Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Oscar

Growing elite opposition to strike on Iran

2012-01-27T00:26:00.000-08:00

Asia Times Online :

We're doing this terrible thing all over again," wrote Leslie Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, the think-tank that publishes Foreign Affairs, in the Daily Beast, in an appeal for senate hearings on the implications of war with Iran.

"As before, we're letting a bunch of ignorant, sloppy-thinking politicians and politicized foreign-policy experts draw 'red line' ultimatums. As before, we're letting them quick-march us off to war," warned Gelb, a repentant Iraq-war hawk, about the chorus of neo-conservatives and other hawks with whom he had previously been aligned.

Bad Dog! Worse Cop.

2012-01-27T00:08:00.000-08:00

Police officers may be liable on claims that they let a police dog attack an unresisting suspecting for five to seven minutes, a federal judge ruled.

Snip

Another day, another report about sadistic cops.

How wrong can one man be?

2012-01-26T23:52:00.000-08:00

"The fact of the matter is, I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South."

-- New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), quoted by the Philadelphia inquirer, arguing that gay marriage should be decided by voters in a ballot referendum.

Snip

Um, genius, basic human rights are not up for a vote. And you might read a few history books on the Civil Right movement while your at it. African-Americans put their lives on the line because the ballot box was closed to them. Jim Crow was not going to end via the ballot box big guy.

Ding-Dong Ditch: Dumb

2012-01-25T17:40:00.000-08:00

JONATHAN TURLEY

Former Bronx prosecutor Bernadette Greenwald, 37, has been criminally charged after she pulled a gun on a teen and fired a shot in anger over teenagers ringing her door bell in the “ding-dong ditch” game. Police say that Greenwald fired her pink 9mm handgun to show the teen she had (in her words) “balls.” Greenwald practices under her maiden name, Bernadette Nicchia.

Snip

Congratulations councilor, you proved that women can be every bit as stooopid as men. Balls indeed.

Cops Still Face Claims of Beating Kids at Parade

2012-01-25T11:37:00.000-08:00

Courthouse News Service

(CN) - Police officers may be liable for using their batons to hit children who stepped into the street during a parade to hug marching family members, the D.C. Circuit ruled.

Roger Rudder, Rosena Rudder, Noverlene Goss, and two juveniles say they suffered injuries from their interaction with police at the 2008 Caribbean Carnival Parade in Washington, D.C. While watching the festivities, the group allegedly spotted family members in the parade march. But when they stepped into the street for a hug, Officer William Chatman allegedly told them to return to the sidewalk.

Though the group tried to comply, Chatman then shoved Rosena Rudder and Officer Shannon Williams used her baton on the two children, ages 5 and 15, according to the lawsuit.

In addition to claiming that Williams struck two children without provocation, "the complaint also alleges Officer Williams beat plaintiff Goss with her baton after Ms. Goss called out to the officer in response to Officer Williams' use of force against the child," the Jan. 17 decision states. "A person who responds verbally to a police officer assaulting a child hardly invites violence against herself."

Snip

Well thanks judge, thanks for pointing out the blindingly obvious.
...
Chatman may have also violated the plaintiffs' Fourth Amendment rights, the court found.
...

No! Really? Who would of guessed?
...
"Unlike pushing an arrestee against a wall and pulling his arm behind his back, beating a suspect to the ground with a baton exceeds in violence anything 'we would expect in the course of a routine arrest,'" Ginsberg wrote, citing precedent.

...

Well Judge Ginsberg, I'm so glad you pointed that out because I might have not figured that out without your brilliant assist.

Wait, he's still alive?!

2012-01-25T10:57:00.000-08:00

Castro lambasts US Republican primary as idiotic

Fidel Castro lambasted the Republican presidential race as the greatest competition of "idiocy and ignorance" the world has ever seen in a column published Wednesday, and also took shots at the news media and foreign governments for seizing on the death of a Cuban prisoner to demand greater respect for human rights.

Castro's comments came in a long opinion piece carried by official media two days after Republican presidential hopefuls at a debate in Florida presented mostly hard-line stances on what to do about the Communist-run island, and even speculated as to what would happen to the 85-year-old revolutionary leader's soul when he dies.

Public sours on Romney in January - Behind the Numbers

2012-01-25T10:48:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post

The number of Americans with negative views of Mitt Romney has spiked in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, compounding the former Massachusetts governor’s challenges as he tries to rally from Saturday’s big loss in South Carolina.

Among independents, Romney’s unfavorable rating now tops 50 percent — albeit by a single point — a first in Post-ABC polling back to 2006. Just two weeks ago, more independents had favorable than unfavorable views of Romney; now, it’s 2 to 1 negative.

Snip

Not good Willard, not good at all.

Pro-Gaddafi fighters retake Bani Walid

2012-01-24T20:30:00.000-08:00

Al Jazeera English

Loyalists of Libya's ousted leader Muammar Gaddafi have seized control of the town of Bani Walid, raising the former government's green flag, an official and a commander have said.

The retaking of the town, 150km southeast of Tripoli, the capital, comes as Libya's new leaders have struggled to unify the oil-rich North African nation three months after Gaddafi was captured and killed.

Hundreds of well-equipped and highly trained remnants of Gaddafi's forces raised the flag over buildings in the western city late on Monday after hours of clashes, said Mubarak al-Fatamni, the head of Bani Walid's local council.

Snip

Great, just freaking wonderful. Boots on the ground anyone? France? Italy? The UK? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Robert Reich (Who is Sheldon Adelson and What Has Newt Promised Him?)

2012-01-24T12:16:00.000-08:00

Robert Reich (Who is Sheldon Adelson and What Has Newt Promised Him?)

Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner, is now the poster boy for what’s terribly wrong with our campaign-finance system. Adelson, you may recall, had, before the South Carolina Republican primary, donated $5 million to the pro-Gingrich Super Pac “Winning Our Future” – giving Newt a pile of money for negative advertising against Mitt Romney in South Carolina.

Wingnut Obsessions Distilled In A Light Bulb.

2012-01-24T09:52:00.000-08:00

Why the light bulb obsession?

Amanda Marcotte

What makes the lightbulb thing the bestest of current wingnut obsessions is that it's a perfect summation of what makes up the modern wingnut. Should you need to craft a future panic to gin up a bunch of wingnuts, I suggest carefully studying this list, because it's a pretty great blueprint.

1) Bullshit. This is one of the most important aspects. For some reason, they can't get quite as whipped up over something that's true. In some cases, that's beause reality is boring, but clearly that doesn't explain all of it, because even if their claim was true---that the government is banning incandescent light bulbs---that would still be roughly the stupidest thing to get upset about, possibly ever. No, I believe they get more excited over lies than the truth is that believing something that's not true makes them feel like they're in a secret, special club. That other people disagree with them because of our tedious adherence to facts and reality increases their sense of specialness. It also helps feed their sense of victimization. They're oppressed by the facts and all those stupid liberal fascists who insist on them. Because of all this, bullshit is way more interesting to the average wingnut than facts.

2) Pettiness. What's weird is that even if it were true, and the entire country was being forced to move to CFLs for daily use, the rational response would be, "So what?" The wailing from wingnuts on this is that CFLs are "ugly", but what's interesting about this is that they're really not. I have nothing but CFLs in my house, and they work great. You could probably even do some empirical research showing that your ordinary American can't tell the difference between a new incandescent and new CFL. They flicker a bit more when being turned on, and that's it. Small price to pay to reduce our nation's energy usage and forstall global warming, right? But pettiness is where wingnuts find their home. They love turning a molehill into a mountain, because that means that every time they flip on a light, they can burn with rage at the evil liberals who are controlling their lives through light bulbs.

3) Selfishness. They really do find it mildly arousing to say, "Screw the planet, I like my light bulbs the way they are." Sure, they rationalize this by pretending not to believe in global warming, but feigned disbelief is just an extension of the larger selfishness problem.

4) Near-psychotic fear of change. They like the world the way it is, and any change is taken as a personal affront, no matter how inconsequential to their personal comfort.

5) Paranoia. This goes back to pettiness. They love to sweat the small stuff, because it makes the grand conspiracy of liberal fascism they believe in seem omnipresent. This is why wingnuts in the past got so attached to fears about fluoride in the drinking water, and now are crapping their pants over fears of mandatory CFLs. They like to feel that the Illlumnati even have their fingers in how you light a room.

But most importantly of all:

6) It pisses off the liberals. It honestly should. This petty, selfish, idiotic, childish, paranoid behavior should piss off anyone with an ounce of decency. But what's funny is that they've been crying wolf so long that it fails to anger anymore, and instead causes mockery. I mean, they're willing to act like paranoid idiots just to get a rise out of us. Don't they have anything better to do with their time? Get a hobby, like replacing all your incandescent light bulbs with CFLs, and then starting a photoblog showing how nice the light is. But Wingnut America is so committed to the "pissing off the liberals" mentality that they'll try to pretend the peals of laughter aimed in their direction are wails of anger. It's sad, really.

Snip

Perfection, thy name is Amanda Marcotte

Pole Dancing.

2012-01-22T12:09:00.000-08:00

This blog gets around. No, really, it catches on in the oddest places. Somehow, without a single word published in Polish, or any other language other than very SAD English, we managed to catch the love of a Mr. Anonymous from Poland. He seems so eager to share his wisdom and some links that must absolutely pertinent to the subject at hand; it seems a pity to consign them to the Spam can. Keep those comments coming and Pocałuj mnie w dupe* Mr. Anonymous.

* http://www.youswear.com/index.asp?language=Polish

Newt Gingrich, The Distillation of The Modern Republican Party

2012-01-22T06:17:00.001-08:00

The March to Mittdom, as Lee Papa calls it has been halted. What was always a dreary trudge toward the crowning of Willard Romney got ambushed in the swamps of South Carolina. It was not even close as the Magic Underwear Man got beaten like a rented mule. The base’s favorite amphibian got forty percent of the vote, while Willard returned to the pre-New Hampshire doldrums of one out of four.

One reason for the rise of Newt has to be that the clown circus of the debates were restarted. While Rick Perry gets a well earned rap for poor debate performances, Mitt is having issues in this area too. Mitt has played defense perfectly. No unforced errors, no oops from Mr. Ice. But, there is no passion, no red meat for the base either. What is worse, is that Mittens has had more than few deer in the headlight moments when his circuit boards shorted. The pander chip failed when Robo-Romney could not figure where to fling the unctuous nonsense. “How to play the voting ex-con talking point? Computer engage! Engage!! Must find the right talking point! Danger! Process failure ... illegal protocol ... reboot ... reboot!!”

Meanwhile, Newt was in his element. God how that sleazy, nasty, piece of work knows how to toss red meat to the Dixie base. If you can get over how god-awful the whole cynical process is, you can almost admire the shear, vicious brutality that Newt appeals to. Man, he has that Reptile Brain of base dialed in and hard-wired for maximum effect. Be warned, were are about get deep, dark, and dirty on this subject.

Put on your hazmat suites and make sure all openings are taped up snug. Check your respirator seals for proper fit. Recheck those rubber gloves for pin-hole leaks gentle reader. We are about to wade in the toxic super-fund site that is the modern Republican Party for a look-see. We are visiting the very heart of darkness; make sure your papers are in order.

What was amazing about Newt’s South Carolina debate performance is how he performed an astounding act of political jujitsu. Face with the fury of a scorned wife, he was able to flip that charging beast without breaking a sweat. In less than five minutes he delivered master class in pure cynical political opportunism. A lesser politician would have had major difficulty if a former wife came at him with the type of scandal that Marianne Gingrich, wife number two, brought up from the depths of that failed marriage. But Newt hit that baby right out of the park. He shredded the moderator for even bring the subject up; which had the partisan crowd roaring with delight. After beating up the host, and by implication the entire Corporate Media, for their grubby, unwarranted attempt at Lese Majesty, Newton then pivoted for the extra bonus round of blatant misogyny.

If you can somehow deactivate your innate sense of moral outrage, you could then admire how well Gingrich played that crowd for the last gram of resentment and white male privilege. No one does the reprehensible, sleazy, cynical, politics of resentment quite like Newton Leroy Gingrich. It helped that Newt was fully engaged in a little bit of pay-back to Mittens, for the whack job Multiple Choice Mitt’s Super Pac did on Newt in Iowa, plus New Hampshire.

South Carolina was the perfect place for Newt to scuff up Mitt’s perfect hair. Newt knows these voters. He knows the dog whistles that brings them running. Like it or not, he is the real face of the Republican base in all its splendor.

Let me deconstruct that, let’s go a little deeper, into the very center of the toxic heart of the Modern Republican Party. Let’ go to the very radioactive center of the Elephant homeland. It begins and ends with two core items; the liberation (if poorly realized) of African Americans, and the liberation (again, if poorly realized) of women. More bluntly put, a lot of people are well and truly angered by the fact that both blacks and sex have slipped their chains. Ever since Nixon we have seen political blow-back, reaction, to civil rights and feminism.

This reaction is strongest in the south, in the beating heart of Dixie. In the rural, white, south, evangelicals went ballistic, and got political, when the sexual and civil rights revolutions blasted their little slice of heaven to smithereens. The twin pillars of Patriarchy and Privilege where shaken to their core; some one had to pay for that.

It was Richard Nixon, a master of the politics of resentment, that saw the opportunity. It was he who really got the southern strategy rolling. But lets be brutally honest. The south was not just Dixie. We are talking about not only a geographic idea, but a social reality. Dixie extends far past the old Confederacy, deep into the fly-over states, with outliers as forward deployed as Orange County, California. Best described by the the trinity of guns, God, and guts, its anchors are a deep bigotry, and an even deeper patriarchy. Peel back the patina provided by the AIE, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover institute and other forms of wingnut welfare, and much Republican philosophy can be distilled to sticking it to the uppity blacks and the wonton sluts. The twin evils of the Republican mind set are femininity and non-white pigmentation; in no particular order.

Getting back to dark prince of dog-whistles, Newt. Mr. Gingrich knows how to really dive deep, dark and dirty into the fetid cesspools of bigotry and misogyny. He provided a master class in bigotry dog-whistles when he teed up against Juan Williams. That no one in that debate audience had any problem sucking down that radio-active bigotry that Newt was serving up; that they treated it like mana from heaven tells you much about the state of the Republican base in 2012. They loved it when the old, nasty white man put the uppity black guy in his place; God, how they cheered.

And as pointed out earlier, Newt also knows how to play the Misogyny card to perfection as well. It helps that the man is world class cad and male chauvinist pig. He has that contempt for women thing nailed down seven ways to Sunday. It is one of the few genuine bits of his inner being he allows to be seen. As this contempt nicely dove-tails with the base’s same feeling, it is not much of a problem for Newt--at least with right-wing Republicans. It is also not as much of a problem with woman voters as one suspects. As the anti-suffragettes, the Anita Bryant crowd, and the female supporters of Sara Palin prove, there is always a minority to a plurality of woman more than happy to keep the rest of the female gender in chains. Of course, outside the hermetically sealed confines of the TEA Party right, this level of misogyny is a bit of stretch.

But this missive is not about the supine left, or the muddled middle, it is about the rabid, reactionary right. The entire Republican Primary process, and especially the debate process, has made it crystal clear how deep down the Elephants have gone into the rabbit hole of reaction and resentment. The self-nominated partisans of the leading edge of the party have shown their colors at every opportunity in every audience in these debates. They are cruel, vicious, uncaring, mean --and proud of it. They are a cohort driven by their hatreds: their hatred for minorities, their hatred for the poor, their hatred for sex, their hatred for women, their hatred for secular society. Left behind by a modern society that no longer honors white, male privilege, nor its religiously fundamentalist underpinnings, their fondest wish is to reinstate the old order when theocracy was the order of the day. They would gladly reset the nation to not only before Griswold but to before Brown; reestablishing both Ozzy and Harriet conformity and Jim Crow. They want their lilly-white world back, and don’t give a damn who get hurts in the process.

This is why Newt will go deep and far in the Republican Primaries. He gets the resentment; hell the man has a few personal scores of his own to settle. His core nastiness, his bent and deeply soiled soul, is in simpatico with much of the Republican base. The man wants to get even, so does much of the Republican base. The base wants to fold modernity seven ways and do some very painful things with it to their fellow citizens. Gingrich is a little more focused, as he wants to do some very politically painful things to Romney; which is fine with the base because they despise the Mormon Robot almost as much as Newt does. Mittens is an silver-spoon, establishment Republican; and the rural, southern base hates those types of swells on general principle.

I honestly wonder if Romney chose the Republican Party out anything other than filial piety and the very special politics of Massachusetts. The man, quite frankly is a political dinosaur, one of the last of the species of Country Club Republicans who used to rule the political landscape of the North East Corridor.

Those creatures are slowly passing away, being replaced in their former habitat by blue-collar bruisers like Chris Christie. In the south, the Patrician Republicans never found a home, and were replaced by Bourbon Democrat turncoats, who kept their toxic politics while shifting labels. It is exactly the same economic royalists ruling the roost in Dixie, only the name has been changed to protect the guilty. There really is not a dimes worth of difference between the politics of Newton Leroy Gingrich and Lester Maddox. Scratch Gingrich and you still get the scent of sulfur that pervaded Maddox. That is the final bitter truth of the modern Republican Party, and perhaps its epitaph in 2012.

I've got nothing; thank you Big Bother.

2012-01-17T19:06:00.001-08:00

The Crash and Burn Future of Robot Warfare

2012-01-17T04:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175489/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_drone_disasters_/

American fighter jets screamed over the Iraqi countryside heading for the MQ-1 Predator drone, while its crew in California stood by helplessly. What had begun as an ordinary reconnaissance mission was now taking a ruinous turn. In an instant, the jets attacked and then it was all over. The Predator, one of the Air Force’s workhorse hunter/killer robots, had been obliterated.

An account of the spectacular end of that nearly $4 million drone in November 2007 is contained in a collection of Air Force accident investigation documents recently examined by TomDispatch. They catalog more than 70 catastrophic Air Force drone mishaps since 2000, each resulting in the loss of an aircraft or property damage of $2 million or more.

These official reports, some obtained by TomDispatch through the Freedom of Information Act, offer new insights into a largely covert, yet highly touted war-fighting, assassination, and spy program involving armed robots that are significantly less reliable than previously acknowledged. These planes, the latest wonder weapons in the U.S. military arsenal, are tested, launched, and piloted from a shadowy network of more than 60 bases spread around the globe, often in support of elite teams of special operations forces. Collectively, the Air Force documents offer a remarkable portrait of modern drone warfare, one rarely found in a decade of generally triumphalist or awestruck press accounts that seldom mention the limitations of drones, much less their mission failures.

Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution

2012-01-17T02:58:00.000-08:00

http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/remaining_awake_through_a_great_revolution/

...

There is another thing closely related to racism that I would like to mention as another challenge. We are challenged to rid our nation and the world of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world. Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed hungry tonight. They are ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they are shabbily clad. I’ve seen it in Latin America; I’ve seen it in Africa; I’ve seen this poverty in Asia.

I remember some years ago Mrs. King and I journeyed to that great country known as India. And I never will forget the experience. It was a marvelous experience to meet and talk with the great leaders of India, to meet and talk with and to speak to thousands and thousands of people all over that vast country. These experiences will remain dear to me as long as the cords of memory shall lengthen.

But I say to you this morning, my friends, there were those depressing moments. How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes evidences of millions of people going to bed hungry at night? How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes God’s children sleeping on the sidewalks at night? In Bombay more than a million people sleep on the sidewalks every night. In Calcutta more than six hundred thousand sleep on the sidewalks every night. They have no beds to sleep in; they have no houses to go in. How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that out of India’s population of more than five hundred million people, some four hundred and eighty million make an annual income of less than ninety dollars a year. And most of them have never seen a doctor or a dentist.

As I noticed these things, something within me cried out, "Can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned?" And an answer came: "Oh no!" Because the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India and every other nation. And I started thinking of the fact that we spend in America millions of dollars a day to store surplus food, and I said to myself, "I know where we can store that food free of charge—in the wrinkled stomachs of millions of God’s children all over the world who go to bed hungry at night." And maybe we spend far too much of our national budget establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding.

Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own nation there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken. I have seen them here and there. I have seen them in the ghettos of the North; I have seen them in the rural areas of the South; I have seen them in Appalachia. I have just been in the process of touring many areas of our country and I must confess that in some situations I have literally found myself crying.

I was in Marks, Mississippi, the other day, which is in Whitman County, the poorest county in the United States. I tell you, I saw hundreds of little black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear. I saw their mothers and fathers trying to carry on a little Head Start program, but they had no money. The federal government hadn’t funded them, but they were trying to carry on. They raised a little money here and there; trying to get a little food to feed the children; trying to teach them a little something.

And I saw mothers and fathers who said to me not only were they unemployed, they didn’t get any kind of income—no old-age pension, no welfare check, no anything. I said, "How do you live?" And they say, "Well, we go around, go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something. When the berry season comes, we pick berries. When the rabbit season comes, we hunt and catch a few rabbits. And that’s about it."

And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions—no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment and this welfare mother said to me, "The landlord will not repair this place. I’ve been here two years and he hasn’t made a single repair." She pointed out the walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children. I said, "How much do you pay for this apartment?" She said, "a hundred and twenty-five dollars." I looked, and I thought, and said to myself, "It isn’t worth sixty dollars." Poor people are forced to pay more for less. Living in conditions day in and day out where the whole area is constantly drained without being replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony. And the tragedy is, so often these forty million people are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich. Because our expressways carry us from the ghetto, we don’t see the poor.

Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. His name was Dives. He was a rich man. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body, and he was so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, "Dives went to hell, and there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives."

There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him, and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not setting forth a universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.

Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world—and nothing’s wrong with that—this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.

...

Musings On The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.

2012-01-16T03:35:00.000-08:00

It’s Monday, the 16th of January, 2012. In the United States that means we recognize the life and times of Martin Luther King Jr. As time passes by the man fades and myth replaces him. I always find this day fraught because in the effort to honor and recognize this exceptional leader and philosopher we have made him so much less than what he was.

If we think about the man at all, if we attempt to reconstruct his sacrifice, it becomes a mangled and flattened tale about a two dimensional man. The complexities and contradictions of the man are buried with his bones. We forget the humanity. We forget the foibles. We forget the crazy bravery. We forget the failures and the disappointments.

This was an African American of the deep south who found his philosophy in India via New England. This was a preacher of an orthodox, hell-fire and damnation, evangelical church who, most likely, was in his own faith, a Unitarian-Universalist. This was the outstanding moral leader and moral compass of the nation who could not keep faith with his wife.

In this time, when transnational corporate capitalism runs amok, that we miss this visionary man. In his last days King was moving beyond civil rights for the narrowly defined cohort of African Americans, and toward the bigger picture of the depredations of poverty. Could King have found a way to convince the poor rural rednecks of the common cause they shared with the black neighbors that they despised? Could have King found a new Christian understanding that overcame the over-arching, toxic, politics of class and race?

I always wonder what would happen if a true visionary Christian, a true follower of Jesus, was able to capture the national imagination now. Could such a person truly break though the chatter, the fluff and nonsense, the twenty four hour news cycle? Could such a person survive the scrutiny of our celebrity culture? Could they survive the inevitable swift-boating, the calumny of opposition research and fabrication?

In his own time Dr. King had to defect the most vile of accusations. He had to endure all kinds of vituperative attacks. He was accused of being a radical, a trouble maker, a Communist, a saboteur. On the home front, King was accused in being too accommodationist, too cautious, too much the Uncle Tom. Black Nationalist like Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver had not one good thing to say about the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.

For all of his life King was seen by White America as pushing too hard, too fast; just the opposite of his black peers. Only the very wise, the very politically astute knew better, knew that MLK was more safety valve than stoker of the fire. It took King’s death for the rest of the US to get wise to the tsunami of rage that MLK held back. When King died, the inner cities of the United States burned. It was only with his assassination that the greater nation truly understand how much it would miss King’s preaching of Christian forbearance.

I cannot think of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. without thinking of his spiritual and political heirs Occupy Wall Street. Both are grounded in the strategies and tactics of non violence. Both faced being slandered and libeled by their political opponents. Both have had to come up with a response to the application of police power to their movements. Both have had to separate themselves from the fringe political provocateurs that hung around the periphery of their movements without betraying their inclusiveness. Both face a steep learning curve as the political, economic establishment, and the police power that enforce its whims, respond to challenge, and adapt to the tactics of a liberation movement. OWS does have an advantage in that it can learn from King's successes and failures to craft the new liberation movement for these new times.

To do this the people who give OWS its theoretical heft need to deal with the historical reality of Dr. King and his movement. They have to understand the uphill battle he faced, not from the bigoted minority of the south, but from the mostly indifferent to hostile majority of the entire nation. They need to understand true change is difficult at best, and damn near impossible most times. Opposition to change is like a brick wall, very hard to break down. King spend his whole adult life attempting to punch just a small hole in that brick wall. It was a long, tiring process that garnered little praise, and even less affection.

It is a good thing that we do celebrate the life of Dr. King. It is important that we reflect on the reality of his works and his cause. It is best that we forget the myth that we have been handed and instead remember the true parameters of Dr. King’s liberation struggle. Much of his work is left undone. Much of his work awaits our further action. Can recommit ourselves to the great undertaking of becoming a more human, more humane nation; to become a more perfect union? We have that option; will we avail of it? Or we continue to wallow in the libertarian delusion that there is no we, no common cause, that we are nothing but atomized individuals with no higher aspirations then self-gratification? Do we follow the spiritual lessons of Jesus, Ghandi, the Buddah, and others or do we wallow in the selfishness of Galt? There is a choice between compassion and casual cruelty; that is the final lesson of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I hope we, as a nation, learn it before it is too late.

The Real Question

2012-01-15T04:24:00.000-08:00

http://cujo359.blogspot.com/2012/01/real-question.html

The video is making the rounds, if you want to see it, it's here, among other places. You can see screenshots here. Personally, I've seen all I want.

There are people, like the sad excuse for a human being CNN hired as its Tea Party viewpoint who think that things like this are just dandy, and what's everyone's problem? Needless to say I disagree with this point of view.

On the other hand, I am neither shocked nor appalled by it. This sort of thing is going to happen in a war. Behavior like this, as disgusting as it is to us, isn't unknown in warfare. I've never been in combat, so I can't speak to what that's like. But I know my own personality well enough to know that if a group of people scared the hell out of me, making me fear for my life or the life of someone I cared about, and then I had a loaded weapon placed in my hands and the chance to deal with the problem, the results would not be pretty, nor would the aftermath.

So I can't condone those Marines' behavior, but I understand it. I think this video should be required viewing for anyone who wants us to go into another country and fight another war, because things like this will inevitably be done by, and to, our soldiers. The only difference between now and wars past is that there are so many cameras around.

One of the things that affects my judgment, of course, is that I'm not a "spiritual" person. As a secular humanist, I view the end of life as being a person's death. I'm not too interested what people do with my body after I'm done with it, though I'd certainly prefer people didn't piss on it. Maybe it can be used for scientific purposes, or maybe some organ can save someone's life. Yes, I'm an organ donor, and have been since I got my first driver's license eons ago.

That's why there's a more important question that occurs to me when I think about that video, which is why those bodies are there in the first place. I'm not talking about the particulars of the firefight that led to their deaths. I'm talking about why our young people are over there killing their young people.

The World Trade Center was destroyed ten years ago. The people who planned and executed that event including Osama bin Laden, are now dead, or wishing they were. We've been blowing up Afghanistan, at tremendous cost, for a decade now. We've killed a whole lot of Taliban, and a whole lot of people whose only mistake was to get in the way. They're not going to let a bunch of religious fanatics have a base in their country again to attack us or anyone else who is capable of coming back there and doing it again.

When I look at the political situation there, it looks like the only choices for Afghanistan are to be run by the corrupt band of drug-financed warlords, or the religious fanatics who are trying to displace them. I don't know if I'd think that was a choice worth fighting over if I were an Afghan. I'm certain it's not a choice I want us fighting over, and no one's proposed a better one.

We're not making the place better. We seem to be doing nothing more than creating more rubble and more bodies.

So, as an American and a human being, that's the question that comes to mind when I see things like that video: Why are we sending our kids over there to kill their kids? What's the point?

When someone comes up with a good answer to that question, I'll start worrying more about what happens to the bodies. For now, I'd just like it if we stopped creating more.

Posted byCujo359at1/13/2012 04:06:00 PM

The Helmand Incident

2012-01-15T03:22:00.001-08:00

Ah, the U.S. Marines, Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children; you dress them up in really cool dress uniforms, but you really can’t take them anywhere. If you have been hiding under a rock, or have been attempting to forget this little bit of idiocy, let me fill you in on the particulars. It seems a U.S. Marine sniper team decided to participate in a little cinema verite’ in Helmand Province. Whoever came up with the brilliant idea of documenting a war crime is definitely regretting his decision now. The video got on the wild wonderful web, and the rest as they say, is history .

A three star general is now been tasked to find out the who, what, when, where and why of the incident. And well, if you know how the military works, that means that sniper team is about to have the entire chain of command land on top of them like a ton of bricks. By the time the military justice system is done with them, they will be ground down to a fine powder. The military is going to strip them of everything they have, including their birthdays.

I am not too worried about those five junior servicemembers, their doom is sealed. What I am worried about is how that incident happened in the first place. The Helmand incident did not happen in a vacuum. There has been a serious breakdown in what the military calls “good order and discipline.”

We are in four wars of choice gentle reader and the military is starting to seriously crack under the pressure. Iraq is still an area of concern, ditto Libya, Afghanistan is on a rolling boil and our efforts in Pakistan are careering about like a New Years drunk on a icy patch of road.

Our effort in Afghanistan, where the incident happened, has now passed a decade. Afghanistan is the longest military effort ever attempted by the U.S. Servicemembers are now on fifth and sixth tours, plus more, in the badlands of the Hindu Kush. It has been a long, hard, haul; with not much to show for it. Forget all the happy talk coming from the brass hats and high level politicians, out in the field the reality is not so rosy. Ask any trooper what is really going on when s/he is not being minded by mid-level officer and s/he will unload a long diatribe about how ineffective the whole nation building effort is.

We saw this in Vietnam, when the brass hats and high level politico were issuing all manner of happy talk that had no relation to the grim realities in the field. Fortunately the All-Volunteer Military is still a much better outfit than the conscript armies of Vietnam.

But lets not fool ourselves, the fault does not lie in the present military as much as it does in the nation. Our leadership is rotten to the core. Not a one of them has any notion of what national service is. Not a one has any true understanding of what sacrifice to the nation really means. Look at the very heights of the political class. Neither Barack Hussein Obama, nor Willard Romney has spent one minute in the military. I doubt either one of their very deep staff has one person who has served in an active duty capacity. Only Vice President Joe Biden can claim a family member in the military, and that is as a reservist and a JAG officer; still not a trigger-puller to be found. The separation between the military and the political elites could not be more profound.

Still, it should be no surprise that our elites do not serve because most of us do not serve. The military and military family members make not even one percent of the population. Military service is concentrated in the working class and the lower middle class. Some of the middle class do serve, but almost none of the upper middle class serve and the wealthy have not been in the fray in any meaningful way since World War 2.

This is why a clueless Dana Loesch can treat the Helmand incident like no big deal. This is why she can treat the whole notion of armed conflict like a Chuck Norris movie, or the latest installment of the Call Of Duty video game series. Dana Loesch has never had to hump a sixty pound ruck, nor get into full battle rattle, nor fire a weapon in her life. She never had to ride a slab of steel in broiling sun of the Persian Gulf, nor get tossed about in that same vessel in the brutal cold of an Alaskan winter. She has never had to stand a post, do a watch, work ridiculous hours, be separated from loved ones, nor had to deal with the countless incidents of “ hurry up and wait” every soldier, sailor, Coastguard man, Marine, or Airman plus their family members have to on a regular basis. War for people like Loesch is a lark, an outsized team sport with guns, you root for the home team and abuse the opponents. Not for these arm chair generals the finer points of the Geneva Conventions. Not for these sunshine patriots the discipline of core values.

This is not to excuse the actions of the Marine sniper team, but I am not in the least surprised by their actions. If you have ever served with Marines, or have been around them for any amount of time you will understand that the ground pounders are not blessed with high levels of intellectual wherewithal. In other word the grunts can be rather foolish. They tend to do foolish things, not thinking of the consequences. Even in peacetime junior Devil Dogs find, um, interesting ways of getting into trouble. Now add to that tendency to act before thinking the stresses of a fire fight. Add to those stresses a mission that is ill-defined and going exactly nowhere. Add to that long, repeated deployments with no end in sight. Add to that the feeling that their own country is oblivious of the sacrifices they make day in, day out. Add all those things together plus a lowering of standards for inductees and you have all sorts of kindling lying around for just the right match.

Those five Marines will be held accountable for their actions. Brother, are they going to be held accountable. But they are only the tip of an ice burg. Our endless war against terrorism is corrupting and corroding our military. From the black site prisons run by the Air Force, to the farce that is Guantanamo Bay, run by the Navy, and beyond to the shadow drone war fought in too may places to enumerate, we are tasking our military with ever more dirty deeds. Is it any surprise that when the mission boils down to “act like Visigoths on the rampage” that our military acts like, well, Visigoths on the rampage?

The incident in Helmand is the result of an interventionist foreign policy gone off the rails. It is a reflection of a deeply dysfunctional government unable to set priorities; unable to discern the true National Interest from chaff.

This is your nation, the victory junkie. It got its first good hit during Gulf War One and has been looking for its next high ever since. Time for an intervention gentle reader, time to take away the crack pipe of military action before this addiction gets any worse. Time to seek a twelve step program and clean up our act. We cannot afford this drug anymore. We are going economically and morally bankrupt chasing this high of military victory, of world hegemony.

Dereliction Of Duty, The Grey Lady Goes AWOL

2012-01-14T10:31:00.000-08:00

I usually look forward to Fridays, they are my only real off day. I get to sleep in, lounge about, or get stuff done. So imagine my dismay when Taylor Marsh pointed out an epically egregious Op-Ed in the New York Times “Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” It took all my limited amounts of self control and self restraint to avoid picking up a verbal flamethrower and fricasseeing Mr. Arthur S. Brisbane to charcoal perfection. This is the great great lady’s “readers' representative”? Things have seemed to have only gotten worse since Judith Miller lowered the TImes to the level of over-priced fish wrap.

Sorry, let me try to dial this back a bit. If I don’t regain some composure, this posting won’t be readable in any kind of family setting. It is going to be difficult because the article begins wrong right at the title and keeps right on digging a deeper hole until the final coda.

Let us look at the title gentle reader, let us drill down to the singular word that causes your faithful reporter to set his phasers to “vaporize.” Exactly how does telling the truth make one a vigilante? Tell me, how does that happen? How can one point out the truth “violently and summarily, without recourse to lawful procedures”? The very use of the word vigilante smacks of rude frontier justice and more darkly; lynch mobs with murder in their hearts. To my eyes this reads like arrogance mixed with condescension. “Do you readers really expect us to get our hands dirty by calling out the lies of politicians? How unseemly” is message bleeding out from the very beginning.

That the “readers’ representative” should spend so much time, effort, ink and electrons wringing his hands over what should be the core competency and responsibility of a reporting, ie. reporting the facts, is beyond depressing. From the article itself :

“readers... look to The Times to set the record straight. They worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?”

I have never seen so many fails power-packed into two paragraphs in a long time. Sorry, there is no objective and fair as far as facts are concerned. There is no fair and balanced way to point out a lie. Their is no way to balance out the big fat lie of President Obama having an “apology tour” or the myriad of other falsehoods spewed out by the Republican Party.

This is where PolitiFact got in such serious trouble. By trying to “balance out” big fat Republican lies with a big fat Democratic lie, PolitiFact jumped the shark with its claim that Obama “lied” when he claimed that Republicans voted to end Medicare. PolitiFact then doubled down on that goof when they made the Obama claim “Lie of the year.” In a foolish attempt to balance out Democratic Party lies with Republican lies PolitiFact managed to construct is own whopper of misstatement.

Like it or not, quite often the truth, the summation of data, the results of the real world, are neither fair nor balanced. Quite often you can be fair or objective; but not both.

For example if you are objective, ei reality based, evidence driven, and results oriented, then you have to admit that climate change is real. Global CO2 poisoning, its deleterious effects, and its acceleration are no longer a subject of debate. There is the fact that climbing CO2 levels in the atmosphere are having an effect; they are changing the environment of the entire globe in ways that are both dangerous and harmful. The science is sold, unbending and inescapable. There is no real debate, there is the truth, and then there is the big fat lie of denial. For any media outlet to speak of a debate, or to attempt to be ‘fair” in providing “both sides of the story,” is to participate in an abject abandonment of their public trust. There are no two sides, there is only a rise to CO2 levels last seen when T-Rex was alive and kicking. There is only human actions that threaten to catastrophically alter the very earth we depend on for subsistence.

I could give example after example that once you become actually objective, based in results, fairness becomes moot. Ideologies, both left and right, sink once they strike the unforgiving rocks of reality. Results matter, gentle reader, and sooner or later the onrushing flood of results, the accumulation of stubborn facts, will sink many a grand ideology. You can twist words into any type of pretzel you wish. You can change the optics anyway you please. Sooner or later the facts will out, sooner or later the barbarians arrive at the gates, sooner or later the ivory castle will fall.

I have no idea when the great grey lady lost this simple truth. It has been a long, slow, torturous process; the death of a thousand cuts. The media of today is a shadow of itself; a dim reflection of the glory days of the late 40’s to late 60’s. Granted the media never really lived up to its self-proclaimed position of the forth estate, at least not in the U.S. If you look at the history of journalism, at the real dirty, nasty underbelly of a press that was scurrilous and highly partisan, the idea of an unbiased, fair, balanced, objective press is a fairly new institution. The idea of an unbiased truth teller is a work in process at best, and perhaps a deception-- a bit of self delusion.

Still as Rachel Maddow proves again and again, you can have a point of view without sinking into the fetid waters of propaganda. You can do journalism that is both factually correct and advances a particular political philosophy. In other words, it is quite possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.

The hand wringing by Mr. Bisbane is what the Filipinos call “maarte.” Literally maarte means “full of art” but is better translated as being a drama queen. Reporters do have a responsibility, if they want to be more than stenographers, to point out when a source is telling a fabrication, a misstatement, a misdirection, a lie. Reporters can research, test case when conflicting statements are made. They need not default to he-said, she-said reporting. The data are out there, the published, peer reviewed papers are out their, the history is out there, do the work.

And that is the real issue here. At the end of the day it is all about the refusal of Corporate Media to do the work of journalism. It is about how reporters, who once were, at their best, barely on the outside fringes of respectability, got utterly co-opted and corrupted by becoming part of the establishment. It is about how reporters abandoned their readers to become the hand maids of the political and economic elites. It is about how the Media abandoned its post and let the barbarians overrun our political process.

The OpEd from the Times is admission that the great grey lady is still non compos mentis; unable and unwilling to do the work of reporting. It is a response of nolo contendere to the charges of gross neglect and gross incompetence by the Times. Well, at least we have it writing; that’s a start.

Newt goes nuclear.

2012-01-13T09:35:00.001-08:00

Oh my stars and garters! I do believe that Newton is a bit piqued by what that cad Mr. Romney did to him in Iowa. Mercy me all this unpleasantness; it offends my sensibilities. I shall go to my garden, so I may be among beautiful things, and forget such unfortunate matters; be a dear and bring my usual to the gazebo.

Why The Truth Does Not Work With The Right Wing

2012-01-10T21:11:00.001-08:00

Pandagon

"Satan cloaks himself in the truth." I can't think of a better summation of right wing attitudes about basically everything. No matter if truth conflicts with their ideology, because Satan is behind that truth. If you see how the candidates are campaigning, you'll see that "Satan cloaks himself in truth" is basically their mantra. Everyone is clawing past each other to see who can demonstrate their fealty to right wing myth over truth.

Drug-sniffing dogs in traffic stops often wrong

2012-01-10T20:52:00.000-08:00

Chicago Tribune

January 06, 2011|By Dan Hinkel and Joe Mahr, Tribune reporters

Drug-sniffing dogs can give police probable cause to root through cars by the roadside, but state data show the dogs have been wrong more often than they have been right about whether vehicles contain drugs or paraphernalia.

The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia.

For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.

Snip

pandagon.net

" I'm saying that drug dogs should be permanently banned. Even if they worked, they're basically a cheap attempt by law enforcement to skirt constitutional protections, but since they don't even work, they're nothing but a magic trick used to distract from what's really going on: cops conducting illegal searches based on their own prejudices."

Snip

Confirmation bias in the form of the "Clever Hans" phenomena, plus more than little racial bigotry equals an all out assault on the Forth Amendment. This is you government on drugs.

Who Knew Band Nerds Could Be Cool?

2012-01-08T05:40:00.001-08:00

The Myth Of JFK And The Beginning Of The Cult Of Personality

2012-01-06T08:44:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about JFK. It all began as a sidebar conversation with one of my favorite blog buddies Cujo359. He wondered if the present generation of Kennedy generation was living up to the standards set by the Jack, Joe Jr. , and Ted. This progressed, or perhaps degraded, into a conversation about the relative merits of John F. Kennedy vs. Lyndon Baines Johnson.

It is brutally hard to do an honest accounting of the charismatic and martyred JFK vs the man who succeeded him. LBJ had none of JFK’s charisma, was quite the brutal SOB, and had the extra large albatross of the Vietnam War hanging around his neck. There is not much love for LBJ. Johnson’s legacy is also shorted because he exploited the death, and image, of his predecessor to twist the arms of politicians, and others, into supporting a specific agenda that was all LBJ, all the time. LBJ was quite complacent in the construction of the myth of John F Kennedy, as were others. I’m going to try to put down my flame thrower and attempt to deconstruct that myth, and its very real, very political effects.

There is a reason that I have to proceed with caution. There is a small cottage industry with the only object of buffing up JFK’s image to a lustrous shine. Topmost is the Kennedy clan. JFK is very much their holy relic, their entre’e into politics, and their get-out-of-jail-free card.

But they are not the only people out there constructing the myth. The Media loves the image of JFK. They love pulling the heart strings of the ill and uninformed. They love diving into the warm, deep,waters of Kennedy bathos and nostalgia. It is a sure-fire way of getting high ratings.

Then you have all the retainers and hangers on that surround the Kennedy clan. The actual people who were attached to Jack’s presidency are fading and passing away, but their are plenty of people willing and able to pick up the dropped banners and carry on the cause. Each and every one of these professionals has good reason to keep the myth of JFK alive, and at the forefront of people’s mind.

So what is the cottage industry at? What are they constructing? What is the product they are selling? It’s an image, carefully crafted, expertly preserved, and mostly bunk. It is the image of a young, vital president, dashing, brilliant and progressive. It is an image of a man of political courage. It is an image of man who brought about massive political and social change. It is an image of a champion for Civil Rights, and a champion of the poor and dispossessed. Most of all it is an image of a great life cut short, brutally ended by murder most foul.

Like any good myth, there is a small grain of truth, a core to build on. Jack Kennedy was charming, handsome, dashing and photogenic. He was the first politician who really understood the then new media of television, and exploited it to the hilt. He really knew how to use the image of his family, the image of him as young Pater Familias, to great effect. But like much of the JFK mystique, the image and the truth of the matter are very different. JFK did have the beautiful wife, and the large brood of children, but the family dynamics were a lot worse than advertised.

I am not going to go into the long, sordid tale of JFK’s numerous infidelities, it is subject that is far too long to relate. JFK followed one of the iron laws of history and biography: men with out-sized charisma, and out-sized egos, have out-sized sexual appetites. There was a pretense of happily married man and wife. This type of hypocrisy was tolerated in the 1960’s. Even today, the visual image of JFK as virile and dedicated family man still trumps the reality of JFK’s serial, and sometimes reckless, sexual affairs.

And since we are, in a way, discussing JFK’s image of virility, now is as good a time as any to drill down into the reality of JFK’s health. Be warned it is not a pretty picture. I really feel for the medical professionals that had to deal with JFK. I also really feel for the patient who those professionals attempted to treat.

If there was one true cross JFK did have to bear, it was his bad health. Where to begin? Do I begin with his war injuries? If so, how deeply do I go in to the symptoms of his ruined back? I’m not going to go too deeply because it is a truly awful thing to contemplate. We are dealing with unbelievable pain and suffering; chronic in nature, with no real end in site. The heavy duty meds Jack was given were only palliative, they temporary eased the pain, but never dealt with the underlying medical issue. There were other work-arounds, other palliative measures, a laundry list actually, but they were equally unsatisfactory. For Jack Kennedy, and many others who shared his type of traumatic back injury, you don’t look forward to a cure to the condition, because the only real cure is the grave.

The back was only one of JFK’s problems. He also suffered from Addison’s disease. As this disease affects the bodies hormone balance, it causes a plethora of symptoms in the sufferer. Unfortunately for JFK, he had to deal with this disease back in the days when the treatment options were just plain awful. Medicine has advanced since that time, and the management of Addison’s is quantum leaps better. In JFK’s time, the treatment for Addison’s had barely advanced from the stone knives and incantations stage. The health care professionals did the best they could with the tools provided, but JFK was often in ill health.

The contrast between the image of a young vital JFK, and the reality of chronically ill, and often debilitated man could not be more stark; yet we cling to the images of youthful vigor, while ignoring the medical reality. As with so much with JFK, image trumps reality.

Having dealt as best and sympathetically as I can with the actual man; let me attempt to deal with the politician as sympathetically as I can. Be warned though, in attempting any such consideration my default is, “results matter.” The one true light I will follow is what JFK achieved in his own lifetime; in his tragically truncated presidency. I am not going to deal with counterfactuals, with could-of, should-of, would-of. The only honest appraisal of any person, but especially a politician, is what they achieved during their time in office; not what was achieved after the fact.

By this measure I must be honest, it really does not look good for the home team. What JFK actually achieved while alive places him, for the most part, in the presidential category of “above average.” He was brilliant in the Cuban Missile Crisis, avoiding nuclear Armageddon, but domestically he was middling.

Granted I have the advantage of hindsight that JFK did not enjoy, but on the core moral issue of Civil Rights, both Jack an Bobby did not cover themselves in glory. They were an improvement over Ike, a step above, they did move the game forward, but not in the way that is now advertised.

Like Ike, the two brothers were mostly dragged into the Civil Rights struggle by other parties. Let us zero in on the Freedom Rides as a prime example. The brothers did everything in there power to make this issue just go away. In this regard they were not alone. Even Martian Luther King Jr. was initially opposed to the idea of the Freedom Rides. But the movement took a life of its own, and as it progressed the awful images of Freedom Riders being beaten, abused and harassed forced Jack and Bobby to do something. It became a matter of protecting US citizens right to life and limb. Jack and Bobby had to act in the face of Southern attempts to nullify Federal protections.

They did the absolute minimum. JFK and RFK negotiated a peaceful extraction of the first set of Freedom Riders from Louisiana and called it a day. But when the second set of Freedom Riders upped the political pressure, Jack and Bobby finally brought out the sledgehammer of Federal Power. This particular sledgehammer happened to be the ICC, but all the same it got the job done. The segregationists of the south howled in pain, but they were not about to challenge the brute application of Federal prerogatives.

JFK dedication to the advancement of Civil Rights is a fraught subject. He did make motions in that area. He did make incremental gains in Civil Rights during his time in office. Unfortunately, it gets really difficult to measure the real amount of political capital he invested, and was willing to invest, because LBJ muddied those waters so thoroughly after JFK was assassinated.

LBJ flogged the image of the holy, sainted, martyr for the last bit of political advantage possible. JFK might have set up the political chess board of Civil Rights, but LBJ and MLK pushed those pieces around to brutal effect. Both LBJ and MLK were grand masters of that political game. King provided the moral force and the outside agitation, wile Johnson provided the inside game of brow-beating and cajoling the Senate into action. Together they steamrolled the recalcitrant Dixiecrats in the Senate.

I just do not see the partnership of JFK and MLK working in the same way. Even if JFK did bring his A game to the effort, how does a second term of JFK match the first term of LBJ in effectiveness? LBJ had a deep knowledge of the Senate, he had a historic mandate after the1964 election, and he had the image of the martyred JFK to use as a holy talisman. Again, I just do not see either the Great Society, nor the Civil Rights happening as they did without that triple threat that LBJ brought to the political table. I sure do not see JFK racing ahead of MLK the way LBJ did.

I’m sorry this took so long. It has been a very long and twisted shaggy dog story; even for me. I’ll try to drive to end of this narrative as best as I can. History matters gentle reader, you can’t discuss were we are without setting up how we got here. I have spent an inordinate amount of time on the history and biography of JFK, on the chasm between that myth and that reality for a reason. I think that it is with Kennedy that our present toxic cult of personality in politics began. It is in the manipulation of image, the choice of surface over substance, that the John F. Kennedy myth began, that our present political woes find their source.

We have made this choice gentle reader, and we have doubled down on our preference for style over substance every time we, as a nation, have been offered the chance. We did it with Nixon, if barely, accepting a very complex and angry man as a moral defender of a mythical silent majority. We did it, in a way, with Jimmy Carter, thinking that somehow an “outsider” could cure all the ills of a post-Watergate USA. We really went in for myth when we voted for Don Renaldo; the sunny, affable cowboy who would make all things bright and shiny again. What Reagan actually did was a whole different matter, best left for a different discussion. With Pappy Bush, we took a bit of a breather before diving back into the calming waters of myth with the man from Hope. After Bill Clinton departed, we wildly gyrated from the faux cowboy presidency of Bush Jr. , who we could have a beer with, to the professorial Obama, who offered Hope and Change.

It is with Obama we have reached an apex of sorts. The myth of Obama, and the reality of his presidency have been at such odds, that to even contemplate such things brings on nose bleeds. As I would rather not bleed over my keyboard at the moment, I will let that discussion pass for now. I will also leave the epic cult of personality his supporters indulge themselves in for other times as well. Obama did not create the present cult of political personality, as much as he has both exploited it and enlarged it. The cult of personality is quite the 800 pound gorilla, is quite the dangerous, lumbering beast.

It is this tendency toward political cultism that I find so toxic. The willingness of voters to cling to an image, while ignoring the reality beneath, is distressing. It becomes almost farcical when you look at the present election of 2012. The fluffing up of both WIllard “Mitt” Romney and Barack Obama by their partisans is disconcerting, to say the least. Both these men are ethically challenged empty suites, political operators and hacks. But to their supporters, they walk on water; and possess an overarching competence that is sadly lacking in reality. It is all smoke and mirrors, and we are without Toto to provide the helpful parting of the curtain.

Sorry, to end on such a down note. Sorry, to end the discussion with such a flame-thrower of invective. Our nation is in a bad way, and our refusal to do the hard work of due diligence with our political class is a big part of why our nation is in such a lamentable state. What to do? What to do?

Oops, Aw, Shucks

2012-01-03T04:04:00.000-08:00

“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families.”
– Rick Santorum, January 1, 2012

Snip

Oh my stars and garters, he said that? I do feel an attack of the vapors coming on; be a dear and fix me my favorite whilst I go to repose on the fainting couch to collect my wits about me.

The Adams Conundrum

2012-01-02T05:26:00.001-08:00

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

I’ve been thinking of that quote for a while now, gentle reader. It does a fairly good job of distilling the central problem with the office of the President of the United States ever since Saint Ronny of Ray-Gun cleaned the old peanut farmer’s clock in 1980. It is hard to take a political process seriously when a grade B movie star, and professional political crank, manages to grab the brass ring.

But it has been even more depressing this election cycle because of the clown car primary process the Republicans have inflicted on a weary republic. I watch these proceedings with an ever rising sense of panic and melancholy. Is this really the best we can do as a nation? Is this really the top tier of political professionals? I would not trust this lot of politicians to run a McDonald’s, never mind the Hyper-power that is the USA.

Granted, it has been darkly humorous to watch the Conservative base swoon over one white knight after another; only to have them self-immolate before even doing battle with the hated dragon of Multiple Choice Mitt Romney. From Bachmann, to Perry, to Cain, to Gingrich, and now to Mr. Man-on-Dog-Sex Santorum, it has been an exercise in flail and fail. Each of these prospect proved beyond a shadow of doubt that they “should on no account be allowed to do the job.” You would do better with a trained monkey.

Not that the Donkey Party is doing much better. They have their own issues to deal with, most under the heading of Barack Hussein Obama. The rank ambition of the man, linked with absolutely no moral compass, has been disastrous for the Democratic Party. Obama’s “lets make a deal” transactional style of “leadership” has perverted everything the Party of FDR stood for.

The J’ accuse against the Obama lead, and feckless, Democratic Party is long and depressing. The “Progressive” wing of that party has been especially inept. Faced with a President who is essentially doing Richard Nixon in black-face, the Democrats in Congress have caved on every center-right talking point their leader has ever uttered. Spineless leaders, Pelosi in the House, Reid in the Senate, have followed the President in a Bataan Death March further and further to the right. Like their President they have followed the corporate money, and kowtowed to the wishes of the New Robber Barons. The special interests of big pharma, big business, and the Insurance Industry were coddled. The masses were toss the odd stale crumb to feast on, but only after reproductive health rights were trampled on by the usual gang of sex-phobes and religious reactionaries.

That even a stalwart leftist and self-proclaimed “Socialist” like Bernie Sanders begged off a legitimate challenge to Obama’s rightward lurch tells you everything you need to know about the Democratic Party. The Republicans are right; the Donkeys are, “surrender monkeys.” The Democrats keep folding to the power of the Corporations, to Wall Street, to the rich and connected, to their donors. They cannot even be bothered to go through the motions of fighting Corporate power.

Thus Obama gets to rest up and keep his powder dry, waiting for Mitt the inevitable to emerge from the toxic swamps of the Republican Primary process. Is anyone else having a severe case of acid reflux over this result? Is anyone else utterly disheartened that the final results of this process, which looks like two political hacks with no core beliefs fighting an epically dirty campaign from May to November? I know I don’t want to watch this unravel. I would rather dig my eyes out with rusty spoons.

Yet that is what we as a nation are up against. It is the end result of an utterly corrupt system melting down into absurdity. Team Obama is shooting for a one billion dollar war chest. Romney will likely meet or exceed that amount. It is an open auction for the Unitary Executive, and you are not invited. In this bidding war, ordinary citizens do not have a prayer of having any influence.

And what of the contenders? What type of person is willing to whore themselves out for a billion dollar price tag? What type of person is willing to dial for dollars, to beg and wheedle for filthy lucre? What kind of promises, subtle or not, will they have to make? How is someone willing to grovel in such a shameless way qualified to hold any kind of office, never mind the Presidency?

Mark Twain once observed that history does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes. I’m seeing that. I’m seeing a rhyme with the “Bearded Nonentities” of the late 19th Century. Starting with Bush Sr. It has been a sorry lot. None of the post Reagan Presidents rose above the low bar of mediocrity, and one fell far below it. We are living in a contradiction not seen often; an executive that has almost limitless powers institutionally, run by men who’s effective power is weak. Maybe it’s because they should never had gotten the job in first place. “[A]nyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” Sad, but ever so true.

Merry Whatever. Sigh

2012-01-02T03:39:00.000-08:00

Informed Comment

The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem has now seen its annual brawl between Armenian and Eastern Orthodox priests, who are jointly responsible for its administration. Police of the Palestine Authority broke it up but made no arrests because the pugilists are “men of God.”

Somehow you get a sense that Jesus of Nazareth would not have approved of his own followers coming to fisticuffs over his birthplace. Wasn’t there something about turning the other cheek? Wouldn’t the Christian thing to do be to abandon one’s claims to the physical site and devote oneself to the spiritual meaning of it?

The Google Will Never Be The Same

2012-01-01T22:20:00.000-08:00

Santorum’s Last Stand

Days before the Iowa caucus the senator shoots from the back of the pack.

http://slate.me/rtroMW

DES MOINES, IOWA—Rick Santorum is so hot right now, you'd think he was the cure to something. When pollsters for the Des Moines Register started contacting Republican voters on Tuesday, Santorum was at 10 percent. By Friday when the polling ended, he was at 22 percent, tied for the lead. If they'd kept calling Saturday, voters might have answered the phone singing the senator's name.

When the days were averaged out, which pollsters do to smooth out anomalies, t he findings put Romney at 24 percent, Ron Paul at 22 percent, and Santorum at 15 percent. Given the trend, it's possible Santorum could win the caucus on Tuesday, which would be a perfect ending to a volatile race.

http://slate.me/rtroMW

Snip

Well, there is nothing for it. This small, humble blog must keep the mem going:

Santorum- The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.

Santorum- The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex

Santorum- The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.

We apologize, but truth and justice must be served.

And The Bad Taste Award Goes To ....

2012-01-01T21:23:00.000-08:00

Israeli Holocaust survivors and political leaders have expressed outrage over a Jerusalem demonstration in which ultra-Orthodox Jews donned yellow Star of David patches and uniforms similar to those Nazi Germany forced Jews to wear.

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews had gathered on Saturday night to protest what they say is a nationwide campaign directed against their lifestyle, implicitly comparing the current Israeli government to the Nazis.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/01/201211143238621501.html

Snip

Interesting how religious fanaticism looks so similar, no matter what faith you are discussion. Same lack of subtlety, same petulance, same tone deafness, same bogus claims of repression, same utter lack of perspective, same boorish behavior. These guys spat on and harassed a eight year old girl, and they expected to be treated like heros. No way that would blow back in their faces in a modern secular society like Israel, right? Morons.

Really Bad Christmas Presents

2012-01-01T21:07:00.000-08:00

US airport explosives suspect charged

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2012/01/201211235839973788.html

Authorities have charged a member of the US military who was arrested after trying to go through a security checkpoint at a Texas airport with explosives in military-grade wrapping, the FBI said.

Trey Scott Atwater, 30, was stopped at security at the Midland International Airport about 9 am on Saturday. Mike Martinez, an FBI spokesman, said on Sunday.

Atwater is being held at the Midland County jail and has been charged with trying to bring explosives onto an airplane.

He will remain in custody at least until his arraignment on Tuesday, given that the courts are closed on Monday for the holiday, Martinez said.

Atwater and his wife and family had been visiting relatives in the area and were on their way back to his base in North Carolina, according to local media reports.

Snip

Nothing says "Happy Holidays" quite like C-4.

Um, what?? Say Again?

2012-01-01T21:02:00.000-08:00

Verbatim from the spam locker:

Approaches for Unlock Iphone 4 h Anybody who has an iPhone would need to really are exposed to your account and they also have to have unlock iPhone 4 grams tips, constantly associated with unique software that is concurrently secure and safe.Having said that, it could be very disheartening every single child unlock our i really telephone if you won't locate the best brand-new apple iphone4 eliminating the lock at application form.There are lots in commercials all around us, yet, without selected being familiar with in the market, fully trapped, consequently a number of options numerous large hard cash involving very little.

Bloody Vikings!

The Stupid, It Burns! New Age Idiocy Division

2011-12-31T17:43:00.000-08:00

[H]ere’s the deal with Braco. He’s a messianic New Age con artist from Croatia. Get this:
He “gazes.” That’s it. He just drifts out on stage, looks at the audience for a couple of minutes, then scrams. The end. Fin. Fade to black. Followers flock to him and throw money. Why?

“He only offers a gift to people through his silent gaze, without words or teachings, allowing people’s own reported experiences of transformative changes – in their lives, relationships, careers, finances and health – to define his work.” — Braco’s website

His ‘work’! Do you fully comprehend the awesomeness of this Braco tool? He doesn’t do shit! He doesn’t have to learn English. He doesn’t have to memorize a bunch of polyester New Age platitudes. He doesn’t have to allude to ancient texts. He doesn’t have to do yoga. He doesn’t even have to touch any sick people. He only has to eyeball’em for 5 minutes and then float silently away. Mass hysteria does the rest.

...

This scam is a work of such extraordinary beauty and criminal genius it brings a tear to my jaundiced eye. Compare it, for instance, to the overly complex, gaudy, and commercialized Osama bin Laden lookalike, Osho®.

...

Snip

The only explanation I can offer for this bit of Baby Boomer foolishness is that many of that generation took far too many (and often, too much) mind altering drugs.

Follow the bouncing ball if you want more.

H/T To "Twisty" mistress of all she surveys at I Blame The Patriarchy for delving here, so I did not have to.

This Souds Like The Premise For A Bad Si-Fi Movie

2011-12-31T11:16:00.000-08:00

Mutated H5N1 virus created in Netherlands research labRotterdam - The University of Rotterdam researchers in the Netherlands have created a mutated H5N1 bird virus. Made in the lab, the virus could not only go pandemic but is considered lethal to over 50% of those it affects.To put it in plain English, a virus with the potential to kill up to half the world's population has been made in a lab, genetically altered to become much more contagious. The fight between academics and bioterrorism experts is whether or not to publish the recipe for anyone to replicate the virus, and whether the research should have been done in the first place."This shows clearly that H5 can change in a way that allows transmission and still cause severe disease in humans. It's scary," says Peter Doherty, a 1996 Nobel prizewinner for work in viral immunology, in the New Scientist article, "Five easy mutations to make bird flu a lethal pandemic."

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/316682

What a great idea, it's like the island of Dr. Moreau, meets The Twelve Monkeys, meets Outbreak; what could possibly go wrong?

Ex-Assistant Sues Lady Gaga for $379,000

2011-12-31T00:10:00.000-08:00

Courthouse News Service

MANHATTAN (CN) - Lady Gaga's former personal assistant claims the pop diva's touring company owes her $379,000 for overtime during the more than a year when the assistant was "figuratively, if not literally, always at her side."

Jennifer O'Neill sued Mermaid Touring Inc. in Federal Court. The head of Mermaid Touring is Joseph Germanotta, the father of Lady Gaga (Stephanie Germanotta), according to corporationwiki.com.

Class Sues 'Christian' Financial Adviser

2011-12-31T00:06:00.000-08:00

Courthouse News Service

JACKSON, Tenn. (CN) - A state legislator who established a second career as a self-proclaimed Christian financial adviser defrauds people by persuading them to buy gold and silver coins, then withholding delivery, investors say in a federal class action.

Plaintiffs Damian Orlowski of Chicago and Lynn Cechin of Texas say Larry Bates, a Democrat who served in the Tennessee General Assembly from 1971 to 1976, his company, First American Monetary Consultants and a handful of associates, including radio stations, target Christians and the elderly through radio broadcasts and the Internet.

Pacific islands lose a day in dateline warp - Asia-Pacific - Al Jazeera English

2011-12-30T23:42:00.000-08:00

Pacific islands lose a day in dateline warp - Asia-Pacific - Al Jazeera English

If you ever had the feeling that time is passing by too quickly, the people in the South Pacific islands of Samoa and Tokelau can relate.

Islanders are missing an entire day, Friday [December 30], after an official change in the time zone.

Perry Doubles Down On The Misogyny

2011-12-28T03:37:00.000-08:00

Rick Perry shifts abortion views: No exception for rape, incest

By James Oliphant | McClatchy-Tribune News Service James Oliphant

OSCEOLA, Iowa — Rick Perry, in the midst of a furious late-stage effort to finish strongly in next week's GOP Iowa caucuses, said at a town-hall-style campaign event here that his views on abortion have shifted and that he no longer believes the procedure is acceptable in any circumstances. Assuredly, the Texas governor has never been a moderate on the issue. But until recently, he had said an abortion might be justifiable in cases of rape or incest or if the mother's life was in danger. Tuesday, at the last leg of a four-stop bus trip across southwestern Iowa, Perry was asked a question by a local pastor about his abortion views, noting that the candidate had recently signed a pledge to oppose abortion in every situation and asking whether Perry had changed his mind. Perry replied that he had. "You're seeing a transformation," he said. Recently watching an anti-abortion film had persuaded him to alter his view, he said. The transformation, such as it is, comes at a particularly opportune time. With a week to go until the Jan. 3 caucuses, Perry is trying to court the social conservatives here who have yet to coalesce around a single candidate as they did for Mike Huckabee four years ago. And Perry has watched as Rick Santorum, an unyielding opponent of abortion rights, has picked up endorsements in the last week from key evangelical leaders in the state.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/27/134237/perry-shifts-abortion-views-no.html

Calling The 6th Fleet

2011-12-28T03:32:00.000-08:00

No oil will be allowed to pass through the Strait of Hormuz if the West applies sanctions on Iran's oil exports, Iranian Vice-President Mohammad Reza Rahimi has warned.

The threat was reported on Tuesday by the state news agency IRNA as Iran conducted its fourth day of naval drills near the Strait of Hormuz, at the entrance to the oil-rich Gulf.
"If sanctions are adopted against Iranian oil, not a drop of oil will pass through the Strait of Hormuz," Rahimi was quoted as saying.

"We have no desire for hostilities or violence ... but the West doesn't want to go back on its plan" to impose sanctions, he said. "The enemies will only drop their plots when we put them back in their place."

The threat underlined Iran's readiness to target the narrow stretch of water along its Gulf coast if it is attacked or economically strangled by Western sanctions.
More than one-third of the world's tanker-borne oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. The US maintains a navy presence in the Gulf in large part to ensure that passage remains free.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2011/12/2011122715516459511.html

Look for gasoline prices to spike and for everyone in the region to get a little more nervous. Iran does not have the capacity to go toe-to-toe with the resources the US and her allies can bring to the area. The Republican Guard can cause lots of trouble though with RPGs launched from small boats. Mining the Straights of Hormuz is not much of an option for Iran as the US has more than enough anti-mine assets to handle that issue.

This may play out like the last time that Iran got frisky in the region with US warships providing oil tankers escort services. But the real issue here is how the ratcheting of tensions in the Gulf could lead to a war of choice against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The lack of diplomatic channels between Iran and the US make a misstep ever more likely.

I'm Really Getting To Hate This Guy.

2011-12-26T03:11:00.000-08:00

Wow,

Mr. Anonymous has been spending lots of time on the blog of late. He seems to be obsessed with some of the earlier posts. We are talking about some deep in the past items, two or three years ago. Somehow Mr. Anonymous just got to them, and just had to shoot a very quick comment how how great my wiring is. Aww, isn't that sweet?

Small problem, many of those great efforts belonged to someone else. We are not above a quick and dirty cut and paste job the way the sea is not above the sky. ( Thank you Douglas Addams for that one.) So Mr. Anonymous should have been praising someone else, not me.

Thanks for nothing, and the fifteen spam comments that needed to flushed down the series of tubes that is the Internet. I do not envy Cujo359's day time gig of policing up the other blog he works on. I wonder if he keeps muttering "bloody Vikings" when he has to clean up all that spam.

Musings On "Outsiders" Running For President

2011-12-25T06:45:00.000-08:00

As Our Most Sacred Lady Of The Tastefully Appointed Pant Suite pointed out, the Presidency is not an OJT job.

I have always hated the idea of an "outsider" because, first, it is pure BS when the job of President is being contested. Only the top tier of Professional Politicians go for the Presidency.

No one who runs for the oval office is an "outsider." Obama was on the national radar, and a hot item for the National Democratic Party from 2004 onwards. How do you think he got the nod for the Kerry Keynote address? He was a player, he was angling for national recognition / office from at least 2004. Add to that, he was a player in Illinois politics for years; and that he played in the sharped-elbowed politics of Chicago. He was no neophyte. He was no outsider. He was a professional politician looking to climb the ladder as high as he could. By performing due diligence, you would have found more than enough data to prove what a political animal was, and how he deliberately crafted an image that had no correspondence to reality at all.

Secondly, any top leadership job is a poor fit for the unprepared. I spent ages in the Navy, and they, plus the rest of the military, do not let untrained, unprepared men or women into critical positions. It is a slow progress to the top, and a ferocious weeding process. You don't want some clueless newbie running a CTF, or a Air Wing, or a battalion of infantry. The same goes for the Captains of Industry. DOW or AT&T are not going to hand the keys over to some joker who only ran a push cart; they want someone who has had experience in running a large institution. Only in politics do we expect a person with next to no executive experience to hit the ground running. It is one of the reasons our national politics are so messed up. We keep voting for "outsiders" who have little to no executive experience, and expect them to perform miracles.

I don't care who the politician is, two years in the Senate (actually less in Obama's case) is not enough time to gain any top level experience. I had problems with HRC's claims of competence, she was a lot less ready for the job than advertised; but Obama was even more unprepared than HRC.

And it shows, Obama has flailed in the toxic swamps of DC. He was utterly unprepared for the lock step opposition of the Republican Party. Far too many times he has played Hamlet in matters domestic and foreign, unable to fish or cut bait. He has reacted to crisis, been caught flat footed far too many times. His messaging has been plain awful, just mailing it in for far too long.

He blew one of the most lopsided advantages a Democratic President had viz the Legislative branch in a long time. His rank incompetence made 2012 a year of mass slaughter for Donkeys, both nationally and locally. He gifted right-wing cranks like Sara Palin with one of the most tone-deaf PR campaigns ever seen.

He was AWOL for most of the health care debate. He was AWOL from most of the stimulus debate. He utterly failed to do the spade work, and back-slapping, required to get Congresscritters in line. He made the political and managerial mistakes you would expect of a rank amateur. He did these things because he did not spend enough time in DC to really understand how that snake pit really works.

Like it or not, the politics of DC require you to know certain players, and to have personal connections to them. There is a level of comfort and bonhomie required, an ability to rub elbows and engage in idle chit-chat. Obama utterly lacks this gift. (Clinton, on the other hand, had it in spades.) Obama's high-minded, cold, professorial personality is like fingernails on a chalk board for most DC pols. The only way he could have countered that was to put more time into the personal relationships that are the real grease that runs DC. Two years is not enough, maybe even HRC's time in Senate was not enough.

There are bare minimums required to handle a high level executive job. There are real world, experience hurdles that need to be cleared. I'm not sure that the institution of Senate offers these experiences. The moving parts of the executive branch are not the moving parts of the Senate.

Institutionally speaking, a governor or a cabinet head is better choice for the Chief Executive than a member of the Senate. Granted, the actual person occupying those job descriptions matters immensely. Still, all other things being equal, a man or woman who has run a state or the Cabinet Department is going to be a better bet to be a competent President, than a man or woman who has solely occupied a legislative office.

The worst possible choice for the office of President would look a lot like Obama, or Palin: a person who cut out of a responsibility to pursue other goals. Please note that both pols cut loose after only two years in office; one to gain filthy lucre, the other to gain the White House. Oh, and both claimed to be an "outsider," despite an entire life spent in politics.

I have no truck, and no patience, with the notion of a white knight "outsider" riding into the castle keep of a corrupt DC, and making things all shiny and new. There is more than enough data out there to show that this notion is pure pig swill. We have tried "outsiders" ever since Jimmy Carter and have rolled snake eyes with each and every one. DC is just too chock-a-block filled with man traps, tiger traps, bear traps, and other assorted snares for the uninitiated to survive. It would be better to just fall on your own sword and be done with it. No real "outsider' is going to slay the dragon that is the Beltway, they are only going to end up as a light snack.

That Obama actually thought that he could rescue the maiden fair from the evil clutches of the Beltway Beast was the worst kind of foolishness I have witnessed in a long time. It was an exercise in epic egomania, and excessive self-regard. It showed an utter disregard for the facts, and for Obama's own inadequacies. Politicians are a rather un-self-aware lot, but Obama took that common fault and put it on human growth hormone and anabolic steroids. I have never seen so intelligent a man so blissfully unaware of his own real faults.

In the end though, the fault does not lie with Obama, it lies with us. We keep electing "outsiders" to the office of President. We keep rolling the iron dice, and are surprised when the "outsider" does a face plant in office. It is insanity as defined by Einstein: doing the same thing over, and over again but expecting different results.

Is it the shoes? I has to be the shoes!

2011-12-25T02:33:00.000-08:00

Police were brought in to quell unrest that nearly turned into riots across the United States following the release of Nike's new basketball shoe, a retro model of one of the most popular Air Jordans ever made.

The mayhem, including scuffles between customers, stretched from Washington state to Georgia on Friday as huge crowds of shoppers overwhelmed stores. It was reminiscent of the violence that broke out 20 years ago in many cities as the shoes became popular targets for thieves.The $180 shoes went on sale in a limited release at stores, and the lines began forming several hours before businesses opened.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2011/12/20111224125139773285.htm

Just another sign of the end of days dear reader, nothing really to see here; move along, move along.

On Class Warfare

2011-12-24T16:46:00.000-08:00

I am irritated gentle reader. I have been watching, reading and listening to the news and I keep running into this notion of “Class Warfare.” To quote the great Spanish Philosopher Inigo Montoya, “I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.” Placing a extra tax on millionaires may be class conflict, it may be punishing the job creators, that is debatable; but it is no way, shape, or form is it Class Warfare.

I wish I could round up every politician and political pundit that vomits the term into the public debate and have them actually endure Class Warfare. When those who survive tell their stories of what real Class Warfare looks like, then we will be done with the hysterical drama queen and drama kings who toss this term about like so much confetti.

First Class Warfare involves real warfare. We’re talking people with murder in their hearts, and the tools to bring their heart’s desires into reality. In much of history this went by the term of “Peasants’ Revolt.” If you have the stomach for such thing, peruse any history book that you might fancy. Those books will be chock-a-block full of harrowing tales of slaughter and rapine indulged by the lower orders, and the counter-reaction by the nobility. Such tales are soaked in blood.

But if clubbing and swordplay are not your milieu, perhaps something from the wrongly named “Age Of Reason” is more to your liking. Wander about the descriptions of the French Revolution, it's a barrel of laughs. Don’t forget to think about the horror of what Napoleon's “whiff of grape” really meant.

But if being shredded by shrapnel spat out of cannon does not sound very pleasant, you can always fast forward to the Russian Revolution, and the horrors performed by both the Red and White forces. Now that Lenin, he really knew how to do class warfare on an industrial scale. Stalin learned from the master, and wiped out millions of class traitors and other undesirables as routine.

But that is wholesale matters, in our own great nation of the United States, we were strictly retail about such things. There were the sundry butchering of the odd Labor member, or the judicial lynching of the odd anarchist, but the US preferred the slow genocide of Slavery and the fast genocide of the First People to the messy business of class warfare.

If brutal murder was needed to keep the lower orders in line, the elites could always fire up a race riot. Divide and conquer was always the preferred method in the US, where the lower classes did not enjoy the homogeneity of the European agricultural workers.

The institutionalization of racism also explains why a true class war never broke out in the United States. Poor whites could always look down on the blacks and find false kinship with the Captains of Industries that shared their Caucasian coloring. Toxic racism, and even more toxic misogyny insured that the poor whites always had someone they could look down upon, and who was in worse state then they were.

But there are limits to such skulduggery. Looked at in the perspective of Class War, one can see the US Civil War as such a phenomena. At the end of the struggle a whole class of people, the Plantation Slave Owners, were crushed. For almost a generation enormous social, political, and economic changed occurred because this block had been eliminated.

Eventually the progress ended, and the next uprising did not occur until the turn of the Century with the excesses of the Gilded Age in clear view. Granted, the anarchists of the Victorian Age made things very dicey for the political leaders of the time, but they never set off the revolution that they dearly desired. Class conflict got brutal, but there was never a real danger of class warfare until the Bolsheviks popped up in Russia.

Ironically, it is with the end of the Communist regime in Russia that class warfare became a talking point again. When the only nation in the world that could actually foment real class war was tossed into the dust bin of history, the threat became alive again--passing strange.

I have no patience with the meme, as I hope you have gathered. It is an over-the-top bit of hysterical heavy breathing. No one in the US is rallying the lower orders to fetch their weapons and torches to burn down the residences of the new Robber Barons. No one is advocating that the 0.1%, hyper-wealthy billionaires be chopped up into cat kibble. No one is advocating that the women-folk of this subset be raped, or that the even smaller subset of pregnant hyper-wealthy be cut open, or their infants be beaten to death before their mother’s eyes. Wall Street was temporary occupied, it was never burned down to its foundations.

I wonder when or how the super-wealthy became so thin-skinned. When did they come around to the notion that they should never, ever, hear a discouraging word? What weird form of egomania makes them need to hear how marvelous, great, wonderful, munificent, and super sexy they are? When did they become so thin skinned?

I guess it comes from believing in the utter garbage their paid sycophants in the Hoover Institute, the AIE, the Cato Institute, and other organizations feed them on a 24/7 basis. I get the need for the hyper rich to fund wing nut welfare to confound and confuse the masses. I just have issues with the hyper rich actually buying into the bilge water propaganda that Wing Nut Welfare pumps out. The ideological insanity that the Koch brothers fund, and actually believe in, is gob-smacking. Ditto for Richard Mellon-Scaife; and the others of the inner circle. The cluelessness mixed with the excessive self-regard is incredible. It would be the stuff of farce if the damage it was doing to the republic were not so real, so massive.

By blocking minor and popular fixes to the economic disparities that warp and twist our nation, these proud few are actually bringing about the class warfare they decry. With participatory democracy blocked, the pressures will only grow. Society will warp and buckle as frightened citizens look for more radical solutions. We see this in Europe already where the austerity craze is causing the rise of fascist, anti-immigrant, ultra-right wing nationalist parties. The elites insistence on perpetuating bad policy, because that is what “the market” wants, is causing nations like Hungry to go off the rails. By tearing up the social contract, by racing to the bottom, the Transnational Corporatist Elite are undermining the very stability that Capitalism needs to thrive.

I have no idea were this temper-tantrum of the pseudo-libertarian right is going. I have no idea how long the super-rich can scotch the will of the people by purchasing politicians by the bucket loads. I don’t know how long low-information voters will buy the crap of protecting the “job creators” when too few jobs are being created. Let’s ignore the fact that the jobs being created pay less than jobs that were eliminated; and the middle class keeps getting vaporized, that only adds insult to injury. I have no idea how long the citizens of the US will put up with no jobs, no benefits, no prospects. That seems the perfect recipe for revolt.

The Fail Of Senator Obama

2011-12-24T14:53:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama, was a creature and the apple of the eye of a very specific group of Senate Democrats. They were Hillary phobes, who felt that Ms. Clinton would go down in flames from a well established right wing and Moron Media attack. They did have a point, the Right Wing Noise Machine had its wrecking ball primed for a Hillary nomination.

This cabal always had a thing against John Edwards too. They considered him a total light- weight. As events played out, they were right about Edwards’ utterly uncontrolled narcissism. I cringe to think of what would have happened if the Rielle Hunter debacle had come out with Edwards as the nominee.

So the doyens of the Senate looked around for a anti-Hillary that was not John Edward and, hey presto, Barack Obama! They were gob-smacked by Barry’s Chauncey Gardiner impression. Trust me, Senators just eat up the type of crap that Obama was peddling. Obama’s transactional nature, his tendency to agree, at least in part, with almost anything his interlocutor said, was music to the ears of the self-involved Democratic leadership of the Senate.

The Senators also loved that Obama had no real history in national politics. By design, Obama had avoided all sorts of hot-button issue that usually trip up national Democratic candidates. This made him the most anti-Hillary of any candidate out there, a tabula rasa unencumbered by the baggage of a Kerry or a Clinton, or a Gore, or a Biden.

From the perspective of the Democratic Senate, Obama was their man. Joe Biden’s awkward bit of man love really did encapsulate the love the Senate had for Barack. With the push from the old Senate war horses, Mr. Hope and Change was unleashed on an unwary electorate.

Still as culpable as people as Dick Durban were, a huge portion of the blame has to rest with Obama. Having watched the man go through the motions, detached, reactive, unmotivated, I wonder why the hell he wanted the job in the first place. He worked so assiduously, making no false moves, saying all the right things, leaving no political trace, looking for his main chance to become the first African-American President. And it came to him only two years into his Senate tenure; woefully unprepared and unready for the slot of the Chief Executive.

What kind of egomania combined with cognitive dissonance allowed a man with not even two years in the Senate to think he was ready for the Oval Office? With his studied avoidance of hard political choices, and his constitutional inability to handle any kind of conflict, Obama should have known that his personal defects made him unsuited for the job during a time of hyper-partisanship.

I don’t like using the politically and racially loaded word “arrogant” to describe the Obama, but it is the only word that fits. The man is unbelievably arrogant. He bought into his own propaganda and drank deep his own kool-aid. He really believed that he was a transformational actor, a person for the ages. He believed that his unique gifts would lead the US out of the hyper-partisan hell it found itself in.

But Obama did not want to do the real work, he did not want to confront a Regan legacy head on, but co-opt it. He thought he could do the small bore Neo-Liberal politics of Bill Clinton without the charm and compassion that the Big Dog brought to the discussion. Barack Obama also thought he could do the politics without Bill Clinton’s willingness to scrap. Clinton always saw politics as a way to connect to people; Obama treats politics like a math equation.

Yet for all his faults, Obama was able to snooker the media and then, very narrowly, the Primary voters, into his myth of adequacy. He was able to convince the nation that he was a better option than McCain, which he was and still is. What he was not able to do, was resolve the central failure of our Political Duopoly, and the rabid partisanship it creates. He never had the tools to do that, he never had the foundational principles, he never had the emotional equipment, he never had the grit. Barack Obama only had his exaggerated belief in himself as a man that would use sweat reason and compromise to bring about unanimity. Not having any ideology to speak of, he never understood the ideological underpinnings of the Republicans nor his base. He knew not either himself or his opponents, which is why he keeps failing. Sun Tzu would not approve.

Oh No!! What A Foolish Thing To Say

2011-12-24T11:55:00.000-08:00

“It’s interesting…. Deep down underneath all the work I do, I think there’s a laziness in me,” Obama said. “It’s probably from growing up in Hawaii, and it’s sunny outside. Sitting on the beach.”

Snip

Oh no,

I just read the Atlantic article, what the fudge? How does a consummate politician like Barack Obama deliver such a bone-headed quote? From the small bit revealed by the piece, this looks like a Barbra Walters fluff job, a bit of Presidential suck up and “human interest story” tossed to the viewers as a bit of Christmas candy. Babara even tried to save Obama from the foolish quote.

What a huge gift this is to every racist, crypto racist, bigot, Obamaphobe, and right wing whack-a-loon out there. Does Obama not get how power packed and dangerous a word like “lazy” is for a man of his skin tone? He going to see this Lazy quote again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Was his brain in the “Off” position?

Obama just gave a huge Christmas gift to every right wing chuckle-head out there. Lazy? Are you serious Mr. President? You went THERE? Oh my stars and garters, I must retire to the fainting couch. Be a dear, and make my usual drink extra strong, light on the ice. Mercy!

Why the Republican Crackup is Bad For America

2011-12-24T09:35:00.001-08:00

Robert Reich

"As Michael Lind has noted, today’s Tea Party is less an ideological movement than the latest incarnation of an angry white minority – predominantly Southern, and mainly rural – that has repeatedly attacked American democracy in order to get its way."
...

This stop-at-nothing radicalism is dangerous for the GOP because most Americans recoil from it. Gingrich himself became an object of ridicule in the late 1990s, and many Republicans today worry that if he heads the ticket the Party will suffer large losses.

http://robertreich.org/post/14535718993

Heathens! What Have You Done To Christmas?!

2011-12-24T09:26:00.000-08:00

Genius I Tell You, Shear Genius!.

2011-12-23T01:06:00.000-08:00

CHICAGO (CN) - A 21-year-old man faces child abuse charges after posting a picture of his daughter's hands, legs and mouth bound with blue tape on his Facebook page with the words, "This is wut happens wen my baby hits me back," the Associated Press reported.

Andre Curry is charged with aggravated domestic battery.

http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/12/22/42461.htm

That did not take any time at all, did it?.

2011-12-22T04:02:00.000-08:00

BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq threatened on Wednesday to abandon an American-backed power-sharing government created a year ago, throwing a fragile democracy into further turmoil just after the departure of American troops and potentially tarnishing what has been cast as a major foreign policy achievement for President Obama.

In a nearly 90-minute news conference broadcast on tape-delay, Mr. Maliki defied his rivals and pushed back on all fronts in Iraq’s deepening political crisis, threatening to release investigatory files that he claimed implicated his opponents in terrorism.
He also threatened the Kurds, valuable allies with close ties to the Americans, warning that there would be “problems” if they protected Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, who fled to the semiautonomous Kurdish region in recent days to escape an arrest warrant on charges that he ran a death squad responsible for assassinations and bombings.

The escalating political crisis underscores the divisions among Iraq’s three main factions — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — that were largely papered over while the American military maintained a presence here. The crisis also lays bare the myriad problems left behind with the final departure of American troops: sectarianism, a judiciary that the populace views as beholden to one man and a political culture with no space for compromise.

http://nyti.ms/tyfwP6

Now you know why the President wanted to keep 30,000 soldiers on Iraqi soil. But that deal died right along with the SOFA. The Iraqi government hewed to the agreement that it reached with the Bush Administration and Team Obama could not move them off that marker.

Iraq is about to enter a Hobbesian struggle of the all against the all and there is not much Obama can do about it. The Shia majority of Iraq holds the upper hand as they have the numbers and the support of their neighbors to the East, Iran. The Kurds do have geography going for them as they can wage a long, dibilitating war of attrition from their mountains. The Sunnis of the Iron Triangle are in the worst position. They are a minority, the other factions of Iraq hate them for the depredations of Saddam, and they lack oil. They were the backbone of the previous regimes military and they have the support of the Saudis, but in long civil war of attrition, that may not mean much.

People who had a grasp of strained politics of Iraq, of the numerous fissures in that society only kept in check by dictatorial excess, knew that this end game was coming sooner or later. The only way the nation of Iraq remained whole was by being lead by an absolute SOB. That position was once held by Saddam Hussein. All the US invasion of 2001 did was offer that position to an ambitious Iraqi politician.

The misguided attempt by the right-wing incompetents of the Bush Administration to create a Arab democracy and free market utopia in Iraq by fiat has ended the only way it could, in failure. Yet the collapse of the NeoCon project by the waters of Babylon has taught no one in the D.C. bubble any humility. The fever dreams indulged in by the denizens of the Beltway continue unabated; with the Islamic Republic Of Iran next on the regime change "to do" list. There is no learning curve at all for the interventionist of the Potomac.

Vladivostok, Hello!!

2011-12-20T19:07:00.000-08:00

This very humble blog site has been blessed with a very active Russian audience; which is odd since your faithful reporter does not speak a word of the Slavic language. Still this has not prevented our fan, Mr. Anonymus, from attempting to comment on various posts. I'm sure the provided links are absolutely germain to the subject at hand; but just on the slight possibility they may not be very helpful, we have sent them to the great big spam file in the sky.

I hope the real flesh and blood commenters do keep on coming to the site, and are patient with delay in getting your contributions added. Your faithful reporter reads and approves every comment on the site and will continue to do so until this option becomes impractical.

The Slow Death Of Civil Liberties.

2011-12-20T04:17:00.000-08:00

A crime was committed this week. It was murder most foul. Some might call it a mercy killing, the victim was barely alive after all, but this ignores how the victim was starved, beaten, and abused over the course of a decade.

The murder was quite nefarious and performed by a cabal of bad actors. The conspirators had a long history of malice towards the victim and had laid their plans long before the actual act.

At first the attack was focused on the Forth Amendment. The cabal used all matter of devious, incremental means to chip away at the protections of the Forth. Most useful in that chipping away was the “War On Drugs.”

Little by little, with the connivance of a Supreme Court packed by Pro Government, “Law and Order” types, the protections of the Forth where sliced away by salami tactics. More and more carve out were provided so police could more easily ensnare the dirty, no good, rotten drug dealers.

But a funny thing happened, even with broader police powers, even with few obstructions placed in law enforcements way, the drug scourge did not diminish. If anything the cartels and the situation got worse. It was not long before overzealous police armed with “no knock” warrants, or no warrants at all, where establishing a reign of terror in many neighborhoods. Occasionally innocent people got shot and killed when the police blundered in unannounced into the wrong location.

Still, it took a grumpy Saudi and his unhappy campers holding out in the Afghan mountains to have the floodgates really open up. The shock of the 9/11 assault allowed unscrupulous politicians to push through a range of Constitution-busting proposals that they had on the back burners for decades. The nation took a sharp lurch toward authoritarianism with the ironically named PATRIOT ACT.

Not only did the PATRIOT ACT codify much of dirty deeds law enforcement were doing in the shadows, it went farther by adding a slew of repressive tools for the police to indulge themselves in.

The worst of the lot was the security theater put on by the newly formed TSA. The Transportation Security Agency began life as a oxymoron and quickly degenerated into farce. It managed to combine massive and utterly pointless privacy violations with utter incompetence in a way never seen before. Despite wielding various and sundry intrusive devices from hand-held metal detectors, to privacy- obliterating X-ray machines that rendered their victims essentially nude to ogling eyes, inspectors routinely smuggled in various knives, box cutters, and fake bombs with nary a blip. It was if the only real role of the TSA was to reduce the already submissive public into servile sheep, totally unaware of their inalienable rights, totally unaware of how utterly wrong the whole infernal machine was.

For seven long, depressing years the nation went further down the rabbit hole. Cowboy George and his posse shot up the landscape with nary a discouraging word from anyone not directly connected with the ACLU. The posse rode hard and long on the notion of the “Unitary Executive.” In the weird optics that were the “War On Terror,” plus a long history of dirty deeds done in the shadow wars of intelligence, up became down. The Bushites cried “Havoc” and let loose the dogs unlimited war. What mangy beast those dogs turned out to be.

Disposing of over two hundred years of history, plus over fifty years of the Nuremberg Laws, Incurious George Bush and Dead Eye Dick Cheney kidnapped, illegally detained, and tortured thousands of “suspected terrorists.” Each extraordinary rendition, each disappearance, each black site prison, each waterboarding, each savage beating, was a knife cut on the body politic. It was the death of thousand cuts for our notions of liberty.

When the facts became apparent, when Abu Ghraib became a household word, the dark lord of the Sith, Darth Cheney, defended the indefensible. Torture became “aggressive interrogation.” Procedures that had once been clearly defined as torture were rehabilitated by Vice Presidential fiat. The very definition of torture was warped, twisted, and distorted into a fun house reflection of itself. All of this was done to fight a rag-tag bunch of malcontents hiding like rats in a warren of caves.

By 2007 a bright and promising politician offered a way out of this fever dream. He promised to return the nation to its founding principles. The claim had some merit because the candidate had been a Constitutional Law Professor and State Representative before becoming a US Senator. While in Primary Campaign mode, the man spoke eloquently on the subject of returning to the status quo ante bellum. There was only one small problem. The candidate bailed out on the promise as soon as the nomination was nailed down. He voted for the get-out-of-jail bill that was FISA; granting cover for a massive violation of privacy rights by the NSA and the Bush Administration.

Real civil libertarians, the very few, but still proud, took one look at this climb down by candidate Barack Hussein Obama and started to become very concerned. No soothing words by the happy clappy Obama partisans could calm the civil libertarians nerves or make them trust Obama. Barry had crossed the line on FISA reform, and the civil liberties crowd were now on their guard and on alert.

In three short years Obama earned every bit of civil libertarian distrust, and more. Wise heads knew that no executive every gives up new found power, or any other kind of power, unless the masses put a rhetorical gun to their heads. But fan politics, the cult of personality, and the toxic partisanship of the late 20th and early 21st century had trumped principle. The left was impotent, furiously spinning how the betrayal of Candidate Obama was not really betrayal at all; but “three dimensional chess.”

With no real opposition, Obama kept on expanding the unitary power of the President. Osama Bin Laden was whacked by the Obama Administration with a ruthless efficiency that would make a Mafia Don’s blood run cold. Anwar al-Awlaki, a natural born US citizen, was vaporized by a drone strike in Yemen with same vicious disregard for due process. But the very acme of this process was reached just this week with the passage of National Defense Authorization Act. By signing this bit of toxic sludge, our great Constitutional Scholar took on the powers of a divine monarch.

With the new law the President can detain people indefinitely, as long as he says the magical word “terrorist.” No Jury of peers need be consulted. No Judge need give his consent. No need to say “mother may I” to the Congress. The President has total, unchecked power to arrest and detain anyone, citizen or no, domestic or foreign, any time any where. The vote for this in the Senate was not even close; only seventeen Senators said no. It is an election year, and both Congresscritters and Senators were tripping over themselves to prove how “tough” they were on terrorism.

In the rush to prove their bona fides to the unwashed masses, the legislators of the Congress just gave a seal of approval to over eleven years of Bush-Cheney-Obama lawlessness. Congress gave into the notion that the US government that was able to respond to the threat of a nuclear armed Soviet Union without these extraordinary powers now needed them to handle the threat of a thoroughly broken Al Qaeda. Our freedoms had to be thrown away to protect us against the threat posed by incompetent shoe and underwear bombers.

I doubt our great legislators felt the slightest bit of shame when they pandered to the lowest common denominator of their electorate. The vote was, unfortunately, drop dead simple for the lot of corrupt cowards that now infest Congress. In proving that they were not “surrender monkeys” against the nefarious legions of the evil mooslim terrorists, the Congress surrendered one of the foundational liberties of the Republic.

It is now up to the courts to check this hideous error, if they are up to it. As constructed, I do not see the Supremes rushing in to check this power grab by the Executive branch. The trend of the highest court has been to find any excuse to either dodge these questions, or to find a way to grant the Executive ever more powers. All sorts of Constitutionally suspect procedures have gotten the green light from an ever more reactionary court. The hard won protections of 60’s and 70’s have been chipped away, eventually gutting the 4th , 5th, and other amendments.

In that war and the new war against terrorism the collateral damage has been massive. The supposed inalienable right to be secure in home and hearth, to be be secure in person and papers, to be left alone by an ever more intrusive government, has been trampled. Boastful cops have laughed at the protestations of put-upon citizens, brazenly letting those people exactly how powerless they are to the police power. But since this happens to the poor and the politically dispossessed, “Real Americans” could care less.

I have no idea when or even if the general public will respond to this ever increasing power grab by the Executive. I have no idea when or even if the general public will demand an end to this ever more destructive “War on Terror.” The general public is either somnolent or scared witless, or both. Only the happy few, the warriors of OWS, seem to be alive to the threat to the Republic. Only a few voices are calling out about the danger. Only a few note that a Democratic Republic can be neither in a prolonged war.

And what of Obama? It has been a long, strange, trip for the former Law Professor. It has been a long slide from fierce defender of the Constitution against the depredations of George W Bush, to the man who not only institutionalized the Bushite shredding of civil rights and civil liberties, but enlarged upon the Cheneyite doctrine of the Unitary Executive.

Still, any student of History would have told you to be very dubious of Obama’s promises made in the heat of the Campaign. The person who occupies the executive office never gives up the power granted to him. Once in power, Obama followed that hard and fast rule. He did not surrender power, he consolidated power. He was gracious enough to ask the Congress to provide the legal covering for the illicit power grab, but that was about it. Even the veto threat he issued on the bill was all about protecting his prerogatives, and his ability to act flexibly. It was about gaining the maximum of power with the minimum of accountability or oversight.

Congress was more than willing to give the Executive that flexibility. It was more than willing to surrender responsibility to the president. As Dan Carlin points out, Congress is more than willing to surrender real power for the illusion of power; as long as it can keep its prestige and keep the corruption going. The powers invested to the President by the Defense Authorization bill in no way affected the real game of the D.C. bubble : Pay To Play. Less oversight by Congress was a net gain for that institution, it gave the Congresscritters more time to dial for dollars, to hit up their contributors.

But the most depressing aspect of the whole affair is how alleged “Progressives” will defend Barack Obama’s utter betrayal of his campaign promise and his sacred oath. They would have done no such thing if John McCain were the incumbent. Obama can treat the provisions of the Constitution as negotiable because his clueless, sycophantic supporters would rather defend his every move than our foundational document. Instead of opposing this move with everything at their disposal, instead of shouting to rooftops the bare fact of Obama’s perfidy, they glance at their shoes and offer up a few vacuous mumbles. Their objections barely raise above a half-hearted “tut-tut.” And in that anemic response, the Constitution dies, in a barely audible whimper.

Something to Kwell About

2011-12-20T02:33:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON — Almost a century after her father's act of wartime bravery, 82-year-old Elsie Shemin-Roth of Missouri is nearing the end of her own determined battle. William Shemin was a 19-year-old kid from Bayonne, N.J., in 1918 when his heroics during World War I made him the recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation's second-highest combat award. The legendary Gen. John "Black Jack" Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, signed it himself. But for a decade, Shemin-Roth has pushed to get the Army to determine whether her father actually deserved the ultimate military award — the Medal of Honor — but was denied because of discrimination.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/19/133535/wwi-vet-to-be-considered-for-honor.html

Just Call Him Nullification Newt.

2011-12-18T03:47:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON — Picking up where he left off in last Thursday's Republican presidential debate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Saturday continued to rail against the federal judicial system, accusing it of overstepping its constitutional role and arguing that the president and Congress can ignore court decisions.

In a conference call with reporters that sounded alternately like a campaign pitch and a law school lecture, Gingrich said, "The courts are too aggressive, and the courts have been trying to impose an elitist value system on a country that's inherently not elitist."

"The founding fathers were very distrustful of judges," Gingrich went on. "Saw them as an elite instrument of government designed to oppress the people. And, as a result, (they) consciously made the judicial branch the third branch and the weakest branch."

In order to restore balance between Congress, the White House, and the courts, Gingrich recommended ignoring rulings, impeaching judges, subpoenaing justices to have them explain their rulings and, as a last resort, abolishing the courts altogether.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/17/133409/gingrich-rails-at-courts-and-suggests.html
Snip

Yes, by all means, let's get rid of those pesky courts. Who needs constitutional interpretation after all? I'm sure that neither the Executive or the Legislative branch would dare abuse their powers once the check of the courts were eliminated.