshole to read Wyden's entire speech today to Center for American Progress.

It's actually frightening to read. Senators Wyden, Udall, and Merkley have been trying for years to bring first Bush's, then Obama's policies on secret surveillance to the attention of the American public. They are severely limited by law as to what they can say about what they know -- if they say too much, they'll end up in a cell next to Bradley Manning (and Edward Snowden, if the government can get their hands on him).

Homer Buys A Gun

Lies, Damned Lies, and Tucker Carlson

Thanks to Karoli at Crooks & Liars for bringing this to my attention.

DC World Exclusive: Venerable leftist weekly demands president’s impeachment over mass surveillance.

That's the headline, in a huge font, for an article in The Daily Caller -- no, I won't link to it. Tucker Carlson, editor of The Daily Caller and lazy, entitled heir to a huge family fortune, is one of the absolute worst sleazebags on the extreme right. This article is a perfect illustration of the worst of today's "journalism": You can't take anything at face value; trust no one; make sure you're not being lied to.

The article is published under a full-width banner with the words "The Nation" in the background and a picture of Obama in a full-on belly laugh. Here's the article in its entirety -- it's quite short:

In the pages of The Nation, the oldest continuously published weekly in the country and the self-described “flagship of the left,” a former member of the House of Representatives has called for the impeachment of the president over revelations of massive government surveillance of ordinary citizens.

Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman of New York, who sat on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate era, powerfully yet dispassionately lays out the case for the immediate impeachment of the president.

“Nothing less is necessary to protect our constitutional system and preserve our democracy,” she declares.

The last straw for the retired Congresswoman was the revelation that the president “directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans” (a number that is likely conservative).

“As a matter of constitutional law, these and other misdeeds constitute grounds for the impeachment,” writes Holtzman in her bombshell treatise. “A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law — and repeatedly violates the law — thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment and removal from office.”

The eloquent Harvard Law grad provides a devastating legal critique of the vast executive-branch scheme to log every phone call in the United States.

“It now appears that thousands of calls were monitored and that the information obtained may have been widely circulated among federal agencies,” Holtzman writes.

The skilled jurist also draws eerily ominous parallels between what’s happening right now and the actions of the corrupt Nixon administration.

“Among his other abuses of power, President Nixon ordered the FBI to conduct warrantless wiretaps of seventeen journalists and White House staffers,” Holtzman sagely explains. “In fact, the first illegal Nixon wiretap was of a reporter who, in 1969, revealed the secret bombing of Cambodia, a program that President Nixon wanted to hide from the American people and Congress.”

The president, Holtzman says, “has been guilty of such gross incompetence or reckless indifference to his obligation to execute the laws faithfully as to call into question whether he takes his oath seriously or is capable of doing so.”

Holtzman makes a remarkably unqualified argument against the president, leaving little doubt that The Nation is laying down strict principles, rather than engaging in some cheap situational attack that it would hypocritically abandon if, for example, the same abuses were being carried out by a president whose party and agenda the flagship left-wing magazine found more palatable.

To show just how serious she is about impeachment proceedings, the former House member concludes with expert guidance for Americans who want to see the president impeached.

“Drumming up public support means organizing rallies, spearheading letter-writing campaigns to newspapers, organizing petition drives, door-knocking in neighborhoods, handing out leaflets and deploying the full range of mobilizing tactics,” she writes.

“An energized public must in turn bear down on Congress. Constituents should request meetings with their Senators and Representatives to educate them on impeachment,” Holtzman concludes. They can also make their case through e-mail, letters and phone calls.”

At this juncture, The Daily Caller is not prepared to endorse the extreme measure Holtzman advises. Nevertheless, if you are, and if you would like to contact the Senators and Representatives who represent you to voice your views on impeachment, you can find their contact information here.

Wow (you may think), what a damning indictment of President Obama (you may think) -- and from a solid left-wing source! The lefties have turned on their own (you may think) and are attacking the president (you may think)!

Solid news -- you heard it here first, at The Daily Caller!

Well, not quite.

Not a word in the article is untrue. Former Congresswoman Holtzman -- according to The Daily Caller an "eloquent Harvard Law grad" and "a skilled jurist" -- said all of those things, and she said them in a solid, mainstream left-wing publication.

Nevertheless, the article is a disgraceful distortion. It links to former Congresswoman Holtzman's article in The Nation where you can read the truth, but how many TDC readers are going to make the effort to verify the truth of Carlson's article? Unfortunately, not many.

For those who make the effort to pursue the link, the article in The Nation is entitled -- surprise, surprise! -- THE IMPEACHMENT OF GEORGE W. BUSH.

Yes, folks, this breathtaking piece of breaking news was published in The Nation on January 30, 2006. And it's not about Obama, Snowden, et cetera, at all; it's about W's illegal wiretaps.

And Tucker Carlson is a lying dirtbag whose opinion on anything and everything deserves to be summarily dismissed.

Republican Obstructionism: Blocking Obama's Appointments

Click here for an article by Paul Rosenberg at Random Lengths News entitled "Seeking Justice" about how Republicans have been frustrating Obama's attempts to make executive appointments to federal agencies and the judiciary.

Obama's Crackpot Realism (Al Jazeera

Click here for an Al Jazeera article entitled "Obama's crackpot realism and the real crime of Edward Snowden." I'll elaborate when I have more time, but it's well worth reading.

Ronald Reagan: The Original Teabagger

On Bill Maher's "Real Time" on June 7, Maher did a marvelous segment, "Reagan was the Original Teabagger," absolutely destroying Ronald Reagan (something that should be done frequently.) An excerpt:

MAHER: This has become a kind of conventional wisdom, that the Republican party has gone so far right, Reagan himself wouldn't fit in. But I'm here tonight to call bullshit on that.

Ronald Reagan was an anti-government, union busting, race baiting, anti-abortion and anti-gay anti-intellectual who cut rich people's taxes in half, had an incurable case of the military industrial complex, and said Medicare was socialism that would destroy our freedom.

Sounds to me like he would fit in just fine. [...]

But what they cannot contest is even though Ronald Reagan did a few things today's GOP would not like, he wrote the playbook for them on every issue of consequence. Sure, he raised taxes a few times, but when you look at where he started with taxes and where he ended, this is where our income inequality problem began. He invented voodoo economics.

On race, his ideas couldn't have been more tea party if he shouted them from a Rascal scooter. He ran on states' rights. He invented the notion that black people get all the breaks. [...] Reagan just made shit up. Something else he pioneered for his party of today.

He described the New Deal as fascism, Medicaid recipients as waiting for handouts, unemployment insurance as pre-paid vacation for freeloaders, and once said, "A tree's a tree; how many more do you need to look at?"

He was the original, official pitch man for bat-shit, where they hold up signs that say "No socialized medicine." Where do you think they got it from? We got it from you, dad. We got it from you.

Paul Krugman Column On Food Stamps

Click here for a particularly good essay from my favorite columnist, Paul Krugman of The New ork Times, entitled "From the Mouths of Babes." The reference is to stealing food from the mouths of poor children through an attack on SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps.

And why must food stamps be cut? We can’t afford it, say politicians like Representative Stephen Fincher, a Republican of Tennessee, who backed his position with biblical quotations — and who also, it turns out, has personally received millions in farm subsidies over the years. 

The link in that quote refers to an NYT article entitled "Farm Subsidy Recipient Backs Food Stamp Cuts" by Ron Nixon, which includes the following passage:

During debate on the farm bill in the House Agriculture Committee last week, Mr. Fincher was one of the biggest proponents of $20 billion in cuts to food stamps in the legislation. At times he quoted passages from the Bible in defending the cuts.

“We have to remember there is not a big printing press in Washington that continually prints money over and over,” Mr. Fincher said during the debate. “This is other people’s money that Washington is appropriating and spending.”

Scott Faber, vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, said that Mr. Fincher was being hypocritical. “Not only is he advocating deep cuts to other people’s money while he is getting subsidies, he also voted to increase the subsidies that he benefits from,” Mr. Faber said.

Aggressive War

In the light of President Obama's recent speech on the prospect of ending the permanent war in which the U.S. finds itself engaged, kudos to Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-California), the lone member of Congress who voted against the AUMF (Authorization to Use Military Force) on September 14, 2001.

The AUMF reads, in part, “the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”


Only one member of Congress voted against that 2001 bill. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said from the floor of the House of Representatives: “I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States. ... Some of us must urge the use of restraint ... and think through the implications of our actions today, so this does not spiral out of control.”


I think the Nuremberg condemnation of aggressive war is well known. Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on it:

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

But here's an opinion I hadn't known, from a well-known Tea Party favorite:

Thomas Paine wrote in the March 21, 1778, edition of his pamphlet The Crisis, “If there is a sin superior to every other, it is that of willful and offensive war ... he who is the author of a war, lets loose the whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.”

The war in Afghanistan began as a defensive action in retaliation for the attacks of September 11, 2001; it had the support of the U.S.'s NATO allies and the United Nations. The war in Iraq, however, was an aggressive war which will remain forever as a blot on the honor of the United States and on the presidency of George W. Bush.

Foistware - And Beware CNET Downloads! (Get Ninite)

Click here for another great article by Bob Rankin, entitld DOWNLOAD ALERT - Foistware Warning.

Foistware is a term used for software that's "foisted" on you, typically without your knowledge or explicit consent. Foistware isn't technically malware, but it can range from marginally useful, to annoying, to malicious. Most often, foistware takes the form of browser toolbars, but it can also take over your browser homepage and preferred search engines. Some foistware pops up when you visit online shopping sites, and tries to steer you to certain vendors or offers.

Foistware almost always tags along when you download a program that you do want. Through various deceptive practices, the download process may try to add extra, unwanted software to your installation package. Usually it takes the form of a checkbox that's already selected, and if you just click NEXT or CONTINUE without reading carefully, you'll end up with this extra software clutter.

The foistware problem is not limited to downloading and installing dodgy programs you probably shouldn't be messing with in the first place. Rather, some of the Internet's most trusted and widely used applications are among the offenders:

You might think this problem would show up mostly in the dark corners of the Web. But the most egregious offenders are some of the most trusted and popular names in Internet software. If you try to download or update your Adobe Reader or Flash Player, Skype, or the Foxit Reader, you'll see examples of what I mean. Adobe pushes the McAfee Security Scan, which you probably don't need because you've already installed one of the options in my list of Free Anti-Virus Programs, right? Foxit Reader, which I use and recommend, is also guilty of pushing the useless Ask.com toolbar.

Toward the end of the article, Bob says: "I've saved the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) for last." And that best (or worst) is downloads from the venerable and previously respected CNET. He describes his "six-part horror story" performing a CNET download. The upshot? DO NOT DOWNLOAD FROM CNET. They are sneaky and deceptive. I still trust and use CNET for their product reviews, but I will not use them for software downloads.

In passing, Bob recommends a little gem of a progam called "Ninite." If you download and run ninite.exe, you get to choose from a wide variety of well-known applications you wish to monitor. It will install those apps for you if they're not already there, and any that you already have loaded will be checked for the latest updates. Ninite guarantees no toolbars or foistware. In other words, those application installations have been checked by Ninite and careful choices have been made to exclude the junk. Ninite is particularly helpful for those of you who help others set up new computers. Check the applications you wish to install, and let Ninite do the work -- no need to monitor each installation to click Next, Next, Next, while accepting EULA agreements and dodging foistware attacks.

UPDATE: I just reviewed a previous Bob Rankin article I had flagged for consideration and then forgotten about. It's a plug for -- Ninite! Entitled "Finally: The End of Next, Next, Next...," it goes into Ninite at some length. Well worth exploring: Click here.

The U.S. Lobbying Disease

Click here for an article in the New York Times entitled "Kill Bill" by Thomas B. Edsall. It tells how corporations can win huge breaks from Congress for relatively small expenditures on lobbyists.

According to statistics ..., the prescription drug industry spent $116 million lobbying for legislation to prevent Medicare from bargaining down drug prices — legislation that enabled drug companies to make an additional $90 billion annually. That amounts to an extraordinary 77,500 percent return on investment. Oil companies, in turn, had a return on investment of 5,900 percent, and multinational companies, 22,000 percent.

Money spent on lobbying offers corporate America an eyepopping ROI (Return On Investment):

According to Drutman [Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation and an adjunct professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University], with whom I exchanged a number of e-mails, a study in The Journal of Law and Politics, “Measuring Rates of Return for Lobbying Expenditures,” estimated that “companies that lobbied on the [jobs] bill got a return of 22,000 percent on their investment, $220 in benefits for every $1 spent on lobbying.”

....

Lobbying, Drutman says, is simply

an investment strategy. What matters is not your win rate, but rather your net gain. So you could lose nine small battles, but win the one battle where most is at stake, and come out more than ahead.

While lobbyists can win huge benefits for their clients by getting favorable new initiatives passed into legislation, it's much easier and therefore more effective to simply block and impede any Congressional attempts to change the status quo:

The main function of agribusiness lobbyists, for example, is to preserve the status quo throughout the process of reauthorizing the Farm Bill, which covers five years. Their most important task is to preserve the network of subsidies and import restrictions that protect domestic commodities, from sugar to milk to peanuts, from foreign competition.

Similarly, the National Rifle Association’s major victory this year was not enacting a favored bill but killing legislation that would require expanded background checks for gun purchasers. Nathaniel Persily, a law professor and political scientist at Columbia, summed up the situation in an e-mail to The Times: “The greatest impact of lobbying is the most difficult to calculate: namely, preventing legislation from ever getting to the floor.”

Despite the reforms that have been aimed at them over the past few decades, lobbyists have become a semi-permanent class with ever-expanding reach – they write legislation, they kill legislation. They have usurped many of the political functions that once belonged to elected officials, in part by adapting to new political ecologies faster than those who seek to counter their influence.

Insofar as they are protecting the status quo, lobbyists insulate calcified interest groups from challenge. They put up roadblocks that become ever-higher barriers to innovation. At a time when sectors of the economy ranging from health care to education to manufacturing are under more or less permanent siege, the tentacles of the lobbying community are choking off open exchange between officeholders and the voters they represent. They have created and now maintain a stifling stasis. It is hard to see how this ends well.

The Plight of a Bangladesh Seamstress

Another article from Spiegel International Online. Click here for an article entitled "Bangladesh Seamstress: 'I Had No Choice but to Go to Work'" describing the plight of a Bangladesh textile worker:

Mushamat Sokina Begum, 27, was at her sewing machine in a fifth-floor factory when the Rana Plaza building where she worked in Savar near the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka collapsed on the morning of April 24 , killing over 1,000 people. Begum was pulled from the rubble three hours later with an injured leg. She spoke to SPIEGEL ONLINE editor Hasnain Kazim about her hopes for her future and those of her two children.

Big Data

Click here for an article entitled "Living by the Numbers: Big Data Knows What Your Future Holds" by Martin U. Müller, Marcel Rosenbach and Thomas Schulz in Spiegel International Online. It's a long article about how the spectre "Big Brother" is being replaced by "Big Data."

An excerpt:

TomTom, a Dutch manufacturer of GPS navigation equipment, had sold its data to the Dutch government. It then passed on the data to the police, which used the information to set up speed traps in places where they were most likely to generate revenue -- that is, locations where especially large numbers of TomTom users were speeding.

Pre-programmed Conflicts

TomTom's CEO issued a public apology, saying that the company had believed that the government wanted the data to improve traffic safety and reduce road congestion. TomTom had not anticipated the use of the data for speed traps, he said.

Similar conflicts are practically pre-programmed into the technology, especially as a central conflict is inherent in its development. Big Data applications are especially valuable when they are personalized, as in the case of credit checks and individual medicine.

Obama's "Scandals" -- Worse Than Watergate? Nonsense!

Click here for an article entitled "Why Obama Is Not Nixon" by Elizabeth Drew at The New York Review of Books. She discusses the current "scandals" -- Benghazi, the IRS, and the AP -- and then presents a fascinating summary of the events we know as "Watergate":

Compared to Watergate, on the basis of everything we know about what are the current “scandals” amount to a piffle. Watergate was a Constitutional crisis. It was about a pattern of behavior on the part of the president of the United States abusing power to carry out his personal vendettas. It was about whether the president was accountable to the other branches of the government; it was about whether the Congress could summon the courage to hold accountable a president who held himself above the law. It was about a president and his aides who were out of control in their efforts to punish the president’s “enemies.”

It was also about, though this has still gone largely unrecognized, an attempt by a sitting president to determine the nomination of the opposition party’s presidential candidate. Potentially strong challengers were spied upon, their offices broken into and files disappeared, their campaign events disrupted by what were diminished by their categorization as laughable “dirty tricks.” It was about black bag jobs and paying criminals to carry out ideas that sprang from the fevered brain of a president who saw opponents, political and otherwise, as enemies, and then trying to hush the whole thing up. The attempt, not unsuccessful though not exclusively their doing, to try to get the opposition party to nominate its weakest candidate was a step along the road to fascism. It was a putsch by a head of state.

Nixon’s extraordinary abuse of his new power started almost as soon as he had put away his Inaugural finery. In February 1969 he told his staff that he wanted private funds raised to establish an intelligence unit within the White House to carry out around-the-clock surveillance of political opponents. This led to the hiring of a group of fanatics, bums, fools, and losers—most of them paid for with private funds but run by White House aides and right out of the Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. Some were of Cuban origin and had participated in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; to motivate them Nixon instructed that they be told that their mission was to root out Communists in the Democratic Party. (He even ordered that they be required to read the chapter of his memoir Six Crisis that recounts his exposure of Alger Hiss as a spy for the Soviet Union. But Nixon was always telling people, even Mao, to read Six Crises. The shrewd Mao had beat him to it.).

The following year Nixon signed off on a plan (the “Huston plan”) that included not just wiretaps also but break-ins and intercepting mail; the plan was so extreme that even the powerful FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, no civil libertarian, objected; though Nixon said that the plan had been rescinded parts of it were implemented. The list of “enemies” he ordered John Dean to draw up, was considered by many who were on it funny and even a point of pride, but it was a chilling exercise of power: the president used the levers of government, including the IRS, to audit and harass his opponents, a wide swath of people in public and private lives. Nixon was often heard on the tapes telling his aides he wanted them to “get the goods” on this or that perceived enemy. Edward Kennedy, presumably Nixon’s most powerful opponent for reelection, was put under twenty-four hour surveillance for a time by one of the clowns hired by the White House to carry out Nixon’s plan.

Nixon’s most serious problems arose out of his obsession about the leak of the Pentagon Papers, in 1971. This led—shortly after the Papers were first published in The New York Times—to the establishing, four days later, the White House “plumbers” office in the EOB. A sign saying PLUMBERS was on the door. But even before the plumbers office was fully set up Nixon’s aides implemented “Special Operation No. 1”: in a first step toward punishing the leaker, Daniel Ellsberg, the White House sanctioned the gravest offense—a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to get the files of this particular patient. A raid of the office of the psychiatrist of a private citizen on the orders of the president of the United States. This clear flouting of the Fourth Amendment protection of private property from searches and seizures was the most disturbing act during this extraordinary period and it shook even conservative senators; Nixon knew that its discovery was the single greatest danger to him, and this was what he was so frantically trying to cover up. As it happened, even though one of the plumbers had cased the place, the psychiatrist’s office contained no files at all.

The obsession over the leak of the Pentagon Papers also led to the mad suggestion by the president of the United States that the offices of the Brookings Institution be firebombed in order to get to the safes in the offices of former Kissinger aides, Leslie Gelb and Morton Halperin, who were suspected of keeping the drafts of some unpublished chapters of the Pentagon Papers. The president could be heard on the tapes instructing his aides: “Godammit. Get in there and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” You see, Kissinger had ordered up the study. Ellsberg had been assigned by Kissinger to do a super-secret study on the papers and had been given access to them, which were stored at Rand. Though one of the burglars had searched Brookings and reported that the files existed, there were none. In any event, some White House aides thwarted that plan before it was fully carried out.

In this context the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building on June 17, 1972 was almost routine. This one, when the burglars were caught, which started the unraveling of Nixon’s secret plots against his enemies, was actually the burglars’ fourth attempt: in the first attempt they faked a banquet to get into the building but ended up locked in a closet; the second time they couldn’t break the lock on the DNC office door; the third time, on Memorial Day, they got into the DNC office but put a bug on the wrong phone, so on they went back to fix it. Perhaps because breaking in had become so habitual they got sloppy and left the immortal piece of tape on a door. That the plumbers were stumblebums doesn’t negate the sinister nature of what they were told to do.

In October 1973, Nixon rattled through a series of beheadings of those who got in the way of his desperate attempts to prevent the tapes into which he had sealed his own fate—as he was oddly aware—from being turned over to the prosecutors. He first ordered the attorney general, Elliott Richardson, to fire Archibald Cox, the Independent Prosecutor who had subpoenaed the tapes and got a court order that they must be released. Richardson, a Boston Brahmin, also refused and was fired by the president; the next in line, Bill Ruckelshaus, a popular environmentalist, also refused and was fired. Finally, the next in line, Robert Bork, agreed to fire Cox. The prosecutors’ staff was barricaded in their offices trying to protect their files from the FBI, who had surrounded them and told them they could not remove their papers. As the bulletins rolled in, one after another on that dark Saturday night, it felt as if we were living in a banana republic and now there were grounds for fearing a President who was irrational and out of control. There was a run on the bookstores to buy legal scholar Raoul Berger’s Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems (1969). No one knew how to impeach a president.

When the House Judiciary Committee took up its work at the beginning of 1974, trying to impeach a sitting president who still had a fairly strong political base was a daunting prospect. Impeachment had not yet been cheapened by the zealots who conducted a trivial pursuit of President Clinton. The triumphalism came later, spurred on by the myth that Watergate was a victory of the good guys over the bad guys. It was about something far deeper: whether our constitutional system would survive. If the Committee did vote for articles of impeachment by a bipartisan and definite majority it was probable that the House would agree and vote to impeach—indict—the president. Next would come a grail in the Senate. And the president remained defiant. The committee had to get it right.

Almost forgotten is the part played by an obscure New Jersey congressman, Peter Rodino, who had been chairman of the committee for only a year. (Inevitably once the spotlight fell on him, rumors circulated, without any evidence, that he must have ties to the mob.) Rodino was not the most articulate member by far but the miracle of the Judiciary Committee’s adopting on a bipartisan basis three articles of impeachment was due to the fact that ordinary people rose to the task and did extraordinary things; Rodino’s choices made a critical difference.

Showboat attorneys or flashy advisers were turned away. As it was, Rodino had to struggle against some committee members who wanted to conduct a prosecution of the president. The two people who along with Rodino shaped not just the committee’s action but the history of the downfall of Richard Nixon were a thirty-four-year-old Francis O’Brien, who had no prior experience in such matters but was recommended to Rodino for his uncommon judgment, and John Doar, the counsel whom O’Brien had found. Doar had served in the Eisenhower Justice Department and then was a civil rights hero in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. He was methodical and low-key and built the case against Nixon brick by brick, slowly earning the trust of committee members, the press, and the public.

These three men had concluded that if there were to be articles of impeachment that would be accepted by a still-divided country they had to be seen as arising from a fair process, be bipartisan and come from the center of the committee members: those on the right who defended Nixon to the end and the most partisan Democrats on the committee had to be contained, and moderate Republicans and southern Democrats had to be convinced that voting for articles of impeachment was necessary and urgent. James Madison’s writings and the Federalist Papers became as familiar in the discussions as morning newspapers.

The atmosphere in Washington was unlike anything that had gone before or has happened since. We lived in fear. Knowing that the telephones of some of the presidents’ “enemies” were being tapped, we joked in our telephone conversations about our phones being bugged. (No Internet then, but just think of the Nixon people’s probable temptation to trace emails.) One Sunday morning when the newspaper delivery was late, a perfectly sane woman I knew said, “They’ve stopped the papers.” It got to the point where, near the end, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger felt compelled to send a memo to military commanders to obey no command that came from the White House to dispatch the troops to restore order.

This brings us to the strange character of Richard Nixon, probably the most peculiar person to serve as president of the United States. He was also an unlikely successful political figure. He didn’t particularly like people and few people liked him. He had very few friends, trusted almost no one. He was awkward in many ways, from his odd motions at times to his virtual inability to make small talk. Nixon’s confusion of opponents with enemies and his indulging his long nurtured grievances gave us a president who came to office filled with hatreds and was willing to use the instruments of government to “get” them. The president was a dangerous man.

But even then, we didn’t know just how dangerous were Nixon’s personality traits. Not until I was doing research for a book about him for the American Presidents series did it become clear that he was often drunk, barking out orders in after-midnight calls to his aides, his words slurred, and they would have to decide whether to carry them out. Worse still, on the advice of a wealthy backer who kept him stocked, Nixon began to take Dilantin, an anti-convulsive drug, on the grounds that it would lessen depression, though it had never been approved for that. Dilantin served to enhance the effects of too much alcohol: mental confusion, slurring of words, physical clumsiness. Often Nixon was holed up with his best and only close pal, Bebe Rebozo, outside the White House, in Key Biscayne or at Camp David. On the eve of the “incursion” into Cambodia, a disastrous spreading of the Vietnam War, the two men were at Camp David and one or the other would call Kissinger to make sure that the incursion went forward. “It’s your ass, Henry,” said one of them, their drunken voices hard to distinguish.

So contrary to the myths that have been built around it, or the use that later politicians want to make of it, Watergate wasn’t about the mistakes of a bureaucracy, it wasn’t a cops and robbers story, or about courageous journalism. It was about a pattern of acts by a president that threatened the constitution, the law, and the Bill of Rights.

Nothing happening now comes close to that.

May 18, 2013, 10:30 a.m.

The Case For Liberal Interventionism

Click here for an article by David Atkins at Hullabaloo entitled "The progressive, anti-imperialist case for international intervention." It's a long article, not the easiest reading, but it's a good explanation of the liberal interventionists' philosophy.

Jon Stewart: The Daily Show, Thursday, May 16

Jon's guest, George Packer, author of "The Unwinding," America on the verge of dystopian collapse.

Barack Hussein Guevara Stalin Obama began his second term as president with high hopes. His only hope, the media! With the attention span of a concussed goldfish -- more of a problem with goldfish than you might think. There's not just the bowl; there's the treasure chest.

In the race for 2016 (Chuck Todd: "With still 1,000 days to go in the 2016 contest ...") Comedy Central calls the Democratic primary for Hillary Clinton. Joe Scarborough, December 20, 2006: "She will crush Barack Obama. Barack, just sit it out. It's going to be ugly. I promise you; you heard it here first."

Stewart: And the rest was alternate history.

(Segment: The Road To The Road To The Road To The White House)

Video of Chuck Todd, discussing a Biden run, reading the word on his teleprompter "literally" as "light rally." Stewart mocks him, as a "come Dian."

Larry Wilmore, Senior Black Correspondent: The blacks want to hold onto the presidency for a while before relinquishing it to other minorities.
Stewart: The white guys had a good run.
Wilmore: Yeah, 43 out of 44.
Stewart: Well, 43 1/2.

Wilmore: When John Oliver takes over this summer --
Stewart: He's just here for a few weeks.
Wilmore: The Internet's right, Jon -- you are funny.

Segment based on getting laughs from the phrase "can't punt" -- and that's not how you spell "can't."

To Disney: As parents, our job is to keep them in front of the screen; your job is to raise them right. And if you keep teaching them the wrong lessons, then we're going to have to start doing it ourselves, and that's not cool.

George Packer: Good interview. Unlike Colbert, Stewart engages his serious guests in a serious way. I'm a big fan of Packer's articles in the NY Times and the New Yorker.

"Washington is represented [in his book] by Newt Gingrich, who I think history will say did more than maybe any other person to create the pretty messed-up politics that we know today." [Soft pedal much?]

Moment of Zen: Republican bottom-feeder Louie Gohmert in verbal combat with Attorney General Eric Holder: doesn't want Holder to "cast aspersions on my asparagus." Yeah, that's what he said:

 

Space Oddity

Bilderberg To Merge With Google For World Domination

Click here for the latest wingnut fantasy from Alex Jones at Infowars:

Put simply, Bilderberg is merging with Google under the stewardship of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a regular Bilderberg attendee.

Want proof?

Backed up by prior research, we were able to confirm in conversations with hotel managers and others that the Grove is now a central base for Google’s agenda to control the global political and technological landscape.

Well, there you go: hotel managers and others. Talk about solid sources!

Bilderberg is indeed being recast as ‘Google-Berg’ – partly because of efforts on behalf of activists to tear away the veil of Bilderberg’s much cherished secrecy, and partly as a means of re-branding authoritarian, undemocratic secret gatherings of elites as trendy, liberal, feel-good philanthropic-style forums like Google Zeitgeist and TED. In reality, behind the scenes Google is using such forums as proving grounds on which to form the consensus that shapes the globe. We were told directly that the organizers behind the so-called “Arab Spring,” which began in Tunisia and Egypt, which as we have documented is in fact a series of contrived western-backed color revolutions masquerading as organic uprisings, were recruited by Google ...

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Google is clearly positioning itself to become a force more powerful than governments in controlling and monitoring people’s behavior across the globe through all manner of different means, from cars that drive themselves (and are constantly tracked by a centralized Google database), to Google Glass which is akin to having a Google microchip in your forehead, to Google’s deep involvement in manipulating mass movements through social media as they did in Egypt and Tunisia. ... The direction in which this is all heading can clearly be surmised from remarks made by Eric Schmidt himself, who has repeatedly made it clear that he thinks privacy is a relic of the past and plans to turn Google into the ultimate Big Brother that makes George Orwell’s 1984 look like a children’s fairy tale.

Loony Ramblings By Glenn Beck

See if you can make any sense out of this clip -- good luck! (2 minutes 23 seconds)



If you need more, here's his take on the Boston Marathon bombing: 12 guys were involved! The Saudi was the money guy! The cops know it! The FBI know it! Wait, the cops, the DHS, and the FBI knew it in advance! (1 minute 10 seconds)

This one's about what Glenn calls his "bizarre gift" of literally feeling other people's pain. (2 minutes 26 seconds)



He's the gift that keeps giving. I'll have to stop adding clips, because it seems the list may be endless. This time he claims that since he didn't support the "birther" or the "Obama is a Muslim" memes, he's not a conspiracy theorist. Then he demands that a special counsel be appointed "to explore impeachment of this president" -- but there has to be "citizen oversight" because "The big government stooges will cover for themselves. They will help each other, because the State Department is full of snakes. So is the White House, so is Congress."

Who Can Take Rand Paul Seriously Ever Again?

Is this going to turn out to be a hoax? Or is it an actual fundraising appeal from Kentucky Senator Rand Paul? Well, it's from a post by the extremely credible Ezra Klein on his blog, Wonkblog, so it's the real deal:

Dear fellow Patriot,

Gun-grabbers around the globe believe they have it made.

You see, only hours after re-election, Barack Obama immediately made a move for gun control… On November 7th, his administration gleefully voted at the UN for a renewed effort to pass the “Small Arms Treaty.”

But after the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut — and anti-gun hysteria in the national media reaching a fever pitch — there’s no doubt President Obama and his anti-gun pals believe the timing has never been better to ram through the U.N.’s global gun control crown jewel.

I don’t know about you, but watching anti-American globalists plot against our Constitution makes me sick.

This Spring, the United Nations went back into session to finalize their radical so-called “Small Arms Treaty.” With the treaty finalized, a full U.S. Senate ratification showdown could come any time President Obama chooses and there will be very little time to fight back.

If we’re to succeed, we must fight back now. That’s why I’m helping lead the fight to defeat the UN “Small Arms Treaty” in the United States Senate. And it’s why I need your help today. Will you join me by taking a public stand against the UN “Small Arms Treaty” and sign the Official Firearms Sovereignty Survey right away?

Ultimately, UN bureaucrats will stop at nothing to register, ban and CONFISCATE firearms owned by private citizens like YOU. So far, the gun-grabbers have successfully kept many of their schemes under wraps. But looking at previous attempts by the UN to pass global gun control, you and I can get a good idea of what’s likely in the works.

You can bet the UN is working to FORCE the U.S. to implement every single one of these anti-gun policies:

*** Enact tougher licensing requirements, making law-abiding Americans cut through even more bureaucratic red tape just to own a firearm legally;

*** CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL “unauthorized” civilian firearms (all firearms owned by the government are excluded, of course);

*** BAN the trade, sale and private ownership of ALL semi-automatic weapons;

*** Create an INTERNATIONAL gun registry, setting the stage for full-scale gun CONFISCATION.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this is NOT a fight we can afford to lose. Ever since its founding 65 years ago, the United Nations has been hell-bent on bringing the United States to its knees. To the petty dictators and one-world socialists who control the UN, the United States of America isn’t a “shining city on a hill” — it’s an affront to their grand designs for the globe.

These anti-gun globalists know that as long as Americans remain free to make our own decisions without being bossed around by big government bureaucrats, they’ll NEVER be able to seize the worldwide power they crave. And the UN’s apologists also know the most effective way to finally strip you and me of ALL our freedoms would be to DESTROY our gun rights.

That’s why I was so excited to see the National Association for Gun Rights leading the fight to stop the UN “Small Arms Treaty!” Will you join them by going on record AGAINST global gun control and sign the Official Firearms Sovereignty Survey today?

The truth is there’s no time to waste. You and I have to be prepared for this fight to move FAST. The fact is the last thing the gun-grabbers at the UN and in Washington, D.C. want is for you and me to have time to mobilize gun owners to defeat this radical agenda.

They’ve made that mistake before, and we’ve made them pay, defeating EVERY attempt to ram the UN Small Arms Treaty into law since the mid-1990s. But now time may not be on our side. And worse… the UN Small Arms Treaty is no longer the only UN scheme threatening our gun rights. More and more of the UN’s radical agenda is slipping through covertly, under the cover of domestic legislation.

Not long ago, Obama told Sarah Brady from the anti-gun Brady Campaign, “I just want you to know that we are working on [gun control]. We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.” In fact, Hillary Clinton’s State Department recently bragged that Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious are implementations of the UN’s anti-gun agenda!

And I’d place a wager that Obama’s M1 Rifle Re-importation Ban was also the UN’s agenda dutifully executed by his administration. Anti-gun UN policy that NEVER received a single vote in the United States Congress! The UN met recently to pass a final version of the “Small Arms Treaty” to be sent for ratification by the Senate. So if you and I are going to defeat them, we have to turn the heat up on Washington now before it’s too late!

1. Do you believe the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Second Amendment are the supreme law of the land?

2. Do you believe any attempt by the United Nations to subvert or supersede your Constitutional rights must be opposed?

If you said “Yes!” to these questions, please sign the survey the National Association for Gun Rights has prepared for you.

But I hope you’ll do more than just sign your survey today. With your help, the National Association for Gun Rights will continue to turn up the heat on targeted Senators who are working to implement the UN “Small Arms Treaty.” Direct mail. Phones. E-mail. Blogs. Guest editorials. Press conferences. Hard-hitting internet, newspaper, radio and even TV ads if funding permits. The whole nine yards.

Of course, a program of this scale is only possible if the National Association for Gun Rights can raise the money. But that’s not easy, and we may not have much time. In fact, if gun owners are going to defeat the UN’s schemes, pro-gun Americans like you and me have to get involved NOW!

So please put yourself on record AGAINST the UN Gun Ban by signing NAGR’s Firearms Sovereignty Survey. But along with your survey, please agree to make a generous contribution of $250, $100, $50 or even just $35. And every dollar counts in this fight so even if you can only chip in $10 or $20, it will make a difference.

Thank you in advance for your time and money devoted to defending our Second Amendment rights.

For Freedom,
Rand Paul, United States Senator

The man's a raving idiot.