Category: politics

Worldwide, engineers are only 3.5% of the population but 20% of all militants & terrorists.

Odd Op Ed at NY Times:

They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn’t bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don’t be fooled.

Though they walk among us with impunity, they are a group that is notoriously associated with fundamentalist political beliefs and terrorist violence.

They are engineers!

Over the past few decades, of 404 violent Islamist men trained beyond high school (some in jail, some not), 44% were engineers.

Grab their slide rules, er, steal their laptops and run.

Yo! Communist &  anarchist groups have almost no engineers.

Fraud! You want fraud? You can’t handle fraud.

American politics and the American economy reached some kind of turning point around 1980. What shifted is that Congressmen are now much more receptive to the opinions of the rich.

Their argument is simple:

Business interests in all sectors organized a takeover of political power that pushed organized labor and other groups protecting middle-class interests to the sidelines and made possible decades of policies that have enriched the super-rich at the expense of everyone else, including the merely affluent. Finance was simply the biggest and most profitable of these sectors–and, we would emphasize, the one best able to hold the government hostage in a financial and economic crisis.

A cycle of politics as old as the Republic, and to a pathology in our politics that is as profound as any that our Republic has faced.

Comment snippets:

A pattern of bribery. Biological altruism does not scale. :::burp::: See the forest for the trees? Man-oh-man, it’s thick with parasitical vines. :::cough::: This liaison with lobbyists is just fancy money laundering. :::arrgh::: I am afraid that you are right. :::sigh:::

“What if Obama is so outside our comprehension that only if you understand Kenyan anti-colonial behavior can you begin to piece together his actions?” Gingrich asked. “And Kenyan is, of course, code for nigger, replies Bill Maher.

Hey America!  Nuts is more costly than debt!

Mysteries in the muck of politics and economics are not so terribly difficult really:

We are too generous and forgiving of the predations of the ruling classes. Too many scholars and pundits fail to be useful to society since they collude with the ruling classes to conceal the true costs of the ham handed incompetence of bureaucrats sharply focused on their essentially trivial concerns.

Oddly overlooked, government by the people for the people also means creating government, not merely choosing players, not merely bellyaching, but building institution and agency as you like it. There’s the failing of trivial consumers and there’s the rub of citizenship.

Americans should be ashamed of local insolvency and vulnerable sovereignty. Exercised governing is a Capitol Hill on every hill. There’s little preventing all the power they’ll require.

The problem with mass politics today is that we increasingly have no idea what is myth and theater, and what is really true.

[BBC’s essay on powerful modern myth.
It is the idea that underneath all the chaotic violence that marks the modern world there are hidden patterns, networks of terror that are orchestrated by America’s deadly enemies.]

The problem with mass politics today is that we increasingly have no idea what is myth and theater, and what is really true.

One day when hierarchy flattens to our nature, fools will be us all.

Why are we vulnerable to con like this?

Some of the nation’s biggest businesses, including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Reynolds, Altria, MillerCoors, Coca-Cola, Zurich Financial, UPS and Google supply the dollars to his campaign. They’ve given him dozens of flights on corporate jets, dozens of stays at luxury resorts and waterfront bashes. He’s raised $36 million for Republicans recently, more than almost anyone else. Thereby, his rise. Thereby, his binding.

After new ethics rules, he’s forced to hide his perks in a political action committee.

In the last 18 months, it has spent at least $67,000 at the Ritz-Carlton Naples in Florida, at least $20,000 at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Virginia, and at least $29,000 at the Muirfield Village Golf Club in Ohio. $116,000. Golfing.

Palming is his scoring.

In public, he brushes it off. “I get lobbied every day by somebody. It could be by my wife. It could be the bellman. It goes on all day, everyday, everyplace.” He said he had broken no rules and was simply assisting his lobbyist friends. Or his wife, sure, or various hotel staff.

What’s Republican fraud?
Vote John A. Boehner. Get more than 100 industry lobbyists.
That’s Republican fraud.

Our media favors this charade; never tapes his days with lobbyists; always hosts his lectern and appearances. If Speaker, there’s no chance in hell he’s working for you.

Michael Moore:

I am opposed to the building of the ‘mosque’ two blocks from Ground Zero.

I want it built on Ground Zero.

Why? Because I believe in an America that protects those who are the victims of hate and prejudice. I believe in an America that says you have the right to worship whatever God you have, wherever you want to worship. And I believe in an America that says to the world that we are a loving and generous people and if a bunch of murderers steal your religion from you and use it as their excuse to kill 3,000 souls, then I want to help you get your religion back. And I want to put it at the spot where it was stolen from you.

Besides, there already was a ‘ground zero mosque’ —on the 17th floor of the south tower and used by Muslim Americans who were murdered just like everyone else.

Without governments as we know them, regions can become territories of the used. We struggle against tyranny and for that, over thousands of years, ladies and gentlemen, we have built charter and civility. But Gingrich emphasized today that not only did God ordain a limited role for government, God, and not the government, is the source of individual rights. “God gives you sovereignty,” said Gingrich, and “the government doesn’t define rights.”

The easiest way to lead people by the nose is through their morality. This speaks to danger greater than all others. We know by the al Qaeda and by Taliban, by all fervor in power, by graves of pain under our footsteps, there is no greater error. Uprising itself is terror. Well before wounds of war, our minds fill with blood. For that we built civil government.

Free you are to pray and ponder this awe of life, so declares our charters. Our charters!  Shudder over the lives made dead to make them. Oh yes, our dead truly did define our rights, and it was government they built to keep them.

Our government is not a ground for pulpits. We made this American government to end that terror. It may be convenient to make political demands moral demands, but it the cheapest use of history.

More greedy for stature than restrained to reasoned policy, Gingrich toys with votes. It’s clear the RNC is committed to heating and urgency. I’m ashamed they use this route to power. District by district it is extracting bias from ignorance and steering it to the polls. Opportunism. There’s pathology in that. There’s tyranny in that.

“As Americans, we will not and never will be at war with Islam. It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was al-Qaeda, a sorry band of men which perverts religion.” – US President Barack Obama

Each of America’s great political crises have really been about the economy.

In our time it’s about energy coming from devices, as opposed to energy as resources. Resources have  to be transformed by fire to become energy. Devices harness energy from the environment.

There is, in fact, plenty of energy all around us — as much as we could ever use. Coming down from the sky, flowing under the Earth, blowing across our land. What we need are devices that can harness it.

Meanwhile we have a Stupid Economy.

It’s stupid because there is an economic force stifling growth we feel powerless to get past, because that force seems to control our politics. In this case, it’s energy billionaires like the Koch Brothers, the oil power, and to a lesser extent coal.

Look closely at who funds the Republican National Committee, all the ‘wingnut welfare’ groups and Tea Party arcades.

Follow the money where it doesn’t want you to go and it’s the same collection of names — energy men and their bankers.

But their economic time has passed.

Dana Blankenhorn

There is no evidence that tax cuts leads to stronger job creation. Moreover, both the Reagan and Bush 43 tax cuts were accompanied by huge increases in government spending. Now they’re cutting Food Stamps. by John Keefe:

“I’m a reporter… I called Rep. Boehner’s press people, and they switched me over to his staff. (They call him ‘The Leader’.)

HA!

Paul Krugman:

It’s hard to overstate how destructive the economic ideas offered earlier this week by John Boehner, the House minority leader, would be…

Basically, he proposes two things: large tax cuts for the wealthy that would increase the budget deficit while doing little to support the economy, and sharp spending cuts that would depress the economy while doing little to improve budget prospects.

Fewer jobs and bigger deficits — the perfect combination.

More broadly, if Republicans regain power, they will surely do what they did during the Bush years: they won’t seriously try to address the economy’s troubles; they’ll just use those troubles as an excuse to push the usual agenda, including Social Security privatization. They’ll also surely try to repeal health reform, which would be another twofer, reducing economic security even as it increases long-term deficits.

Margaret & Helen:

If you vote Republican today, what exactly are you voting for?  It’s certainly not smaller government.  If you vote Republican today you are telling “Pastor” Terry Jones that fifty religious fanatics are more important than any chance for world peace.  You are telling  Sarah Palin that when it comes to the presidency – pretty is more important than smart.  You are telling Glenn Beck that honesty isn’t really necessary if you have your own cable news show on Fox.  You are telling Michele Bachmann that hearing voices in your head isn’t cause for alarm.  Hell, if you vote Republican today you might as well just shove a few more dollars in Rush Limbaugh’s pockets and a few more pills in his mouth.  It’s all very entertaining, I’ll give you that.  But considering what they did when we gave them the keys to the car the last time, are you really ready to put them behind the wheel again so soon?  I’m just not sure there are that many more countries we can bomb, world religions we can vilify and oil wells we can drill before the rest of the world calls us on our bullshit.

Here’s a thought. If  Pastor Jones is so dead set on burning a book he should just wait until The George Bush Memoirs come out.

After all, everyone knows the only thing God loves more than a good book burning is a burning Bush.

HA!

JeffreyGoldberg, The Atlantic, in a rare interview with Fidel Castro:

I’ve seen a lot of dolphin shows. I will also say this: I’ve never seen someone enjoy a dolphin show as much as Fidel Castro enjoyed the dolphin show.

This snippet:

“How do you train the dolphins to do what they do?”  I asked.

“That’s a good question,” Fidel said.

Garcia called over one of the aquarium’s veterinarians to help answer the question. Her name was Celia. A few minutes later, Antonio Castro told me her last name: Guevara.

“You’re Che’s daughter?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“And you’re a dolphin veterinarian?”

“I take care of all the inhabitants of the aquarium,” she said.

You’re supposed to be the watchdogs over dubious actors. Why aren’t you an exception?

What is the biggest problem with the news media in America today?

Jay Rosen:

I do not think journalists should ‘join the team’.

Power-seeking and truth-seeking are different behaviors, and this is how we distinguish politics from journalism.

I think it does take a certain detachment from your own preferences and assumptions to be a good reporter. The difficulty is that neutrality has its limits. Taken too far, it undermines the very project in which a serious journalist is engaged.

Suppose the forces that want to convince Americans that Barack Obama is a Muslim or wasn’t born in the United States start winning, and more and more people believe it. This is a defeat for journalism—in fact, for verification itself. Neutrality and objectivity carry no instructions for how to react to something like that. They aren’t ‘wrong’, they’re just limited.

The American press does not know what to do when neutrality, objectivity, balance and ‘report both sides’ reach their natural limits. And so journalists tend to deny that there are such limits. But with this denial they’ve violated the code of the truth-teller because these limits are real. See the problem?

Oh the trouble with health care is liberal lawyers chasing personal injury clients, say the coffee shop ideologues of the Republican Party. Tort Reform. Tort Reform. Sloganeering to suck votes from the fired up and uninformed, and juice donations.

Republican tort reform would reduce total U.S. health care spending by only 0.5 percent but destroy liability as we know it. And forty percent of that meager trade-off is a reduction in clinic insurance costs —a cynical favor to well-heeled donors.

“Yes, 40% of the savings just lands in the pockets of docs via premium reductions. Good news for Jaguar dealers, not a lot of bend in the cost curve for anyone else.”

Texas was first to stall medical lawsuits. Gingrich and Republican pulpiteers of polling claimed health care would enjoy a boom. Results are in. Destroying redress fails.

“The Odd Logic of Tort Reform” by Aaron Carroll. “Do you see the increase in coverage? I ask, because I can’t. This claim is actually laughable, because Texas as a state has the highest level of uninsurance in the US.

“Some people believe – just know – that reducing malpractice awards will lead to fewer lawsuits which will lead to a reduction in premiums which will lead to a reduction in defensive medicine which will lead to a reduction in health care costs. It’s a matter of faith. It has to be, because there’s just not that much evidence it will happen.”

Republicans, at the same time that they are claiming that a $50 billion investment in America’s infrastructure is a budget-buster, are pushing to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans. That’s a Boehner.

Mark Thoma:

Would we be better or worse off today if the Bush tax cuts at the upper end of the income distribution had been used instead for a decade long program to rebuild infrastructure? My answer won’t be hard to guess.

A comment:

This is not an economic proposal at all. It is an ideological one disguised as an economic one.

Their proposal is based on conservative ideology to shrink government by cutting both government expenditure and revenue.

These are people that think that “government is the problem.” So their solution to governing is not governing and leaving it to ‘the invisible hand’  which is code for the hand in the till. You know, “to the victor belong the spoils.”

A comment:

Unfortunately, without the mechanism that is supposed to be the journalism profession, the public has no chance of getting a clue about the ‘why’ of ‘what’ is happening to them.

A comment:

The Democrats are the party of no ideas, the Republicans are the party of really crappy ideas.

As if Tony Blair is a random number on a lottery ticket, his time in power seems more luck and circumstance than merit. We fail to test leaders against broad needs.

Voting isn’t enough if merely choosing winners during a carnival.

We know too little of politics, peer into its strange place, and must bring makers of our lives to better evaluation.

Gill Corkindale at Harvard Business Review:

In the UK, Blair appears not to be valued for his political legacy — his service to the UK his and international statesmanship — but rather as one of a new breed of self-serving politicians, who literally spun a web of power, duped the public on the grounds for going to war, blindly supported of George W. Bush, left a party in turmoil, and then attained fabulous wealth and faux-celebrity lifestyle after leaving office.

By Sarah Posner and Julie Ingersoll:

The Tea Party movement emerges out of the confluence of different strands of the far right, including Christian Reconstructionism.

The militia movement and Christian Reconstructionism both contend that our current civil government, most especially the federal government, is illegitimate: that it has overreached the limits of its divinely ordained authority, and that it continues to do so.

Many in the militia movement, the Tea Party Movement, and Christian Reconstruction also share the view that civil government should be reformed according to the dictates of biblical law.

Too many of us are manifestly unwilling to put out any intellectual energy whatever and a large part of the reason can be traced to the far Right, particularly the far Religious Right.

Mick Arran on how devil-dogma, plutocratic greed, and religious orthodoxy renders the faithful blindly ignorant:

For four straight decades now, conservatives have been selling us economic and political policies based on 3-sec sound bites and sloganeering phrases, some of them barely more than a single loaded word. “Tax cuts”, “socialism”, “death panels”, “death tax”, and so on. They have told us over and over again that “liberals” always make things too complicated, and that they do that to bamboozle us suckers.

This has been the origination and the development of a doctrine I call “simplicism”: an orthodoxy masquerading as common sense that feeds into the historic American distaste for mental pursuits by promulgating a philosophical paradigm in which all solutions are simple and any solution that isn’t must therefore be a trick and should be ignored unless you want to be the victim of a con artist.

In effect, it excuses, justifies, and even encourages ignorance as a defense against an unnecessary and supposedly wasteful intellectual effort.

Complexity and nuance just confuse the situation, we’re told. They muddy the waters and throw sand in our eyes to prevent us from seeing that the answers we’re looking for are the simple ones, the ones any moron can understand.

The onslaught of simplicism slung from the political far Right would have been bad enough, dangerous enough, damaging enough to cause the our democracy serious problems in any case, but added to it was the sudden emergence of the fundalmentalist Religious Right’s insistence that God didn’t make us to think but to obey the Bible in all things, blindly believing every word literally, thereby cutting off all discussion or disagreement.

A quote FWIW:

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. —Murray Rothbard

The Bush-Cheney private sector military fiasco:

Blackwater Worldwide created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq, according to Congressional investigators and former Blackwater officials.

Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency awarded up to $600 million in classified contracts to Blackwater and its affiliates.

Oh just must follow up on veneer peeling off Palin.

“This whole hunter thing, for Sarah? That is the biggest fallacy,” says one longtime friend of the family. “That woman has never hunted.”

“The picture of her with the caribou she says she shot? She got out of the R.V. to pose for a picture. She never helps with the fishing either. It’s all a joke.”

The friend goes on to recall that when Greta Van Susteren came to the house to interview Palin “[Sarah] cooked moose chili and whatnot. Todd was calling everyone he knew the day before—’Do you got any moose?’ Desperate.”

The Koch billionaires prefer favors and breaks. Koch subsidiaries Flint Hills Resources and Tesoro, as well as Valero Oil, are seeking status quo. They’ve pumped more than $2 million into ballot Proposition 23 which is designed to reverse California’s climate initiatives.

Google’s William Wiehl says California’s green energy rules under AB32 have created 500,000 cleantech jobs since implemented in 2006.

Oh do get to know your neighborhood wingnut.

Bob Altemeyer has been studying this matter more than 30 years.

The greatest threat to American democracy today arises from a militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the nation.

Barack Obama and Warren Buffett are blood relatives. The president’s ninth great-grandfather—and Buffett’s sixth great-grandfather—is French immigrant Mareen Duvall.

Snippet discovered at this link.

Even as Sarah Palin’s public voice grows louder, she has become increasingly secretive, walling herself off from old friends and associates, and attempting to enforce silence from those around her.

Following the former Alaska governor’s road show, the author delves into the surreal new world Palin now inhabits—a place of fear, anger, and illusion, which has swallowed up the engaging, small-town hockey mom and her family—and the sadness she has left in her wake.

Michael Joseph Gross at VanityFair:

The Palin machine is supported by organizations that do much of their business under the cover of pseudonyms and shell companies.

In accordance with the terms of a reported $1 million annual contract with Fox News, Palin regularly delivers canned commentary on that network.

But in the year since she abruptly resigned the governorship of Alaska, in order to market herself full-time—earning an estimated $13 million in the process—she keeps tight control of her pronouncements, speaking only in settings of her own choosing, with audiences of her own selection, and with reporters kept at bay. She injects herself into the news almost every day, but on a strictly one-way basis…

Warm and effusive in public, indifferent or angry in private:

Of the many famous people who have stayed at the Hyatt in Wichita (Cher, Reba McEntire, Neil Young), Sarah Palin ranks as the all-time worst tipper: $5 for seven bags. But the bellhops had it good in Kansas, compared with the bellman at another midwestern hotel who waited up until past midnight for Palin and her entourage to check in—and then got no tip at all for 10 bags. He was stiffed again at checkout time. The same went for the maids who cleaned Palin’s rooms in both places—no tip whatsoever.