I keep forgetting to mention Virtually Speaking Science, but Alan Boyle is actually pretty good not just on science, but the issues around it, and the politicization of science.
Tonight's Virtually Speaking line-up will feature Stirling Newberry following Stuart and Jay on the week in liberalism.

From Naked Capitalism:Yves Smith on "Yet More Mortgage Settlement Lies: Release Looks Broad, Not Narrow; Other States Screwed to Bribe California to Join [...] "It is hard to fathom how any responsible attorney general can agree to this deal not knowing what they are getting for their constituents. It is particularly bizarre that Pam Bondi of Florida has been pushing so hard for California to join the deal rather than do her best to secure terms at least as good as those offered to California for Florida homeowners. And the same question can be asked of Schneiderman. Why has he gone from pushing for a better deal or no deal to sitting on the sidelines? This brave talk of investigations is all well and good, but this settlement agreement is being finalized now, and all the PR related to his new Federal role seems to have taken him off his day job responsibilities at a critical time.
Yves again, on how Gingrich created the Pay-to-Play Congress: "Our Polarized and Money-Driven Congress: Created Over 25 Years By Republicans (and Quickly Imitated by Democrats) [...] The extent of corruption may surprise even jaundiced readers. Both houses have price lists for committees and sub-committees. Ferguson delineates some of the many mechanisms for influencing political outcomes; they extend well beyond campaign donations and formal lobbying. Even though many are by nature hard to quantify in any hard or fast way, he does categorize them and has developed some estimates (see The Spectrum of Political Money, starting on p. 23, and see also his summary on p. 42). Finally, Ferguson goes through conventional explanations of why politics has become so polarized (such as changing cultural attitudes) and shows why they don't stand up. (More on Gringrich's crimes against the US government at The Nation.)

In the wake of the tenth birthday of Guantanamo Bay we few weeks back, The Talking Dog has gone back to doing interviews about this continuing outrage with those most familiar with it, this timeKristine Huskey, Director of the Anti-Torture Program of Physicians for Human Rights, and is an adjunct faculty member in national security law at the Georgetown University Law Center and counsel to a number of current and former detainees at Gitmo, and Col. Morris Davis (USAF, Ret.), the Chief Prosecutor for the Guantanamo Bay military commissions who resigned from that post in 2007 in protest of political interference in prosecutorial functions.

I have been trying to point out for a long time that the scam about Social Security is based on the fallacious notion that the former largest generation in history, the post-war Baby Boomers, represents a bulge in the population that was followed by a fall-off in the number of offspring available to pay for the retirement of their elders. (We'll leave aside for the moment the fact that this is irrelevant anyway, since the Boomers actually paid not just for their parents' retirement, but for their own, in advance.) This story about how the Boomer generation is too big to pay for is a lie. The Boomers had kids, who had kids (and some of those kids have already had kids). As the Boomers have begun to approach retirement, an even larger generation has already entered the workforce. This isn't even a secret - look, for example, at the first paragraph of this article.

At Eschaton
Isn't it about time someone admitted that there's a word for what MF Global has been up to? No, I don't just mean theft, I mean a very specific kind. If one guy did this and just put the money in his own pocket, he'd be arrested for embezzlement. Make it company policy and it suddenly they want to pretend it's something else, but, you know, it really isn't.
This is what it means when people talk about only using various social safety net programs to help "the truly needy" - pit the poor against the poorest. But the issue should never be whether "the truly needy" should get aid from the government; rather, it means giving everyone the resources to make sure they never have to be poor.

As the fourth year of the Obama presidency begins, Bruce Dixon at Black Agenda Report says, "Black America Paralyzed, Powerless, Irrelevant [...] If the black misleadership class has its way, the only political role for black America is to be the solid black wall around the president, the wall that does not insulate him from Wall Street or the energy companies or the warmongers. They're inside the wall. Our job once again will be to protect Barack Obama from any semblance of accountability to his supposed base. To us. Afraid of weakening him before the Republicans, we weaken ourselves instead."

"City of Oakland's Increasing Hostility Toward the Occupy Movement" - The city is sending the cops out to cause riots so they can tell lies about the violent protesters and call them "domestic terrorists".

What Bill Clinton told Charlie Pierce and Mark Warren: "I had a fascinating meeting with Bob Inglis the other day. Bob Inglis was an extremely conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina. He was a three-term-pledge guy in the nineties.... So he came to me and he said, 'I just want you to know, when you got elected, I hated you. And I asked to be on the Judiciary Committee in 1993, because a bunch of us had already made up our minds that no matter what you did or didn't do, we were going to find some way to impeach you. We hated you. You had no right to be president.'"

The inappropriately named Americans United for Life has pressured a right-wing Congressman to investigate Planned Parenthood, and suddenly the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which contributes funds to PP's mammogram operation, has invented a whole new rule that requires them to withdraw any association with the organization that gives mammograms to millions of women who otherwise couldn't get them. Take off your pink ribbon and give to Planned Parenthood instead. I have to rely on TBogg for useful news on this front, since The Washington Post is in the habit of getting it wrong Meanwhile, Charles Pierce reports on Oklahoma's continuing war on women.

Echidne really went to town on the crap science behind the phony abortion=breast cancer story as well as the latest from Charles Murray, who rears his ugly head every now and then to try to put a new shine on racist science. This time his science is still bad, but he has one thing right: The elites are now so far away from everyone else that they don't have a clue. Marcy Wheeler was on Virtually Speaking Tuesdays talking about that bubble.

Can non-violence work - or is violent reaction necessary and inevitable? Perhaps the convention wisdom is wrong.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the first time E.J. Dionne has earned Atrios' Wanker of the Day award? I had no idea he was an idiot on birth control. Hey, E.J., it's not like it's Canon Law or anything, you know...

Oh, good, we're being told to "love it or leave it" again.

Quantum dating.

Flying People in New York City

I never could figure out why it was called "Tiger Bread".

I keep meaning to post a photo of the neat steampunk earrings our alpha geek made me for Christmas. And, along those same lines, look what I have! ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sjan12.htm#1201291615 We usually drink at the Rugby Tavern these days (Larger image).

Tonight's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays will be Digby and Stuart Zechman.
Thursday on Virtually Speaking A-Z, Stuart Zechman and Jay Ackroyd discussed a fascinating new emission from the Disney Studios, a song by Joy Division, and the horrors of SOPA and our entire disgusting, authoritarian, tyrannical "intellectual property protection" regime - well worth a listen. They were joined in the second hour by Olivier Knox of Agence France Press.

Another linky post at Pruning Shears, which also has some good stuff on SOPA and our existing draconian "intellectual property" laws, along with the traditional quoting from Econned, alerts us to these stories:
Oakland: "This is an attempt to keep people from participating non-violently. It's instilling fear." Unsurprisingly, MSNBC gets the story wrong.
David Dayen sees hopeful signs from Schneiderman's appearance on the Maddow show, including the possibility that the IRS will be involved in helping to go after the banks for tax fraud. Even Matt Taibbi is sounding hopeful after Schneiderman discussed his focus on origination/securitization: "The securitization offenses were massive criminal conspiracies, identically undertaken by all of the big banks, to defraud investors in mortgage-backed securities. If you're looking for an appropriate target for a massive federal investigation, one that would get right to the heart of the corruption of the crisis era... well, they picked the right target here." But: "The question is, how real of an investigation will we get? The fact that Schneiderman's co-chairs are Lanny Breuer and Robert Khuzami make me extremely skeptical. I'm actually not sure that both men, in an ideal world, wouldn't be targets of their own committee's investigation." (And based on Yves Smith's assessment, I'm sticking with my initial judgement: This is just more typical Obama campaign kabuki. It's probably working - there was a lot of bad PR when Schneiderman was suddenly removed from the settlement committee with what I imagine was more public notice than was expected, and this has the smell of damage control, giving a high public profile to the appearance of the administration giving Schneiderman a better position to work from, but leaving him hamstrung by having to depend on two criminals to do the right thing, which they won't.)

Dean Baker wrote an interesting piece on "Loser Liberalism" and why the whole argument about "redistribution of wealth" is BS: "Anyone trying to understand the role of the government in the economy should know that whatever it does or does not do by way of redistribution is trivial compared with the actions it takes to determine the initial distribution. Rich people don't get rich exclusively by virtue of their talents and hard work; they get rich because the government made rules to allow them to get rich. To take an obvious example, according to the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services, we spend close to $300bn a year on prescription drugs. If drugs were sold in a free market, without government granted patent monopolies, we would spend around $30bn a year. The difference of $270bn a year is more than five times as much money as is at stake with extending the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy." And then there are the laws that create a huge imbalance in the power of corporations over unions. And then there are things like valuation of the dollar... Baker points out that as matters of pure policy, these are huge compared to tax policy. But, it has to be said, tax policy is still important, because the very fact that the rich can now keep all their money and pass it on to the next generation of their dynasties, and corporations don't have to invest back into their companies because there is no strong tax incentive to do it, is why they have the power to buy our government and make sure that all of the other laws and policies unfairly weight the game in their favor. Sam Seder talked about all this last week on The Majority Report.

Darcy Burner points out that we could make a lot of useful changes by just getting rid of the new rules Gingrich imposed when he took control of the House in 1995.

Really? None of these Smart, Successful Business Leaders and Politicians were bright enough to see this coming? They made a huge deal to trade American jobs for cheap Chinese goods and didn't know what the price tag would be? Or did they know all along what would happen?

Oh, this is good. I was working in the swaps department of an international bank in the late '80s, it was all the rage - but Larry Summers apparently didn't hear about all those swaps going on until after Clinton left office. How mysterious that he did not notice all this serious money being burned.

@downwithtyranny says, "We've been looking for a progressive to run vs Blue Dog Jim Cooper. What about his neighbor Nanci Griffith? And she's got a new song to add to my extremely restricted list in the countrified section: "Hell No, I'm Not Alright."

More ways to get gouged - get recording contract with a major company.

Trailer for Ethos: A Time for Change - or, you know, go to the source.

Google celebrated the anniversary of the big snowflake. But only in the US and UK. ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sjan12.htm#1201271710 isn't really all that affordable. When it turned out Susie was eligible for the program, she was really relieved, but it still put her into debt, and then she still has that premium to keep on paying. So, yeah, give if you can. (And check out that video included in the latter post, which is really what liberalism is supposed to be about, not just taking care of "the truly needy" or whatever it is Obama seems to think makes him more virtuous than the Republican delegation. It's not virtuous to make people poor and then pat yourself on the back because you threw them a few crumbs. You keep them from becoming poor so they can take care of themselves.) Also from or via Susie:
The United States of unemployment
Pierce on Obama's SOTU campaign speech
"Citigroup Replaces JPMorgan as White House Chief of Staff."
Mortgage settlement kabuki - it looks like Schneiderman may have been bought of or otherwise sidelined. "Schneiderman isn't chairing anything. He's Co-Chairing. That's a huge difference. If he's Chair he's in charge. If he's Co-Chair he needs consensus. And who is he Co-Chairing with? Lanny Breuer. That's unacceptable."
It's not just New York - the LAPD has been coordinating with the CIA on "terrorism" as well.
Slave labor is good for business.

Sam Seder talked to David Dayen about Obama's SOTU and what it means that Schneiderman is suddenly taking a gig that appears to neutralize his strength, on Wednesday's Majority Report.

War on Whistleblowers - This administration is so opposed to prosecuting serious crimes that they treat honest citizens who report crimes as if they were committing the worst crime of all.

Democracy v. Plutocracy, Unions v. Servitude, and some definitions, and a warning.

My thanks to Edinburgh Eye, whose complaints about Labour are so, so much like the ones I have about the D-crats, led to the provision of this fine quote from my hero, Aneurin Bevan: "Referring to Mr. Churchill's 'set-the-people-free' speech, Mr. Bevan said that the result of the free-for-all preferred by Churchill would have been cinemas, mansions, hotels, and theatres going up, but no houses for the poor. 'in 1945 and 1946,' he said, 'we were attacked on our housing policy by every spiv in the country - for what is Toryism, except organized spivery? They wanted to let the spivs loose.' As a result of controls, the well-to-do had not been able to build houses, but ordinary men and women were moving into their own homes. Progress could not be made without pain, and the important thing was to make the right people suffer the pain." Always remembering that the "pain" of the rich was more of an inconvenience than the very real pain the rich would prefer to inflict on the rest of us.

Man, it sure doesn't take much to be a class traitor to the rich these days. I mean, what Soros is saying here isn't special, it's just a matter of not wanting to kill the golden goose. Except that Soros still believes in democracy, and if Soros is worried about deflation and depression, he's worried about democracy, and, yeah, that makes him a class traitor. (More on this from Digby.)

Software locks hurt everyone - keep "jailbreaking" legal.

No-brainer: "The results are clear: high marginal rates correlate with broad-based economic prosperity and an expanding middle class. Low marginal rates correlate with extreme income inequality, reduced prosperity overall, and ultimately, economic catastrophe."

Welfare Disincentivises Work - for the 1%.

It's nice that all the rich hot-shots are asking the right questions at Davos, but something tells me they won't take the right answers from it.

I think it might get cold in Europe.

Thers posted this protest song. It's got the feeling - oh, and it rocks. (I'm not sure this is quite the same idea.)

Kaiser Chiefs ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sjan12.htm#1201250520 Virtually Speaking Sundays, and Digby did the same on The Majority Report with Sam Seder. It was entertaining, but I think people spend too much time talking about the Republicans, and I'm a bit annoyed by the effort involved in, say, unpacking Ron Paul, worthy effort though it may be, when there is the much larger issue of restoring liberalism at stake. Talking about Ron Paul's connections to the Koch brothers is all very well, but if you're ignoring the Democratic Party's own ties to some of the most right-wing funders in America, you are missing the larger point, which is that our entire political apparatus has been hijacked by these people. Electing Democrats no longer means building and promoting liberal policies, it just means we don't fight as hard to do it because we're supposed to be protecting and defending Democrats - even Democrats whose "strategy", apparently, is to sabotage their own party. But if the Democratic leadership is manifestly unliberal, as it certainly is, why would we want to defend them? What is the point of electing Democrats whose sole purpose is to help the Republicans slip their own hideously right-wing policies by us without our fighting back?

Remember, George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, but he failed, and he failed because people - with liberals leading the charge - fought back, to the point where even registered Republicans realized what was going on and called their GOP Congresscreeps and let them know they'd never get another vote from them if they signed on to this outrage. Now Obama is trying to wreck Social Security, and where are those people? Well, they're not telling people to call their Congressmen, because they are still too busy telling us how awful the Republicans are, as if only the Republicans were doing anything outrageous. (The rest of the Virtually Speaking schedule for this week can be found here.)

And, meanwhile, "conservative" thinkers are starting to notice that their Pollyannaish euphoria over the fall of the Soviet Union might have been premature, as William Greider observes: "Just as candidate Newt condemns 'crony capitalism' and Perry denounces 'vultures,' historian Francis Fukuyama has abruptly rescinded the happy talk that made him famous twenty years ago. At the end of the cold war, Fukuyama's book The End of History and the Last Man declared that left-right ideological conflicts were over. Liberal democracy had won. It would henceforth prevail around the world. Hold that prophecy. The professor has issued a sort of retraction (he might say 'correction'). His essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, explained that 'some very troubling economic and social trends, if they continue, will both threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood.' Yikes. What trends are those? Global capitalism, he said. Free-trade doctrine and new technology, along with the steady offloading of American jobs, are destroying the middle class - the necessary foundation for democracy in advanced economies. [...] His alarming observations were picked up by other conservative commentators and treated respectfully, a sign that these anxieties are widely shared. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, longstanding advocate of globalization, embraced Fukuyama's argument. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote with sympathy for the struggling white working class. It votes Republican and gets hammered by corporate capitalists in return." Greider also notes that Fukuyama doesn't recognize his as the liberal critique laid out long before by people like Robert Kuttner and himself, but then, Fukuyama probably doesn't see it that way. What he might imagine is that he is still a bright young conservative thinker who is seeing past the errors of his elders - exactly the way Obama appears to see himself in comparison with "out-dated" liberal New Deal thinking. In which case, Fukuyama is a lot closer to the truth.

Right on the heels of the news that the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, is one of the big culprits in the mortgage mess (gee, no wonder he doesn't want to prosecute anyone!), we see a seasoned union-buster promoted to White House Chief of Staff. As Pruning Shears suggests, we're seeing a pattern. Pruning Shears also has another good quote from Econned talking about just how our overlords protectors made the whole financial crises worse. Whose idea was that, anyway?

If you wanted to read some well-written unpacking of SOPA/PIPA, you couldn't do better than what Patrick Nielsen Hayden put up at Making Light over the last week. from the first announcement that ML would go dark - and why, and a short post later reminding everyone that this isn't going away, and one a couple of days later going into more about what the issues are and who is lying ("The MPAA and RIAA would love to see everybody frame these issues as nothing more than a spat between 'industries.' But the tens of thousands of writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers who spoke out yesterday against SOPA and PIPA aren't the 'tech industry.' They're creators - actual content creators - who know perfectly well that censorship is a greater threat to their livelihood than piracy, and that a world with a crippled internet and a no-appeals, guilty-until-proven-innocent copyright-enforcement regime would be a world in which they would be unable to do their work and survive."). (And, while you're there, Abi Sutherland has a good post about the way rape is used in fiction - to get a particular rating in films, to create motivations for female characters, to tell you the rapists are scumbags - and what lessons are unfortunately taught as a result, "Can't you hear beyond the croaking?.")

So, the evil censorship was defeated? Not really, says Glenn Greenwald: "Critics insisted that these bills were dangerous because they empowered the U.S. Government, based on mere accusations of piracy and copyright infringement, to shut down websites without any real due process. But just as the celebrations began over the saving of Internet Freedom, something else happened: the U.S. Justice Department not only indicted the owners of one of the world's largest websites, the file-sharing site Megaupload, but also seized and shut down that site, and also seized or froze millions of dollars of its assets - all based on the unproved accusations, set forth in an indictment, that the site deliberately aided copyright infringement. In other words, many SOPA opponents were confused and even shocked when they learned that the very power they feared the most in that bill - the power of the U.S. Government to seize and shut down websites based solely on accusations, with no trial - is a power the U.S. Government already possesses and, obviously, is willing and able to exercise even against the world's largest sites..." In other words, once again, we see that the game is to further codify powers that the government already claims to hold. That's something Obama has been making a practice of: They are already doing bad things, then they propose new laws to try to nail down what they are doing, and "progressives" get to "win" a fight when they occasionally manage to "beat" those new laws back, even though it may be only for a month or two or the administration finds some new way to do it through a backdoor (e.g., the "Deficit Commission" Obama couldn't get Congress to give him so he made one himself and treats it as if it is every bit as legalistically solid.) This is pretty much what Dahlia Lithwick has been saying about Obama's tendency to make sure George W. Bush's excesses are given a more solid legal framework.

The stink is everywhere, and after all, there's no reason to think we wouldn't find General Electric in the giant control fraud.

"Obama to use pension funds of ordinary Americans to pay for bank mortgage 'settlement': Obama's latest housing market chicanery should come as no surprise. As we discuss below, he will use the State of the Union address to announce a mortgage 'settlement' by Federal regulators, and at least some state attorneys general. It's yet another gambit designed to generate a campaign talking point while making the underlying problem worse."

"1 Million Recall Signatures vs. 1 Partisan Judge: Activist right-wing judge threatens to thwart democracy by legislating from the bench in favor of Walker..."

Bill Gibson can't predict the future.

Wales has been reclassified as a country instead of a principality. Fancy that. (via)

Supercharged Northern Lights

Now, you do know whose music we've been listening to, right? Oh, yeah, she could sing. Oh, yes, she could. Rest in peace, Etta. ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sjan12.htm#1201211603 Virtually Speaking A-Z, Jay and Stuart discussed the idea that the dog-whistles coming out of the mouths of people like Newt Gingrich aren't aimed at the general voter or even at unreconstructed racists, they're aimed at us, and "progressives" keep falling for it. Atrios keeps pointing out that they do and say things "just to piss liberals off," and I suspect he's more right than he knows, and I think a lot of prog bloggers really need to give this some thought, because I believe Stuart is absolutely right - they say things that get liberals to react and that works for them in ways "the left" seems to be entirely unaware of. I don't just mean that it's a distraction; I mean that we're doing their PR for them. People are worried about their jobs. Gingrich talks about jobs, and instead of talking about jobs, progressives react with partisan defenses and accuse him of dog-whistle racism. But ordinary people don't hear racism when Gingrich says he wants to give people paychecks rather than welfare checks, because ordinary people are worried that maybe a welfare check is all they can hope for anymore if things keep going the way they're going. Obama himself has been telling people that we can't have good jobs anymore, we can't have 4% unemployment and a healthy economy anymore, but we'll try to protect "the most needy" - which means the only way you'll get any help from the government is after they have made you too poor to help yourself - and you'll never be able to help yourself again. It doesn't matter that Gingrich is lying about his intentions to create jobs, since no one is actually offering jobs. What matters is that instead of acknowledging that the jobs situation keeps getting worse, liberals sit around crying racism. And racism really isn't the issue.

And in the second half of the Thursday line-up on Virtually Speaking, Matt Stoller came in to discuss his point in the article I was remiss in not linking directly at the time, "Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals" - an article that caused rather a large fuss. This is not about presidential politics, but about the real intellectual knot that is created by the relationship between war policy and domestic socioeconomic policy - and the fact that these mechanisms that were being used to create liberal domestic policies aren't working anymore, and they aren't working anymore because our government has been thoroughly hollowed out and corrupted. We have reached the point where crucial areas of government don't even contain people who know how to do what is supposed to be their job. For example, Tim Geithner, unlike anyone who was walking down their street looking at local housing prices and realizing they were too expensive for people to pay for, did not notice - even laughed at the idea - that we were in a housing bubble. Apparently, it wasn't so much that he was trying to cause another Depression as that he simply didn't recognize what was as plain as the nose on my face. Even more frightening is the kind of lawyering that's now on display at Justice, where those who actually know how to prosecute criminals have been pushed aside in favor of people who think their job is to rubber-stamp whatever criminal conduct big corporations engage in, and wouldn't know how to run a prosecution even if they thought they should do that. And, for some reason, there don't seem to be any real liberals left in government who actually know how to write legislation. So, it looks like the arch-conservative project of turning good government into bad government has succeeded pretty well, and we have more than a simple course-correction on our hands; we will need to rebuild from the ground up. (But, should we wonder why someone who is a professional political operative is saying this now?)

Stuart Zechman alludes from time to time to a scam that's being run in collusion between our government and the health care industry that could be described as "price-fixing". It's something that not many people are really aware of, and Stuart is one of the few who've actually done the work of researching it, so I asked him if he had anything he could post that helps explain it. The gist is that, though Medicare itself keeps costs down, it is also a vehicle for setting prices for medical treatment - and sets them higher than they need to be. He dug up one of his comments to a post at Swampland that delved into just this question. Have a look at "PPACA: The Third Way To Lowering Health Care Prices?" and incorporate that into your thinking on the subject.

Sam Seder's interviews this week including one with Cory Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Garlin Gilchrist of MoveOn about SOPA and the blackout, and Rick Pearlstein (about his his Rolling Stone article, among other things). He also had his usual live coverage of the Occupy movement, this time focused on Occupy DC.

So, after the big fat blackout by major sites, Obama claims he won't support SOPA, which I suppose means he wants to wait until no one's looking to sign it. The lobbyist with "the best job on K Street", doing what the entertainment industry wants, shook his head. Cenk presents Chris Dodd, former pretend protector of Constitutional rights.

David Dayen doesn't appear to have faith in the "more aggressive" stance Obama claims he'll be taking after his prior wimpy performance on the foreclosure crisis. Nor, for that matter, in the recovery.

It's on: Wisconsin Democrats to submit one million signatures to recall Scott Walker [...] One million signatures is 185 percent of the minimum threshold. There is no doubt about it: Gov. Scott Walker will face a recall election. (And, appropriately, CMike celebrated MLK Day by posting a couple of links down in comments to this post to a ten minute YouTube video about the Memphis sanitation workers' strike, complete with some clips of his speeches. He also supplied an "infrequently cited" passage from King's last speech.)

I confess, I don't pay much attention to what movie stars are up to, but I was disappointed to learn that George Clooney had lost the plot.

VastLeft provides a Shorter Andrew Sullivan: "Obama's great because he's conservative, liberals are nuts for thinking he's conservative."

Also from VastLeft, another cartoon: American Extremists: Disposable issues. Plus, Ladies' choice. Oh, and this bitter pill, too.

I haven't thought about this in a long time, but I stumbled on the introduction to David Loftus' book while looking for something else and thought I'd share. A long, long time ago I responded to claims about what men were really thinking when they looked at pornography by pointing out that no one had done any research on the subject and what we had seen so far was projection by some women of what they feared men were thinking about sex. Eventually, thanks to the internet, I stumbled on Loftus, who had decided it was time to at least make a start at that kind of research. Lacking the resources for a full study, he interviewed as many guys as he could (as he acknowledges, a self-selecting group), to find out what men were able to say about their own experience looking at pornography. If that piques your interest, look here.

My friend Yves just posted his sonata at YouTube, and it's lovely. ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sjan12.htm#1201171650 Virtually Speaking Tuesdays will be Avedon Carol and Lambert Strether.

Dan at Pruning Shears has another quote from Yves' Econned and says: "This model highlights a tradeoff ignored (at least until recently) by most economists. All the arguments for deregulation were those of greater efficiency, that less government intervention would lower costs and spur innovation. We'll put aside the question of whether any gains would in fact be shared or would simply accrue to the financier class. Regardless, risks to stability never entered into these recommendations. But if we put on our systems engineering hat, stability is always a first order design requirement and efficiency is secondary." I guess that depends on the question of: "Efficency of what?" If markets are seen as a means to extract resources for the few at the top, they did a fine job. As the system destabilizes, the only thing they have to worry about is whether their private armies and gated communities can keep the rabble out until after their own deaths.

Most of us have heard by now that someone is murdering Iranian scientists, and pretty much everyone figures it's Mossad, probably with the approval and possibly in concert with the United States. I don't know anyone who approves of it, but I hang out in that kind of crowd. And yes, it was a bit shocking, a few years ago, when Glenn Reynolds advocated doing this very thing. But the problem, you see, is that it's not shocking anymore. By now, so much is so wrong that this is just one little item on a long list of horrific things being undertaken under, most shockingly of all, a president who was clearly elected by people who believed he would put a stop to the United States government's outrageous behavior toward both other countries and its own people. Now, Glenn Greenwald may be right that there's something suspicious about the silence about this coming from the left blogosphere, even among people who condemned Reynolds on the subject of assassinating civilians. And sure, maybe there is an element of people not wanting to go after someone whose side they are on, but I'm no Obamapologist and I haven't written about it, either. That's mainly for the usual reason I haven't posted something yet, which is that I haven't gotten around to it. But there's also the fact that this administration just decided to run around assassinating American citizens, and after that, well, having them connive in the murder of Iranian scientists seems like pretty small beans, and not even a little surprising. Sure, it's outrageous, it's indefensible - but, you know, almost everything is, these days. I don't know why anyone else hasn't written long screeds about it, but for me, I'm tending to narrow my view to things that are closer to home, these days, because until we can figure out what to do about these people, it's almost pointless to rail against one more outrage abroad. We don't have to use the models we're using. We could have a better country - and a better world - if we had made different policy decisions. Stupid, short-sighted, or nasty people have worked hard to close off other avenues, but if there is anything to be done, it won't start merely with saying we shouldn't assassinate Iranian scientists.

Thanks to Atrios for posting this Will Rogers clip. Oh, and this certainly sums up the Labour Leadership. As opposed to America, where it's, "Same policies, but just not foaming at the mouth."

Betty White

My local Google search page did not tell me about MLK day, but that was a local phenomenon. ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sjan12.htm#1201160024 Virtually Speaking Sundays. On Virtually Speaking Tuesdays, Susie Madrak talked to Mike Patterson and Stuart Zechman about #J17, Congress, Election 2012, Occupy Congress, being an undecided voter - and the potential for a bloody revolution if certain individuals do not pull themselves together and start behaving sensibly. On the last Virtually Speaking A-Z, Jay and Stuart tried their hand at explaining why socialists, libertarians and what Lambert describes as "benevolent Democrats" are not different forms of "liberals." (God, I'm sick of people who think this is just about taking care of the poor. The point is to keep people from having to be poor in the first place!) Here's the schedule for the next week of Virtually Speaking.

The big news of the week was that the NYT public editor asked readers if reporters should verify facts. No, I'm not making that up. Greenwald: "The New York Times' Public Editor Arthur Brisbane unwittingly sparked an intense and likely enduring controversy yesterday when he pondered - as though it were some agonizing, complex dilemma - whether news reporters 'should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.' That's basically the equivalent of pondering in a medical journal whether doctors should treat diseases, or asking in a law review article whether lawyers should defend the legal interests of their clients, etc.: reporting facts that conflict with public claims (what Brisbane tellingly demeaned as being 'truth vigilantes') is one of the defining functions of journalism, at least in theory." Indeed. It's why the press even has a first amendment right - to cut through the bull. In a day when you can read the Congressional Record, the White House press gaggle, and impending legislation on the web, as well as watch the idiots talk out of their own faces in online videos, newspapers become utterly irrelevant if they are just going to repeat their lies uncritically. There's a reason why people who do things like reading The New York Times turned out to be more misinformed than people who do not follow the news at all.

Listening to Sam Seder interviewing Rocky Anderson the other day, I figured he still sounds much better than the other guys and if he's on my ballot, I might just vote for him. It's not as if Maryland isn't likely to go for Obama, in any case, so there's no guilt, there. I just want to be able to register a vote for someone who isn't any of these other bastards.

You know, I'd almost forgotten Santorum's attempt to get taxpayers to pay a private company if they want to read the weather info online that they'd already paid to collect with their taxes - a service that is currently provided free by the US government, because you pay for it already. Interestingly, listening to the news spot on the Hartmann show when Sam Seder sat in, I noticed that Darrell Issa is trying to pull the same crap with medical information collected thanks to NIH, in a similar kick-back scheme - with the help of a Democratic New York Congresswoman, of course.

Dean Baker notes that the guys who were and are running the Fed were and are utterly incompetent: "btw, as noted in the article, many of the people at these Fed meetings are still in top policy making positions. This shows that the U.S. economy still produces good-paying jobs for people without skills." (via)

Today's Voice of Socialism is, of course, Newt Gingrich, filmmaker. Well, his PAC, anyway, and he seems to be distancing himself a bit from alleged errors or overstatements in King of Bain. But the half-hour video about Mitt Romney's company points the finger at Mitt Romney and Bain in terms that might have been expected to come from the left, a critique of modern capitalism (the version of capitalism Newt once championed) that condemns Gordon Gekko's impact on America's economy - and, especially, on its workers and families. Of course, Romney didn't make this happen all by himself, and there's no one running things who would stand up and say, "This is wrong," and make it stop. Robert Reich addressed this point the other day, and Sam Seder, sitting in for Thom Hartmann Friday, talked to Reich on this subject in the first hour. (Sammy also talked to Dahlia Lithwick later in the show, about Citizens United and the Montana court that decided to ignore that decision to protect its own elections - as discussed in here piece here.) But Romney's Bain Capital has been a profound source for evil in our country, and still is. These welfare cheats also own the airwaves.

Marion in Savannah has an episode of Bobo versus Krugman, discussing the entire "job creation" myth. I'm not sure it's really accurate, however, to say that shutting down companies doesn't actually destroy jobs and only means the new jobs available aren't as good as the old jobs. My experience is that the number of jobs available also contracts as employers feel free to load their employees up with longer hours and harsher conditions, overworking them in lieu of simply hiring an adequate workforce.

Looks like Colbert is running on the RepubliDem platform: "At least some establishment figures are worried that Colbert might cause an upset in the Romney coronation. CNN has a blistering anti-Colbert opinion piece pointing out that Colbert's platform is a travesty, calling for more unemployment, more wars, more inequality. In other words what George W. Bush wanted to do and did and what George W. Romney and George W. Santorum and George W. Gingrich want and plan to do." And Obama, don't forget.

Angelides to lead distressed mortgage firm: "The company, Mortgage Resolution Partners, claims its strategy of using "legal and political leverage" to acquire the loans could generate a 20 percent annual return for investors. The company intends to purchase mortgages at a steep discount and re-work them to enable the homeowners to continue making payments, with the firm collecting the proceeds." I have no idea what to make of this.

Wow, that must be some sale!

Dr. Watson has a blog, but the hit counter is stuck at 1895.

Pretty Aurora picture

Music videos for the deaf. No, it's not ironic, it's just fun. ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sjan12.htm#1201121655 Majority Report, with Robert Forrant.

I guess now we have to put all our energy into protecting programs for the extremely poor, since the plan is to make sure we are all in that category. I look at it, however, as a reason to take your money out of banks and hide it all in a box in the ground so they won't know you've got it.

At Naked Capitalism:
- Nobody likes the Economist's love-letter to the criminals of The City.
- "The Devil and Rick Santorum- Dilemmas of a Holy Owned Subsidiary"
-American exceptionalism and Euro-bashing
- Matt Stoller on the latest flurry of hippie bashing by "progressives".
- Hatchet job by Florida Inspector General to justify firing of two lawyers for foreclosure fraud investigations
-GAO goes after administration "TARP made money" claim.

Bruce Schneier has a round-up of the TSA's top ten good catches of 2011. But my favorite is the butter knife confiscated from the pilot of the plane - you know, in case he wanted to hold himself hostage and hijack the plane. Although a teenage girl's purse with an embroidered handgun design was another great one, since we all know how much damage you can do with embroidery. He also features expert predictions of terrorist attacks, most of which were wrong. Of course, they were all wrong, since the attack on the WTC was so successful that no other attack was necessary. Bush made sure that the terrorists won. Bruce also has some links from himself and EFF on protecting your security at the borders. I'm lately coming to the conclusion that carrying your laptop with you may be more trouble than it's worth if you are crossing the US border. I'll probably just take my (dumb) cell phone with me if I go home for a visit - and a back-up of the piece of paper with vital phone numbers on it that I always carry when I fly.

'Wild Old Women' Close San Francisco Bank Of America Branch - You know, there's a reason why they want to kill older people off as fast as they can. One big one is that these people remember what life used to be like before the "Serious" people took over. (So do the older Boomers, which is why they hate them even more, since they aren't dying fast enough.)

Charlie Pierce, in "Pain: The David Gregory Solution", doesn't mention how often it is that we hear White House policy from Gregory's lips (don't we all remember him, just after this administration took office, insisting, in his "balanced", non-opinionated way, that something has to be done about entitlements?), but I enjoy watching his target practice on the man who won Atrios' The Worst Person In The World award Monday.

Well, thank goodness the Democrats have protected your reproductive rights, yeah?

Are you sure? "'We must leave the Holocaust and its symbols outside the arguments in Israeli society,' said Moshe Zanbar, chairman of the main umbrella group for Holocaust survivors in Israel. 'This harms the memory of the Holocaust." Yeah, let's freeze it in amber and not think about what it means.

"I am RuPaul & I'm not running for president." Which is a shame, since RuPaul is preferable to anyone who is in the race. Right?

Oh, I can't help the feeling this could be dangerous.

The Joy of Books

Murray Gold rocks out at home.

In almost every case, the definitive version of a Beatles song is by the Beatles. However, when I heard this, I immediately felt that it was the way it was intended to be performed. And this is just lovely.

Space Oddity Original Video (1969) - this is a version I'd never heard. ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sjan12.htm#1201082003 Virtually Speaking Sundays will be Cliff Schecter and Gotta Laff. The rest of this week's VS schedule is here.

Listening to Culture of Truth on Santorum, I caught myself thinking, "Sometimes ya gotta admire their chutzpah," and then I realized, no, actually, you don't.

Thursday's Majority Report covered Obama's recess appointments and the Occupy action in Grand Central Station on the NDAA.

Whenever I see the latest news on how the Occupy movement is being suppressed, I remember all those people who kept insisting that we were lucky America was a free country, because we'd be arrested if we tried to protest in a real dictatorship. Well, Americans are getting arrested for trying to protest. Are we a real dictatorship, yet?

By now it's clear that there is no shortage of people with advanced technical education, skill, and experience in the United States (and Britain) - home-grown geeks of every kind who could easily be employed by the very companies that are moaning about the lack of availability of such people. A considerable number of those people are among the growing numbers of the unemployed. They aren't unemployed because the work doesn't exist or the money isn't there to pay for them - it does, and it is - but because the companies they can no longer find work with are hell-bent on driving down wages and working conditions for employees, and it's easier to do that to foreigners. For example, it's illegal for foreigners on work visas to go on strike in the United States. Employers who want to be able to treat their employees with contempt enjoy that sort of thing. I really wish we could hope that candidates would be pressed to answer questions on their views on giving away Americans' jobs to foreigners. Not that I'd trust anything any of them - especially Obama - said, but Romney would have his work cut out for him. Oh, wait, I forgot - reversing positions is something of a signature for Romney. Um, and for Obama.

This is being described as "new", but "benefit corporation" is just a new name for what used to be perfectly normal - corporations that were not allowed to put share earnings above all other considerations. And when I say "normal", I don't mean there used to always be companies like that, I mean it used to be that companies had to be like that.

Robert A. Gattis is not denying that he murdered a woman. But are we any better if we kill him on January 20th?

Pro editors and journalists finally figure out that SOPA is bad. Sort of. (via)

Gary Johnson, dropped out of the Republican Party and running as a Libertarian, is for reproductive rights, which makes him more libertarian than Ron Paul, but is he a better anti-war candidate? (But is he better than guys who do this?)

Yes, as we have all pointed out, Ron Paul's position on the drug war isn't that these drugs should be decriminalized, it's that there should be no federal laws against those drugs, and the states should be able to make their own indefensible laws about them. Be that as it may, it would still mean that the endless supply of money and clout of the federal government would not be available to states that want to be draconian about drugs. We'd actually be in much better shape now if that had been the case for the last 30 years, because we would have had nowhere near the coast-to-coat militarization of the police that we've had during that time. And, in the meantime, states that want to legalize medical marijuana would not have to worry that the licenses they grant would not protect doctors and providers from being arrested (and robbed and murdered) by the Feds. States that wanted to decriminalize drugs, or reschedule them, could do so. That's still better than what we have now. (Ian Welsh has thoughts on why there seems to be Ron Paul Hysteria.)

What has Obama done so far?

Rare photos of an albino hummingbird.

Anna says, "I want a box of these right now!"

I missed this at the time, but Janis Ian wrote some new lyrics just for us. (Get the .mp3.) ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sjan12.htm#1201061650

I guess I need to clarify that when I say that Ron Paul is the only one who seems to have any sensible policies on anything at all, I mean "gives the appearance of" rather than "seems to me". The fact that Paul can give the appearance of someone who understands that military aggression against foreign countries and the War On (Some People Who Use Some) Drugs are stupid policies that should be stopped is what people hear. Whether I, personally, trust that his policy statements on those issues are (a) genuine or (b) coming from the same place as mine is another, and irrelevant, matter. Because it actually takes some attention to get a grip on where Ron Paul or any other public voice is coming from, and right now almost no one is allowed to suggest anything sensible on television. And yet, Ron Paul is running around saying we should withdraw from stupid wars, including the incredibly destructive and wasteful drug war. Those are, by themselves, excellent ideas.

Withdrawing ground action from foreign countries just so we can simply drop nukes on them, of course, would not be consistent with what most people who want to stop the stupid wars abroad want from such withdrawals, and is not a good idea, but it could be what Paul is really thinking - which is beside the point, because it is not, as yet, what he is saying. Stopping the federal war on drugs only to allow states to impose their own drug wars individually is also not quite what Paul sounds like he means most of the time, even thought it actually is what he means.

But we're dealing with an age in which people who watch the news on TV and read the papers think they aren't low-information voters, even though they are actually being wildly misinformed. Those people don't spend a lot of time doing further research on who the misinformers are, where the money is coming from, what the connections are between, say, Ron Paul and the Koch brothers and the John Birch Society, or the funders of the Heritage Foundation and the funders of the Democratic Leadership Council/Third Way bunch that is allegedly to their left in the fantasy "center". It's been a long time since most of those people have even heard a real liberal argument on TV, either from pundit/operatives or from elective officials themselves. Most of them have no clue that virtually everything they are seeing and hearing is a right-wing argument for right-wing goals. In fact, if we are to believe Jay Ackroyd, it is quite possible that the President of the United States himself does not realize that the stuff that comes out of his own mouth is just a pack of right-wing lies made up to serve right-wing goals - and I'm sure Obama doesn't think of himself as a low-information voter.

Nevertheless, we have a situation in which it is fair to say that:

• The Republicans and the Democrats want to reduce or eliminate your ability to get redress in court against corporations or employers who sell you poison, wreck your environment, or treat you like slaves, under the guise of "tort reform".
• The Republicans and the Democrats want to bust unions so that wages can be driven down and workers rights can be a forgotten relic of a quaintly sentimental age that is no more than a nostalgic dream.
• The Republicans and the Democrats want to reduce the number of ordinary employees of the federal government who try to make things work and then go out and spend their paychecks in the real economy.
• The Republicans and the Democrats want to privatize our public health and unemployment insurance programs that will cease to be useful to the public but still cost us even more money while killing even more people from lack of affordability.
• The Republicans and the Democrats want to essentially privatize the school system, again reducing the educational capabilities of the schools while costing taxpayers more money.
• The Republicans and the Democrats want to restrict (or eliminate) the public's access to the internet as a multi-directional communication tool.

And the only discernable distinctions between the two parties seem to be that:

• The Republicans want to eliminate reproductive choice for women, while the Democrats aver that they sympathize with the (alleged) feelings of anti-choice campaigners but don't actually care about the issue except where they think it will win or lose them votes, and maybe not even then, but they are certainly willing to bargain reproductive choice away as fast as they can if it will buy them some illusory victory on the political playing field as defined by Big Media pundits.
• The Democrats think overt racism and homophobia are unseemly and the Republicans don't, but the Democrats will sell out their "minority" constituencies if they can do so covertly in order to buy them some illusory victory on the political playing field as defined by Big Media pundits.
• The Republicans and the Democrats want to continue our wars abroad and our ruinous Israel-right-or-wrong policies - except for Ron Paul.
• The Republicans and the Democrats want to continue a federal war on drugs which not only imposes its laws against the individual states against the wills of both the voters and the leaders in those states, but also against other countries who try to weaken or reconsider their own part in the drug war - except for Ron Paul, who, remarkably, seems to be the only major political figure who has even noticed its racist enforcement and ruinous effect on the black community.
• The Republicans and the Democrats are happy with treating whistleblowers like terrorists while letting the criminals the whistle is blown on carry on their crimes, except for Ron Paul, who says Bradley Manning is a true patriot.
• The Republicans and the Democrats were cool with the extension of the Patriot Act - except for Ron Paul.
• The Republicans and the Democrats are happy to have the president simply decide to assassinate American citizens and the elimination of due process - except for Ron Paul.

(Here's Matt Taibbi writing about the meaningless sideshow of the electoral process as it currently stands, and he talked to Sam Seder about it, and what Ron Paul's real positions are, Wednesday on The Majority Report. Note that Sammy has no illusions about Paul being genuinely libertarian on any personal freedom issues.)

Jay and Stuart talked about this, and the fuss it's created in the blogosphere, last night on Virtually Speaking A-Z, and covered a lot of ground, but I'd say there's more to cover.

My beef is that it's unforgivable that Ron Paul, of all people, is the only person on the national stage who is making any case for what should be liberal positions, and indefensible that people who call themselves liberals or progressives persist in making excuses for the lack of such a case coming from Obama, and even the fact that he most often makes the case for the opposing positions.

And until we get some national voices making the case for the genuinely liberal approach to those issues - and being heard - we will be in big trouble, because the only person who even makes something that, on the surface, sounds a bit liberal, is a crazy and dangerous right-wing crackpot named Ron Paul.

Yves wants us all to read Amar Bhide's article in the NYT about a need to return to boring - and responsible - banking: "To prevent the next panic, it's not enough to rely on emergency actions by the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. Instead, governments should fully guarantee all bank deposits - and impose much tighter restrictions on risk-taking by banks. Banks should be forced to shed activities like derivatives trading that regulators cannot easily examine." Ah, the way it used to be.

Krugman: "Look, economic policy matters. It matters for real people who suffer real consequences when we get it wrong. If I believe that the doctrine of expansionary austerity is all wrong, or that the Ryan plan for Medicare would have disastrous effects, or whatever, then my duty, as I see it, is to make my case as best I honestly can - not put on a decorous show of civilized discussion that pretends that there aren't hired guns posing as analysts, and spares the feelings of people who are not in danger of losing their jobs or their health care."

At Suburban Guerrilla:
- So ICE doesn't even bother to determine the citizenship of people who are obviously American teenagers before they deport them to Columbia.
- Russ Baker, "Obama: 'Yes, I'm in a Can' [...] The essence of Obama is to make gestures that will please everyone, but to do it without genuine enthusiasm or pleasure - and therefore please no one. Ordinary people feel he cares not a whit about them, and the moneyed class resents his occasional populist-firebrand rhetoric. It is a mark of cynicism to operate like this. It is also not necessarily a winning formula for a politician. And for a country, it is a disaster." (Orwell called it.)
- Occupy broadcaster evicted: "Earlier this morning, Global Revolution Studios was ordered to vacate from their building by the NYPD in conjunction with the building department. It took three separate departments visiting 13 Thames to finally come up with a reason to remove the Global Revolution team with a posted notice despite having all applicable paperwork for the department of buildings in order."
- Mole - I just can't believe that Obama has never lifted a finger to put Spakovsky in jail where he has belonged for years, rather than leave him to continue to damage our country from within the United States government.
- Jay Rosen on the Iowa caucus coverage.
- The real reason they are called Liar's Loans. It wasn't the home-buyers who were the liars.
- I can only agree with Susie's Deep Thought.

Play Obamapologist Bingo.

Huh. Two-thirds of caucus members claimed to be Tea Party folks, and Romney still came out ahead - by 8 votes.

Looking for work?

RIP Ronald Searle, who returned from captivity by the Japanese to create the St. Trinian's cartoon series (which became a series of movies), and become the most famous cartoonist in Britain. (And, of course, we know who Flash Harry grew up to be...)

And once I got on that theme, I found this, which is fun.] ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sjan12.htm#1201040104

Spocko and Mike Stark will be on Virtually Speaking Tuesdays tonight.

It's that time of year again (actually, it was that time of year last month, and the people who got theirs done on time have their posts listed here) when tradition calls for a round-up of the best of my own blog posts of the year we've just survived. Dan nominated this post, which I must admit is a pretty good post, but it's sad to think I haven't written anything else up to that standard for a year. He could be right.

And I guess looking back at that post, we're looking at what has increasingly become a major theme here, which could roughly be summed up as, "Globalization is not new, just metastasized by corporatist government policies." It is precisely what our Founding Fathers saw as an intolerable threat to freedom and caused them to foment and fight a revolution against the Crown.

Which makes me go back again to the conversation Jay and Stuart had last week in which Jay made the case that the Centrist Democrats actually believe the crazy, wrong, inconsistent ideology and factoids they keep spouting about the economy.

Which means that they think the speed of the internet is so significant that it can change the fact that everything else - all the real, physical stuff that in the end is what matters - hasn't suddenly been changed. You may be able to move certain "intellectual property" like books and music at rapid speed, but you still can't send a pair of socks or a car or a basket of fruit itself by electronic means, despite the fact that you can order one that way.

Ships don't travel that much faster than they used to when I was a kid, and neither do planes. The turnaround time on an exchange of physical letters across the Atlantic is about two weeks, same as when I was born - when, by the way, we already had phones. We're not talking about putting products on a transmat and sending them instantaneously, we're talking about sending documents faster. The possibility of reducing all of the world's labor to subsistence level was always there and often the reality for a considerable proportion of the world's workers (hence Ricardo's Iron Law), it's just that we chose not to do it. We made that choice in 1776, and we made it again with the New Deal. We could do that again, because Keynes was right. And yet the Democratic leadership honestly seems to believe that there is nothing we can do. And that's not just a local phenomenon. (Jay posted some background material for his discussion with Stuart here.)

Pierce: "And, of course, we must never make the perfect the enemy of the good. But you know what else is the enemy of good? Timidity is the enemy of the good. Cruelty is the enemy of the good, and so are selfishness, bigotry, and ignorance. Why perfection is the only enemy of the good that ever seems worth fighting is a good question with which to launch the new year."

It's now almost permanent election season, which means that we always have to be in partisan mode and never discuss actual issues. We can never acknowledge that maybe a guy on Our Side is promoting bad positions because to do so would give aid and comfort to the Bad Guys on The Other Side. Almost from the moment he got into office, we've been told we can't criticize Obama because it would help the Republicans. We also can't ever admit that someone who isn't a Democrat might actually have a better position on some issue than Obama does. We can't be honest about what's really going on because it might help the Republicans. But it's true that, no matter how wrong and repugnant (and dishonest or stupid) he is on many other important issues, Ron Paul is the only one who seems to have sensible positions about the war and secrecy regime. "Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform - certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party - who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote - Barack Obama - advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil." Sure, his "libertarianism" seems to be limited to a "states rights" fallacy (it's okay for individual states to destroy your freedom, it's just not okay for the federal government to do it) and then only on certain issues (obviously, not reproductive freedom, a fairly crucial one), but then, I haven't seen any evidence that Obama and his cadre of money-grubbing warmongers care about those freedoms at any level. And while Paul advocates ghastly economic policies, so do the people who currently occupy the White House. And yet, while Obama's supporters would draw the line at raping a nun on live TV (sorry, Glenn, but that's in the "dead girl/live boy" category), they are still happy to support him despite the fact that he is deliberately dismantling the American economy and every feature that might have saved you and yours from various kinds of slavery and unnecessary death. (And, you know, though I can tell you from experience that being raped is seriously unpleasant, it really isn't the worst thing that can happen. I mean, be honest: Given the choice between watching your children die because Obama managed to derail the creation of a decent health care system or seeing Obama rape a nun on live TV, which would you rather have him do?) But, you know, what really burns is that the only person saying these perfectly sane things about stupid wars is a right-wing crackpot, because there is no one in the allegedly liberal leadership saying it. And for that alone, those people deserve to be locked up someplace where they will feel forced to scream about their civil liberties and rights as Americans.

"TransCanada Inspector: Keystone Pipelines Not Safe: Writing an opinion piece for the Lincoln (NE) Journal-Star, civil engineer Mike Klink calls TransCanada's predecessor Keystone XL pipeline, for which he was a construction quality inspector, a 'lemon' and a 'proven loser.' Klink was fired from his job and is seeking Department of Labor whistleblower protection. His entire plea is worth reading."

On the bright side, it's nice to have anti-choicers like Retaliban Rick actually saying what they mean so people like me don't get called crazy when we point out that it's what they really mean.

Occupy: It's really hard work, but it's the work worth doing.

Echnidne ruminates on merit.

In honor of the 75th anniversary of the first science fiction convention, a report on the 1937 Leeds convention, complete with unseen photographs of attendees like a very young Arthur C. Clarke.

Oh, yeah, happy new year.

The Temptations ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sdec11.htm#1112301600 Since it was after midnight, the first thing I did last night to celebrate my birthday was listen to Jay and Stuart trying to work out the economic theories of the idiots who are running the country on Virtually Speaking A-Z, and then Eve Gittelson (nyceve) came along to discuss the year in health insurance policy. Digby was the guest on Virtually Speaking Susie, with a couple of interesting call-ins, one from Stuart Zechman joining arguments about whether voting for Obama and his friends in the coming election is useful. And why is even Newsweek publishing articles suggesting that if the idiots in charge don't pull themselves together, there's gonna be a revolution and their heads will end up on pikes? (Of course, Andrew Sullivan already said he had learned to love hippies...)

"Anonymous denies Stratfor attack: 'The Stratfor hack is not the work of Anonymous. Stratfor is an open source intelligence agency, publishing daily reports on data collected from the open Internet. Hackers claiming to be Anonymous have distorted this truth in order to further their hidden agenda, and some Anons have taken the bait,' the group claimed in an online communiqué."

Bloomberg, "Copyrights Are No Longer About Copies (Part 1) [...] Copyright laws can, in fact, serve valuable purposes: They can ensure that once works are created, their authors are able to protect them and benefit from them economically. But copyright laws rarely cause people to create things they otherwise wouldn't have. Nor are copyright laws responsible for either commercial or critical success. The benefits from ownership of copy rights have always flowed disproportionately to gatekeepers who are interested in artificial scarcity and monopoly profits, rather than abundance and diversity. [...] The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a prime example of our march backward, of how our laws are used to thwart innovation and creativity. It's the reason you can't load lawfully purchased copies of your DVDs into your iPod, why you can't transfer copies of many lawfully purchased works from one electronic device to another, why DVDs bought in one country may not work in another. (This is something that should have greatly embarrassed President Barack Obama when he gave then-U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of DVDs of American movies, which couldn't be lawfully played on Brown's player.) Under this law, both consumers and technology are treated as the enemy."

Seriously, what kind of newspaper reporter gets the dope and then waits years to publish it? Oh, yeah, Bob Woodward.

Matt Stoller, "Why Is The Term 'Financial Repression' Being Sold? Over the past few months, the concept of 'Financial Repression' has come into the lexicon and is increasingly used to describe a possible set of government strategies that constrains the financial sector. It has far more political significance than its users would have you believe." I can take a wild guess....

I used to have complaints like this. The best part about visiting my cousin Greg at Christmas was getting to play with the cool toys he got.

Yves came in and said "I made a song!" His English isn't so good, but it's actually a lovely piece.

Your musical interlude from the best Rolling Stones album ever. [Update: Lambert just turned me on to this great live performance of it.] ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sdec11.htm#1112271520 Dave Johnson, "What Next In The Fight Over Who Our Economy Is For? [...] To provide cover for the operation these agents of the 1% spread a thick blanket of propaganda, using every technique in the modern marketing book. They divided us by race, religion, gender, sexual preference, even pitting people who like quiche and lattes against those who like beer and sausage. To cripple potential opposition they infiltrated and fractured key institutions, and turned the public against the news media. They developed a professional career-path system that rewards those who play along with the corruption and destruction and punishes those who do not. To cripple dissent they used ridicule, shame and intimidation."

Bipartisan: Don't say "Paul Ryan" when you mean "Paul Ryan and a bunch of Democrats" are working together to destroy Medicare. And, no, it's not just "Blue Dogs" - it's "progressives", too: "Some commentators have wrongly dismissed Wyden as a 'crackpot' risking political suicide; in fact, Wyden is a cautious, 'pragmatic' politician, i.e. he blindly follows party leaders and their corporate bosses. [...] By attaching his name to Paul Ryan (the anti-Medicare crusader), Wyden is now revealing the ultra-right, pro-corporate trajectory of the Democratic Party leadership. And although the White House has spoken against the bill, Obama's own health care reform bill created the framework now copied by the Wyden-Paul plan."

Matt Taibbi responds to A Christmas Message From America's Rich full of moaning and whining about how poor people don't pay enough income taxes and therefore have "no skin in the game": "But it seems to me that if you're broke enough that you're not paying any income tax, you've got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works." Exactly. The billionaire class is so well insulated that they don't even come close to having skin in the game. Obama couldn't even bring himself to make his bankster friends take "a haircut" for breaking the law, so he decided instead to take their victims' scalps. Via Pruning Shears, where a quote from Econned also explains what this has to do with the price of sardines.

"2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark: As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2011 and discussing where we are in the fight for a free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy. The government has been using its secrecy system in absurd ways for decades, but 2011 was particularly egregious. Here are a few examples..." Though nothing could make the Thatcher government seem reasonable, Obama is making a fabulous try.

"'Anonymous' hackers target US security think tank: The loose-knit hacking movement "Anonymous" claimed Sunday to have stolen thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to clients of U.S.-based security think tank Stratfor. One hacker said the goal was to pilfer funds from individuals' accounts to give away as Christmas donations, and some victims confirmed unauthorized transactions linked to their credit cards."

"How the feds fueled the militarization of police [...] The militarization of America's metropolitan police forces was on full display in recent months as police from Los Angeles to New York cracked down on Occupy protests, decked out in full SWAT gear and occasionally using strange pieces of military hardware."

Wouldn't it be cool if we cold vote for a straight ticket of guys like Rocky Anderson?

"Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make" - Actually, there are lots of sites that make these mistakes.

"Whole Foods Parking Lot". I bet no one will remember why this made me think of Martin Mull.

Remember, Christmas isn't for another six days. Here's a carol you probably haven't heard over and over, yet.

And these are just pretty.

The Christmas Doctor Who episode made my eyes all tear up, I really liked it, and it made much more sense than last year's. ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sdec11.htm#1112251845

I was about to be overjoyed that none of the links I expected to have linkrot from the traditional Christmas post had rotted since last year, until I found out that the one link I assumed would still be there was gone. That was the .mp3 of "Truce" that Tom Robinson had put up at my request, and I can't find it anywhere else (but, since we all know how bad I am at finding the right keywords, you're welcome to try). You can still find the lyrics here, and of course the original letter about the event to which the song refers is still up at Brew's site. [Update: A commenter directs me here for an .mp3 download.]

I can always get into the mood with Brian Brink's tour-de-force performance of "Carol of the Bells."

The link that has rotted every year, until now, was to this excellent Christmas card from Joshua Held, Irving Berlin, and the Drifters - but this year it was right where I left it, and so is the version of the same thing I found done in Christmas lights.

I still just like this.

Dave Langford always makes sure I can find Ron Tiner's one-page cartoon version of A Christmas Carol from that ancient Xmas edition of Ansible.

In all these years, I have never gotten tired of re-reading Mark's wonderful Mel Tormé story. Last year I finally found a good video of Mel singing his famous song with Judy Garland (that association with rainbows must just be too strong), and I also found a good, relatively recent solo performance by the man they called The Velvet Fog.

And now, as always, a few words from Marley's Ghost:

"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?"

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"

Scrooge trembled more and more.

"Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!"

[...]"But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"

Merry Christmas, and may the truth finally set us free. ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sdec11.htm#1112241628 For those who asked: I hit the Start button and I typed "mouse" and ran it, and it gave me a picture of the pointer that I clicked and that gave me a dialog with a tab for "touchpad". Try messing around with that and see if it helps. I think enabling "Touch Check" may have improved things.

Atrios is quite right, and so is David Weigel, about the failure of PolitiFact in its ability to fact-check, but there's a great deal more to this story, and it's worth listening to what Stuart Zechman and Jay Ackroyod said about it on Virtually Speaking A-Z. And that was followed by Jay's interview with C.W. Anderson about the failures of media.

And here I want to insert a note to Stuart about our continuing argument on whether there is any real distinction between the "centrists" and the "conservatives". Because, judging from statements the Centrists have been making and from what conservatives have done all along, the apparent difference between them and their rationale for doing the same things is an opposing set of beliefs in what is real and what is not.

The arch-conservatives believe that the rich - the aristocracy - should run everything, and the rest of us should be "losers" who are poor and miserable and have to live a hard-scrabble existence in which we literally have to beg them for jobs, alms, and mercy. They recognize that the world can be ordered differently, that there can be democracy and freedom and a decent living for everyone, they just think it shouldn't be that way, it should be their way, because they are morally better than us and should be able to lord it over us. They have worked tirelessly (and effectively) for more than 30 years to undo democracy, and they knew just what they were doing.

The Centrists, by their statements and position papers, believe this choice no longer exists - that the "new rules" of "globalization" mean that democracy and a better life, decent wages, worker safety and all that jazz are just no longer possible. We will have to live according to the desires of the arch-conservatives - not because it is morally right, but because there is simply no other option. We are no longer in an aberrant situation where democracy can be a realistic hope and workers can be treated like human beings. We "have to" "compete" with China, and that's that. Somehow, these centrists have all managed not to notice more than two centuries of American and European history and thousands of years of world history, not to mention many changes in their own lifetimes. They have failed to read any economic charts or to make any coherent conclusions about the direct and visible results of policy choices.

If this is actually the case, it is clearly the Centrists who are most stupid, since they are unable to recognize that these options are the result of choices and not simply what must be. We can choose to redistribute wealth so that we have a healthy economy that reduces the power of the aristocrats and allows a return to government by, for, and of the people. We can, if we want to, have full employment and reasonable interest rates, controls against monopoly/duopoly capitalism, and a return of real innovation and choice. Steps were taken to create those things, steps were taken to eliminate those things, and we can see that the choice is there to take the steps we want to take to create the country we want to create.

The trouble is, I'm not sure I believe the Centrists are as stupid as they purport to be. Again I return to this statement by the ubiquitous unnamed White House official who claims that the public does not agree about liberal policy with us flaky liberals who think that the White House should be using its "bully pulpit" to make the liberal case. I don't believe these people can't read the polls - I know they are reading the polls and I know they know that it is us, and not them, who the public agrees with about essential liberal programs and how government should function to serve the public. And I also know they have admitted amongst themselves that deception is necessary to bring their policies into being - just as the arch-conservatives have always similarly observed to each other. The only thing liberals have been asking the White House to do is to tell the truth about the greater efficiency and promise of liberal programs and quit lying about the necessity of making us all live like Chinese slave laborers. Tell the public the truth about real single-payer medical systems, and then they won't worry about having to pay more taxes for a single-payer system. Tell the public that Social Security is not broke and that there is no reason on earth to raise the retirement age. The public already supports SSI, as the Dem leadership knows, which is why they keep lying about it to make it less popular. The truth is that the White House is perfectly happy to use the bully pulpit to push right-wing memes they know are false in order to try to make the public less likely to put their heads on pikes for trying to wreck Social Security and Medicare.

And, aside from that, I know that the DLC and Third Way and whatever re-brand they come up with next time are just spin-tanky groups who are funded by the very same people who fund the right-wing spin tanks, and I see no reason to believe they are doing anything other than what the right-wing groups are doing, which is coming up with targeted new language to push the same old right-wing programs. They have always done this and they always will.

Glenn Greenwald says that it has to be "the single most amusing phrase ever to appear unironically in the Paper of Record: Twitter terrorism." In a separate post, Glenn recommends a number of articles, including: "There are two new must-read articles on one of the worst legacies of the Obama presidency thus far: the failure to prosecute Wall Street executives for the criminal behavior that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. The first is from Jeff Connaughton, the former chief of staff to former Democratic Sen. Ted Kaufman, who chaired Senate oversight hearings on financial fraud prosecutions; Connaughton documents what he calls the 'misleading' statements and multiple actions of President Obama designed to shield those executives from accountability. The second is from Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi who, commenting on Connaughton's piece, writes that 'what makes Obama's statements so dangerous is that they suggest an ongoing strategy of covering up the Wall Street crimewave.'"

Who Supports SOPA: Special Interests.

While Newt Gingrich continues to run around pretending to be some sort of Warrior Statesman Scholar, the most popular candidate for guys in the military is Ron Paul. And not without good reason. (via) Not sure what happens now, but I'm still not voting for him.

Why do I get the impression that self-examination is not the CIA's strong suit? It's amazing how often they find they didn't do anything wrong.

"What we hate are the people who we view as having found their success as a consequence of the damage their activities have done to our country. What we hate are those who take and give nothing back in the form of innovation, convenience, entertainment or scientific progress. We hate those who've exploited political relationships and stupidity to rake in even more of the nation's wealth while simultaneously driving the potential for success further away from the grasp of everyone else." That's Joshua Brown's response to Jamie Dimon's whining about how everybody hates wonderful, successful people like him, and good for Brown in pointing out that the type and use of wealth these predators have wrapped themselves up in means that others, no matter how clever and hard-working, are less likely to be able to succeed and create and do things for society. Some people think Jamie Dimon can be helped. Fred Clark does, as he recalls The Liberation of Ebenezer Scrooge (and possible liberation of Jamie Dimon). (via)

Mick wrote "Socialism - It's Not Just For Crackpots Any More" way back in March, but things have changed a little since then, and maybe it'll have different resonance now, I don't know. But it sure wouldn't hurt if we could get more socialists into Congress. Meanwhile, voters are leaving the Republican and Democratic parties in large numbers. And we continue to struggle with the question of whether voting for Obama would actually mean voting for the lesser evil: "The neat thing about the lesser evil argument is that, like the argument about whether or not God exists, there is no way to design an experiment to prove it." Noam Chomsky says that of course you should vote for the lesser evil - you get less evil! But which is which? The Republicans sound more evil, but I think that's only on the surface. When you get down to cases, the Republicans know they are trying to screw you and just plain doing it because they can, but the Dems know they are screwing you because you let them. And maybe Eugene Debs was right.

Trust The Economist to come up with the rubbishy claim that Americans are more euphemistic about asking where the toilet is than Brits are. Yes, we're so radically different - in America it's "men's room" and in England it's "the gents". (And then there's that line in A Hard Day's Night....)

Astronomy, anyone?

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Trailer #1

Google is singing to me today.

Merry Christmas from Galactic Central.

Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime. ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sdec11.htm#1112201650

It's funny, but I found myself unable to have a political reaction to Christopher Hitchens' death. Instead, I wondered - maybe even worried, a little - about how Roz Kaveney was taking it. Because, you see, Roz had more than a passing relationship with Hitchens, and she probably knows more about him than almost anyone. So I sent her an IM and said I found myself wondering how she was reacting to the news about Chris Hitchens, and she said she was wondering, too. She said she would certainly write a poem, and I said I expected as much, and I see it's started here, and includes a little something you may not have known about him that may have had more impact than you'd thought on how he turned away from the light. And more here, a little more bitter, a la Kipling. And then the drinking song.

I want you to understand why I have always hesitated to call for "Medicare for all" as an alternative to single-payer. Yes, I said alternative to single-payer. It's not single-payer. It's a whole lot more efficient than the commercial system, but it's still not good enough. Single-payer does not involve co-pays. The NHS does not involve co-pays. Here in England, my out-of-pocket for seeing a specialist or being hospitalized is exactly the same as for seeing my GP or, for that matter, not seeing him: Nothing. My NHS-related taxes, which are no higher than those paid by Americans to support the US medical system, have covered my physician care, and no one charges me separately for that coverage and no one asks for more money when I want to actually get the care. I never have to weigh seeing a doctor, seeing a specialist, or being hospitalized when I need to against how much money I have or what other bills I need to pay. It's already paid for. And that means that if I'm ill and can't work for several weeks, like Diane has, I don't find myself suddenly having to put all my money into paying off medical bills instead of all of the other things I need to live. And yes, this isn't the best time of year to be asking for your help, but I really hope you will throw some money to Diane, because (like all of us), she doesn't deserve what will happen if you don't, and anyway, we need her blogging, not living out of a cardboard box.

Patricia J. Williams: "You know these are interesting times when Glenn Beck, Dianne Feinstein, Rand Paul and the ACLU all stand on the same side of an issue. [...] For noncitizens, such detention would be mandatory. And while news agencies from Reuters to the Huffington Post have recently reported that American citizens would be 'exempt' from this requirement, the truth is more complicated. Military detention would still be the default, even for citizens, but at the discretion of the president, it could be waived in favor of handing over the case to domestic law enforcement. Under this law, if the Defense Department thinks you're a terrorist, there would be no presumption of innocence; you would be presumed a detainee of the military unless the executive decides otherwise. Without such a waiver, again, even if you're a citizen, you will never hear words like 'alleged' or 'suspected.' You will be an 'unprivileged enemy belligerent,' with limited rights to appeal that status, no rights to due process, or to a jury, or to a speedy trial guided by the rules of evidence."

Apparently, it will be all my fault if somehow all those people who would otherwise have voted for Obama suddenly notice that everything is turning to crap and Obama is no helpless victim of circumstance - and they stay home on election day (Also, another great quote from Econned, and more good links.)

Sam Seder talked to Jason Benlevi about who controls our digital life, and the latest Occupy news, and a lot of other things, on Monday's Majority Report. Tuesday's show features an interview with Jeff Clements about corporate personhood and the Powell memo.

"An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress: If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties' right and ability to communicate and express themselves online."

"Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works."

"Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works."

"Occupying Jesus and His Church: "It is an inconvenient truth for mainstream and right-wing Christians that Jesus was crucified for taking his protest against income inequality to the power center of Jerusalem, where he challenged how money had perverted religious principles. Now, that tension is returning with the Occupy protests..."

2011: The War on Contraception - Don't say we didn't warn you.

Note to libertoonians: Monopoly and duopoly capitalism are not free market capitalism, they are the opposite.

Commenter Jawbone complains that he can't let it snow. Apparently, a few weeks ago, I couldn't have, either. I've noticed more and more of this problem that things keep happening that make even the simple pages load slowly, that you seem to be constantly having to update your browser to make stuff work. There are even some things that will only work on one specific browser. Fortunately, I finally got that total makeover I've been needing for so long, so I was able to let it snow, and still manage to resist the continual nudging from Google to use their browser. (At least now I don't have them giving me screwy-looking pages and then telling me I need to turn off a setting I don't even have.)

Neil Gaiman says: "Took me 3 years of scribbling & rewrites to make 45 minutes of Dr. Who, summed up in 2:29 by a smart girl with a ukulele." Her name is Allegra Rosenberg (and Anna says she's obviously Willow's sister, although she kinda reminds me of Dawn). ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sdec11.htm#1112182150

Me and Susie is gonna be doing the last Virtually Speaking Sundays of the year tonight at 9:00 PM Eastern. You can listen live or later at the link. (The rest of this week's Virtually Speaking schedule is here)

Between the DEA just stealing your money and your car and your house and the 2012 NNDA, I don't see how the Third Amendment even matters anymore when they can just decide you're either a drug dealer or a terrorist and take everything anyway. Unsurprisingly, Obama's vow to veto NNDA was a signal that he would sign it. The negative response - even from Obama's supporters - has been sufficiently strong that the White House is now pushing back by, as usual, spreading myths about what the bill actually does and doesn't do. They're lying.

On the other hand, there is Jamie Dimon, who fits all the definitions, and Marcy Wheeler has outlined how he can be indefinitely detained. Anybody that rich probably has a coke stash, too, so everything he's got would be up for grabs. (via)

Does a week ever go by without at least two atrocities from Obama? Now those "health insurance" policies you're forced to buy are worth even less than they already were.

Sam Seder interviewed Chris Cobb about Wall Street's role in the slave trade, and Jeff Smith about his arrest at the Occupation, onThe Majority Report Thursday.

Yes, most of the poor people in America are still white, but that's not what they want you to hear.
Yes, New Labour and Third Way Democrats are operating out of the same playbook.

I guess the USDA now works for Monsanto, too.

For those who were horrified by the Crazy Man at PayPal episode, I meant to post a link to the resolution, but I got distracted by the fact that I still can't make things work like I want them to.

I wish more people understood that Israel has deliberately supported what they regard as extreme Palestinian groups in the hope that such groups would make peace agreements impossible. Peace would interfere with what they have now, which is a license to steal.

CMike was kind enough to provide links in comments to this transcript of an interview with David Graeber which might be easier for some people to follow, and this comment by David Graeber which tells you what hippies used to talk about. (I think it's important that Graeber is one of the few people who has talked explicitly about the fact that we eliminated laws against usury, and how that wrenched us from the path of civilization. I've talked about this from time to time but no one's ever picked it up. I guess this is what Obama's chums really mean when they talk about "the new rules".)

Paying the Christmas layaway tabs of strangers actually seems like a really nice Christmas present.

I don't get it - why aren't these "nudes" nude? The monochrome still lifes are as advertised, though, and the art dolls are art dolls.

Google lets it snow. ]]> http://sideshow.me.uk/sdec11.htm#1112151623 Earlier this week, Sam Seder did a fascinating interview with David Graeber, one of the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street, about the movement and his book Debt: the First 5,000 Years, on The Majority Report. (And Google tells me I can hear more interviews with Graeber on this subject from NPR and C-SPAN.)

A judge thinks you have to write for a "real" newspaper to be a legitimate journalist entitled to the protection of your sources. Discussion of this subject at The Newspaper of Record suggests otherwise: "The plain fact is, anyone who got their information on the case from David Carr's writing at the New York Times would be substantially less informed than those who read Curtis Cartier's piece at the Seattle Weekly blog. That is why we need bloggers, lots of them, in lots of places. And we need to find a place for their journalism - yes, David Carr, journalism - within the legal system. Because even the Times cannot cover all the news that's fit to print."

People like to blame the voters for electing creeps and nitwits - it's all our fault. But is it? Did American Workers "Get What They Deserved?" No. (Also: Pictures of income disparity.)

Atrios is quite right about the reason DoleRomneyObamacare existed and the result of having a Democrat pass it, but I find it difficult to accept that Obama, who can't be completely stupid, wasn't aware that nothing he did would make Republicans love him. In fact, it seems to me that Obama, no less than the Republicans, insisted on passing the Allegedly Affordable Care Act for exactly the same reasons Atrios brings up - to make sure that nothing better could be passed. The thing is, I don't think Obama actually cares whether Republicans (or most Democrats) love him. He identifies with a different constituency who he regards as more legitimate than the rest of us. (Also, what he said. The best advice for avoiding rape is to mace any guy who gets within three feet of you. If you do this consistently, you are much less likely to get raped. Alternatively, you can never leave your home, and make sure there is at least a 200 lb. deadfall between you and the rest of the world. Even these suggestions do not guarantee that you won't get raped anyway, but they are no more crazy than the idea that there is some presentable way to dress that will keep you from getting raped without also being so disgusting that no one will want to come within a hundred yards of you.)

"SPECIAL REPORT: Forensic Analysis Finds Venango County, PA, E-Voting System 'Remotely Accessed' on 'Multiple Occasions' by Unknown Computer."

"Ron Paul: Obama pushing 'martial law,' Holder should be 'fired'."

Kunstler seems to be missing the fact that Obama's message ever since he was elected is that we are not going back to having a healthy economy, let alone a turbo-charged one. We have to compete with slave labor, remember? Unlike David Cameron, he doesn't admit openly that he is destroying his nation's way of life, but he's been telling us over and over that there is no going back to a better one.

An amusing little comic

How Charles Platt designed News Worlds

A cute but surprising visitor

Lately whenever I get a new laptop, I have to reset something to make the touchpad stop launching my cursor all over the screen in mid-sentence. Only I can't figure out what to reset on this one. Anyone remember? I have to use the touchpad because I really don't have room to use a mouse, but it's making me kinda crazy. ]]>