Testifying Fetus

I'm starting a new rock band - Testifying Fetus.

We'll only play non-union gigs in Ohio.

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Wikileaks and War

It's really lousy that a lone, low-ranking military intelligence operative could violate his oath and our morality by leaking hundreds of thousands of electronic documents gathered during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

That said, if the press corp was doing its job, and our government could tell the truth and maintain some sort of temerity to stick to American values and traditions, Wikileaks would be irrelevant.

We reap what we sow sometimes. Let the outrage begin.



Image via Wikimedia Commons

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Age of Denial

I think Peter Daou is right:

America is in an Age of Denial, a time in which intolerable injustices are widely ignored, from preventable hunger, poverty and disease to irreversible environmental destruction to the global oppression of girls and women.

It is an age where wealth disparities are at record levels, where a war based on lies and deceptions that resulted in unimaginable carnage is heralded as a success, where the assault on basic rights and liberties is greeted with a yawn — if not a cheer.

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Robert Byrd - Pork Fritter

In the many tributes to Senator Robert Byrd, nearly all mentioned his acumen at bringing home the bacon to West-By-God Virginia.

I think Radley Balko said it best:

So if I’m correctly reading the various tributes to Sen. Robert Byrd floating around the web this morning, I’m supposed to celebrate how the man atoned for his bigotry earlier in life by devoting the rest of his life to public service . . . where he used other people’s money to build monuments to himself.

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Kevin Drum on 'Oil Spill Kabuki'

Kevin Drum seems a little frustrated by the current oil spill machinations, and understandably so:

I feel like I should say something about the big press conference Obama just held. It's not like he does a whole lot of them. But it seemed pretty soporific to me. On the one hand, it's true that when he said he was "angry and frustrated" about the BP oil spill, he sure didn't seem very angry or frustrated. On the other hand, watching the CNN dimwits after the conference solemnly advising us one after one that Obama really needed to be more emotional because that's what the American people want — well, screw that. I have no idea what the American people want, and neither do they.


In times like this, I'm not looking for a leader to give folks a warm fuzzy. I'm seeking a cold, methodical manager who believes that execution is more important than elocution.


There will be plenty of time to sit around the fire and talk about how we felt when we heard the news that a major oil company had killed a huge section of our environment while MMS personnel frolicked in piles of hookers and blow. 


For now, just plug the damn hole.

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Denmark Loves Mukhtar the Bus Driver

Mukhtar is having a birthday, so his regulars turn into a well-wishing flash mob.



A Daily Dish commenter shares the following:

Thanks for posting that. Six months ago, extremists in Denmark were pitching legislation banning minarets. And of course there was the Muhammed cartoon controversy. Now a bus driver whose name means "chosen" in Arabic is celebrated by the folks who see him every day. It's good to see a sense of goodwill, born of community, triumph over the tyranny of the fearful.

Indeed.

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Take My Job? Just Shove It

You may have heard of the anonymous letter penned by a Wall Street brainiac that essentially opined anything we could do, he could do better, and if our pesky populism kept up and led to actual constraints on the financial services industry, those saintly bankers would blitzkreig through the rest of the economy using the God-given talents that have provided them obscene levels of wealth and hubris.

Or as Nick Kapur writes in The Motley Fool:

The letter cautioned that because of our unwarranted meddling in his industry, we're going to lose our cushy "$85k a year" jobs to him and all his financial friends. We'll lose our "4 month" vacation privileges, the superfluous bathroom breaks that we take, and our swollen, blue-collar benefit packages. Naturally, Wall Street folk don't require such frivolities, he says, but they'll gladly take them (or assist in their elimination) if they're forced to work our jobs.

I'll wait a moment while you ponder the between-the-legs brass clangers required to utter such horseshit.

Ready?

Rather than unleash a stream of invectives in response, I'll simply cut and paste a snippet of Kapur's wisdom.

The reality is that no one here relies on your munificence. Our nation's stagnant per capita income and growing wealth divide should make that obvious. In fact, when this country's collective wealth was at its greatest, bankers had little more responsibility than to hold onto our money until we wanted it. Since then, you've grown like an aggressive cancer feeding off our prosperity. It's high time you realize that whether or not it hurts your feelings, you will no longer have that kind of unchecked autonomy.

Which leads me to my last point: What makes you think you could even survive in the real world? What exactly do you do well? Your own people acknowledge your uselessness. Jeremy Grantham believes that you "add nothing but costs." Paul Volcker believes that the best thing your business has produced in the last 25 years is the ATM machine. Jack Bogle ... well, you don't want to know what Jack Bogle thinks. Even in the best of times, 85% of professional money managers still can't beat a simple market index. Your business has a long and well-documented history of failing to provide value.

Honestly, I'm not sure I even want you doing something as complex as mowing my lawn. With the seemingly perverse attitude with which you view the world, I certainly don't want you within 500 yards of my kids' schools, let alone teaching at them. Your arrogance, your lack of a moral compass, and your incompetence spell out only one thing to me: You're unemployable.

Here's an idea to consider: Rather than infiltrate our lowly jobs, why don't you take that huge brain of yours and that renowned work ethic and become an engineer or a scientist or a doctor and actually create something of value? It would probably be more fun, potentially more lucrative, and you'd finally develop something that you could be proud of. We might even respect you for it.

What he said, you fuckety-fucker.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

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It's Time For A Little Populism

Nola.com, via Balloon Juice:

Corporations being regarded as people by our laws and courts seems to be back firing a bit. If you operate a hot dog stand and sell contaminated hot dogs that get people sick you are out of business and get sued. If you operate an oil drilling operation and cause an eco-disaster you collect insurance money for you losses, you have limited liability and the profits keep rolling in. We need some fundamental change.

That sounds about right to me. The game has been rigged for so long that people have become inured to the results. Sadly, it's difficult for most of us to relate to the shenanigans on Wall Street, the machinations of big oil, and the incestuous dynamic between our government, corporations, and the lobbyists who act as financial Jezebels in the relationship. 

But when we lose our jobs and can't get a mortgage due to the oafish, criminal behavior of the money managers, and The Daily Show parrots the kabuki theater of the House and Senate nightly, even the most dense of us begin to realize that we've been played as a bunch of saps. Start throwing some petroleum-coated birds and dead fish on the television news next to video of BP, Trans Ocean, and Halliburton passing the buck while lighting cigars with sawbucks, and the closing argument has been made.

In a perfect world, the concept of privatizing the profit while putting the public on the hook for the risk would seem ridiculous. But that's where we've landed. The question now becomes whether it's too late for the pendulum to swing back toward honesty, fairness, ethics, and responsibility.

I fear that it has.

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I Love The Smell of Terror Smell in the Morning

The Poor Man Institute has some keen advice for those who are demagoging after the recent Times Square attempted fireworks demonstration:

Can I make a tactical suggestion?  If you find the Center for Advanced Study in Terror Arts and Sciences where Mr. Shazad received the technical training which led him to build a “bomb” out of bottle rockets and Miracle-Gro, and then gave him the operational training such that he was somehow incapable of setting fire to fucking gasoline, please do not do anything which would lead to any disruption of classes.  I’ll give you a moment to let that sink in.  If anything, the US government should be making sure they have the best facilities and most attractive campus for training people how to fail six different ways at terrorizing anyone.

We shouldn't be afraid of these nitwits. Terrorism only works if fear changes your way of life.

We should be curled up on the floor, giggling. That's how you win the war on terror.

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Barenaked Ladies Bummer

We headed to the Palace Theater last night to take in the Barenaked Ladies show. The verdict?

Meh.





The band's newer stuff was impressive - catchy syncopation, powerful harmonies, and uncommonly-good lyrical styles. Even some doo-wop.

When launching into tunes from the past, however, it was troubling how much Steven Page's unique voice is missed. The songs weren't bad - they were just different. Really different.

It's obvious that Ed Robertson is (and was) a key contributor to the mirth and joy of the concert-goers. And Ed was giving it everything he had, and if I'd never heard the band before, that probably would have been enough.

But I've got history with these guys, so while it was good, it wasn't great.

Damn you, Steven Page, and your cocaine and party girls. You had a good gig going and you blew it.

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Times Square Bomber Ineptitude

I've been scratching my head since Monday, wondering why it is that people are screaming about Miranda rights, Pakistani connections, and the rest.

The bomber dude used non-explosive fertilizer, fireworks, and an alarm clock that could have come from the local Duane Reade. He paid cash for the Pathfinder, left the VIN number on the engine block, and his cell phone was tracked from the skies as he made his way to the airport.

Like the underwear bomber, he failed spectacularly, and was captured not with torture, wiretaps, or trampling on the Constitution, but due to old-fashioned detective work.

He wasn't very good at this. New Yorkers should feel relieved. The rest of us need to move on.

We should all be reading The Incompetent Ninja.

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Government is Evil Until A Disaster Happens

From No More Mister Nice Blog:

For the last sixteen months the GOP has been screaming that government is evil, that it is the problem, that we need less regulation in order to be more productive, more profitable, and that rules and oversight aren't needed because the free market will take care of things.  You know what?  If the booms aren't "effective" and the resources of BP are "not adequate" to deal with a disaster of this magnitude, then why the hell are you letting them operate offshore oil rigs off of your coastline, you jagoff?  You're the Governor, Mr. State Sovereignty Teapublican guy.  Stop the drilling until this disaster is resolved, and don't start it until you can be sure it can't happen again.

Folks, the hand of the free market just ripped a wellhead to pieces and is completely screwing over the Gulf.  It's going to cost several billion dollars to fix.  I'm sick of people saying that the magical free market will be responsible and keep anything bad from happening.  Well guess what?  The Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, this oil rig nightmare, and our economy back in 2008, they all got "fixed by the magical free market" where deregulation caused untold damage to our economy and hey, even killed people.

And now the Republicans are demanding that the government "fix the problem"?  Screw you guys.  Government is a lumbering vampiric dinosaur to you morons until you need the government to solve your problems for you.  Then it's "I demand the government does something about this!"  And it's the same Teabagger assclowns doing the loudest yelling and screaming.

What he said.

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Frank Rich - Arizona Isn't The Real Problem

DON’T blame it all on Arizona. The Grand Canyon State simply happened to be in the right place at the right time to tilt over to the dark side. Its hysteria is but another symptom of a political virus that can’t be quarantined and whose cure is as yet unknown.

That's an ominous way to begin a column that proceeds to examine the reactionary immigration legislation recently passed in Arizona as a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" conundrum instead of a more populist "us vs. them" equation. But Rich makes a number of salient points.

Arizonans, like all Americans, have every right to be furious about Washington’s protracted and bipartisan failure to address the immigration stalemate. To be angry about illegal immigration is hardly tantamount to being a bigot. But the Arizona law expressing that anger is bigoted, and in a very particular way. The law dovetails seamlessly with the national “Take Back America” crusade that has attended the rise of Barack Obama and the accelerating demographic shift our first African-American president represents. 

True. Ever since Barack Obama's ascension to America's highest office become a fait accompli, segments of the population have become whirling dervishes, spitting out cultural molasses in their attempts to slow the force majeure of white descent as the majority demographic.

That's two French phrases in one paragraph. Need some Freedom Fries before we move on?

It wasn't election night that set these factions in motion. As soon as Obama began knee-capping Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary race, the rumbling began. There's enough video of McCain supporters with monkey puppets and bigoted misspelled signs to fill several days worth of Fox News airtime, not to mention the countless Photoshop pics of the White House as a watermelon patch, or Obama caricatured as the Huggy Bear of 21st century American politics.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then loss of power most certainly turns folks into frightened, shrill dingbats.

Rich:

To the “Take Back America” right, the illegitimate Obama is Illegal Alien No. 1. It’s no surprise that of the 35 members of the Arizona House who voted for the immigration law (the entire Republican caucus), 31 voted soon after for another new law that would require all presidential candidates to produce birth certificates to qualify for inclusion on the state’s 2012 ballot. With the whole country now watching Arizona, that “birther” bill was abruptly yanked Thursday.

The legislators who voted for both it and the immigration law were exclusively Republicans, but what happened in the Arizona G.O.P. is not staying in Arizona. Officials in at least 10 other states are now teeing up their own new immigration legislation. They are doing so even in un-Arizonan places like Ohio, Missouri, Maryland and Nebraska, none of them on the Department of Homeland Security’s 2009 list of the 10 states that contain three-quarters of America’s illegal immigrant population. 

Ah, yes. The bed-wetting, hand-wringing, "what if they change the American symbol from a bald eagle to Cheech Marin?" crowd has mobilized, determined to dig into their very own ultranationalist Alamo, forgetting two key historical points - the Mexicans kicked Texian ass, and only two Alamo defenders survived.

But what of the current racial tensions permeating our national discourse? One hopes that clearer minds will prevail, but then again, no one puts Baby in the corner. And that's where many who have enlisted in the alabaster army fervently believe they've been forced.

It's not true, of course. Sadly, rational ideas and fear mix like the Gulf of Mexico and BP oil. Nate Silver could set the loyalist gringos straight with some metrics and fancy graphs and trendlines, but facts and figures are no match for cultural hysteria.

In this Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, it’s politically incorrect to entertain a reasonable suspicion that race may be at least a factor in what drives an action like the Arizona immigration law. Any racism in America, it turns out, is directed at whites. Beck called Obama a “racist.” Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a “Latina woman racist.” When Obama put up a routine YouTube video calling for the Democratic base to mobilize last week — which he defined as “young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women” — the Republican National Committee attacked him for playing the race card. Presumably the best defense is a good offense when you’re a party boasting an all-white membership in both the House and the Senate and represented by governors who omit slavery from their proclamations of Confederate History Month.

In a development that can only be described as startling, the G.O.P.’s one visible black leader, the party chairman Michael Steele, went off message when appearing at DePaul University on April 20. He conceded that African-Americans “really don’t have a reason” to vote Republican, citing his party’s pursuit of a race-baiting “Southern strategy” since the Nixon-Agnew era. For this he was attacked by conservatives who denied there had ever been such a strategy. That bit of historical revisionism would require erasing, for starters, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the Willie Horton campaign that helped to propel Bush 41 into the White House in 1988. 

Sound the bugles, you pallid jingoists. Want to read a history book on your Kindle while you wait?

Image via Wikimedia Commons

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Bill Moyers - Plutocracy and Democracy Don't Mix

I'm going to miss Bill Moyers. Do not go gentle into that good night, Bill.

You've no doubt figured out my bias by now. I've hardly kept it a secret. In this regard, I take my cue from the late Edward R. Murrow, the Moses of broadcast news.

Ed Murrow told his generation of journalists bias is okay as long as you don't try to hide it. So here, one more time, is mine: plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Plutocracy, the rule of the rich, political power controlled by the wealthy.

Plutocracy is not an American word but it's become an American phenomenon. Back in the fall of 2005, the Wall Street giant Citigroup even coined a variation on it, plutonomy, an economic system where the privileged few make sure the rich get richer with government on their side. By the next spring, Citigroup decided the time had come to publicly "bang the drum on plutonomy."

And bang they did, with an "equity strategy" for their investors, entitled, "Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer." Here are some excerpts:

"Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper...[and] take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years..."

"...the top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the US-- the plutonomists in our parlance-- have benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surge in the US...[and] from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor."

"...[and they] are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years. [Because] the dynamics of plutonomy are still intact."

And so they were, before the great collapse of 2008. And so they are, today, after the fall. While millions of people have lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings, the plutonomists are doing just fine. In some cases, even better, thanks to our bailout of the big banks which meant record profits and record bonuses for Wall Street.

Now why is this? Because over the past 30 years the plutocrats, or plutonomists — choose your poison — have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding. Remember that Citigroup reference to "market-friendly governments" on their side? It hasn't mattered which party has been in power — government has done Wall Street's bidding.

Don't blame the lobbyists, by the way; they are simply the mules of politics, delivering the drug of choice to a political class addicted to cash — what polite circles call "campaign contributions" and Tony Soprano would call "protection."

This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet. According to a study from the Pew Research Center last month, nine out of ten Americans give our national economy a negative rating. Eight out of ten report difficulty finding jobs in their communities, and seven out of ten say they experienced job-related or financial problems over the past year.

So it is that like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy.

Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs.

So along with Jim Hightower and Iowa's concerned citizens, and many of you, I am biased: democracy only works when we claim it as our own.

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Boycott Arizona

The draconian immigration law recently passed in Arizona demonstrates the power of small groups of crazy people when they are in charge.

We're people. What can we do?

Attorney Michael Yaki, writing at SFGate, has some thoughts:

Illegal immigration is a problem. Perhaps this law galvanizes a reluctant Congress and Administration to tackle it. But mere displeasure, even outrage, at federal inaction is no excuse to enact a law that has its antecedents in a dictatorship, not a democracy, and certainly not American democracy.

There is one way to express displeasure and opposition to the outrageous action of the Arizona legislature. Boycott the state. Cancel conventions. Shift golf vacations to Oregon, New Mexico, Florida, the Carolinas. And as painful as it may seem, if the state of affairs continues next year, it may be time to think the unthinkable -- missing the annual fan and beerfest known as spring training.

That's change we can believe in. Don't drop any coins to support Arizona.

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Shut Up, Gun Lovers

These are the same windbags who went apoplectic when the Dixie Chicks had the audacity to publicly disagree with the Bush administration.

Armed insurrection is justified in their minds, but free speech that differs from what the people with guns believe is verboten.



I'm tired of hearing them flap their gums. Bring it on.

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MSNBC Uses Puppets to Explain Financial Crisis

Is this what it's come to? Why not just have Statler and Waldorf yelling from the balcony?

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

Waldorf: That was wonderful!

Statler: Bravo!

Waldorf: I loved it

Statler: It was great

Waldorf: Well it was pretty good

Statler: Well it wasn’t bad

Waldorf: Well there were parts of it that weren’t very good though

Statler: It could have been a lot better

Waldorf: I didn’t really like it

Statler: It was pretty terrible

Waldorf: It was bad

Statler: It was awful!

Waldorf: Terrible!

Statler: Terrible!

Waldorf: Hey, boo!

Statler: BOO!

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