"American Stasi"

Charles Pierce is always a good read, as evidenced by the fact that he wrote the phrase from which I stole the title to this post.

 http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/nypd-spy-on-liberal-groups-7552703

To wit:

I expect we'll be hearing howls of outrage, and anguished cries for Liberty (!) from all the Republican contenders when word gets around that the NYPD apparently woke up one morning and decided it was the American Stasi.I expect we'll hear humble apologies from the people who laughed at the nervous-liberal slippery slope arguments about how unleashing the power of the U.S. intelligence apparatus on American Muslims invariably would result in that power's being loosed generally on people who disagreed with the government itself, and for any reason. I expect the president and his men will condemn this inexcusable abridgement of the Bill of Rights vigorously and vow to make whole its victims to the full extent of the law.

Why a metropolitan police force is sending officers (undercover, no less) to any other metropolitan area for the sole purpose of spying on American citizens is beyond me, but then again I'm still trying to sort the utility of police departments of all sizes routinely employing assault weapons in their day-to-day operations and obtaining armored vehicles to ride around in.

Glenzilla is shrill

Moar woar! 

Love the briefing's assertion that Iran will have useful nuclear capability within 36 months.

Best I recall, the Iranians were supposed to have the bomb by back in like 1991. What's taking them so long? 

Isn't the Iranian regime about to topple right after it achieves world domination?

I can't keep the narrative straight.

 

Golden Age Of Illness

Seems to be a longing for the diseases from America's "golden age." 

Because everything was better back in the good old days.

Can't help but think about the Far Side cartoon "the real Reason dinosaurs became extinct."

Charlie Pierce Owes Roy Batty An Apology

But is otherwise dead fucking right about Mitt Romney and what a Romney administration would look like.

Comes now this pure piece of manufactured product, this vacant replicant of American plutocracy, to lecture a country in the middle of a fragile recovery from an economic disaster brought on by the other soulless replicants on the topics of our vanishing work ethic, and the great moral cleansing power of onrushing poverty. And, because he cares less about the country he's planning to lead than he does about the next nickel he can squeeze out of it, he's doing so with rhetoric that owes more to George Wallace than it does to George Romney, who was a decent Republican in the days before greasy-beaked vultures like his spalpeen hijacked the party. (Which is pretty much what E.J. Dionne was saying recently.) Willard is working the old poor-people-are-robbing-you-blind melodeon again while his real targets are anyone who receives any kind of federal government assistance of any kind whatsoever. And don't fall for the old "states do it better" dodge. Willard knows full good and well that the states can't carry this kind of load, either, and that the costs will just get passed down to lower and lower levels of government until nobody can pay for anything, and the programs that he'd like to see eliminated because it will help him get elected simply disappear.

He is the real austerity candidate, the guy who will run the ball here for the banksters who are crippling Europe, and a lot of Europeans, with economic strategies that keep themselves afloat while children die of preventable diseases, and guaranteeing that whatever recoveries there will be in places like Ireland and the UK will be the sole property of the people who most deserve them. This is what Willard Romney would like to bring to America. He just has to convince enough people that the pain will be imposed upon the undeserving Them. It is a vicious puppet show of a campaign he's running.

Year after year we are told that America is just like a big business, and that all we need is the right cult hero CEO to run it (cue to exhume Steve Job, or Steve Forbes, or whoever). Been there, done that, it always turns out to be flat out wrong for 99% of the country. Besides, do you really want the assclowns who blew up your economy and your mortgage and got rich doing so to have more power than they already do?

No thanks.

Bruce Cockburn Can Really Play

Unemployment Kills

Truth is often stranger - and more terrifying - than fiction:

Instead, in a scheme so macabre that residents here are already speculating on when it will be turned into a movie script, three of the four men, one from Virginia, one from the Akron area and one still unidentified, were lured to their deaths, their bodies buried in shallow graves. The fourth man, from South Carolina, who was hired and driven to the property in rural southern Ohio, was shot in the arm but escaped and alerted the authorities. The “farm” was in fact land owned by a coal company.

More bodies may still be found, as the bogus advertisement, which was picked up by online job aggregators, drew more than 100 responses from Ohio and other states.