A Thought

It's never about what they say it's about.

What if the GOP crazies are willing to default on the debt because they think it's a clever way to fuck the Chinese?

Just wonderin'.

Elizabeth Warren And Today's Quote

Ask a smart and qualified woman what it means to her when somebody calls her a "know-it-all", and I'm guessing you'll hear back something like, "It means I kept using my brain even after no one wanted to fuck me anymore" -- to bastardize a line from Tina Fey (via Jason Linkens).

I think we're missing a huge opportunity to straighten out some serious shit by not getting Elizabeth Warren confirmed to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  But now there's talk of running her for senate.  Could be interesting.

Rupertgate

Standard play - claim victimhood and blame "the media".

In one way, I just gotta give 'em props. The bottom of the shit-hole I like to call DumFux News will simply never be reached.


Read this From James Fallows at the Atlantic.

Balanced Budget Nonsense

Bruce Bartlett is becoming a real hero for me.

Historically, those supporting a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution were only interested in balance per se. That is, requiring that revenues and expenditures be as close to equal as possible. The view was that if the states – almost all of which are required to balance their budgets annually – could do it then so could the federal government.

One problem is that the states don’t really balance their budgets. All have separate operating and capital budgets and only the operating budget is required to be balanced. By contrast, the federal budget lumps together operating and capital expenses, such as roads and buildings that will last for decades. Moreover, the states are notorious for using gimmicks to give the appearance of budget balance even though they run deficits.

TIme Out

I've been in Vacation Mode since Thursday.  I plan on being back around the 25th.

Shortly after that, I'll be getting my first bionic hip.  If I'm up to it, and the hospital allows it, I'll start posting again right after surgery - as soon as I can anyway.

See ya'll on the other side.

Some Not So Revoltin' Developments?

Recent developments in the "debate" over raising the debt ceiling seem to confirm that the Repubs are really struggling with some serious structural problems. I think it's possible that Obama has pulled off an amazing thing, even if all he did was to let the Repubs dance at Center Stage long enough for people to see how crass and cynical they've become.

I doubt any of the Repubs changed their minds about the debt ceiling. In fact, I doubt most Repubs have any real objection to raising the limit at all, even tho' an awful lot of people have to have been worrying about the deficits and the debt for a good long while. If anything's actually changed, it's just that McConnell and Boehner and Cantor have taken such a public beating, they have to put up some bullshit strategy that makes them look a little less stupid and lets them believe for a while that they can get back out in front of their own party before it evaporates. Right now, this looks like nothing less than a complete breakdown. And it's prob'ly because the Repub Leadership got an attitude adjustment from the mega-donors who aren't gonna sit by and let the PseudoCons fuck up what's left of a good thing. (Obama's fund-raising numbers indicate something significant is happening, so maybe he's managed to strip off some of the big money providers - of course we won't find much info on that because the Citizens United thing means most of the money can stay incognito)

So now (for once) Obama doesn't have to beat the Repubs, because the Repubs are beating the Repubs. I think the indicator to watch is Michelle Bachmann's campaign. She's the Queen of the PseudoCons; the leader of the Radical Rowdies. We'll hafta wait and see what DumFux News comes up with, but so far, they've seemed reluctant to promote her in a big way. And it's possible that Fox has to divert too much energy to defending itself because of the whole Rupertgate thing, and so they'll be less of a factor. Dunno, but I'll bet the big donors are slappin' Roger Ailes around now too. It promises to get funner and funner.

Finally, here's a question: Why has the DNC/Obama Campaign quietly released this little commercial now? First, it's always a good idea to hit 'em with the hard sell right after some good news. But mainly, if I'm right in thinking a bunch of the big donors are shifting away from the Repubs, and if the Dems wanna re-assert their brand as "The Party of the Little Guys" in order to keep us from recognizing them as the same kind of Coin-Operated Politicos as anybody else, then they need something to demonstrate that they have "huge numbers of regular folk, sending in their nickels and dimes".

Michelle And The Debt Ceiling

Michelle Bachmann says she has a titanium spine.  Yeah - that and a reinforced concrete skull.

btw: Bill O'Reilly snickers at a Republican populist in this clip. Did anybody else just feel the earth shift on its axis?

Isn't It Interesting?

The biggest deal in the last 20 years of Rupert Murdoch's media empire (his attempt to buy BskyB in the UK) is stalled and may be dead because Murdoch has to prop up the share value of News Corp by accelerating his buy-back program - and of course the reason he has a stock price problem is because he had to shut down his single most profitable daily newspaper in his UK operation because of his suddenly revealed trouble concerning illegal wiretapping (and maybe fraud and obstruction and official bribery too) and gosh - not a single word of any of that is to be found anywhere on foxnews.com or Fox Business or Fox Nation; and there's been no ink all in The Wall Street Journal.

A multi-billion dollar deal that may go in the tank, and a major scandal involving one of the biggest media players in the world - and WSJ... uh...what?  They missed it?  It just slipped by unnoticed?

The good news is that maybe this finally rips the bandaid off and we wake up to what these assholes have been doing to us.

The bad news is that maybe this is how the real collapse starts.

Watch out for what happens in Italy in the next few months. (read this at The Agonist)

Tabloid Politics

Or maybe we could call it Pin-up Politicians; or Political Porn.  Whatever it is, it is not a development that I can call serious.

Here's a look at what Newsweek thinks is journalism.

 

My Dear Mr Boehner

For 2 years, and now especially during the big debate about whether or not to raise the Debt Ceiling, and what the US budget should look like, I've heard John Boehner say that his party just couldn't possibly abide imposing any kind of tax increase on the "job creators" in this country.  (I ranted in some detail yesterday on the "tax-cuts-equals-jobs" malarkey)

Question:  Exactly who are these job creators?  They've gotten practically nothing but tax breaks for the last ten fucking years, and we've seen a net job increase of a little over 17,000 per month for that whole period.  Seems to me they've gotten about everything they've wanted - so where's the payoff?  What the fuck are they waiting for?

No wait; I keep forgetting that Boehner doesn't say that crap thinking he'll persuade me and change my mind.  He says that because when the Rubes hear anything that hints at contradicting what they're being spoon fed by DumFux News, they tend to get a little nervous; so guys like Boehner need to rush around puttin' that big Republican cock back in their mouths to calm 'em down.

Made In China

(Anticipating the standard response to this revoltin' development): Let's be sure we figure out a way to make "the unions" out to be the bad guys here. We have to remember that no matter what happens; if it's bad and it's something the "Libruls" don't like, then we need to Blame America First. And if it's bad and it's something the PseudoCons don't like, then we Blame Americans.

Whatever it is, we must never be allowed to look past our own biases to see a problem resulting from a policy or a law or a regulation or the lack of regulation that was put in place at least at the behest of a lobbying effort - if not something that was bought and paid for outright as the result of the decisions of some sliver-spoon fuck in the executive suite of some very large and very wealthy corporation.

We must be kept distracted. While we're busy bickering on a level that's really nothing more than Red Team vs Blue Team, these Dons of Corporatopia are free to continue bleeding us dry.

Today's Campaign Button

Beating A Dead Horse

Sometimes you just have to keep going over the same ground, and revisiting the same arguments ad nauseum just to stay even with the epidemic of ignorance in the American Body Politic.

Repubs in general, and their PseudoCon wing in particular, just refuse to let go of their fairy tales.  Especially the one about "Tax Cuts Generate More Tax Revenue By Creating More Tax Payers".

Simply put, this is total bunkum.  I know this because while I generally kinda suck at Math, I can manage some basic arithmetic, which is what the TeaBaggers (eg) like to believe is all they need to make their "common sense" judgements on tax policy.

So here it is:
Bush Tax Cuts 2001 - 2011 (remembering that Obama agreed to extend them thru 2012)
Conservative estimates say these cost us about $800,000,000,000.00; or about $80 Billion/Year.

If each job created by the Bush Tax Cuts pays an average of $30k per year, then the Feds collect about $6,000.00 in taxes.

So, if we divide $80 Billion (cost) by $6,000 (revenue), we need to have created more than 13,000,000 jobs per year, which means we needed to have added over 1,000,000 jobs per month in the last 10 years.  When was the last time this economy showed a net increase of a million jobs in any month in the last 10 years?  When was the last time we showed an increase of a million jobs in any quarter?

But, let's back up a little and say that I'm using wacky numbers and that my calculations are just way off the mark.  OK; for grins and giggles, let's say I'm off by huge margins.  Let's say the cost is only half of what I'm citing, and that the jobs created are paying 50% better than $30,000 a year.

Now we've got a cost of $40 Billion per year divided by revenues of $9,000, which means we only needed 370,000 new jobs per month over the last 10 years.  Again, when was the last time we had a string of jobs reports that said we'd added 370,000 new jobs for any number of months in a row?

Reality: In the 118 months of W Bush and Obama, we've averaged a net increase of 17,144 jobs per month.  I don't care how you look at it, a decade of deep tax cuts has failed to produce what the proponents of this policy promised us.  We have to find it in ourselves to admit that it's a failure and that it belongs in the dumpster with The Great Society and The Domino Theory and a whole host of others that sounded good, but turned out to be little more than political flim-flam.

Fair warning: From here on out, if you try to float this shit by me, I will not preface my remarks by starting off with, "I'm sorry but..."  I will straight-up call you stupid to your face, and I really don't care what else happens.

Coup de Bankster

Can you say, "Fucked with our pants on?"

Grief And The Media

It's been a while since Gil Scott Heron died, and it's been a while since I first saw this video from Jay Smooth. I'm putting it up now because I think I'm kinda starting to get what Jay's talking about when he criticizes some of the affects that all of this new technology is having on our ability to relate to the world and to each other.

A Simple Truth

Or rather, there's at least one simple truth about the big flap over the Debt Ceiling.  So, to put it simply, what the Repubs are saying is that they ran up the bills all thru W's time in office (when they controlled the purse strings for 75% of that period), but now that it's time to raise the money to pay for all that spending, they're balking - they wanna renege on the obligation to pay for what they did.  And, of course, they're pretty sure they can get the rubes to blame Obama for it, because he's the guy in charge now.  And, of course the rubes will eat it up because that's what they do - the elephant shits on their heads, and they all say, "Thanks for the hat, boss".

And btw: Obama played much the same game when he was on the other side of the fence.  Nobody comes outa this smellin' fresh.

Take a look at Bruce Bartlett's 5 Myths About The Debt Ceiling.

Put this together with the crappy jobs reports for May and June, and I don't see anything but shit storms coming over the horizon.  The stimulus is pretty much all tapped out, the PseudoCons are yankin' the Repubs around like they had tails, and the Dems seem intent on missing yet another opportunity to grow some balls.

One last thing:  I think The Repubs actually believe that no matter what happens, they'll be able to make a case that Obama has broken the law, or is taking some outrageous action that's outside the bounds of the Constitution - so what's really happening here is that they're trying to set him up for impeachment.

Ya heard it here first.

A Christian Freaks Out

The lady seems pretty calm at first - and the recording has nothing about what leads up to her tantrum - but then she gets just a little nuts.

I do wonder about the affects of all this constant exposure of our behavior to millions of people via the inter-tubes.  Seems like everybody has a camera, and there's an awful lot of casual surveillance going on.

Taxation

"We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem."
"Taxes are too high in the US."
"No wonder companies are trying to shelter their income; corporate taxes are sky high."

All of that is bullshit.  To wit (Citizens For Tax Justice):

Today's Brain Lesson

Try not to think about Frank Luntz or DumFux News.



I may have posted this before - dunno; don't care. It's enlightening and bears repeating.

Told Ya So

From Ed Pilkington, Guardian:

Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby. But her case is by no means isolated. Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.

For a country supposedly filled with smart people, some of the things we do are just fuckin' stupid.

What To Call 'Em

What do you call somebody who can't stop deifying Ronald Reagan, but who also says they would never vote for anybody who raises taxes, compromises with Democrats, and negotiates with America's enemies?

What do you call somebody who says he hates government intrusion, but insists on making the government the final arbiter of morality and propriety in cases of entertainment and radio and TV and print material and internet content?

What do you call somebody who says the government must prevent women from making their own decisions about child-bearing?

What do you call somebody who conveniently ignores the first 13 words (out of 27 total) while trying to make a case in favor of "a strictly constructionist interpretation" of the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution?

What do you call somebody enjoying a nice long career at Northrup Grumman who states flatly that the government never creates any jobs?

What do you call somebody who says illegal aliens are too lazy to work, and are at the same time, trying to steal their jobs?

You call these people PseudoCons.

(hat tip: The American Scholar)

Nuthin' But Amazing

And he got up and walked away.

Go And Sin No More

As always, the question is: what are they not telling us?

Over 100 detainees died during U.S. interrogations, dozens due directly to interrogation abuse. Gen. Barry McCaffrey said: "We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A." Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the official investigation into detainee abuse, wrote: "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

I think Obama may have made the right call by allowing a whitewash - as shitty as that seems, and as thoroughly depressing as it is.  The Bushies knew how to play it.  They made sure practically everybody shared the guilt - not just the bosses and the party apparatchiks, but the career bureaucrats as well.  Obama couldn't just go after a few at the top because that'd look too politically motivated.  And if he tried to let the thing go wherever it needed to go, then he'd have to spend every waking moment riding herd on it.  Once you start that kind of thing, it quickly turns into a witch hunt, and then the careerists and the cynical manipulators are about the only ones who really benefit.  Obama had to be thinking the costs of that level of disruption outweigh the benefits.

I'm hoping big time that Obama's working behind the scenes (thru the IG Offices maybe?) to root out the bad guys and cut 'em loose.  Unfortunately, I think once somebody gets around to writing The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire, this episode will be cited as a signal event.

About DumFux News

From Cynthia Boaz at truthout:

There is nothing more sacred to the maintenance of democracy than a free press. Access to comprehensive, accurate and quality information is essential to the manifestation of Socratic citizenship - the society characterized by a civically engaged, well-informed and socially invested populace. Thus, to the degree that access to quality information is willfully or unintentionally obstructed, democracy itself is degraded.

-snip-

The basics:
Panic Mongering
Ad Hominem
Projection
Revision of History
Scapegoating
Violence = Power, Opposition to Violence = Weakness
Bullying
Confusion
Populism
Invoking the Christian God
Saturation
Disparaging Education
Guilt By Association
Diversion

In debating some of these tactics with colleagues and friends, I have also noticed that the Fox viewership seems to be marked by a sort of collective personality disorder whereby the viewer feels almost as though they've been let into a secret society. Something about their affiliation with the network makes them feel privileged and this affinity is likely what drives the viewers to defend the network so vehemently. They seem to identify with it at a core level, because it tells them they are special and privy to something the rest of us don't have. It's akin to the loyalty one feels by being let into a private club or a gang. That effect is also likely to make the propaganda more powerful, because it goes mostly unquestioned.

A Word From Mr Carnegie

“Take away my people, but leave my factories, and soon grass will grow on the factory floors. Take away my factories, but leave my people, and soon we will have a new and better factory.” --Andrew Carnegie

I think Carnegie understood there are ways to get what you want and still be a human being about it.

Also, by retiring and spending his last 18 years disposing of his wealth (about $4.3 Billion adjusted), he ended up turning his fortune back to the people who helped him amass it in the first place.

Kind Of A Dick

I've said many times that whatever the issue is, and whatever the politician says about the issue, we're never hearing the full story.  There's always something they're not telling us.  And so, it's the first priority of a properly functioning free press to find out what we're not being told.

Unfortunately, the Corporate Press has been almost completely co-opted, and serves more of a PR role than anything else.  But they still need to believe they're doing something; and they need to make it look like they're doing something other than simply repeating what they're told at the "news conference".

That's what gives us the Horse Race style of "reporting".  There's very little actual substance they can get from the politicians, and if they get too pushy, or they snoop too much, they'll start to lose their access to the politician and to the staffers, etc.  So what we get is a variation on Yakov Smirnoff's line:  The politicians pretend to do the people's business, and the Press Poodles pretend to tell us about it.

What's crazy, tho', is that when we do get some real news about some pretty amazing fucked-up-ed-ness, it feels like nothing is done about it for fear that it'll look too much like political retaliation - which is (usually) exactly how the Press Poodles present it to us.  (example): By rights, half of the people in the last Bush Administration should be doin' hard time in federal prisons, but all we hear about is how this horrendous official behavior will affect the turnout for the next election.

And so it evolves into a game of Beat The Scandal.  Politicians and power brokers need to make sure we don't realize how thoroughly mangled and corrupt the system is, so they throw us a nice juicy story of some Brand Name politico's misdeeds.  It has to be sexual tho'; official misconduct attracts too much of the wrong kind of attention, and since practically everybody's crooked, then everybody gets roasted if the public knows too much.  The Press Poodles, knowing they're part of the power-and-money problem, tend to play it up in order to give us the illusion that they're digging for the truth and "keepin' 'em honest".

Instead of learning anything at all from Mark Halperin about what prompted him to say Obama was "kind of a dick", we get nothing but the standard package of phony outrage for 2 solid days.  And the thing ran out of steam so fast, they had to shift the focus to the failures of the technology and/or production process that allowed the comment to make it out over the air.

We know Bush lied about Iraq
We know about torture and extra-legal prisons
We know Scalia and Thomas are as crooked as the day is long
We know Big Banking put a thirty-year hole in the world economy
We know Big Corporate buys politicians
We know Obama is outside the War Powers Resolution in Libya
We know Obama signs orders to assassinate people he deems "enemies"
We know there's a storm coming because of the budget hassles

We know all of this - and a lot more - but nobody's being held to account for their fuckups in the past - and nobody's being asked about how we prevent more fuckups in the future.

The World Spins Madly On

From The Weepies

More about Ryan Woodward here

Careful What You Wish For

h/t Crooks & Liars

Stating The Obvious

Maybe the Dems are finally starting to get it.  Michael Tomasky:

It’s about time the Democrats started saying openly what has been clear for months or even years now—that as long as economic recovery would work to the political benefit of Barack Obama, the Republicans have been, are, and will be in favor of sabotaging the economy. Senators Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin made the point in a press conference in the Capitol Thursday. Noting that his GOP colleagues are coming out against business tax cuts (read that again: Republicans against tax cuts for businesses) that Democrats happen to support, Schumer said, “It almost makes you wonder if they aren't trying to slow down the economic recovery for political gain.”

A politician doing something for political gain is not news.  But looking at what exactly that politician is trying to do, and how he's doing it can be hugely important.

And while I don't think Chucky Schumer has a lot of room to criticize, it'll be interesting to see if playing the Repubs' main game and making them defend their positions (for once) will work to the Dems' favor.

Get Ready Cuz Here It Comes

Are you ready for the next big collapse?  NYT has a ruin-your-whole-day kinda piece today, all about the frenzy over how Natural Gas will save us.

The Late Great US of A

From a story in the LA Times:

The would-be CIA director tells the Senate Intelligence Committee that the U.S. should consider a policy for using special interrogation techniques when information is needed right away to save lives. John McCain, a fellow opponent of recent 'enhanced' methods, agrees.

Quick aside: David Patraeus was nicknamed Peaches in high school - and never mind how I know that.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure this is what that famous Slippery Slope actually looks like.

First, tho', I think it's important to remember that when these guys talk about this stuff in public, they're not talking about everything they know about it.  There's always something they're not telling us  - either because it really is justifiably secret, or because it would make them look like assholes &/or idiots.  Getting past the obstacle of Information asymmetry is what journalism is supposed to be all about - and what we have to remember about the Press Poodles is that they're show dogs, not workin' dogs.

So, now what're we supposed to get outa this little dog-and-pony show?

Main Point: We're the good guys, so of course, we don't torture people.  But if you fuck with us, we'll rip off your eyelids and make you watch as we feed 'em to the dogs.

Over time, this will evolve.  Before too long, "for the sake of public safety" will be used to justify harsh treatment of anybody in custody; and eventually, detention and harsh treatment will not be limited to "the terrorists".  Remember that it's already been established in the law that the president can point at anybody, and calling that person an enemy combatant, make that person disappear.  Don't even try to suggest that it couldn't or won't happen here because America is exceptional (and therefore superior).  It will happen here because now it can happen here.  We removed all the safeguards that always worked to keep it from happening.

Generally, people don't gravitate to the centers of power because they think it'll be fun to work 18 hours a day for crappy wages "in service to the people".  There are some of those of course, but the ladder climbers are the same people you find in any other line of work.  They're hyper-competitive and coldly ambitious, and they're not there seeking the noble fulfillment of doing well by doing good.  They want the power for its own sake.

Oops

It's an axiom of politics that a gaffe is what they call it when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

Mitch McConnell was trying to talk about why so many senate Repubs are suddenly against military adventures in arab countries.

"The only thing I can tell you at this point is that there are differences. I’m not sure that these kind of differences might not have been there in a more latent form when you had a Republican president. But I do think there is more of a tendency to pull together when the guy in the White House is on your side. So I think some of these views were probably held by some of my members even in the previous administration, but party loyalty tended to mute them. So yeah, I think there are clearly differences and I think a lot of our members, not having a Republican in the White House, feel more free to express their reservations which might have been somewhat muted during the previous administration."

What's right? What's best for US interests? What's really their honest opinion?  None of that matters.  The only thing that matters is the political advantage that can be gained or lost for you own party.

These people have no soul and no honor.

Nostalgia Warp

Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR, and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?  Yeah.. Me neither.

Yikes

Just in case you were feeling a little too good about things in general, here's something to ponder as you set about choosing between pills, a rope or a gun. Yeeesh

Land Of The Free

The embedding code was disabled on the original - dunno why. Luckily, in this world of blogging and the viral spread of info, we still get to see examples of the growing threat of authoritarian governance.



I made a call to the Rochester (NY) PD, and the lady who answered told me she'd been instructed to read a statement issued by Chief of Police James Sheppard. (585-428-7033) RPD website

Oy

The question is "Should evolution be taught in school?"

If you're scoring at home*:
Yes = 16
No = 2
Yeah But -or- Both = 28
WTF = 5



*50 states plus DC

A Short Response

To my friends of the Libertarian persuasion: yours is the ideology of the five-year-old.  To put it simply: No, you don't get to do whatever you want.  Grow the fuck up a little.

A Bi-Lingual Cat

The Pre-Googlian Era

Today's Big Idea

A stop light with a Status Indicator.

Today's Question

Repubs are fond of saying, "they govern best who govern least".  Then they run an election campaign on the premise that since the Dems haven't solved any of our problems (surely not due to Repub obstruction of course), you should vote for them to run the government because they have better ideas about how the government should go about solving problems.

The Pledge Updated

Under The Sun

Just another day here in the old solar system, until the sun explodes.

Doin' The Math

We keep hearing from certain politicians that Tax Cutting is a magic elixir that always fixes anything that could possibly be wrong with our economy.

Here's a simple little chart that says different, in the words of Michael Linden:

“These numbers do not mean that higher rates necessarily lead to higher growth. But the central tenet of modern conservative economics is that a lower top marginal tax rate will result in more growth, and these numbers do show conclusively that history has not been kind to that theory.”

It's from Think Progress, so of course there's a certain bias towards a more traditionally conservative approach to economic stimulus, but still; how d'ya argue against real numbers?

What Congress Looks Like

This does (and somehow doesn't really) surprise me. From a study published in National Journal.

One other thing that caught my eye was the bit on Lobbying experience.  We've been led to believe that government is chock full of lobbyists, but that's not how it looks.  Maybe we need to look at how many people working for lobbying outfits have experience in Congress(?)

Welcome Back, KO

Current TV on the web.

DirecTV: 358
Comcast: 107
Time Warner NY: 103
Time Warner LA: 142
Dish Network: 196
Verizon FIOS: 192
AT&T U-Verse: 189

We Are So Fucked

A rosy outlook from BBC's Richard Black:

"The findings are shocking," said Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University.

"As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.

"We've sat in one forum and spoken to each other about what we're seeing, and we've ended up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we're seeing changes that are happening faster than we'd thought, or in ways that we didn't expect to see for hundreds of years."

It's not about "saving the planet".  The planet was just fine before we showed up, and it'll be just fine long after we're gone.  This is about self-preservation, and making our own living conditions as pleasant as possible.  It's about not making it any harder than it has to be to survive; and to thrive; and to enjoy our lives.

Same Shit, New Day

In a very real sense, everything the Watergate Burglars did in 1972 - hijinks that got them sent to jail, and which then led directly to Nixon's resignation (one step in front of Impeachment, Conviction and Removal) - can now be considered reasonably within the law.

NYT Editorial:

Instead of tightening the relaxed rules for F.B.I. investigations — not just of terrorism suspects but of pretty much anyone — that were put in place in the Bush years, President Obama’s Justice Department is getting ready to push the proper bounds of privacy even further.

This is not what I voted for in 2008.

Dilemma

It'll be hard for me to vote for Obama in 2012 because he's continuing a lot of the abuses of power I complained about under GWB (Illegal wars, Gitmo, etc)

And it'll be hard to vote for any of the current Repubs because of the usual reasons (God, Gays, Guns, Abortion, Tax Cuts and all-round dickishness).

Good politicians know all this.  Their advisers know how to slice and dice the polling results in order to tweak their candidate's positions so he picks up more votes than he loses on any given issue.

So it's become a lot easier for me to understand the complete non sequitur of so many people simply rejecting the only thing that has any chance of fixing whatever they think is wrong.  How do you justify participating in a system when you're convinced the system itself is broken?

But when the system is in such dire need of remedy, how do you justify withdrawing your support for it?

The Drought

Back in April, Gov Rick Perry called for Texans to pray because the drought was kinda bad.  Here's what it's been like since then:
Drought Map

Something else I wonder about: Perry has been playing the Labor Arbitrage game, and he's done a good bit of bragging about the influx of people because there're so many new jobs in Texas.  First, Texas leads the US in minimum-wage jobs. Second, the majority of new jobs in Texas are minimum wage or minimum plus 20% jobs.  Third, a big increase in population only puts a greater strain on things like infrastructure and resources like clean water.

Just sayin'.