Is Fox News’ prophet of doom truly concerned that one of his listeners or viewers might do “something stupid,” as unnamed Glenn Beck “friends” recently told the New York Times? Does he fret that one of his followers will be inspired by the talkers’ doomsday warnings of progressive peril and lash out at an innocent target? Is Beck, the self-described “progressive hunter,” nervous that an act of vigilante violence will cast a cloud over his mini-media empire?

If so, Beck’s too late because that bloody ship has already sailed.

The acts of stupidity have been many in the wake of the Tea Party movement’s rise, fueled at times by its government-hating message of revenge and reconciliation, eagerly amplified by the likes of Beck.

So, how you doin'? I only ask because I am checking to see how the whole "trickle-down" thing is working for you. Because, if the news in today's Wall St. Journal is true, those of us down here must be just about due for a real soaker. Because the folks at the top are really raking it in -- again:

Wall Street Pay to Hit Record $144 Billion This Year

Pay on Wall Street is on pace to break a record high for a second consecutive year, according to a study conducted byThe Wall Street Journal, growing 4% in 2010 at nearly three dozen of the top financial institutions...The 35 top publicly held securities and investment-services firms are set to pay $144 billion in compensation and benefits, up from $139 billion in 2009, according to theJournalsurvey. Compensation was expected to rise at 26 of the firms.

NYT:

The Obama administration has sharply expanded the shadow waragainst terrorists, using both the military and the C.I.A. to track down and kill hundreds of them, in a dozen countries, on and off the battlefield.

The drone program has been effective, killing more than 400 Al Qaeda militants this year alone, according to American officials, but fewer than 10 noncombatants.

Okay, let’s unpack this. This should read “alleged Al-Qaeda militants.” Remember those worst of the worst Masters of Destruction, who were all like totally 100 percent guilty, we locked up in Gitmo? Yeah, well…

The foreclosure fraud scandal is a big deal (or a big "effin'" deal, as Joe Biden might say). But its real significance is an even bigger deal. Foreclosure fraud is one domino, and if it falls others will follow. The result could be an end to the "invisible bailout" -- the one you never hear about, the one that forces millions of people to subsidize bad lending practices in order to prop up Wall Street.

— from Truthout

Ever have a day when your mind simply refuses to focus on one thing at a time? I'm having one of those today; looking over the blogs and newswires, I'm seeing fifty different things that deserve total concentration, but my brain is acting like a dragonfly in a marsh, lighting from one frond to the next.

Screw it. If that's how it's going to be, I might as well play along.

President Reagan once famously quipped that everyone who supports abortion has already been born. In the same vein it is worth noting that all the policymakers who don't think we should worry about 9.6 percent unemployment have jobs.

This simple fact cannot be repeated enough times because it explains a huge amount about current economic policy. For the tens of millions of people who are unemployed, underemployed, or have given up looking for work altogether, we are in a crisis. The economy is an absolute disaster, ruining their lives and also jeopardizing the futures of their children and grandchildren.

— from Truthdig

The Titanic that is the U.S. housing market has just sprung its biggest leak, and even some of the largest banks responsible for this mess, like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, are now imposing a temporary moratorium on foreclosures. They have done so very reluctantly and only after courts throughout the nation, and the attorneys general of 40 states, questioned the legality of a securitized system of homeownership that has impoverished tens of millions.

Anyone who claims that if you don't know your history, you are doomed to relive it, is boring.

Anyone who claims that you are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts is boring.

"Anyone dumb enough to wanna be in the military should be allowed in," said the late great Bill Hicks. It was one of the few things he got wrong. Anyone dumb enough to wanna be in the military is too dumb to be trusted with a weapon. So the issue of getting gays into the military is not the issue. The issue is getting heterosexuals out of the military. They're the ones who are shooting civilians for sport and taking trophies. Anyone who gets jazzed about equal rights for war criminals is boring.

[click image to enlarge]

Obama tells the jobless to wait for his trickle-down policies to start working.

OSLO, NORWAY (The Borowitz Report) - Two of the theory of evolution's most vociferous doubters, Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell, may be living proof that Darwin was wrong, leading scientists believe.

A conference of the most prominent evolutionary scientists in the world has concluded that the apparent evolution of Ms. Palin into Ms. O'Donnell suggests, in the words of Dr. Hiroshi Kyosuke of the University of Tokyo, "that Darwin got it backwards."

What's that old phrase? "

"What's good for those who have been legally goosed, is good for the gander?"

But, for some reason, there are few to nil questions amongst the usual swill offered by the mainstream media regarding one very important Constitutional question and the Phelps case...

"Due process."

Has the New York Times decided to follow Fox News’ lead and become shills offering partisan political propaganda to their audience? The first sentence of the New York Times’ lead article on Monday October 11, 2010, would get an “F” in a Journalism 101 classroom. It read: “Republicans are well-positioned to pick up a substantial number of governor’s seats in this year’s election, with potentially far-reaching effects on issues like the new health care law, Congressional redistricting and presidential politics.” The writers (Jeff Zeleny and Monica Davey) do not say what evidence caused them to jump to that conclusion. If it is based on extensive, quality polling that would be a very strong reason to draw that conclusion; if it was based on a partisan press release (from Karl Rove?) that would completely destroy the logic of agreeing with that conclusion.

Is it a mystery why a six-pack of rightwingnuts, loonier than the Wasilla quitter, are vying for Senate seats while the most principled Democrat, Russ Feingold, faces ruin? Hot-dogging prayer warriors sell better in off years than a modern philosopher king - all of two years after Democrats supposedly routed wrong-way Bush and demon Cheney.

What an irony if the GOP Demolition Party thrives from the very horrendous recession its own self-serving, tax-giveaway, budget-busting wars fomented. Not only is this season's nasty spawn of Palinistas riding roughshod, I see few progressive antidotes - not one, new, significant, emerging leftwing candidate who champions reason over politics as goon show.

"We are going to protect our young, we are going to protect the next generation of Americans, so the Mama Grizzlies are growling, we are rising up on our hind legs and saying no, we are going to change course, we need that real hope, we need that real change."
-- Sarah Palin, speaking this weekend to a Patriotic Gala Celebration in San Diego.

"...[C]hildren and grandchildren..."

During late 2009 and early 2010, I criss-crossed the country talking to the rank-and-file not just of the Tea Party Movement but the 9-12 Project, the Oath Keepers and others in the backlash movement that sprung from nowhere practically in the hours after President Barack Obama's inauguration.

American capitalism is broken. So is the Democratic-Republican duopoly that supports it. Neither can be fixed. The system is collapsing. A power vacuum is beginning to open.

As murderous as our dying system is, it still features a veneer of sanity. What comes next will certainly be worse. It will probably be Very Bad. Dictatorship? A 21st century po-mo variant of fascism? Warlordism? A Christianist Taliban-style terror state, as depicted in Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel "The Handmaid's Tale"?

Before moronic right-wing tyrants seize power, I urge in my new book "The Anti-American Manifesto," the left should do it first. Well, first they have to become a big-L Left: organized, and with a program the people of the Soon-to-be Former United States of America can get behind.

If you Google "candidate wears Nazi uniform," you would probably guess it would be a Tea Party favorite, a Republican, and someone once called "a rising star in the GOP." If you did guess this, you would be right!

We refer, of course, to Rich Lott, the Republican nominee for a congressional seat in Ohio, a Tea Party darling and a fellow who gets his jollies dressing up as a Nazi SS officer! Where do they find these guys?

To be fair to Lott, he does not endorse the Waffen SS policies, he merely holds profound admiration for their fighting abilities, and enjoys parading up imagined battlefields, jackboot on foot, Republican policies in mind.

What did Sharron Angle mean when she talked about Second Amendment solutions and "taking out" political opponents?

I've been going door-to-door canvassing, and it's not that bad -- really. It's actually kind of fun. But only because I've found a way to break through people's cynicism.

No wonder people are cynical. Crashing from the sky-high hopes of two years ago, people are worried about jobs, the economy and their own uncertain futures, about the wars we're bogged down in and the threats to our planet. They don't like where America is headed, don't like most politicians or candidates, and are often uncertain whether their vote even matters. But when I talked about the takeover of our politics by destructive corporate interests, culminating in the barrage of anonymous attack ads unleashed by the Supreme Court's ghastly Citizens United decision, they quickly became willing to listen.

By most mainstream media accounts - especially the recent segment about her on CBS' "60 Minutes" - Melinda Gates, the wife of Microsoft's Bill Gates, is a smart, caring, highly-motivated and well-organized woman seeking to do great good both at home and abroad. As the co-founder and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she, along with her husband, are the world's most generous philanthropists. They have given away of hundreds of millions of dollars to such diverse efforts as improving education in the U.S., the elimination of diseases like Malaria in underdeveloped countries, fighting HIV/AIDS, and the prevention of mother and child deaths around the world.

"I have to be here. To see it, and to feel it, and to understand, you know, what motivates these people," Melinda Gates told "60 Minutes'" Scott Pelley, during a Foundation trip to north India. "What is it that they're doing for their livelihood? Unless I see it and feel it and touch it, I just don't feel like I can do the foundation justice in terms of what we're trying to accomplish."

This is a tale of two stories. One happened in Greece, the other in America.

In 2008, Epaminondas Korkoneas, a Greek police officer, shot and killed Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old student. Alexandros’s execution led to protests and widespread rioting that lasted for three weeks. Rioters took to the streets armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails. Vehicles were damaged, police officers were injured, protesters were arrested, and students occupied buildings. Rioters set fire to the Kostis Palamas building, which led to the total destruction of the European Law Library. On December 23, thousands of people marched through Athens, and the next day, hundreds of anarchists peacefully gathered in the streets — all parts of the movement to resist police thuggery.

There was a trial and today the police officer was found guilty of murder.

— from TomDispatch

Back before email, a world traveler who wanted to keep in touch and couldn't just pop into the nearest Internet café might drop you a series of postcards from one exotic locale after another. Pepe Escobar, that edgy, peripatetic globe-trotting reporter for one of my favorite on-line publications, Asia Times, has been doing just that for TomDispatch readers as he explores the geography that undergirds our civilization, the pipelines that crisscross Eurasia through which flow energy -- and trouble. This, then, is his fourth "postcard" from what he likes to call Pipelineistan. The first in March 2009 began laying out a great, ongoing energy struggle across Eurasia and the Great Game of business, diplomacy, and proxy war between Russia and the U.S. that went with it.

"If it gets any worse," said Wilda, a homeless Haitian mother, "we're not going to survive." Mothers and grandmothers surrounding her nodded solemnly.

We are in a broiling "tent" with a group of women trying to raise their families in a public park. Around the back of the Haitian National Palace, the park hosts a regal statute of Alexandre Petion in its middle. It is now home to five thousand people displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.

Nine months after the quake, over a million people are still homeless in Haiti.

Haiti looks like the quake could have been last month. I visited Port au Prince shortly after the quake and much of the destruction then looks the same nine months later.

The following debate over the merits of one Democratic congress member may have relevance for others around the country.

I recently posted "On Voting for Bad Democrats: the Perriello Predicament," expressing doubts about exactly how progressive Congressman Tom Perriello (D., VA-05) is.

Bill Lankford sent me a response, arguing in favor of supporting Perriello. I said I would post it, but asked if there was any way to strengthen it by mentioning even one thing Perriello had done in the past two years. Lankford had commented purely on who Perriello was deep in his heart. I like to vote for elected officials who do what I want done, more than those who just mean well.

I’ve been thinking about yields. Actually I’ve been thinking about St. Johns, corn, soybeans, moisture, real estate assessments, property taxes, Kishwaukee College, campaign signs, Illinois Governor Candidate Brady, and Christopher Columbus. This was quite a past week and weekend. I was inundated with so much information, even more than usual. Most of it was good news for a change. Some was not so good, but the subjects were diverse. Some of the items were completely unexpected, then again, we do live in “interesting” times.

Maryland's Calvert Cliffs nuke project is on the brink of cancellation. It's potentially one of the most critical atomic failures in decades. 

But financial markets love the nuke's demise. The stock of its American partner---Constellation Energy---has soared with the apparent death of a project widely feared as a huge money-loser. 

Just 40 miles south of the White House, George W. Bush hailed Calvert Cliffs in 2005 as the shining symbol of a "reactor renaissance." In partnership with EDF, the French national utility, Constellation jumped high in the line for a share of the $18.5 billion Bush earmarked for federal loan guarantees to finance new reactors 

Stop me if you've heard this one: A poet, an economist, and a biologist walk into in a barn in Kansas and start talking. What do you get when you cross their ideas?

Answer: Hybrid vigor.

OK, the joke might not quite work unless you're an agronomist (and maybe even the agronomists aren't laughing), but it captures the importance of the conversations at The Land Institute's annual gathering in Salina, KS. In the search for alternatives to our dead-end industrial agriculture system, Land Institute researchers are pursuing plant breeding programs that just may be the key to post-oil farming. But beyond the science, "The Land" -- that's how everyone there refers to the Institute in conversation -- provides a fertile space for mixing the ideas of people as well as the genes of plants. In both cases, the hybrid vigor -- the superior qualities that result from crossbreeding -- is exciting.