Saturday Reads
Posted: November 27, 2010 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Jeffrey Rosen, Korea, Rey Decerega, Samuel Alito, Soviet Union, The Onion, TSA, Wikileaks 86 Comments
President Obama after being injured while playing basketball
Good Morning!! You probably heard the top story on all the commercial and cable networks last night. President Obama got a split lip from a flying elbow while playing basketball Friday, and needed 12 stitches.
The White House has identified the person whose elbow injured President Barack Obama during a pickup game of basketball on Friday as Rey Decerega, who works for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.
Decerega had better watch his back. He did manage to do a little public sucking up:
The White House also released a statement from Decerega, NBC News said: “I learned today the president is both a tough competitor and a good sport. I enjoyed playing basketball with him this morning. I’m sure he’ll be back out on the court again soon.”
Perhaps that will help. Good Luck Ray Decerega!
U.S. officials are freaking out over the upcoming release of diplomatic documents by Wikileaks. According to The Independent:
Frantic behind the scenes wrangling was under way last night as US officials tried to stem the fallout from the expected release of up to three million confidential diplomatic communiques by the Wikileaks website.
Over the past 48 hours, American ambassadors have had the unenviable task of informing some of the country’s strongest allies that a series of potentially embarrassing cables are likely to be released in the coming days….
Downing Street yesterday confirmed that the US ambassador in London had already briefed the Government on what might be contained in the files. Similar meetings were also reported in Turkey, Israel, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Australia.
[MABlue here]
abc has more on the “Big Freakout”. there must really be some unsavory stuff in that report. Apparently, most of the stuff comes from Bradly Manning.
Bracing for WikiLeaks’ Release of Diplomatic Documents, State Department Warns Allies
Senior U.S. officials warn that the next round of WikiLeaks documents would be considerably more damaging than the two previous WikiLeaks document dumps.
“This is outrageous and dangerous,” a senior U.S. official told ABC News. “This puts at risk the ability of the United States to conduct foreign policy. Period. End of paragraph.”
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff also weighed in today, telling CNN he hoped these kinds of leaks will eventually be plugged.
According to op-ed commentator Jerome Taylor: This is a public airing of Washington’s dirty linen
What makes the release of diplomatic cables so potentially explosive is that they could cover a vast spectrum of information that America and her allies would like to keep secret. Cables are the diplomatic equivalent of dirty linen that no country wants to see aired in public. “Diplomatic cables might talk about political instability inside the country – there could be information about secret deals, weapons agreements, talks with dissidents, all sorts of things,” explains Yossi Mekelberg, an expert on Israel-US relations at Chatham House. “But cables are not policy papers. When I read cables I’m often surprised at how gossipy they can be.”
The informal nature of such missives has the potential to cause some serious red faces in capitals around the world.
The U.S. has now been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Union was.
The last Red Army troops left Feb. 15, 1989, driven out after nine years and 50 days by the U.S.-backed Afghan fighters known as mujahedin, or holy warriors. Ragtag yet ferocious, they were so spectrally elusive that the Soviet forces called them dukhi, or ghosts. A fitting term, perhaps, for a country that has been called “the graveyard of empires.”
Aren’t you proud to be an American? And our empire hasn’t even collapsed like the USSR’s–yet.
And history twists back on itself. In the Soviets’ war, the United States armed and aided the mujahedin; in this one, Russia is increasingly cooperating with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Moscow agreed this month to let the Western military alliance take armored vehicles through its territory. Last month, Russian counternarcotics agents went along on a joint NATO-Afghan drug raid.
It’s all so pointless…and yet it’s destroying us.
And what about Korea? Is our Nobel Peace Prize-winning President going to get us involved there too? It doesn’t look good:
The joint military exercises the US will conduct with South Korea’s navy on Sunday, off the Korean peninsula in the Yellow Sea, are taking on added significance as a message-bearer to North Korea, following Pyongyang’s shelling of the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong on Tuesday.
The Pentagon is quick to point out that the naval exercises are “defensive in nature” and that similar events have been held frequently. But US commanders also acknowledge that this joint exercise is a pointed reminder to the North of US military strength and America’s allegiance with South Korea. The US announced the exercises after the artillery barrage of Yeonpyeong, home to South Korean military bases and a small civilian population.
George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen has an article in the Washington Post in which he argues that the TSA’s naked body scans and “enhanced pat down” searches are unconstitutional. Interestingly, he cites a 2006 decision by then circuit court judge Samuel Alito:
…Alito stressed that screening procedures must be both “minimally intrusive” and “effective” – in other words, they must be “well-tailored to protect personal privacy,” and they must deliver on their promise of discovering serious threats. Alito upheld the practices at an airport checkpoint where passengers were first screened with walk-through magnetometers and then, if they set off an alarm, with hand-held wands. He wrote that airport searches are reasonable if they escalate “in invasiveness only after a lower level of screening disclose[s] a reason to conduct a more probing search.”
As currently used in U.S. airports, the new full-body scanners fail all of Alito’s tests. First, as European regulators have recognized, they could be much less intrusive without sacrificing effectiveness. For example, Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, the European airport that employs body-scanning machines most extensively, has incorporated crucial privacy and safety protections. Rejecting the “backscatter” machines used in the United States, which produce revealing images of the body and have raised concerns about radiation, the Dutch use scanners known as ProVision ATD, which employ radio waves with far lower frequencies than those used in common hand-held devices. If the software detects contraband or suspicious material under a passenger’s clothing, it projects an outline of that area of the body onto a gender-neutral, blob-like human image, instead of generating a virtually naked image of the passenger. The passenger can then be taken aside for secondary screening.
Rosen concludes:
…there’s good reason to believe that the machines are not effective in detecting the weapons they’re purportedly designed to identify. For U.S. courts, that’s yet another consideration that could make them constitutionally unreasonable.
Broadly, U.S. courts have held that “routine” searches of all travelers can be conducted at airports as long as they don’t threaten serious invasions of privacy. By contrast, “non-routine” searches, such as strip-searches or body-cavity searches, require some individualized suspicion – that is, some cause to suspect a particular traveler of wrongdoing. Neither virtual strip-searches nor intrusive pat-downs should be considered “routine,” and therefore courts should rule that neither can be used for primary screening.
The only question is whether the Supreme Court will stand up for individual rights or continue to accede to the executive branch’s demands for more Presidential power.
I’m going to end with a funny, but pretty realistic, satirical piece from The Onion: Frustrated Obama Sends Nation Rambling 75,000-Word E-Mail
The e-mail, which was titled “A couple things,” addressed countless topics in a dense, stream-of-consciousness rant that often went on for hundreds of words without any punctuation or paragraph breaks. Throughout, the president expressed his aggravation on subjects as disparate as the war in Afghanistan, the sluggish economic recovery, his live-in mother-in-law, China’s undervalued currency, Boston’s Logan Airport, and tort reform.
According to its timestamp, the e-mail was sent at 4:26 a.m.
“Hey Everyone,” read the first line of the president’s note, which at 27 megabytes proved too large for millions of Americans’ in-boxes. “I’m writing to you because I need to clear up some important issues. First and foremost, I want to say that this has nothing to do with the midterm elections because I was going to send an e-mail regardless of the outcome. However, I guess one could argue that, in the end, the midterms are an important measure of a president’s overall success, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call the results a referendum. Legislatively, I feel I’ve had a lot of success that I think history will judge quite favorably. I mean, pretty much every modern president has seen his party lose seats during a midterm, you know?
Go read the whole thing. It’s really funny, in an lolsob kind of way. Oh…and Fox News published the Onion story on their website without identifying it as satire.
[MABlue’s Saturday picks] It’s all about real life crime and investigation.
From Vanity Fair: The Case of the Vanishing Blonde
After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went cold. But when the victim sued the Airport Regency, the hotel’s private detective, Ken Brennan, became obsessed with the case: how had the 21-year-old blonde disappeared from her room, unseen by security cameras? The author follows Brennan’s trail as the P.I. worked a chilling hunch that would lead him to other states, other crimes, and a man nobody else suspected.
Apparently, the Chandra Levy case is not resolved: Reasonable doubt in the Chandra Levy case
How reliable is the conviction of Ingmar Guandique for the 2001 murder, when the key evidence is a disputed prison confession?
There’s a debate going on about the goodness of religion between Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens. By all accounts, Hitch won the 1st round yesterday.
Hitchens defeats Blair in Canadian religion debate
What are you reading this morning?
Simpson Strikes Again
Posted: November 26, 2010 Filed under: Surreality, Team Obama, The Bonus Class, WE TOLD THEM SO | Tags: agism, Alan Simpson, Barack Obama, Catfood Commission, homophobia, Sexism, Social Security 37 Comments
Alan Simpson, Co-chair of President Obama’s Catfood Commission has opened his mouth again, attacking seniors:
…because they are unhappy with his ideas for reducing the deficit by cutting Social Security benefits while reducing corporate taxes.
“I’ve never had any nastier mail or [been in a] more difficult position in my life,” Simpson told Jeremy Pelzer at the Casper Star-Tribune. “Just vicious. People I’ve known, relatives [saying], ‘You son of a bitch. How could you do this?'”
[….]
“We had the greatest generation,” Simpson said. “I think this is the greediest generation.”
Maybe you all have heard about this already–I wasn’t following the news too closely yesterday–but I just had to frontpage it. The nerve of this man! And why isn’t President Obama responding to his ugly slurs of elderly people who paid into Social Security for their entire lives? Why should we take cuts in Social Security so that rich people like Simpson can take more money for themselves?
The problem, Simpson explained, is the “polarized” country we live in, and the media that exemplifies it. He then to reeled off the media figures ruining America for deficit commissioners like him.
“You don’t want to listen to the right and the left — the extremes,” he said. “You don’t want to listen to Keith Olbermann and Rush Babe [Limbaugh] and Rachel Minnow [sic] or whatever that is, and Glenn Beck. They’re entertainers. They couldn’t govern their way out of a paper sack — from the right or the left. But they get paid a lot of money from you and advertisers — thirty, fifty million a year — to work you over and get you juiced up with emotion, fear, guilt, and racism. Emotion, fear, guilt, and racism.
Simpson refers to Rachel Maddow as “that.” Is that because she’s a lesbian or because she’s a woman or both?
At FDL, Jon Walker writes: Is Simpson an Obama-Appointed Bully or Sexist?
While I don’t know former Republican Senator Alan Simpson personally and can’t say definitively whether or not he is a sexist, his behavior says a lot about him. He’s repeatedly behaved and spoken in a manner completely consistent with sexists who have strong disdain for intelligent women. His schoolyard attempts at bullying women, the strange terms he uses, and his incredibly childish attempts at demeaning women who dare criticize with name calling are all trademarks of a sexist.
Walker ends with this:
I could care less about Simpson’s behavior if it weren’t for the fact that President Obama appointed him co-chair of the bipartisan President’s Deficit Commission. It’s disconcerting that Obama tolerates this sexist behavior. Why would he appoint Simpson and stay silent as Simpson used the perch Obama gave him to lash out in such a childish manner and pointedly against women?
The fact that President Obama has not yet countered any of the ugly words that have come out of Simpson’s mouth strongly suggests that Obama himself agrees with Simpson’s views. And Obama dares to call himself a Democrat?
But should Jon Walker or anyone else really be surprised? Obama is the same person who during the primaries in 2008 characterized Hillary Clinton’s experiences as First Lady as drinking tea with foreign ambassadors. He’s the same guy who suggested that Hillary’s “claws come out” if you “challenge the status quo,” and that when Hillary “is feeling down” she “periodically launches attacks.”
No one should be surprised at Obama supporting attacks on the elderly or gays either. Here at Skydancing, we can easily cite the many previous examples of President Obama’s disrespect for seniors and gays.
Alan Simpson is simply saying aloud in very crude language what the President of the United States apparently believes in his heart–if he has one.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: November 23, 2010 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Barack Obama, Chris Hedges, Emptywheel, gate rape, Jefferson Morley, JFK assassination, TSA abuse 56 Comments
Good Morning!!
Yesterday was the 47th anniversary of the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Many Americans are unaware that a great deal of archival information on the assassination and on Kennedy’s administration has become available at the National Archives in the recent years.
A number of important, even scholarly, books have now been published based on that new information. Unfortunately, more records–especially CIA records–remain hidden, but it seems clear that, as a Congressional Commission affirmed years ago, it is highly unlikely that Oswald acted alone. In fact, elements of our government were probably complicit in the assassination of a U.S. President. Here are some of the best of recent books dealing with the JFK assassination.
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James W. Douglass
The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, by David E. Kaiser
The Kennedy Detail: JFK’s Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence, by Gerald Blaine and Lisa McCubbin
Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK, by John Newman
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, by David Talbot
Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years by Russ Baker
Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, by Jefferson Morley
Yesterday, the Atlantic published a piece by Jefferson Morley (the last author on my list): The Kennedy Assassination: 47 Years Later, What Do We Really Know?
Morley:
…for all the crazy ideas out there, there remain sober and careful alternative views of the assassination. These theories may or may not ultimately be right, but they represent the continuation of serious discussion of the subject.
He then debunks “five common myths about the state of the debate itself.” It would be very hard to excerpt anything from this article, you really need to read the entire thing. But here is just a taste:
Myth 3. No one high-up in the U.S. government ever thought there was a conspiracy behind JFK’s murder.
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, publicly endorsed the Warren Commissions conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Privately, LBJ told many people, ranging from Atlantic contributor Leo Janos to CIA director Richard Helms, that he did not believe the lone-gunman explanation.
The president’s brother Robert and widow Jacqueline also believed that he had been killed by political enemies, according to historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Tim Naftali. In their 1999 book on the Cuban missile crisis, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964, they reported that William Walton — a friend of the First Lady — went to Moscow on a previously scheduled trip a week after JFK’s murder. Walton carried a message from RFK and Jackie for their friend, Georgi Bolshakov, a Russian diplomat who had served as a back-channel link between the White House and the Kremlin during the October 1962 crisis: RFK and Jackie wanted the Soviet leadership to know that “despite Oswald’s connections to the communist world, the Kennedys believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents.”
In the Senate, Democrats Richard Russell of Georgia and Russell Long of Louisiana both rejected official accounts of the assassination. In the executive branch, Joseph Califano, the Secretary of Army in 1963 and later Secretary of Health Education and Welfare, concluded that Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy. In the White House, H.R. Haldeman, chief of staff to President Richard Nixon, wanted to reopen the JFK investigation in 1969. Nixon wasn’t interested.
Please read the whole thing. IMHO, 1963 is the year when everything started to go to hell for our country. The murderers were allowed to go free and even stay within our government, and today we are living with the results of allowing corruption to run rampant without any accountability.
I know not everyone likes Chris Hedges’ writing as much as I do, but please read his latest column at Truthdig if you can. It is depressing reading, I admit, but I believe Hedges is right and should be heeded. Again, a brief excerpt can’t do the piece justice, but I’ll include one anyway.
There is no hope left for achieving significant reform or restoring our democracy through established mechanisms of power. The electoral process has been hijacked by corporations. The judiciary has been corrupted and bought. The press shuts out the most important voices in the country and feeds us the banal and the absurd. Universities prostitute themselves for corporate dollars. Labor unions are marginal and ineffectual forces. The economy is in the hands of corporate swindlers and speculators. And the public, enchanted by electronic hallucinations, remains passive and supine. We have no tools left within the power structure in our fight to halt unchecked corporate pillage.
The liberal class, which Barack Obama represents, was never endowed with much vision or courage, but it did occasionally respond when pressured by popular democratic movements. This was how we got the New Deal, civil rights legislation and the array of consumer legislation pushed through by Ralph Nader and his allies in the Democratic Party. The complete surrendering of power, however, to corporate interests means that those of us who seek nonviolent yet profound change have no one within the power elite we can trust for support. The corporate coup has ossified the structures of power. It has obliterated all checks on corporate malfeasance. It has left us stripped of the tools of mass organization that once nudged the system forward toward justice.
Obama knows where power lies and serves these centers of power. The tragedy—if tragedy is the right word—is that Obama, after selling his soul to corporations, has been discarded. Corporate power doesn’t need brand Obama anymore. They have found new brands in the tea party, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. Obama has been abandoned by those who once bundled contributions for him by the millions of dollars. Obama and the Democratic Party will, I expect, spend the next two years being even more obsequious to corporate power. Obama clearly loves the pomp and privilege of statecraft that much. But I am not sure it will work.
I highly recommend reading the whole thing. We are approaching the point of no return–we may even have passed that point, as Hedges argues.
This morning I came across this op-ed from a PA newspaper. I think it really expresses what we saw in Obama early on, and what so many other people seemed not to see.
Above all others: Obama’s arrogance, by Ralph R. Reiland, associate professor of economics, Robert Morris University
Reiland argues that Obama’s inflated self-esteem is a huge problem. You’ll recognize the quotes, but Reiland ties them all together nicely. Here is just one:
Patrick Gaspard, former community organizer, ex-lobbyist for the Service Employees International Union and now director of Obama’s Office of Political Affairs, is quoted in a 2008 New Yorker article describing what Obama said to him during his job interview: “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”
As much of the world is now beginning to understand, Obama’s opinion of himself is not very accurate, and unfortunately he has surrounded himself with sycophants who reinforce his false self-image to the detriment of our country.
Long-time media sycophant Marc Ambinder presents the White House case for gate rapes (h/t Emptywheel) at The National Journal:
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security indicated today that they won’t yield to demands to amend new airline passenger screening rules that have been decried as wildly intrusive.
On the contrary, administration officials are quietly and aggressively defending the policies against what they see as a media frenzy of distorted information. For instance, the administration noted that fewer than one half of one percent of the 34 million passengers who traveled on airplanes in or to the U.S. last week were subjected to crotch-area pat-downs.
They also disputed the very notion of a public backlash, even as those words played ubiquitously on news tickers and as video parodies of the Transportation Safety Administration were being emailed around the globe. Before press coverage of the new rules reached a roar late last week, TSA received only 700 complaints nationwide about its procedures, an administration official said. The official insisted on anonymity because the information was not intended for public release. The issue is sensitive because physical space intrusions are just about the last thing an administration cast by Republicans as prone to governmental overreach needs.
Talk about clueless. I can’t imagine how Obama and his Chicago gang actually believe he can be reelected with such tone-deaf strategies.
At FDL, Emptywheel is doing yeoman’s work on the TSA story. Here’s a bit of her latest post: White House: Only 170,000 People Have Had Genitalia Groped by Complete Stranger in Last Week
The White House has started a pushback campaign on gate rape that is reminiscent of “Recovery Summer” or “Mission Accomplished” for its credibility.
It consists of a number of things, in addition to the inevitable army of talking-point-people using the word “enhanced” the same way Cheney did.
She is particularly angered by Obama’s claim that naked body scanners and crotch gropes are the only techniques that can prevent attacks like the one attempted by the underpants bomber:
Um, no. You see, after the underwear bombing, we had a whole bunch of studies that examined what went wrong and what might have been effective against the underwear bomber. And the answer–in the face of clear fuck-ups by the NCTC and CIA (and to a much lesser degree, the FBI for which John Pistole then served as second-in-command)–the answer was to stop fucking up and start sharing information. To claim that junk-touching is the only thing that would be effective at stopping the undie bomber, when we know that the intelligence community had already identified Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab but failed to stop him, is an out and out lie.
Mind you, crotch groping might be effective if al Qaeda or another terrorist organization decided to launch the same type of attack, this time from within the United States. Or it might be effective against another sort of attack we haven’t yet thought up. Then again, it pointedly wouldn’t be effective against an attack by an organization that has proven itself capable of adjusting and exploiting new weaknesses–that is, the organization we’re fighting.
If only fighting terrorism were the real goal of these police state tactics. Unfortunately, the goal (IMNSHO) is to scare the bejesus out of innocent American citizens to soften them up for even more invasive tactics to come.
Remember how Obama acknowledged that he doesn’t have to go through the nightmare of naked body scanning like the “small people”? Ian Welsh reminds us that most rich people don’t have to deal with this crap either–it’s just us serfs.
If important people don’t have skin in the game, things don’t get fixed and the quality of whatever experience they don’t experience doesn’t get better. Everyone, most especially the rich and powerful, must fly on the same planes, must be subject to the draft, must have their kids go to the same schools and so on. Only then will the general quality be high.
To the extent possible the rich have created an entire alternative structure: they don’t fly on the same planes, their kids don’t go to the same schools, they don’t fight in the wars, they have hotels that you will never enter (can you afford 50K a night?) They live in a system parallel to that of ordinary people.
The rich must never, ever, be allowed to opt out of the shared social and economic experience. Fly first class? Sure, but not on private jets. Drive in a limo? Sure, but not fly in a helicopter avoiding congestion. Get a room to themselves in the hospital? Sure, but not jump the queue for treatment in front of anyone.
Too late, that ship has sailed.
Okay, I’ve probably thoroughly depressed you, and I’m sorry for that. But still, where there’s life, there’s hope. Maybe you guys can find some cheerful news even though I couldn’t. What stories and blogs are you following today?
Saturday Reads
Posted: November 20, 2010 Filed under: Diplomacy Nightmares, morning reads, The Great Recession | Tags: Alexander Cockburn, Barack Obama, David Sirota, missile shield, NATO, Poverty, Russia, unemployment 52 Comments
Good Morning!!
President Obama has left the country again. He was in Lisbon today for a NATO meeting, at which the organization agreed to build a missile shield, and they hope that Russia will go along with it too.
In general, senior NATO officials note a welcoming Russian tone under President Dmitri A. Medvedev to the idea of cooperation with NATO on missile defense and European security, and they also note the general silence of Mr. Putin, now prime minister.
On Saturday, Russia will be formally invited to take part in the missile defense system, especially with intelligence and radar sharing. Moscow has indicated that it is interested but has questions, and wants to ensure that the system is not aimed at countering Russian missiles.
The missile defense system approved Friday is different from the fixed-missile defense that President George W. Bush initiated and that proved controversial. The idea is to have a phased system of radars and antimissile missiles that would be less expensive than the Bush system. The NATO spokesman, James Appathurai, said the nearly $1.5 billion cost could be managed over 10 years.
Plenty of money for missile defense that probably won’t work, but nothing for the desperate long-term unemployed.
In one of his many bad decisions, President Obama invited Skeltor Alan Simpson back out of obscurity, and we may never get rid of him. With his latest pronouncement, he has moved way beyond inappropriate to sociopathic.
He predicted a government that approaches shutdown in April of next year.
“This is going to be beautiful politics – The brutal kind,” he told reporters in Washington at a forum put on by the Christian Science Monitor. “I love those,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye and a jokester tinge to his voice.
“The debt limit, when it comes in April or May, will prove who’s a hero and who’s a jerk and who’s a charlatan and who’s a faqir,” said Simpson. “And there it will be right there. Because they’re going to say, these new guys, some of them, and I’ve met a good deal of them and boy they’re sharp cookies,” he said, adding a message to new Congressmen.
“Compromise is not a filthy word,” said Simpson. “It doesn’t mean you’re a wimp when you learn to compromise. You either learn to compromise and legislate or go home – my personal view – anyway there they are and they’re going to say I will not vote for the debt limit extension until you cut this. Say, you can’t do that. you can’t possibly do that. well, then I’m not voting for it. and they’ll say well the government will close. Which they’ll say that’s what I came here for. Oh, I can’t wait. It’ll be something and I’ll be watching.”
You can watch it at the Christian Science Monitor site.
If only there really were a hell so Alan Simpson could spend eternity there.
Ezra Klein is thinking along the same lines as Simpson, but makes more of an effort to sound reasonable. He says Democrats should trade an extension of the Bush tax cuts to the rich for Republican votes to extend unemployment benefits and increase the debt ceiling when the time comes.
Ezra must have learned bargaining strategy from that great bipartisan choker compromiser Barack Obama.
Elsewhere in The Washington Post is the story of “one family’s plunge from the middle class into poverty.”
Walker used to make $100,000 a year as a nursing home executive until she lost her job a year and a half ago. Unable to find a new one, she shed her business suits and high heels and put on an apron and soft-soled shoes. This year, she and her daughter are living on $11,000: her unemployment benefits plus whatever she can earn selling home-cooked dinners for $10 apiece….
The Census Bureau recently reported that the poverty rate in the United States rose to 14.3 percent last year, the highest level in more than 50 years.
Texas and Florida saw the most people fall below the line. In Florida alone, 323,000 people became newly poor last year, bringing the state’s poverty total to 2.7 million.
The numbers tell another tale as well: Nationwide, in black households such as Walker’s, income plunged an average of 4.4 percent in 2009, almost three times the drop among whites. The number of blacks living below the official poverty line – $21,756 for a family of four – increased by 7 percent in just one year.
Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, co-chairs of the Catfood Commission, should be forced to read this article, memorize it, and then write on a blackboard 1,000 times, “I am a damn fool who knows nothing about economics.”
At Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn thinks “it’s time for a real mutiny.”
So much for 2010 as the year of mutiny, when the American people rose up and said, “Enough! Throw the bums out!” As the dust finally clears after the midterm elections, and the bodies are hauled from the field of battle, guess what? It was all so predictable. The safest thing to be in 2010 was an incumbent.
Out of 435 seats, 351 incumbents will be returning to the House in January. In the Senate, out of 100 seats, 77 incumbents will return in January. As the libertarian Joel Hirschorn puts it, “Welcome back to the reality of America’s delusional democracy where career politicians will continue to foster a corrupt, inefficient and dysfunctional government because that is what the two-party plutocracy and its supporters want for their own selfish reasons.”
What will Dear Leader do next?
Already there are the omens of a steady stream of concessions by Obama to the right.
There’s hardly any countervailing pressure for him to do otherwise. The president has no fixed principles of political economy, and who is at his elbow in the White House? Not the Labor Secretary, Hilda Solis. Not that splendid radical Elizabeth Warren, whose Consumer Financial Protection Bureau the Republicans are already scheduling for destruction. Next to Obama is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the bankers’ lapdog, whom the president holds in high esteem….
Two more years, of the same downward slide, courtesy of bipartisanship and “working together”? No way. Enough of dreary predictability. Let’s have a real mutiny against Obamian rightward drift. The time is not six months or a year down the road. The time is now.
But who will lead the charge?
Dakinikat turned me on to this article about Obama’s Asian trip: Asia After Obama, by Brahma Chellaney
Significantly, Obama restricted his tour to Asia’s leading democracies – India, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea – which surround China and are central to managing its rise. Yet he spent all of last year assiduously courting the government in Beijing in the hope that he could make China a global partner on issues ranging from climate change to trade and financial regulation. The catchphrase coined by US Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg in relation to China, “strategic reassurance,” actually signaled America’s intent to be more accommodating toward China’s ambitions.
Now, with his China strategy falling apart, Obama is seeking to do exactly what his predecessor attempted – to line up partners as an insurance policy in case China’s rising power slides into arrogance. Other players on the grand chessboard of Asian geopolitics also are seeking to formulate new equations, as they concurrently pursue strategies of hedging, balancing, and bandwagoning.
Once again, Obama plays the role of Bush III.
At Truthdig, I learned that David Sirota has found a new hero to replace his now tarnished idol Barack Obama. These days Sirota is bragging about hanging with cut rate Rolling Stone gonzo writer Matt Taibbi.
Sirota reminds me of that little dog Chester in the Looney Tunes cartoons–the one that idolizes the big bulldog Spike. Chester jumps around Butch, trying to get his attention, praising him, agreeing with him; and when Spike brushes him aside, he just keeps coming back for more. Sirota:
Over drinks in my living room, Taibbi and I pondered the financial Masters of the Universe and their maddening infallibility. I asked him why they never fear facing legal consequences. Do they believe they’re untouchable? Or do they know law enforcement won’t pursue them?
“They’re not afraid because other than Bernie Madoff, when was the last time someone on Wall Street faced any real punishment?” he responded. “Sure, a few go to jail once in a while, but they’re usually out in a few months and then on the speaking circuit. That’s not exactly a deterrent against bad behavior that’s making you millions.”
Deterrence—it’s the vaunted idea behind “tough on crime” sentences for violent offenses. Lock the door, throw away the key, and the theory says that heinous acts will be prevented.
Duh! I think Sirota wrote this piece just so everyone would know he’s pals with Taibbi.
Since it’s Saturday Morning….
What’s on your reading menu this morning?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments