Housekeeping

As previously announced, any blog in which nothing has been posted for a year or more has been moved to the Archived Blogses blogroll.

Tertium Squid, which was, if I remember correctly, the successor to Real Live Preacher, seems to be gone.  Nope.  Restored to Time Insensitive.

I should probably promote some blog to the Blog 'n' Roll, but I just can't decide.

Oh well.  This is the best time of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway).                                  

Real Things in the World

• In memoriam:  Rev. Andrew Greeley, priest and writer.
• Via Mercury Rising:  "Media fact-checking organization rates Republicans as less trustworthy than Democrats."  George Mason University's Center for Media and Public Affairs studied PolitiFact.com-rated statements made by members of both political parties over a one-third year period.  (And apparently the untrue statements are sorted into "false" and "pants on fire.")  It is not that Democrats don't lie; they lie considerably less than Republicans, though.  Paging Joe Isuzu...
• Slippery legal case settled.
• ETA:  The Slacktivist expands on Southern Beale's post on Rep. Fincher of Tennessee with more Gospel.  Both essays are things of beauty.

The Dark Side (of the Force, of course)

Melissa McEwan, Shakesville, on the Republican Party and its descent into, well, fascism:

America's great tradition of conferring undeserved privilege on you won't fail. Not on our watch.

That has been the sacred covenant between the Republican Party and its straight, white, patriarchal, Christian supremacist base for a generation: Vote for us, and we'll protect you.

And so they voted. And, in the process, they gave away their standard of living, their children's education, their jobs, their civil liberties, their national security, their environment, and their economy—all in exchange for the gossamer promise of a return to a time that never happened in a country that never really existed.

Read the rest.  It's good.

In Memoriam

Jack Vance, writer.

"Ninth Time -- That Business on Cato Neimoidia Doesn't Count"

• "Why do police guys beat on peace guys?"  -- "The Pause of Mr. Claus," Arlo Guthrie
  
  The Boston Police Department believed peace activists were more dangerous than the Tsarnaev brothers turned out to be.  OK, that's a very compressed summary.  Let's open it out a little:

  In March 2010, the BPD finally responded to records inquiries made by the ACLU for info on the BRIC. Rather than turn over all requested documents, though, police attorneys only produced papers outlining the center’s procedural guidelines and policies, and neglected to hand over records that revealed specific targets of surveillance. So in August 2011, the ACLU joined 10 groups and federations—Veterans for Peace, the Boston Stop the Wars Coalition, and others—in suing the BPD, and its commissioner Davis.
  
  Under increased legal pressure, 14 months later the department released embarrassing documents showing that the BRIC had indeed been spying on peace activists since at least 2008.
  
  As assumed, they were also keeping records of their non-criminal behavior.

  and

  By that time, the U.S. government had twice been warned by the Russian government that Tamerlan had radical ties. He was also on at least three watch lists: the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) which is compiled by the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database, and a compendium amassed by the DHS’s Customs and Border Protection bureau. For what it’s worth, it also appears that Tamerlan had an Amazon wish list that included several books on how to manufacture fake IDs. Considering that, and his noted anti-peace outbursts at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Cambridge, and
  
  it’s almost like he was trying to get caught.
  
  Meanwhile, in Boston, the BRIC spent much of September 2011 monitoring Occupy protesters in Dewey Square, as well as anti-foreclosure activists and other peaceful crusaders. As such, the question now being asked of the BPD and Commissioner Davis—by the ACLU, by Congress, by an increasing number of reporters—is if police intelligence could have, should have netted Tsarnaev.

  Because, y'know, peace activists are a clear and present danger.  Not.  I have never really understood the animosity toward people who oppose war.  War is not really a good thing; it should be a very last resort, rare thing (really, don't talk to me about Iraq).
• Destroying the New York Public Library system (Nathan Tankus at naked capitalism reports):

  When the public sector divests itself of physical space en masse, the ability for it to regain control is substantially decreased. If an upswing in municipal finances occurs in the future, the enormous amounts of money it takes to purchase and develop real estate (especially in New York) for public use makes rolling back any sell-offs nearly impossible. Additionally, harming the quality of research libraries in New York has a substantial impact on the regional economy since researchers from all over the world come here to access them.
  
  On a more personal note, the New York Public Library has been indispensable for my research (including research I’ve done for this site). Public libraries are essentially the only organization that provide access to journals (both digital and physical) for those without an academic affiliation. Even for those with Academic affiliations, they have a fantastic collection of books and will even digitize selected pages and send them to you at no cost. Destroying public libraries and schools is not only a great boon to the FIRE sector, it also greatly harms [our] ability to resist and articulately criticize dominant narratives and conventional wisdom. As Orwell famously wrote in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”.

  .

The Good Stuff

• Via skippy and a year late:  What I've suspected for many years is true -- stupidity and prejudice correlate.

  In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology.
  
  A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status.

• Paid holidays, by country.  At Mills River Progressive.
• People who think they're saving a few million by postponing maintenance but end up having to spend many millions for repairs are, let's be blunt, not your friends.
• The so-called Family Policy Institute throws whoppers about a rape case in Washington state.  
• Lance Mannion administers the Vulcan mind-meld to a New York Times editorial writer about something that writer should have remembered.
• But then, "the NYTimes worships state power" (thank you, Arthur Silber).  (You might also want to read "You Say You Want a Peaceful Revolution," same author, if you want a peaceful revolution.  You won't like the other kind, you know.)

A Little Linky Love

From Welcome Back to Pottersville, klepto-bankers and wish-fulfillment.  (Yes, I see that it employs a stereotype.  Yes, I'd prefer monetary restitution plus fines of $2 million per family.  I'm not going to get that.)

Pol (No Pot)

Via digby, James Fallows' portrait of Jerry Brown the politician.

America’s dynamism and ingenuity have kept it ahead of its public-institution paralysis, so far. The same is true, barely, for California. “The idea that people are really going to move their companies to Nevada because of taxes is nonsense,” Paul Saffo, a longtime technology analyst based in Northern California, told me. “Silicon Valley has always been a high-cost place to operate and, like the state, has always been in danger of drowning in the products of its own success.” Jerry Brown told me about a Look magazine cover story from the mid-1960s, which after the Watts riots in Los Angeles and Free Speech Movement upheaval at Berkeley declared California a “failed state.” Since that time Look magazine has disappeared, California’s population has doubled, and its economy has grown larger than those of Brazil and Spain.

Still, California’s challenge is America’s: how to manage public business competently enough—collecting taxes, covering costs, educating children, fostering research, protecting the environment, maintaining order—to allow the creative carnival of its private activities to go on.

Encouraging. Maybe.

Progresssive activism, popping up all over.

We began the week prepared to focus our attention on the amazing teacher, student and community actions that were occurring in defense of schools. In Philadelphia, there was a giant walk-out of schools last Friday as students demanded their schools remain open and be adequately funded. The photos of young people fighting for the basic necessity of education were an inspiration.

That was followed by three days of protests in Chicago that were equally inspiring, students organized and communities came together to fight for education. Though corporate-mayor Rahm Emanuel’s carefully selected board voted to close 50 elementary schools and one high school (while the city funds the building of a new basketball stadium), the Chicago activists say they are not done. They are just getting started. It is that kind of persistence that wins transformation. These school battles are part of a national plan to replace community schools with corporatized charter schools. The battles of Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities are all of our battles.

There's more at the link.

In Memoriam

Ray Manzarek, the Doors.

(Skippy has video.)

Today in "Make Ugly"

• Echidne of the Snakes points to a useful article in the New Yorker about, yes, the Koch brothers and their relationship to PBS, and why this is a problem.  Echidne goes further:

  That we could get the Soviet-style Pravda and Izvestia not because of the government but because of the billionaires is something that either doesn't occur to those supporters or something they don't think matters in their own lives.
  
  But accurate information matters. It matters in deciding whether a country should go to war, it matters in how many victims cigarette industry manages to produce, it matters in deciding whether to import products from China or from India or from Pakistan or from some other country. Yet those with power and money have certain incentives not to give the rest of us accurate information.

• Via AlterNet:
• Robert Reich on larcenous corporations and xenophobia;
• "Paper terrorism;"
• The right wing has always been racist.
• Why safety is not a corporate concern.  Thanks; will not buy a table saw.
• Why I was a Mets fan back in the day; Faith and Fear in Flushing.

Goodish News

Possible medical use for marijuana--the treatment of Crohn's Disease.  The study was published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology (Pub Med link to abstract).  Full article available for purchase here after log-in/registration.

The joints were standardized.  Also, it was a small group and short term; let's see what happens with greater numbers over more time.

Traveling Notes

This year is on notice.

• Motown is 50.  (Brilliant at Breakfast)
• Comrade Misfit reports that apparently those leaked White House emails on Benghazi were misquoted:

  The White House released the real emails late Wednesday. Here's what we found when we compared them to the quotes that had been provided by Republicans.
  
  One email was written by deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.
  
  White House Benghazi email release prompts GOP to demand more
  WH releases emails showing changes to Benghazi talking points
  Complete Coverage: U.S. Consulate attack in Benghazi
  
  On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: "We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don't want to undermine the FBI investigation."
  
  But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department.
  
  It read: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation."

  Video (which continues) and transcript at link.
• We might be in for strong solar eruptions.  (Mills River Progressive)
• Phoenix Woman (Mercury Rising) on someone who is not rejoicing that Minnesota is the twelfth state to permit same-sex marriage.  ("Hissy fit" is about right.)
• Bustednuckles spotlights an interesting link to a story in the Long Island Press averring that the military has given itself power to intervene in civil disturbances.  A taste:

  For Hedges and the other plaintiffs, including Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, the government’s ever-expanding authority over civilian affairs has a “chilling effect” on First Amendment activities such as free speech and the right to assemble. First District Court Judge Katherine Forrest agreed with the plaintiffs and handed Hedges et al a resounding victory prompting the Department of Justice to immediately file an injunction and an appeal. The appellate court is expected to rule on the matter within the next few months.
  
  Another of the plaintiffs in the Hedges suit is Alexa O’Brien, a journalist and organizer who joined the lawsuit after she discovered a Wikileaks cable showing government officials attempting to link her efforts to terrorist activities. For activists such as O’Brien, the new DoD regulatory change is frightening because it creates, “an environment of fear when people cannot associate with one another.” Like Afran and Freedman, she too calls the move, “another grab for power under the rubric of the war on terror, to the detriment of citizens.”
  
  “This is a complete erosion of the rule of law,” says O’Brien. Knowing these sweeping powers were granted under a rule change and not by Congress is even more harrowing to activists. “That anything can be made legal,” says O’Brien, “is fundamentally antithetical to good governance.”
  
  As far as what might qualify as a civil disturbance, Afran notes, “In the Sixties all of the Vietnam protests would meet this description. We saw Kent State. This would legalize Kent State.”
  
  But the focus on the DoD regulatory change obscures the creeping militarization that has already occurred in police departments across the nation. Even prior to the NDAA lawsuit, journalist Chris Hedges was critical of domestic law enforcement agencies saying, “The widening use of militarized police units effectively nullifies the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.”
  
  This de facto nullification isn’t lost on the DoD.

  I'm taking it with a grain (or two) of salt for the moment. Although the possibility of a shift of power has been mentioned by Arthur Silber. Recently, even.

More Skimble-Skamble

Via Shakesville, Digby's take on "the Villagers will not be ignored."

Which is to say, they have a pot and they think they have a rabbit.  (I think the actual subject may be Benghazi, the AP, and the IRS flap an article at Politico crowing about suggesting that the President needs to get decisive about the scandalous activity in his administration.  I could be wrong.)

Apparently Digby shut off comments a while back; I hadn't noticed.

At the Daily Howler, there are four articles on Benghazi and journalism:

• What actually happened?
• "Congressional fact-finding trip"
• May not have read the assignment
• Fox "News"

Comrade Misfit has a tart response to the story of warrantlessly-searched Associated Press phone records.

All this makes me want to curl up and sleep.

Nibbled to Death by Ducks

• Centrist hogwash.

  Because unless someone can point to actual Democrats who have established an actual, y'know, record of inventing scandals by rubbing two copies of "The Socialist Worker's Daily" together...and then inflating them With Very Big Headlines wall-to-wall for weeks on end in every Liberal media outlet in America...and then point to actual cases where those artificial scandals have been transmogrified into actual Democratic congressional witch-hunts that promise to go on for months...then it seems to me that Mr. Greenwald is telling a Very Big Lie here.

• And as long as Benghazi is mentioned (Benghazi?  Wasn't he in Run For Your Life * back in the '60s?), quoted by supergee on Dreamwidth, a sentence from Public Policy Polling:

  One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal in American history is that 39% of them don't actually know where it is. 10% think it's in Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess.

  Yes, the math is off. Just a little.
  
• The student loan problem, as analyzed by pecunium.

  University endowments and teachers’ pension funds are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education, a Huffington Post review of financial documents has revealed.
  The previously unreported investments mean that education professionals are able to profit twice off the same student: first by hiking the cost of tuition, then through dividends and higher valuations on their holdings in Sallie Mae, the largest student lender and loan servicer in the country, which profits by charging relatively high interest rates on its loans and not refinancing high-rate loans after students graduate and get well-paying jobs.

In Memoriam

• Dr. Joyce Brothers, psychologist
• Barbara Salinas-Norman, author and activist

I Forgot to Mention

1. Mr. Sanford won the election in South Carolina to his old House seat.  (CNN, video included, link will eventually rot.  You are warned.)
2. Forgot it again.  Sorry.

The Usual Suspects

...probably have no clue about actual tyranny.  (Orcinus.)

Another Poppyseed Banana Nut Bread, or "The Death Star Has Cleared the Planet."

So while Star Wars is happening in the background (I forgot Saturday) and the scent of fresh banana nut bread is in the air, I thought I'd gather all those loose tabs and put them in one post.  This is that post.

• Arthur Silber quote, because very true:

  I say, laugh at the fuckers. They must hate being laughed at. They work so hard at being serious and earnest, and well-meaning. They desperately want you to believe they're good people, and that they think very, very carefully about those measures the times call for. I just look at them and listen to what they say, and I think: What a colossal crock of shit. Politics is only and always about power, which only and always means power over other human beings. Anyone who devotes a substantial amount of time -- or his entire life, God forbid -- to achieving power is a shit-eating buffoon. The desire for power over others is the most profoundly deforming desire of all: it corrupts everything it touches. To put it very briefly: politics is the shit end of life.

  [Added emphasis mine.]
• Via Mercury Rising and Shakesville, from Salon:  The judge pushes back against the Obama Administration's attempt to restrict Plan B (no, that doesn't make sense to me either, but maybe the evil twin has the body this week).  [ETA:  Why conservatives fear Plan B.  Which doesn't explain the Obama Administration.]
• Spocko on the dearth of justice:

  People who read me know that I’m a big science fiction fan (my name is a clue!) but I’m also a fan of what I call “comeuppance stories” ones where a person or group of people work together to ensure the bad guys get their comeuppance. I don’t like violent revenge stories, but stories of justice. I like seeing a show of karma in this lifetime. In the olden days journalists used to work on stories that lead to someone getting their comeuppance. You know, “afflict the comfortable.” But now these kind of stories are almost entirely seen in fiction.
  
  These days people who SHOULD be getting their comeuppance have insulated themselves from the traditional sources of comeupatude–the press, the prosecutor, the politicians, the people.
  
  Instead of the press creating stories that might lead to someone’s comeuppance they wait for someone else to do the heavy living and jump in to report on “both sides.”

• Republic of T on who's waging class warfare against whom.

  When Republicans start touting “flexibility” working Americans and their families should make haste to their battle-stations, because it’s an attack. If Republicans are offering your “flexibility” with one hand, they are usually taking away a lot more with the other hand. (For example giving state’s more “flexibility” in administering Medicaid actually means slashing Medicaid’s federal funding, and block-granting the remains t to the states to administer as they please.)

• In the Make Us Sickby Department:  Coronavirus in Saudi Arabia.  From Wired.  Nod of the hat to Mad Magazine.  ETA:  Ahem.  1 Similarity to SARS.

In Memoriam

Ray Harryhausen.

Keep On Truckin', No. 65,536

Someone must have done a cover of "Keep On Truckin'" but it doesn't seem to have turned up among the usual suspects...

• The old shell game (yes, the Koch Brothers.  Again.  Making Howard Hughes look sociable and reasonable) only with actual shells.

  The Association for American Innovation will likely help the Kochs and their allies continue avoiding transparency in political spending.
  
  [...]
  
  The Association is organized under Section 501(c)(6) of the tax code, setting it apart from many of the dark money groups active in the 2010 and 2012 elections, like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS or Americans for Prosperity, which are organized as 501(c)(4) "social welfare" nonprofits.
  
  Section 501(c)(6) is reserved for business leagues like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or trade associations like the pharmaceutical lobby PhRMA; but unlike those groups, there is little evidence the Association exists to advance the interests of any particular trade or industry.

  Oh, I dunno...  (PR Watch, via AlterNet)
• Assata Shakur (not Tupac's mother; different first name and history) has been moved to the top of the FBI's Most Wanted list.  (She's been in Cuba for nearly 30 years.  This is not a secret.)
• "Food, Foodborne Illness, and Antibiotic Resistance in Food" because this is what you want to read over dinner.

  This E[nviromental] W[orking] G[roup] report is notable for another reason: The Food and Drug Administration decided to scold the group for it. In a really unusual move, the agency (which oversees the portion of NARMS that deals with retail meat) issued a press release criticizing EWG’s analysis and calling it “inaccurate and alarmist.” The press release was derided by food policy bloggers and analysts; in one stinging reaction, author and NYU professor Marion Nestle said: “The FDA’s current stance on use of animal antibiotics appears to be more about protecting the meat industry than about protecting public health.

  Why it matters:

  Because foodborne illness is so widespread, and so potentially deadly. The CDC recently held its annual Epidemic Intelligence Service Conference, which serves as an informal graduation ceremony for members of its disease-detective corps. Among the research presented, there was this little-noticed paper by EIS officer Dr. Von Nguyen, analyzing the impact of foodborne outbreaks which cross state borders. These outbreaks are becoming more common, because food production and distribution has become so complex — but because the victims are so far apart, linking cases together is challenging. Nevertheless, doing the footwork to track foodborne illness across the miles is critical, Nguyen said: “These outbreaks represented only 1 percent of foodborne disease outbreaks over the last decade; however, they accounted for 5 percent of outbreak-related illnesses, 21 percent of hospitalizations, and 26 percent of deaths.”

Bon appetit!

Somebody Didn't Read the First Quarter of The Stand

In nature, some strains of the influenza virus are highly lethal while others jump easily from person to person. What public health officials fear most is a hybrid that combines the lethality of one with the transmissibility of the other, creating a deadly global pandemic.

Now a team of Chinese scientists has investigated that in their lab by creating a new hybrid virus. They combined H5N1 avian influenza, which is highly lethal but doesn’t transmit easily between people, with the highly contagious H1N1 swine flu strain responsible for infecting tens of millions of people in 2009.

Charming.

Via Diverse Sources

That is, supergee on Dreamwidth got it from Feministing, who got it from Alice Think Progress:

South Carolina has a reputation for dirty tricks, and next week’s special election between former Gov. Mark Sanford (R) and businesswoman Elizabeth Colbert Busch (D) is no exception. One of the most popular tactics is known as “push polling,” whereby a group calls up voters under the guise of conducting a poll, only to ask questions that leave the voter with a highly-misleading impression about a certain candidate.

ThinkProgress spoke with multiple individuals in South Carolina’s first congressional district who have received push polls from an unknown conservative group that only referred to itself as “SSI Polling”.

[...]

After about a half dozen of these questions, Wolford began to challenge the caller for asking such absurd questions. He apologized, telling her, “ma’am, I’m just paid to ask questions.” When Wolford asked who all he was calling, he demurred, saying he “just had to call the numbers they gave him.” She told ThinkProgress she suspects the calls were targeted towards Democratic women to try to discourage them from voting.

The idea is that merely "hiking the Appalachian trail" pales next to what the other candidate might be accused of (not to mention that "running up a charge account bill" is what one does if one isn't paying cash every single time on every single transaction.  I have run up a charge account bill at [store].  I still owe about $30, which will probably get paid in a month.  Even in South Carolina, that doesn't make me a financial profligate) and the hypotheticals are sufficiently off-putting that the former Governor looks squeaky-clean in comparison.

As some of the Internet gang might say, after they'd finished laughing, "Hahahah.  No."