Today's History Lesson

Heroes remain heroes only as long as we don't look too close.  It's always important to judge slowly.

From a long pice at AlterNet:

The disruption of Johnson’s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. However, as the new President was taking steps in 1969 to extend the war another four-plus years, he sensed the threat from the wiretap file and ordered two of his top aides, chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to locate it. But they couldn’t find the file.

--and--

So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and ensured Reagan’s victory.

The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
Over the years, about two dozen sources – including Iranian officials, Israeli insiders, European intelligence operatives, Republican activists and even Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat – have provided information about alleged contacts with Iran by the Reagan campaign.

And, there were indications early in the Reagan presidency that something peculiar was afoot. On July 18, 1981, an Israeli-chartered plane crashed or was shot down after straying over the Soviet Union on a return flight from delivering U.S.-manufactured weapons to Iran.

--and--

When journalist Gary Webb revived the Contra-Cocaine scandal in the mid-to-late 1990s, he faced unrelenting hostility from Establishment reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. The attacks were so ugly that Webb’s editors at the San Jose Mercury News forced him out, setting in motion his professional destruction.

It didn’t even matter when an internal investigation by the CIA’s inspector general in 1998 confirmed that the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations had tolerated and protected drug trafficking by the Contras. The major newspapers largely ignored the findings and did nothing to help rehabilitate Webb’s career, eventually contributing to his suicide in 2004. [For details on the CIA report, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Iraq By The Numbers

This is the best rundown I've found recently - and expanding on the basic theme (as Fugelsang does) - if you voted for Jr Bush and/or you supported the war in Iraq, you never ever get to make any noise about the deficit or the debt again.  You just get to shut the fuck up while the rest of us get some of this shit straightened out.

Today's Pix

So glad they made pot legal - am I doin' this right?

Yo, Glenn

...ya wanna get my flag up off the fuckin' floor, please?



Not that long ago, he called himself a rodeo clown.  I think maybe he's turned into something else now.  I haven't seen much of him for a while, but - holy crap, dude - you might make a bit more sense and be a lot more watchable if you started to drinkin' again.

Another One Bites The Dust

Just in case you're as Math-Challenged as I am, here's the deal on the "conservative" meme about how American life-expectancy was so much shorter way back when Social Security was first put in place.

If we look at life expectancy statistics from the 1930s we might come to the conclusion that the Social Security program was designed in such a way that people would work for many years paying in taxes, but would not live long enough to collect benefits. Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65. But life expectancy at birth in the early decades of the 20th century was low due mainly to high infant mortality, and someone who died as a child would never have worked and paid into Social Security. A more appropriate measure is probably life expectancy after attainment of adulthood.

As Table 1 shows, the majority of Americans who made it to adulthood could expect to live to 65, and those who did live to 65 could look forward to collecting benefits for many years into the future. So we can observe that for men, for example, almost 54% of the them could expect to live to age 65 if they survived to age 21, and men who attained age 65 could expect to collect Social Security benefits for almost 13 years (and the numbers are even higher for women).

"Average" can be kinda tricky.  I try to remember that if I put Warren Buffett in line at the local soup kitchen, the 'average' net worth goes up to about $100 million, but I've still got 50 homeless guys plus Warren Buffett.  Tricky.

hat tip = Paul Krugman

Harvest Moon

God Bless The Child

The best quality I could find - sorry - I remember this from a TV show sometime in the 70s(?)



This band was another example of the kind of shitty things that happen when The Suits take over.

The People's Music

I used to fiddle with a 4-track DIY mini-studio thingie I bought for a coupla thousand bucks way way back in the Jurassic 80s - and on my best fuckin' day, I could maybe almost imagine doing something like this.



Astounding is all it is.

Winter Storm Saturn

A few pix from this morning:

Of course, power went out late last night and isn't expected to be back up for another day or two or three or whatever.

Lots of broken branches and downed trees - and the generator is again proven to be a great investment.

There They Go Again

From WaPo:

In a post today on the ABC News site, Rhonda Schwartz and Brian Ross deliver a few details that upend a Nov. 1 Daily Caller story alleging that Menendez paid for sex in the Dominican Republic. That story consisted of interviews with two alleged prostitutes who attested to having conducted transactions with the senator.

It looks as if ABC News got the same spiel as the Daily Caller. In her story, Schwartz-Ross say that ABC News received back-to-back interviews with the Daily Caller with three women who leveled the allegations against Menendez. As the Washington Post reported yesterday, one of those women has recanted the story and says that the whole operation was an effort to frame Menendez and a friend and donor from Florida, Dr. Salomon Melgen.
Three bombshells from ABC News:

Bombshell No. 1: The recanter yesterday was identified as one Nexis de los Santos Santana. That’s news to ABC News:

In her interview with ABC News before the election, she said her name was Michelle Rodriguez and that she had come forward because Menendez had paid her only $100 of the $500 she had expected. She now says she was coached to make the claim.

Bombshell No. 2 (nuclear): From the story: “Asked during the interview with ABC News how she knew that the man named “Bob” was a United States Senator, one of the other women said she had put the name “Bob” into a web search site and a picture of Menendez popped up.” Here’s what came up on the Erik Wemple Blog’s computer when we searched on “Bob.”

Bombshell No. 3: ABC News reports a troubling degree of sameness among the women’s accounts: “Her account of sex with Menendez in the video interview was almost word-for-word the account given by two other women who were produced for interviews about having sex with the man they knew only as ‘Bob.’” In other words, there appears to have been some coaching involved here.

The ABC News story isn’t a game changer; it’s a game ender.

Nobody doesn't know that Bob Menendez has some trouble keeping to the straight-and-narrow; everybody knows there's a thing or three wrong with New Jersey politics, and everybody knows we have something of a pay-to-play system in effect in at least a good bunch of our government.

But in their absolute insistence on maintaining Centrist Orthodoxy, some of the Press Poodles swallowed the Fable of the Dominican Hookers like a...well, like a hooker swallows whatever a hooker gets paid to swallow.
It's classic.

• Menendez has a reputation, so anything that gets thrown his general direction will prob'ly stick as far as some folks are concerned. 
• some sleazoid lawyer gets paid to dish some dirt (ie: make shit up)
• the story starts out at Daily Caller (or WND or Drudge or whatever)
• it gets picked up by "the real news guys" 
• by the time it's debunked, the wingnuts have another Libtard Myth memorized and ready to drop into any conversation about any policy - and one they can pull out whenever one of their guys gets caught actually doing something shitty.

And in the meantime?  Bob's real problems are conveniently ignored, and we can all go back to being comfortably numb.

The good news is that ABC somehow managed to find it's own "center", and instead of going with the flow, they did a little thing (that we used to able to recognize) called "JOURNALISM".

In some ways - at least in some cases - the narrative is starting to change.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

What Are We Waiting For?

It's just possible "the American people" are finally gettin' hip to the centrist bullshit of Both Sides Do It; They're All The Same; A Pox On Both Your Houses.

I'm not saying the Dems are all perfect angels and the Repubs are all complete dicks.  And I'm not going to put up the long list of examples showing how Repub Policies are harmful and how the combination of Republican Platform plus Republican Obstruction is actually intended to take their Gubmint-Is-Bad slogan and turn it into a self-fullfilling prophecy.

Right now, it's Sequestration.  But almost without exception, It turns out to be pretty simple:  We get a deal when The Repubs decide we get a deal.

Ezra Klein at WaPo:

The bottom line on American budgetary politics right now is that Republicans won’t agree to further tax increases and so there’s no deal to be had. This is not a controversial perspective in D.C.: It’s what Hill Republicans have told me, it’s what the White House has told me, it's what Hill Democrats have told me. The various camps disagree on whether Republicans are right to refuse a deal that includes further tax increases, but they all agree that that’s the key fact holding up a compromise to replace the sequester.

But it’s unpopular for Republicans to simply say they won’t agree to any compromise and there’s no deal to be had — particularly since taxing the wealthy is more popular than cutting entitlements, and so their position is less popular than Obama’s. That’s made it important for Republicans to prove that it’s the president who is somehow holding up a deal.

The narrative is changing.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Yikes

--and--

Today's Homework Assignment

Nuthin' but spectacular.

Don't Get Pushed Around

We Need To Get Up

...and get mad.  And figure out what exactly we're gonna be mad about.



Great bit near the end about Tea Partiers and Occupiers needing to understand that they have something important in common (something I need to work a little harder at recognizing).

Today's Cartoon

Fugelsang

About the Pope Emeritus:

Today's Pix

Today's Wingnut

...just happens to be Chief Justice of SCOTUS.  And I'm thinking I may hafta consider changing my name.

From Charlie Pierce:

One of the more signifying moments in Wednesday's oral arguments at the Supreme Court regarding the Voting Rights Act came when Chuef Justice John Roberts asked Solicitor General Ralph Verrilli:

"Do you know which state has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American voter turnout?" "I do not know that," Verrilli answered.

"Massachusetts," Roberts responded, adding that even Mississippi has a narrower gap.

--snip--

The problem is, Roberts is woefully wrong on those points, according to Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin, who on Thursday branded Roberts's assertion a slur and made a declaration of his own. "I'm calling him out," Galvin said. Galvin was not alone in his view. Academics and Massachusetts politicians said that Roberts appeared to be misguided. A Supreme Court spokeswoman declined to offer supporting evidence of ­Roberts's view, referring a ­reporter to the court transcript. On Thursday, Galvin tried to set the record straight. "We have one of the highest voter registrations in the country," he said, "so this whole effort to make a cheap-shot point at Massachusetts is deceptive...In the November 2012 election, there was little difference in voter turnout in Boston neighborhoods with high concentrations of white or black voters. In Charlestown, where 80 percent of residents are white, 68 percent of voters cast ballots in November. In Roxbury, the traditional heart of Boston's African-American community, about 64 percent of voters came out to the polls. Galvin and political scientists speculated that Roberts drew his conclusions using US Census Bureau data known as "The Current Population Survey," which collects information on voting and registration every other year. Political scientists say this is one of the few national databases, if not the only one, providing state-by-state voting information.

Read the whole thing and then tell me they're not trying to fuck us with our pants on.

Today's Gun Nut

Welcome to the new normal, courtesy Wayne LaPierre.

Via Addicting Info, from WKMG in Orlando:

ORANGE CITY, Fla. - A man arrested for opening fire in a busy Walmart parking lot said he was trying to stop a shoplifter and is now defending his actions.
Orange City police arrested Jose Martinez, 35, after they said he unleashed at least five bullets in the parking lot of the Walmart on Veterans Memorial Parkway.

Martinez told Local 6, he was defending himself from a shoplifter who nearly ran him over and injured him.

Except that Martinez pulled his gun and opened fire well after the time the bad guy's car posed any kind of "threat" to him.  This was not defense - this was retribution - at best, just some dumbass rube playing out his Wyatt Earp fantasies.

Put something in place that the cops can use to charge Martinez with a low-end felony, get a conviction, and then put him on the list of People Too Fuckin' Stoopid To Own A Gun.

God, I'm sicka this shit.