No matter how this election turns out, the endgame has already begun: America is becoming more multicultural, more gay-friendly and more feminist every day. But as every hunter knows, a wounded or cornered quarry is the most dangerous. Even as the white, patriarchal, Christian hegemony declines, its backlash politics become more vicious.
To give a comparative sense for the historic scale of the swindle, it is worth noting that the entire inflation-adjusted cost of World War II was $3.6 trillion.(11)Original article at Truthout; link is to AlterNet via skippy.
How did this happen?
In the 1980s, US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher set out to reconfigure and liberate Western capitalism by shrinking government's role in the economy based on the neoliberal concept that markets are "self-regulating" and would produce unprecedented societal wealth if deregulated. Using the ideas of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek of the famed Austrian School as macro-economic underpinning, Reagan and Thatcher sought to limit or eliminate government regulation that might inhibit the actions and movement of capital.
From the start of this Reagan-Thatcher revolution, the "trickle down" theory of wealth was accompanied by promises of a smaller, less intrusive state, except for a strong military. Fast forward through 30-plus years of nearly uninterrupted neoliberal policymaking - Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were deregulating neoliberal champions - and not only do we have the most expensive, heavily militarized, war-prone, increasingly inequitable and intrusive state in US (and British) history, it is also the most indebted.
Neoliberalism is failing on its own terms, yet it continues to define US politics due to its appeal among a sizable and particularly fervent segment of the electorate.
It's quite funny, in an entirely horrific way. The State has so perfected its media domination -- and the media have so willingly neutered themselves -- that explicit censorship has been rendered irrelevant and completely unnecessary. That's very useful from the State's perspective: the State can guarantee that coverage will be exactly what it wants, while preserving the mirage of an active, free-ranging press, dedicated to ferreting out the truth. My goodness, whatever would we do without a free press? That's exactly what we're finding out.(Also, if you can spare some, he needs donations.)
[...] I must emphasize -- and here, I must stop to note that I am forever emphasizing the actual nature of the subject of these articles, for it is precisely the bloody truth of the subject that these articles are constantly submerging, disguising, and burying in misdirection. And bloody is the goddamned operative word.
The bloody fucking subject of these articles -- and the bloody fucking task to which Brennan devotes his goddamned miserable life -- is the murder of innocent human beings. To the extent Brennan and his fellow monsters rely on information at all, they rely on "intelligence" gathered across numerous agencies. But, and here I shock the children and doubtless many adults as well, "intelligence" is almost always wrong. [...]
And given the numerous, repeated errors of intelligence that have occurred just in the last decade, Brennan and his wretched associates know that to the extent they rely on intelligence, they are most likely relying on information that is wrong. So Brennan regularly, routinely, systematically orders the death of human beings on the basis of information that he knows is most likely to be wrong.
He orders the murders anyway. And the government carries them out. Thus, the government regularly, routinely, systematically orders the death of innocent human beings.
We can plainly see a massive, nationwide concerted effort to steal votes from the president in a multitude of ways. Tagg Romney and family buying up dysfunctional, easily-hacked voting machines in five, perhaps six states. At least 25 racist and restrictive Voter ID laws being enacted in 19 states. SAC and the electoral fraud scandal in Florida, which led to the "firing" of SAC's Nathan Sproul, another infamous right wing operative tied to yet unprosecuted over electoral fraud. An operative in Virginia, one hired by Sproul, who was recently arrested for throwing in a Dumpster Democratic registration forms. Purge lists ordered by Florida Governor Rick Scott targeting minorities. Republican operatives training challengers to intimidate minority voters and to spread disinformation. The list stretches longer than the rap sheet that most Republicans ought to have on public record.Your delicate and shell-like ears may find themselves closing on some of JP's language.)
[Catherine] Engelbrecht has received especially valuable counsel from one member of the group: Hans von Spakovsky. A Republican lawyer who served in the Bush Administration, he is now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. “Hans is very, very helpful,” Engelbrecht said. “He’s one of the senior advisers on our advisory council.” Von Spakovsky, who frequently appears on Fox News, is the co-author, with the columnist John Fund, of the recent book “Who’s Counting?,” which argues that America is facing an electoral-security crisis. “Election fraud, whether it’s phony voter registrations, illegal absentee ballots, vote-buying, shady recounts, or old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing, can be found in every part of the United States,” they write. The book connects these modern threats with sordid episodes from the American past: crooked inner-city machines, corrupt black bosses in the Deep South. Von Spakovsky and Fund conclude that electoral fraud is a “spreading” danger, and declare that True the Vote serves “an obvious need.”Er, "corrupt black bosses in the Deep South"? Have I missed something? Vote-buying has been on the wane even in Chicago for a long time now. The only people I see trying to stuff ballot-boxes...are Republicans.
The deadline cometh: Monday is the last day to register to vote for the November election - you can do it online, in person or through the mail, but the application has to be in election officials' hands by midnight.
To register, visit RegisterToVote.ca.gov, or visit your local post office, library or county registrar's office to get a paper application.
If you're like 544,000 of your fellow Californians, you'll go the online route: That's the number of people who have used the new, web-based system since it went public Sept. 19.
Paul Mitchell, vice president of the voter information firm Redistricting Partners, said the online system could result in a record 18 million registered voters in California by election day.
If you vote for Obama or Romney, that is certainly your right -- although you will forever forfeit the right to speak of "rights" at all. If a human being can be murdered for any reason, or for no reason at all, merely on the arbitrary order of someone who claims the power to issue such orders, she has no rights at all. You thus sanction the destruction of all rights, of all human beings -- including yours. The victim may be Mrs. Hamilton, or Joanna -- or you.Politicians, as we know, never give up power.
Not everyone agrees. Opinion pollsters say defense often tops the list of areas where the public would like to see cuts, while fatigue over the last decade's wars makes new overseas commitments hard to sell.[ETA: via Obsidian Wings]
Am I the only one that’s had about enough of this war on democracy? The “True the Vote” nonsense and other accusations of voter fraud by the right wing (incidentally, all of the recent fraud scandals are by the right wing) are just excuses to lock minorities and others out of the election because it is well-known that they prefer to vote democratic (with, notably, their best interests).
Interfering with that in any way is un-American, to say the least. We are a country that prides ourselves on the democratic process and this has no place in it.
On a September episode of her eponymous MSNBC show, Melissa Harris-Perry had on “business and finance expert” Monica Mehta as one of her guests. Mehta was spouting a lot of right-wing, pro-business, anti-welfare talking points, which Harris-Perry clearly took issue with. The discussion came to a head when Mehta referenced the risks taken by business owners. “What is riskier than living poor in America?” said Harris-Perry, raising her voice. “Seriously, what in the world is riskier than being a poor person in America? I live in a neighborhood where people are shot on my street corner. I live in a neighborhood where people have to figure out how to get their kid into school because maybe it'll be a good school and maybe it won’t. I am sick of the idea that being wealthy is risky. No! There is a huge safety net that whenever you fail will catch you and catch you and catch you. Being poor is what is risky. We have to create a safety net for poor people. And when we won’t, because they happen to look different from us, it is the pervasive ugliness! We cannot do that!"
Moreover, tyranny and violence came out in force, rights to free assembly and speech had long disappeared and no one had been there to notice. Worse still, more openly sold those rights for nothing more than the promise of security, with only those of intellect, fewer each day it seems, aware that the enemy was and is…us.
It would undoubtedly shock Geller and her Islamophobic buddies to know that Muslims have been in America for so long they could almost have formed a welcoming committee to the Daughters of the Revolution.Lynn Parramore at Naked Capitalism. There's more. I believe I mentioned that the Syrian community of lower Manhattan predated the Civil War.
Yes, please go. Go now. Don't wait until November. You are a bloated leech on the hard work of the middle class, the real engine of our economy, and the very people whom you deride as living a worry-free existence thanks to your sacrifice. This country would be better off without you. Ta-ta. Buh-bye.
Almost every moral pillar of our contemporary societies – from the discipline of economics, to ideas that dominate about what constitutes good statesmanship – militates against the formation of such a new mythology. And, as psychopathology teaches us well, people are quite stubborn in their giving up of their mythologies, despite their possibly high degree of dysfunction. But given that the stakes are rather high and humans are a fairly adaptive species, we may surprise ourselves yet.The daily howler has a posting on Jim Lehrer, moderator of last week's debate. It is not flattering.
Besides, as some of the earliest Christians showed, the command to submit to government is conditioned upon being able to do so without violating any higher moral principles, such as loving our neighbor and sharing the gospel. Paul may have told the early Christians to submit to Rome, but he didn't tell them to get excited about the armies spreading Roman values on the frontier.Also, you might want to stop eating rice:
It was no secret that arsenic was going into farms and fields where our food is grown, and yet the question of where the arsenic went was mostly ignored. The FDA recently released its own tests, confirming Consumers’ Union’s findings. As their data shows, even organic rice contains arsenic. (Organic farmers cannot use arsenical pesticides, but they can use manure from chickens fed roxarsone and other arsenical drugs.)
So what is the coded message here? Yeah, we’re gonna lose some species, but they are so obscure most scientists don’t recognize them. The fact that acidification can and likely will make the ocean hostile to many forms of life, either directly or second hand, by diminishing their habitat or food supply, is acknowledged in “many will not adapt to new oceanic conditions,” a remarkably bloodless formulation.
Yet unlike other post-Enlightenment political philosophies – both the capitalism of Adam Smith or the communism of Karl Marx – Mill saw growth as more than material. Borrowing from its classical antecedent – the Ancient Greeks spoke of humanity’s goal aseudaimonia, or flourishing – modern society is built on the ideal of improvement, development, growth and expansion, but it needn’t be so mono-dimensional. Indeed, Aristotle considered an essential pillar of eudaimonia, or one of the four cardinal virtues, to be moderation.
[Michigan secretary of state Ruth] Johnson keeps claiming that there are thousands of noncitizens on the Michigan voting rolls, but hasn’t provided actual evidence to back that up. Her claims that illegal votes have been cast in previous elections are contradicted by her own Bureau of Elections. The “need” for that citizenship checkbox is a fabrication, which makes the motives for it suspect. [Emphasis added.]Via Mercury Rising.
Some observers will want to focus on Obama’s record. Here’s what we found on that score (using, as noted, the most recent available numbers for Obama). Based on all three of our measures, Obama’s manufacturing jobs record is currently better than eight of the nine Republican presidential terms. President Ronald Reagan’s second term does slightly better than Obama’s incomplete first term, but the numbers are close enough that this may change once we have all the numbers. An interesting question is what Obama’s manufacturing jobs record might have been had he not intervened to save General Motors and Chrysler.
[...] Previous estimates had summer ice disappearing by 2050. “But governments have not responded to the change with any greater urgency about limiting greenhouse emissions,” Gillis writes. “To the contrary, their main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including drilling for more oil” – that is, to accelerate the catastrophe. This reaction demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children and grandchildren for short-term gain. Or, perhaps, an equally remarkable willingness to shut our eyes so as not to see the impending peril. That’s hardly all. A new study from the Climate Vulnerability Monitor has found that “climate change caused by global warming is slowing down world economic output by 1.6 percent a year and will lead to a doubling of costs in the next two decades.” The study was widely reported elsewhere but Americans have been spared the disturbing news. The official Democratic and Republican platforms on climate matters are reviewed in Science magazine’s Sept. 14 issue. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, both parties demand that we make the problem worse. [...]
I'm glad to see a video like this. I sure hope Obama was angry, and I hope he's still angry. If you're not angry about racial injustice, I have trouble trusting you. If you're not angry, I'm not sure how to relate to you. I understand that many of us have not had the experiences necessary to open our eyes. I can respect that. But these men take it upon themselves to explain the truth to millions of people. They have audiences of millions, and as such their responsibility is heavy. Yet all they know to do is demand that everyone see the world exactly as they do. These men are not necessarily bad, nor are they necessarily stupid, but they have to be one or the other.The conservative pundits keep promising the Bogeyman, but all they seem to produce is mouse corpses.
Withholding the benefit is a violation of the employee’s religious liberty and since the benefit is part of a compensation package, trying to control how the employee spends it on religious grounds is really no different than telling the employee she can’t spend her money on birth control because you sign her paychecks.
[...]
Because this is about female sexuality and there’s all these sex-phobic and misogynist arguments being thrown around, the basic issue has gotten somewhat obscured, which is that your boss is not actually your master. Also, your compensation is not your allowance, and they don’t get to dock your pay because they think you’re being naughty on your own time. Conservatives would generally like to give employers more control over their employees, so anyone who supports the plantiffs in these lawsuits because they’re pissed that women are having sex without including them is being an utter fool, as well as an asshole. If the door is opened to allowing employers to control how you use your compensation after you’ve earned it, god only knows what other kinds of restrictions on how you spend your money they’re going to start angling for.
It is, of course, possible that pollsters are all collaborating in an effort to re-elect Barack Obama, just as it is possible that pollsters are all members of the Order of the Knights Templar who are conspiring to effect the return of the Emperor Barbarossa and reinstate the Holy Roman Empire.It's actually calling for less fanaticism when citing polls.
Gee, it's almost as if staking out the position that women should have no control over their reproduction, and defending that position with narratives like "women are lying bitchez about rape, anyway," as if women are a dispensable voting bloc and not 52% of the population, is a bad idea. Huh. Who knew.
The racial dimension of the 2012 clash over weekend voting burst into the open last month when one of Ohio's most powerful Republicans, Franklin County GOP Chairman Doug Preisse, told the Columbus Dispatch, "We shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African American — voter-turnout machine."From the second (Slate):
Some Democrats see the developments in Ohio as part of a national drive by Obama's opponents to minimize turnout of his supporters, one that includes efforts elsewhere to impose new voter ID rules.
"Too much of this is going on for this not to be a coordinated effort," said Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Democratic Party in the tea party stronghold of southwestern Ohio.
The Rev. Rousseau A. O'Neal, one of a group of black ministers from Cincinnati who provided buses to take African Americans to the polls in 2008 and plan to do so again in November, described the tea party project and the curtailment of weekend voting as "bigotry of the highest order."
"Who ever thought we'd be fighting for the right to vote in 2012?" he asked.
The tea party groups, scattered around the state, have joined forces under the banner of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project. It is an offshoot of True the Vote, a Texas organization that has recruited volunteers nationwide to challenge voter rosters and work as poll watchers.
[...]
In Ohio, election records show, one of the project's top priorities has been to remove college students from the voter rolls for failure to specify dorm room numbers. (As a group, college students are strongly in Obama's camp.)
Voters challenged include 284 students at the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, 110 at Oberlin College, 88 at College of Wooster, 38 at Kent State — and dozens more from the University of Cincinnati, Miami University, Lake Erie College, Walsh University, Hiram College, John Carroll University and Telshe Yeshiva, a rabbinical college near Cleveland.
So far, every county election board that has reviewed the dorm challenges found them invalid.
At issue are potentially thousands of Ohio ballots that the state will not count solely because of poll worker error. Here’s the problem: A number of the state’s polling places, especially in cities, cover more than one voting precinct, and in order to cast a valid vote, a voter has to be given the correct precinct ballot. Poll workers, however, often hand voters the wrong precinct ballot mistakenly. In earlier litigation involving a disputed 2010 juvenile judge race in Hamilton County, Ohio, a poll worker testified to sending a voter whose address started with the numbers “798” to vote in the precinct for voters with odd-numbered addresses because the poll worker believed “798” was an odd number. This “right church, wrong pew” problem with precinct ballots was a big problem in 2008, when over 14,000 such ballots were cast.Ohio, remember, is a swing state; there was some dispute about the results in 2004.
Ohio law says wrong precinct ballots cannot be counted, even for the races for which a person is eligible to vote (including president), and the Ohio Supreme Court confirmed this point in 2011, in the dispute over the juvenile judge race. Astonishingly, under Ohio law a voter can be disenfranchised not through some nefarious plan but through the simple incompetence of poll workers.
In the SEIU case, voters are arguing that the failure to count wrong precinct ballots caused by poll worker error violates the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process. A federal district court in Ohio agreed, and issued a preliminary injunction requiring the state to count these ballots (and some other provisional ballots as well). Ohio has appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit—that’s the hearing today.
The thing I was asked to be an expert about — and I wasn't, which was one reason I said no — was about executive compensation. A senior exec was hired away from another firm. He did almost nothing at the new firm — and what he did do was by his own admission, wrong. They fired him and he left with a $20 million Golden Parachute. (I told them I could make bad decisions for them for less than half that salary.) The suit was about that he thought he deserved more.
So to recap: the President a) refuses to acknowledge that insurance-paid contraception is actually abortion; b) refuses to admit that for-profit operations which receive federal funds but are owned by a particular cult are, in fact, churches, because 1) Karl Rove and 2) the Constitution clearly say so. And that c) this qualifies as "unprecedented", despite the fact that the identical thing has occurred in American history, and occurs today with some of those same institutions under state law, and has actually been topped, unquestionably, by other restrictions on religious expression (notably the anti-Mormon laws that preceded Utah statehood).
