My Kinda Veteran

As long as the protesters fit the hippie/hipster stereotype, the police can function within a comfortable frame of reference. But throw 'em a curve, and they're lost - it blows their programming all to pieces.

Bunny Hitler

It's a good idea to mock these assholes for a thousand eternities.  This is what hell is about for a nonbeliever like me.  If there's any possibility of an afterlife, then it's important to make sure that every time Adolf tunes in to find out what's happening, what he sees is many many people reiterating what a fuckin' jerk he was.

James Fallows - Again

The guy is fast becoming one of my faves.

Critical of a recent WaPo article, Mr Fallows writes:

- It reflects so thorough an absorption of the idea that the filibuster-threat is normal business that it describes the latest cloture vote as a vote on the bill itself: "Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Jon Tester (Mont.), who are both up for reelection next year, took to the Senate floor and delivered a sizeable blow to the bill's prospects by voting against it." No, they voted against the cloture measure, which they knew had zero chance of getting the necessary 60 votes. Several other Democrats with doubts about the bill itself nonetheless were persuaded to vote for cloture, so that it would end up with a symbolic but ineffective 51-vote majority.

Yay James Fallows

From The Atlantic:

'Enabler' problem: The reluctance of the mainstream media to call this what it is, and instead to talk about "partisanship" and "logjam" and "dysfunction." Yes, those are the results. But the cause is intentional, and it comes overwhelmingly from one side.

I tend to read Fallows as a "goodguy conservative".  ie: He has a point of view that's generally "more right-of-center" than mine, but he understands (and has begun insisting) that policies have to be in line with facts and not ideology.

I think I see many more signs that a real shift could be taking place.

Yay David Frum - Kinda

From truthout:

This is not a moment for government to be cutting back. … Right now we’re watching state governments try to balance all of their budgets at the same time in the middle of this crisis. We’ve seen half a million public sector jobs disappear. Now, if these were good times, I would applaud that. We need to see a thinner public sector — especially at the state and local level. But we’re seeing what happens when you do that as an anti-recession measure and you make the recession worse. And even though we’re in a technical recovery, incomes and employment — all of that remains lagging for people — I think that we’ve rediscovered in this crisis something that I think we all knew. Which is, there’s a reason why the people of the 1930s built some kind of minimum guarantee — unemployment insurance, health care coverage and things like that. And it’s not because they wanted to be nice. It’s because in a crisis when people lose their jobs, if there is no social safety net they loose 100 percent of their purchasing power.

Even tho' I agree with him on the basics of keeping Government under control, I've not been much of a fan of Lil Davey Frum because there was always something in the way he spoke that sounded hollow.  The piece from truthout goes a good way to explaining it.  Maybe it's just that it's always good to find out there are others who think like me. Dunno, but Frum has a decent-sized audience, and while he won't be delivering them to the Dems, leading them away from the Extreme Right should be a good thing.

A Gentle Reminder

The New Colossus

By Emma Lazarus, 1883

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Victoria Jackson - Super Genius

I remain unconvinced that she's not making a fairly lame attempt at satire.

Signage

From my quick trip last Thursday up to DC to check on Occupy K Street.

Elizabeth Warren

I'm a Capitalist because God's a Capitalist.  And I favor regulation because God favors regulation.

Signage

The Jobs Bill

Obama asked the Senate to put aside their rancor for a moment in order to try something that might help get a coupla million Americans a little help finding work.  And the Senate replied:

Tech Solutions For The Revolution

Whenever the rabble get a little riled up and start to do that icky and unsanitary thing called "a protest", the establishment (or powers that be, or whatever you choose to label them) always try to tamp the thing down by interfering with the crowd's ability to communicate.  In Iran and Egypt and practically every other arab state where protests sprang up, the governments took down the internet, or they suspended cellphone service or they blocked twitter - they did whatever they thought would be the most disruptive to the protestors' need to communicate and coordinate.  It's a primary tactic in every conflict, and every government does it whenever they feel threatened.  Remember that the USSR banned fax machines for years, and when they finally allowed them, each machine had to be registered and each transmission was monitored and recorded.  That's how threatening free and open communication is to any government, including here in the good ol' USofA.

Occupy Wall Street has struggled with NYC's prohibition on the use of amplification in public spaces.  Their work-around has been to use humans to relay the speakers' words out to the crowd by simply repeating what the speakers are saying.  Semi-brilliant in that it's organic and cheap and very "community-ish".  I imagine it also tends to work in favor of keeping the oratorical blather to a minimum.

I'm wondering, tho', if maybe there's a better solution that serves the purpose and stays within the law.  What if you just put together a conference call?  One quick pass thru Google and I found a company offering "free" conference calling, allowing up to 1,000 listen-only participants.  If you had a thousand cell phones scattered thru the crowd (on external speaker), it'd be like one of those church services at the old drive-in theater setups.

There must be other tech solutions too.  Get thinkin', you guys.

This Is What You Call A Recovery?

To go along with Bush's Jobless Recovery, now we get Obama's Wageless Recovery.  And it kinda makes sense in a weird, Compendium-of-Official-Horse-Shit kind of way.  We already have the Non-Denial Denial, and the Non-Apology Apology - now we can add the Non-Recovery Recovery.

NYT

Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent.

It gets harder and harder for me to justify voting for Obama again.  I'll probably stick with him because the alternative (so far) just seems too terrible to contemplate.  That could change tho'.  Everybody has to decide; at what point are you willing just to let the fuckin' thing burn?

OWS Statement

Oo-rah

And what would you like to say to Sean Hannity?