"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.

The One That Didn't Go Off

I recall the amazing lack of coverage, the shying away from the word "terrorism."

Charles Pierce published this a day before Anders Behring Breivik set off a car bomb in downtown Oslo then went on a shooting spree at a youth camp.

This is wrenching stuff. 

 h/t to Balloon Juice

Twenty Seven Strikes Again

Amy Winehouse is dead.

Given the high profile of her addictions this comes as little surprise, sad as it is. I admit that when she popped onto the music scene I took a couple of listens to Frank and Back To Black and tried very hard to like them.

I did not. Her music just didn't speak to me. Or perhaps I couldn't hear what she had to say.

Humans die in multitudes every second of every day. All but a rare few are utterly unknown to me. Those who exist far outside my small circle of family and friends but who are known to me can have an impact when living, and again when they die. At the very least a recognized name in the obituaries prompts me to say “Hmm...how sad.” The connections we have to public figures exist entirely in our minds. They are forged through our consumption of books, films, music, art, news and the like, but are of our own making. The person who prompted this connection, this kindred recognition doesn't know who we are, or that we even exist. That fact doesn't negate the reality of what they have made us feel, or think, or attempt.

Amy Winehouse is dead. Her music didn't touch or move me, but her desperate, whipsaw dance with addiction, too familiar to me, did. I don't believe there is anything after this world, so wishing peace upon her in some fictitious after life would be dishonest of me. The only peace she has found, intentionally, accidentally or otherwise, is the total surcease of death.

Worth Remembering

In the midst of the fury and frenzy surrounding the debt ceiling kerfluffle a simple fact has been utterly lost.

Congress need not reach any deal of any kind concerning the deficit (about which Republicans care not a whit), taxes, nor anything else. The debt ceiling is a relatively simple thing that can be raised entirely on its own.

That it has become a hostage to the vandals quest to annihilate government by other than military means is rather revealing.

That is all.

Oklahoma Covers Itself In, Well, Something

And it ain't exactly glory.

Our state continues its inexorable regression into the primordial ooze.

Steve Benen has it.

What Does "Melt Down" Mean?

An excellent primer by the ever useful Rachel Maddow.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Gone Silent

Gary Moore Is Dead

This is doubly odd for me as just last night I watched a BBC 4 documentary on the band.  Woke up this morning and read of his passing.


I readily admit I was never a fan of his solo music, but Moore played a significant role in Thin Lizzy, a great Irish rock band best known for cheeky and sometimes truly poetic lyrics and that awesome harmonizing twin guitar sound.

Moore several times rejoined the band on the road to take the place of whomever the latest guitar casualty was in that second spot, and he could seriously tear it up. He was also the other guitarist across form Scott Gorham on Black Rose, arguably the last Lizzy album worth a damn.

Moore was also a driving force behind the gathering of the band's alumni in Dublin in 2005 for a tribute concert set to coincide with the unveiling of a statue of Phil Lynott in the city. At that show Moore was on fire, and it was obvious from start to finish how much he loved the Thin Lizzy catalog.

58 years old. Damn shame.

A Likely Story, Indeed!

Three soldiers break into a medical marijuana dispensary in order to destroy the pot housed inside.

Cops had to rescue them when they locked themselves in the building. 

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Soldiers accused of breaking into a Colorado medical marijuana dispensary and then accidentally locking themselves inside told police they planned to destroy the marijuana - not smoke or sell it. 

The Gazette in Colorado Springs reports a police affidavit says two of the three Fort Carson soldiers told officers they were trying to steal the marijuana so they could get rid of it. 

Police say the three were arrested Saturday on second-degree burglary charges after they accidentally locked themselves in the Colorado Springs dispensary during a burglary attempt.

WaPo Article.

Hehe.

HAHAHAHAHA!

"We come no to smoke or steal your skunk, but to kill it."


That's audaciousness.

It's the kind of readily apparent lie a kid would tell his parents to explain away the brown stains all over his mouth when the chocolate's gone missing.

Gone Votin'

So we went and did our citizen's duty.

Having moved house since the 2008 election  we went to a different polling place, and it was really busy (of course, last time I voted in the middle of the day, but reported turnout in many places in Oklahoma was characterized as higher than usual during a gubernatorial year).


Rufus was the star of the show - several election workers approached me while I was in line for my ballot to ask questions. This is pretty typical anyplace I go where I wind up in a line, or waiting for something, or standing still for more than two seconds. 


Our xenophobic and spectacularly backward ass state approved a couple of embarrassing and unnecessary ballot questions, and yes, the Sharia Law one passed with flying colors.



State Representative Rex Duncan is remarkably stupid and ignorant, and alas, pretty par for the course in these here parts.

To The Polls

I'll be off to vote later after my wife comes home.

Every person I vote for in my state is going to lose, most by a gigantic margin. Some races that affect me feature incumbents running unopposed.

Oklahoma is a deeply backward state in too many ways, and when the day is done here it will have taken a decisively regressive step by finally simultaneously handing the governorship and both houses of the legislature to the Republican party. 

Big deal, right?

The Oklahoma Republican party is far to the right of the nearly insane national GOP. Every crackpot right wing idea you've heard of being floated in other states or by so-called "Tea Party" folks or conspiracy nuts will be front and center on the legislative agenda in this state once Mary Fallin is elected governor, and the takeover is complete. 

Think Birthers, Tenthers, nullifiers and interpositionists, anti-abortion zealots, immigration extremists, theocratic assholes and the like, and you've just got a notion of what politics will look like for 2011 Oklahoma. Pay attention to what happens here the next year or so, for it will be a preview of what will occur nationally if the inmates take over the Federal asylum, as they so rabidly hope to do.

I'll be voting today, because it is the right thing to do, and my  vote on some of the state questions (which include one of those lunatic right wing things about Sharia Law) may make a difference.

Repeat After Me

"Regulatory capture is a myth"

As George H. Painter was preparing to retire recently as one of two administrative law judges presiding over investor complaints at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, he issued an extraordinary request: 

Please don't assign my pending cases to the other judge. 

In a notice recently released by the CFTC, Painter said Judge Bruce Levine, his longtime colleague, had a secret agreement with a former Republican chairwoman of the agency to stand in the way of investors filing complaints with the agency. 

"On Judge Levine's first week on the job, nearly twenty years ago, he came into my office and stated that he had promised Wendy Gramm, then Chairwoman of the Commission, that we would never rule in a complainant's favor," Painter wrote. "A review of his rulings will confirm that he fulfilled his vow," Painter wrote. 

Painter continued: "Judge Levine, in the cynical guise of enforcing the rules, forces pro se complainants to run a hostile procedural gauntlet until they lose hope, and either withdraw their complaint or settle for a pittance, regardless of the merits of the case." 

The CFTC oversees trading of the nation's most important commodities, including oil, gold and cotton. The agency's administrative law judges handle cases in which investors allege that trading professionals or financial firms violated the rules. 

 Gramm's name in this is no surprise, considering to whom she was married and the infamous corporate board she soon wound up sitting on.

Headline Of The Day

From the "no shit" headline department:

 Banks Shared Clients’ Profits, but Not Losses

Here is the deal: Funds lend some of their stocks and bonds to Wall Street, in return for cash that banks like JPMorgan then invest. If the trades do well, the bank takes a cut of the profits. If the trades do poorly, the funds absorb all of the losses. 

The strategy is called securities lending, a practice that is thriving even though some investments linked to it were virtually wiped out during the financial panic of 2008. These trades were supposed to be safe enough to make a little extra money at little risk. 

JPMorgan customers, including public or corporate pension funds of I.B.M., New York State and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, ended up owing JPMorgan more than $500 million to cover the losses. But JPMorgan protected itself on some of these investments and kept millions of dollars in profit, before the trades went awry. 

"Went awry."

Hehe.

But they got theirs, and that's all that matters.

These Are Not Accidents

The financial crisis was not an accident or series of accidents, as has been proclaimed by its progenitors and the involved industries and even much of government itself. It was the logical outcome of releasing large corporations from any sane regulatory restraint, and worse, in many cases writing new regulations specifically allowing and encouraging extremely risky behavior.

With other people's money. And they got to keep all the profits. Personally.

Then there was the housing bubble, an intrinsic part of this grand theft of unsurpassed proportions, actively inflated by the Bush administration from pretty much day one of operations. The giant financial corporations and their many ill-spawned children were directly involved in creating a mortgage morass that now has companies foreclosing on homes they have no legal claim to, using an evidence free bald assertion process in letters to homeowners and the few courts in which they've been challenged to prove their "rights."

Which leads the ever spot-on Paul Krugman to note and ask:

The accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom dispelled the myth of effective corporate governance. These days, the idea that our banks were well capitalized and supervised sounds like a sick joke. And now the mortgage mess is making nonsense of claims that we have effective contract enforcement — in fact, the question is whether our economy is governed by any kind of rule of law.

In fact, it is governed by a kind of rule of law, the law that the rich and powerful create on the fly and assert behind the cover of armies of lawyers trained in the arcana of the regulations these same corporations wrote in rooms just off the floor of Congress in the late 1990s and all of the 2000s. And Krugman is also correct when he talks in that same cloumn about the essential character of every Obama response to the banks, mortgage companies and other criminal organizations and their leaders - utter deference in all things. 

We Can't Build Shit

I once visited Hoover Dam at the Nevada-Arizona border. I'd been up most of the night before playing nickel slots in the lobby of the Sahara where we were staying, so when my future brother in law and I set out I was pretty tired, but it was nothing a few jugs of coffee couldn't cure.

Approaching the dam is a lot like approaching Las Vegas itself - the dry desert heat suddenly gives way to this humid wash of air, a sign of the excess water displays in the city, and of the Colorado river itself, trapped in narrow Black Canyon. Then you see the gigantic power line towers that stick out at an angle over the river, guiding the massive electricity cables up over the lip of the canyon to set them on a path parallel to the ground, carrying power to multiple states.

As if that isn't incredible enough to look upon, you eventually wend your way around the two lane black top to see the top of the dam itself, which looks rather thin at first glance, until you realize this is just the top of a massive 700+ foot tall structure that is 660 feet thick at its base. The word "awesome" is much overused in American culture, but this thing easily qualifies.

The interior is as impressive as the exterior, with marble floors and Deco accents all over the place. It is an industrial construct of absolute beauty.

Hoover Dam was constructed both ahead of schedule and under budget. We could argue all day about the environmental effects of American dam building generally, worker safety in the 1930s, our water use policies, and electricity consumption, but the thing itself is a major work of human engineering, capital, and will.

Flash forward to 2010. A tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey to double the rate of passenger travel between those two destinations (for which current carrying capacity is already over taxed) that has been in the works for 20 years has suddenly ground to a halt because the new governor of New Jersey, a fiscal charlatan named Chirs Christie, has decided his state can no longer afford its share.

I'll let the estimable Bob Herbert put it in words  I never could:

The United States is not just losing its capacity to do great things. It’s losing its soul. It’s speeding down an increasingly rubble-strewn path to a region where being second rate is good enough. 

The railroad tunnel was the kind of infrastructure project that used to get done in the United States almost as a matter of routine. It was a big and expensive project, but the payoff would have been huge. It would have reduced congestion and pollution in the New York-New Jersey corridor. It would have generated economic activity and put thousands of people to work. It would have enabled twice as many passengers to ride the trains on that heavily traveled route between the two states. 

The project had been in the works for 20 years, and ground had already been broken when the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, rejected the project on Thursday, saying that his state could not afford its share of the costs. Extreme pressure is being exerted from federal officials and others to get Mr. Christie to change his mind, but, as of now, the project is a no-go. 

This is a railroad tunnel we’re talking about. We’re not trying to go to the Moon. This is not the Manhattan Project. It’s a railroad tunnel that’s needed to take people back and forth to work and to ease the pressure on the existing tunnel, a wilting two-track facility that’s about 100 years old. What is the matter with us?

The rest is well worth reading, as Herbert ties this sort of rudderless leadership to the present unemployment emergency, about which no one seems willing to do the heavy lifting to solve the problem. 80 years ago government created agencies to contract with companies and individuals to build a modern infrastructure, much of which we still enjoy today, crumbling as it may be, and to simply put people to work to give them spending money and some small, precious shred of dignity. These days, we determine the right amount of stimulus to jolt the economy back into gear, then cut it in half before even considering whether to enact it. We have become beholden to an ideology that proclaims government is incapable of doing anything at all useful, and when the proponents of that ideology take power, they make sure that view becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the ideology of the modern Republican Party, which was carried out quite efficiently during the W. years, when people were appointed to head agencies overseeing the very sectors of industry from which they made their many millions, regulations were slashed, discarded, or simply ignored, and a form of maximalist capitalism known as "got mine" was allowed to run untethered by sanity or prudence. 

As a result, the electorate, the alleged party of opposition which now holds power, and the media have bought the idea that this sort of thinking is true, that, at default, government is evil and always incompetent if not down right criminal, and thus can never be part of the solution to major national problems such as those we have been facing for the last three years. It is a poisonous, false ideology, and it is destroying our country's ability to do anything useful for anyone who isn't already stinking rich.

I've got news for you motherfuckers. We ain't number 1. At anything. Not anymore.

Speaking Of Government Teats...

Matt Taibbi kicks over the Tea Party ant nest and discovers...a bunch of ignorant, angry Republican folks who are quite happy to collect benefits and pensions form the government they regard as absolutely tyrannical.

Same goes for Hatriot candidate Sharron Angle in Nevada, who claims government benefits and health care every month, as does her husband.

But of course, this was never about deficits, budgets, fiscal propriety or any of the other bullshit they've been spewing the last two years, it's about who else might be getting a thin dime of "their" tax money. And what's changed? The color of the president's skin and the party in charge. They fear and hate Others so much they are convinced that now, only now, these same government programs that have been humming along for decades are suddenly some sort of free ATM for the poor and non-white.

It really is nuts, but incredibly revealing.