Turkeys away

I've decided to go back to maintaining The Sideshow site and using the Blogspot pages as the permalink and comment facility.

Panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays this week were Digby and Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel), talking about the NSA and denial of domestic spying, Snowden, and the filibuster. Bunch of eye-openers in here, particularly with regard to DiFi's continuing fealty to the security state.

Here's Glenn Greenwald being interviewed on BBC's HardTalk. As Glenn observed on Twitter, the interviewer seems to have a hard time absorbing the fact that security officials lie and that there have to be independent observers holding them to account. Note that the interviewer doesn't even understand how ironic - and terrifying - it is for someone to be called "a special case" who of course has his communications content spied on by the government when that person is a journalist. (Can't imagine why they'd want to do that.) Notice the way he seems to lash out when Glenn responds to another repetition of the idea that journalists shouldn't question power by saying that it's not the job of a journalist to investigate other journalists who question the claims of the powerful. It's almost comical to see how this stung interviewer tries to "challenge" Glenn.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism on "Identity Politics and the Stoking of Generational Warfare [...] A particularly potent political grouping would be for older people, particularly retirees, to team up with young people on economic issues. So it's not surprising that some political mavens are trying to make sure that doesn't happen. One of the strategies of the plutocrats comes from financier Jay Gould : 'I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,' except this time, they aren't even having to hire one half to turn it against the other. Just as I've noticed an sharp uptick in women's identity articles, I've also seen a ramping up of generational warfare and anti-baby-boomer messaging (I have as much antipathy towards broad comments about baby boomers as I do women). This phenomenon admittedly has deeper roots, since billionaire Pete Peterson has been campaigning against Social Security and Medicare since the mid 1980s, and presenting old people as something society can't afford is part of his strategy. But he's been joined by fresh troops, such as Fix the Debt and billionaire Stan Druckenmiller's overt campaign to turn young people against older ones, The Can Kicks Back. Yet how does indicting a large group of people who are extremely diverse in terms of income, occupation, religion, family status, and ethnicity make any sense? It's tantamount to prosecuting everyone at JP Morgan for fraud and predatory practices, rather than Jamie Dimon and other responsible individuals."

Since we've railed here about patent trolls before, it is with some delight that we see our friend Whit Diffie taking them on.

It would appear that the new pope actually reads the Gospels. Rush Limbaugh is calling him a "Marxist" for it, but RJ Eskow wants to Occupy Christmas.

"12 Reasons Why Obama Is One of the Best Presidents Ever" - Remember the name Matthew D. Lynch, because this article is its own special kind of crazy. Everything in it is just plain wrong.

Lee Camp's Moment of Clarity: "Do You Have Any Idea What $50 TRILLION Looks Like?!"

The Sylvia School of Mainstream Journalism

Judith Kerr and the story behind The Tiger Who Came To Tea

Tauriel Refuses To Get Into Butt Pose In Hobbit Poster, Makes Legolas Do It Instead

Behind the Lens - The Day of the Doctor

Did Magneto kill JFK? See The Bent Bullet.

The great turkey pardon, myth-busting included.

Fine Dining with Albert Finney and Joyce Redman

A WKRP Thanksgiving
(I kept thinking of replacements for that second clause, like, "As God is my witness, I thought the NSA was above reproach," or, "As God is my witness, I thought bankers would never lie," or, "As God is my witness, I thought all black people were liberals.")

I'll never get over losing you

Sam Seder interviewed Diane Ravitch about Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools about the myth of the education crisis and where the real problem is for our schools, on The Majority Report.

"Huge Change in Senate But Most People Don't Care" - Not sure how huge a change it is, since Democrats never bothered to filibuster anything much in the first place. They appear to have saved it for Supreme Court appointments, as if it's a special case, but with far-right crackpot radicals like Alito, Scalia, and Roberts on the court, it's hard to argue that eliminating the filibuster means extremists will somehow start sneaking onto the court, as if they hadn't already been walking right in and doing the crazy. And, you know, it's not as if we have any proof that Republicans won't change the rule back once they take over the Senate - which could easily happen unless Democrats start behaving as if they believe in democracy in the first place.
Jay Ackroyd got Joan McCarter and KagroX together to discuss what happened with the filibuster and what its impact is likely to be. This isn't a regular episode of Virtually Speaking, but it may clear things up for people to give it a listen.

Obamacare: Experimenting on people when you already know the outcome. This is when you really want to slap someone. And like Lambert, the first thing I thought of when I read that quote from an Obamacare defender was the Tuskegee Experiment. We already know what the outcomes are, we don't have to experiment at the cost of people's lives. And the whole "consumer shopping" approach to health care makes so little sense that it's amazing a person could reach adulthood and argue for it with a straight face. "Oh, yes, I'm in agonizing pain and may have only minutes to get into surgery to save life or limb, but this is a great time to sit down and comparison shop for the best surgeons and figure out which hospital is willing to take me and...."
Found a nice quote from Bob Perillo on FB: "I regularly get called things like "a friend of Ted Cruz" for opposing the ACA from the left -- which is kind of funny, since it was invented by Republicans in the first place. But of course I've just failed to appreciate liberal alchemy: policies made of lead become golden by the mere fact that they have been adopted by Democrats."

This is an interesting take on the guy who is funding Glenn Greenwald's new venture: "The Extraordinary Pierre Omidyar [...] Since its founding in 2004, Omidyar Network has committed nearly $300 million to a range of nonprofit and for-profit "charity" outfits. An examination of the ideas behind the Omidyar Network and of the investments it has made suggests that its founder is anything but a "different" sort of billionaire. Instead, what emerges is almost a caricature of neoliberal ideology, complete with the trail of destruction that ensues when that ideology is put into practice. The generous support of the Omidyar Network goes toward "fighting poverty" through micro-lending, reducing third-world illiteracy rates by privatizing education and protecting human rights by expanding property titles ("private property rights") into slums and villages across the developing world. In short, Omidyar Network's philanthropy reveals Omidyar as a free-market zealot with an almost mystical faith in the power of "markets" to transform the world, end poverty, and improve lives - one micro-individual at a time. [...] So brace yourself, you're about to get something you've never seen before: billionaire-backed journalism taking on the power of the state. How radical is that? In other words: look out Government, you're about to be pummeled by a crusading, righteous billionaire! And corporate America? Ah, don't worry. Your dirty secrets - freshly transferred from the nasty non-profit hands of the Guardian to the aggressively for-profit hands of Pierre Omidyar - are safe with us." There is a distinction between fighting state power and fighting the power. Will Omidyar be happy if his new news project goes after all of it?

Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations: This report is an effort to document something we know little about: corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations. The entire subject is veiled in secrecy. In recent years, there have been few serious journalistic efforts and no serious government efforts to come to terms with the reality of corporate spying against nonprofits. Much of what we do know about this subject has been uncovered by accident. So the picture we have is fragmentary at best: just a few snapshots, taken mostly at random, arising from brilliant strokes of luck, giving a mere inkling of the full range of espionage activity against nonprofits. There are, however, a few things we can say for certain." (.pdf)

"Workplace Climate of Retaliation at Hanford" - More whistleblower punishment. Honestly, bosses who do this should be put in jail anyway, but there is no earthly reason why any private company should be hired to do the public's business when they can easily profit by failing.

"Bob Woodward Disappointed That Snowden Didn't Go To Him" - Poor old Bob could have had a whole new Deep Throat to play with. Except, you know, he couldn't, because he wasn't trustworthy.

Unexpected quotations: "America is way too quick to trade freedom for the illusion of security,' he told The Daily Beast. 'Whether it's allowing the NSA to go way too far in what it intercepts of our personal data, to our government monitoring of everything domestically and spending way more than we should. I don't know if I want to live in a country where lone wolf and random terror attacks are impossible 'cause that country would look more like North Korea than America." -- Blackwater founder Erik Prince, noticing that the policies that made him rich are bad when done by a Democratic president

Atrios named Tom Brower The Worst Person in the World Tuesday and wondered why he isn't being arrested. You'd think someone who makes a practice of roaming around town taking a sledgehammer to other people's private possessions would be in custody by now.

The NYT is lying with scare quotes - If something is true but you put it in scare quotes anyway, you're telling your readers it's actually not true. Sometimes you really need to use scare quotes - like when the media call antidemocratic radicals "centrist" as if for all the world they really represent some sort of middle ground, I want them to put it in scare quotes, but they don't, so I have to. But when "doctors" are actual doctors, "farm equipment" is actual farm equipment, and "rights" are actual rights, well, you're never going to understand the Iran "negotiations" that way.

Once again, Ezra Klein makes me want to pound my head against the wall. Jeez, Ezra, hasn't anyone explained to you yet that privatization just loads on inefficiencies and "big government" can do a better job without greedheads getting in the way?

"A Cleveland Wal-Mart store is holding a food drive - for its own employees." I can't even think about that without getting up and yelling, so I sure can't type anything.

Krugman, "The Geezers Are Not Alright" - Someone needs to tell The Washington Post that there are already old people living on catfood.
"Expanding Social Security [...] The rise in life expectancy, it turns out, is overwhelmingly a story about affluent, well-educated Americans. Those with lower incomes and less education have, at best, seen hardly any rise in life expectancy at age 65; in fact, those with less education have seen their life expectancy decline. So this common argument amounts, in effect, to the notion that we can't let janitors retire because lawyers are living longer. And lower-income Americans, in case you haven't noticed, are the people who need Social Security most."

So, basically, Zimmerman is just a violent loony.

"Mother fined $10 for not including Ritz crackers in kids' school lunch" - because gods forbid your kid might not be getting enough starch.

More tips people shouldn't give their waiters

Cameron's Britain: "Police are cracking down on students - but what threat to law and order is an over-articulate history graduate?" Like Thatcher's Britain and Blair's Britain.

Is Al Gore right?

Don't make this film - a sequel to It's a Wonderful Life that seems determined to erase the virtues of the original film.

The death of science fiction's first Nobel Laureate, Doris Lessing, seems to have been a good excuse for the Evening Standard to dredge up an amusing little story about her night with Kenneth Tynan.

These concrete arrows point the way across America

The lost Eno album

Bitter Barista

The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings

Trailer for Mr. Peabody and Sherman. It doesn't feel like an improvement on the original.

How to peel a head of garlic in less than 10 seconds

Gah, I don't have time to finish playing the Doctor Who Google doodle. And if you don't, either, you might as well just watch this. (Later: Dammit, I couldn't resist!)

Geraldine: The David Frost Interview

The making of the making of Doctor Who - This is about ten minutes of background to the BBC's drama about how the BBC's first female producer and the first Indian director worked together to get the right man and make the TV show we're all still watching and loving 50 years on. An Adventure in Space and Time starts off as Verity Lambert's story, but it's really William Hartnell's, and the choice of actor for this role was perfect - he not only looks like him, but he plays like him, and I kept forgetting I wasn't looking at William Hartnell. And here's a video review of the drama with which I can't disagree.

Randy Newman, "Losing You"

From me to you

Yesterday was the only convenient day for us to have Thanksgiving dinner. The best sysadmin ever also provided the pies. As always, I am grateful to him, and to Mr. Sideshow, and to you. And also to Boopsie, who is the most cutie-pie of them all and makes me laugh and laugh.

Avedon Carol and David Waldman (KagroX) are tonight's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays. I'm told we'll "discuss populism; the PPACA as yet another example of technocratic centrist failure; declaring surrender in the drug wars as Colorado passes weed tax and; the Village's slavering for Obama failure in his second term. Jay Ackroyd moderates. Plus today's ridiculous moment from Culture of Truth."
Thursday's guest on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd was Ian Welsh. CMike was kind enough to transcribe a portion of this talk in comments here. Homework for the episode includes Ian's articles, "Baseline Predictions for the next sixty years", "A New Ideology", and "How to Create a Viable Ideology".
You might also want to save this handy quotation: "After serving his time federal prison, John Ehrlichman granted an interview to author Dan Baum, who reports that Ehrlichman explained the origin of the war on drugs this way: 'The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.'"

I can't now remember when it was I noticed it, but at some point in the Bush years I realized that there is an enormous group of people out there who don't recognize what I think of as a fairly universal story for English-speaking (and other) people, a story we refer to all the time as the illustration of how some piece of elite flim-flam is occurring and no one has the nerve to say so. A bunch of people who are younger than me simply have no idea what we're talking about when we say, "The Emperor has no clothes." I think that's a shame, because it's not simply a children's story (it sure isn't), but a warning about how con artists exist at every level and can swindle absolutely anyone because humans are too often afraid to speak up and may even believe there is something going on that everyone else can see but them, that the problem is with them. How many people, for example, simply assumed that our leaders talking suddenly about the dire threat represented by Saddam Hussein was based on some demonstrated fact that was not visible to those of us who kept noticing that Saddam simply didn't have the capability to be such a threat? How many people believed that the completely contrafactual "models" and rationales for the economic policies of the last 30-odd years all made perfect sense, that housing prices could just naturally (and harmlessly!) jump to ten times the median annual income of the populace, that Clinton's welfare "reform" of eliminating Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) would improve the condition of the poor rather than having a devastating impact on the poor and the black community, that Social Security is taking money out of the economy rather than putting it in, that private corporations can do a better job than government at running the programs government once manifestly ran more efficiently and effectively, that deregulation was actually a good idea - and so on? How many people hear that these fantasticly complicated-sounding financial facilities are just "too complicated" for anyone else to understand and think it actually makes sense to let the foxes continue to "guard" the henhouse? From the mouths of babes (e.g., cranky old activists and hippie bloggers) we heard that so many of these stories were actually not true, but the grown-ups wouldn't listen, even when the whistleblowers joined in - and instead they just wanted to shoot the messenger.

Among the myriad issues where the emperor has no clothes is one I still find it amazing that members of my own generational cohort seem to have completely fallen for an obvious lie: the crack cocaine story. I remember when it first reared its ugly head how we started hearing the same kind of outrageous claims that we once heard about marijuana and LSD; every issue of Time seemed to be all Reefer Madness on this drug preparation. It should have been manifestly obvious that no drug could instantly addict someone with one dose, for example - it simply makes no sense. And you would have thought a generation that cut its teeth on debunking lies about marijuana would have seen right through it, but they didn't. One of the most draconian drug laws ever resulted from this insanity and a succession of tragically evil drug policies have followed in its wake. (All of which, by the way, has had devastating impact on the black community as a whole, not to mention black activism.) Of course, it's not just my generation that dropped the ball on this - everyone does it all the time, dismissing even what they have seen with their own eyes in favor of manufactured "conventional wisdom" that pours down on them from the elites. Sam Seder did a great interview with Columbia University neuroscientist Carl Hart, author of the new book High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society, who explained "how we demonize people on welfare, his life experience and academic work, why not all users of Crack Cocaine are addicted, the Rat Park study, the variety of reasons people fall into drug addiction, who benefits from the War on Drugs and who pays the highest price and how we use drugs to avoid addressing poverty and unemployment," on The Majority Report.

Another term that I suspect some people have lost a grip on is one that Atrios keeps using quite accurately to describe the convoluted means "centrists" keep coming up with to do what should be straightforward tasks, is Rube Goldberg machine. He frequently employs the term to talk about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), an overburdened mess that could have bypassed most of its problems by getting rid of the huge complication of the expensive middle-men in the insurance industry, as we have seen. Perhaps that's why he posted this entertaining video Tuesday night.

The Amazingly Articulate Barack Obama gives a presser about a fiasco any smart person should have seen coming.
And an appropriate word from Mike the Mad Biologist

"Can we trade Obama for Nixon? It's difficult to know, in historical terms, how best to understand the monumental catastrophe of the Obamacare rollout. Is it yet another example of the pathological weakness and spinelessness of the Democratic Party, which never seems to get anything right and always prefers to negotiate itself into unnecessary compromise and ideological defeat? Or is it another symptom of our national refusal to pursue a rational and coherent healthcare policy, fueled partly by our bogus mythology of individualism and partly by the machinations of insurance-industry racketeers? Is there, to go one step further, a relationship between those two things?"

Suddenly I am not the only person talking about giving Americans a guaranteed basic income. And this is Business Insider!

Marcy Wheeler on "The Opportunity Cost of the Global Dragnet," or how the NSA is wrecking everything.

Dept. of Worse Than Bush: NSA Whistleblower speaks.
"Americans' personal data shared with CIA, IRS, others in security probe"

"The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority [...] Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress writes the laws and sets trade policy. And so it was for 200 years. Over the last few decades, presidents have seized those powers through a mechanism known as Fast Track. Fast Track facilitated controversial pacts such as NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, which extend beyond traditional tariff-cutting to set constraints on domestic financial, energy, patents and copyright, food safety, immigration and other policies."
Why Do We The People Have To Read TPP On Wikileaks?"
Just in case you thought it was any better over here, the Transatlantic Trade Deal is the European version of the TPP, "...a privatised justice system for global corporations", and a direct attack on democracy.

Matt Taibbi, "Chase's Twitter Gambit Devolves into All-Time PR Fiasco."
Stacy Keach, #AskJPM tweets performed by voice of American Greed
Read the Tweets

"Caught in Unemployment's Revolving Door [...] 'I've been turned down from McDonald's because I was told I was too articulate,' she says. 'I got denied a job scrubbing toilets because I didn't speak Spanish and turned away from a laundromat because I was 'too pretty.' I've also been told point-blank to my face, 'We don't hire the unemployed.' And the two times I got real interest from a prospective employer, the credit check ended it immediately.'"

Say what you will about Ralph Nader, but the only way he's wrong about the Democratic Party and Obama is that he's not scathing enough. I don't think he even realizes what Obama really is.

"Vanity Fair editor's crazy conspiracy theory: Former NYT scribe Kurt Eichenwald just knows Edward Snowden's a Chinese spy -- no matter what logic says."

Richard Cohen managed to commit another atrocity, with the open approval of his editor, and a response from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
In honor of the occasion, Atrios linked to this blast from the past at A Tiny Revolution.

As some of you may recall, I learned my way around unpacking pseudo-science and "conventional wisdom" by studying the relationship between sex crime and a whole passel of anti-sex assumptions and anti-pornography "science". And no matter how much time you spend debunking this stuff, there is always more. And it's like that with everything.

"No, This is Not an Okay Tip to Leave." And if the meal comes to less than $25, you might want to consider this. (Well, some of us can only afford to eat in restaurants if we stick to the local tipping conventions, but if you can afford it, why not do it?)

The Original "Occupy": Novel Was Written 100 Years Before Zuccotti Park

How to Be an Atheist Without Being a Dick About It

Google, if the '80s never ended

You can listen to this Beatles at the BBC program until Thursday. It's fun.

Easier said than done

Stuart Zechman explained the problems with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and how to fix them on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd. Here's Stuart's text outline of those issues. Homework includes a piece from last year in the WaPo, "A Limit on Consumer Costs Is Delayed in Health Care Law."
Joan McCarter and Jay Ackroyd discussed "the politics of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act; Harry Reid's filibuster reform talk; expanding social security; and the results of the 2013 elections and the attendant exit polls" on Virtually Speaking Sundays.

Today's healthcare frauds: Johnson & Johnson

"The rich: 'A class of people for whom humans are disposable commodities'" - Gaius Publius recommends pieces by Chris Hedges and Digby on the pathology of the Cloud People.*

More like this, please: Keith Ellison and Tom Guild in Oklahoma. Talk like the people matter and even the reddest states might just come out on the right side.

Noam Scheiber in The New Republic, "Hillary's Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren"

Key Obama priority: "Getting the Republican Party back in a functioning state"

David Dayen in The New Republic, "Congress Is Starving the Agency That's Supposed to Prevent Another Meltdown"

Matt Taibbi, "Chase Isn't the Only Bank in Trouble"

If your business model requires you to break the law and continuously go to court and pay fines as a matter of course, you'd better make sure you have sufficient reserves of funds for the legal process.

WaPo: "The Great Recession may have crushed America's economic potential [...] The paper offers a depressing portrait of where the economy stands nearly six years after the onset of recession, and amounts to a damning indictment of U.S. policymakers. Their upshot: The United States's long-term economic potential has been diminished by the fact that policymakers have not done more to put people back to work quickly. Our national economic potential is now a whopping 7 percent below where it was heading at the pre-2007 trajectory, the authors find."
Paul Krugman on "The Mutilated Economy". The administration and Congress have conspired in their attack on the nation's economy at the behest of their corporate masters, but there's no reason we shouldn't call it what it is: a national security crisis.

Another surprise from the Pope.
"This might be the worse thing you read today: This story from New Mexico is just insane, and show just how out of control the 'War on Drugs' has gotten."
Election highlights: There's bad news, of course, but a surprising amount of good news.
Well, it would have been nice if they hadn't kept saying "trans fats" and just said margarine is bad for you. Doesn't anyone listen to Julia Child? Jeez.
Not everything is lost, in the world we all want to live in.

"Australian David Hicks: Survivor of Gitmo's Sadistic Abuse: Richard Phillips in 'David Hicks seeks to overturn Guantánamo "terrorism" conviction' reveals that former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Australian citizen David Hicks has lodged an appeal with the US Court of Military Commission Review to overturn his 2007 conviction of 'providing support for terrorism.' It is expected that the commission will NOT quash Hicks' conviction. His American lawyer from the Center for Constitutional Rights will then appeal the case to the US federal district court. "

Digby on the culture of unaccountability and prosecutorial misconduct that puts innocent people in prison - on purpose.

The Rorschach test controversy on Wikipedia. Oh, my!

Black Panthers' Fight For Free Health Care

"Terrible Columnist Richard Cohen Shocked To Learn That Slavery Was Really, Really Bad"

Cartoon: The high cost of incarceration

"Legal paper maps out conservative plan to abolish pornography"

Michael Moore recommends 12 years a slave.

"Why Scandinavian women make the rest of the world jealous"

Every now and then I think of these bitter things, and try not to break things.

Laurie Anderson's Farewell to Lou Reed

You can now look at the original Mary Shelly drafts for Frankenstein online.

Photoset: Steampunk DC characters

H.P. Lovecraft's "The Haunter Of The Dark", animated.

Sail - Awolnation with Tesla coils! FOR SCIENCE!

Masha and the Bear - a cute little children's show from Russia.

Fortean Times: 40 years of covers - in pictures

Halloween costume that makes lemons into lemonade.

"41 Camping Hacks that are borderline genius" - I don't do much camping, but a few of these are things you can use at home or in the wilds of, say, Central London.

Famous paintings animated

The M&S Christmas TV Advert 2013

The Essex, because it's the moment to just do it.

Paradise is waiting for you and me

Gaius Publius and Marcy Wheeler were this week's guests on Virtually Speaking Sundays Topics include: Whose in charge here? U.S. elected officials, like the President and Sen. Dianne Feinstein have disavowed knowledge of targets of U.S. intelligence services. Heads of intelligence operations tell bald-faced lies to Congressional oversight committees, and not only retain their jobs, but continue to be treated by the Beltway media as authoritative sources. Who are they spying on and who gives them their orders? Homework for this one includes:
"NSA tapping Google & Yahoo cloud-servers worldwide, per Snowden docs"
"DiFi's Fake FISA Fix Appears to Further Extend Searches on US Persons Under Section 702"
"What's the Relationship Database About?"
"Climate crisis: Our government is captured by billionaires; the solution is civil disobedience"
"Fukushima: 'Usual suspects in Japan are getting richer... at the expense of public safety'"

* * * * *

My thanks to CMike in comments for calling our attention to Seth Ackerman's antidote to Lind's piece trying to draw a straight line between the confederacy and today's right-wing Republicans:

Tea Party Yankees

[...]

In fact, all of Lyndon Johnson's major War on Poverty programs were enacted with a majority of Southerners voting for final passage. The 1964 Economic Opportunity Act - the omnibus bill establishing Job Corps, a federal work-study program, adult education funding, and various other things - was sponsored in the House by staunch anti-labor segregationist Phil Landrum of Georgia, and passed with 60% of Southern Democrats voting in favor, even as 87% of Republicans opposed it. Likewise, Medicare passed in 1965 with 61% of Southern Democrats in favor and 93% of Republicans opposed. The 1964 Food Stamp Act, after an intra-party log-rolling deal involving farm subsidies, went through on virtually a straight party-line vote.

There were certainly hard-right Southern Democratic legislators who refused to vote for such policies. There were also surprisingly liberal ones; the region's Congressional delegations were more ideologically diverse than is usually assumed.

If there was one legislator who best embodied the classic image of a conservative Southern Democrat in Congress, it was probably Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. An uncompromising (if 'genteel') segregationist and signer of the Southern Manifesto, Russell, according to a political scientist writing in 1950, belonged to a class of Southern legislators which 'speaks for the respectable conservatives, speaks for chambers of commerce, civic clubs, banks, corporations.' Russell was probably a bit to the right of the median Southerner in Congress. But it is a mark of how different that time and place were that Russell declared the proudest accomplishment of his forty-year Congressional career to be the National School Lunch Act, which he spearheaded in 1946 and then doggedly defended over the years whenever its funding was challenged: 'No one,' he charged, 'should seek to deny a poor child in a poor state a lunch at school because both child and state are less able to pay than a wealthier child in a wealthy state.'

The notion that this brand of Southern Democratic politics prefigured modern-day Rush Limbaugh-style Tea Party Republicanism is fallacious. If, today, there are modern-day equivalents of Russell's genre of Southern Democrat - on issues other than civil rights - they are not Eric Cantor or Ted Cruz, but rather Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, John Breaux, or Claire McCaskill. In other words, the closest modern-day equivalents of the conservative Democrats of the 1940s are modern-day conservative Democrats.

* * * * *

Mark Millar at Reuters, "Can expanding Social Security solve the retirement crisis?: I asked a financial services executive recently how our retirement saving system can be considered a success, considering that all but the highest-income households are approaching retirement with next to nothing saved. His reply: 'They don't have any money while they're working, so why would they have any money in retirement?'"

Michael Hiltzik in the LAT, "How much are we willing to pay for the pursuit of happiness? Research by Notre Dame political scientist Benjamin Radcliff suggests that social programs produce a happier population." Even better, we don't have to "pay" more for it, because these so-called "social" programs feed a healthier economy, as well.

Naomi Klein's article "How science is telling us all to revolt" in the New Statesman was an inspiration to Lee Camp, who did a video just for that, "Scientific Models Now Showing Revolt Is Our Only Chance?" (The Klein pieces is, of course, in the Russell Brand-edited issue.)

I don't know why David Sirota says "liberal-washing" is new. Stealing our language has been going on for over 30 years and Obama may very well be its pinnacle. Anyone remember during the Iraq war propaganda build-up how people who are completely hostile to women's rights suddenly kept pointing to how unfeminist Iraq is? (Boy, I bet those women are really grateful we destroyed their homes and made them all wear headscarves.) They've got Cory Brooker tagged as some kind of "liberal" even though he is one of the most important factors in the push for charter schools. And there's nothing like a famous Jewish civil liberties lawyer explain why torturing Muslims is perfectly fine to "liberal-wash" an evil, right-wing policy.

Alex Pareene, "Obamacare is a mess, and liberals need to fix it." Too right. People need to stop defending Obama and start pushing to make the problem workable. Yes, the program is a mess, because they let conservatives and the insurance companies influence policy. Now we have to get rid of that influence.

Robert Reich, "Why Washington Is Cutting Safety Nets When Most Americans Are Still in the Great Recession [...] Get it? The bottom 90 percent of Americans - most of whom are still suffering from the Great Recession, most of whom have been on a downward escalator for decades - have disappeared from official Washington." You know, lobbying your representatives used to be a perfectly honorable part of democracy. We need to figure out how to get back into that in a way they need to pay attention to. That used to be what demonstrations were about, of course, but they've found ways to put a stop to that. But people who represent the bottom 90% aren't running for office, either. They're not even trying to be a nuisance to the bad guys in primaries anymore. Where are they?

Poll: Growing Number of Republicans Dislike GOP. Now, if only all the people who hate their party leaders could get together....

"Coal Baron and Major Ken Cuccinelli Campaign Donor Sues Blogger for Defamation, Invasion of Privacy [...] Filed on September 25 in Belmont County's Court of Common Pleas, Murray's complaint accuses Mike Stark, creator of FossilAgenda.com and Stark Reports, and The Huffington Post of defamation and invasion of privacy stemming from Mr. Stark's September 20 article, 'Meet the Extremist Coal Baron Bankrolling Ken Cuccinelli's Campaign"."

Tom Tomorrow and Dr. Hand

To Flatten A Heroine: Artist Puts Disney Princess Filter On 10 Real Life Female Role Models

Yes, it's Diwali again. You would not believe the noise outside my window.

Barbara Lewis, "Make Me Your Baby"

Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive

We saw this seasonal beer at the pub last week. Too hoppy for my tastes but with a lot of nice flavor, anyway.

Digby and Stuart Zechman were this week's guests on Virtually Speaking Sundays, and discussed the austerity zombie, this time in response to Gene Sperling's remarks about the "necessity" of "entitlement" cuts. Stuart also provided some insight into large software development projects involving multiple participants referring and why the PPACA is such a pig of a project.

Just learned that Robert Silverberg had a heart attack here in London, but he seems to be okay. Nothing on File 770 or Locus yet, but Pat Cadigan is on the scene and John Clute confirms on Twitter.

Good on Atrios for being one of the very few people who all along has been saying that inflation can be too low - and it is.

Ian Welsh's recent post "A brief note on why the progressive blog movement failed" generated some lively discussion among members of the early liberal blogosphere, including a post from MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong that Ian promoted as a separate post, "Jerome Armstrong on the Failure of the Netroots". I'm not sure how Jerome sees a coalition with Libertarians (or the libertarian right) doing any good (assuming it can happen in any substantive way at all), but I don't think it's wise for liberals to automatically discount any action in concert with them when our interests coincide. Alan Grayson and Ron Paul got the Fed audited, which is a very good thing, regardless of how many crackpot ideas Paul may have. I think liberals make a grave mistake when they sneer at Jane Hamsher because she once co-signed a letter with Grover Norquist - a letter calling for Rahm Emanuel's resignation. Is there really any liberal who doesn't think getting Emanuel and people like him out of government is a good idea?

Glenn Greenwald schools Bill Keller: "So yes: along with new privacy-enhancing technologies, I do think that brave, innovative whistle-blowers like Manning and Snowden are crucial to opening up some of this darkness and providing some sunlight. It shouldn't take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting. Reclaiming basic press freedoms in the U.S. is an important impetus for our new venture." And Keller tries to defend David Brooks.

"The Strange Silence [...] It is pointless to tell these 'fans' [of Obama] that there is nothing wrong with criticizing the president and his policies. It doesn't make you the grand master of the local KKK or mean that you've failed Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, I might even go out on a limb to suggest that the reason Bill Clinton gets so much negative attention from these 'fans', in spite of the fact that his record is more liberal than Obama's, is because these 'fans' are projecting their pent up frustration on a legitimate white target as a proxy. They simply cannot overcome their fear of ostracism if they criticize the president in the strong terms they would like to use. Just thinking about it makes them feel uncomfortable and oogy. This is ridiculous but it appears to be useless to point out that if people on the left don't get over this conditioned Pavlovian response (courtesy of Obama's campaign strategists) they are condemning their side to complete and utter fecklessness and continued perceptions of ineptitude. But I might suggest that this is exactly what the bad guys want. If you don't raise a fuss, no effective regulation gets implemented and ideas that benefit most of the people in America never see the light of day and are considered politically impractical by the savvy people."

Michael Lind is an idiot if he really believes this nonsense about the Tea party. The Tea Party, like the rest of the Republican Party and like the Democratic Party, has two tiers, one led and funded by crackpot billionaires, and the other made up of all of the other people who probably would kill their own leaders in their beds if they ever tumbled to what they are really up to. There is no great distinction in the leaderships (all three of which are in some part funded by the same crackpot billionaires), and the distinctions in the rank and file are trivial compared to their areas of agreement. One group is not distinctly richer or poorer or crazier or saner or better educated or less educated, despite whatever fudging of trivial percentages Lind tries to fan into significance. Right-wing populists believe that "the government" is the problem, while liberal populists believe that the people leading the government (and the rich creeps who bribe them) are the problem, but there is remarkable agreement between most Tea Partiers and most liberals that the government should serve the people, that Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid should not be cut, and that a lot of elite creeps are wrecking our country. Lind's piece is just another sample of Let's-you-and-him-fight crap meant to buttress tribalistic hatreds between the two groups. This is not the antebellum south, and if people don't stop buying this nonsense, trust me, liberals are being just as hateful and unreality-based as their counterparts on the right.

Delicious: "Activist Tweets Former NSA Chief's ‘Off Record' Phone Call On Train." Sometimes, when I'm on a train and some creep in a suit is talking too loud on his phone, I have a little fantasy that he's about to spill some corporate secret in my hearing. This one is even better - Michael Hayden bragging about torture and rendition in the hearing of a guy from MoveOn.org.

CMike says: "Ordinarily I don't have much patience for prescription-less rants but I listened to this one to the end and then I listened to it again." Jeremy Paxman interviews Russell Brand and proves that Paxman is as fatuous and trivial as ever, but Russell Brand is not. Christopher Goodfellow sees real potential in Brand, and provided the highest praise: "The comedian's appearance before a home affairs select committee about drugs last year was also worthwhile. Amid the humorous comments about chairman Keith Vaz were lucid and informative statements on an issue he takes seriously. It all adds up to a level of engagement by a political satirist/stand up comedian that not even Bill Hicks ever reached."

A bunch of Dems introduced a bill [...] "The proposed law holds the Supreme Court to the same standards required of judges in the federal court system. Currently, Justices on the Supreme Court decide for themselves if they should recuse themselves from cases in which they may have a personal stake or in Thomas' case, his wife has a political or financial stake as a holy roller in the Tea Party." Well, that's closing the barn door after the horses are gone, innit?

David Dayen in The Pacific Standard: "How a Frustrated Blogger Made Expanding Social Security a Respectable Idea: Thanks to decades of stagnant wages and the Great Recession, more than half of American working-class households are at risk of being unable to sustain their standard of living past retirement. Duncan Black is trying to change that."

America: The Best at Being Worst

I sure wish there were a DVD set available of all of the episodes of Steve Allen's Meeting of Minds.

Lion cubs being lion cubs

That neat Honda ad and how they did it

This picture is strangely funny and yet disturbing.

19th Century .gifs

Google Street View and some nice views of Tower Bridge (aka "the one that everyone thinks is London Bridge, but isn't").

"Sunday Morning", live.
And this is the album that we heard from across the hall the night I lost my virginity.

Roz wrote a poem for the occasion, and I knew from the first line when I first saw it sans title what it was about:
"He watched them dance their lives."

"I'm Waiting For the Man"

You'll see my smile looks out of place

Tonight's guest on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd is Stephanie Kelton, Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who joins Jay "to discuss Modern Monetary Theory and how the MMT policy recommendations compare to those of Keynesians, Monetarists and Real Business Cycle advocates. Stephanie appeared on Up with Chris last January, ostensibly to talk about the trillion dollar coin, but didn't really get a chance to explain why it's actually not a crazy idea."
This week's episode of Virtually Speaking Sundays featured Dave Johnson and Cliff Schecter on the return of the austerity and grand bargain narratives, including the appointment of New Democrats Chris Van Hollen, James Clyburn and Nita Lowey to the budget negotiation committee; GOP in disarray - Are the Teahadists chastened, or emboldened by the loss? PPACA, particularly the tension between identifying problems and defending it from attack; plus satirical commentary from Culture of Truth. Homework for the show: "'A Leninist Strategy" for Social Security, Decades in the Making" and The Powell Memo.

Sam Seder did a great interview with Max Blumenthal about what Israel has become, on The Majority Report. Highly recommended.

As I've been saying all along, what's been keeping the Republican Party insanity beating is not the Republican Party or even its crackpot billionaire friends, it's the Democratic leadership: "During his brief run for President five years ago, Joe Biden said something alarming. While on the campaign trail, he said to a Republican audience that the GOP, which had suffered a stinging defeat in the '06 midterms and were about to get their asses kicked back to Jebus Land again, needed to get back up and fight for what they believed in. Here's the darker side of my Fight Club metaphor, the road far less traveled by our useless mainstream media: The Democratic Party's unfailing penchant for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. [...] And we're seeing it again now. Now we're hearing about otherwise reliably-Democratic guys like Dick Durbin, Ron Wyden and Patty Murray dangling little strips of red meat to the GOP in order to coax them up off their shiny pants suit bottoms and those little pieces of red meat are "reforms" to entitlement programs that has nothing whatsoever to do with ObamaCare or the debt ceiling, the debt, deficit or anything else the GOP had almost single-handedly fucked up or tried to. And then the Democrats wonder who encourages the Republican Party to take hostages every few months until they can get their way."

"What Kind of Problem is the ACA Rollout for Liberalism?" - As usual, the only problem for liberalism is that it's being called a "liberal" problem. But the policies that are creating these issues aren't liberal policies, they are "centrist" or "neoliberal" policies that introduce vast inefficiencies into what could have been a simple program to get medical care (not just commercial junk insurance) to everyone who needs it - and more cheaply than our current system(s) (with or without Obamacare) ever could.

Bill Black, "Justice Department Misrepresents JP Morgan Settlement [...] The settlement is not $13 billion, although it's being portrayed as that. It is at best $9 billion. And that's because the other $4 billion represents what we call loan workouts. Loan workouts are something that you do as a bank because if you try to insist on the original deal, the borrower can't repay, it goes to foreclosure, there are lots of losses. So in a loan workout you reduce the payments. And you do this not because of the goodness of your heart, but because the bank minimizes its losses by loan workouts. So what the Justice Department is agreeing is that JPMorgan can count all these loan workouts that it would have done anyway to minimize its losses as if they were part of a settlement. So disregard the $4 billion entirely. That leaves us with $9 billion. But that $9 billion, unless there's something not being reported again, will be reduced substantially, probably by about one-third, because these fraud expenses will be taxed deductible. In other words, the United States of America will pay a third of this supposed fine from the JPMorgan frauds to the United States of America."

Joan Walsh seems to be one of those people who've never heard of constructive criticism, or at least they forget the whole idea when it comes to things the Obama administration is up to. Look, it's obvious that our "technocratic elite" bollixed things up, and if the right-wingers say so, well, sure, the website is probably the result of a lot of profit-driven outsourcing instead of, say, civil servants with expertise dedicated to making the project work. But it's pretty clear from what Brian Beutler says the administration has been telling him that they don't really have a handle on what they are doing, and if we don't step up and demand that it be fixed, that's just gonna be the right-wing pointing out the obvious and pretending it's all because of "socialism" rather than the overweening confidence of people who think they can make big decisions about stuff they don't understand because they are so much smarter than the rest of us. If they are too dumb to know the basics of how systems work - and I'm not even talking about the tech end of things, but systems in general - then they'd better be listening to our criticisms.

Texas disenfranchises most married women (and anyone else who has ever changed their name): "Supporters of these new laws insist that requiring voters to have an ID that matches their birth certificate is a reasonable requirement. As Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has repeatedly said, 'Almost every single person either has a valid photo ID - or it is very easy to get one.' What they don't say, however, is that the people who don't are largely married women who have taken their husband's name." (via)

I've never liked the name of the group Strengthen Social Security because it fits too neatly into the meme that Social Security is weak, and of course the stories we hear about how weak it is all come from the shop that wants to make it even weaker. But, anyway, they've got this video, and I'm still trying to decide how I feel about it. It certainly contains some good elements, but it hinges on a pretty big If: "If the president is standing with the majority of Americans against all cuts to Social Security... then let's stand with him." And that If is downplayed enough that I worry that too many people will read that not as an if/then statement but as a declarative - without the If. And then it turns into just another "Trust our president to do the right thing" thing. Except that I'm not sure this ad is actually aimed at the public at large, but rather at the politicians.

Storify has a pretty good collection of tweets from the Fix the Debt trollfest (and thanks to commenter ifthethunderdontgetya for giving us that link), but as Chris Hayes noted, The Washington Post somehow omitted all of Sam Seder's best material.

Ryan Cooper has a decent piece on why Social Security cuts are exactly the wrong way to go, "Washington is still stuck in the wrong conversation," over at The Plum Line. I'm still not sure why raising taxes on the Malefactors of Great Wealth is supposed to take such a big bite out of aggregate demand, though, given that the immorally rich are just hoarding their wealth at this point. You have 18 families who could stand to lose literally billions and would still be rich enough to pay everyone they are currently paying (maids, gardeners, chauffeurs, lobbyists, right-wing "centrist" spin-tanks, blog trolls, etc.) without noticing it, and reducing their power would vastly improve our system. Wealth confiscation at the top was good for our country when it was first founded, and confiscatory taxes on the rich helped drag us out of the Great Depression and keep our economy stable and productive for over a generation. Redistribute the money you take away from rich people to people who need to spend it (e.g., all those poor and unemployed people), and you'll have plenty of aggregate demand. If the Filthy Rich suddenly become the Merely Slightly Soiled Rich and can't afford to buy the government anymore, there will be plenty of honest jobs available for all the people who suddenly find themselves unfunded by the Great Grift machines. After all, we have an entire government to rebuild. (via)

Yves on Thomas Friedman: "Who Should Young People Throw Under the Bus: Granny or Billionaire Hedgie Stan Druckenmiller?"

Black Agenda Report, "Obamacare VS Single Payer - Top 10 Things the ACA Gave Us VS the Top 10 We Gave Up

Robert Kuttner, "A Letter From the GOP to Itself: Why We Will Come Out Ahead [...] On domestic discretionary spending, the current spending budget that Obama has accepted is already below the level of the Paul Ryan budget!"

"Ilargi: Winter In America Gets Colder - Why We Choose Poverty" - I have a problem with the use of the pronoun "we" in this piece, but anyway... .

Marcy Wheeler on "CIA and the President: The Warm Embrace of Mutual Incrimination [...] Again, I think this is the way Presidential Findings are supposed to work: to implicate the President deeply enough to ensure he'll protect the CIA for the crimes he asks it to commit. But it's not the way a democracy is supposed to work."

"Anti-Establishment Journalist Has Spent 400 Days in Jail [...] His name is Barrett Brown, the founder of Project PM, and he also spent some time as an activist embedded with Anonymous, which no doubt earned him the attention of the authorities."

"Wall Street Journal Reporters Sabotaged By Bosses On News Corp Phone Hacking Story"

"The real reason that 500,000 people died in Iraq" - There's a reason why Atrios periodically re-posts the clip of Thomas Friedman explaining that we had to invade Iraq to tell 'em to "Suck on this" - it really does sum it up, and the astonishing thing is that Friedman actually thinks this is not something to be ashamed of. But even Washington insiders admit that this is really the reason we "had to" invade Iraq. Via Atrios, who had a few words to say about it.

Richard Cohen admits he was wrong about Snowden.

Is Tory MP Julian Smith trying to have the Guardian arrested?

Tom Tomorrow: "Security Trek: The Next Generation"

RIP Noel Harrison. Contrary to the obits, the song I remember him for is "A Young Girl".
"Maxine Powell, head of Motown Finishing School, dies at 98 [...] Her Artists Development Department - known as Motown's Finishing School - was considered as important to its operations as any singer or producer. Some of its training included teaching Marvin Gaye to sing with his eyes open and the proper way to exit a limousine."

I don't know what you're seeing on those sidebar adstrips in the US, but I've really been enjoying them since they all started advertising The Halloween Corset Sale! I can't begin to tell you how much of an improvement this is over what I usually see there.

"It took four miles of yarn to turn this tree into a knit squid."

A Lobbyist And A Senator Walk Into A Restaurant ...

MAP: Christian Kendrick called it "The rise and fall of the Jennifer Empire" - six decades of girls' names.

MAP: What each country leads the world in. I think they left a few things out, but I wonder if this map might have made Ricardo think.

"Whoever painted this church mural really didn't think it through did they?" [Link]

Smokey Robinson & The Miracles

Well, I just had to laugh

Anthropologist Karen Ho talked about Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, based on interviews with employees of Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and other firms, on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd.
If you haven't listened to this week's Virtually Speaking Sundays with McJoan and Stuart yet, here's the homework:
Joan McCarter, "How House Republicans guaranteed a shutdown: by changing the rules"
Rules Chair admits changing rule to prevent vote to fund govt
Jay Rosen, "The production of innocence and the reporting of American politics"

David Dayen, "Right-wing nuts nab new way to sabotage Obamacare: Remember how the shutdown deal only gave the GOP "small" concessions? One low-profile component could prove costly."

Benjamin Wittes, "The Debt Ceiling as a National Security Issue: If a body other than the Congress of the United States were actively contemplating a step that would, by the accounts of virtually all economists, tank the U.S. economy, cause interest rates to shoot up, and trigger a financial crisis, we would talk about that body as threat to national security. At a minimum, we would talk about the step it is contemplating in national security terms. A government shutdown, after all, can invite a national security event, but by itself it isn't one. It's a game of Russian Roulette. A default, by contrast, is a national security event, the loss of one of this country's great international and domestic assets: Its undoubted creditworthiness. It is an asset on which much of this country's prosperity and power rests."

"Glenn Greenwald Exits 'The Guardian' to Help Launch New Media Outlet [...] But who was the moneyman behind the new venture? A short while later Reuters was the first to report this scoop on the man behind the offer: 'Glenn Greenwald, who has made headlines around the world with his reporting on U.S. electronic surveillance programs, is leaving the Guardian newspaper to join a new media venture funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, according to people familiar with the matter.'"
"The extraordinary promise of the new Greenwald-Omidyar venture [...] By hiring Greenwald & Co., Omidyar is making a clear statement that he's the billionaire exception. A little more than a year ago, Greenwald was writing for Salon.com, which (somehow) has a market cap of $3.5 million. Six years ago he was still typing away on his own blog. It's like Izzy Stone running into a civic-minded plastics billionaire determined to take I.F. Stone's Weekly large back in the day. It does sound exciting. And this is interesting: "NYU's Jay Rosen interviewed Omidyar and breaks the news that he was one of the few people approached about purchasing the Washington Post. That process led Omidyar to 'ask himself what could be done with the same investment if you decided to build something from the ground up,' Rosen writes. Wait... did he say 'same investment'? As in $250 million-ish? Yes he did."

Sirota: "Hostage-Taking In The Classroom [...] 'Experimenting with new methods' is Wall Street Journal-ese for anti-union aristocrats like Bloomberg using children as pawns in an ideological scheme to turn more of the public school system into union-free - and failing - charter schools." And that's just one little thing.

We're having a resurgence of 'Evil Old People Are Eating Their Kids' from the media, again as an argument for cutting Social Security. You really have to wonder how these people got the idea that old people are magically going to take care of themselves if they lose SS, as if everyone didn't know that one great selling point of the program is that it helps prevent old people from being a burden to their children. Your choice isn't just between "the government" taking care of granny and granny magically being kept on longer at the company she has been working for or finding a new job, it's between granny having no job and granny having no job but receiving Social Security. Which means the real choice is between granny maybe being able to afford to stay in her own home and pay for her own groceries, or granny moving in with the kids and grandkids and being another mouth to feed (one who doesn't have a few extra bucks to send to the grandchildren at Christmas). Not to mention the fact that if granny and grandpa can't afford to retire and can manage to stay in the jobs longer, that means no one below them is moving up and no new jobs are opening up at the bottom for younger people to get onto the jobs ladder. This is all so obvious that it's embarrassing to feel the need to re-state it. Digby, "The moustache of (mis)understanding strikes again: I know there is no more trite phrase in America, but Lord, this Thomas Friedman column is bad is bad. It's so bad you have to read the whole thing to experience the full horror of it. In fact, I'm not even sure he wrote it himself. It reads more like something the messaging shop at Fix the Debt put together to sound like Thomas Friedman."
I rather enjoyed Michael Brooks' response to David Gregory's claim that "entitlements" are "cannibalizing the budget".

"Pete Peterson Exposed: The 'Grand Bargain' Hoax"

"Miami attorney to challenge criminal asset seizures in Supreme Court case" - The forfeiture process is meant to reduce the possibility that "organized crime" earnings will be spent on legal defense rather than be available to be spent by the government. What it really means is that the cops take your money and then you can't defend yourself. And, interestingly, no one seizes the assets of bankers who visibly acquired their ill-gotten gains by breaking the law. It will be interesting to see what Scalia says in this case.

I generally avoid the Republican Crazy Train, but I'll make an exception for this story on John Bolton and his place in history: "But Mr. Bustani and some senior officials, both in Brazil and the United States, say Washington acted because it believed that the organization under Mr. Bustani threatened to become an obstacle to the administration's plans to invade Iraq. As justification, Washington was claiming that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, possessed chemical weapons, but Mr. Bustani said his own experts had told him that those weapons were destroyed in the 1990s, after the Persian Gulf war. 'Everybody knew there weren't any,' he said. 'An inspection would make it obvious there were no weapons to destroy. This would completely nullify the decision to invade.' Mr. Bolton disputed that account. 'He made that argument after we invaded,' he said. Twice during the interview, Mr. Bolton said, 'The kind of person who believes that argument is the kind who puts tin foil on his ears to ward off cosmic waves.'" Since everyone saw this happening in real-time, you'd have to be a moron to believe anything John Bolton says.

Beating the DCCC's protection of Republicans, one district at a time.

Ted Rall, "My Fake French Birthplace and the NSA: Why the Best Way to Keep Big Data Safe is Not to Have Any [...] After the war, the French realized that data collected for innocent purposes during the 1930s under a leftist government headed by a Jewish president had facilitated the murder of thousands of people who might otherwise have escaped or stayed hidden."

Glenn Greenwald, "The perfect epitaph for establishment journalism: "'If MI5 warns that this is not in the public interest who am I to disbelieve them?', says the former editor of The Independent."

This bit in Bill Moyers' "Let's Call The Shutdown What It Is: Secession By Another Means" bothers me: "Despite what they say, Obamacare is only one of their targets. Before they will allow the government to reopen, they demand employers be enabled to deny birth control coverage to female employees; they demand Obama cave on the Keystone pipeline; they demand the watchdogs over corporate pollution be muzzled and the big bad regulators of Wall Street sent home. Their ransom list goes on and on. The debt ceiling is next. They would have the government default on its obligations and responsibilities. " I am befuddled by his including of "caving" on the Keystone pipeline. Is he implying that Obama opposes Keystone? Or that Keystone is a good thing? I don't get that at all, because everything else on this list (excerpted, he tells us, from a much longer list that "goes on and on"), is something every good liberal opposes, right? Something Obama (at least publicly) opposes. But Obama doesn't oppose Keystone, and from all reports he seems to be the guy who is keeping it alive. Does Moyers believe this is not the case? I can't believe he actually supports it himself, so....

How the Obama administration is killing black colleges

Ten myths and facts about the death penalty

Russell Brand on all kinds of revolution

Lee Camp on gun rights

Benedict Cumberbatch wrote a letter to Julian Assange asking if they could meet. Here's Assange's reply.

Well, fancy that - CMike tips me off that Sanjay Gupta has finally admitted that marijuana has medical value and actually has a documentary about it.

One of the most stunning things I ever saw anyone say on the internet was back in the old Usenet days when a libertarian opined that what made Dilbert so funny is that it was so unrealistic, no one had those experiences. Which I guess explains why he was a libertarian, at least. Anyway, here's a post called "How 'Dilbert' Practically Wrote Itself."

"Gamers solve decade old HIV puzzle in ten days."

Heels

"A Day in the Life"

It's a rich man's game, no matter what they call it

This week's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays are Joan McCarter and Stuart Zechman. This should really be interesting. I kind of fell down when I was on with Joan last time because she seemed to keep heading toward what's good for Democratic Party candidates, and Jay seemed to be going there with her, and I kept feeling like I'd just walked into a brick wall. I don't think Stuart will let them get away with that.

You know what would be a good deal? A good deal would be if Obama agreed to delay the individual mandate for a year (or forever) if the Republicans agree to get rid of the debt ceiling. Really. Look who thinks so: the old Barack Obama. Note his main point: The reason people don't buy health insurance is because they can't afford it. What he doesn't say is that they especially can't afford to pay for an overpriced product that doesn't do what they're paying for.

Ted Rall checked the website, and he's not finding any affordable options: "New York State's healthcare plans range from Fidelis Care's 'Bronze' plan at $810.84 per month to $2554.71 per month for something I didn't bother to look up because if I had $2500+ a month to spend on doctors, I'd buy a doctor and have him/her live with me and dole out pills like I was Michael Jackson. The deductibles - the amount you pay out of pocket every year before you the insurer has to give you anything at all - are outrageously high. Fidelis Care Bronze has a $3000/year deductible per person. I'm in pretty good health; it's a rare year I spend that much on doctors. After the $3000/year deductible, they pay 50% of your bills. So if you rack up $5000/year in medical bills, you pay $4000 and they pay $1000. Pretty damned crappy." That doesn't even qualify as insurance, it's just extortion.

"Obama: We're Willing To Fund Government With Republican Priorities [...] 'The bill that is being presented to end the government shutdown reflects Republican priorities,' Obama said, addressing federal employees at FEMA in Washington. 'It's the Republican budget. The funding levels of this short-term funding bill, called the CR, is far lower than what Democrats think it should be.'" Gosh, I wonder how we ended up there? That headline, by the way, is at Talking Points Memo, where I guess it's supposed to prove how amicable dear old Barack is, contrary to Republican charges. Which would be great if we had wanted a Democratic president so that he could give the Republicans whatever they want.

"The Obama Administration and the Press [...] 'I think we have a real problem,' said New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane. 'Most people are deterred by those leaks prosecutions. They're scared to death. There's a gray zone between classified and unclassified information, and most sources were in that gray zone. Sources are now afraid to enter that gray zone. It's having a deterrent effect. If we consider aggressive press coverage of government activities being at the core of American democracy, this tips the balance heavily in favor of the government.'"

"Judge recants own decision on GOP polling place photo id law later upheld by SCOTUS: This is nothing less than remarkable. The 7th circuit court judge who wrote the majority opinion in the landmark Crawford v. Marion County Election Board case, has now admitted he got it wrong! 'I think we did not have enough information,' Judge Richard Posner said in remarks today. 'If the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.'" Richard Posner! That's twice this year that Posner has shown signs of being more than just a right-wing operative. I can't help but wonder where this sudden respect for liberal government came from.

"Edward Snowden says NSA surveillance programmes 'hurt our country': Video clips posted to WikiLeaks website show former NSA analyst speaking for the first time since July asylum plea. In short video clips posted by the WikiLeaks website on Friday, Snowden said that the NSA's mass surveillance, which he disclosed before fleeing to Russia, 'puts us at risk of coming into conflict with our own government'. [...] 'They hurt our economy. They hurt our country. They limit our ability to speak and think and live and be creative, to have relationships and to associate freely,' Snowden said."

"Swiss to Vote on Guaranteed $2800 Monthly Income for All Adults: The Swiss really know how to kick us when we're down - while our congress is busy shutting itself down because it's run by soulless opportunists, the Swiss people have gathered enough signatures to force a referendum on whether they should guarantee $2800 in monthly income for all adults." You know, we should be doing this. (via)

"Vets and Seniors Are Ending the Drug War [...] Pollsters are finally accepting (though scratching their heads over the fact) that older Americans are the fastest growing segment of the population to support the Drug Peace era. The reason is pretty simple: in a pill-popping society, any plant that will, with negligible side-effects, reduce the number of capsules in the weekly pill box is welcome. [...] So that explains seniors. Guess what? The reasons the second 'surprising' group to support the end of the war on cannabis - military veterans returning from combat in harm's way - also feel so strongly, are nearly identical to those expressed by seniors across the nation. They are eager to be free of addictive or otherwise harmful pharmaceuticals after their service has ended."

"Democracy Alliance, Network Of Rich Liberal Donors, Signals Shift Away From Partisan Political Activity." Took their damned time.

@ggreenwald: "At some point, things like this [Edward Snowden should be put on kill list, joke US intelligence chiefs] - become a pathology, not a "joke" [Obama threatens Jonas Brothers with drone strikes] - [Time correspondent under fire for tweet suggesting Assange be killed in drone strike]"

I actually couldn't believe my radio Saturday morning. I'd managed not to pay much attention to the news Friday but it turns out the war on a free press is taking a giant step over here with the government's proposal that newspapers should have a royal charter. Then I just watched the previous night's Have I Got News For You and Ian Hislop was explaining that this law includes a provision that says that if someone sues your unchartered newspaper and you win, you still have to pay their costs. So if you run an unchartered newspaper, it's open season on you for nuisance suits.

In case you forgot, I'm a big supporter of being a big supporter of organizations that genuinely do good, and if you're going to pay for mobile phone service in the US, you could do a lot of good by signing up with CREDO - and that includes supporting Sam Seder by signing up through his site at that link. You might also want to get the free Majority Report app, which everyone says is really great. I can't tell you anything about any of it, because I don't live there and I hardly ever use my phone at all, so I have a dumb phone that, y'know, does a few rare phone calls and text messages and is pay-as-you-go so it costs me almost nothing every month. I listen to Sam's show at home on my computer. And, speaking of Sam, he did some great shows recently that included interviews with Digby, Becky Bond, and Guy Lawson of Rolling Stone (recommended).

100 years ago, America met modern art.

The Picture Book Lab

The history of movie popcorn

Freudian slip A; Freudian slip B

First Look at Game of Bones, the X-Rated Version of Westeros [SFW!]

"This anamorphic optical illusion is the most mind-bending thing you'll see today" - I think they should have added a pipe just so you could say - well, you know.

Telekineses seen in coffee shop.

Dolly Parton et alia