The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls.
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View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.
Web wide crawl with initial seedlist and crawler configuration from March 2011. This uses the new HQ software for distributed crawling by Kenji Nagahashi.
What’s in the data set:
Crawl start date: 09 March, 2011
Crawl end date: 23 December, 2011
Number of captures: 2,713,676,341
Number of unique URLs: 2,273,840,159
Number of hosts: 29,032,069
The seed list for this crawl was a list of Alexa’s top 1 million web sites, retrieved close to the crawl start date. We used Heritrix (3.1.1-SNAPSHOT) crawler software and respected robots.txt directives. The scope of the crawl was not limited except for a few manually excluded sites.
However this was a somewhat experimental crawl for us, as we were using newly minted software to feed URLs to the crawlers, and we know there were some operational issues with it. For example, in many cases we may not have crawled all of the embedded and linked objects in a page since the URLs for these resources were added into queues that quickly grew bigger than the intended size of the crawl (and therefore we never got to them). We also included repeated crawls of some Argentinian government sites, so looking at results by country will be somewhat skewed.
We have made many changes to how we do these wide crawls since this particular example, but we wanted to make the data available “warts and all” for people to experiment with. We have also done some further analysis of the content.
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TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20110728161131/http://sideshow.me.uk/
Avedon Carol presents:
The Sideshow
My motto as I live and learn is: dig and be dug in return. -- Langston Hughes
Jay and Stuart were a lot more coherent than us on Thursday, and CMike even congratulated them down in comments to this post, where he added to the discussion of the purpose of Social Security.
So far on debt ceiling week, Sam Seder has talked to Digby and Ryan Grim, among others.
Thom Hartmann Takes On The Myth Of The Wealthy 'Job Creator' - The real job-creators in an economy are the ordinary working people who collect a paycheck and go out and spend. The concentrated accumulation of wealth at the top doesn't create jobs, it stops them from being created. Tax the rich - it's what Americans want.
That little creep on Reliable Sources let Cenk come on to his little CNN perch to talk about his departure from MSNBC and, of course, Cenk told the truth.
Black Agenda Radio for week of July 25, 2011: Torture is Routine in U.S. Prisons, "War on Terror" Worsens Somalia's Plight, Obama "Deal" is no Bargain, Charter Schools: Favorites of the Rich, Obama's Low Regard for Non-White Lives, Democracy, Anyone?
Froomkin says if you want to know who wins on the "free trade" deals, just check out the lobbyists.
He's risking his life for us: "The obstacles only make him more committed, he said. The women who have turned to him for abortions have had severe fetal abnormalities, he said. 'We have helped them.... They'd rather die than have these pregnancies,' he said."
Torchwood spoiler: In a strange twist of the usual way things have been done, some sexy stuff that was shown in the US when it aired has been clipped from what will be shown in the UK!
Just how much was the shooting spree in Norway a political crime? "Taking out 80+ of the people committed enough to go to the AUF's Utoya summer retreat? That's like sending a Terminator back in time to take out a future Parliamentary leadership."
The purpose of Voter ID: "The Wisconsin legislature is finalizing a bill to close ten Department of Motor Vehicle centers located in Democratic districts within the state. The money saved will be used to extend operating hours at DMV centers in Republican districts. These cuts come on the heels of new voter ID laws that require voters to present a state-issued photo identification card at the poll booths."
I don't know what Obama thought he was talking about with this nonsense, but I don't think he's compromising at all, I think he's just getting the Republicans to give him cover for doing what he wants to do anyway because he's a creep who thinks killing lots of Americans by stealing from them is an appropriate balance to letting a bunch of really really rich people keep stealing. And he should just shut up about everyone having "skin in the game" until I see him and his cronies lose some actual skin. Skin? All because these guys can't bear to take a haircut? they're barely in line for a slight trim, and you want to scalp everyone else? I've reached the point where most days I'm just left agape by President Grand Bargain, so I'm glad Digby can still form coherent sentences and paragraphs about it all.
Our great geniuses cannot wait to side-step the Constitution completely (which is no surprise - their long attack on the American form of government is now so blatant that no one believes there is really anyone to vote for), but I really wish I could convince people to stop using terms like "entitlements" and "discretionary spending". These are not the kinds of phrases you use for things that you've paid for and are now owed. And, if you go into a shop and give the cashier money for a product, is their delivery of said product "discretionary spending"? No, it is not - it is a firm obligation. What Obama is talking about is refusing to fulfill obligations. Defaulting on the American people. Just quit using their language, will you?
Yves: "This puts the Treasury's actions beyond the rule of law. This is a financial coup d'etat...."
I'm certainly not supporting any party where I can't nominate Lady Gaga. She couldn't possibly be worse than what Tom Friedman would come up with. (via)
Down in comments, CMike advises: "Max Keiser provides a minute or so of useless analysis but Stacy Herbert does spotlight a headline about "fair use" here which I found interesting."
More treason - An assassination attempt was made on the two leading members of the Democratic Party a decade ago, and a number of very strange things happened, and keep happening. One is that the FBI seems to have hounded a guy into suicide as the supposed assassin, despite the fact that no one thought he could have done it. (Another is that Bush administration officials were telling their friends to stock up on Cipro before the anthrax attacks had even happened.) Of course, we all know why the Bush administration wasn't terribly interested in having assassination attempts against two US Senators investigated properly, but, now that everyone knows the "suspect" couldn't have been the guy, as Glenn Greenwald points out, Bush's successor seems willing to go up against Congress as well as even many conservative newspapers such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post to prevent important information from seeing the light of day: "But, of course, in the U.S., the nation's most powerful political and financial factions -- especially those who control the National Security State -- are immune from meaningful scrutiny and investigation. As a result, President Obama -- in what I think is one his most indefensible acts -- actually threatened to veto the entire intelligence authorization bill if it included a proposed bipartisan amendment (passed by the House) that would have mandated an independent inquiry into the FBI's anthrax investigation. Democratic Rep. Rush Holt, whose New Jersey district was the site where the letters were allegedly mailed and one of the bill's sponsors, said at the time he was appalled that 'an Administration that has pledged to be transparent and accountable would seek to block any review of the investigation in this matter.'"
It's little wonder that the public hates both parties. But, now that it's clear Obama is the one really holding things up on the debt ceiling because he wants to kill Social Security and Medicaid so bad, the public is finally blaming the Republicans. Even Republicans are blaming them. The dirty secret is that Obama is leading the charge. Think they'll figure it out by election day?
David Dayen: "Florida AG's Politically Motivated Firings Protect the Foreclosure Fraud Industry. Maybe it's because I've done so much reporting on the foreclosure fraud issue, but I have to admit to some surprise that the firing of two Assistant Attorney Generals down in Florida, the hotbed of the housing crisis, hasn't gotten much attention nationally. In my mind, this is the state-based equivalent of the US Attorney scandal. You have a conservative Attorney General who has fired two investigators who were tasked by a previous Republican regime with finding violations of the law. When they proved too effective for the next regime to stomach, they were canned. And now, the new AG, Pam Bondi, is smearing their reputations."
It is amazing to me that no matter how obvious it is that Muslim terrorists have nothing to do with it, our great purveyors of opinion just can't seem to rememberwhat a terrorist looks like. Seriously, it was never likely to be the case that Al Qaeda - who spent over a decade planning attacks on internationally-recognized, gigantic symbols of western hubris, would waste their time with major attacks on local buildings that no one outside of the area had ever heard of. Everyone knew the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the White House, but some government building in Oklahoma City was meaningless to Al Qaeda even if they knew it was there, and there is nothing in Norway that has that kind of symbolic power in the eyes of the world. A school group? Really? Al Qaeda didn't know it existed. And anyway..
See, the reason we don't want to just help "the truly needy" is because you have to help people before they become "truly needy" so they don't fall that far down that they may not be able to get up again. Everyone, at some point in their lives, makes some sort of mistake or just runs into a bit of bad luck that could have dire consequences for them, depending on what kind of supports they already have in place. These days, there only seem to be second chances for those who either have lots of money or miraculous luck. So you try to keep people form going over the edge before it happens.
Southern Beale on Truth Telling: "Cenk Uygur is out at MSNBC. Love him or hate him, what's truly interesting is his explanation of why. Cenk reveals that he was told to 'tone it down': he was making people 'in Washington' uncomfortable. Even though his ratings were strong, he was too hard on the guests, he was too much of an outsider. MSNBC views themselves as insiders. 'We are the establishment,' they told him."
Sam Seder interviewed Jeremy Scahill about black sites as well as doing heavy coverage of the Murdoch inquiry on Tuesday's Majority Report Sam also made an important point on that show - that our leaders aren't arguing about whether or not to default, they're just arguing about the best way to default on their obligations to the American people. On Wednesday's show, Sam talked to David Dayen about the Murdoch saga and other things. Oh, and, if you feel you must vote for Obama, you can send a message.
It looks like Digby has come over to my view: "Until the last few months I have always argued that a Democratic president was always going to be preferable to a Republican because of the Supreme Court --- and the partisan necessity to protect the "entitlements" from the GOP's ongoing assaults. I would have assumed that any Democrat would issue a veto threat on this Gang of Six monstrosity rather than praise it. I would have also assumed that all Democratic voters and liberal commentators would be aghast that the Democratic Party would even contemplate such a plan when so many people are suffering and there's no end in sight. Times have certainly changed." Obama loves the fact that the House is controlled by Republicans. It's what he wanted. It's giving him lots of room to screw us. I don't know how we can get out of this short of replacing everyone in Congress and the White House with Bernie Sanders clones, and I don't see that happening any time soon.
Atrios says, "Taking The People Out Of Politics: Leaving aside policy disagreements, and for sake of discussion assuming good intentions, I think the group being discussed are basically not fans of democracy. Voters and elections are problems, and the biggest problem for the Democratic party are actual Democrats. They'd prefer that government be run by some sort of committee headed by Robert Rubin. They dreamed of somehow ending politics, of just creating and implementing some sort of "consensus" (not of the people, but of the people who mattered) and then hitting the play button."
Dkos is starting a labor stream on their site, now. I don't know where that will go but if they can avoid thinking "Republicans" when they mean conservatives (both avowedly and "centrist"), they might be all right.
Crazy right-wing black people aren't a surprise to me. Leaving aside well-known clowns like Alan Keyes, I came out of the house in a city that was 90% black and I'm well aware that crazy right-wingery knows no racial boundaries and black people, just like white people, are capable of every kind of meanness of spirit, self-righteousness, stupidity, craziness, avarice, chicanery, sleaze, and even smooth confidence games. So you can have this guy, who, like Keyes, makes you sit up and go, "Who do you think you're foolin'?" or you can have Obama, who gets to be President of the United States and still do crazy, stupid, destructive stuff and doesn't trigger your defenses until it's way, way too late.
Hmmm. For people wondering, "Why now?" there is the fact that certain people always want to make you pay and pay double. The guy had been working as a bricklayer because he could no longer get a job in journalism, but that really isn't enough for some people. But, even if the death is "not suspicious", there is the point that ruining a journalist who made the mistake of exposing the truth, aside from being enough to drive him to the ultimate extreme, is necessary to both the success and the revenge impulses of evil people. Getting someone to the point where they kill themselves is even better than having to send your henchmen to do it.
I thought Stuart Zechman and Culture of Truth took an interesting little journey through the bizarre dialog of the Villagers on Thursday's Virtually Speaking.
On Friday's Majority Report, Cliff Schecter and Sam Seder were still a bit shell-shocked from Obama's presser and were forced to conclude that Obama is more right-wing than a lot of Republicans. And on Monday's show, Sammy talked to John Nichols and Julie Underwood about ALEC.
"How The Corporate Court Harms Consumers: Mike Papantonio talks with Arthur Bryant, president of Public Justice, about the recent Supreme Court decision that protects pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits when their pills kill or injure consumers."
I keep hearing that people on "the left" prefer politicians who compromise but people on the right prefer people who "stick to their guns no matter what", so who are the 71% discussed here?
"The Next American Revolution? What America's current movement against corporate power can learn from that time we overthrew a king."
And, of course, the arrest of Rebekah Brookes was added fun, and then the head of the Met resigned, and now so has the top terrorism guy. I'll wait to see how big a clean-up job they do before I really start celebrating, but, still. And Amy Goodman is in the Guardian asking how deep this goes on the American side. And the shareholders are unhappy as the share value falls. There's a whole lot of talk about getting rid of the crazy old man whose agenda seems to be more political than financial - and his family.
Nice catch from Bluegal, who found a bit of Fry & Laurie as Clarence the Angel and Rupert Murdoch in It's a Wonderful Life.
I can't believed I missed this. How does anyone even grow up able to think like this?
Well, now Douthat, Krugman, and Taibbi are all saying out loud that, for whatever reason, Obama is pushing things to the right. It may be true that Obama is doing it for what he - and the DLC/Third Way/New Democrat types - believe will be the path to electoral victory, but I doubt it, since there is that little problem of the electorate to contend with. As I said below, the only way this works electorally is if Obama can make a convincing case to the right-wingers who control a substantial proportion of the voting apparatus in America to fix the race for him. If that's his constituency, then yes, it's probably a winning strategy. But if it's addressed to the voters, well, who wants to vote for this creep? Even most Republicans want to preserve Social Security and Medicare. Why, most people even want to preserve Medicaid, strange as that may seem.
So, it occurs to me, maybe there is only one thing left for liberals to do: Join the Tea Party.
No, no, hear me out.
One thing that comes through when you read all those stories about the exciting emergence of the Tea Party that breathlessly report their every move is that people are, by and large, angry about many of the same things we're angry about, but they don't know that. What they see is elite liberals - as the media calls them - rattling on about how we need to screw up Social Security and Medicaid. And Obama gave all our money to the bankers!!!
Next time you hear this stuff, wouldn't it be good to be right there saying, "Yes, I don't understand why Senator Obama voted for TARP when Bush proposed it. It was about to die in Congress and he went out of his way to help the Republicans pass it."
Also, these snooty "liberals" are unconcerned about jobs, fergodssakes! Whenever did you see two parties fight so hard to prove that they didn't give a damn about jobs?
Oops, did I let the phrase "two parties" slip in there? Yes, and that's the point. Being able to say, "They're both doing it!" could be the meme we most need to spread, and I can't think of a better place to spread it. Cheap-labor blue bloods piss everyone off, so why not point out that they lead both parties - and do it where those on the ground will hear it? Hell, if you say it at a Tea Party event, the press might even report it.
Besides, I think it would be amusing to be at a Tea Party event carrying an accurate sign protesting Obama's policies and chatting with fellow Americans who know something is wrong - that is, using the Koch brothers' apparatus to spread left-wing memes. Just don't tell anyone you're a liberal and they will probably never guess.
But here's Krugman again, pointing out that Obama has offered an extremely right-wing, destructive package to the Republicans, and they won't take it - and then saying the Republicans are the ones who are crazy. Are you sure, Paul?
Robert Reich: "Washington insiders will consider the McConnell compromise a win for Obama. But the rest of the country hasn't been paying much attention and won't consider it much of a win for either side. Their attention is riveted to the economy, particularly jobs and wages. If those don't improve, Obama will be a one-term president regardless of how the GOP wants to paint him."
David Waldman says, "Think you know the Koch story? Not if you don't know ALEC.. People (and that includes journalists!) are starting to catch on to the political toxicity of the billionaire Koch brothers. But the crucial next step in opening people's eyes to how these guys work is to show them just how Koch brothers schemes get turned into the bat-$#*@ crazy legislation that just happens to pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, in virtually identical form, in 15 states at once."
All these years later, there is still more to learn about the original October Surprise - and, now, a look Inside the October Surprise Cover-up: "The George H.W. Bush Library in Texas has just released thousands of pages of documents on the October Surprise mystery, revealing how Bush's inner circle handled allegations that the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 struck a treacherous deal with Iran. It was a textbook case of controlling the narrative, reports Robert Parry." They had their talking points ready, of course: "Among 'touchstones' cited by Gray were 'No Surprises to the White House, and Maintain Ability to Respond to Leaks in Real Time. This is Partisan.'"
Dan Choi says, "We Must Stand With Bradley Manning [...] The chat logs of his conversations are reminiscent of some of the same feelings that go unvoiced by the vast majority of soldiers: questioning the purpose of our mission when politics has mired us in prisons of moral turpitude. That Bradley voiced his concerns proves he was the least unstable and most moral of all the members of his team."
Ding dong the witch is dead - Rupert put a newspaper out of business and a couple hundred people out of work to protect her, but now Rebekah Brooks gets thrown under the bus with them.
I haven't said anything about Strauss-Kahn because it just looked like another one of those things where an open secret suddenly became important to "expose" when he was in the way. of important people. That's the funny thing about sex scandals - they are so handy for going after someone, but they aren't even acknowledged, no matter how blatant or egregious, unless you get on the wrong side of the right people. Back in the days when we were still friends with Saddam, people were screaming about the rape rooms and everyone knew about them, but the wrong people were doing the screaming while Saddam was doing what he was told, so they were of no consequence. Then he became the designated enemy, and suddenly we were hearing about rape rooms all the time. The Right People couldn't wait to destroy Anthony Weiner's career, and for some reason he didn't realize he was in the line of fire and did something stupid. Just like Tim Russert's obsession with Clinton's appendage. Why do these things matter? Because they are convenient. (I sometimes wonder if Clinton wasn't the choice for president because they always knew they could get him on his bimbo habit if he misbehaved.) Assange is probably an inconsiderate lover (or maybe not - he could just be a slut and they knew they could find a way to make him behave more irresponsibly than usual with a bit of persuasion), but the intensity with which they went after him is just not usual for even the most brutal rape, let alone what he is accused of. I'm betting a lot of the people who called for Strauss-Kahn's head after his exposure knew all along he was a creep toward women but they just saw that as convenient leverage.
Generally speaking, I love the London Underground map just the way it is, but I sure could have used one like this (only readable) the day I needed to get to Bayswater and found out too late that it would have been faster to get out at Queensway than to change at Notting Hill Gate.
The thing that interested me about the first four paragraphs of Ross Douthat's column was that they were true. (Well, except for the phrase "bigger spending cuts than he would otherwise support" - actually, he supports those, too.) After that, the article falls apart, because the conservatism of Obama's policies will only do Obama any good at the polls to the extent that the people who own and run the voting machines are willing to cheat for him. Obama's approval numbers aren't terribly good right now. I noticed, clicking on this link (via Atrios, who tells us Mitch McConnell, of all people, looks to be trying to save us from Obama's posturing), that the TPM poll tracker is saying Obama's disapproval numbers look higher than his approval numbers - not a good sign. Again, the public is figuring out that Obama isn't their friend despite the fact that the media won't tell them the truth about anything. Obama could use his position to put an end to the lies we're hearing about evil public servants and seniors sucking the government teat and all that, but he appears to agree with those lies. However, the craziness of the Republicans is probably the only thing Obama has going for him, even though policy-wise there is really no difference between them. Well, maybe there's a difference, but not one that works in Obama's favor with the Democratic base - he seems even more interested in starving the public than the Republicans are these days. As Yves says, the "Change" Obama appears to be in pursuit of is "to a more brutal, grasping, dog eat dog society, all administered by self serving elites." Of course, he must have supporters somewhere....
Meanwhile, Republican voters are showing their own dissatisfaction with the way things are by choosing a union guy over the machine-backed candidate. As with the Dems, the party leadership may be crazy, but maybe the rank and file are not so nuts.
Krugman, "No, We Can't? Or Won't? [...] Our failure to create jobs is a choice, not a necessity - a choice rationalized by an ever-shifting set of excuses."
Atrios has Geithner bragging about wrecking the country: "This is still a very tough economy. For a lot of people, it's going to feel very hard - harder than anything they've experienced in a lifetime now - for some time to come." They know what they're doing. It's what they want to do.
If they really wanted to destroy everything of value in the United States without it much benefiting anyone, they came up with a really great idea. It's not just the ground they're fracturing.
Just for the record, if I call my doc's office in the morning asking for an appointment in the afternoon, I get an appointment in the afternoon. If he's on vacation, there will be arrangements made so that I can see someone else. But I can't even imagine waiting periods like these. (Also: Methane leaks, or why we need good regulation and enforcement, Part 4,866.)
It seems like only days ago that the Murdoch story was just a personal fancy, something I linked because of my long, long, long horror at everything Murdoch has done to us. I noticed it almost as soon as I arrived in Britain and found it stomach-turning when I saw him actually buying law in the US to spread his poison there. When it reached the point where there's an announcement in Parliament that the BSkyB deal is now being referred to the Competition Commission, my eyes went wide. Clearly, Murdoch finally managed to piss off the wrong people, because it's never been a secret that unethical and illegal behavior is rewarded, rather than punished, at News Corps. But now, even Carl Bernstein and John Dean have referred to it as "Murdoch's Watergate".
(This Special Comment from Keith Olbermann on Obama's policies is riddled with flaws, but still brought a tear to my eye, for all that I don't think Obama is betraying what he is, and for all that I know that the impact your life has on other people's lives can keep you remembered for a very long time whether that impact is good or evil. After all, though some of us may remember the good FDR did, we remember Hitler, too.)
I've asked Lambert Strether of Corrente to join me tonight on Virtually Speaking Sundays to talk about how, basically, they know perfectly well what they're doing to us and that they don't have to do it, but they're doing it anyway and no one is telling the truth. Watch live at 6:00 PM Pacific, 9:00 PM Eastern, 2:00 AM BST, or stream or download the podcast later at the link.
Remember being told how Obama was going to get all those awful Republican operatives out of government so regulators and oversight specialists could do their jobs? It's worse than a joke to watch what the Obama administration policies on that matter are. Because they're not just leaving right-wing operatives in place, they are turning malfeasance into policy. It's well beyond "regulatory capture". (I've never understood the way libertarians point to regulatory capture as a reason to disempower government. They know regulatory capture is bad, and they know it will happen, but their answer is to simply get rid of the regulators entirely and let the people who they know will bribe and corrupt run things without interference. That is, instead of guarding against regulatory capture, you just get rid of the things that can slow it down. How does that make sense?)
People are only just beginning to become aware of a creepy organization called ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council - and how it is dedicated to a mission to destroy America from the highest reaches of power. They are in the boardrooms and even in Congress and they are among the most dangerous people in America. You should know who they are and try to stop them, and help your neighbors do the same.
What's missing from this fake straight talk about what's "really" wrong with the economy is that all of the "causes" are uncaused, they just happened without anyone doing anything and there's nothing that can really undo them, we should just dick around with SSI and wring our hands.
Via Suburban Guerrilla I learn that Ron Paul has a solution to debt ceiling madness, and that Dean Baker thinks it's a "surprisingly lucid" plan. "In short, Representative Paul has produced a very creative plan that has two enormously helpful outcomes. The first one is that the destruction of the Fed's $1.6 trillion in bond holdings immediately gives us plenty of borrowing capacity under the current debt ceiling. The second benefit is that it will substantially reduce the government's interest burden over the coming decades. This is a proposal that deserves serious consideration, even from people who may not like its source." Of course, it won't happen, because then they'd lose their fake "reason" for killing Social Security, public education, Medicaid and Medicare, and any other "social" program they can wreck, and that's what this is really all about. Susie thinks she knows the rationale behind Obama's policy of greasing the slide to serfdom: "Rather than do the hard work of bringing other countries up to our standards, he's decided we have to be broken. And he thinks it's what's 'best' for us. He's doing it because he cares. He sees social programs as simply postponing the day when the workers (not the special people, like him and his friends) are living in tin shacks without running water, and he wants to wean us off the safety net." Well, he's certainly driving the economy down. (Also, salt is not bad for your heart.)
Emma Goldman went to the Soviet Union to see how Utopia was working out, and declared, "It doesn't work!" She didn't mean so much that communism as a structure didn't, or couldn't, work, but rather that whatever it was the Soviets were doing was not an effective way to do the ordinary business of making basic physical stuff like water and sewers and getting food to people work. Because what she was looking at was a machine that simply didn't work. It's quite understandable that many Americans heard that and thought, "Thank God I live in a capitalist society!" But now it's beginning to dawn that, like what Goldman saw in the early Soviet Union, America's structure, increasingly, doesn't work. And it's going to get worse. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Obama's Political, Economic Advisers Say Jobless Rate Won't Matter in 2012: "With polls telling us that the vast majority of the country disapproves of Mr. Obama's handling of the economy and even larger majorities fear the country is on the wrong track, Mr. Pflouffe believes he can lie about his guy's vision better than Mitt Romney can lie about his. May the gods help us all."
Well, yeah, spinning is what it's all about, isn't it? Down in comments to the post below, Jawbone provides a link to this edition of NewsHour (transcript included) in which Andrew Kohut of Pew Research Center repeatedly states that the Republicans in Congress and Obama are hell-bent on doing what the public opposes - not just "a majority", but a two-to-one majority that includes a pretty big numbers of Republicans, too. And does anyone point out that this means our "leaders" are being anti-democratic? Of course not: "JUDY WOODRUFF: And so I hear you saying some of the public reaction is going to depend on how this is packaged, how it is described to the American people, whatever -- if they come up with an agreement." So the real deal is that the right-wing and the far-right wing are going to get together to strategize on how to sell you this piece of crap. It appears the plan will be to "save" social programs the same way they "got combat troops out of Iraq" - by calling it something else. ("And if you think Democrats are playing dumb because they want a deal, think again. They're some of the biggest supporters of this plan.")
Why The Democrat Grassroots Should Withhold Contributions From Obama's Reelection Campaign [...] "In his autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, Obama admits he has a hard time feeling a truly pressing sense of urgency about the great issues of the day." You can't help the feeling that all those people who told you it was all in his books and you should read them had not read them, either.
I think a lot of people have missed the point that continued failure on the part of Democrats to push back against anti-abortion rhetoric, lies, and legislation has left us in a state where there are already huge areas of the United States where abortion is effectively unavailable - and that's before George W. Bush even took office. Allowing late-term abortion to be demonized and restricted, as well as further restrictions on the availability of abortion without parental consent and numerous other legislative attacks, all but guaranteed that abortion providers could more easily be targetted. I'm not sure about current laws in Texas, but I have no reason to think that low-earning women in the state have any better access to a safe, legal abortion than Norma McCorvey did in 1969. You have to remember that, contrary to the revised history of the right wing, there was no movement against the 1973 decision at the time - it had to be assiduously fostered by big money from the wealthy right and took years to emerge as even a marginal movement. Even before Roe v. Wade was decided, we had an environment in which even Republicans happily signed legislation assuring the availability of abortion on Welfare. Because Democrats continuously gave ground on those rights - abortion on welfare, privacy for minors, late-term abortion, timely access, and so on - we are in this situation today. (Oh, and anyone who thinks Democrats couldn't have stopped those five right-wing loonies from being appointed to the Supremes is out of their minds. Obama himself was part of the effort to get Roberts confirmed.)
First Google, and now The Huffington Post, have decided to block me from seeing their US front pages, preferring to redirect me to an entirely different UK news headline page so I can avoid accidental exposure to what Americans are talking about. Yeah, that's just what I use the internet for, you putzes. (Of course, I use neither for my headline news source anyway, but if they're doing that, I really have no reason to go to their front page at all, do I? I'm sure if they post anything worthwhile, I can get the link from one of my favorite blogs.) And according to HuffPo, almost all of the news is about the announcement that the last issue of News of the World will be published this Sunday, proceeds to go to "charity" (presumably one chosen by Rupert Murdoch, which is an unpleasant prospect). Oh, well, at least Andy Coulson is getting arrested... But everyone knows that throughout News Corps, it has always been the case that if you do things that are dishonest or even illegal and manage to stay out of jail, you usually get promoted, not fired. This fish definitely rotted from the top.
Today, in a sweeping victory for communities across the country, a federal appeals court overturned the Federal Communications Commission's attempt to weaken media ownership rules.
Had these rules gone into effect, it would have unleashed a new wave of media consolidation across the country.
In 2007, the FCC ignored letters and calls from millions of Americans and tried to rewrite its media ownership rules to let companies own both newspapers and TV or radio stations in the same town. This change would have opened the floodgates to new media mergers, leading to even more layoffs in newsrooms while thinning out diverse perspectives from local news.
We sued the FCC for ignoring the public outcry. Today, we won. The court tossed out the FCC's flawed rules, but also upheld all other media consolidation restrictions and told the FCC it needed to do better to support and foster diverse voices in the media - all crucial decisions for our fight to build better media.
This isn't just our victory - it's your victory, too.
Strange, I missed that story in The New York Times....
From The New York Times, "Obama to Push for Wider Deal With G.O.P. on Deficit Cuts [...] The president's renewed efforts follow what knowledgeable officials said was an overture from Mr. Boehner, who met secretly with Mr. Obama last weekend, to consider as much as $1 trillion in unspecified new revenues as part of an overhaul of tax laws in exchange for an agreement that made substantial spending cuts, including in such social programs as Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security - programs that had been off the table."
From The Washington Post, "In debt talks, Obama offers Social Security Cuts [...] As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal. The move marks a major shift for the White House and could present a direct challenge to Democratic lawmakers who have vowed to protect health and retirement benefits from the assault on government spending."
If I'm being charitable, I'll just assume the White House is floating a trial balloon in order to make the eventual Republican rejection look even worse. AKA "we even offered to cut social security!" But if there's any reality to this proposal, I hope that at the very least a senator like Bernie Sanders and the few remaining Senate Dems who aren't spineless or bought off will filibuster.
[...]
We've broken enough stones in America on the backs of the middle class and the poor. We bailed out the uber-wealthy and didn't attach any strings as they collapsed the global economy.
No more.
Of course, it's naive of Willis to assume Obama's 11-dimensional chess is being played against Republicans when it's Obama who revived the whole "Social Security crisis" monster in the first place and started pouring on the "something has to be done about entitlements" meme from the moment he entered the White House. Wrecking Social Security is what he wants to do, and this whole monstrousgame is about getting it done.
From time to time I like to remind people that the government makes the money and then decides who to give it to. Money has value because it's the only thing the government will accept in payment of taxes, so you have to have some to give back to the government.
I like to remind people of that for a number of reasons, such as the fact that, when the government makes money, it can decide to give it to people like you (through civil service jobs, or government programs that subsidize small businesses that pay you, or welfare or whatever), so that you have money to spend and thus support local businesses and create incentives for people to innovate, to open more businesses, to hire more people, etc. - or, they can just give it to a bunch of rich people who will sit on it and not do much with it except bribe and corrupt the government so that they can create monopolies and prevent competition from small businesses and creators who will innovate and create jobs &etc.
So now you need to ask the next question, which no one ever asks, which is:
If the government makes the money in the first place, why do we have to borrow money to pay for government programs?
Well, in real, structural terms, we don't. But here's the funny thing: When Congress took us off the gold standard, they included a requirement in the law that we have to borrow in order to spend. Yes, that's right - even though we make the money, we can't just spend it - we have to borrow anyway. It's like being told you have to take out a loan to buy your car even though you already have the money, but you're only allowed to use your money to pay off a loan (at high interest) rather than just go out and buy the car.
So it works as a kind of welfare program for the banks.
So next time someone tries to convince you that "private enterprise" operates independently from government meddling and blah blah blah, make sure they know that it really makes its money because the government forces us to give them our money.
By the way, another thing you might like to ask yourself and others is this: If the United States government is effectively not demanding taxes from corporations and rich people, doesn't that mean they don't need US dollars?
* * * * *
Digby unpacked the Big Things Obama said about why we have to wreck our economy on behalf of rich elites: "Keep in mind that even if one agrees that the most important thing you must do at a time of 10% unemployment, a dead housing sector and anemic growth is tackle 'the deficit', there is absolutely nothing anywhere that says it has to be done under a threat to not raise the debt ceiling. That is an artificial deadline, completely made up with absolutely no authority whatsoever. He is fundamentally misleading the American people about this at this point. Raising the debt limit is a pro-forma vote that if passed simply allows the government to keep paying its bills, it's not 'kicking the can down the road." Not that any of this matters, by the way, since they'll do what they want to do and make sure we can't vote them out for it.
Even Media Matters starts to get stories wrong when it corrects them. Eric Boehlert has been all over this story of how the NYT interviewed Breitbart and let him walk away from his false charges against Shirley Sherrod, but so far they have reprinted his variations on his lie while correcting only the part about the audience response. But just to refresh my memory I went back and watched the edited clip Breitbart posted, and even in its original, misleading form, Sherrod never says she didn't help the white farmer. What she says is that she didn't do as much for him as she could have, instead putting his case into the hands of a white lawyer - and that that's when she found out it wasn't about color, but about poverty.
Apparently, the Supreme Court ruled recently that if Johnson & Johnson knowingly kills you by giving you a hip replacement that poisons you, it's just too damned bad for you. But Google wouldn't help me find a story I can link to.
This is the so-called leader of the so-called Labour Party. (I suppose you could say he might as well just repeat the same point since the reporter isn't likely to ask anything meaningful anyway, but still.)
On certain days of the year, the burning questions in my mind are these: 1. Who was the idiot who decided that the best way to do fireworks is to send off so many at once that you can't enjoy any one of them? 2. What moron thought dense smoke that obscures everything else was a brilliant thing to introduce to fireworks displays?. Honest to god, they're spending literally millions of dollars on fireworks shows that aren't as cool as the ones we used to get in our neighborhood when we were kids. It's just sad. And all that smoke is like being stuck in traffic.
One of the things I love about Dean Baker is that he still manages to convey a sense of outrage when infamous hacks like George Will do their infamous hackery: "It really is incredible to see such a concerted effort to rewrite history in front of our faces. There is not much ambiguity in the story of the housing bubble. The private financial sector went nuts. They made a fortune issuing bad and often fraudulent loans which they could quickly resell in the secondary market. The big actors in the junk market were the private issuers like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Lehman Brothers. However, George Will and Co. are determined to blame this disaster on government 'compassion' for low-income families."
Frank Rich on Obama's Original Sin: "The president's failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down has cursed his first term, and could prevent a second." Oh, I dunno, the Republicans are working awfully hard to get him re-elected.
NPR interviewed Fareed Zakaria of the Conservative News Network (CNN) and the conservative magazine Time, and he told the truth about deficits: "America's political system, Zakaria says, becomes mired in debate and cannot deal with the short-term deficit. 'To put it in perspective, if Congress were to do nothing, the Bush tax cuts would expire next year,' he says. 'That by itself would yield $3.9 trillion to the federal government over the next 10 years. We would go to the bottom of the pack in terms of deficit as a percentage of GDP among the rich countries in the world - we would basically solve our fiscal problems for the short term.'" He also pointed out that we're lagging in, well, just about everything.
The Crises of Capitalism - David Harvey on why we need to rethink our structural model. (And, by the way, do you see anywhere on this page - or even the website - telling you what "RSA" stands for? Isn't that going just a bit too far in the "Everyone already knows who we are" mode?)
Dan Froomkin's 4th of July message was a bleak one, on how Obama's refusal too "look backward" at the horrors of Bush/Cheney administration torture policies means we may end up looking forward to even more torture. If only there were, say, a big building somewhere that had the words, "What is past is prologue," written on it in big letters so Obama would see them and perhaps ponder their meaning.
"Murdoch Paper Hacked Murdered Girl's Voicemail: News Corps paper News of the World already admitted to illegally hacking the cell phones of 24 celebrities. But that's not all they did! The paper also hacked the phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler after she'd gone missing - even deleting messages in order to make more room." And giving friends and family the false impression that she must still be alive since she'd cleared her messages. And then interviewing them about their renewed hopes!
Long-time readers may remember this outrage from the drug war over the last few years, but I need to congratulate someone for not letting this go, because Radley Balko is a hero who helped save a man's life: "MONTICELLO, Miss. -- After 10 years of incarceration, and seven years after a jury sentenced him to die, 30-year-old Cory Maye will soon be going home." Via Digby.
Senator Bernie's Week in Review: "Senate Budget Committee Democrats agreed on a proposal that would cut more than $4 trillion from the deficit. A member of the committee, Sanders had insisted that at least half of any deficit reduction come from closing tax loopholes to increase revenue from the wealthiest Americans and the most profitable corporations. 'He probably got something close to that,' The Hill's Erik Wasson told C-SPAN. Appearing Thursday on C-C-SPAN's 'Washington Journal,' Sanders said it is 'grotesquely unfair' and 'immoral' for Republicans to put all the burden of deficit reduction on the backs of the poor, the elderly and children. Sanders also faulted President Obama. 'He has been much too soft on the Republicans.'"
Bayer payout: "German conglomerate Bayer AG (BYR.L: News ,BAYRY.PK: News ,BAYZF.PK: News ) said Friday it has agreed to a $750 million settlement with U.S. rice farmers who had sued the company after an experimental strain of Bayer's genetically modified rice contaminated their crops."
The NYT regrets the error - but only one error in a rather impressive list of errors in their misreporting of Breitbart and O'Keefe's business of lying and the NYT's business of covering up right-wing malfeasance.
A little sex education from Spidey. A bit dated, but with only slight editing it's a lot better than what your kids are getting in most schools these days.
Via Atrios, a nice take-down of the stupid idea that you should support laws against things you wouldn't want your daughter to do, even though those laws would make things significantly worse for your daughter if she happened to do them anyway. Well, theoretically, anyway, since the police don't normally raid your whole neighborhood for drugs when you live in comfortably upper-middle-class digs, or even notice high-class hookers unless they sleep with Eliot Spitzer. Just leaving aside the fact that the average father can't stand the idea of his daughter having a sex life at all, even if they have to tolerate it - eventually - in the name of having grandkids.
And Atrios himself with some crazy talk: "Banks are skimmers. In ideal world they do a job by having good underwriting standards, and allocating money to worthy borrowers, and in doing so earn the bit they skim. In actual world they take free money from the government and then bring it to the Great Casino."
Welfare cheats for treason - and their minions: "Chase's chief executive, challenged Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, about the costs and benefits of the Dodd-Frank rules. More attention has been paid to the banker's audacity, but the response of the world's most powerful banking regulator was more troubling. Mr. Bernanke scraped and bowed in apology without mentioning the staggering costs of the crisis the banks led us into." The correct response to Mr. Dimon was, of course, "You've taken down the United States economy. We should be throwing you in jail anyway for treason, but we are being kind. That could change." Obviously, that's not gonna happen. "The federal government, in ways explicit and implicit, profoundly subsidizes and shelters the banking industry. True since the 1930s, it is much more so today. And that makes Mr. Dimon no capitalist colossus astride the Isle of Manhattan, but one of the great welfare queens in America." (via)
Jay Ackroyd: 'I am still trying to understand why the first words out of the mouths of every Democrat in a public setting are not 'I really would like Eric Cantor to explain why he is betting against America.'"
Sam Seder did an illuminating interview with Jared Bernstein at Netroots Nation that he aired on yesterday's Majority Report (transcript). He also explained why Ezra is wrong about where the threat to the economy really is.
"John Dean Knows How to Get Rid of Clarence Thomas: As the associate deputy attorney general in President Richard M. Nixon's Department of Justice, I was there when Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist outlined how to remove a Supreme Court justice who had engaged in conduct not quite as troublesome as that of Thomas. Rehnquist, of course, would later become chief justice of the United States. His memorandum providing the process for the Department of Justice to proceed against then Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas remains solid precedent and the way to deal with Clarence Thomas. But before looking at the solution, I should explain the problem."
At the Dept. of Everything You Know Is Wrong, Jonathan Schwarz learns that when Adolph Ochs declared that The New York Times would operate "Without Fear or Favor," he meant something rather similar to what another big news organ means today when it pretends to be "Fair and Balanced": "Ochs just announced straight up that the New York Times was going to be a standard-issue upper class conservative newspaper. And "history" has not just forgotten it completely, but used the exact same proclamation to congratulate the New York Times for being completely impartial. Thanks, liberal media!"
So, while Mr. Sideshow and I were celebrating our 26th year of wedded bliss, the New York legislature was digging up the necessary votes (from Republicans) to pass gay marriage. Which they did, 33-29, last night. We expect this to have no greater impact on our own marriage than Phyl and Del's or Elton and David's marriages, because, you know, we're not stupid. So congratulations to all the happy couples.
Peter Falk was in one of my favorite movies of all time, but I searched YouTube in vain for a relevant clip. It's probably there and I just used the wrong keywords or something, but you've all already seen him in Pocketful of Miracles, right? So here's a different clip.that isn't from Columbo.
As for The Big Man, well, enjoy some beautiful sax from 2009 in Madison Square Garden.
And farewell to the legendary Gene Colan, who made some wonderful comics.
Everyone, including the Republican rank and file, knows that small business is where the jobs really come from. So what does it mean when: "Nearly nine months after its formation, a $30 billion government fund to foster small-business lending has yet to pay out a single dime, even as the nation struggles with traumatic levels of unemployment." It means they don't want you to have jobs.
New Report : How Private Prisons Game the System: "The Justice Policy Institute has released a new report on how private prisons game the system, creating a perceived need for their services. How they do it: Lots of money spent on lobbying and campaign contributions."
"The day the drug war really started." It would be foolish to underestimate the damage Nixon did on that front, but something has been happening in the last 30 years that has made fighting against the drug war seem harder than ever - and people who should know better seem to be on the other side. Jonathan Easley argues that the death of a basketball star at my alma mater is the moment when it all got much, much worse. But there's no pretending that the drug war "works", so why do we have it? We have it because someone has to fill the prisons.
Dan at Pruning Shears thinks he's found a reason to want to keep Obama in the White House. But, given that Obama doesn't think he has to listen to anyone in Congress who doesn't agree with him and just runs off launching wars unilaterally, I'm not sure it makes any difference. (Also via Dan, Five myths about Americans in prison.)The Big Lie works again - Americans now believe that cutting spending will create jobs.
Reading Rolling Stone's article about climate denial, I was grateful that Peter had used the print link so I could see the whole thing without having to click through to the next page, until I realized that for some reason I couldn't see who the author was. "But in spite of these and other achievements, President Obama has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change. After successfully passing his green stimulus package, he did nothing to defend it when Congress decimated its funding. After the House passed cap and trade, he did little to make passage in the Senate a priority. Senate advocates - including one Republican - felt abandoned when the president made concessions to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return. He has also called for a massive expansion of oil drilling in the United States, apparently in an effort to defuse criticism from those who argue speciously that "drill, baby, drill" is the answer to our growing dependence on foreign oil." (I learned from Sam Seder yesterday that Obama had promised to put solar panels back on the White House, and he still hasn't done it. He can't pretend the Republicans are stopping him, because they can't. Just one more promise Obama won't keep because he doesn't want to.)
Jose Antonio Vargas was an ordinary kid in America, living in fear. And now he has been inspired by other ordinary kids.
RJ Eskow on Why Conservatives Punish Their Victims: A Lesson From Arizona: "But that doesn't answer the basic question: Why? Why attack people whose lives have been shattered by conservative policies? One answer is: Because their lives have been shattered by conservative policies. Once you accept the fact that the misfortune of the unemployed isn't of their own making, then you have to ask what caused it. And since that leads to an indictment of the right-wing agenda, these conservatives can't let that happen."
Let's face it, the Republicans already have a president: "Why the GOP should nominate Barack Obama in 2012: A modest proposal stemming from the president's apparent rejection of his own party's liberal tradition." (Thanks to PBTrue.)
A Loophole a Day - Insurance companies reverse their definitions of things so that they can still continue to screw you.
One of our most useful bloggers, D2 Route, is living close to the wire, and right now she could use a little help.
Down With Tyranny!: "Cynical observers are noting, and people of a liberal persuasion are beginning to grasp, that in areas with strong liberal constituencies, support for some movement toward legislating acceptance of basic rights for LGBT folks is a really cheap way of throwing the us -- both LGBT folk and people of a liberal persuasion -- a bone while pursuing their right-of-center agenda. (Have you met our governor, Andrew Cuomo?)"
Advocating treason isn't just something that's required of Republicans, it's just that Democrats aren't allowed to suggest violent treason.
Ruth Calvo called my attention to Crane-Station's first-person accounts of what it's like to be incarcerated in Kentucky, and what you get to read.
Sorry I didn't get around to posting this beforehand, but Stuart Zechman and I were the talking heads on Virtually Speaking Sundays last night, and we talked about how useless the Democrats are and what we can do about it, and Susie Madrak called in with her ideas, and for a change I think we managed to get most of the tech working. (CMike, this is your cue to put a review in the comments.) (Personally, I am even more impressed with Stewart since I heard him pronounce "Quixotic" correctly.) And I also mention an email from a friend on the Left Coast who tells me his health insurance premiums are now nineteen hundred dollars a month! So much for "affordable" care...
Two excellent links from CMike: Scarecrow says, "At NN11, White House Propagandist Pfeiffer Preps for President Romney: "No. Just no. You've had your chance to prove you are indeed different, and you've failed on every front. [...] I defy any Obama spokesperson to point out any meaningful difference between what Obama has done and what a President Romney would have done." And we are all living in Mouseland.
LarryE (of) in comments: "When Maddow covered the item about Juan Cole, she included a denial from the CIA (as good journalism would require). However, she and everyone else seems to have missed an important point: The CIA denied having supplied derogatory information about Cole. But that wasn't the question! The question wasn't did the CIA obtain and supply derogatory info, it was if the CIA was asked to do so. The spooks could have gotten such a request, looked high and low for dirt that could be used, and upon finding none could still have issued that same statement. It is what was called during Watergate a "non-denial denial," the slippery practice of denying something other than what you were asked."
What it means: "Again, I say what I have said here over and over (and will keep on saying): This is what you are supporting, enabling and continuing when you support the Obama Administration. Whether that support is wholehearted -- if you, like Kevin Drum, proudly shut down you own brain and defer supinely to Obama's superior wisdom -- or whether it is reluctant, defensive, "to keep the other guys out" because you desperately hope the Democrats might possibly be marginally better, the results are still the same: murder, brutality, violence, corruption, chaos and suffering." Like I said last week on Virtually Speaking Susie, I have been voting against Republicans all my life, and it hasn't worked. This all has to change.
Via another linky post at Pruning Shears, I learn that: "We Are Ohio Announces New Petition Signature Totals: COLUMBUS - Today ,We Are Ohio announced at a press conference on the steps of the Ohio Statehouse that 714,137 total signatures have been collected in just two months. This surpasses the We Are Ohio goal of collecting 450,000 to 500,000 total signatures and represents more than three times the total amount of valid signatures needed to place the repeal of SB 5 on the November ballot."
And also via Pruning Shears, Kay on education: "For-profit charter schools have been in operation in Ohio for more than a decade. They are not a thought experiment. They are not an abstract hypothetical. They are not just a topic being batted around at various 'reform roundtables'. They have an extensive record of failure. Why we are pretending this is all just in the discussion stage is beyond me. The jury really isn't still out. In Ohio, the jury came straggling back in years ago, and the verdict isn't good.
Have I mentioned Our comprehensively insane sex-offender laws, lately? I mean, what better way to protect children than to permanently ruin their lives when they are too young to even understand their "crime"? (And just how, exactly, is "public urination" a sex crime?)
And maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help the feeling that Monsanto is creating its very own environmental mythology just to sell poisons. (Thanks, PBTrue.)
Still a great song. Well, they all are, but finding new performances of thesesongs, by this band, now, still sounding pretty damned good, is a gift. Thanks, Lenny.
Really, any elective official who gets behind a deal that includes throwing people off of Medicaid should be primaried hard. Especially if they're a Democrat.
Meanwhile, AARP is suddenly "ready to accept cuts to Social Security benefits". Why would that be? AARP has been warned that certain individuals are ready to launch investigations of them if they don't go along. (Sam Seder, doing bang up interviews at Netroots Nation Thursday and Friday, discussed just that issue yesterday afternoon with McJoan).
Atrios has more on how with the elite sociopaths in charge, We Are Doomed.
I nearly missed this fine example of how much right-wingers love small business: "Tucked into Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's (R) much-discussed budget was a little-noticed provision to overhaul the state's regulation of the beer industry. In a state long associated with beer, the provision will make it much more difficult for the Wisconsin's burgeoning craft breweries to operate and expand their business by barring them from selling directly to restaurants and liquor stores, and preventing them from selling their own product onsite." Yeah, that's really promoting entrepreneurship, isn't it?
From James Risen, "Ex-Spy Alleges Bush White House Sought to Discredit Juan Cole [...] In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted 'to get' Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful." More on that here. And from Ezra: "Judging from Senator Feinstein's quote, the scope and goals of this initial effort to look into the story are unclear, but at a minimum, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee are now taking a first step in that direction. This could also force a public relitigation of the Bush administration's efforts to sell the Iraq War to the public - a topic that is likely to stir intense passions on both sides." Yeah, I'm sure we can trust DiFi to get to the bottom of things.
Maddow: "Congratulations, Democrats. In an era of unhinged, ideological, big money conservative media that is wholly and admittedly divorced from the precepts of journalism, in hounding Anthony Weiner into resigning ... you have just fed and unleashed this beast onto yourselves, probably for a generation. [...] It's. OK. If. You're. A. Republican." Yep, she actually said it. But I think the Democrats might not have gotten on that train so eagerly if Weiner had sounded like the rest of them or at least been quiet about things like health care. Jefferson stayed in office until his constituents kicked him, despite having thousands of dollars in cold cash in his freezer, because he was no threat. It's a bit like the Packwood story - a Republican who stood up for basic American values. Republicans were very happy to see him go - but decades later, they made it all look like it was the nasty old feminists who made it happen. It wasn't. If they'd wanted to keep him, he would have stayed in the Senate until he either decided he'd rather go fishin' or dropped dead. (Shorter)
I was accidentally a guest on Virtually Speaking Susie where we discussed whether the Democratic leadership is evil and stupid or just evil. And Jay Ackroyd used the word "treason". (I seem to have had a bit of trouble explaining the divine right of kings to Jay, though. DRoK works exactly the same way as "self-made meritocrat" works. You start off with a King who first rose to the top of his gang and then united armies under him and, well, people who are, or at least think they are, "self-made men" are very good at believing that their kids inherited whatever virtue it was that made them great. And the kids often believe it, too. Although some kids have a kind of inferiority complex where they see all their father has achieved and reckon they are going to have to do something big to prove themselves, and frequently that means they have to go out and screw up whatever the old man achieved. So you get a mixture of pampered parasites who complain about the help, and guys who have to prove they are the New Broom. Either way, it usually means you end up with crappy leadership.)
Digby got into The Hill again, wondering whether the GOP just gamed the Democrats into sounding like Republicans so they could attack Dems from the left on jobs and Medicare and what-have-you. However, I have to take issue with the beginning of her final paragraph: "It's too much to believe that this was a master plan. Predicting the ups and downs of this economy has stumped the best market players in the world. But to be able to corner a Democratic president into focusing on deficits in the middle of the worst employment crisis since the Great Depression, and then pivot and run against him from the left, is a dazzling political move. It helps if you are completely unmoored from any kind of accountability for your former statements - as proven by front-runner Mitt Romney - but you just can't help but be impressed by the sheer chutzpah of it all. Well played, GOP." Actually, there's a pretty straight line from the Royalists who opposed the American Revolution to the UberGOPs and UberDems of today, coming - as has been true longer than I've been alive - right through their long-standing hatred of the New Deal. They know perfectly well how to screw up the economy to create the greatest amount of suffering and benefit by it. Lots of people saw this coming. It's what the Republicans have done time and again. It's just like "faith" and "values" - something they believe in only as a cudgel to attack their opposition, but never to be applied to themselves.) Also from Digby, back at her usual haunts, news that the organizations that helped create this mess are now worried about the mess they've created, or at least claim to be. And it looks like Andrew Sullivan has taken one of his occasional detours into getting things right, again.
Via Susie, another moment in the story of the September Surprise: "Truthout's Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold report on new documents they exclusively obtained from a top counterterrorism official that, for the first time, reveals the existence of a secret Defense Department intelligence unit charged with tracking Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda prior to 9/11, which knew that the terrorist group wanted to strike the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But, the documents show, this information was 'intentionally' withheld from Congressional investigators probing the 9/11 attacks." (Also: NY Court says you can't foreclose if you don't hold the note (yay!) and Walmart loses a case over denying workers breaks. And BoA threatens to foreclose on a homeowner unless they get a check for the balance on his account - of $0.00.)
"Pakistan's detention of five C.I.A. informants, including a Pakistani Army major who officials said copied the license plates of cars visiting Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in the weeks before the raid, is the latest evidence of the fractured relationship between the United States and Pakistan."
You can watch MSNBC live here. If you can stand it. I probably won't, but there it is.
I'm pretty sure that the whole payroll tax holiday idea is not better than doing nothing, but aside from that, Atrios is right that when it doesn't work, they'll still blame us.
Eric Holder says he wants another season of The Wire. David Simon names his terms: "The Attorney-General's kind remarks are noted and appreciated. I've spoken to Ed Burns and we are prepared to go to work on season six of The Wire if the Department of Justice is equally ready to reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanising drug prohibition."
Digby found an interesting article in the WaPo that explains the game Obama has been playing - with your head: "I'm sure people will say that he had no choice because the presidency is a very weak office that the only power it has (except to wage war unilaterally) is to gently gently beg the congress for permission to adopt its agenda. This, however, is not true. Others will say that there was no point in pursuing further stimulus because the congress wouldn't pass it. But if this account is true, the "pivot" to deficit reduction wasn't a political surrender -- it was a policy choice going back to 2009. And I suspect that's true since the president had been touting his Grand Bargain since before the inauguration, and the whole discussion of "sacrifice" has been implicit since the early days of the administration. That Geithner was worrying about deficits even as the entire global economy was melting down from the financial crisis doesn't really surprise me. (It does send a chill down my spine however -- that's the very definition of disaster capitalism.)" From the very beginning, Obama's language has been the polite translation of the insane ravings of the conservatives - rather than a refutation of it. His job has been to make the insanity behind those right-wing ideas sound sane. (More on the WaPo story at Americablog.)
Given that we are told over and over that invading other countries and shooting up weddings is something we do to defend democracy and protect citizens there from evil dictators and blah blah blah, it's not surprising that many people think "foreign aid" and launching wars are part of the same program. And there are plenty of people who have worked very hard to keep the public confused about what "foreign aid" actually means. It's handy, because then you can get people to hate something called "foreign aid" when what they really hate are things that really deserve their hate. Then you get to sneer at the public when the latest survey comes out saying: "Notably, Republicans (62% approve) are as likely as Democrats (58%) to approve of limiting corporate tax deductions; while 63% of Democrats approve of reducing foreign military commitments, 56% of Republicans agree." Oh, stupid public! You don't know how much we really spend on foreign aid, so you must be wrong about this, too! (The more interesting thing about that quote, if it's not a typo, is - wait! Republicans are more likely than Democrats to want to limit corporate tax deductions? Really? How the hell did that happen?)
Ian Welsh has some Strategies for Resistance and Change: "Note also that Malcolm X makes Martin Luther King possible. Everyone doesn't have to have the strategy, what they must not do is what Arundhati Roy refused to do, they must not condemn others on the same side."
"Not-for-Profit Hospitals unfairly receiving Tax Exemptions: Illinois law requires non profit hospitals to provide charity care (free or reduced care) which eases the financial toll on government- and nothing less- to qualify for property tax exemption. When non profit hospitals fail to provide charity, some poor, uninsured, and underinsured patients find themselves in public hospitals funded by public dollars and stretched beyond capacity. This failure to meet legal requirements results in the loss of tens of billions of tax dollars across the nation at a time of great national need."
Dirty tricks: "A member of the Republican Party of Ozaukee County has surfaced as a possible Democratic candidate in the recall election that targets Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills). Gladys Huber, listed on the Ozaukee GOP's website as a member at large - presumably of the county party's executive committee - has filed a registration form to run as a Democrat against Rep. Sandy Pasch (D-Whitefish Bay). The candidacy is part of the state GOP strategy - described by Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) - to run "protest" candidates against Democrats challenging six Republican senators in recall campaigns." Kind of like Obama running as a Democrat....
At Angry Bear, a technical default is manageable; we're in one right now.
Doug: "What I've never understood about 'what will the children think' is that it is always applied to something trivial, usually to consensual sexual relations among adults. No one ever asks 'what will the children think about genocide in the Sudan?' or 'what will the children think about the government torturing people?'. I can remember as a kid, listening to the news and hearing of horrible atrocities and being genuinely troubled by it (truth be told, I still don't like to listen to that stuff, even though I think it's important that it be reported)."
Atrios on "The Failed International Financial System: I think one thing which has been mostly lost in the conversation is the fact that our financial system completely failed at its supposed purpose, the efficient allocation of capital. Even leaving aside all of the issues of corruption and criminality, the point is that it proved that it's a failed system. And we, and most other countries, responded by leaving it, and the people who run it, in place. Iceland told everyone to bugger off. They were smart."
Roy Edroso: "I grow more convinced every day that libertarianism only exists to give young Republicans something marginally less repulsive to call themselves when they're trying to get laid."
And now, a few words from the Archbishop of Canterbury: "With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted. At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context"
CMike did me a nice favor in comments with this one:
Just eff'in wow. I hadn't seen this. Via an Yves' link post, hot on the heels of giving his prickly response in a Christine Amanpour interview that we're not in a jobless recovery, the Institute for Public Accuracy has a post up about President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers chairman, "Colbert or Goolsbee: Who's the Clown?"
Nearly two years ago, Chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee, told Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert, "A year from now we're going to be in a very happy place." (June 15, 2009, 1:40 mark of the video.)
...Last month, Goolsbee was on Colbert's show again and refused to contradict Colbert's repeated assertion that the government has never created a single job (0:50 mark of the video).
Now I know Avedon can not stream Comedy Central video so I'll provide a transcript and add-in a few observations in an attempt to do justice to the Chairman's capitulation on this fundamental far right talking point:
Goolsbee: [00:25] The fact is, we've known about these long run fiscal issues for forty years. We should address them, we must address them. But don't forget that the most important problem we face as a country is that we grow. And so cutting the things we need so that we can remain the richest country in the world five years from now...
Colbert: [00:40] But the government's never created one job.
[Pause, Goolsbee looks down, he does not respond but gives a slight shake of the head.]
Colbert: [00:44] The government can't create jobs. That's an accepted maxim.
Goolsbee: [00:48] O.K., that maxim -- we're not objecting in Phase II...
Colbert [surprised, speaking quickly]: You agree? You agree with that?
Goolsbee: In Phase II as we move out of the rescue phase...
Colbert [continuing to be surprised]: You're agreeing that the government has never created one job.
Goolsbee: In rescue mode, we saved a lot of jobs.
Colbert: So you didn't create one.
Goolsbee: Uh, look, what I will say is in Phase II our...
Colbert: [01:05] No, no, they never created any jobs.
Goolsbee: ...our providing incentives to get the private sector to stand-up. We want the private sector to stand-up. We want the private sector to do the creation of the jobs.
Colbert: That's what they always do.
Goolsbee: That's what we want them to do.
Colbert: Then why are you fighting them by raising taxes?
Goolsbee: We're not fighting them, we're lowering taxes. We gave them incentives...
Colbert: None of this is going on the air by the way...
[Laughter]
Goolsbee: Look...
Colbert: Let me ask you, let me ask you another question.
Goolsbee: O.K.
Colbert: Last night I had on Amy Kremer of the Tea Party...
* * * * *
The spiritual leader of the modern Republican Party is Ayn Rand, who said: "I am against God. I don't approve of religion. It is a sign of a psychological weakness ... I regard it as evil. ... I am the creator of a new code of morality; a morality not based on faith." If I had a lot of money, I'd commission a poster with Ayn Rand's face on it and her name and those words in very big letters and put it on every billboard I could buy space on. And after it had been up long enough for a few "faith-based" people to feel they had to disavow her, I'd slowly, one by one, change the poster for one with the words of a different author: "For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows."
"GOP attacks Dems from the left, accuses them of shredding `social safety net': As I've noted here before, Republicans have again taken to attacking Dems from the left on Medicare after doing it successfully last cycle, arguing that Democrats are the only ones who have ever voted to cut the program and insisting that Dems are intent on destroying Medicare by doing nothing to save it." Well, attacking as if from the left, but not really. But the real point of all this is that those liberal New Deal programs are popular and you don't charm the public by appearing to threaten them - and one party, at least, seems to have figured this out.
I just have to conclude that something about the internet makes people stupid. I can't even imagine why someone would think it's safe to do this stuff, especially given the Washington media's obsession with Democrats' members. It just doesn't make sense. But, Glennzilla: "What makes the Anthony Weiner story somewhat unique and thus worth discussing for a moment is that, as Hendrik Hertzberg points out, the pretense of substantive relevance (which, lame though it was in prior scandals, was at least maintained) has been more or less brazenly dispensed with here. This isn't a case of illegal sex activity or gross hypocrisy (i.e., David Vitter, Larry Craig, Mark Foley (who built their careers on Family Values) or Eliot Spitzer (who viciously prosecuted trivial prostitution cases)). There's no lying under oath (Clinton) or allegedly illegal payments (Ensign, Edwards). From what is known, none of the women claim harassment and Weiner didn't even have actual sex with any of them. This is just pure mucking around in the private, consensual, unquestionably legal private sexual affairs of someone for partisan gain, voyeuristic fun and the soothing fulfillment of judgmental condemnation. And in that regard, it sets a new standard: the private sexual activities of public figures -- down to the most intimate details -- are now inherently newsworthy, without the need for any pretense of other relevance." Well, it doesn't even have to be sexual or misconduct - remember how many nights Senator Clinton spent under the same roof as her husband? (Nice commentary from Amanda on the New Prudery, which is possibly even ickier than the old prudery.)
I have read five "corrections" of Palin's version of Paul Revere's ride that completely fail to mention that it was lights, not bells, that were the signal - that is, he didn't ring any bells and wasn't planning to. One of these only mentions her geographical error and doesn't even note that he wasn't intending to warn the British of anything.
Keep it simple: "Republicans Demand Layoffs As Cure For Job Losses. In response to today's terrible jobs report Republicans are demanding that even more government employees, contractors and others lose their jobs. They also demand that even more construction workers and others receiving government contracts lose their jobs, too. They want to do more of what they did in the Bush years, which led to this mess. If we do what they want to do it will send us into a depression."
The list of people who can use our help is long, but all these guys wanted to do was help cancer patients, and now they're the ones who need to be protected from the police state.
Thomas Heffner: "A most effective war has been waged on the American economy. Through the debilitating effects of the WTO, NAFTA and other Free Trade Agreements, we have placed foreigners in charge of our means of production. Many of our current problems arose following World War II. While we came out victorious militarily, an insidious stealth war on the lifeblood of our strength - our economy - was waged with results as damaging as if we lost a military war."
It's funny, I can remember posting this same story from another source years ago, but now Kristof, of all people, is telling it, and it's that the country that does what the Republicans say they believe in is...Pakistan.
It probably wouldn't hurt to propagate the story of how Paul Ryan refused a Bible to your more annoying relatives who send you those creepy emails and ruin Thanksgiving dinner every year.
"Organic farmers expand lawsuit against Monsanto :The case was initially filed in March by the Public Patent Foundation (PubPat), a non-profit legal services organization based at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, on behalf of 60 organic farmers and associated organizations. The farmers want assurance from Monsanto that they will not be sued for patent infringement if their farms become contaminated with the company's genetically modified crops. On 1 June, PubPat announced that the list of plaintiffs had grown to 83, and that the original complaint had been amended to include a recent exchange with Monsanto's lawyers. In a letter written on behalf of Monsanto, Seth Waxman, former solicitor general under Bill Clinton and a partner at the law firm WilmerHale in Washington, DC, said Monsanto has no intention of suing the farmers for patent infringement. 'Monsanto policy never has been, nor will be, to exercise its patent rights where trace amounts of its patented seed or traits are present in a farmer's fields as a result of inadvertent means,' he wrote, echoing a statement Monsanto has also made on its website. But rather than placating PubPat, executive director Daniel Ravicher says he saw a veiled threat in the statement's ambiguity. Farmers whose crops contain more than a 'trace' -- whatever that means -- of contamination are still vulnerable to action by Monsanto, he argues. Instead, Ravicher wants a legally binding declaration that Monsanto will not sue his clients for patent infringement."
When I was younger, we used to recoil in horror at stories about how horrible things were in other countries. Now other countries tell stories about how horrible things are in America. And, no, it does society no good to treat people this way - even pretty low-level scum. But it serves the purposes of evil people to make us terrified of the cost of resistance.
Yes, Obama really says stupid things. Look, you want to create jobs, you hire people. The government can do that. If it wants to. You putz.
I hate to do this, but I'm a little tired of the repetition of what increasingly looks like concern trolling. So I'm going to promote some of my own responses out of the comment thread to the post below. The argument is about whether or not there is any benefit to supporting Obama's re-election. Charles said:
Granting that in liberal enclaves there's opposition to Obama, and granting that Lars needs some lessons in manners, the fact is that he's correct that in the purple->red states see Obama as (by far) the lesser of evils. Obama is not trying to break unions, outlaw abortion, make whole cities the fiefdoms of Emergency Financial Management Czars, shift the tax burden to the poor, privatize Medicare and Medicaid, and so on.
And I said:
He's not? Then why did Senator Obama rush back to Washington to save TARP from the oblivion it deserved? Why did he vote against a 30% cap on usury? Why did he start babbling nonsense about the "Social Security crisis"?
And why did President Obama work so hard to keep Single-Payer not just off the table but beneath mention? Why did he extend the Bush tax-shift? Why did he start the whole "we have to do something about entitlements" meme rushing through Washington as soon as he got into office? Why did he create the Catfood Commission?
Con men are genial and charming. The fact that they don't use a gun may make them seem more genteel than a street thug, but a street thug only takes what's in your pocket today. A con man usually cleans out your bank account.
And Obama and his friends are going even farther - they're taking your house, your pension, and your future.
And Lars Macomb accused me of saying that, "someone who agrees with the Ryan plan for America would be a better president." And I said:
No, I don't, and I never said that. There is no "better president" option among any of the leading or likely contenders. They all, including Obama, believe in the same things and they are all a disaster.
Obama himself spoke highly of the Ryan plan.
I was just playing the stream at Rachel's page and was baffled that she did a whole story on the mysterious emergence of Herman Cain as a GOP favorite. The story is: There was this debate with some top contenders, and Cain was one of them. Then there was a call for a show of hands for who the audience thought won the debate. "We'll take them in order - Herman Cain. ..." And everybody voted for Cain. So, even though no one in the media has been talking about him, there's been a quiet undercurrent of rising support for Cain on the right ever since. No one was talking about him. Gosh. And at no time did Rachel ask, "If no one is talking about him and no one has seemed to be supporting him, why was he included in a debate among top GOP contenders?" Because it seems pretty obvious to me that in a lackluster field full of people no one really likes, if you introduce a new candidate who no one hates yet, he already is going to have an edge. Sort of like, oh, Barack Obama.
Atrios: "There was a lot the administration could have done with the blessing of President Snowe. There's probably less of that going forward, though there are things they could do. But more than that, I have no idea what the administration (Obama, Treasury, others, whoever) thinks they should do. I know what they didn't think they should do - cramdown, a HAMP that actually did what they initially claimed, aggressively prosecute mortgage fraud - because they aren't doing those things. I don't know if there's anything they would like to do that they are being stopped from doing. A discussion of what they could do is ultimately a discussion of "why the hell aren't they doing it?" And the answer, presumably, is because they don't want to."
Thanks so much to ql for bringing our attention to this lovely post, and to Michael F for retrieving the graphic, illustrating this Krugman post.on what the conservatives are bringing back. Of course, the difference between then and now is that we had two parties, and one of them wanted to bring prosperity to Americans.
Case Closed - basically, the whole Weiner thing was just another Republican dirty trick. Surprise!
This graph is a bit confusing because you expect it to be chronological and it isn't, but: Obama didn't cause this mess : National Debt By President. Well, Obama didn't help this mess, but yes, George W. Bush jacked up the debt way beyond anyone else's contribution. But the trouble with conservatives, even when they are Democrats, is that they don't unmake the mess.
DCBlogger helps me out in comments: "lefty blogs shows all the local Democratic bloggers. it is incomplete, but for following events in Wisconsin and Ohio and similar situations, it is pretty good."
RIP Rosalyn Yalow, whose work on quantifying amounts of hormone in the body helped a lot of people, including me, and won her a Nobel Prize. And, of course, our condolences to Ben.
Member of the National Academy of Sciences, winner of 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "If women are to start moving towards that goal, we must believe in ourselves or no one else will believe in us; we must match our aspirations with the competence, courage and determination to succeed."
I heard Joe Colombo's "Southern Lullaby" for the first time the other night on BellyUp4Blues and just thought it was, as we used to say, real fine.
I think a chill ran down my spine listening to Sam Seder's show Wednesday when he talked about how little muscle you have as a consumer. See, the customer is still always right, but you aren't the customer. (Actually, this has been true for a while, but before it was because you were the product - the big players were selling your money, your earnings, your mortgage, your future, to other big players. But now it's because the middle-class market no longer exists, you have no money and no future, nobody cares, the rich people have all the money and they are the only customer in town.)
I think one of the most important points Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) brought up when she was a guest on Virtually Speaking Susie was that more and more local bloggers are dropping out because it's just getting too hard. (Not that I'm dismissing the issue of the Supreme Court's recent decision that the authorities can "detain" anyone they want to because you might know someone suspicious....) Local bloggers are what you have now instead of local press, and they are fast becoming one of the only ways to find out what's going on locally so that maybe you can all get up in arms and do something to protest, make others aware, and frighten the pants of local politicians. Local politicians are the ones who actually have to live with their constituents, so scaring them is a good idea. Local bloggers are the ones who can focus your attention on who is running for office and whether they are worthy of your support - or your vote. (I'm pretty sure I used to know about a directory of local bloggers, and I wish I could remember where to find it. You should probably be looking to see who is doing blogging in your area and adopt a couple-few of the best ones as both a source and someone to direct your donations to. They need you, and you need them.) Meanwhile, I had been completely unaware, until listening to this show, that the right-wing blogosphere is all agog at Anthony Weiner's weiner.
Bridge to the 21st century: "On the one hand, I doubt that Franco's police worried very much about being taken to court. Progress! On the other, the days where the police have impunity could very easily return. Decay. From Franco, to democracy, to austerity and bankster kleptocracy all in one lifetime. Darkness to sunlight to shadows..." Of course, the police in America don't seem to worry much about being taken to court anymore. And in Britain, neither atrociously bad decision-making that kills innocents or out-and-out fatal assaults (murders) on innocent bystanders seem to be answered for by the individuals responsible.
Evil North Americans: "A certain powerful North American country has been brazenly meddling in Europe's affairs, bullying and twisting arms to advance a corporate agenda on the most pressing environmental issue of our time. A phalanx of its lobbyists has descended on European capitals to covertly scheme with oil companies and menace EU parliamentarians who would dare address climate change. It's not who you might think but Canada. If any illusions remained about this country's behaviour abroad, they should be put to rest." (Thanks to Mr. Sideshow.)
"Hostages Usually Require Ransom: So what will happen next is pretty dreary and predictable. Republicans will attach some kind of Medicare 'reform' to the debt ceiling bill. They'll pass it at the last possible minute, probably a week after Tim Geithner is hospitalized for nervous exhaustion, and a day or two after Paul Krugman is put under mental hygiene arrest. It will be carefully calibrated to be the worst thing that the Senate can pass and Obama can sign. And, just in the same way that the wife always goes back to her jackass husband for the sake of the kids, Obama will then sign it, for the sake of the country."
"Follow the money: Well, well... former President Bill Clinton is now walking back his earlier remarks that a Congressional failure to enlarge the (over $14 trillion) federal debt ceiling by another trillion or two "wouldn't be so calamitous." As is necessary in the Alice-in-Wonderland faux reality that now passes for reality, we'll forget that what the man who gave us "depends on what the meaning of is " was actually making an accurate statement, to wit, what matters is not the technical default itself, but whether the world's credit markets believe it really matters... Bill Clinton knows God damned well that his remarks themselves may well influence those very same credit markets. So... why would he stray off the official Obama Admin. reservation, even momentarily?"
I've always really liked and respected Jesse Taylor, so I can't tell you how disappointed I am to see this. I really would have expected him to have realized by now that it does us no good at all to re-elect Obama.
Last week I found a rose in my garden that was bigger than my coffee mug.
Atrios paraphrases the "deal" being offered to Greece: "How About The Keys To The Acropolis: Give us everything that isn't nailed down, much of what is, completely destroy your economy, and maybe, just maybe, we'll do you the favor of bailing out our banksters."
House bans funding of abortion training: "By a 234-182 vote, the House of Representatives passed an amendment last Wednesday, sponsored by Virginia Foxx (R-NC) that would prohibit teaching hospitals from receiving federal funding if they teach doctors how to perform abortions."
Stirling Newberry and Ian Welsh were on Virtually Speaking talking about how the rich people have been herding and selling their slaves (that's you). "I think it all comes back to you have to make these people's lives really unpleasant and people aren't willing to do that yet. The only people who really got anything from Obama that was really significant were the gays and they were willing to get in his face personally every time he showed up somewhere and make his life hell." And he was losing them. I thought at the time it was clear Obama realized he was going to have to give them something because unlike all the other good proggy groups, they weren't willing to be taken for granted. And until all of these disparate groups who consider themselves liberal stop allowing themselves to be sold out for the sake of, oh, the latest hostage, or We Have To Get Behind The President, or OMG REPUBLICANS!!!! - until everyone just stops being placated or frightened into silence and starts fighting for what we really need, the gay groups are the only ones that are going to be able to say they got one little thing out of Mr. HopeyChangey - while the rest of us continue to lose everything we ever had. (CMike transcribed a bit more of Ian and Stirling's conversation in the thread to this post. More discussion on this one. Related subjects: " How to Destroy the Democratic Party", " Say You Want a Revolution", and "Do you want to help organize a jailbreak?")
And, in another Bank of America scam... "Can you believe B of A would go to the trouble of reordering transactions so it could jack up overdraft fees? Yeah, me, too. Seems a bit shameful."
The funny thing about Jan Brewer is, she gets all states' rights on immigration, but doesn't feel her own state should have any rights against federal marijuana laws. Odd, that. Oh, wait... (Ta, PBTrue.)
Emptywheel on the an interesting dance on the Senate floor and the mysteries of DiFi's secret law: "Make no mistake, not only did Wyden get this colloquy in the Senate record, but there appear to have been several threats hiding behind the Senate blather. DiFi has said she thinks the way to fix a secret law is to change it in a secret committee meeting. But Wyden et al have made it clear that if she doesn't agree to fix it in her secret committee meeting, he will try to do so on the Senate floor."
"The Tea Party Wants to Teach Your Kids About the Constitution: Teaching kids about the Constitution is certainly a laudable goal, especially given the many public surveys showing that most Americans can't even name the three branches of government. But it's the tea partiers' favored curriculum that may concern parents of both liberal and conservative persuasions." (Have I mentioned lately that the Constitution is short and not that hard to read? It might be a good idea to refresh your memory of it periodically - and carry a copy in your pocket for those days when you get into arguments. It doesn't take up much space.)
"The Ludlow Massacre resulted in the violent deaths of 19 people[1] during an attack by the Colorado National Guard on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado on April 20, 1914. The deaths occurred after a day-long fight between strikers and the Guard. Two women and eleven children were asphyxiated and burned to death. Three union leaders and two strikers were killed by gunfire, along with one child, one passer-by, and one National Guardsman. In response, the miners armed themselves and attacked dozens of mines, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard."
"The Palmer Raids were attempts by the United States Department of Justice to arrest and deport radical leftists, especially anarchists, from the United States. The raids and arrests occurred in November 1919 and January 1920 under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Though more than 500 foreign citizens were deported, including a number of prominent leftist leaders, Palmer's efforts were largely frustrated by officials at the U.S. Department of Labor who had responsibility for deportations and who objected to Palmer's methods and disrespect for the legal process. The Palmer Raids occurred in the larger context of the Red Scare, the term given to fear of and reaction against political radicals in the U.S. in the years immediately following World War I."
Last night, just as I was falling asleep, I wondered just how many rich people from other countries really do go to the US for medical treatment, and why. I mean, given that even ordinary working-class people in England are healthier than rich people in America, why would anyone go to America for medical care? We hear about it occasionally (although it's usually people who are sufficiently evil that they might very well suspect their own doctors would kill them), but does it really happen that often? There are a lot of rich people all over the world who, as far as I can tell, never go to the US for medical treatment. Why do we never hear about them?
The real reason that malpractice insurance rates keep going up is that insurance companies jack them up as high as they can to cover their stupid investments. But the real reason for malpractice insurance itself, and high awards, is that there is lots of malpractice, and you still get charged hundreds of thousands of dollars for the fact that some idiot doctor crippled you. "In November 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a study that covered just the 15 percent of the U.S. population enrolled in Medicare. It found that each month one out of seven Medicare hospital patients is injured - and an estimated 15,000 are killed - by harmful medical practice. Treating the consequences of medical errors cost Medicare a full $324 million in October 2008 alone, or 3.5 percent of all Medicare expenditures for inpatient care. Another recent study looked at the incidence of avoidable medical errors across the entire population and concluded that they affected 1.5 million people and cost the U.S. economy $19.5 billion in 2008. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have estimated that almost 100,000 Americans now die from hospital-acquired infections alone, and that most of these are preventable." A lot of it could be fixed, but, "Some doctors and hospital administrators will object on principle. When O'Connell, aka 'The Numerator,' asked his surgeon about the moral implications of billing patients for treatments made necessary by sloppy medical practice, the response he reports receiving was disheartening: 'We're like lawyers,' O'Connell recalls the surgeon saying. 'We just provide services by the hour and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.'
Actual terrorist arrested: "A Wisconsin man was arrested Wednesday after he told police that he had traveled to Madison to shoot an abortion provider 'right in the head.'"
There's no point in wooing undecided voters until you teach them that the concerns in their lives are political issues. And...is it really the end of unions?
I think Stuart and Jay actually got down to the important point this week when discussing the efficacy of wasting our efforts supporting the current crop of approved Dems in elections. Is it necessarily a good thing when a nominal ("pro-business") Democrat beats out a Tea Party candidate who wants to bring the troops home and get rid of the Patriot Act? Is it meaningful if a Democrat will "vote the right way on Choice" (on a floor vote) if they will always be acting in concert with the kind of Democrats who threw ACORN under the bus? For that matter, are these Democrats really defending reproductive choice, or are they just allowing it to be whittled away? And why is Harry Reid sounding like Dick Cheney, and should we really want someone like that in our Congress? If the people vote against a Tea Party candidate, even if he's never advocated weakening Medicare, because he's a Republican, and vote for a Democrat who has the support of a Democratic leadership that clearly does intend to weaken Medicare, just because she says vouchers are bad, is that really any kind of a win for us? This is the situation we are in; what do we do about it?
Really? Would you have been enthusiastic about such a right-wing creep if he'd been white? Honestly? Because we're not talking about every single thing that happened in Obama's life, we're talking about how the hell he got elected. There were continual claims being made for Obama's black experience throughout the campaign. And there was also a continuous stream of dismissals when Obama was criticized - whether from the right or from the left - that such criticisms could only be based in racism, thus making it impossible for any such criticism to get any traction. I saw people talking like it was impossible for a block Democrat to be anything but a pure, liberal progressive. Really? Would people have been talking about how "articulate" he was if he'd been white? Would they have ignored the fact that he was raised by well-to-do Republicans and talked and voted like a Reaganite if he'd been white? Really? I don't think so.
