The Thing About That Edward Snowden Thing

I'm really glad I'm not the only one thinking this whole fish stinks.

Some passing observations:
1) When everybody's in on the secret, there are no secrets
The number of people with Top Secret Clearance was 850,000 two years ago.

2) It's not what you know or who you know that counts; it's what you know about who you know.
And also too, Little Eddie got his cool job at Booz Allen by being a National Security Legacy Puke (imho) - a kid with a GED and the absolute minimum "experience" just kinda waltzes in?  Either the recruitment standards are total crap or Mommy and Daddy's pals greased the skids; with a side order of paranoia about "anybody from the outside".

3) And all of that generally points to a system where very few people are all that interested in learning any real truth about much of anything because everybody's way more interested in having good compliant little go-bots working diligently to make sure they gather the info necessary to confirm the foregone conclusions of management.

No soul and no honor.  But I'll give Snowden this much:  I think he came to understand that what he was doing wasn't accomplishing anything he was constantly being told it was accomplishing - his recent comment about how he could bring down the entire CIA Field Ops structure makes me think the guy really bought into it, and he's just now trying to come out of it - so "blowing the whistle" is his way of saying he got to the point where he could recognize it as bullshit, and now he's calling it bullshit.  Which is really why he poses such a threat; which in turn is why we get two basic reactions from the power centers in Washington - they either sniff and wave him off as an insignificant little bug, or he's Benedict Arnold times infinity squared.

Leave it to Crooks & Liars to come up with a good one that manages to look past the veil:

It should be self-evident that recent NSA revelations bring up some grave concerns about civil liberties. But they also raise other profound and troubling questions - about the privatization of our military, our culture's inflated expectations for digital technology, and the increasingly cozy relationship between Big Corporations (including Wall Street) and Big Defense.

Are these corporations perverting our political process? The campaign war chest for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who today said NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden committed "treason," is heavily subsidized by defense and intelligence contractors that include General Dynamics, General Atomic, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and Bechtel.

One might argue that a politician with that kind of backing is in no moral position to lecture others about "treason."

But Feinstein's funders are decidedly old-school Military/Industrial Complex types. What about the new crowd? This confluence of forces hasn't been named yet, so for the time being we'll use a cumbersome label: the "Security/Digital Complex."

Today's Pix

Ya Heard It Here First

Everybody's favorite media creation and the latest in a long and ingloriously prideful tradition of Heisman Trophy Failbots, Timmy Tebow the JesusBro, signed on with the Patriots the other day.

Here's Press Poodle Dan Shanoff at USAToday to polish the godly knob for us:

Today’s Big Winner: Tim Tebow
Six weeks ago, I said that New England was the most likely destination for Tim Tebow.

After nearly eight years of obsessively covering the Tebow phenomenon, it was not hard to trace his Belichick-approved success at Florida through Josh McDaniels making him a first-round draft pick through Rex Ryan’s bungling to Belichick’s status as the only coach who is smart enough, secure enough and dismissive enough of his critics to bring him in to put Tebow in Foxboro.
Needless to say, I’m on a roll, so let’s keep it going with 10 predictions (entirely sincere!) for the Tebow Era in New England, under the general “first principle” of Tebowmania — just when you think it can’t get any crazier, it does:

(1) He will get jersey No. 5 (from back-up punter David Ruffer).
(2) His Pats jersey sales will lead the league.
(3) He will score a TD in Week 1 versus the Bills.
(4) He will score 2 TDs in Week 2 versus the Jets.
(5) The Pats-Jets game on Sept. 12 will be the most-watched Thursday night game in the history of the NFL.
(6) He will get designated as an RB in fantasy and be owned in no less than 50% of the leagues.
(7) The Pats-Broncos game on Sunday night in Week 12 will be the most-watched Sunday night game in NFL history.
(8) He will finish the season with 9 TDs — and 6 two-point conversions.
(9) The Patriots will get to the Super Bowl, and Tebow will score a touchdown.
(10) Tim Tebow will win a Super Bowl ring in New England.

Is there a chance that things might not work in New England and I could be 100% wrong on all of these? Sure.

But given the history of Tebow, the bigger mistake is to scoff at the mania.

In case you missed it up there at the top, Dan - that was me scoffing at the media you.

Yeesh

I guess we file this one under:

• First World Problems 
• White Girl, Spoiled Little
• Stoopidly Opportunistic
• Something-For-Nothing
• Racist Vindictive Cunt
• Social Media Backfire

hat tip = Addicting Info

My Man, Charlie

This reads like poetry.

Please, if it's not too damn much trouble, can you tell me what's being done in my name?

That has been the essential plea of the citizen of a democratic political commonwealth for going on 70 years now, since the war powers and their attendant influence detached themselves from -- or were abandoned entirely by -- the constitutional authority in which they were supposed to reside. That was the plea that was answered, officially, by the incredibly brave Frank Church and his committee, and by the House Committee on Assassinations (the case of the murder of a president in broad daylight is still open, by the way). That was the plea that has been answered, unofficially, by Ron Ridenhour about My Lai, and by Sy Hersh about a lot of the things the Church committee opened up, and by those guys in Lebanon with the mimeograph machine concerning Iran-Contra, and by Bob Parry and so many others during the era of Reagan triumphalism, and by people like the invaluable Charlie Savage and Jane Mayer and others when the country lost its mind after 9/11, and, yes, by Jeremy Scahill and whoever he talks to, and, yes, by Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, too.

Just tell me what is being done in my name. 

Today's Eternal Sadness

Not a day goes by.  The big story over the weekend, of course, was the shooting spree in Santa Monica.  That's what got all the coverage because of the requisite body-count; and since the shooter was dark-skinned with a Muslim-sounding name, we can get our TerrorPorn with a double shot of Anti-Immigration Adrenaline jolt for the day.

We're also required now to jump into the speculation that the shooter "suffered from emotional and psychological problems" because that's become the over-arching theme of the NRA's campaign to keep us comfortably numb.  If we're not properly distracted and/or sedated, we might start to notice a few connectable dots:

PRESCOTT VALLEY, Ariz. (AP) — Police aren't expected to seek charges in the death of an Arizona man who was accidentally shot by his 4-year-old son, authorities said.

Justin Stanfield Thomas, 35, was fatally shot Friday after he and his son traveled from Phoenix to a friend's home 90 miles away in the northern Arizona community of Prescott Valley for a surprise visit.

The boy found the loaded gun in the home within minutes of arrival, asked a question about it and pulled the trigger, Prescott Valley Police spokesman Brandon Bonney said.

Thomas later died at a hospital.

The child has been with his mother since the day the shooting occurred.
Bonney said the gun should have been locked away, but that Thomas' friend, whose identity hasn't been released, was caught off guard by the unannounced visit. No children lived in the house.

"They're processing everything to see where they stand with the interviews and the crime scene investigation and see if everything is matching up," Bonney told The Prescott Daily Courier.

The paper described Thomas as an Army special forces veteran who served in Iraq.

I can imagine that kid growing up with some pretty heavy issues that he'll have to deal with at some point. (btw: can we have any reasonable expectation that he won't "deal with his hangups" by shooting up a school with an AR-15, or do we have to settle for blind hope on that one?)

So I have to wonder about Wayne Lapierre's recent conversion to the gospel of Mental Health in America.  Why do I get the feeling that it's just a good way for the gun makers to abdicate any and all responsibility?  Why is it I think they're trying to get the taxpayers to pick up the tab for their shit?  Why am I thinking "Hey, I know - the Libruls love gettin' all squishy about their feelings and crap, so let's give 'em a nice rag to chew on and maybe they'll leave us alone for a while."

It's a great way for the NRA to deflect criticism by getting us talking about any-damn-thing other than the simple fact that in a very obvious and important way the guns themselves are the fucking problem.

Support PBS

Cuz this is a tiny little taste of what they can do.



Go ahead - try to feel shitty about something right now.

And btw - it's good to reflect and to try to recapture some small element of the simple joys of being alive; the unencumbered soaring spirit of youth.

But let's be smart about it - and let's try not to get too carried away, OK?

Two Guitars

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Today's Eternal Sadness

(lifted wholesale from Balloon Juice):

You can have my metadata, but you will pry the projectile fired by my [firearm of choice] out of my cold, dead partner.

Not to mention this.

This is not to diminish the implications of Osama Bin Laden’s victory — his ability to terrify the US into surrendering willingly what we have long said was worth fighting for. That’s been coming a long time –see this ProPublica timeline (h/t TPM) for a quick overview of just how we’ve done it to ourselves over the last four decades. But, I can’t cease getting heart sick at each new anecdote, each new framing of the rolling massacre that takes Americans by the dozens every damn day of the year…every year.

So, for those who declare the 2nd amendment the one sure bulwark against tyranny, I have a question:
Where were you when the surveillance state was forming? What are you going to do about it now? What tree, exactly, has been watered by the blood of all the men, women, and children lost to suicide, to partner-murder, to bad luck, to whatever.

Feh.

Update: On tweeting this post I got a message from Chris Clarke, who made this chart and posted it to his Facebook pagealmost exactly a year ago. I’m glad to be able to make the acknowledgement here.

Today's Dismal-ness

For all the time we spend blathering on about how rotten the schools are; and for all the inked up dead trees that eventually serve no purpose except to keep our Christmas decorations safe - for all of that over-stated and under-informed rhetoric, we still seem not to have any good ideas about what we might do to keep 'our precious youth' from rising up and slaughtering us in our beds one night when they finally get hip to how bad we're fuckin' 'em over.

From Salon, by David Sirota (hat tip = Facebook friend DC):

Before getting to the big news, let’s review the dominant fairy tale: As embodied by New York City’s major education announcement this weekend, the “reform” fantasy pretends that a lack of teacher “accountability” is the major education problem and somehow wholly writes family economics out of the story (amazingly, this fantasy persists even in a place like the Big Apple where economic inequality is particularly crushing). That key — and deliberate — omission serves myriad political interests.

For education, technology and charter school companies and the Wall Streeters who back them, it lets them cite troubled public schools to argue that the current public education system is flawed, and to then argue that education can be improved if taxpayer money is funneled away from the public school system’s priorities (hiring teachers, training teachers, reducing class size, etc.) and into the private sector (replacing teachers with computers, replacing public schools with privately run charter schools, etc.). Likewise, for conservative politicians and activist-profiteers disproportionately bankrolled by these and other monied interests, the “reform” argument gives them a way to both talk about fixing education and to bash organized labor, all without having to mention an economic status quo that monied interests benefit from and thus do not want changed.

It's a big hot gnarly mess that doesn't get any better any time soon if we just continue to beat a starving mule, and while there is no solution for a big hot gnarly mess that fits neatly on a bumper sticker, this one thing is certain: you can't fix the schools if you don't fix the neighborhoods.

Todays' Pix

 

What Ya Don't Do

• You don't fight terrorism by becoming a terrorist.
• You don't improve a democratic system by squelching the voting franchise.
• You don't boost Demand in a struggling economy by making it harder for people to buy stuff.
• You don't make your Democratic Party brand stronger by acting just like the Republicans.
• You don't ensure our precious way of life here in God's US America™ by turning the joint into some bullshit parody of itself, as we actually become something more like Noriega's Panama if you look too close.

I'm thinking there's more to this than we know (as usual - it's not about what they tell us it's about).  And what we don't know could easily either mitigate or exacerbate the "scandal", but even if I'm willing to give TeamObama some wagon room on this, I still have a hard time not thinking somebody in Obama's administration - up to and including Obama himself - needs to get kicked right in the nuts.  (And BTW, that goes for the Diane Feinsteins and Lindsay Grahams in congress as well)

At the very least, the politics and the "optics" make this look a lot worse than it may actually be.

I do have to ask one question tho'.  This kind of abusable power has been legal - and has been applied inside the US - for a very long time now.  That doesn't make it OK, even after "9/11 changed everything", but still, why are we gettin' all spastic about it now?

John Mayer

From the Abbey Road sessions in about 2007(?)

--Never Gonna Win The War--

Is there anyone who
Ever remembers changing their mind from
The paint on a sign?
Is there anyone who really recalls
Ever breaking rank at all
For something someone yelled real loud one time

Everyone believes
In how they think it ought to be
Everyone believes
And they're not going easily

Belief is a beautiful armor
But makes for the heaviest sword
Like punching under water
You never can hit who you're trying for
Some need the exhibition
And some have to know they tried
It's the chemical weapon
For the war that's raging on inside

Everyone believes
From emptiness to everything
Everyone believes
And no one's going quietly

We're never gonna win the world
We're never gonna stop the war
We're never gonna beat this
If belief is what we're fighting for

What puts a hundred thousand children in the sand
Belief can
Belief can
What puts the folded flag inside his mother's hand
Belief can
Belief can

Today's Gaffe

It's well known that a 'gaffe' is when some politician accidentally tells the truth.

At a Dallas County GOP event last month, Bishop John Lawson asked Ken Emanuelson, a Tea Party activist, what the Republican Party was doing for African-American voters. The progressive group Battleground Texas posted audio from the event. "I'm going to be real honest with you," Emanuelson said. "The Republican Party doesn't want black people to vote if they are going to vote 9-to-1 for Democrats." In Emanuelson's view, in other words, the solution to lack of support from African-American voters is to have fewer of them show up at the polls. When the inevitable criticism ensued, Emanuelson backtracked. In a post on his Facebook page, the Tea Party activist acknowledged that he "misspoke" and tried to clarify what he was getting at. "What I meant, and should have said, is that it is not, in my personal opinion, in the interests of the Republican Party to spend its own time and energy working to generally increase the number of Democratic voters at the polls, and at this point in time, nine of every ten African-American voters cast their votes for the Democratic Party."

And Emanualson isn't the first Repub to say something like that.

1) It's not in the best interests of the GOP for everybody who's eligible to vote to go out and vote.
2) The GOP is working very hard in many places to pass laws that effectively keep people - the big majority of whom are likely not going to vote for Repubs - away from the polls.

Here's a slightly different angle:  When everybody who should vote gets to vote, we say yay, democracy - our system is healthy, and it's working the way it's supposed to work.  That's what America's all about.  But that's what the TeaParty Republicans are against; they're saying it's wrong for so many people to vote; they're saying there's too much democracy going on here.  They're saying democracy is bad for the GOP, and so the GOP is opposed to democracy.

It just seems pretty clear, and it's pretty fucked up.

Today's Quote

"I will continue to work vehemently and robustly to fight back against what most in the other party want to do to transform our country into becoming."
--Michelle Bachmann, announcing she won't run for a 5th term.

Seriously.  That's what she said.  I've checked it several times.  I've checked the actual quote; and I've checked my typing and my hearing and my willingness to keep trying to make sense of what these meatheads have to say.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,Video Archive

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

A Pretty Good Rant

Dear "Conservatives",

I wanna believe you.  I really do.  I wanna know when the people I'm trusting to run my government are fucking up and/or fucking us over and/or whatever.  We all need you to tell us about the things you find out - especially the shit that goes on in every administration that every administration doesn't want us to know about.  Do that and you're fulfilling your number one obligation to our country.  Your guys aren't in the White House right now, so applying counter weight to the balance of power is what you're supposed be doing.  All well and good - but ya gotta stop just makin' shit up.  Cuz guess what - I'm not inclined to believe one fuckin' thing that falls outa your gob-shite pie-holes any more.

First off, there's plenty of stuff about Obama we should be talking about that we're not talking about, because you won't let us talk about it, because you're too busy jumping up and down screeching about stoopid "issues" that're either trivial or straight-up made-up bullshit.

Let's see if Ol' Doc Maddow can 'splain some of it:



Repubs are fond of saying how fucked up Gubmint is, and they seem to be working really hard to make sure it says that way.

Today's Pix

Today's Best Comment

From the comments at The American Conservative:

Cliff says:
June 3, 2013 at 9:18 am

The Tea Party was founded in much the same way as the Monkees…

The Parade Of Clowns

...continues unabated, via James Fallows at The Atlantic:

The menace of the all-powerful bicycle lobby -- revealed at last! Writers at the Onion, take careful notes.

The best part of this video comes very near the beginning when Ms Rabinowitz more than implies (ie: makes a rather straight-up claim) that she represents the entire citizenry of NYC - and the journalist interviewer Press Poodle let's it go completely unchallenged.



The Rupert Street Journal editorial page was a big part of WingNut Central Command even before Papa Murdoch came along, so this shouldn't be such a big surprise for me.  It's just that every time I get a big whiff of the atmosphere from inside that "conservative" bubble, it makes my eyes water and I feel a certain churning in my bowels - like I'd spent the last coupla days chompin' on Feen-a-mint and slammin' Metamucil shots or somethin'.

I mean, c'mon, lady.  Offering bikes for people to ride in a city that's way over-packed with cars - is that really what you're convinced is a sure sign of impending tyranny and enslavement?  Seriously?

This is just too fuckin' weird, man.