And it sure looks like he's running:

Now who looks like the raving lunatic here? (Hint: It isn't Grayson.)

Since when does the desire to have a job make you an unreasonable money-grubber who wants a pony and a baseball team?

Labels: Alan Grayson, Democrats with balls, Fox News, The Right Wing War on the Middle Class

Given what a sellout Barack Obama has shown himself to be, I'm ready to believe that if Republicans gave him a bill that made it illegal for anyone black or poor or elderly to vote, he'd sign it just to try to get Rand Paul to like him.

So good for Bill Clinton, who grew up in the Jim Crow south, to call the rash of "voter ID" laws being passed in swing states across the country what they are:

"There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today," Clinton said in a speech at a Campus Progress conference in Washington.

He specifically called out Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) for trying to reverse past precedent and prevent convicted felons from voting even after they've completed their sentence.

"Why should we disenfranchise people forever once they've paid their price?" Clinton said. "Because most of them in Florida were African Americans and Hispanics who tended to vote for Democrats. That's why."

Labels: Bill Clinton, vote suppression

I don't know.

Maybe Barack Obama really in his heart still believes, despite being depicted as a monkey, the target of an e-mail depicting his parents as chimpanzees, called a liar in the middle of the State of the Union message, described with lynching metaphors by a leading presidential candidate, and a nonstop barrage of obstructionism by Congressional Republicans during the last two-and-a-half years, that he still can negotiate with Republicans; that he's so special that he can part the waters. Maybe he has some deep-seated self-loathing that's so pervasive that he gets some kind of perverse gratification out of being abused by Republicans.

Maybe he's even just doing what he's wanted to do all along -- set himself up for a nice cushy eight-figure job with an investment bank after he leaves office and join the ranks of the very people we elected him to keep under some kind of control.

Whatever it is, it's pretty clear that the poor and the elderly in this country are going to be sacrificed, not by some right-wing Republican greedmeister, but by a Democrat that those very poor and elderly elected:

President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.

At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for Thursday morning, Obama plans to argue that a rare consensus has emerged about the size and scope of the nation’s budget problems and that policymakers should seize the moment to take dramatic action.

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.

“Obviously, there will be some Democrats who don’t believe we need to do entitlement reform. But there seems to be some hunger to do something of some significance,” said a Democratic official familiar with the administration’s thinking. “These moments come along at most once a decade. And it would be a real mistake if we let it pass us by.”

Rather than roughly $2 trillion in savings, the White House is now seeking a plan that would slash more than $4 trillion from annual budget deficits over the next decade, stabilize borrowing, and defuse the biggest budgetary time bombs that are set to explode as the cost of health care rises and the nation’s population ages.

That would represent a major legislative achievement, but it would also put Obama and GOP leaders at odds with major factions of their own parties. While Democrats would be asked to cut social-safety-net programs, Republicans would be asked to raise taxes, perhaps by letting tax breaks for the nation’s wealthiest households expire on schedule at the end of next year.

The administration argues that lawmakers would also get an important victory to sell to voters in 2012. “The fiscal good has to outweigh the pain,” said a Democratic official familiar with the discussions.

Yup. Cuts to the social safety net that have been in place for decades and that keep the elderly from living out on the street are going to really be a big seller in 2012, especially in states like, oh, say, Florida, and North Carolina, where there are both a lot of retirees AND a lot of poor people. That's gonna go over BIG.

Americans have drunk the deficit kool-aid, but they don't really understand what the kind of BIG CUTS NOW they seem to be asking for are going to mean. A poll in March of this year showed that while 80% of Americans are concerned about the deficit, they oppose cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and K-12 education. Believe me, when Grandma has to move into a house where Dad has been out of work for two years and the family income is a third of what it was; where the son has been out of college for a year and is still working at the Piggly-Wiggly for $7.25 an hour because he can't find a programming job; where the daughter who's an A student is living at home and going to community college because the money that Dad and Mom had put away from her college lost 40% of its value during the 2008 financial crisis and still hasn't recovered -- because Grandma can no longer afford her apartment and food after her Social Security checks have been cut, families like that are going to find their concern with the deficit disappearing mighty quick.

Americans don't favor cuts to these programs, but they DO, contrary to the relentless drumbeats of Republicans, favor increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, especially when the questions are framed as a choice between just cuts, just tax hikes, or a combination of both:

Several polls ask people if taxes should be increased on people who make more than $250,000. Polls show substantial majorities support the idea. We found majorities of 72 percent, 64 percent, and 59 percent. (Those are from April polls by ABC News/Washington Post, McClatchy-Marist, and USA Today/Gallup, respectively.)

On whether corporations pay enough in taxes, Gallup found that 67 percent said they pay too little.

Finally, we should note one area where we found contradictions on tax increases --in polls that ask people if they favor spending cuts, tax increases, or some combination thereof.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted at the beginning of May found that most people, 52 percent, favored a combination of cuts and tax increases. The NBC/Washington Post poll from April found that number was even higher, at 59 percent.

On the other hand, when you don't give people the option of both, they favor spending cuts over tax increases by significant margins. We found a Reuters/Ipsos poll from March that found people favored spending cuts over tax increase by 56 percent to 30, and a CBS News/New York Times poll from January that put it at 62 to 29.

But then we found polls that asked participants if they preferred cuts to benefits such as Social Security and Medicare over tax increases. In those cases, the results favored tax increases. The CBS News/New York Times poll found that 62 percent favored increasing taxes before Medicare benefits are cut.

The tax cuts that were instituted by George W. Bush in conjunction with his spending spree on two futile have been in place for a decade -- and there are still no jobs. But that isn't stopping Republicans from continuing the trickle-down meme that when the rich have stuffed all the cash into their pockets that will fit, they will start just tossing it on the floor in the form of jobs and let us pick up the scraps. The reality that we're seeing is that when their pockets are full, they just start stuffing cash into the pockets of another jacket.

And yet there is our President -- the one we elected in 2008, along with a Democratic Congress, to protect Social Security and Medicare, to protect public education, and to protect a woman's sovereignty over his own body -- selling us out on EVERYTHING.

Wo which is it? Are we once again dealing with a president who's willing to sacrifice a nation to his primal childhood wounds, or just another greedy asshole who rode a Trojan Horse into the White House?

Labels: despair, Medicare, social Darwinism, Social Security, We Are So Screwed

It's almost enough to make you think maybe this should happen while Republicans are running things:

Weakening economic conditions will come together in 2013 and create a "perfect storm" of global weakness, economist Nouriel Roubini told CNBC.

Known for his generally dour outlook that helped him see the financial crisis before it hit in 2008, Roubini said the US, European nations and others have become adept enough at forestalling their problems that a true crisis won't hit until 2013.

But when it does, the effects are likely to be painful.

"My prediction for the perfect storm is not this year or next year but 2013, because everybody is kicking the can down the road," he said in a live interview. "We now have a problem in the US after the election if we don't resolve our fiscal problems. China is overheating...eventually it's going to have a hard landing."

In the nearer term, Roubini sees slow but steady growth in the US, with gross domestic product likely to be a bit above 2 percent, with unemployment and housing continuing to hold back the economy.

From there, recovery will be difficult as the government cuts spending and raises taxes to ease pressure from the bulging debt and deficit issues.

At the same time, euro zone periphery nations like Greece, Portugal and Spain will continue to wrestle with their own debt problems, and China will act to prevent inflation from getting out of control.

Then the storm hits, he said.

If Bernie Sanders is right and the corporations and banks have already written off America once they finish sucking everything they can out of it, the global economic collapse they're so busy architecting may result in the emerging countries they're counting on not having anything left for them to suck either.

Labels: economic death watch

This is not from The Onion:

TSA warns of implant bombers, prepares fliers for swab tests

The latest threat to America's skies -- explosive surgical implants that authorities have dubbed "belly bombs" -- poses a security challenge so bizarre that air travelers learning of the new danger Wednesday could only scratch their heads and wonder what's next.

If those fliers had collagen injections or dental implants, what's next may mean having their heads examined. Literally.

The Transportation Security Administration advised airlines that terror groups are believed to be experimenting with explosives that could be implanted in buttocks and breasts, allowing suicide bombers to pass through airport body scanners undetected.

[snip]

The TSA said it had no evidence of a specific plot, but intelligence sources indicated this new twist in bomb-proofing international air travel was likely the handiwork of Ibrahim Asiri, the al-Qaeda mastermind behind the Christmas Day attempt to bring down a Northwest Airlines plane by the so-called "underwear bomber."

Few Americans could have imagined when the first airport metal detectors were installed more than four decades ago that travelers would one day be expected to nearly disrobe before boarding their flights. The idea of implanting explosives in the same places plastic surgeons use to "enhance" many Americans does not strike Zoltan Prokay as far-fetched.

"If they do it properly, like a breast implant where the skin is stretched to accommodate the device, it could work," said Prokay, who spent two and a half years in Iraq working to detect improvised explosive devices as a member of a U.S. Special Forces team. He was flying out of San Jose as a pilot for a private airline, which he declined to identify, when word of the TSA advisory began to spread. "It could be set to go off at a certain altitude. If you get an altimeter implanted in your other breast though, maybe you would set off the metal detector."

Prokay sees it as a natural -- if horrifying -- progression from the Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber. "This would be the Bosom Bomber," he said. "It's not funny. And yet it is kind of funny. The Bosom Bomber."

"If (terrorists) really want to attack, there is always a way," Renata Boudon, 47, said in French after arriving at San Francisco International for a two-week vacation in the western United States. "It doesn't scare me much." She and her two sons, 18-year-old Eric and 12-year-old Marc, live in Brazil and said they won't change anything about their travel habits because of the new information. "If it happens, it happens," she said. "There is nothing you can do."

Renata Boudon of France is a hell of a lot smarter than the idiots who populate this country, who will no doubt line up like sheep to have their breasts and buttocks grabbed by TSA agents in the name of national security.

It sure sounds like this is the TSA's way of justifying intrusive "pat-downs" that are often more like being groped by a creep on a crowded subway.

Labels: security theatre, TSA, You can't make this shit up

The first thing I thought of when I heard that "In the Arena" with Eliot Spitzer was cancelled was that "Weiner/Spitzer" would be a great name for an evening talk show.

(I think it'd be entertaining as hell, too.)

Labels: Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, humor, sick motherfuckers

For those of us who pay attention to dates, today happens to be the 65th birthday of not only Sylvester Stallone but also that of another mush-mouthed right wing idiot: "Former President" George W. Bush. Just two days ago, we'd celebrated as a nation our collective 235th birthday. Believe it or not, the jury's still officially out on Bush's place in presidential history. For those of us in the reality-based community, the conclusion was foregone even before Bush got inaugurated in the presence of the guy who'd actually won, a guy who had to depart from presidential tradition and ride in an armored limousine down Pennsylvania Avenue on account of all the eggs that were thrown at him by enraged voters who knew he'd stolen the presidency.

And that was but the first of all the traditions and "innovations" launched by Bush, a man whose illegitimate presidency was somehow, by some inexplicable political alchemy that turns rotten eggs into golden ones, turned around and literally and figuratively given one blank check after another after the most catastrophic failure in American history since the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Under Bush, we saw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, by now a $100 billion a year, 21-headed clusterfuck that has hardly resulted in the arrest or conviction of a single terrorist. Instead, riders attached to a Homeland Security funding bill stripped 180,000 federal workers of their union rights. Homeland Security, which never included the two agencies best equipped with dealing with terrorist threats (CIA and FBI), instead boasts Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (which checks for mold and boll weevils), the recently demoted FEMA (incapable, as Keith Olbermann famously said, of responding to a terrorist called standing water), the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (trainees against seasoned al Qaeda terrorists?).

2002 also saw Bush sign into law the USA Patriot Act, the most fascist bit of legislation to come down the pike since Hitler's Enabling Act. It essentially designated all Americans as potential terrorists, especially in the Draconian Section 215 that gives the FBI the power to seize or otherwise subpoena library records or book store receipts if our choice of reading falls within the parameters of some secret list of objectionable titles.

Back in 2001, Bush also authorized the NSA, our nation's largest spy agency, to spy on not just foreign nationals but every American while using the telecommunications giants to that end. Those that complied were rewarded with big government contracts. Those that didn't, such as Qwest, were frozen out. It made a mockery of the Carter-era FISA courts that had granted 9000 out of 9005 requests for warrantless wiretaps on foreign nationals.

The USA PATRIOT Act, as with the bloated Dept. of Homeland Security, has not captured, brought to trial or convicted one person of terrorist activity, unless you count wouldbe gang-banger Jose Padilla, British moron Richard Reid and another Woody Allen-type of plane bomber from Nigeria.

Yet the very suggestion that we let expire even some provisions of Bush's USA PATRIOT Act is enough to send bad-ass, trash-talking Republicans into (manufactured, to be sure) sweaty hysterics, proof right there that Bush's culture of fear is still very much alive and well.

Things have hardly gotten better under Obama, who seems to have gratefully accepted the massive national security apparatus and quasi-fascist infrastructure handed to him by Bush. I'd predicted years ago that there was no way Obama would phase out the USA PATRIOT Act, dismantle Homeland Security or relax cumbersome, humiliating and quite possible illegal restrictions and invasions of our privacy by another bloated, corporately-co-opted bureaucracy now called the Transportation Security Administration.

While still running for President, Barack Obama voted to give the TelCom giants immunity from prosecution for violating our 4th Amendment rights. It was the vote that told me and many of us that this man would not effect any change whatsoever. Just as several Watergate-era criminals came back into the fold during Bush's residency, many unconvicted Wall Street criminals were soon infesting the Obama administration, starting with the Treasury Department.

Under Obama, we've seen no erosion of the power of the USA PATRIOT Act, no decrease of the size and scope of Homeland Security, no corporate accountability whatsoever, tepid at best oversight and, if anything, a tighter collar and shorter leash attached to every American. Soon, we may not be immune to humiliating and invasive patdowns while driving in our own cars.

To put it mildly, George W. Bush will never be considered one of our great presidents but in a purely objective way he was certainly the most transformative... just as Hitler was the most transformative Chancellor in Germany's history.

We may like to fool ourselves into thinking we remain the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave but remember the true rationale that went behind the formation of Homeland Security and the PATRIOT Act. Until Bush's first 8 months in office, American soil had not been seriously attacked by foreign terrorism. We did perfectly fine before Homeland Security and the USA PATRIOT Act were formed. Homeland Security's greatest efficacy, it could be argued, was in jacking up the terror threat level when Bush's ratings began to slip during the 2004 election year.

We still live in a culture of fear. It's greatly subdued now but we still live in one, nonetheless. And until we dissolve Homeland Security and the PATRIOT Act, we will continue to live under Bush's baleful shadow. Our collective fear and willingness to have our rights stripped from us is Bush's real coveted legacy. And if that’s what Bush secretly wished for when he blew out a birthday cake way back when, he certainly got it.

Ohio Governor John Kasich and his legislature of Republican goons is doing an even better job than Ken Blackwell did in 2004 to make sure that Ohio goes 100% Republican in 2012:

A sweeping overhaul of Ohio's election laws passed the Senate on a party-line vote yesterday, and a bill requiring Ohio voters to present a photo ID before casting a ballot is now on track to move next week.

After a day filled with heated rhetoric and shifting plans, majority Republicans pushed through House Bill 194, which moves the 2012 presidential primary from March to May.

The bill, which the House is likely to send to Gov. John Kasich next week after approving Senate changes, would let Ohioans register to vote or change their addresses online and reduce early voting from 35 days before an election to 21 days by mail and 17 in person - which eliminates the so-called "golden week" when people could register and vote on the same day.

Bob Fitrakis:

Under the direction of GOP Governor John Kasich---himself the beneficiary of a dubious vote count in 2010---the Ohio Republicans are clearly determined to make it as difficult as possible for traditional Democrats to register, vote or get their votes counted in future elections.

Since 2000, the Republicans have eliminated more than a 1.5 million voters from the Buckeye state voter rolls. The purges have been centered on urban voters. Moreover, in 2004 hundreds of thousands of additional Ohio voters were disenfranchised by orchestrated bottlenecks at polling places that forced people to wait seven hours and more in line. The lines were most evident in the heavily Democratic urban areas of Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland.

But in 2008, because the Democrats controlled the legislature and state house, voters were allowed to cast their ballots up to 35 days before election day. The lines disappeared. Polling places were voter-friendly, with election workers giving voters clear directions on how to proceed.

Now the GOP is intent on ending all that. Ohio HB 194 slashes the timeframe for early in-person voting from 35 days to 16. The new law also prohibits Ohio’s 88 counties from mailing absentee ballots to all voters, or to pay the return postage. (In 2004, thousands of absentee ballots never made it to the county boards of elections because they had a pre-printed space for one stamp when they actually required two, and most voters only put on one stamp).

The HB 194 law also prohibits local board of elections officials from designing systems that best meet the needs of their community. For example, it forbids the county boards of elections from setting up off-site early voting locations. Banning voter-friendly practices such as pre-paid postage for absentee ballots and convenient places for citizens to vote, the law mandates practices design to lower turnouts as much as possible.

In perhaps the Bill’s most shocking provision, pollworkers are prohibited from helping voters find the right precinct line at the polling site. They are actually barred from answering questions or providing directions to voters.

In the 2004 election, then-Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, directed that any voter in the right polling place but in the wrong precinct, could not have his or her vote counted. Prior to Blackwell, Ohioans would have had all of their votes counted in that case, except for the rare precinct-level vote which would usually be about alcohol sales.

Now the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio has written the legislature to ask: “Why else would we expend scarce taxpayer dollars on training and paying pollworkers? Ohio should not pass legislation that tells pollworkers not to do their job.”

HB 194 also overrides an the existing law---passed after the 2004 debacle---that required pollworkers to direct voters to the correct precinct. As the ACLU puts it: “Pollworkers will not be allowed to direct voters to the correct precinct or help them fill out forms correctly, both of which are required for a ballot to be counted. This will lead to more ballots that are not counted, and likely more lawsuits.”

The ACLU adds that HB 194 “…shifts responsibility for fair elections off of taxpayer-paid election officials whose job it is to administer elections, and on to the voters, who have a constitutional right to vote.”

The intent of Governor Kasich and the Republican-dominated legislature in Ohio is clear. Whatever minor detail they can find will be used to prevent Ohioans from voting. As the ACLU puts it, voters are "guilty until proven innocent, by assuming that all errors are voters' errors.”

In a separate bill---House Bill 159 (see Free Press Article) the Republicans will disenfranchise an estimated 900,000 Ohio voters, primarily Democrats, by requiring a photo ID to vote. Under the bill, an Ohio voter must produce either an Ohio driver's license, or an Ohio state ID card, military ID, or U.S. passport. IDs with photos and address provided by Ohio colleges or universities are prohibited as well as any ID provided by a county board of elections.

In a courageous move, Republican Secretary of State John Husted has come out against HB 159. In a speech to the League of Women Voters of Ohio, Husted said “I believe if you have a government-issued check, a utility bill in your name with your address on it, that no one made that up, they didn’t call AEP and establish utilities in their name to commit voter fraud. Let’s be clear about this. There are some other forms that are legitimate.”

The League of Women Voters, the American Association of Retired People of Ohio (AARP), Project Vote, and the ACLU all join Husted in opposing House Bill 159. But its passage seems all but assured.

And taken in tandem with HB 194 and the rest of the GOP assault on the ability of working Ohioans to vote, the day when Democrats had any chance of carrying any or all of swing state Ohio may be long gone.

It's tempting to think that presentation of a photo ID isn't all that much to ask, except that anyone who has ever spent the better part of the morning at a motor vehicle department knows how much time it can take to deal with officialdom. Students who must attend class and low-income workers who are paid by the hour, punch a time clock, and do not have the luxury of taking time off to stand in line waiting for a photo ID are going to be disproportionately affected by this new law -- and that's precisely the point. The low-income citizens of Ohio who cannot take time off work to get a photo ID, the elderly who are not able to stand for hours on end waiting for the gears of officialdom to grind out a photo ID -- these are voters who tend to vote Democratic. And of course that's precisely the point.

In the face of ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE that there is any kind of systemic problem with people who are ineligible to vote going to the polls, the Republicans are attempting to disenfranchise as many people as possible who might be unlikely to vote in their direction. They're doing it with onerous voting laws, they're doing it with redistricting, they're doing it any way they can. There won't be another Florida 2000 happening, because Republican governors are making damn sure that no vote will ever be close enough to warrant any scrutiny in the future.

Republicans know that they cannot win on ideas, because they have none, other than elminiating Social Security and Medicare, and cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations. So they're making sure that their policies don't hurt them at the ballot box by keeping away anyone who might dare question them.

Labels: And You Want To Give Power Back To These People?, Republican brownshirts, vote suppression

Up in Cape Cod, in the Commie Heathen Godless Liberal Jewish Homosexual state of Massachusetts, they got a rousing start to the holiday weekend last Friday at a local Stop & Shop:

Labels: fun stuff, patriotism

Throw a pancake on the griddle for Addicting Info.

Labels: bloggers, Blogroll Amnesty Day

Nothing quite like a good old fashioned lynching metaphor directed at a black president to cement your hate cred with the teabaggers, eh?

Republican Presidential front-runner Mitt Romney is now trying to explain his way out of controversial and racist remarks about President Barack Obama. During a campaign stop in New Hampshire, the presidential hopeful referenced “hanging Obama by the neck” as a way to defeat him in the next election.

During a dinner hosted by Americans for Prosperity, Romney said "Reagan came up with this great thing about the ‘misery index’ and he hung that around Jimmy Carter’s neck and that had a lot to do with Jimmy Carter losing." He then said, "Well, we’re going to have to hang the ‘Obama Misery Index’ around his neck."


For some odd reason, Romney kept going down the path of no return when he said, "I’ll tell you, the fact that you’ve got people in this country really squeezed, with gasoline getting so expensive, with commodities getting so expensive, families are having a hard time making ends meet. So, we’re going to have to talk about that, and housing foreclosures and bankruptcies and higher taxation. We’re going to hang him with that, so to speak, metaphorically."

Despicable. This is no gaffe. Romney knows damn well what he's doing. Perhaps he's worried about the entrance of former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke into the presidential race.

(And to the comment on JP's post criticizing him for daring to criticize Obama and me for allowing his July 4 post, all I can say is that the day we are not allowed to criticize a sitting president is the day we really have lost our freedom. Republicans may march in lockstep like mindles automatons, but we prefer to apply pressure to OUR leaders to keep them honest.)

Labels: 2012 election, institutionalized racism, Mitt Romney

"I support my country 100% of the time and my government only when it deserves it." - Mark Twain

As with all too many of us, my landlord trots out his American flag and hangs it over the porch he shares with one of his tenants to prove his patriotism once a year. It hangs limply since that section of the property hardly gets a breeze. It's tattered and the colors faded.

It's almost too easy to look at this Old Glory that's seen better days as a synecdoche of what's happened to our Republic and Democratic system of government that's been so buttfucked, bought-and-sold and perverted from its original intent that the Founding Fathers wouldn't recognize their ultimately failed Great Experiment.

In spite of all Americans, liberal, conservative and in between, black and white, brown, yellow and red, young and old all openly and proudly declaring that we are not with the terrorists but against them, the terrorists have won. Because al Qaida allegedly got astoundingly lucky one day almost a decade ago and supposedly pulled off the greatest terrorist attack on US soil ever with a handful of box cutters, because of this the terrorists have won.

They've won because life no longer much resembles pre-9/11 America. Most humans being sheep, we are still susceptible to our government's fear-mongering. Most white humans being craven, we're not happy unless we're fearing and hating some race with skin darker than ours and now the flavor of the day is the Muslim.

Despite bin laden being dead, our own Transportation Security Administration recently announced it was ramping up the public molestation of our children 12 and under. A 95 year-old woman was recently forced to endure having her adult diaper removed by the TSA. If you live next to a ballpark, make sure you get there at least two hours before the first pitch since everyone will have their bags checked and have to pass single-file through a metal detector.

Then we can forget all that indignity by singing in unison the National Anthem while stadium security carefully watches out for anyone still wearing their hat and "God Bless America" in the 7th inning stretch.

Yes, many of us have proven our patriotic bona fides (with manic, Orwellian fear during the "You're either with the terr'ists or against 'em" Bush years) yet no matter how many rights we freely give away and allow to have taken from us, our government and local law enforcement still looks at us as 300,000,000 potential terrorists and criminals.


Nearly seven years ago, the Democratic Party, not the Republican Party but the Democratic Party in Boston during their convention set up "free speech zones" far enough from the Fleet Center to guarantee no one would hear the "free speech" of the protesters as they were temporarily incarcerated in what were called (and I swear, I am not making this up) "Freedom Cages"...


...carefully watched from above by Boston City police snipers.

It goes without saying that the GOP, not to be outdone by the Democrat party, had dozens of journalists arrested during their own convention in Minnesota four years later. That was a great day for Minnesota law enforcement since it produced a bumper crop of over 800 arrests mainly just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time or committing the unpardonable sin of dissent.

And how many of us still remember that KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary, was given $400 million to build detention centers all over the country? If you forgot, you're excused. No one's written about it since Feb. 2008.

This is just a taste of the erosion of our civil liberties that had transpired during the previous administration. Entire multi-volume books can be written on the subject, with the Bush administration earning a volume of its own. But things have hardly gotten any looser and those of us paying attention don't feel much freer or braver since Obama took over.

Because the Obama administration, as with the Bush administration in the aftermath of Katrina, paid Blackwater $70 million just weeks after the inauguration to kill brown people. It goes way beyond irony that every single administration in recent memory employs criminals and corporations charged and even convicted of criminal activity to keep 300,000,000 potential criminals in line.

They no longer need to suck up to us for campaign contributions because they know Citizens United guarantees they can vacuum all the cash they need from self-dealing corporations. But they still have to suck up to us for votes and all too many of us forget there are a lot more of us than there are executives and even lobbyists.

I can tell you not to vote for Obama and make that closet Republican a one termer like HW and you'd counter that the only other choice would be a Republican and we'd be even worse off. And I could counter that there's no distinction between the parties and what the fuck's the difference between living in the 8th or 9th Circle of Hell?

I'm not telling you to enjoy today, to not fire up the grill in the back yard, drink beer on your property and take the kids to a fireworks display tonight. You're going to do that anyway regardless of what I say. I just want you to remember that being able to grill and drink in your back yard and see a fireworks display are among the few freedoms we have left and to enjoy them while they last. Because these basic rights have been taken away from us for decades and, to put it charitably, Obama's doing nothing to reverse that trend.


Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Sorry, but if the people who hacked Fox News' Twitter feed think this is funny, they should guess again:


This BBC story on the hack was timestamped 5:32 AM Eastern Time. It is 11:30 AM Eastern Time as I write this. Why is it still up? Fox News is aware that this Twitter feed was hacked. Why are there no later tweets disavowing these posts? And don't you think Twitter has an obligation to take these down?

(As always, Mr. Olbermann is the beacon of truth...even when it pertains to his bête noire.)

Labels: assholes, eliminationism

BMW could never get away with this in Germany.

Frank Rich is back and noting that the very financial community on which Obama is relying for campaign cash will probably be his undoing.

One has to wonder what Thomas Jefferson would have thought about people like this.

At least one NJ paper has Chris Christie's number. (via) And on a related topic, how did the hacktacular Steve Sweeney EXEPCT us to respond?

If you want to know how a nation that used to have presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and political/cultural leaders like Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony now has presidential candidates like Mitt "I'm Unemployed Too" Romney and Michele "Beard" Bachmann, this should give you an idea.

Who really run tings.

Executive pay is up 23% but God forbid they should have to pay a nickel more in taxes. (And yet more...)

Dear wingnuts: Do you STILL believe that everyone should have children?

And finally:

Labels: We Are So Screwed

This is WORSE than anything Margaret Atwood ever came up with, and this is actually happening:

This year, the Georgia legislature considered a bill that would require women to prove their miscarriages “occurred naturally” and weren’t secret abortions. In a similar vein, the Guardian reports that states including Mississippi and Alabama are charging dozens of women with murder or other serious crimes who have miscarried or had stillbirths:

Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.[...]

In Alabama at least 40 cases have been brought under the state’s “chemical endangerment” law. Introduced in 2006, the statute was designed to protect children whose parents were cooking methamphetamine in the home and thus putting their children at risk from inhaling the fumes. Amanda Kimbrough is one of the women who have been ensnared as a result of the law being applied in a wholly different way.[...]

The baby was delivered by caesarean section prematurely in April 2008 and died 19 minutes after birth. Six months later Kimbrough was arrested at home and charged with “chemical endangerment” of her unborn child on the grounds that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy – a claim she has denied.

“That shocked me, it really did,” Kimbrough said. “I had lost a child, that was enough.”

Kimbrough is now facing a 10-year sentence if her case is not reversed on appeal — a 10 year sentence that will deprive her three other children of their mother.

A common tactic by prosecutors is singling out a group of women who are unlikely to draw public sympathy — women who may have used drugs while pregnant — to blur the line between abortion and homicide. Rennie Gibbs, for example, was 15 when she became pregnant and lost her baby in a stillbirth. Prosecutors charged her with a “depraved heart murder” after they discovered she had used cocaine, although there was “no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby’s death.” She now faces life in prison in Mississippi.

Targeting women who use drugs while they are pregnant is exactly the wrong policy for protecting the health of their future children. When a woman who is addicted to drug becomes pregnant, she needs immediate treatment to ensure that her addiction does not lead to serious birth defects for her child. But the threat of criminal prosecution — especially for a crime as serious as murder — will only drive her into the shadows. For this reason, dozens of public health organizations including the American Public Health Association have all denounced these prosecutions as harmful to both woman and child.

Other prosecutors are twisting laws designed to protect pregnant women and their unborn children into attacks on childbearers themselves. At least 38 states have introduced fetal homicide laws that were intended to be used against violent attacks by third parties like abusive male partners. But in South Carolina, only one case has been brought against a man for assaulting a pregnant woman, while up to 300 women have been arrested under the law, according to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

If this was truly about TEH BAYBEEEEEEEEZZZZZZZZ, Republican legislators would be advocating treatment and a support structure for these women so that their babies may be born healthy and have a better shot at a good home life. But this is not about babies, nor is it about motherhood. It is about two things: punishment of women who do not live according to right-wing rules, and also, more ominously, about putting into state custody large numbers of women who have demonstrated that they are capable of conceiving. That the most ominous sign yet that we are headed towards Gilead.

Labels: The Republican War on Women

Guess who bought and paid for the opinions of the nation's top climate change-denying scientist:

Dr. Willie Soon is certainly entitled to his theory that global warming is caused by solar variations rather than CO2, especially given his field of study within astrophysics—Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences. But getting paid to $1 million by the Koch Brothers, Exxon and a fleet of other energy industry giants makes Soone a stooge.

Now, it is possible that Dr. Soon developed the theory that solar variations cause climate change before the $1 million in grants began to arrive in his bank account, but it’s just as likely that he was approached by the energy industry and developed the theory for the express purpose of earning his keep.

Soon himself states in a Reuters interview:

I have never been motivated by financial reward in any of my scientific research. I would have accepted money from Greenpeace if they had offered it to do my research

Question: if Greenpeace had funded his studies, would his research have aligned with their point of view?

If we are to get unvarnished scientific opinion, there cannot be the appearance of corporate influence. Soon may be sincere in his theory, but his acceptance of oil and coal industry grants do much to discredit his studies, even if there is possible value in his ideas. And it seems that Soon has had his ideas peer-reviewed.

Greenpeace filed a Freedom of Information Act and obtained information revealing the Koch Brothers gave Soon $175,000 in 2005/2006 and once again in 2010. The American Petroleum institute gave Soon grants totalling $274,000 between 2001 and 2007, and Exxon Mobile provided Soon with $335,000 in grants between 2005 and 2010.

One can’t really fault Soon for wanting a payday or for holding such a theory on climate change—but we can certainly be skeptical of his sincerity now. Like every American, Soon seems to have a price.

Labels: climate change, corporate assholes, Greedy Republican Bastards, Koch brothers, The War Against Science

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

“Our concern is that the Manhattan district attorney is too afraid to try this case.” - Kenneth P. Thompson, counsel for the plaintiff

As has been noted many times before, fortunes and misfortunes in the political arena in the age of digital media and 24/7 news cycles occur with frightening rapidity. The potential for success or failure, for scandal or redemption, whether deserved or not, has never been higher since former president-elect Al Gore invented the internets. And we've perhaps never seen a more vivid delineation in how rapidly one can be snatched from the jaws of destruction and placed back on their pedestal than in the circus surrounding former IMF chief and accused rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

This case contains more drama and twists and turns than John Grisham could fit into a legal thriller. We have an accusation of rape against a presumptive future head of state, we have a discredited witness, we have a suddenly embarrassed District Attorney whose political ambitions are now shakier than that of the defendant's, we have Strauss-Khan's native France's full support, we even have an inflatable Statue of Liberty and early 4th of July independence wishes. This sad, sorry clown show makes the OJ Simpson murder trial of 1995 look like a dignified model of jurisprudence by conspicuous relief. And it hasn't even gone to trial, yet. And, by the looks of the tails tucked between Manhattan prosecutors' legs, it never will.

There seems to be little to no doubt that the star witness, the maid who insists she was raped by Strauss-Khan on the 28th floor of the Sofitel New York hotel, has repeatedly lied in other matters or been inconsistent at best with her account of being sexually assaulted. Anyone who's ever watched an episode of Perry Mason knows that in the world of jurisprudence, so much depends upon the credibility of witnesses and plaintiffs.

And while destroying the credibility of a witness or plaintiff is the fastest way to win a case, in many cases it becomes a witch hunt with your more aggressive attorneys who know they cannot prove their clients to be not guilty. The rules of the legal game always has within it an enormous potential for abuse and the innocent get destroyed in court five days a week, 52 weeks a year while the guilty (such as Simpson) walk out of the courthouses with broad smiles on their faces.

What passed over the heads of the three NY Times reporters who contributed a pair of page one, above the fold stories in today's edition was why this woman had to lie about certain things. In a word, it's survival.

She had to lie about being gang-raped in her native Guinea to get into and stay in this country. She had to lie about having another dependent in order to get a slightly bigger tax refund. She had to allow her bank account to be used as a little money-laundering operation for her jailbird fiance and his friends, all drug dealers.

If Cyrus Vance Jr's office were to ignore these revelations, he'd likely be impeached or perhaps even disbarred and his political career would be deader than his father's. I think we all get it.

But this maid accusing Strauss-Khan of rape (and some of the forensic evidence could lead one to believe something non-consensual could've taken place) and Strauss-Khan himself is an unexplored case study in opposites, one that delineates better than any story currently serving as fodder for the MSM in the difference in how we treat the wealthy and powerful and the poor and powerless.

Strauss-Khan is now a free man who can travel anywhere in the United States without notifying the prosecutors, his bail greatly reduced, his posh and cushy house arrest in lower Manhattan now lifted, his ankle bracelet removed and if he wanted to launch a presidential campaign against French President Sarkozy, he'd once again stand a good chance of winning (and don't think for a minute that Strauss-Khan wouldn't play up the martyr angle and set himself up as the 21st century's answer to Joan of Arc).

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr., on the other hand, has, because of the wealth and power of the defendant, is on the verge of joining Anthony Weiner on the unemployment line, his own political career virtually in tatters. Considering the prosecution did not protest the reduced bail, it's obvious at this point that Vance is, unlike Strauss-Khan in that hotel room, looking for a dignified exit. It's a foregone conclusion this case will never go to trial.

The plaintiff-turned-defendant, the victim, will surely, if she hasn't already, lose her job and possibly face jail time for lying about her taxes and immigration status and will very likely get deported along with 800,000 others in the Glorious Age of Obama, her hopes and dreams of making it in the United States completely destroyed.

It's the classic case of the boy who cried wolf except in this case it's a girl, one who's been living a borderline criminal life in the interests of survival and the wolf just happens to be the presumptive next President of France and former head of the IMF. But while people are sending him balloons shaped like the Statue of Liberty (an inflatable shark with a fish in its mouth was turned away at the townhouse) and bemoaning how he was victimized by having to give up his IMF post, hardly anyone save for the woman's attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, seem to care about the potential and likely fallout that'll be suffered by the complainant. Suddenly, we're not hearing so much about the compelling forensic evidence, about Strauss-Khan's extremely suspicious behavior (he left the hotel in such a hurry after the rape, he left his cell phone behind).

Once a liar, always a liar, is what we're hearing from the MSM. "If she lied about her immigration status and on her tax returns, then she must be lying about this" is the unspoken consensus. Yet, while it's true that she sought to profit from this (as per the transcript of a recorded conversation she'd had with her self-serving fiance in prison, who put the idea in her head), it's notable that the prison visit reveals the rape to be a matter of fact and not some hoax or conspiracy to extort a vast sum of money from a powerful, wealthy and innocent man.

Here's the difference in a nutshell: If one is poor and has a verifiable history of telling lies, one is doomed. If one is powerful and wealthy and has a verifiable history of telling lies, they get elected, re-elected, literary agents and huge book and TV deals.

Driftglass has an idea for allowing Obama to cave on a no-revenue, all-cut deal to raise the debt ceiling:

Well, everyone has an imaginary scenario, so here's mine.

The Obama Administration announces next week today that since the GOP refuses to participate in good faith in the actual work of governing the United States, in order to avoid defaulting on our national debt and sending the world into a global financial meltdown, the Administration would accede to Republican demands that all deficit reduction be accomplished solely by making radical cuts to existing government programs with no increase in taxes.

However, in the spirit of the Time Honored Conservative Principle of Federalism, the President adds that the cuts would not be allocated programmatically, but geographically by state.

[snip]

Under the Obama Administration's proposed "Reward Wealth Producers and Penalize Moochers American Value Re-alignment" Act, "wealth producing" states such as New York, California, Illinois who have traditionally received less than a dollar back for every dollar they pay in taxes would be exempt from any budgetary cuts, and would qualify for across-the-board tax cuts since wealth-producing states should always be accommodated and encouraged in every way possible, regardless of circumstances.

On the other hand, the "welfare mooching, deficit-teat-sucking" states such as Kansas, Arizona, Kentucky and Alaska who have for years gotten away with parasitically looting their wealth-producing neighbors by receiving more than a dollar back for every dollar they pay in taxes will now assume 100% of the responsibility for eliminating the federal budget deficit. Each of these welfare mooching, deficit-teat-sucking states will be given a block rescission amount representing the percentage of the federal deficit for which they will be now be help legally responsible.

I'm on board. Let's get moving with it.

Labels: debt, deficits, Greedy Republican Bastards, wussy-ass Democrats

In 2003, we saw a president who wanted to prove something to his father to resolve his childhood conflict take us into a completely unnecessary war, one which has cost us trillions in national wealth and thousands of lives.

Today we have a president so invested in proving he is no threat to the mainstream that he is going to inevitably allow the nation to succumb to a renewed recession -- or worse, simply because of his own need to belief that he can somehow transcend deep-seated differences.

Krugman, in the New York Times today:

The federal debt limit is a strange quirk of U.S. budget law: since debt is the consequence of decisions about taxing and spending, and Congress already makes those taxing and spending decisions, why require an additional vote on debt? And traditionally the debt limit has been treated as a minor detail. During the administration of former President George W. Bush — who added more than $4 trillion to the national debt — Congress, with little fanfare, voted to raise the debt ceiling no less than seven times.

So the use of the debt ceiling to extort political concessions is something new in American politics. And it seems to have come as a complete surprise to Mr. Obama.

Last December, after Mr. Obama agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts — a move that many people, myself included, viewed as in effect a concession to Republican blackmail — Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic asked why the deal hadn’t included a rise in the debt limit, so as to forestall another hostage situation (my words, not Mr. Ambinder’s).

The president’s response seemed clueless even then. He asserted that “nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse,” and that he was sure that John Boehner, as speaker of the House, would accept his “responsibilities to govern.”

Well, we’ve seen how that worked out.

Now, Mr. Obama was right about the dangers of failing to raise the debt limit. In fact, he understated the case, by focusing only on financial confidence.

Not that the confidence issue is trivial. Failure to raise the debt limit — which would, among other things, disrupt payments on existing debt — could convince investors that the United States is no longer a serious, responsible country, with nasty consequences. Furthermore, nobody knows what a U.S. default would do to the world financial system, which is built on the presumption that U.S. government debt is the ultimate safe asset.

But confidence isn’t the only thing at stake. Failure to raise the debt limit would also force the U.S. government to make drastic, immediate spending cuts, on a scale that would dwarf the austerity currently being imposed on Greece. And don’t believe the nonsense about the benefits of spending cuts that has taken over much of our public discourse: slashing spending at a time when the economy is deeply depressed would destroy hundreds of thousands and quite possibly millions of jobs.

So failure to reach a debt deal would have very bad consequences. But here’s the thing: Mr. Obama must be prepared to face those consequences if he wants his presidency to survive.

Bear in mind that G.O.P. leaders don’t actually care about the level of debt. Instead, they’re using the threat of a debt crisis to impose an ideological agenda. If you had any doubt about that, last week’s tantrum should have convinced you. Democrats engaged in debt negotiations argued that since we’re supposedly in dire fiscal straits, we should talk about limiting tax breaks for corporate jets and hedge-fund managers as well as slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. And Republicans, in response, walked out of the talks.

So what’s really going on is extortion pure and simple. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute puts it, the G.O.P. has, in effect, come around with baseball bats and declared, “Nice economy you have here. A real shame if something happened to it.”

And the reason Republicans are doing this is because they must believe that it will work: Mr. Obama caved in over tax cuts, and they expect him to cave again. They believe that they have the upper hand, because the public will blame the president for the economic crisis they’re threatening to create. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that G.O.P. leaders actually want the economy to perform badly.

This fits nicely into what Bernie Sanders was saying on the Randi Rhodes Show the other day -- that the moneyed interests that have taken over our government really do not care what is left behind after their pillage, because they are already looking ahead to China and India. The notion that if the U.S. defaults on its debt, Wall Street will suffer too has been held up as a talisman against the assured destruction being held over our heads by the Republicans. Believe me, the big investors have already taken care of this in regard to their own interests...and investors who have less than billions of dollars don't even figure into this equation. Your 401(k)? Of no importance to these people whatsoever. Families being tossed into the streets? Old people dying in the gutters? Trivial. Because when people are as evil as those who currently dominate the Republican Party and their billionaire masters, it's impossible to fight them until you at least recgnize them.

In his 1983 book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, the late M. Scott Peck referred to scapegoating as the primary manifesation of evil:

A predominant characteristic, however, of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because they consider themselves beyond reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to serve their self-image of perfection.

It's easy to see why people like this take Ayn Rand as their political guru, for Randian Objectivism reinforces their sense of "specialness."

Peck goes on:

Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault.

[...]

Evil, then, is most often committed in order to scapegoat...

Look at the the Koch Republican Party's scapegoats are: Women, especially women who want reproductive autonomy. Immigrants. Liberals. Black people. George Soros. Gays. The list goes on and on. This is the Peck model made real -- evil people scapegoating others so as to pass the "hot potato" of evil onto someone else.

What Peck didn't address in his analysis was greed. The book's primary example of evil is the Vietnam-era My Lai massacre, so he thinks of evil primarily in terms of war. He presumably would make the same connection of evil with the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. But the kind of evil that would deliberately destroy the economy of a once-great nation purely out of greed, because there's another emerging market just across the sea that is just waiting for exploitation is something of which even Peck never dreamed.

Nor, apparently, has Barack Obama.

Even in his speech the other day, the one that prompted the hacktacular Mark Halperin to call him a dick, Obama still remained hopeful that the Republicans would ultimately step back from the brink and compromise. When one is simply misguided, but not evil, it's impossible to fathom party leaders who would destroy an entire country at the behest of the people who finance their campaigns. But that is what Barack Obama is dealing with, and that is why if he doesn't recognize pretty damn soon that what he is dealing with is not simple political differences, but a particularly vile form of evil, then we are all completely fucked.

I think we know already how this will play out.

Labels: Barack Obama, economic death watch, evil, wussy-ass Democrats