Bitch In Charge

Pardons

I spent a lot of time in the 70s feeling more than a little worried and frustrated because  Ford issued a blanket pardon for Tricky Dick Nixon.

And now that Obama might be doing the same for The Shrubster and his VP (Snidely Whips-n-Chainsey) et al, it struck me as an ah-fuck-not-this-shit-again kinda moment.

But Ol' Doc Maddow has some purty decent 'splainin' goin' on.  This is the only good clip I can find that's also easy to embed here in my little blog:



Find more at Rachel's show archives at MSNBC.com.

Charlie Gets It

It starts with what seems like an unrelated event in Georgia, but Charlie knows there's no such thing as unrelated event.

Mr Charles Pierce at Esquire:

Somewhere in itself, and not very far from the surface, either, this country has gone mad with fear and rage. As a result, it is finding sustenance in the acts of official violence, and doing so in more different ways than the republic has seen since we had lynching, union busting, and Red Scares at the same time, back when the 19th century was turning into the 20th. Anyone who can't see the political and sociological tissue connecting the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the revelations of a decade's worth of CIA brutality, and the execution of Robert Holsey isn't looking hard enough. In the country's untrammelled fear and rage, it is exercising the only function of self-government it can recall as its mad brain turns to red fire -- to encourage the exercise of the state's power to wound and kill all the right people. In this madness, race and class are mere diagnostic categories. In this madness, the politics of right and left, of Republicans and Democrats, of conservatives and liberals, of red and blue, are pathetically inadequate to assess the situation. In this madness, the choices are not made within the easy and obvious contexts . This is a choice between barbarism and not, between savagery and not. This is a choice between the national soul and the national Id. This is a choice of whether to take inchoate and weaponized vengeance against the living representations of the monsters in our paranoid dreams. That's the last vestige of self-government that we have allowed ourselves. The right to demand that the institutions of government kill what we fear. By any means necessary, as someone once said. 

Today's Pix

About That Torture Thing

Our politicians and Press Poodles and everybody else showing off a talent for farting thru their mouths have all been telling us for quite a while that they don't want those rotten terrorists at Gitmo to be brought into this country because they'll stink up the joint - or some such nonsense.

Here's the thing.  I think we know now why we can't just close Gitmo and bring 'em here - it's because we tortured them.  If we put these guys into the regular channels of either our civilian justice system or the military justice system, we lose 'em.

Nothing we have against them can be used in court now because we fucking tortured them.

We completely lost our shit after 9/11. We went more than a little looney, and we did all these really lousy things to people.  

BTW - not to put us on the couch too much here, but we made the transition from Andy Hardy to Vlad The Impaler in one big fuckin' hurry; fast enough to make me think maybe we weren't really making this huge change so much as we were just kinda coming out of the closet(?).

So anyway, when we began to understand just how fucked up it was that we were doing all this really bad shit, we went into the standard CYA mode that happens every god dammed time we allow too few people to hold too much power, and let 'em do their thing without any way to keep an eye on 'em.

And the kicker - we knew it was wrong.  All of us.  We knew it.  It's wrong to torture people. And it was wrong to change the law in order to help us pretend we were still the good guys just trying to protect our sweet innocent little ol' American selves.  We knew it was wrong and we did it anyway.

Can we stop pretending now?

Leave It To Charlie

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

Today, with the release of the executive summary of the congressional investigation into the American torture program, we have lost forever the right to moral leadership that we claimed at Nuremberg, and at the tribunals that investigated the actions of the Japanese in the Pacific. Those proceedings were based in two fundamental beliefs: a) that there are some activities that are beyond the law, even in wartime, and b) that the people responsible for those activities, even the worst of them, deserve a fair trial, and a trial that is open to the world, not only because the world needed to see the savagery of which humans are capable, but also because the trial would demonstrate to the world that there is a better way to resolve the issues raised by the native savagery of which people and nations are capable than the masturbatory exercise of blind vengeance. Justice Robert Jackson, in his eloquent summation for the prosecution in the trial of the Nazi warlords, saw all of this with coruscating clarity.

Dunno about losing it "forever".  I guess we can only hope the republic lasts long enough to get some of it back.

Whoa - George

In the next post down from here, I go all I-Told-Ya-So, but here's a bit of a pre-quel to it that's kinda interesting (in a feel-a-little-embarrassed-for-him-but-not-really-the-prick-should-be-in-fucking-prison kinda way).  Anybody else notice this guy's really lost his game?



Le Shrub was always about as sharp as a bagful 'o wet yarn, but he knew how to deflect and pivot a shitload better'n that.  Dang.

Squandered

What His Shrub-i-ness said back then was bullshit.




Some knew it was bullshit back then - and they said so out loud - and they were either ignored or fucked over because they said it out loud.

Olbermann knew how to put it in terms of having to deal with our shit before we get to move on to anything else.




And he said it a lot.



(Search YouTube = Olbermann Torture)


"But they would not listen. 
They're not listening still.
Perhaps they never will."

Purple

If we want Congress to work the way it's supposed to work, then we have to figure out how to unfuck all the "safe" voting districts that the parties have Gerrymandered to the point of being inherited feifdoms.

With Apologies To Mr Wrigley

In the course of my everyday herky-jerky travels thru my corner of paradise, I've been thru some variations of my own existence, not the least of which has to do with my flavor(s) of politics.

I won't recount the details right now because I'm not convinced it's of any interest to anybody, and if I try to write it all down we'll be here all fuckin' day, and we all have some shit that needs to get done.  Besides, it has little to do with anything real -  'specially as regards something as unreal as whatever the fuck it is that passes for politics here in USAmerica, Inc.

Anyway, after all this time, I'm kinda back to a starting point.  

I think I understand now that if you listen, you learn. But also too, that no matter who it is you're listening to - DumFux News, Limbaugh, NPR, MSNBC, the big 3 networks, or your crazy Uncle Billy - if you never disagree with any of it, then you can count on any or all of these 3 things:

• you're not really listening 
• you're not doing your own thinking
• you're totally unnecessary to the process.

Get necessary, dammit.

It Got Me Thinkin'

Which is always a little dangerous, but anyway - here's a little bit of a thing:



'Conservatives' are always yammerin' about how they want Gubmint to run more like a Bidness.

My contention is that's pretty much exactly what we've been seeing for 20 or more years, and here's why I think it:  Congress Critters are privy to lots and lots of information that's either not known to the rest of us, or that they get to know about way before we get to know  about it; AND, they get to make rules and regulations that can easily tilt the money chute a little (or a lot) in the general direction of their own bank accounts and portfolios.  So while we have managed to put certain safeguards in place to make it harder for them to give themselves raises in their salaries, we've done practically nothing to keep them from creating a very slick and lucrative money-laundering apparatus that funnels shitloads of cash into their pockets, even if it does happen behind a thick veil of toxic fog.

Meanwhile, Corporate Bosses get to do this in a slightly more open way - but it's still pretty fucked up.  CEOs and Directors and Senior Execs get paid a lot, but the way they make the real money is by putting policy decisions in place that benefit them greatly at the expense (often) of everybody else.

Ask a simple question: why are so many companies spending so much (~$2.4 TRILLION) buying their own stock?

Then ask: what's the Comp Plan look like for those Bosses?  

I'm betting dollars to dingleberries that those guys are gonna make more than a few bucks over and above their salaries if the company stock performs well, and what better way to boost the value of a share of your stock than to make it look like it's a hot property because "somebody's snapping it up like crazy"?

And when you're in bed with the politicians who conveniently vote against close enforcement of the rules you've already gotten them to weaken, then collusion and cronyism and outright bribery become the orders of the day, and simply the usual and customary way of doing business.

It gets really complex and convoluted, and I'm not pretending to know what all is wrong or what all needs to be done.  But I think it points back to the need for Separation-Of-Powers solutions; we have to rebuild the firewalls - the ones that keep Businesses and Governments and individuals from becoming too big and too powerful.

Cuz always remember - a business is not a democracy.

Snarky Jab Du Jour

Just A Tho't

"A mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam." --Carl Sagan



hat tip = Facebook friend VWE

So, Earth is all we've got.  It's home and there's literally nowhere else to go.

And then there's a guy like Charles Koch (just an example), who seems to be going to great lengths to fuck up the joint, making life in our little corner of the universe less and less likely to continue.

If some nutball ammosexual suddenly got all tree-hugger-y and walked up to Ol' Chuckles and poked 5 or 6 holes in Mr Koch's torso with a Glock .40, do ya think the shooter's lawyer'd have a chance to get him off by claiming it was justifiable under the Stand Your Ground statutes?

Just wonderin'.



(No - seriously, you knuckleheads - don't be out there pullin' shit, OK?)

Almost In Passing

I've been trying to think my way through all this Mike Brown / Eric Garner stuff; crashing around in my head looking for some boiled-down guiding principle to apply that might help me sort it out.

And then: The law must be a shield, not a sword.

For a good 2,000 - 10,000 generations, The Law was used and abused as a way to rationalize Might-Makes-Right.  As long as I had some reasonable expectation of being able to take you in a fist fight, I could jack your shit; and fuck you if you don't like it cuz fuck you, that's why. All the big guys did it cuz that's just what a big guy could do.  And it worked - Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, Britain, etc etc etc - you get the idea.

Unfortunately, saying it that way makes it sound like we'd have to look way far back to find good examples, and that makes me think we're feeling a little too comfortable about ignoring the need to examine our motives and our reasoning, and our willingness to shrug it all off like a buncha fuckin' Eloi.

But gosh, it seems we don't have to look back very far to find some examples of people doing some pretty fucked up things because they had the juice to make the law do whatever they wanted it to do in order to pad their bank accounts or act out their domination fantasies or whatever their issues were at the time.

--slavery in America was lawful; and so was Jim Crow after that.

-- the genocide committed by Nazi Germany was mostly lawful under German law, and according to most written international law in effect at the time.

-- apartheid in South Africa was established by law.

-- Saddam Hussein claimed at his trial in Baghdad in 2006 that his order mandating the execution of 148 persons in response to an attempted assassination of him was lawful.

-- the Israeli military justified their heavy use of cluster bombs during the 2006 war by stating that “[a]ll the weapons and munitions used by the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] are legal under international law and their use conforms with international standards” (Shadid 2006, A01).

-- the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq was lawful according to American interpretation of law.

The law has to be a shield.  It has to be there to protect us from overbearing, over-reaching, evermore ambitious and power-craving despots.  When the law instead protects the police (eg) from being held to the same standards of justice as apply to everybody else, then the law has become a sword against the people, and it will be changed by the people one way or another.  It has to be changed because it's become a contradiction.  And while contradictions exist, they can't prevail.
(all you 'conserva-tarians' might recognize that one from the Sacred Texts of Our Lady Ayn of Rand)

For my own self, I kinda like The American Exceptionalism way, and I'll keep trying to do it that way.  But if it has to be changed the old-fashioned way, then I'll be sadly watching from the bench, unsurprised.

I just really hope we can get back to being that exception.

I Hope Not

These 2 movies are not bad.  Some decent values statements, and some really good Movie Moments.

I only wish I could shake the creepy feeling that they're really just 2-hour ads for companies with piles of money so ridiculously gigundous that they can produce feature-length infomercials, and get us to pay twelve bucks a head for the privilege of absorbing their Corporate Branding Messages.