Representative Darrell Issa calls it a way to promote transparency: a request for the names of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, business executives, journalists and others who have requested copies of federal government documents in recent years.
Mr. Issa, a California Republican and the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, says he wants to make sure agencies respond in a timely fashion to Freedom of Information Act requests and do not delay them out of political considerations.
But his extraordinary request worries some civil libertarians. It “just seems sort of creepy that one person in the government could track who is looking into what and what kinds of questions they are asking,” said David Cuillier, a University of Arizona journalism professor and chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee at the Society of Professional Journalists. “It is an easy way to target people who he might think are up to no good.”
And so the fishing expedition begins. Perhaps Issa is engaging in some good old Republican projection -- looking for corruption in others to cover up the filthy stench of his own history.
I know that other areas, like Connecticut, have it worse than we do. All we have is about 20" is snowpack on the ground, ruined shrubs, and ice dams in the gutters with icicles that would have to be registered as deadly weapons in some states. And of course there's that storm coming this week, which is going to either dump another ton of snow on us, or coat everything with ice, undoubtedly causing a power outage that will mean no heat for who knows how many days. Just something else to look forward to.
But if you're wondering why this winter is so crazy, here's why:
The warming Arctic and melting sea ice is a planetary-scale change since the Arctic Ocean covers 14 million sq km, an area almost as big as Russia. The Arctic and Antarctic polar regions are key drivers of Earth's weather and climate. The rapid defrosting of the Arctic has already altered the climate system, researchers now agree.
IPS previously broke the story revealing that the snow and cold in the eastern United States and Europe during the winter of 2009-10 was likely the result of the loss of Arctic sea ice. The same thing has happened this year.
As more and more sea ice melts, there is more open water to absorb the summer sun's heat. A day of 24-hour summer sun in the Arctic puts more heat on the surface of the ocean than a day in the tropics, James Overland of the NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the United States told IPS.
That extra heat in the ocean is gradually released into the lower atmosphere from October to January as the region slowly re-freezes months later than normal. This is a fundamental change - a large part of the Arctic Ocean is radiating heat instead of being cold and ice-covered. That has disrupted wind circulation patterns in the northern hemisphere, reported Overland and other researchers at the International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference in Norway last June.
The result: the Arctic stays warm and mid-latitude regions become colder and receive more snow for much of the winter. Last December was the coldest south Florida has experienced in more than a century of record-keeping.
Most of Britain suffered through its coldest December ever. Up in the Arctic, Coral Harbour on the northwest corner of Hudson Bay was above zero degrees C for two days in early January for the first time in history. Much of the eastern Arctic centred around Baffin Island averaged +21C above normal between Dec. 17 and Jan. 15 this year.
This looks to be the new normal since Arctic experts agree the melting sea ice is now locked into a death spiral.
"In future, cold and snowy winters will be the rule rather than the exception" in the eastern United States and Europe, Overland previously told IPS.
So tell your wingnut friends who think climate change is a hoax to stop bitching about this winter. Because there are more of them to come.
At twenty-seven I felt like Faith Jackson did, that I would never meet anyone, that I would be alone my whole life, that I would never have work that I enjoyed, a partner, joy in life. I too felt that everything would be the same.
Every day you wake up is one with potential for things to change. Sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes it doesn't look like you thought it would. But to give up at age 34 is tragic.
If you find yourself feeling like this, that you do not feel like going on because nothing in your life will ever change, PLEASE SEEK HELP.
The proper way to prepare teh tarik is by pouring the strong milky tea at great height from one metal cup into another, a thunderous waterfall that creates a foaming bubble of froth. It's a traditional method not always practised in Sydney restaurants, and so I'm mesmerised as we watch the spectacular tea pouring process in action at Aseana Food Village.
Noted speed freak, serial-killer fangirl, and Tea Party hero Ayn Rand was also a kleptoparasite, sneakily gobbling up taxpayer funds under an assumed name to pay for her medical treatments after she got lung cancer.
An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand's law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand's behalf she secured Rand's Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O'Connor (husband Frank O'Connor).
As Pryor said, "Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out" without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn "despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual should take help."
But alas she did and said it was wrong for everyone else to do so.
Because as long as you espouse bootstraps for others, you can participate in government programs without guilt.
(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)
OK, so now in a reprise of June of 2009 when blood literally ran down Tehran's streets, our president is once again, no pun intended, Tut Tutting the violence and chaos that's essentially replaced the Egyptian government. Egyptians are so hostile toward authority figures that they're literally ripping the heads of Pharaoh mummies and otherwise looting or vandalizing their national treasures.
The very fact that the violence is escalating and that the protesters are winning proves that saturnine Obama calling for restraint and siding with a tyrannical, oppressive regime such as Mubarek's makes the leader of the free world look about as effective as a junior high school cafeteria monitor during a food fight.
If nothing else, the metastasizing unrest and bloodshed (at least 74 Egyptians have been killed since this week's riots) puts our government in an extremely uncomfortable, and untenable, position. As stated earlier, Obama is forced to stick with his man Hosni despite the fact that Africa's one superpower is among the most brutal, barbaric and oppressive nations on earth, the kind of sadistic dictatorship to which the Bush administration turned when it wanted to extraordinarily rendition terror suspects.
In other words, Egypt these past 30 years has no more resembled a democracy than post-Soviet Russia. At the risk of oversimplification, a vote for Egypt is a vote against democracy. Hosni Mubarek had literally turned off the internet, shut down al-Jazeera while revoking press credentials, sent troops onto the streets to kill at least 74 protesters, place Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed elBaradei under house arrest and fired his entire government while naming a puppet as his "successor", thereby officially making Egypt a one man dictatorship. Yet Obama still stands by his man at a time when even his own son wouldn't, even flying in the face of a fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
The desire for democracy across the Middle East and North Africa these past two weeks, if nothing else, had brought into razor-sharp focus our ongoing hypocrisy as regards democracy. Our pious platitudes about democracy, belied by years of deadly adventurism across Latin America from the 50's to the present day, ring hollow. We'd rather support one dictatorship after another in the Middle East as long as they momentarily ally themselves with the United States' War on Terror.
Here's a something else that's huge that ought to be getting more play in the media: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is actually encouraging the protesters in direct contravention to Obama's "policy" of noninvolvement. In fact, as long as Obama chooses to remain saturninely detached from these proceedings as if they really don't involve the United States, then Mrs. Clinton's hands are tied. It's telling that Clinton, in direct and almost unique contravention to a president whose policies she is constitutionally bound to support, is instead supporting the unrest in Cairo and elsewhere while her immediate predecessor, Condi Rice, had called for Egypt to move closer to a democracy. If that doesn't put Mrs. Clinton and Dr. Rice on the same page, it certainly puts them in the same chapter.
In short, what's happening in Cairo is actually fragmenting our government so that now our commander in chief and secretary of state are at stark odds with each other.
For all its massive faults and foreign policy failures, it had to be said that the Bush administration was at least cognizant that Egypt had nothing than a mere sham of a democracy and, however lazily or timidly, attempted to make some inroads toward effecting that.
To listen to the Obama administration, the unrest in the Middle East and northern Africa doesn't really affect us or our foreign policy but it's impossible to see how this will not involve a necessary paradigm shift from Foggy Bottom to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
This ought to force the Obama administration to rethink its foreign policy priorities both for our present nation as well as the generations of Americans and presidential administrations to come. If you need a predictor of how disastrous it is for one administration to blindly and stupidly take up the initiatives of the previous one, look at Obama's very insistence on supporting the dying dictatorship in Egypt, look at Iraq, look at Afghanistan and tell me how Obama has improved things in those geopolitical arenas.
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Because when politicians and writers on the right starts talking about sex, they're telling you an awful lot about themselves.
Amanda on Maggie Gallagher's strange world in which legal abortion leads to anal sex and how the world was much better when women would grit their teeth, lie back, and think of England. And extra bonus points for this rant about Rush Limbaugh's view that advising people to eat fruits and vegetables is a Kenyan Socialist Communist Fascist plot by four-eyed aliens named Gallaxhar.
Melissa, whom I've knocked on more than one occasion for an ever-expanding definition of rape that turns every woman into someone who was victimized at some point, makes a very valid point about how Chris Smith and the Republican House of Representatives want to give men a roadmap as to how to avoid a rape rap and as a bonus, force women to carry their children.
Sady at Tiger Beatdown: "Instead of maintaining that rape is always rape, that there’s no such thing as a “minor” or “excusable” rape, the GOP is putting forth a bill that says some rapes are so very minor and excusable as not to warrant consideration."
Taking a stroll down memory lane over to I Blame the Patriarchy, back to Bill Napoli's musings about the kind of virtuous, untouched, pure virgin he might allow to have an abortion if raped. Think about it. Chris Smith is even more nutty than Bill Napoli. And so is the current Speaker of the House.
RMuse at Politics USA wonders: just who are the ones imposing tyranny and stealing liberty here, when the House is starting to resemble the Westboro Baptist Church?
Was this a real enough rape to satisfy Chris Smith, Daniel Lipinksi, and John Boehner?
Dennis G. at Balloon Juice makes special note of how this bill protects child predators, which makes me wonder just what kind of secrets Rep. Chris Smith and others who support this travesty are hiding. After all, when Republicans start ranting about the morality and sexual practices of others, they're telling you a great deal about themselves.
You really have to wonder about Republican men. These are the guys who rail the most about family values but have affairs themselves. They call others corrupt when their own histories are questionable at best. And they stand for reproductive policies that punish women and girls while their own ranks are rife with sex offenders, many of whom prey on underage girls and boys.
In the past, they have advocated laws requiring minors to have parental consent for abortion on the grounds that without such laws, men who prey on underage girls (like some Republicans???) will be able to hide the consequences of their actions (such as pregnant 12-year-olds). But now, even though the Hyde Amendment prevents federal funding of abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or endangerment of the woman's life, New Jersey lunatic wingnut Congressman Chris Smith has decided that while he's not quite ready to protect fathers who rape their daughters, and he knows it's political suicide to come out and say that women are just garbage to be thrown in the trash if it meqans saving a fetus, what he CAN do is define what constitutes rape. Yes, folks, a Congressman from New Jersey is all set to redefine rape according to his own twisted vision:
Rape is only really rape if it involves force. So says the new House Republican majority as it now moves to change abortion law.
For years, federal laws restricting the use of government funds to pay for abortions have included exemptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. (Another exemption covers pregnancies that could endanger the life of the woman.) But the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," a bill with 173 mostly Republican co-sponsors that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has dubbed a top priority in the new Congress, contains a provision that would rewrite the rules to limit drastically the definition of rape and incest in these cases.
With this legislation, which was introduced last week by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to "forcible rape." This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion. (Smith's spokesman did not respond to a call and an email requesting comment.)
Given that the bill also would forbid the use of tax benefits to pay for abortions, that 13-year-old's parents wouldn't be allowed to use money from a tax-exempt health savings account (HSA) to pay for the procedure. They also wouldn't be able to deduct the cost of the abortion or the cost of any insurance that paid for it as a medical expense.
So if your twelve-year-old is sexually attacked by a neighbor, and her attacker says he'll kill her if she doesn't keep quiet and do what he wants, in Chris Smith's world she wasn't actually raped. And if your twelve-year-old becomes pregnant as a result, and your insurance doesn't cover abortion, and you want to use your flex or HSA money to pay for it, Chris Smith won't let you do that either. Because Chris Smith thinks your daughter is a dirty slut who asked for it.
And this is one of the new GOP Congress' first priorities.
Where ARE those jobs, anyway? Or are we too busy painting scarlet letters on women who are assuaulted by guys like Chris Smith?
The legislation was first introduced last summer by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), and the former has promised to bring it to the floor again in 2011. It isn't called anything as obvious as the Internet Kill Switch, of course. It is called the "Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act." Who could be against that? Anyone who's watching the news on TV today, that's who.
The proposal calls for the Department of Homeland Security to establish and maintain a list of systems or assets that constitute critical cyber-infrastructure. The President would be able to be able to control those systems. He or she would have ability to turn them off. The kicker: none of this would be subject to judicial review. This is just a proposal, mind you, but it certainly warrants concern. Particularly given the heavy-handed example being provided by Egypt.
Reports of Egypt's grand disconnection came first from James Cowie of Renesys, a New Hampshire-based firm that tracks Internet Traffic. As he watched Egypt drop off the grid, Cowie wrote:
"Every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world."
Keeping citizens off the Internet is becoming standard operating procedure during civil unrest. The Iranian government slowed Internet access to a crawl during last year's civil unrest, but the country online. Myanmar has a little more success blocking its citizens. Egypt's move, however, is unprecedented in its scope.
"It's time for this government to change. I want a better future for me and my family when I get married." - Amal Ahmed, a 22-year-old Egyptian protester.
(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)
If one takes even a cursory, hurried look at events in the Middle East this month, especially Tunisia and Egypt, it makes Time's Choice of "Person of the Year" seem unforgivably shallow and superficial. In an unexpected turn perfectly delineated by his apparently clueless and astonished face on the cover, the always-dubious honor went to 26 year-old billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, founder of an online community that made its, and his, fortune not the old fashioned way with advertising revenue through ads but by selling personal information to marketing companies, information we gladly give away to an overachieving Harvard grad nerd so we can more easily supplant actually meeting people.
To bring his amorality into conspicuous relief, Zuckerberg has recently climbed into bed with Goldman Sachs, a bailed-out Wall Street bank that no doubt can give the billionaire boy wonder another Ivy League education in corporate sleaziness. So far, all this has done is to grossly inflate Facebook's net worth and share price and, if one is smart, one will reserve a front row online seat to wait for the Facebook.com bubble to burst like a massive prank cigar.
In the meantime, as Time is quick to point out, the "Person of the Year" award doesn't necessarily go to the best, most do-gooding or even the most popular but to the person or organization that was the most catalytic. Zuckerberg's elevation puts him in rarified company, including presidents, other corporate titans and tyrants like Adolph Hitler. And it only serves to bring into merciless focus our own bottomless superficiality in that Facebook's founder would prove to be more catalytic to American society than President Barack Obama, former Senator Russ Feingold, former Rep. Alan Grayson or, (here's a crazy-ass idea), Wikileaks.
Not to give short shrift to Zuckerberg's Facebook, which easily toppled in a couple of short years MySpace's hegemony in the online networking community (It can be easily argued that as recently as the 2008 general elections, MySpace was much more instrumental in getting then Senator Barack Obama elected president than the still-fledgling Facebook). But a volatile online community that's just one major hack or Conficker virus away from complete and utter oblivion should not be considered more catalytic to American society than Wikileaks' Four Horsemen of Disclosures. Yet it is and last year's winner is as pitilessly reflective of our current values as the year in which the mirror-covered Time named us as the "Person of the Year."
There is a New World Order taking shape that's far more profound and important than a domain that plasters spam ads all over the place, harvests our too-free personal information and features groups such as "I'll Bet This Steak Can Get More Friends Than Sarah Palin."
Julian Assange's Wikileaks, to descend into a platitude for a moment, simply changed the world forever. It put and continues to put the largest and most powerful governments and corporations on notice that secrets are no longer safe and that they will not be allowed to practice their Machiavellian schemes in the shadows any more.
Of course, Wikileaks, as laudable as their intentions and catalytic effects is, is a mere conduit and Julian Assange is a mere conduit of a conduit. The power of Wikileaks comes from people like Bradley Manning, people who seem to have a sincere vested interest in proclaiming, "Enough is enough!" and effecting that change through disclosures of information much, much more devastating than anything your 13 year-old daughter or co-worker will post on Facebook.
"But, but... What does this have to do with me or my Facebook avatar?"
There's a New World Order that's superimposing itself over the world we used to know, a more transparent and (if you'll pardon the alliteration) pitilessly punitive palimpsest in which the people of the Middle East are also rising up against decades-long tyrannies such as the ones in Tunisia, Egypt and now Yemen. Understandably, the hypocritical and dictatorial Saudi Royal Family is nervously eying shaping developments with their neighbors.
It's notable that a few rock-throwing young men with bandannas over their mouths achieved in mere days in Tunisia what George W. Bush tried and failed to do in eight years and with the world's most powerful military at his disposal: Kickstarting the democratization of the Middle East. And the protests against autocratic rule puts our own president in the ridiculous position of actually supporting these despotic regimes simply because they're "our allies in the war on terror" (so was Yemen's dictatorship).
The riots in Tunis, Cairo and elsewhere in the Muslim world have brought about some startling changes and things we would've thought impossible a mere year or two ago: That the once popular Hosni Mubarek, Egypt's answer to Lyndon Johnson, would have his image disrespected by shoe soles (a grave insult in the Muslim/Arab world). For once, the mainstream media had actually gotten it right: This appears to be a region-wide revolution on a Che Guevaran scale.
But it's easy to scan the headlines and to assume that developments in the Middle East have nothing to do with us but they do.
One of the reasons the people of Tunisia rioted against the quarter century-long autocratic rule of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was there simply weren't enough jobs to go around. And they were organized and energized enough so that they'd actually routed the police and even regrouped when they themselves were routed. Now we're seeing the same thing in Egypt. As something of a sidebar, it also ought to be noted and remembered that this wave of democratization we're seeing in the Middle East is being effected from within with no need of invasions, carpet bombings, smashing of economic infrastructures nor the bank-busting involvement of American war profiteering corporations. Regime change is almost always untidy but ultimately streamlined and less costly in terms of life when effected from within.
Joblessness is and was during the 2010 midterms the singlebiggestconcern for the average American voter. It would be easy to claim that online entities such as Facebook have taken the place of Juvenal's circus and that we're too distracted or anesthetized to similarly gather on Wall Street and Washington, DC to demand our jobs back. But we must remember that Facebook is also available in Tunisia and Egypt as well as virtually everywhere else in the Middle East. Yet these people were able to tear themselves away from their computer chairs and Facebook mood updates to risk (and give) their lives in the endless and timeless call for freedom.
What's happening in the Middle East isn't a Middle Eastern or a Muslim thingie. We are all human and have the same anxieties and concerns as Amal Ahmed and others 7000 miles away. We all want jobs, security for our families present and future, we all yearn to live freely and to have a voice in our governments, hence our destinies.
And, the last time I checked, these things were far from being guaranteed in our own country. The world is indeed changing and not necessarily for the worst. I see the Tunisian, Egyptian and Yemenese protesters, I remember the protesters in Iran, Mexico and Kenya and I see hope that the eternal flame of the human demand of freedom is far from extinguished. In the meantime, I wait and wonder when the day will come when the United States finally gets meaningfully involved in a worldwide cause that's even larger than national corporate interests.
In a city over-run with Thai restaurants, the best Thai restaurants in Sydney converge around two city blocks that locals simply know as Thainatown.
I-San Thai was one of my favourite eats - cheap, cheerful and free of the incessant queues that plague Chat Thai around the corner - but sadly closed in late 2009. Thanon Khao San now takes it place, a little fancier and more upmarket than its
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Your brilliant server Jill Hussein and now Jason Linkins of the HuffPo have gotten on the same page to openly speculate, not altogether without just cause, whether or not Breitbart butt boy James O'Keefe has taken his pimp coat out of mothballs and began stalking Planned Parenthood.
O'Keefe has done this before in 2009. The cover story that O'Keefe used with ACORN is also identical to the one used by the still-unidentified man who recently visited longtime O'Keefe target Planned Parenthood:
But O'Keefe and Giles upped the ante on the sting by telling ACORN workers that they were looking to import at least ten child prostitutes from El Salvador - human trafficking in child prostitutes.
Linkins quotes Planned Parenthood on today's HuffPo story:
In the course of five days this month, eight Planned Parenthood clinics in five states and D.C. reported getting the same visit: A man said he needed treatment for a sexually transmitted disease and then, once alone with a staff member, implied that he ran an interstate sex trafficking ring that involves minors and illegal immigrants.
And if we know anything about conservatives, especially mouthbreathers such as O'Keefe, it's that they will keep using the same playbook over and over again even after all the pages have slipped out of the binder.
Ashton Kutcher had railroaded people with more restraint, dignity, respect and intelligence on Punk'd. And Kutcher, a man whose funniest act was in taking up with the much-older Demi Moore, is still funny compared with O'Keefe, unless you include bathos.
As with mental bulimics such as George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Christine O'Donnell and Glenn Beck, stupidity and keeping a healthy distance from facts and truth is actually a winning asset. It doesn't matter that O'Keefe heavily edited a video to make his case against ACORN. It doesn't matter that ACORN employees punked him (and, consequently, Fox "News") by concocting a story about a phony murder. It doesn't matter that OKeefe is a jailbird for having tried to break into a US Senator's office and tamper with her phones. It doesn't matter that O'Keefe's Fagin, Andrew Breitbart, also heavily edited a video to present a contrary story than the one an FDA official had presented about racial tolerance.
There will always be a market for lies, for untruths, for muck-raking even if there's no muck to rake. And the money, prestige and influence tends to go to those who can tell the most outrageous lies in the most creative ways.
And this is why America is doomed. It is doomed because not only can we no longer distinguish between fact and falsehood but because we do not even care what the difference is or even acknowledge that such a dramatic, crucial distinction can and should be made.
And this is why the Globe, National Enquirer and Andrew Breitbart's Big Bullshit websites are still in business and making money hand over fist.
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While Glenn Beck advocates shooting everyone who doesn't agree with him in the head, and we all are forced to submit to x-rays and groping in order to visit Grandma just because one guy smuggled explosives in his underwear, a bomb went off in an airport in Russia yesterday OUTSIDE THE SECURITY CHECKPOINTS.
Think about that, the next time you go pick someone up at the International Arrivals terminal at JFK, or stand in a long line at the Continental counter behind a couple hundred people on their way to their Caribbean vacations.
I can't believe that we are reduced to running Tweety clips, but there we are:
The right has denied that anything said by Glenn Beck is going to drive anyone to violence. When Beck talks about shooting people in the head because they are destroying this country, does hereally think that no one is going to actually do it?
Right now there is an elderly professor named Frances Fox Piven, who in a recent column in The Nation, called on the unemployed to form a mass movement. Piven is one of Glenn Beck's favorite targets because of her advocacy of movements to produce social change. It's interesting that in Glenn Beck's sick, twisted world. a mass movement of peaceful action by the powerless and the disenfranchised is a threat to America, but a mass movement of people toting guns because of an imagined totalitarian threat led by the first Black president is what he wants to see.
These are not pretty e-mails, but they appear positively decorous compared with what has been written about her by commentators on Glenn Beck's website, The Blaze, where she's been the target of a relentless campaign to demonize her—and worse. There, under cover of anonymous handles, scores of people have called for Piven's murder, even volunteering to do the job with their own hands. "Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas [sic] ready and I'll give My life to take Our freedom back," wrote superwrench4. "ONE SHOT...ONE KILL!" proclaimed Jst1425. "The only redistribution I am interested in is that of a precious metal.... LEAD," declared Patriot1952.
I ventured into the cesspool that is The Blaze, and comments like this have been scrubbed -- not surprisingly, since there is undoubtedly someone out there right now preparing to take a shot at a 78-year-old professor no one had heard of until Beck decided to place her in his Pantheon o'Scapegoats.
The thing that's so dangerous about Glenn Beck is that I'm not convinced he's buying any of it. When you look at him, and his TV schtick, he seems more of a carnival barker than a right-wing rabble-rouser. I'm always reminded more of Andy Kaufman than of Rush Limbaugh when I see what Beck does, because while Limbaugh is a genuinely mean, greedy, hateful man who gets paid millions for stirring the rage pot of downwardly-mobile white American males, Beck seems simply to be a guy with a troubled background, steamer trunks of emotional baggage, who has found a form of performance art that has made him wealthy beyond his wildest imaginings.
The jury is still out on whether an overall climate of hate, of legitimizing violence against those who disagree with you politically, of scapegoating politicians for your own grievances, contributed to the Tucson shootings. I still maintain that when you create an echo chamber of violent rhetoric, you legitimize the plottings of those mentally ill who hear voices in their heads. After all, if the voices outside your own head confirm what the ones inside your own head are telling you, that must make it OK, right?
Glenn Beck has as much right to rant and rave as the street corner guy used to. What he does not have is a right to have the public airwaves on which to do it.
Because his fingerprints, along with those of his mentor Andrew Breitbart, are all over this:
Planned Parenthood, a perennial protest target because of its role in providing abortions, has notified the FBI that at least 12 of its health centers were visited recently by a man purporting to be a sex trafficker but who may instead be part of an attempted ruse to entrap clinic employees.
In each case, according to Planned Parenthood, the man sought to speak privately with a clinic employee and then requested information about health services for sex workers, including some who he said were minors and in the U.S. illegally.
Planned Parenthood's vice president for communications, Stuart Schear, said the organization has requested an FBI probe of the man's claims and has already fielded some initial FBI inquiries. However, Schear said Planned Parenthood's own investigation indicates that the man has links with Live Action, an anti-abortion group that has conducted previous undercover projects aimed at discrediting the nation's leading abortion provider.
Lila Rose, Live Action's founder and president, described Planned Parenthood's assertion as "very interesting." She declined to confirm or deny that the clinic visits were part of a Live Action operation, but did indicate in a telephone interview that an undercover videotape project of some sort was in the works.
"The story that speaks loudest will be in the evidence," she said. "I can't comment until we release the visual evidence."
The visits were made between Jan. 11 and Jan. 15 to health centers in Virginia, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and Arizona. Among them was a clinic in Tucson, Ariz., which Planned Parenthood said was visited on the 15th, a week after the shooting rampage in that city that critically injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Last week, Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Cecile Richards wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder summarizing the visits and requesting an FBI investigation. If the man's assertions were true, she wrote, they would indicate possible violations of federal laws dealing with interstate sex trafficking of minors.
However, Richards said the visits could be part of a hoax resembling some past actions by anti-abortion activists.
"Once inside, these people have recorded `undercover' videos of their conversations with our clinic staff and then selectively and maliciously edited the videos," she wrote. "This may be happening once again. If so, this kind of activity should be firmly condemned."
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Low-key, cheerful and a little bit cheeky, Eathouse Diner is the kind of hangout everyone wishes they had in their neighbourhood. We follow the pointing finger instructing us to "eat here" and find ourselves in a deliberately kitsch American-style diner that is already half-full barely 15 minutes into service.
Turquoise walls trimmed with black-and-white check can't compete with the main
Money quote (repeat this to your wingnut friends over and over until it sinks in):
Because the real goal is not balancing state budgets: the goal is demonizing public employees in order to eliminate the largest remaining source of decent-paying middle-class jobs.
If you envy public employees whose jobs seem more secure and better-paying with better benefits than your job, destroying those jobs won't improve your situation by a dime.
What does it mean to be "competitive" in an economic sense? Does it mean to make products the rest of the world wants, as used to be the case? Or does it simply mean active participation in a race to the bottom, one in which employers can pay lower and lower wages and salaries so that the only people "competing" are exploited workers worldwise scrambling for scraps? Does "competitiveness" mean American manufacturing workers settling for the wages paid and the working conditions of the developing nations to which American corporations have outsourced far too much of their operations?
Does it mean an educated workforce? How can it, when Republican governors all over the country are seeking to address their budget problems by specifically targeting education? Here in New Jersey, Chris Christie is supporting a voucher program that would, instead of trying to save failing schools or provide support for time-strapped families, provide vouchers for private and especially religious schools that would have zero accountability for their own performance. In other words, parents of children in failing schools would receive vouchers that would not allow them to send their kids to the prestigious prep schools, but to unaccountable religious schools where they would learn about God creating the earth in six days and Adam and Eve living alongside dinosaurs. Of course graduating a generation of ignoramuses would justify paying them ten cents a day, but I don't think that's what most people have in mind when they talk about American competitiveness.
Meet the new buzzword, same as the old buzzword. In advance of the State of the Union, President Obama has telegraphed his main theme: competitiveness. The President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board has been renamed the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. And in his Saturday radio address, the president declared that “We can out-compete any other nation on Earth.”
This may be smart politics. Arguably, Mr. Obama has enlisted an old cliché on behalf of a good cause, as a way to sell a much-needed increase in public investment to a public thoroughly indoctrinated in the view that government spending is a bad thing.
But let’s not kid ourselves: talking about “competitiveness” as a goal is fundamentally misleading. At best, it’s a misdiagnosis of our problems. At worst, it could lead to policies based on the false idea that what’s good for corporations is good for America.
About that misdiagnosis: What sense does it make to view our current woes as stemming from lack of competitiveness?
It’s true that we’d have more jobs if we exported more and imported less. But the same is true of Europe and Japan, which also have depressed economies. And we can’t all export more while importing less, unless we can find another planet to sell to. Yes, we could demand that China shrink its trade surplus — but if confronting China is what Mr. Obama is proposing, he should say that plainly.
Furthermore, while America is running a trade deficit, this deficit is smaller than it was before the Great Recession began. It would help if we could make it smaller still. But ultimately, we’re in a mess because we had a financial crisis, not because American companies have lost their ability to compete with foreign rivals.
But isn’t it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were America Inc., competing in the global marketplace? No.
Consider: A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that’s more or less what has happened in America recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success?
The executives pocketing huge sums of cash while 400,000 more Americans become unemployed each month, that's who. After all, they got theirs, what else is necessary?
Because, just for shits and giggles, he's enjoyed pissing off conservatives with his Commie, Socialist, leftist agenda of shielding the war criminals of the Bush junta, keeping from the American public pictures and videos of us torturing defenseless brown people in our name and paid for with our tax dollars, giving two more years of tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% while beginning the hamstring-cutting of Social Security, giving us a lobbyist-written and Republican-approved health care bill, ramping up the war in Afghanistan, moving the goalposts back on getting us out of Iraq, bailing out Wall Street for the 2nd time, using more war profiteers than we ever did under Bush, playing Hu's Your Daddy with a Commie figurehead, sucking up to the terrorist Israelis, rattling his saber against a sovereign nation based on unsubstantiated, right wing rumors they may have nukes, firing and othereise throwing under the wheels of the bus any person of color with whom racists like Breitbart and Glenn Beck might have a problem, refusing to sign us on the Kyoto Protocol, giving a free pass for galactic-class polluters like BP to continue business as usual, has done everything in his power to undermine the unions that were crucial to his getting elected and bitch-slapping liberals, while giving racist Tea Baggers a free pass, for exercising our first amendment rights to criticize his administration for these broken campaign promises and other transgressions.
Those poor, poor Republicans. What they've had to deal with from this radical pinko over the last two years.
So now we're going to go to the right of center for a while, as if there's actually been a neutral meeting point between Obama and the Republicans, as if there's actually been a "center" on which Obama and the Republicans have been openly meeting and upon which they've been forming policy.
So let's go to the right of that, closer to the "center."
The problem is, if Obama moves any closer to the "center", pretty soon Jim DeMint will be complaining that he's too conservative and that we ought to, instead, go back to the "centrist" days of St. Ronnie of the Horse Ranch.
Readers of the Saturday Daily Telegraph in Sydney may have noticed the above article written by food editor Grant Jones on "The secret world of culinary bloggers", a somewhat odd title given the very public sphere in which we publish the minutiae of our lives and meals.
The feature makes some analysis of the growing influence of food blogs, including a quote that "one industry identity
As far as I can tell, this hasn't been getting a lot of play in the blogosphere but Glenn Beck's new target, political theorist Francis Fox Piven, has been getting death threats. In fact, the threats on Ms. Pivens' life are getting so numerous and virulent that the Center for Constitutional Rights has been forced to write a letter to Roger Ailes to do something about it (I'm sure he'll get right on it, too).
I don't know what it will require to get Beck off the air as easily as we got Hal Turner off the air. Will it require another 300 sponsors to pull their ads off Beck's show or will the local constabulary have to find Beck standing over a gunshot murder victim with a smoking pistol in his hand?
Beck is a frequent contributor to a Drudge-wannabe right wing rag called The Blaze and one such (understandably) anonymous article about Piven makes use of highly edited sound bytes to "prove" Beck's conspiracy theories. The comments, 336 strong as of this writing, are pretty revealing of the mindset that praises Beck as a national hero for "confirming" all their fears about elitist, leftist radicals while wishing or even outright threatening a 78 year-old woman with death.
Imagine the furor that would ensue if Keith Olbermann or Michael Moore wrote a pack of lies about Phyllis Schlafly or Nancy Reagan that resulted in dozens of death threats. Here's a sample of some of the wit and wisdom of Beck's Crazy Base (Note: I'm deliberately ignoring all the stupid, offtopic and immature comments about this nearly 80 year-old woman's loss of pulchritude and championing Communist China's human rights violations and deliberate devaluing of their currency to undercut foreign trade):
milig The cemeteries are half empty and this witch is still running around living? what4 Choking on her tongue would be a fitting way for this POS to die! CYCLONE @ M4Colt…. I’ll pay up for the bullet….I”m $1.07 bid….I’ll just have to let Glenn shoot her though…. he’s the best shot out there… :-) Kaen Why hasn’t she had an “accident” yet?…lol… Stljarhead Prison? No, traitors are usually executed. The Rosenbergs got fried in the Chair. Hanging is cheaper, and you can reuse the rope.
I have a Home Depot right up the street from me…. winterhawka7ac She needs to ch oke at her next meal. Spawnomite She’d break a rib gagging at least. Old b!tc# needs to just die. Pugfriend Remember her kind are the first ones to be taken out and shot after the revolutions! Race Just let me know when she dies so I can piss on her grave. viperpsyche Please meet your maker…TY JFDYATES1 Hang this witch for treason ! She don`t even deserve a trial because she has convicted herself with her words . ares338 This creature is a prime candidate for one of those infamous death panels.
If you were to read all 336 comments, as I just have, you'll note that about half seek to discredit or rebut Piven's call for Chinese workers to strike with disparaging comments about her appearance and twisting her words while grossly inflating her influence with the current administration.
These criminally misinformed right wing cunts have also disparaged unions, call federal laws requiring a minimum wage and taxation "government meddling" while actually championing or deliberately overlooking Communist China's countless human rights violations that go back to the days of Mao.
In short, the sons and daughters of Glenn Beck, these Constitutionalists who only trumpet the First Amendment when someone agrees with them, are among some of the most insane people in America.
Just keep in mind by Election Day next year that these right wing freaks also have the right to vote.
Last week, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) announced seven judgeship appointments to the New Jersey Superior Court, including the appointment of Sohail Mohammed to serve on the court in Passaic County. Mohammed is an immigration lawyer in Clifton, NJ who notably defended many Muslims caught up in post-Sept. 11 dragnets, in which the Department of Justice quickly and secretly arrested hundreds of Muslims in the wake of the attacks. Often, the false pretense of an immigration violation was used to hold these men for many months, even though a vast majority of them had no connection to terrorism whatsoever.
Several prominent anti-Muslim voices on the right have reacted with characteristic vitriol to the elevation of a Muslim in the U.S. justice system, calling Mohammed “the enemy” and accusing Christie of turning New Jersey into a “Sharia State.
This is actually one of the few things Christie has done that shows something other than knee-jerk Republican idiocy. Mohammed has been an intermediary between law enforcement and the state's growing population. More visionary stuff like this and less "Fuck the Poor and Middle Class" policy, and I might even give him kudos.
If it seems like I haven't written much lately, it's not your imagination. Lately I just don't have it in me. There are a number of reasons for this. Part of it is the ridiculous hours I'm working, which has been seven days a week, 65-80 hours over those seven days. Some of it is outrage fatigue. After all, there's only so much internal resources that one has at the ripe old age of 55, and I have to keep my priorities straight in the age of American Diminishment. Since it looks like the guy we put into the White House is getting ready to fulfull the Republican dream of pulling the rug out from under the Social Security system into which I've been paying for thirty-eight years, if working seven days a week is what I have to do in order to have a roof over my head and some mac and cheese on the table in my old age, well, that's what I do. But some days I have to conserve my internal resources for work, and I don't have the luxury of expending it on the State of the World.
As Ian Holm says as Bilbo Baggins in the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring, "I feel thin, sort of stretched... like butter spread over too much bread." Well, I can't remember the last time I felt thin, but you get what I mean. The way it's manifested over the last couple of weeks is a kind of hair-trigger emotionality.
It really started with the Tucson shootings. For two weeks I simply could not look at a photograph of Christina Taylor-Green, or even THINK about her, without bursting into tears. Every step that Gabrielle Giffords, a Blue Dog Democrat who had I known more about her, might have been the focus of one of my anti-DINO rants, makes towards recovery, brings me a kind of joy that only comes from a small beacon of light shining on an otherwise dark, dark world.
Here in the New York area, it's Jets Fever, as the boisterous, goofy, brash, perhaps overachieving New York Jets prepare to take on Ben "Sexual Assault" Roethlisberger, Troy Polamalu, and the rest of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Championship game tomorrow. For those who hate the Jets, Rex Ryan is an ass, Mark Sanchez is a pretty boy hype machine who doesn't have the goods, and the assortment of scrap heap cast-offs who have found new life with this team are a bunch of scrubs. But for those of us who have been captivated by this team, this asshole of a coach, for whom everyone in the NFL seems to want to play because he seems to galvanize a team the way no "gentleman coach" can, there's something endearing about this bunch of cast-offs like Santonio Holmes and LaDainian Tomlinson and Jason Taylor, this Byronesque quarterback who befriends dying children and loves musical theatre. I won't cry into my beer if the Jets lose tomorrow (or maybe I will, who knows?) because it's been a good long run for them. But a win would again send me off into a transcendent joy that far outweighs any degree of football fandom I might have.
Yesterday I was reading Roger Ebert describing his new chin prosthesis, which he will wear in his segment on a new At the Movies (which premiered last night on PBS). Ebert is such an American institution, and his very public journey with a disfiguring salivary gland cancer has been such a moving one, that simply having him back in the balcony (if in a limited capacity) is a cause for celebration. Again -- something far more significant to Ebert than to those who don't know him, but a small beam of light just the same. (Note: You'll be able to stream the show soon here.)
And then last night we lost Countdown, and it's all part of the same thing. I didn't know Christina-Taylor Green. I don't know Gabrielle Giffords, or Roger Ebert, or Keith Olbermann. And unlike people like, say, Rich Lowry, I do know the difference between actual people and images on a TV screen. But whatever happened to push Keith Olbermann off the air (and despite some rumblings that he just quit, whenever I hear "mutual agreement", you know it always means "asked him to resign"); whether it was outrage fatigue, grief over losing his father last year, an inability to conceive of how to keep the show sharp while "dialing it back a notch", the fact is that many of us invited this man into our living rooms every night for eight years. If it's eight o'clock, it's Olbermann. And now it isn't.
It isn't that we LIKED him, not in the way we LIKE, say, Rachel Maddow. Keith Olbermann never came across as someone you'd actually want to know. Those of us who watched every night knew that he was a bombastic, egotistical ass. But he was OUR bombastic, egotistical ass, and we loved him warts and all. When he was suspended for making the same kind of political contributions that everyone at Fox does (and even Joe Scarborough at MSNBC does), over 250,000 viewers signed a petition for reinstatement. We recognized his faults, but he wasn't our friend. He was the guy we turned to for a voice of sanity in a world full of climate change deniers and Christofascist zombies and ignoramuses who regard facts as just other opinions. At first it was just Keith Olbermann, but he's also the guy who gave us Rachel Maddow in prime time -- a gift for which we can never hope to repay him. And if you saw Rachel refuse to capitulate to the inevitable and ubiquitous filibustering of Club for Growth shill Stephen Moore on Real Time last night you too will be grateful to Olbermann for giving her a well-deserved break:
Olbermann was important to us, but despite his good work in setting up free health care clinics and making it possible for Americans to donate to help provide transplants to Arizona residents doomed by Jan Brewer's REAL death panel, he kept us at a distance. Rachel is more like the big sister of the narrator in a Carson McCullers story -- the happy, athletic, popular big sister who is always there for you when your parents don't understand you because you're nerdy, bookish, and anxious. Her success has allowed her to be filmed doing segments and promos without full makeup, in the blue nerd glasses and the Converse All-Stars. And the fact that she exudes passion and unabashed liberalism, and then puts on Kent Jones in a funny costume, may help insulate her somewhat from the kind of controversy that has always shadowed Olbermann.
But as much as we adore Rachel, it's Keith Olbermann who has been the pioneer, the voice cursing the darkness when no one else could have. Without Keith Olbermann, there's no Rachel Maddow. There's no Ed Show. There's no Sam Seder in front of the cameras in prime time. There's no Cenk Uygur forcing Republican former Congressman Bob McEwen to admit that there's no money in the Social Security trust fund because they stole it and we have to just suck it up. Without Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O'Donnell (who is still too "centrist" for my taste) is still an occasional third banana on Morning Schmoe. Without Keith Olbermann, the only voices of opinion journalism on the medium in which most people still get their news are the reality-challenged hatemeisters on Fox News.
Who knows...perhaps with the "friendlier faces of liberalism" that now constitute the MSNBC lineup (because Cenk Uygur's seat-warming at 6 PM is still only filler), the "both sides do it" claim will be mitigated. But for those of us who invited Keith Olbermann into our homes at 8 PM every weeknight for eight years, there's a big empty chair today. And just another weepy-trigger for an exhausted blogger.
Keith Olbermann got the boot today. This disgusting piece of shit rants on:
Citizens United is the worst thing to ever happen to this country, and yes I am including Pearl Harbor and 9/11 in that consideration. Yes, more people died in those events. But freedom and democracy itself died the day the Roberts court decided that corporations should be able to buy government and control the public airwaves utterly.
If you have Comcast, AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, you might consider speaking to these fuckers in the only language they understand, and cancel your subscription. I've had Dish Network for over a decade. Yes, it costs me a bit more, and I have no triple threat or triple trouble or any of the other packages the giant behemoths who control the information flow are putting out. I also often have coupons. If you want more information, contact me. Dish Network also carries FSTV, where you can see Democracy Now and Thom Hartmann's new show. You won't find that on Comcast.
UPDATE: You can thank Keith Olbermann for speaking truth to power for the last eight years here.
It snowed in New Jersey again this morning. My garden, composter and window boxes are covered and frozen over. Like a lot of my neighbors, I'm bone-weary of shoveling and long for spring. According to Herb Calendar Pro, it's time to:
Review any notes that you made about last year’s garden; transfer important reminders (such as plants to move or divide) to a list or calendar for the coming year. Start new garden plans or revise existing ones. Take stock of stored tender bulbs, and any seeds that you’ve collected and stored; toss out any that are damaged. Heavy snow kills garden pests, but its weight can break branches, so shake it off. Secure plants against strong winds and repair any heaving caused by frost.
Zomigod, that's a lot to do while it's dark out and I'm trying to hibernate. Try this for a divine bedtime story:
Your free 2011 Catalog & Garden Guide will be shipped separately from anything else you might order and will arrive within one month. If the free catalog is the only item in your shopping cart when you check out, you will be asked for your address but not for payment information.
I'm a sucker for a happy ending! We have very little in the way of usable space here at Handmade House, so mostly we grow herbs and lettuces in window boxes. Inevitably, this leads to scenes where I'm leaning out a window with scissors in one hand and a determined 6 lb. cat trying to get a better snootful in the other, but fresh basil and arugula are totally worth it. Are you dreaming of spring? If you're planting, what will you plant?
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Has Barack Obama just had enough of his thankless job and is essentially saying "Take this job and shove it", or is he really living in so much of a bubble that he can't hear anyone but Republicans and Washington pundits?
It's one or the other.
OR, he was a Republican mole the whole time and it's all just kabuki.
Because unless we are all being misled somehow, it's very likely that in his upcoming State of the Union address, the President Of All Wall Street is going to talk about "tough choices" and "having an adult conversation" and "belt tightening" -- all in the context of cutting Social Security.
President Barack Obama's apparent willingness to consider cuts in Social Security benefits may be winning him points with Washington elites, but it's killing him with voters, who see the program as inviolate and may start to wonder what the Democratic Party stands for, if not for Social Security.
That's the conclusion of three top progressive pollsters who spoke to reporters Wednesday at a briefing sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, the Century Foundation and Demos.
"For the public, cutting benefits is the problem, not the solution," said Guy Molyneux, a partner at Hart Research Associates.
As a result, the pollsters said that any Democrat seeking elected office in 2012 should be begging Obama not to say anything about Social Security cuts in his State of the Union address later this month.
A post-election poll by Celinda Lake's Lake Research Partners found that, by a margin of 3 percentage points, Americans now trust Republicans in Congress more than Democrats when it comes to Social Security -- surely the first time since the program became a signature issue for the Democratic Party in the 1930s.
The poll found confidence in Democrats on the issue dropping 14 points just since January 2007, accompanied by a 13-point increase for Republicans.
The public favors congressional Republicans over Obama on Social Security by an even larger 6-point margin. Obama's 26-percent rating is not only less than half Bill Clinton's (53 percent), it's even lower than that of George W. Bush (37 percent), whose proposal to privatize the program went down in flames.
Imagine that. The very people who would have signed on to George W. Bush's privatization plan to hand over Social Security to Lloyd Blankfein now poll better than Obama does on Social Security.
I'm starting to long for the good old days when Bill Clinton wanted EVERYONE to love him. This guy only wants REPUBLICANS and Wall Street investment bankers to love him.
It was one thing when he threw the progressives under the bus. But alienate everyone who is over the age of 30 (and yes, young people are also concerned about their own future benefits) and it's a sure one-way ticket back to Cubs games. As Blue Girl noted on Tuesday, the entire concept of the Social Security Trust Fund was designed to get the elephant that is the baby boom generation through the snake, and then with a better balance of workers to retirees, it can go back to the pay-as-you-go system it was before WWII veterans were told to Be Fruitful And Multiply after returning home. But since most people think of Social Security as a bank account anyway, it's far easier for people to envision a passbook with only fifty cents in it than the complexities of how a system that's worked for over a half a decade will work once everyone who's over 45 today meets all their old pets at the Rainbow Bridge.
So in his effort to be Nixon in China, and therefore perhaps part of his quest to become a throwaway line uttered by Zachary Quinto in a future Star Trek movie, Barack Obama seems not content to try to suck up to politicians who want to "repeal" him by returning to the Golden Bushian Age of Deregulation and ensuring that old people who lose their retirement savings to his good friends at investment banks and brokerage firms have NO money to live on in their old age.
