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

'Cause how could anything ever go wrong?

This photo of Janis on her (formerly oyster white) 1965 Porsche 356c Cabriolet that Dave Richards repainted with what he called "the history of the universe" was stolen from Bartcop.com.

Tonight's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays will be Marcy Wheeler and David Dayen, which should be really good - two of the best reporters anywhere if you want to know what's really going on. (And well, well, our very own Marcy Wheeler has been profiled in Newsweek: "Wheeler, known to her Twitter followers and readers as emptywheel, pores over government memos, transcripts and court opinions in an upstairs room in her home in Grand Rapids. Bookshelves hold the thousands of pages she's read over the years and often returns to when piecing together her investigations.")
Bruce Schneier was last week's guest on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd, and he talked about just how much the NSA has damaged the internet - among other things. It's about power, as Bruce also said in his TED talk.
Last Sunday, Cliff Schechter talked with David Neiwert on Virtually Speaking.

I can't recommend Aimai's "The Punishers Want To Run The Country or We Are All Tipped Waitstaff Now" enough. In it, she draws a pretty direct line between the conservative antipathy toward federal workers and the practice of tipping as a means to reward or punish (that doesn't actually work). What she left out is the magic word "aristocracy", here represented as a belief that money should buy you superiority over people you are in a position to punish, and the desire to be in that position. "The Restaurant customer, and I'd argue many Americans, don't respect work or workers and see situations in which they are served by a worker as a kind of passion play in which the served get to experience the power of the purse, the power of the john vis a vis the prostitute, the power to coerce service and specifically the power to punish one person for disappointment or bad service or really anything the tipper wants to punish that person for. More than that: Americans see tipping as an occasion to right the wrongs of a situation and to restore a balance--a balance that is upset when one person (the client) expects something good and gets something they didn't want" (via)

"Plutocrats at Work: How Big Philanthropy Undermines Democracy [...] One hundred years later, big philanthropy still aims to solve the world's problems - with foundation trustees deciding what is a problem and how to fix it. They may act with good intentions, but they define 'good.' The arrangement remains thoroughly plutocratic: it is the exercise of wealth-derived power in the public sphere with minimal democratic controls and civic obligations. Controls and obligations include filing an annual IRS form and (since 1969) paying an annual excise tax of up to 2 percent on net investment income. There are regulations against self-dealing, lobbying (although 'educating' lawmakers is legal), and supporting candidates for public office. In reality, the limits on political activity barely function now: loopholes, indirect support for groups that do political work, and scant resources for regulators have crippled oversight. Because they are mostly free to do what they want, mega-foundations threaten democratic governance and civil society (defined as the associational life of people outside the market and independent of the state). When a foundation project fails - when, say, high-yield seeds end up forcing farmers off the land or privately operated charter schools displace and then underperform traditional public schools - the subjects of the experiment suffer, as does the general public. Yet the do-gooders can simply move on to their next project. Without countervailing forces, wealth in capitalist societies already translates into political power; big philanthropy reinforces this tendency. [...] Despite scores of studies, the relationship of charitable giving to tax incentives remains unclear. Too many different factors determine giving: religiosity, innate altruism, family tradition, social attitudes, community ties, alumni loyalty, fluctuations in income. But other patterns of giving are well known. Less than 10 percent of all charity in the United States addresses basic human needs. The wealthiest donors devote an even tinier portion of their giving to these needs. Most major donations go to universities and colleges, hospitals, and cultural institutions, often for highly visible building projects carrying the donor's name."

"Yes, for the Millionth Time: You Can Be Fired for This [...] Regardless of what buttons are being set off by this guy, the story just confirms a point some of us have been making over and over again: the American workplace is one of the most coercive institutions around. It's a place where, whatever the niceties and pieties of our allegedly tolerant culture may be, bosses and supervisors get to act out - and on - their most regressive anxieties and fears. It's a playground of cultural and political recidivism, where men and women (but more often men) are given the tools to inflict and enforce their beliefs, their style, their values upon their employees."

"One Nation Under Shutdown: Here's How Congress Is Hurting Your State." I actually don't even want to talk about this. It's an outrage that it's happening, but it's an outrage that Obama could put a stop to if he wanted to. He doesn't want to.

"Will the Affordable Care Act Make Health Care More Affordable?" - What's important about this article isn't what it's saying, but that Rand is saying it, which means it's what a lot of people are listening to.

"How a Purse Snatching Led to the Legal Justification for NSA Domestic Spying"

It's the same story over here - The anti-sex people get professorships, government funding, and awards from the Queen. "In it for the money? The smart investment is in an anti-sex worker career."

Elliot K. Shorter (1939-2013).

"Everything You've Been Told About How to Eat Is Wrong."

Little did I know there was a Space Opera Society...

Don't look down.

"Over 100 long-lost Doctor Who episodes found by dedicated fans - in Ethiopia."
And:Bigger on the inside

You knew that Steve Brust wrote a Firefly novel that you can download free here, right?

It's been a long time since I saw The Wizard of Speed and Time, but it's still pretty damned impressive. Made on film.

"My Baby"

Some rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen

Dear Kevin and Atrios,

Yes, there's always been an element of right-wing craziness in America and in the Republican Party, but that used to be contained by the Democratic Party, which was more likely to respond to the majority of the country - and the needs of the American people.

That's no longer true. The Democratic leadership today agrees with the policy goals of the crazy right wing, they just don't foam at the mouth when they explain themselves, thus lulling people into thinking they believe something else.

It is not hard to hate this Democratic leadership, as long as you don't feel a tribal loyalty to being a Democrat or a "liberal". On television, you rarely see the identified Democrat or "liberal" make substantive arguments against Republicans, so it's not as if they are holding up a standard that might make self-identified "conservatives" or Republicans open their eyes. In fact, they generally confirm whatever the Republicans said while nit-picking, thus making the Republicans sound even more correct.

So, just as a start, you have the so-called "liberals" and "moderates" and "centrists" of the elite enabling the craziest behavior by the Republicans.

How do these crazy Republicans get to be leaders in their party? It's pretty simple, really - they have no opposition party to compete with. The gerrymandering that gives them a disproportionate percentage of seats in Congress has in large part been agreed to by Democrats, often creating safe Republican seats where there should be none. (I mean, New York? How can that happen in New York?)

But it's worse than that - there are beatable crazy Republicans in the leadership of their party who the Democratic leadership has deliberately refused to oppose. Dems could easily have beaten people like Paul Ryan, for example, if they had simply agreed to put some money behind the Democratic candidate.

And while all this madness goes on, as we watch the most mean-hearted and bullying creeps in the country living high on the hog, we are constantly being told - by Democrats! - that WE have to sacrifice "for the good of the country". Billionaires openly steal our homes and no one even forces them to make restitution, let alone put them in jail where they belong, and WE should be the ones to sacrifice? Really?

We've already sacrificed quite a good deal. We've sacrificed a country where we could afford to pay our medical bills and prescriptions out of pocket, where there were decent jobs (with decent protections) for almost anyone who wanted one, where we had schools that were mostly good and slowly improving, where the fat of the land was available to most and being slowly extended to all. Because suddenly it went into reverse and we have a country with high unemployment, unceasing debt, where only one party to a contract has to worry about defaulting (because the stronger signee can just do what it wants), where vital resources are becoming unaffordable, where things we've bought and paid for can be stolen out from under us on the whim of some rich creep who wants to be even richer (and wants to make us poorer), where no one says, "It's a free country," anymore, because it isn't. The land of the free is now a police state, the home of the brave is now cowering in fear of imaginary Caliphates in Kansas. We are the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free - and there is no one to welcome us but the grave. So there'd better be a Heaven.

And Democrats are telling us that we have to give up what little we have left. That's not how Democrats used to talk. So if Republicans sound crazy, the Democrats who keep telling us the Republicans have a point, that the Republicans are reasonable men who can come to reasonable agreements sound even crazier.

Seriously, if you are not angry, there is something wrong with you.

* * * * *

Matt Taibbi, "Looting the Pension Funds: All across America, Wall Street is grabbing money meant for public workers [...] Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo's strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion - 14 percent of the state fund - to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb's Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina's Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer's Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. Felicitously, Loeb, Garschina and Singer serve on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank with a history of supporting benefit-slashing reforms. The institute named Raimondo its 2011 "Urban Innovator" of the year. [...] Here's what this game comes down to. Politicians run for office, promising to deliver law and order, safe and clean streets, and good schools. Then they get elected, and instead of paying for the cops, garbagemen, teachers and firefighters they only just 10 minutes ago promised voters, they intercept taxpayer money allocated for those workers and blow it on other stuff. It's the governmental equivalent of stealing from your kids' college fund to buy lap dances. [...] So even if Pew's numbers were right, the "unfunded liability" crisis had nothing to do with the systemic unsustainability of public pensions. Thanks to a deadly combination of unscrupulous states illegally borrowing from their pensioners, and unscrupulous banks whose mass sales of fraudulent toxic subprime products crashed the market, these funds were out some $930 billion. Yet the public was being told that the problem was state workers' benefits were simply too expensive." This isn't just about pensions, though - Taibbi's story is a crash course on how our owners have been stealing our country out from under us and using fantasy math and a truckload of lies to bamboozle us all.
Sam Seder did a good interview with Taibbi following up on this story, on The Majority Report.

Alex Pareene, "How I botched it on CNBC" - I was actually a little surprised that when he was asked what shady practices JP Morgan Chase had been up to, Pareene didn't point out that the entire segment was about the fact that they'd been investigated and fined for those shady practices.

"Larry Summers: Goldman Sacked: Joseph Stiglitz couldn't believe his ears. Here they were in the White House, with President Bill Clinton asking the chiefs of the US Treasury for guidance on the life and death of America's economy, when the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers turns to his boss, Secretary Robert Rubin, and says, "What would Goldman think of that?" Huh? Then, at another meeting, Summers said it again: What would Goldman think? A shocked Stiglitz, then Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, told me he'd turned to Summers, and asked if Summers thought it appropriate to decide US economic policy based on "what Goldman thought." As opposed to say, the facts, or say, the needs of the American public, you know, all that stuff that we heard in Cabinet meetings on The West Wing. Summers looked at Stiglitz like Stiglitz was some kind of naive fool who'd read too many civics books."

"Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the 'pathetic' American media [..] The Obama administration lies systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him. 'It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama],' he declares in an interview with the Guardian." And I see Susie has video of Hersh's excellent recent speech to go with that - .well worth watching the whole 90 minutes of the man himself explaining what he got and how he got it, journalism, and ethics.

This is fun - Tweety kicks Congressman off a show after "cheap shot".
"Why conservatives should re-read Milton Friedman"

Expand Social Security.

"How Thor Power Hammered Publishing" - The 1979 Supreme Court decision in Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue made it more expensive for publishers to maintain inventory for older books.

A short Wonder Woman fan film

I missed this lovely little Google doodle they did for Claude Debussy's 151st birthday. (The Roswell one is kinda cute, too.)

They'll be rocking in the projects

Panelists on this week's Virtually Speaking Sundays were Digby and Susie Madrak, with a call-in from Stephanie Kelton, reminding people that the entire debt limit argument is a scam.
Homework for this show:
Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union speech
Yves Smith on another round of budget brinkmanship (but DCBlogger has some nasty thoughts.)
Nicole Bell's Open Letter to Deborah Turness, President of NBC News, in response to Chuck Todd's statement that it's not his job to "sell" Obamacare, it's Obama's job. (Follow-ups: "Why We Fight: Holding Journalists' Feet to the Fire", "Jonathan Alter Corrects Media's Constant Harping on ACA Polls.")

Sam Seder interviewed David Dayen about banks ripping people off and courts letting them do it on The Majority Report. I think that's the show where I pulled the quote out, "You do not know how bad your health insurance is until you really need it."

Lambert in Naked Capitalism on the ObamaCare rollout and how Democrats and Republicans are conspiring to prevent us from having good health care.

Salon interview with Dean Baker:
"Salon: So what has this process shown about the Obama approach to economic policy?
Baker: If nothing else, I think this is kind of a confirmation of what I'm reluctant to believe: I think he thinks things are good. I mean, even if he doesn't want to blame Larry Summers for where we are, I would think he would want to say it's not a good situation, Larry Summers was really important in getting us here, and why go back? I understand [Obama's] got all kinds of opposition in congress. But that you would act as though things are good now, that's to my view close to crazy. But I actually think he and his people might believe that."

Alex Pareene notes that the NYT has uncovered Bill de Blasio's scandalous past as someone who cares what happens to people, suggesting that he might do the same in the office of the mayor!

Paul Krugman recommends an article about how proponents of austerity are lying about their motives. And they apparently assume the other side is doing the same.
Krugman on The Rage of the Privileged

No surprises here: "Close ties between White House, NSA spying review: Stung by public unease about new details of spying by the National Security Agency, President Barack Obama selected a panel of advisers he described as independent experts to scrutinize the NSA's surveillance programs to be sure they weren't violating civil liberties and to restore Americans' trust. But with just weeks remaining before its first deadline to report back to the White House, the review panel has effectively been operating as an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA and all other U.S. spy efforts."

"Former Gov. Don Siegelman Brings the Hammer Down on Tom DeLay from Prison: Alabama's former Democratic governor issues statement to The BRAD BLOG, slamming the former GOP House Majority Leader for his part in a $20 million 'money laundering' conspiracy to defeat him..." You remember that Siegelman is in jail for the sole crime of being a Democrat, right? The idea that Tom DeLay doesn't belong in jail is almost as outrageous as the fact that Siegelman is still there.

"This Job Can Kill You. Literally." Because being an adjunct professor is no walk in the park.

When Democrats vote with Republicans... "There's something profoundly hypocritical about the DCCC asking grassroots donors to send them money to fight against Republicans who voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, just so they can funnel that money into the reelection campaigns of Mike McIntyre and Jim Matheson" - the two Democrats who voted with the Republicans to repeal the PPACA or shut down the government. I don't know why Howie used the word "hypocritical" when, more importantly, it is fraudulent.

It's good to see people protesting the TPP - and maybe making people more aware of it.

The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish

Daniel Webster's speech in the Senate on The Constitution and the Union, 7 March 1850.

Trolling the Veep: "Biden Recruited To Hand Out Free Joints"

Commenter ksix checks out Wikipedia and decides that, using Marxist analysis, Stuart and I are both right! Those New Democrats are two mints in one.

"An Even Dozen Signs We're All Nuts" - most of these are good, but the Justin Bieber crack is just wasted space that could have been used to talk about, say, how we're being ripped off by the medical industry. I don't think pre-teenage girls getting crushes on some boy they think is cute is a sign of anything other than, you know, heterosexuality.

Alan Grayson's Email, "Peace, and Eric Clapton"

What literary character are you? (I think I've come to hate these things, but I'm posting it out of nostalgia.)

What would it be like to be raised by BatDad?

Thanks to the anonymous commenter (oh, it's Matilda) who recommended these gorgeous landscape photographs by Maciej Duczynski.

"When Johnny Strikes Up The Band," live.

All I've got is a photograph

Tim Noah was the guest on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd this week. Tim's recent book, The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, "provides evidence of two inequality trends: between the college educated and those who are not, and between the 1% and everyone else." What I found most interesting was the fact that this is Tim Noah, who hasn't been all that far outside of the CW (and still clearly believes a lot of it), a former senior editor at The New Republic, and he seems to be morphing into...well, liberalism. The clear suggestion here is that more and more members of the press corps are starting to realize that they aren't part of the elite, and that their ox really is getting gored.
And something else is going on, too - that people on the Republican right and on the libertarian right are starting to make common cause with liberals on issues that were once simply partisan and can now be seen differently - in things like David Vitter working with the most liberal Democrats in Congress to try to clean up the financial industry, and things like Rand Paul signing on to the once unspeakably liberal cause of getting rid of mandatory minimum sentences. Since this sort of issue is far more important to what's happening to the black community than almost anything (other than the general economy) over the last few decades, it will be interesting to see how this shakes out the partisan divide. But it's also reassuring that, at long last, we are seeing some Democrats actually talk like liberals and make the liberal case on these issues.

David Dayen on how the courts are preventing homeowners from filing class action suits against the banks: "Those defrauded by Bank of America aren't allowed to file a collective complaint thanks to a 2011 Supreme Court ruling."

Five Charts You Need to See of our non-recovery recovery.

Adam Weinstein doesn't feel special or entitled, just poor. How dumb do you have to be not to notice that things are too tight for most people today, regardless of which generation they're in? Yeah, a lot of boomers are better off than their kids and grandkids, but the truth is that even a substantial proportion of boomers are losing or have lost everything, and can see for themselves that their kids can't find jobs because there aren't any and the costs of higher education are simply unsupportable. People who get paid good money to write about how this or that generation "feels entitled" and deserves to be cut loose from what few supports our system has left should never be listened to. And none of this has to happen. This is all a decision made by a few powerful creeps, and their answer is to pay some privileged journalists to write about how the poor got too much already, the olds got too much, the young got too much, and everybody wants more than they deserve - except for the very rich, who deserve more more more until there is nothing left for everyone else. If your kids aren't angry, they should be. If your parents and siblings aren't angry, they should be. It should surprise no one that the "generation" that is writing all this crap about "entitled" young people has names like "Megan McArdle", of course, but no one should be fooled by this crap. If you still think it's generational warfare, you are way behind the curve. Ah, I see via Atrios that Roy Edroso went after this one, too.

"One Disturbing Reason For Our Exploding Prison Population" - because the prison contracts guarantee the state will pay the prison company for unused beds at a high price if quotas aren't filled.

"The Government is Spying on You: ACLU Releases New Evidence of Overly Broad Surveillance of Everyday Activities."

Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange, and others participated in a 90-minute discussion of The war on whistleblowers and journalism, and you can watch the video at the Guardian site, where Glenn posted it with some interesting background and links on his page.

"NSA Sends Letter to Its ‘Extended' Family to Reassure Them That They Will ‘Weather' This ‘Storm': The National Security Agency sent out a letter to all of its employees and affiliates, including contractors, that could be printed and shared with family, friends and colleagues. It was intended to reassure them that the NSA is not really the abusive and unchecked spying agency engaged in illegal activity that someone reading former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's disclosures might think it happens to be."

You might be an Obot if you attack Jeremy Scahill: "Jeremy Scahill, an investigative foreign correspondent whose first documentary, Dirty Wars, opens Friday, writes for The Nation and achieved his biggest success with Blackwater, a best-selling book critiquing security contractors hired by the George W. Bush administration. Neither of which keeps him from being labeled a right-wing stooge by detractors. "Most of my hate mail nowadays comes from liberals, not conservatives," he said. This is because Mr. Scahill has also been an outspoken critic of President Obama. Specifically, he disapproves of what he describes as the administration's efforts to "normalize and legitimize" targeted assassinations - drone-executed and otherwise - Special Operations raids and other covert military practices that blur the battle lines of the war on terrorism."

Syrian President: 'In 2003 we proposed UN to get rid of WMD in the entire Middle East but U.S. was against the proposal'

Credit where it's due: Obama did something that slightly makes things better by extending minimum wage and overtime protections to home care workers. Yes, it's a situation that was intentionally racist, but that is less the case now and the fact is that even people who already, theoretically, have these protections mostly don't have them in practice these days, and by the way, the minimum wage is still much, much lower than it should be. And this is good, too, but let's remember that benefits only accrue to people who have jobs, and in the current economy, equality means an equal right to no jobs. But it's something.

Alan Grayson asks the questions that clear up Benghazi.

In comments, ksix asks: "Remember this profile in presidential courage from the Clinton years? He certainly did set the tone for New Democrats." He's referencing "Is the CIA above the law?" which says, "PARIS -- On the day that Alger Hiss' death was made known, the New York Times reported that Richard Nuccio, a senior State Department officer, has been threatened with criminal charges and faces the ruin of his government career because last year he made it known to a member of the House Intelligence Committee that the CIA had repeatedly lied to it, in defiance of the law, about its responsibility in the murders of an American citizen and the husband of another American in Guatemala. The CIA argues that it is a crime (the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation of Mr. Nuccio) for an official of the government to privately inform an appropriate member of Congress -- properly cleared to receive classified information -- that the CIA had lied to Congress about illegal actions that included complicity in murder."

If you haven't been asked to sign A Statement of Trans-Inclusive Feminism and Womanism yet, you can still add your name in support.

The New York Times 1924: "Hitler Tamed By Prison. [...] He looked a much sadder and wiser man today..."

RIP Ray Dolby, 80: "Dolby left behind a legacy that is etched in the annals of the audio and film industry, changing the face of studio recording, and blazing a path for high fidelity and surround sound in both movie theaters and the home that is still being followed today."

"ReThink Review: Good Ol' Freda - The Beatles' Longtime Secretary Speaks [...] Freda Kelly, who ran the Beatles' fan club and was the secretary for their manager Brian Epstein, has refused to speak about or profit from her account of the eleven years she spent working for the Beatles. But with a desire for her grandson to know her story and her place in rock history, Freda is now ready to talk about her time at the epicenter of Beatlemania, even if she isn't ready to spill all of the beans just yet -- or ever."

"Firefly Premiered 11 Years Ago Today, It's About Time We Recapped It"

Arlo's Flickr stream - some lovely stuff here.

"Maxime Qavtaradze is literally close to the heavens." Photo essay with some great pictures, and a movie trailer for The Stylite.

A Year of Incredible Space Photos: Royal Observatory's Winning Images

Autocorrect

Ringo Starr and some friends, live

Where angels fear to tread

Panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays this week were Avedon Carol and (rock star!) Stuart Zechman, who discussed the day's big headline about Larry Summers, the horrible Unaffordable Care Act, and the horror of the morning talk show pundits that Obama may have let the popular will influence his decision to do the right thing about Syria. Stuart is the star of this one, I could barely hear anything I said anyway - but, really, you should always pay attention when Stuart talks, 'cause even when I disagree with him, he's still packed with insights and information.

We were all, of course, delighted to hear that Larry Summers withdrew his name from consideration as Fed Chair, although the WaPo story hints that Obama is still looking hither and yon over Yellen's shoulder to find some other (probably male) world-wrecker to give the job to.
Just the other day, Prez HopeyChangey looked so certain to nominate Summers that Alex Pareene, with his usual scathing accuracy, was celebrating the irony this way: "Let's honor Larry Summers' disastrous record: Name him Fed chair today! [...] Laws and policies he championed directly led to the financial crisis, and the same laws and policies caused that crisis to kick off a global recession that we still have not crawled out of. He is more responsible than almost anyone else alive - it's him, Robert Rubin, Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan, basically - for the severity of the crisis. I can't think of a better time to inexplicably reward Summers for his disastrous record than today, as news outlets everywhere revisit those miserable days of five years ago and sort through the aftermath. The ascension should happen as soon as possible. Think of it as a sort of birthday president for the crisis. That sorry anniversary isn't even the only reason an immediate Summers announcement would be apt. You may have noticed that Vladimir Putin has been in the news lately, using the Syrian civil war to raise his stature as an international statesman and undermine the foreign policy of the United States. Putin is basically Larry Summers' fault, too."
But let's not underestimate just how vital Summers was to global meltdown policy: "The Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global Financial Crisis [...] But what was the use of turning US banks into derivatives casinos if money would flee to nations with safer banking laws? The answer conceived by the Big Bank Five: eliminate controls on banks in every nation on the planet -- in one single move. It was as brilliant as it was insanely dangerous. [...] Why in the world would any nation agree to let its banking system be boarded and seized by financial pirates like JP Morgan? The answer, in the case of Ecuador, was bananas. Ecuador was truly a banana republic. The yellow fruit was that nation's life-and-death source of hard currency. If it refused to sign the new FSA, Ecuador could feed its bananas to the monkeys and go back into bankruptcy. Ecuador signed. And so on - with every single nation bullied into signing. Every nation but one, I should say. Brazil's new President, Inacio Lula da Silva, refused. In retaliation, Brazil was threatened with a virtual embargo of its products by the European Union's Trade Commissioner, one Peter Mandelson, according to another confidential memo I got my hands on. But Lula's refusenik stance paid off for Brazil which, alone among Western nations, survived and thrived during the 2007-9 bank crisis. China signed - but got its pound of flesh in return. It opened its banking sector a crack in return for access and control of the US auto parts and other markets. (Swiftly, two million US jobs shifted to China.)"

Atrios has a New Rule: "Any pundit who advocates war for supposed humanitarian reasons must be able to point to 5 recent occasions when they advocated for achieving humanitarian goals using non-killing methods. Otherwise, STFU."

"Trayvon Martin's Medical Examiner: Prosecution Threw the Case [...] According to the former assistant coroner, the results of Martin's autopsy clearly showed that, despite Zimmerman's statements regarding their altercation, there was no feasible way for Martin to have been on top of Zimmerman when the gun was fired, because the bullet entered Martin's back." He's the former assistant coroner because they fired him - he believes because he questioned the way the case was handled.

Susie says: "I try to explain this to people. Tax cuts are only high-cost loans against deferred maintenance."
Isn't it curious how convenient some fires are?

"The Real Reason the Poor Go Without Bank Accounts [...] The depersonalization of banking is widespread. But there are an increasing number of Americans who frequent alternative financial service providers where the personal relationships between the teller and the customer still matter tremendously."

"How Dems view this fall's fiscal fights: Several liberal bloggers have raised an interesting question: Are Senate Democrats set to cave in this fall's fiscal fights? Here's the case, as laid out by Jonathan Bernstein, Kevin Drum and Jonathan Cohn. House Republicans want to pass a temporary measure funding the government through December 15 at sequestration levels, give or take. But we don't know if deeply divided House Republicans can even do that. So leverage lies with Dems. Why should they agree to fund the government at austerity levels? Shouldn't they hold out for higher funding levels and force the GOP leadership to pass it with a lot of Dem support? The official position of Senate Dems is they've made no decisions and are waiting to see what House Republicans can pass. But aides have said Senate Dems would probably pass a temporary funding measure at current levels - if House Republicans do. And let's face it: President Obama has not signaled he wants a fight over temporary funding, so there probably won't be one. Progressive groups are wary of Dems accepting GOP austerity spending levels. So would it be a cave?"

EFF's Cheat Sheet to Congress' NSA Spying Bills

Banned book week is coming soon, so what can't you read this year?

The Omni Reboot site is up and Norman Spinrad says you can read the interview with him here.

Pretty flowers. I'm still not sure they're paintings.
Pretty sure these aren't snapshots, though.

Extreme Staircases - They missed out the one across from the Wellington Tavern into Waterloo Station.

Rick Nelson and Marilyn McCoo

A house is not a home

"This man owed $134 in property taxes. The District sold the lien to an investor who foreclosed on his $197,000 house and sold it. He and many homeowners like him were Left with nothing."
Pierce: "For several decades now, we have celebrated sharp practices and gunslinger business-school schemes by which ordinary people get robbed of their jobs, their pensions, their homes, and their livelihoods, or just generally get ground up in schemes concocted by people they don't even know. We based our entire national economy on the law of the jungle, and then we rigged the jungle. This country is now thick with victims who don't know what happened to them, and how, and it is also thick with clever dicks who have made their fortunes in the grinding up of people whom they do not know. The only thing the country is not thick with is conscience. This is another one of the casual cruelties we are training ourselves to overlook. [...] Ultimately, it is cruelty that is the real New Normal. We accept it every time we accept that cops can stop teenagers for "furtive movements," or when they respond to every unusual situation as though it were taking place atop Mount Suribachi. We accept it every time we accept that "the economy" is some faceless force over which we have no control, and that the plight of its victims are somehow the natural result of immutable natural laws, instead of the natural result of thousands of individual decisions, many of which were made down the marble halls not 10 feet from this keyboard, where the Congress is back to discuss, seriously, how a distant government could do such horrible things to its own citizens."

David Dayen , "The jerks got away with it! 5 years after economic collapse, they're still smiling: In summary, the financial industry collectively decided that you could fund economic growth despite stagnant wages through piling on mountains of debt. But when it all went bad, the solution wasn't to rebalance the economy, to get money into the hands of ordinary workers and preference wages over assets. The solution was to point a fire hose of money at the people who caused the problem, and inflate their assets to preserve the status quo. The Federal Reserve's emergency lending and then quantitative easing rescued bank balance sheets. The five biggest U.S. banks are now 30 percent bigger than they were at the height of the crisis, nursed back to health by the government. Anyone who tells you TARP worked is looking at a tiny fraction of multi-trillion-dollar government support. And TARP didn't translate support for the banks into the regular economy. Banks used the TARP program for foreclosure mitigation as a predatory lending system to trap borrowers. Lending for businesses did not increase. Worst of all, despite a crisis built on fraud, nobody who perpetrated that fraud saw the inside of a jail cell, removing any meaningful deterrent for financial crimes. Most of those criminals walked away with enough money to fund their lavish lifestyles forever. The Justice Department recently had to admit that they inflated their own statistics on financial fraud prosecutions, and they disgracefully tried to re-insert the revised stats into old speeches to cover their tracks. I guess fraud is contagious." Via Susie Madrak, who has video to go with it.

"Fighting Back Against Predatory Lenders Is a Struggle for Justice "

David Dayen again, "These Three Democrats Could Torpedo Larry Summers's Nomination" - three members of the Senate Banking Committee named Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley and Elizabeth Warren. It would be nice if they've got the bottle to do it. And if the Republicans on the committee stick to their anti-Obama intransigence, too.

I hope seeing what Michael Bloomberg has to say about the people in our country disabuses those few remaining liberals who thought Bloomberg had any interest in improving New York or anywhere else. Unless he was actually trying to guarantee de Blasio's election, which would make him a secret hero.

Chris Floyd's "Requiem for a Whistleblower" is an unsurprising tale of government vengeance, but this victim went to his grave without all the fanfare we've come to expect.

From Cyber Security Law and Policy, "NSA Roundup: Rep. Holt Proposes Repeal Act, NSA Surveillance Methods, and the Assembly of a Surveillance Review Panel on the Hill."
Schneier: "The Real, Terrifying Reason Why British Authorities Detained David Miranda: "The scariest explanation of all? That the NSA and GCHQ are just showing they don't want to be messed with."
"Our Decreasing Tolerance To Risk" and "Excess Automobile Deaths as a Result of 9/11" (Well, not really as a result of 9/11 - it's a result of the policies that didn't have to happen after 9/11.)

"Documents: NSA violated phone-number rules: NSA presented false information to surveillance court, documents say."

"Replica Enterprise bridge used to sell surveillance to Congress [...] 'Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard,' says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits."

Labor digest: Sick leave in Seattle, Indiana anti-union law's day in court, and TFA

Oh, yeah, Obama made another speech.

Strange that you still can't watch Chris Hayes' The Politics of Power....

Never forget $9.11.
(Really? I mean, really?)

"Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, in Boise, laments 'alarming degree of public ignorance'" - Too bad Ronald Reagan destroyed the country's civics curriculum, huh?

Do you know there's a computer game of "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream"? Complete with Harlan's voice.

World's Largest Cave, Son Doong, Prepping For First Public Tours - some great photos.

There is this folk art I totally didn't know about until now, called Hobo nickels. Some of them are really amazing.

Etta James, "Stop the Wedding"

Dionne Warwick, live

They say that all good things must end someday

On one of the first nice days we had this year, the local baby hurricane ran outside and got down on the ground and kicked up her heels.

This week, Gaius Publius, Stuart Zechman, and Dave Johnson had a very useful discussion of the importance of brainstorming language, and how to promote democracy, and who the enemy is, on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd. I highly recommend this - pass it around. Our commenter CMike says: "Wow, finally it's like someone is ready to write the essential omeM llewoP. For me, this one is the most useful Virtually Speaking --or make that hour of liberal chat-- I've ever listened to. And a special shout out to Dave Johnson, you can't play the straight man any better than that."
Homework for this one is Stuart's earlier post on The Difference Between Us and Them.

Bruce Schneier has been writing up a storm about the disaster the NSA spying program is, and these first two links are from earlier in the week, before the emergence of the latest Snowden leaks, which he calls "explosive".
in The Atlantic, "The Only Way to Restore Trust in the NSA: The public has no faith left in the intelligence community or what the president says about it. A strong, independent special prosecutor needs to clean up the mess. "
in Wired, "How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis - And Can We Resist It?"
But now he's sent me these links:
James Ball, Julian Borger and Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian: "Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security"
Nicole Perlroth in the NYT: "N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web"
Bruce in the Guardian: "The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back" and
"NSA surveillance: A guide to staying secure"

Here's a nice story about some local activism that's turning energy back into a local (and more sustainable) utility, despite massive disinformation campaigns from a big energy company. It's great to see people getting out there and doing the business - and even having some victories.

"Here Are All The People Who Have Died From A Marijuana Overdose [...] Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the federal government wouldn't intervene as Colorado and Washington state implement plans for a system of legalized marijuana for adults. The decision opened the floodgates for other states to pursue similar legalization efforts and outraged police groups apparently not excited to see a shift away from the failed war on drugs." But the War on (Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs kills more people than it saves, and Holder certainly didn't say he would be de-prioritizing it in any other way.

Dean Baker: "Scary Thought on Labor Day Weekend: Obama's Economic Team Think They Are Doing a Good Job."

Texas? "Saddam Was More Compliant With Inspectors [...] Yeah, you read that right. Nearly a half dozen Texas fertilizer plants housing ammonium nitrate, the extremely combustible substance that blew up a West, Texas fertilizer plant that claimed 15 human lives and injured over 200 others have refused to be inspected and, under Texas law, or the lack of them, they have that right. The article goes on to state that lawmakers were "intrigued" by the total lack of cooperation that saw the State Fire Marshall literally turned away at the front door by five fertilizer plant owners."

Harold Meyerson's "A Labor Day proposal for labor: Extend the Civil Rights Act's Title VII protections to workers seeking to unionize."

Dean Baker in AlJazeera, "Leisure or unemployment? It's a political question: The US is the only wealthy country in the world where workers are not guaranteed paid leave."

Digby, "They don't call it wage slavery for nothing."

There's just no excuse for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

"What's wrong with the media" - Libby Spencer likes Jake Tapper more than I do, but his own words condemn his attitude to journalism.

"This Drug Could Save Thousands Of Lives A Year, So Why Aren't We Using It? [...] Despite the effectiveness of naloxone, many states have yet to adopt measures that would remove obstacles to distributing the drug to addicts, family members and first responders. The Fix, a website that covers addiction and recovery, explained opposition to naloxone as a "moral discomfort among drug warriors who apparently feel that the wages of drug use should be death." Many of the drug's critics claim that increasing access to naloxone will only encourage increasingly dangerous drug use, though studies have not been able to confirm this hypothesis. Proponents are quick to point out that any risks associated with naloxone would be minimal compared with the alternative -- death."

"Anatomy of an Al Qaeda 'Conference Call': Dubious sources feed national-security reporter Eli Lake a fraudulent story for political purposes - once again."

"A Pastor Asks A Politician Why He Supports Gay Marriage. It Seems He Wasn't Prepared For His Reply. What do you do when you're a politician live on television and a pastor who is against marriage equality asks you why you support marriage rights for all? You take note from Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, a devout Christian, and do exactly what he does in these amazing four minutes."

Matt Drudge finally works it out.

Russell Brand on Syria

The Library of Congress is Saving Pulp Fiction. (Thanks to Bob Michaelson.)

RIP: Fred Pohl, 93 - Aside from massive contributions to science fiction and fandom, he also made me learn to play bridge.

"Rochus Misch, Bodyguard of Hitler, Dies at 96 ...'I ask you,' he said in the Salon interview, 'if Hitler really did all the terrible things people now say he did, how could he have been our Führer? How is it possible?'"

This is too late for this year, but save it in case you need it in the future: How to interact with author Robert Jackson Bennett at Worldcon

London's Death Ray Building
22 Surefire Ways To Spot A London Newbie

16 Unfortunate Misuses of Punctuation

Hot Wheels wall track

Solar-powered hummingbird

Baby Elephant discovers ocean

Now, this looks like a Hollywood movie I wanna see: The Fifth Estate, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange. (Nice title, that should stick in some craws.) "If you want the truth, you should seek it out for yourself. That's what they're afraid of: You."

Chad & Jeremy, "A Summer Song"