stupid is as stupid does

I keep hearing people I would respect tell me it's stupid to vote for Obama, or say you're going to vote for Obama, if you don't respect his policies.

As someone who says and does things that are pretty stupid, let me offer a rationale why someone who hates what Obama has done and is intent on doing will probably end up voting for the jerk, anyway.

You remember that Bill Clinton guy. You know, promoted NAFTA, repealed Glass-Stegall, and cheered about it. The Third Way guy. And Al Gore, his Vice President, who pretty much rolled over for all of it. He was such a weak candidate in his progressive credentials that he pretty much let Dubya and Cheneyburton walk all over him and steal the election. No wonder so many conscientious people voted for Ralph Nader.

No wonder Cheneyburton and the Company got the New Pearl Harbor they wrote a letter to Clinton about...

Look, I voted for Obama in the last election. I said then before I voted for him that if he turned out as badly as he seemed with all that bank$ter backing I'd mock him as much as I did Commander Bunnypants. It turns out the Laureate has proved to be as venal as we'd imagined and feared. Pretty much like the Clintons, but with less charisma, unless you go for his schtick.

But he's no Dick Cheney.

Of course, even the Republicans hated and feared Cheney at the end, which is probably one reason Obama won, really. The other is to give Poppy's man Gates a chance to repair Rumsfeld's damage under a bipartisan cover without further offending the Cheneyburton faction. But Obama hasn't had time to set the tone for Jebbie yet. This is why all the Republicans running are so terribly demented. The Koch/ Dominionist crowd would really like to take this one, but Poppy's Company is betting even we won't buy into that disaster.

Because make no mistake, if the American Taliban win the presidency, you haven't seen bad yet.

It's a stupid reason to vote for Obama, but I also voted for Gore in 2000. If the old sawhorse had won, shit would have still hit the fan, but perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people might still walk the earth, and there would be no Endless War.

But perhaps it is a bit unfair to compare the Laureate with the Slick One. Even Digby notices:

...So here's what's happened so far. The President put forth a jobs bill, which didn't make it through the congress, as expected. This jobs bill was highly touted as containing "ideas" that Republicans had proposed in the past and therefore, it should have "something for everyone." Needless to say, the GOP wasn't interested in any one from column A and one from column B negotiating. After the defeat of the big jobs package, the Democrats announced they were going to propose popular pieces of the bill and force the Republicans to prove once and for all that they don't care about the plight of the average American as they join together in Scrooglike conformity.

Unfortunately, the Republicans decided not to play (surprise!) and are instead proposing their own combinations of the most toxic conservative elements of the President's bill and the President is apparently signing on, thus signing into law a terrible GOP policy while simultaneously giving them a "bipartisan" win...

Yes, the Laureate is busy playing n-dimensional chess, while the Reptilians are playing poker. Too bad it's not Slick Hillie in office instead, some say, she'd never fall for that trick. That gamblers and gamesmanship is what got us, and keep us, in a world of trouble is totally beside the point to those intent on the play.

don't forget to duck

The 200m diameter asteroid 2005 YU55 is set to pass within the moon's orbit of earth on November 8th.

Of course, they test the nationwide emergency alert system on the next day

steal this logo

They might not get it on Long Island, but they think they sure know how to sell it:

...In a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) application, Robert and Diane Maresca are seeking to trademark the phrase “Occupy Wall St.” so that they can place it on a wide variety of goods, including bumper stickers, shirts, beach bags, footwear, umbrellas, and hobo bags.

what happens when criminal meets incompetent?

...a big fat meal is what happens:

...The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting..

What, objecting to be stuck holding the bag on $75 Trillion's worth of bad bets by the Big B.o'A.? The main$tream can't see what the fuss is all about...



So B.o'A. wraps more coils around you:

...This move reflects either criminal incompetence or abject corruption by the Fed. Even though I’ve expressed my doubts as to whether Dodd Frank resolutions will work, dumping derivatives into depositaries pretty much guarantees a Dodd Frank resolution will fail. Remember the effect of the 2005 bankruptcy law revisions: derivatives counterparties are first in line, they get to grab assets first and leave everyone else to scramble for crumbs. So this move amounts to a direct transfer from derivatives counterparties of Merrill to the taxpayer, via the FDIC, which would have to make depositors whole after derivatives counterparties grabbed collateral. It’s well nigh impossible to have an orderly wind down in this scenario. You have a derivatives counterparty land grab and an abrupt insolvency. Lehman failed over a weekend after JP Morgan grabbed collateral.

But it’s even worse than that. During the savings & loan crisis, the FDIC did not have enough in deposit insurance receipts to pay for the Resolution Trust Corporation wind-down vehicle. It had to get more funding from Congress. This move paves the way for another TARP-style shakedown of taxpayers, this time to save depositors. No Congressman would dare vote against that. This move is Machiavellian, and just plain evil...

But seriously, this should not be seen as a deathwatch of the B.o'A. unless you mean watching while the Big Snake strangles the country while our government is being drowned in Grover Norquist's bathtub.

None of this is an accident, and if you think it is, you haven't been paying attention.

These aren't zombie banks falling apart as they stagger after you.

These are predators, big reptilian, and lethal if you let them wrap their coils around you.

job selection for psychopaths

Is it any wonder that our social order selects for leaders that are, to put it mildly, unbalanced?

Or that it disposes of them in a morality tale before they can tell anyone where all the bodies are buried or who ordered them planted?

promises on the table and stealing beneath it

While the Laureate is promising all troops out of Iraq by the end of the year with noises of vocal shock of the $erious people in D.C., in a quieter corner the administration just gave BP the okay to drill in the Gulf again.

emminent Dominion

You are not a citizen, only a consumer in a country owned by and for the oil companies.

...TransCanada, a Canadian oil company, promises to confiscate private land from South Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico, and has already filed nearly 60 lawsuits against private US citizens who refuse to allow the Keystone XL pipeline on their property, even though the controversial project has yet to receive federal approval...

And if you beotches complain? Daddy Oilbucks will cut you off.

it's a suicide rap

Reich on the Austerity Death Trap.

...Can we just put ideology aside for a moment and be clear about the facts? Consumer spending (70 percent of the economy) is flat or dropping because consumers are losing their jobs and wages, and don’t have the dough. And businesses aren’t hiring because they don’t have enough customers.

The only way out of this vicious cycle is for the government – the spender of last resort – to boost the economy. The regressives are all calling for the opposite.

But even without these hare-brained Republican plans, we’re heading in their direction anyway. Unless Republicans agree to a budget deal before the end of the year (don’t hold your breath), the temporary payroll tax cuts and extended unemployment benefits we have now will end.

The result will be the most stringent fiscal tightening of any large economy in the world.

Together with ongoing cuts at the state and local government level, the scale of this fiscal contraction would be almost unprecedented.

It will come at a time when 25 million are Americans looking for full-time work, median incomes are dropping, home foreclosures rising, and a record 37 percent of American families with young children are in poverty.

To call this economic lunacy is to understate the point.

And if you think 2011 is bad, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Even if you’re a deficit hawk this is nuts. Instead of reducing the ratio of debt to the size of the overall economy, this strategy increases the ratio because it causes the economy to shrink.

Call it the austerity death trap.

Under these circumstances, the harder a country works to cut its debt, the worse the ratio becomes — because the economy shrinks even faster...

A.k.a. a vicious cycle, the negative feedback amplifying itself at each step, and the conservative ideologues in either party screeching louder to do more at each step down the death spiral of the economy- and society- into the new feudalism.

treason to the Company

Limburger and the Murdoch machine are decrying the treasonous advice guys like Tiabbi are openly giving OWS.

Here's a little bit of Tiabbi's pinko commie advice he's sending secretly to his co-conspirators and anyone else who reads Rolling Stone;

...1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called "Too Big to Fail" financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term "Systemically Dangerous Institutions" – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.

2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about. It would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes like High Frequency Trading, and force Wall Street to go back to the job it's supposed to be doing, i.e., making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow.

3. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer's own money to lobby against him. You can either suck on the public teat or influence the next presidential race, but you can't do both. Butt out for once and let the people choose the next president and Congress.

4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. For starters, we need an immediate repeal of the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires. I defy any politician to stand up and defend that loophole during an election year.

5. Change the way bankers get paid. We need new laws preventing Wall Street executives from getting bonuses upfront for deals that might blow up in all of our faces later. It should be: You make a deal today, you get company stock you can redeem two or three years from now. That forces everyone to be invested in his own company's long-term health – no more Joe Cassanos pocketing multimillion-dollar bonuses for destroying the AIGs of the world.

To quote the immortal political philosopher Matt Damon from Rounders, "The key to No Limit poker is to put a man to a decision for all his chips." The only reason the Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of the world survive is that they're never forced, by the media or anyone else, to put all their cards on the table...

I'm sure the Rushies and the Ruperts and the Lloyds and little Jamies would like to give all you co-conspirators one way tickets to Gitmo for this un'Merikan talk.

After they foreclosed on you and seized your assets, anyway.

on the Masters of War

Bob Dylan:


Bob Dylan's MASTERS of WAR

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

leaving the big issues to the small and the silly

Small-minded, that is. Robert Reich:

...once again, Americans will hear the standard regressive litany: government is bad, Medicare and Medicaid should be cut, “Obamacare” is killing the economy, undocumented immigrants are taking our jobs, the military should get more money, taxes should be lowered on corporations and the rich, and regulations should be gutted.

Four years ago the most widely-watched TV debate among Republican aspirants attracted 3.2 million viewers. This year it’s almost twice that number. And for every viewer assume a multiplier effect as he or she shares what’s heard with friends and family.

Americans are listening more intently this time around because they’re hurting and they want answers. But the answers they’re getting from Republican candidates – tripping over themselves trying to appeal to hard-core regressives – are the wrong ones.

The correct ones aren’t being aired.

That’s partly because there’s no primary contest in the Democratic party. So Republicans automatically get loads of free broadcast time to air their regressive nonsense while the Democrats get none.

But even if the President had equal time, the debate about what to do about the crisis would still be frighteningly narrow.

That’s because the President’s answers don’t nearly match up to the magnitude of the crisis...

It's because the same bank$ters own both parties.

It's because the answers they're trying to sell to the 99% are the right solutions for the 1%.

bigger fleas have smaller fleas upon their back to watch 'em

the mole rats walk among us

from Gawker via Cryptogon:

...it seems the FBI and NYPD have had help tracking protesters' moves thanks to a conservative computer security expert who gained access to one of the group's internal mailing lists, and then handed over information on the group's plans to authorities and corporations targeted by protesters.

Since the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, New York security consultant Thomas Ryan has been waging a campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan says he's done contract work for the U.S. Army and he brags on his blog that he leads "a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world." But over the past few weeks, he and his computer security buddies have been spending time covertly attending Occupy Wall Street meetings, monitoring organizers' social media accounts, and hanging out with protesters in Lower Manhattan...

At this point in time, there are probably dozens of private security and police moles all over the movement. And since the Europeans seem to be taking heart from the existance of a resistance here, likely the CIA, DIA, and the NSA are all over the movement now too. Unless the Occupation can enlist a real-life V or an Adam Selene, it should avoid the internet like the plague.

'Merikan Fall

soon everyone will have lots of time to do this

...if the bank$ters keep playing their same casino

“It’s not a middle-class uprising. It’s fringe groups. It’s people who have the time to do this...”

"...Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well..."

Well, sure, as long as Uncle $ugar keeps bankrolling your dice rolls. But destroy the middle class and create more jobless, and you change your winning bet. That rag-tag mob will just get bigger as it begins to look more ragged.

And hungry.

So just keep on keeping on, Marie, I'm sure there's plenty of cake to go around.

lots of jobs there

He sees absolutely nothing wrong with this picture.

It's left his state- and soon the rest of the country if he or his cronies win- looking worse than the Sahara.

you are simply a shadow to someone having someone else's dream

Krugman again:

...In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all.

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets — and private rating agencies played along. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.

No, in the universe of the Republican Party we found ourselves in a crisis because Representative Barney Frank forced helpless bankers to lend money to the undeserving poor...

...The Great Recession should have been a huge wake-up call. Nothing like this was supposed to be possible in the modern world. Everyone, and I mean everyone, should be engaged in serious soul-searching, asking how much of what he or she thought was true actually isn’t.

But the G.O.P. has responded to the crisis not by rethinking its dogma but by adopting an even cruder version of that dogma, becoming a caricature of itself...

...It’s a terrible thing when an individual loses his or her grip on reality. But it’s much worse when the same thing happens to a whole political party, one that already has the power to block anything the president proposes — and which may soon control the whole government.

It's even more terrifying when said reality slippage among a significant fraction of the people is quite evidently benefiting another vastly smaller fraction that seems to have a clear grasp of what they stand to gain by such delusional beliefs.



And if you happen to be able to see through the charade, and there are enough said zealots in the crowd? Well, they used to burn witches, didn't they?

WInning the War on Terra

Keep on worrying about those Messican gangstas.

Our Boys in Afghanistan had a banner year, a 61% increase over last year's record opium crop, coming soon to a street corner in your town, as heroin.

Who sez nobody profits from these wars?

The Masters of Espionage

...Mr. Arbabsiar and the informant worked out a deal under which Mr. Arbabsiar would pay $1.5 million to Los Zetas to kill the Saudi ambassador at a restaurant in Washington...

Yes, trying to engage the dastardly Messican Drug Dealers to precipitate World War Whatever the D.o'D.'s calling it these days by assassination. For $1.5 million dollars.



They have a single mark perpetrator, and the DEA agent who busted him, to forge an international incident with. That's all.

Well, not quite. They also got an Iranian spokesman to show some love for the Occupation and claim the plot was a diversion. That's a Terra showpiece- $1.5 million, but linking the Occupation with Iranian espionage- priceless!

You can not ask for a more Mobius plot of disinformation, unless you hired a scriptwriter for an Austin Powers flick. For $1.5 million.

how you know

Somebody ought to tell the Iranian government that the only Americans willing to do political violence on American soil are federal agents, their informants, or their contractors.

You'd think if they'd been paying attention, they would know.