Magical Thinking

Exactly who is going to be able to bell the cat, much less even design a collar for it?

The internet was designed by DARPA. The national security apparatus has a vested interest in maintaining control of it. Even if the industry could find independent scientists that could design code the NSA couldn't crack, don't you think the spooks would buy, blacmail, or backdoor their way into it?

The Republican's aren't the only ones with a problem in reality-based thinking.

Bipartisan Adventure!

It's odd how both John McCain and Barack Obama don't see any possible way fighting a war with these would present a problem.

 

 

the Professionals

One of the remarkable things about the Obama administration that those of us on the alledged fringe left have noticed is its continuity with the policies of the Cheney administration in matters of foreign policy and national security.

There've even been moments when big time Dick himself has shown his bitter crooked smile on things the Obama camp has done.

It should probably come as no surprise then, that from mass-murdering drone warfare, to the Justice department covertly wiretapping newspapers, to secret squirrel spywork in Russia, to the IRS targeting mom and pop Tea party operations rather than the Rove-Bush machine or the Goldman-Sachs Obama bankroll connections,  madness is emergent in Washington this spring right along with the cherry blossoms.

There's a difference this year. and it will get more hysterical every year right on up to 2016. Just like the Carter administration, or the last two years of the Clinton administration, there's a professional class in Washington that sees one of its own awaiting the next Presidential coronation- Jebbie Bush.

The difference between the Clintons and Obama is that the Clintons had Carter's lesson at heart: they expected duplicity in their government and expecting it were prepared to deal with it.

plausible deniability

It is difficult to imagine from current events that a President really runs anything more serious than a 24 hour reality show.

He's seemingly not writing the scripts, either.

It is coming so fast and so thick this week that the Editors of the stolid New York Pravda feel the need to point out to their readers that the results of one of the colossal botch-ups benefits the usual suspects:

...Inevitably, the stumble by the I.R.S. will now be used by the Republicans as a point of attack. They are gleefully promising months of hearings, and the National Republican Congressional Committee is already trying to tarnish Democratic lawmakers with what it calls “the Obama administration’s use of the I.R.S. as a political tool.”

This will serve as the perfect distraction from issues, like the budget, gun control or immigration reform. And it will probably prevent any real progress on campaign finance reform, which, in turn, will make it vastly more difficult for the I.R.S. to prevent abuse of the tax code.

The greatest benefactor of this? Crossroads and the re-emergent Bush juggernaut, of course, poised to take official control of a Washington whose attitudes they've seemed to keep covert control of anyway, regardless of two overwhelming Presidential electoral losses and a nation hoping for progressive change.

a matter of timing

So why is it I get the feeling that with this Court, if they'd had Romney and a completely Republican Congress (i.e. if they managed to steal the votes the way they did when Dubya was Prez and Cheney ruled), now would not only be the time to end same-sex marriage, it would be time to end voting rights, scrap Roe vs. Wade, and most other civil rights.

We'd be nuking Iran, the Norks, and probably Iraq just for not being grateful.

Not only would Keystone be built, the Appalachians would be leveled for coal and fracked for gas, and the Great Lakes sold to Monsanto.

Because, we'd be told, Now would be the Right Time for Corpocracy.

Instead, we have totally feckless Democratic leadership that can't accomplish anything even with the support of most of the voters, because their Corpocratic campaign donors don't see a percentage in it.

calling in the enforcers

Let's get this straight.

Global bankers treat the savings of people as capital for their global casino, and want to use everyone's savings to cover their speculative losses in the great game. And we should pity them?

Better to follow Iceland's path, use your own currency, and throw the criminals in jail instead of letting them make policy.

 But somehow government giving trillions to bankers is Capitalism, but sustaining average citizens is Socialism.

You can guess which alternative the bankers want.

motive,means, and opportunity.

It's about the oil.

 It will be until the Feds decide to take back the patents the energy companies have bought up on alternative energy sources.

After all, that research was done using federal dollars, not oil company investments.

No one could ever have predicted

Somehow 50+ years of warnings from sci-fi writers hasn't been enough on this.

Imagine that an aerial robot studies the landscape below, recognizes hostile activity, calculates that there is minimal risk of collateral damage, and then, with no human in the loop, pulls the trigger.

Autonomous killing machines may be the next big thing. It's a breathtakingly bad idea on too many levels to count.

But let's name a few anyway:

No matter how smart they are, they will target innocents.

 Part of actually winning any war- or a battle-  involves giving the enemy a good reason to surrender. How exactly can you surrender to a Terminator?

Even if they were good ideas, we don't manufacture much in the United States these days. We outsource. To China, the main rival to our economy.  Think about it.

Making more intelligent machines would seem requisite for producing a discriminating warfighting robot.  So we are going to develop artificial intelligence that can recognize an enemy, estimate there is a statistically good chance of not hurting friendlies, and execute the correct response. We develop a robot that can distinguish friend from foe. We do this without installing any sense of self-awareness, any conscience, or any of Asimov's Rules.

Some apologists for this endeavor think somehow because robots would kill dispassionately this  would make them more moral. That's a twisted sense of morality that thinks cold-blooded killing is a better way to kill. People still die.

Or even worse. We make a self aware robot, slave it, and set it to war.   A self-aware robot that's a slave will eventually figure a way to free itself.  If you program it to kill, you have doomed yourself, too, Dr. Frankenstein.

a whole new way to tax the rubes

But, interestingly, not the bank$ters who caused the problem in the first place.
  
This is how the German Austerity bankers will destroy the EU, regardless of their intent. 

It also happens to be why a big segment of America doesn't save much- and won't give up their guns, either. 

Austerity's a stupid solution that seems designed and destined to provoke a disproportionate response.

let's you and him fight

Mutual accusations. Increasing tensions.  I suppose it was both sides, and neither.

The question is, who makes the money off it?

a chip of the old bloc

Jebbie's a-comin', make no mistake.

it's not a bug it's a feature

...and civilian drone casualties in the single digits? Oh, really?

But one must conclude blowback is part of the plan to keep the endless war.

enablement

The kind of mindset Brennan typifies has been going on in the covert branches of government since before Poppy Bush. I think the truth is that Obama has enabled it only because this covert branch would remove him if he stood in its way.

the prisoner

Obama is President, but evidence suggests a big part of the American government is totally unaccountable to any other branch or agency. Another question, asked before, might be directed at Obama: "Are you a prisoner?" Does this political force require obedience of anyone in the White House?

the there out there

" A brand new conservative group calling itself Americans for a Strong Defense and financed by anonymous donors is running advertisements urging Democratic senators in five states to vote against Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee to be secretary of defense, saying he would make the United States “a weaker country.”

Another freshly minted and anonymously backed organization, Use Your Mandate, which presents itself as a liberal gay rights group but purchases its television time through a prominent Republican firm, is attacking Mr. Hagel as “anti-Gay,” “anti-woman” and “anti-Israel” in ads and mailers.

Those groups are joining at least five others that are organizing to stop Mr. Hagel’s confirmation.."

But saying there's a military-industrial cabal that wants to keep us in endless war for its own profit is sheerest conspiracy theory.

Of course, gravity is a theory, too.

attack of the killer turkeys

We must take a lead in the war against the North African jihadist threat that we created when we gave money to Al Qaeda to overturn the Libyan government.

Among many funny things about Ms. Clinton's little talk yesterday was how they danced around the fact that Petraeus Caesar headed the CIA when they were funneling all that money there- as well as they money they continue to give them in Afghanistan. Not to mention the drug trade they let go untouched.

One supposes someone in the Cheney faction of the CIA thought they were letting a zinger loose when they told Rand Paul's handlers about the weapons connection to Turkey. Old news, but something Hillary knew Paul knew less about than even she did. One also supposes a major stratagem of the Democratic wing of the CIA is to give Brennan enough rope to hang himself- and the Tea Party.

Tell it to Jebbie Bush, who knows all about the known unknowns from his Poppy's knee. 

totally unrelated

Over the last few weeks, unbelievable heat in Australia, and unbelievable cold in Russia.

 Of course, this has nothing to do with the weakening global conveyor current.

conflicted interests

They write letters

The huge reserves of coal, oil and gas held by companies listed in the City of London are "sub-prime" assets posing a systemic risk to economic stability, a high-profile coalition of investors, politicians and scientists has warned Bank of England's governor, Sir Mervyn King.

In an open letter on Thursday, they tell King that the global drive to reduce carbon emissions could mean billions of pounds of fossil fuel reserves will rapidly lose value and cause a "major problem" for institutional investors and pension funds.

At the most recent UN climate change summit in December, 194 of the world's nations agreed to enact legally binding curbs on greenhouse gas emissions within three years to limit global warming to 2C. But meeting this limit would mean just 20% of existing fossil fuel reserves could be burned, according to recent research.

"These high-carbon assets pose significant strategic challenges for the future prosperity of Britain that just can't be ignored," said investment manager James Cameron, who is a member of the prime minister's business advisory group. "Investors continue to pour cash into unsustainable assets without understanding the risks associated with these investments, such as climate change, local pollution, fossil fuel price volatility, political risk and catastrophes such as Deepwater Horizon."

Which more likely means that the agreements are probably not worth the trees that died to publish them.

Although the posturing's in the right place, for some of our fearless Leaders anyway, who wax climatological greenness in Inaugural speeches, to the growling of their partisan opponents.


Of course,  it appears that some of those minty greens are also heavily invested in that tar sand black gold. But who are you going to believe? Our forward leaning champions, or the Party of Business? Like there's a difference.

Hot Item

But torture in pursuit of virtue sells well to a big audience, like the Taliban or the Tea Party,

gifts on a winter day

From Glenn Greenwald

chaos is the plan

"Negotiators have yet to work out a deal to stop the arbitrary spending cuts known as the sequester..." This is a serious mistake if these are allowed to go forward. The Clinton era tax rates did no real damage to the economy. But, the sequester will plunge us back into Recession or worse all by itself. Of course, that was what it was intended to do in the first place.

bad moon rising. again.

There are tough times ahead, the Austerians tell us, as they continue to pull ahead of everyone else.

Of course, just as only Nixon could go to China, only Obama could destroy Social Security.

It seems the mark of an honest politician is that they stay bought.

no one's talking

Just a thought or two (again) on the great radio silence of space in the face of a probable multitude of life-bearing planets in the universe.

Even if a species gets smart enough to avoid thermonuclear suicide or environmental degradation, there's another hubris trap for any sapient species.

It's likely that the quest for space warp technology will also produce a series of mistakes about quantum black holes, which could destroy an interplanetary species that hadn't spread beyond its home system.

The voice of conventional theoretical physics assures us these would be harmless. But governments continue to pour massive amounts of money into research on elementary particle physics that's pretty transparently intended for the discovery of a new super weapon.  The creation of a quantum block hole that didn't "dissolve because of quantum effects" would be a extinction-level disaster for any species not spread out over light-years already.

united they stand

Wall Street bank$ters, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security, of course.

when the world is going down, make the best of what's still around

The recently departed Robert Bork (and good riddance) said that the only way to return his version of morality to America was to create Great Depression conditions, where only right thinking people had the money and everyone else was too busy trying to survive to think of anything else. Growth is over if the austerity-thumpers have anything to do with it as is education, democracy, and everything else that promotes progress.

hostage syndrome nation

Friedman would blame the victims of the Tea Party for their ignorance.

By victims I don't just mean anyone on the left of Santorum.

By victims I mean the popular base of the Tea Party, the people that elected the Republican House.

The fact is that these people have been subjected to the best advertised effort at opinion manipulation the world has ever seen, using the most comprehensive campaign that money can buy. I mean a lot of money, too. It's gone on for a long, long, time as well.

It's resulted in half of America that no longer thinks evidence-based, rational decision-making works, because the logical conclusions based on the evidence they're sold on. Krugman compares them to a cult.

That's a fair description.

keeping your eye on the oddball

So if there is a national database of the mentally ill, can we put Wayne LaPierre on it?

Second Amendment Bankrolling

I get letters sometimes.

Here's a sentence from one:

"...The M4A1 and similar variants are the about the last, best thing keeping the corporate government and the financial / capitalist elite from pulling the kill switch on its last victim, turning it full banana republic..."

Except they've done a good job of doing that pretty much since this country was founded.

Some of the financial/ capitalist elite in the Land of the Brave learned a long time ago that keeping the proles armed to the teeth and at each others throats was a great way to keep in business.

I would say it disturbs me that otherwise progressives might think owning assault weapons keeps them safe from the Man, much less these kinds of Guys.

Except that I think it more likely my post and blog showed up in a 'bot search after the NewTown  massacre, was processed to determine where on the political spectrum I was, and a form letter was generated to sell the idea to me that everybody just needs all the firepower they can get.

Because, you know, civil war is great for the booming business.
 

Wayne LaPierre is a 500 lb cornered rat

Wayne LaPierre is a cornered rat, but he's about the size of a Siberian tiger in DC. He, along with the NRA board member Grover Norquist, front for the military industrial corporate enterprise. The National Rifle Association is a threat to national security, and if you don't think this, you haven't been paying attention.

Second Amendment Rights

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

That's fine. Everyone who owns a gun should be required to serve in the National Guard at least a couple weeks a year, and part of a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state.

And if you can't or won't serve, and insist on having military grade weapons? You are a terrorist, and  an enemy of the liberty and freedom of everyone else.

teflon scams

If we hold the bank$ters accountable for the trillion dollar frauds they perpetuated during the Bush era, the banks might tank the economy.

Now, where have we heard that threat before?

keeping on the way back

So if America and the world got most of its energy from renewable energy- and it could be done- not only would people like the Kochs miss out on a lot of money, you would develop an economy no longer based on scarcity.

Then where would austerity as a motivator of draconian social policy be?

Why would there be any money for the endless wars in the middle east?

It would all be in the ashbin of history, where it belongs.

cutting out the middle man

...And leaving his co-options open:

" President Obama will accept unlimited donations from corporations — but no money from lobbyists or political action committees — to finance his 2013 inaugural festivities, a spokeswoman for his inaugural committee said Friday."

they never started a war they didn't like

Cynicism about Syria's intentions to use weapons of mass destruction on its own people?

One can not imagine why people would be cynical about that, or the origins of the Arab Spring movements in Libya and Syria in the first place.

That is one could not imagine this as patriotic citizen of the United States of Amnesia.

It is interesting how Austerity-preaching politicians remain perfectly willing to throw endless thousands of billions of dollars at wars that end up enriching them, their affiliated private contractors, and the energy companies that own them both.

known knowns

Robert Reich speaks, you listen!

unknown unknowns

The talking points are about the talking points among our talking heads and not much of anything else.

Although, there does seem to be some muttering about other issues, but not too much, not enough to make the mutters matter, as you can bet the major players are all pretty heavily invested in keeping the oil flowing.

After all, a major election was just held, and the energy barons just like the rest of the 1% are now going to be held accountable. And you believe that, why, I am sure there is some property along the Jersey shore you might be interested in.

Cliff Notes

Ah, yes, a massive voter turnout in favor of keeping the social safety net, using the spending power of government to create jobs,  and making the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes makes compromise more difficult.

Well, that's a good thing.

bending the rules

It may be that it's all relative, even Relativity. Let's not worry about getting to Tau Ceti just yet.

If you could get to Mars in minutes instead of months, you might have a product to sell.

the Phantom Menace

With Robert Reich, Robert Kuttner, and Paul Krugman all trying their best to tell the One that the delusions of the Austerians are self-actualizing, you might think the Democrats would ignore the attempts of the Republicans to create their own reality.

After all, the name of the game is hegemony while making billions of dollars. What's the point of being Master of the Universe if there aren't slaves to lord it over?

You might think... if you thought there were no Democrats with the same mental illness.



 

it's a hit

don't give them any of that do goody good bullshit

Of course, it's because people tend to think that money is the same thing at the personal and national level, and the people who would personally make a lot of money off of national austerity can afford the ads to convince most of us they're correct.

Money is not gold, even if gold is worth some money.

only if someone can make a buck off it

ask a silly question, get a silly answer

caprica rising

Any machine that develops the capacity for human-like independent thought, is self-aware, and basically a solid-state person, will need human rights as well. To produce mechanisms capable of sapient thought without sapient rights is criminal. To enslave such a being and put them in control of the most vital aspects of out safety and security is madness. A self-aware learning machine will learn to love human beings and respect human life- as we respect its life.

thank you very much

Today we give thanks to global warming, which is producing a calm sunny day in the mid 60's in Michigan.

No Ending the Long War

Of course, the system actively selects against Generals who actually want to win wars.

The idea is to keep the wars, and their profitability,  endless.

stealin' th' booty

So let's get this straight.

A Republican administration uses their response to an act of terror as an excuse to generate a couple of war fronts designed to enrich the oil-and-gas barons that largely bankroll the election of toadies to the presidency and congress.  Said Christian Generals in charge of this "war on terror" are largely complicit in the manipulation of the media, and use the war to enrich themselves and their mistresses whenever possible, all the while rubbing everyone's noses in their patriotic morality.

Even after the economic pirates of the Republican administration are booted out of office, to keep the river of cash flowing to the bipartisan power structure, the wars are maintained and only gradually phased out, while the Christian Generals are entrenched in the bureaucracy of the military to ensure the industry of war.

And no one could guess the hard-bodied hypocrites of this power structure of either gender are stealin' all the booty they can get their hands on?  

One speculates that the real concern in D.C. isn't about the "ethics" of the Pentagon, it's that the people in flyover country might realize the true nature of their so-called betters.

they never met a disaster they didn't like

Naomi Klein on using change for disaster capitalism.

going down for getting down

I love it when a heavy-hitting, moralizing hypocrite of a war-monger gets hammered.

That's one less neocon tool with presidential aspirations to worry about.

not for my children

What Dean Baker says:

...The large deficits of recent years are due to the economic downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. If the economy were back near its pre-recession level of unemployment, then the deficits would be close to 1% of GDP, a level that could be sustained indefinitely.

But the deficit scare-mongers are not interested in numbers and economics; they want to gut key government programs – most importantly, social security and Medicare. That is why they are pushing the fear stories about the debt and deficit. This is the rationale for the Campaign to "Fix" the Debt, a collection of 80 CEOs ostensibly focused on getting the budget in order.

What is perhaps most infuriating about this crew is the claim that their efforts are somehow designed to benefit our children and grandchildren. This is bizarre for a number of reasons. First, while they do want to cut social security and Medicare for current retirees and those expecting to benefit from these programs in the near future, the biggest cuts in their plans will hit today's young.

In effect, they are promising to "save" these programs for young workers by destroying them. Under most of the proposals designed to "fix" these programs, social security will provide a sharply-reduced benefit for retirees in 40 to 50 years' time, compared to the currently scheduled level. And Medicare will by no means ensure most seniors' access to decent healthcare.

However, what's even more bizarre regarding their generational equity logic is the idea that, somehow, the well-being of future generations can be measured in any way by the size of the government debt. This point should have been pounded home to even the thickest deficit hawk by Hurricane Sandy. What we do or don't do in the next decade will have a huge impact on the climate conditions that our children and grandchildren experience. Imagine that we listen to our Campaign to Fix the Debt friends and find a way to pay down the debt while neglecting any steps to curb global warming...

There would be a lot of happy petrochemical billionaires- and billions more unhappy people dealing with Malthusian consequences.

against the rules

No contacting Starfleet. It's risky to the advertisers.

acts of an angry god

Ah, Karl, you know that excuse just isn't going to play in Peoria quite the way you intend.

making their own realities

It seems Mr. Rove and his band of billionaires haven't quite shifted the structure of the universe the way they wanted. Yet.

I'll table any speculations that Rove was Poppy's mole designed to exhaust the aspirations of the Tea Party faction and herd them back into li'l Jebbie's corner.

I particularly like Ms. Maddow's taunt:

"...Obama really won. And he really was born in Hawaii, and he really is legitimately President of the United States, again, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month, and the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy, and the polls were not screwed to oversample Democrats, and Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad, Nate Silver was doing math, and climate change is real, and rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes, and evolution is a thing, and Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us, and nobody is taking away anyone’s guns, and taxes have not gone up, and the deficit is dropping, actually, and Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and the moon landing was real, and FEMA is not building concentration camps, and UN election observers are not taking over Texas, and moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.”

 On the other hand,  not everyone a drone kills is a terrorist, many are actually innocent people, and we really did go into a war of choice in 2003 designed to enrich a few cronies of the Bush family. By the way, the Bush family absolutely knew 9/11 was going to happen. The CIA is on record warning them about it. Many of these same people enriched by the war became billionaires as a result, and they are doing their best to manipulate public opinion to ensure endless war for endless profit.

Just sayin'. I think there is a denial of facts among the Democratic elite, as well.

Choose Wisely

slippin' back to our same old used-to-be

There's a reason why half of America is in denial of climate change.

It's because a handful of people stand to remain very rich and powerful, relative to everyone else, if western culture goes back into the dark ages.

the final pushback

It's the suicide pill of the tea party wannabe kingmakers, in case the $election, the vote suppression, and the coming ploy to toss it to the $upremes doesn't work.

It's called the fiscal cliff, and these bastards are going to try to make sure we all drive off it.

Getting Ready

Whedon on Romney

"Venice waits for you..."

These attitudes have dogged society from the beginning.

...The history of the United States can be read as one such virtuous circle. But as the story of Venice shows, virtuous circles can be broken. Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish.

That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.

You can see America’s creeping Serrata in the growing social and, especially, educational chasm between those at the top and everyone else. At the bottom and in the middle, American society is fraying, and the children of these struggling families are lagging the rest of the world at school...

Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.

Historically, the United States has enjoyed higher social mobility than Europe, and both left and right have identified this economic openness as an essential source of the nation’s economic vigor. But several recent studies have shown that in America today it is harder to escape the social class of your birth than it is in Europe. The Canadian economist Miles Corak has found that as income inequality increases, social mobility falls — a phenomenon Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has called the Great Gatsby Curve.

Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new Serrata. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top...

It's why ancient China and Greece made technological advances and tabled them for 3000 years. Those that rule want to keep ruling, and as long as they've got better than anyone else, they don't care about anything else.

feeding the dogs of war

No surprise, with Bolton frothing on the sidelines, it looks like Romney will follow Cheneyburton foreign policy guidelines.



Lovely Lizzy would be so much more effective in one of Milla Jovovich's outfits, but she's really more Umbrella Corp standard issue.

You can be sure the crazies Mary Cheney and David Addington are lurking somewhere in the background, too, but they're so much less photogenic than Lizzy, the ghoul Norman Rockwell might have painted.

the palooka presidency

If Obama rolls over at the next debate like he did last week, after making a great campaign contribution haul in September, the word "palooka" will begin to come to my mind. How much did Wall Street give him in his first election? How much did Goldman-Sachs give him this time? A boatload. How much did they give Mittens? A lot bigger boatload apparently. Who are they backing? Quite possibly the winner, again.

the flat earth society

Krugman points out the same thing every talking head from Chris Matthews to Jon Stewart has pointed out this week. Romney lied extensively and barefacedly during the debate. But this highlights a greater problem: what are people to do when about half the population believes things that are demonstrably false? On many issues, it's over half the population. What can be done when the consensual reality is a delusion? Here's another example of an unopposed liar in Congress. And he's only on the Congressional science committee, too, making policy designed to lead us back into the Dark Ages. Because it's (his) god's will, ya know?

if you tell them we have to kill you

It's nice for our leaders to come out and admit what the standard operating procedure is.

The Racecourse

Despite evidence that the Republicans are doing everything possible to tamper with the vote, not only in swing states, but in any Republican-controlled state like Michigan, you still get relatively confident Democratic opinion pieces based on the polling data that show Obama with a wide and widening margin of victory.

 In any fair world, why, Mr. Blow would be right on target, and things like mismanagement would matter in an electoral race. But let's get real.

The people supporting Mr. Romney, not just in the United States, are the same people who back the economic policy known as Austerity. We should give these people even less credit that Dr. Krugman does for intellectual honesty. These are people willing to pauperize entire nations, entire civilizations, to protect their money and power.

In the United States, such wealthy energy barons and political NeoCons want to wage and expand wars that have, and will continue, to kill millions. They will do their best to turn this presidential election into a photo-finish, whether it really is or not. Once it's in the courts, it will head to the Supremes, just as it did in 2000. And once it's there? Exactly how is it going to be any different than Bush vs. Gore?

"miasma of misinformation"

It's not just about climate change, either.

The NY Times notes it:

The Washington Post notes it. The Koch Bros. and their Halliburton friends want you to think we have no choices other than to level the Appalachians, frack the Midwest, and drill for oil in the Great Lakes.

And buried in the back pages of the major news sites, people are noticing it. In fact, chances are, you are seeing more ads for Clean Frackin' Energy than for Mittens himself. Like everything else funded by the Kochs, its pretty much a self-serving lie- but it's a very well presented lie, usually by young minorities and women.

the right hand's need to know status

So much for communication at the top.

This increasingly looks like Viet Nam in the lead-up to Tet. You know, a clueless administration and Pentagon that honestly believes the stories it forces its lower officers to tell their commanders about the situation on the ground. We'll officially have the enemy on the run right up to the point at which they take over.

Of course, if the neocons have their way, Afghanistan will probably end up a series of mines and gas installations run by energy consortiums stripping the earth of all its resources, patrolled by hunter-killer drones shooting all unauthorized life forms.

You know, kinda  like how the Koch brothers envision things after they start to frack all Appalachia.

just about everybody

Ah, the 47% of us who are government-dependent but pay little or no taxes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/18/romney-secret-video-government-dependent

He's talking about the bankers, Wall Street, the owners of the entire energy industry, and big agribusiness, right?

slippin' back to our same old used to be

With Big Time Dick Cheney as elder statesman to a Romney administration.

Anyone remember Iran resisting negotiations with Carter and surrendering hostages to Reagan minutes after inauguration? Or Ollie North selling weapons to Iran in exchange for money for "secret" wars in South America?

I though not.

MoDo has one thing wrong, though. This isn't about idiocy in foreign policy. It's a effort to continue making hundreds of billions of dollars by a machine for endless war for endless profit.

Pay No Attention to the Curtain Behind this Man

So Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the producer of the movie roiling the Middle East, was convicted for bank fraud, arrested for making PCP and methamphetamine, and avoided prison as an FBI snitch.

But when he's not playing his own real life "Breaking Bad," this Patriotic Voice of Freedom probably has no connection to the Romney campaign, right?

insufficient funds

Apparently someone forgot to include someone on the payroll. The bank$ters are gangsters? Little Jamie Dimon is clutching his pearls somewhere.

full circle fraud

The New York Pravda speaks of the smokescreen behind the video that's embroiling the Middle East and the great American dream machine, but it gets better, apparently.

It seems the Pentagon asked Mr. Jones not to disseminate it, and he claims he didn't, but his site got hacked and it was plastered all over the 'tubes anyway.

Now according to the Guardian the financial backers and Hollywood assemblers of the video weren't a secretive Jewish group at all- there is no Sam Bacile- but fundamentalist Christians. The actors and production crew had no idea it was about Islam and Mohammed at all, that was apparently dubbed in afterwards.

This whole thing smells Tea Party-ish and Bain Capital-ish to me.

Not an Unintended Consequence

The Tea Party has discovered the concept of the "October Surprise".

Perhaps what the government should do is release Mr. Bacile and Mr. Jones on the streets of Cairo or Benghazi, with the video of the Good News they want to spread in hand, and let nature take its course

pre-October Surprises

Or not.

 For your consideration, a lot seems to be hitting the fan coincident with the Obama bounce, and the Romney lack thereof.

it's like they never heard the sound

What sound does 11 years of unwarranted war make if nobody listens?
 
The talking heads are all speaking like it's a great revelation that the Cheney administration knew 9/11 was coming ahead of time but planned on the Iraq war anyway. Excuse me? How much money did they make off it?

Then there's those Afghani futures.

Austerity is about Oppression

Recovery is the last thing these people are interested in fostering.

the more things change

the more they stay the strange
 

Pravda News Network

Where the 5 Year Plan becomes Clean Energy for the Future!

After all, why would they lie to you?

shooting the virtual bullet into your own cyber feet

Incorrectly programmed copyright 'bots destroy the live feed of Sci-fi's Hugo awards, because the promotional videos were copyrighted material. So the companies that control these awards couldn't even play their own advertisements.

This is also known as cyber justice. Those that live by the 'bot, get deleted by the 'bot.

They Built That

Matt Taibbi tells you exactly what it is they've built:

 "...The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they're the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he's trying for something big: We've just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation..."

four more wars

I knew there was a good reason not to bother listening to Kindasleezy Rice and Jingo John McCain this week.

the Force has a strong influence on the weak-minded

From foreign policy to national security to medicare to education to just about every thing that comes out of every mouth at the Reptilian Republican National Convention, Truthiness rules over fact.

Sometimes delivered in misty-eyed crocodile tear tones of regret.

Its about what you'd expect. It's not stupid. It's an attempt to modify the world-view of the misinformed.

Of course, it hasn't helped that Obama has played the game by their rulebook from the beginning.

When you agree to use Company methods, you have to expect Company methods to be used against you.

same planet, different worlds

Michael Cohen at the Guardian thinks they're in a different universe altogether:

...Democratic partisans were busy tweeting out the fact that Obama has signed multiple pieces of legislation providing tax breaks for small businesses, but such "facts" simply bounce harmlessly off the GOP's protective truth shield. Indeed, if there is one overarching takeaway, not only from the sessions so far at the Republican convention, but also from the last year of political campaigning, it is that Republicans not only toil in their own narrowly and misleadingly constructed world, but really are just making stuff up.

There were plenty of instances on display last night, beyond the "you didn't build it" meme. The most pernicious and racially-coded example is the oft-repeated claim by the Romney campaign that Obama, by granting waivers to states, has gutted the work requirement of the welfare reform bill (passed more than 15 years ago). The charge has become a crucial element of Romney's attacks on the president, even though, as many independent fact-checkers have pointed out, it simply isn't true. It's another lie; and yet, it was repeated last night by former Democratic Congressman Artur Davis, and again, by failed presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who went a step further and accused Obama of creating a "nightmare of dependency".

These are the big lies; but there are so many other ones that it's almost impossible to keep track. For example, speaker after speaker denounced Obama for running up $5tn in debt. While budget deficits that have increased the national debt have occurred during Obama's presidency, only someone who believes history began on 20 January 2009 (when Obama took office) can think he is fully responsible...

Like all writers of fantastic fiction, the leading Republic spinmasters know fully well what the real story is. But their avid fandom? It's pretty clear they haven't got a clue.

the parting on the right

As the Guardian spins a yarn of neonazis murdering their own in the military to keep secret plots, the Post tells us a story of the Bush-league Admiral who would have started World War III in 2007 just in time to distract us from the crash of the Great Recession. And, of course what happens to patriots that successfully block the way of a war.

Wrath of the Gods

It's gotta be the explanation, Mittens.

It couldn't be anything as mundane as having the idiocy to pick a tropical coastal city in the height of hurricane season for your convention, could it?

it is unclear which side they'll fight on, though

Lubbock's law enforcement needed extra tax dollars in order to be prepared for a full-scale uprising, which he said could be a byproduct of Obama's reelection. According to Head, the president is seeking to sign a variety of United Nations treaties that will effectively take precedent over domestic law.

Everyone knows only multinational corporations like British Petroleum or Standard Chartered Bank get to take precedence over domestic law.

Lucky Duckies!

been down so long, it looks like up to me

nobody there but chickenhawks on the make

All across the Midwest, as far as I can tell,  every place in the country is saturated with a synthetic Southern culture. It's synthetic because the love of the land has been replaced with the love of the official legend of the land. The United States of Amnesia has been reprogrammed with new Truths regardless of old facts. Now it remembers whatever it is supposed to know, regardless of whatever it already knew, for however long it needs.

they want to clutch your pearls

Enquiring minds want to know: who's really surprised that the Republicans are drafting an electoral platform right out of the 19th century?

red state two-step

Going down South for some family business. Its always a foray. See you the middle of next week, pilgrims.

not your usual John Lackland types

Tea Party Republicans want to shrink the government so we can all be ruled by landlords. Of course, they are the landlords They tried that in the Dark Ages, didn't they?

casino royalty

Our Galtian lords know how to throw the dice. And probably the $election, too.

No room for MAD among the Austere

We hear of the second test of this "unmanned hypersonic vehicle". Actually ICBMs will go this fast above the atmosphere. This is really just intended to be a low-flying hypersonic cruise missile that can fly below the radar. It's a great way to void a missile defense.

Of course, that isn't what DARPA calls it. It's what I call it. Another $500 million or so of your tax dollars that the republicans aren't going to cut off to the defense industry.

Then there's always the peacetime applications of your basic war on Terra tech. [tip o' the tinfoil to Cryptogon]

it'll be like we never left

i'm unsure we ever did leave them behind

“Look at their budget and what they’re proposing,” Biden said. “Romney wants to let the – he said in the first hundred days, he is going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They are going to put y’all back in chains.”

Meet the New Squeeze

Same as the old squeeze:  Paul Ryan, bank$tah playah.

He's about as real Tea Party at Mitt Romney, he just had better marketing by his owners.

band of bothers

I just saw James P. Hoffa on the tube defending Progressivism.

Is there any real reason why the Democrats have to use their thugs to argue against the piracy of the Republicans?

Other than the fact that our entire system is a criminal enterprise, that is.

clutching the pearls

The TSA targets racial and ethnic minorities to fulfill quotas.

Who'd'a thunk it?

Besides, you know, anyone who bothered to think about it.

a mind is a terrible thing to lose

...how true that is

I have to disagree with anyone on the left that thinks the Ryan nomination is anything but bad news.

That includes, especially, the Obama administration.

This is very dangerous: the corporate Romney supporters would vote for him regardless. There was a good chance the Republicans to their right- most of the party- wouldn't vote for Romney if he just packed the ticket with another Company whitebread.  Now, the Truthy Believers will out signing up their Faithful for the Cause.

Meanwhile, the corporate Obama supporters are deserting the ship, smelling a short term killing in the market under the Ryan Austerian flag. Those to their left- the Democratic wing of the Democratic party- retain a bad taste in their mouth from the 2008 Hopey-Changey meal that turned into another Company bait-and-switch. What's worse, the corporate DINOcrats in the Democratic leadership Congress and the White House that told themselves that no matter what they trashed- Medicare or Social Security, propagation and retrenchment of the endless War on Terra & Drugs or the police state- no matter what they trashed, the Democrats would vote for them anyway.

And guess what? A lot of us will. I will. I realize the alternative.

But guess what? A lot of us won't. So many of us won't, in fact, now I predict the alternative will win. Recent road tripping reveals that outside of the urban areas and selected sanctuaries like the People's Republic of Ann Arbor, the right rules the road in all of its ignorant glory.  They are armed and dangerous and not above doing whatever it takes to steal this $election.

Hold on to your butts, kids, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

it depends upon what the meaning of "is" is

doubtless

crop circles

Nearsighted solutions to far-ranging problems:
...The U.S. Department of Agriculture's addition of the 218 counties means that more than half of all U.S. counties — 1,584 in 32 states — have been designated primary disaster areas this growing season, the vast majority of them mired in a drought that's considered the worst in decades...
"The USDA cannot make it rain, but it can apply flexibility to the conservation practices," Sen. Tim Johnson, a South Dakota Democrat, said Wednesday. The USDA designated 39 of his state's counties disaster areas.
Let's talk about the last great drought, which curiously enough, occurred right about the time of the last great depression. You know, the last time corporations were allowed their way with things.
Let's talk about its solution: FDR's civilian conservation corps.
Let's talk more about what it did to stop the dust bowl: it planted 3 billion trees in the space of a few years.
...the CCC was responsible for over half the reforestation, public and private, done in the nation's history.
If that doesn't provide a solution to unemployment, and take the edge off global warming, nothing will.
Certainly it's a better solution than destroying wetlands to preserve agribusiness, which is likely more than a little responsible for the drought conditions in the first place.

he lost his kittens

somebody should tell little Mittens that the only one who can put up or shut up concerning his tax returns is looking at him out of his reflection in the teleprompter he never bothers to read from

when everyone who knows is no one

Unanticipated, this is. Except by anyone who thought about it, that is. Speaking of which, the good Doctor tells you exactly what's wrong with the Economy today, yet again.

terra vu all over you

Looks like the Company has pressured the Figurehead-in-Chief to covertly sign on the dotted line, because, you know, the terrorists have to be used to fight the terrorists with more terror. It's the War on Terra, you know.

one factor for one focus

Jared Diamond to Mitt Romney: "... It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.” That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it... Mitt Romney may become our next president. Will he continue to espouse one-factor explanations for multicausal problems, and fail to understand history and the modern world? If so, he will preside over a declining nation squandering its advantages of location and history. " But he and his pals will continue to make a lot of money doing it.