Who will you empower?

"Three Ways Obama Carried Bush's Tyrannical Torch, in Just One Week: If one were looking for a way to demonstrate how faithfully the Obama administration had carried on the legacy of the Bush administration, this past week takes the cake, and no, I'm not talking about making Bush tax cuts on the middle class permanent. In a matter of four days, President Obama ushered in three landmark decisions that further institutionalized the Bush administration's penchant for abridging civil liberties in the name of national security, all the while making us less safe."

Glenn Greenwald reports, "John Brennan's extremism and dishonesty rewarded with CIA Director nomination: "Obama's top terrorism adviser goes from unconfirmable in 2008 to uncontroversial in 2013, reflecting the Obama legacy." (As I write this, I'm listening to Glenn talking live to Sam Seder right now about just how egregious this choice really is, on The Majority Report.)

Jonathan Turley, "Minnesota Man Criminally Charged After Filming Police in Public [...] Henderson, 28, was filming Ramsey County deputies arresting a man when his camera was confiscated by a deputy, Jacqueline Muellner, who suddenly announced 'We'll just take this for evidence.' She also warned Henderson that 'If I end up on YouTube, I'm gonna be upset.'"

"INSOURCING Analysis - Prison Labor Competing For Your Job" - This is a heavily-sourced piece that covers a lot of ground.

David Sirota on Why Chuck Hagel terrifies hawks, GOP: "Here's a rule of thumb for understanding Washington politics: On the rare occasion when everything including the kitchen sink gets thrown at a Cabinet nominee to block an appointment, there's a solid chance that the opposition is not merely about the collage of negative headlines. Instead, it's more likely that the opposition is motivated by a deeper belief that the nominee fundamentally threatens the Beltway's Permanent Bipartisan Power Structure™. That is particularly the case when a nominee is seen as a threat to the lucrative business of permanent war - a business whose profit margins, employment footprint across America, campaign contributions and think-tank underwriting make it, by far, the most powerful pillar of that power structure."

Monday, 27 August 2007, David Broder: "Two who could find a third way" - Chuck Hagel and Michael Bloomberg. Both of these guys have been the dream boys of the "Centrists" for a good long time.

Readers of The Sideshow may recall that Chuck Hagel first came to our notice as an owner of the very voting machines that had given him unlikely wins of a Senate seat. And that's one of many reasons why I would prefer not to see Hegal anywhere near government. But the horrible fact is that he may not be quite as terrible as most of Obama's other appointments.

"Teachers Irate as Bloomberg Likens Union to the N.R.A." Absolutely shameless.

Paul Rosenberg at AlJazeera: "Obama and the transformation illusion: Everyone has an ideology, whether they know it or not. But when your ideology has you - that's when you're an ideologue. It's not a matter of "extremism" but of rigidity and blindness - detachment from reality. Which is why Barack Obama is one of the most ideological presidents we've ever had. And being imprisoned in his "pragmatist" ideology is key to his numerous pragmatic train wrecks, as well his less-noted failures to even take on several really big, really significant problems."

"Now That the Election Is Over, the Real Battles in the States Begin" - This is a depressing list of assaults on the public that will require energetic pushback.

Bulletin: In the wake of the economic meltdown big-time policy mistakes were made!

Replacing Jesse Jackson, Jr In IL-02 - Is there actually a chance to get a real liberal in there, now?

"The most annoying conservative Democrat? Starts with E and ends with Rendell" - He really is annoying, but I still reserve the #1 spot for Obama.

I'm not entirely sure that this interview with Alex Jones was really any loopier than the one Jon Stewart had with Alan Simpson, who just produced a lot of babble when asked to explain his crazy ideas.

Speaking of Jon Stewart, he thinks it's time to talk about gun control: "No one is taking away all the guns. But now I get it. Now I see what is happening. So this is what it is, their paranoid fear of a possible dystopic future prevents us from addressing our actual dystopic present. We can't even begin to address 30,000 gun deaths that are actually in reality happening in this country every year because a few of us must remain vigilant against the rise of imaginary Hitler."

"NRA Vows To Stop Tucson From Destroying Guns" - via Moshe, who said, "Suing to prevent the destruction of these guns demonstrates that for many, our gun culture is not about Constitutional rights, self defense, or an innocent hobby interest in precision machines. Rather, it is a form of what the Hebrew prophets, and the Puritans influenced by them, called idolatry."

Robert Reich, "'Entitlement Reform' is a hoax." Well, yeah, but it's always worth saying it again.

Interesting, The Examiner is calling Robert Borosage "the Left's Grover Norquist". Don't see a pledge yet, though. How 'bout lowering the Social Security retirement age to 55?

Ted Rall: Proletariat Steak

Tom Tomorrow: Always Crashing in the Same Car

Definitely worth your while to check out the little family tale from NPR Snap Judgment Performance of the Year / Noah St. John, "The Last Mile".

On the 150th anniversary of the London Underground, Google gave me an Underground map.

Rescue Me

It's the last day of Christmas, or Orthodox Christmas, or Armenian Christmas, or the Epiphany, as you prefer. So, now it's just boring old January. The sky is grey and it's too long until spring. But the fancy Christmas food is marked down at Tesco's, so brandy butter on toast makes a nice breakfast.

Tonight's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays are Joan McCarter (McJoan) and Fiscal Cliff Schecter.

Well, at least Obama didn't find a way to prevent Tom Delay being sentenced to three years in prison.

"Why Tom Harkin and a Handful of Other Progressives Opposed the Deal: The deal also makes tax benefits for high income earners permanent, while tax benefits designed to help those of modest means and the middle class are only extended for five years. In essence, this agreement locks in a tax structure that is grossly unfair to middle class Americans, one which provides permanent tax assistance to wealthy Americans, and only temporary relief to everyone else. Every dollar that wealthy taxpayers do not pay under this deal, we will eventually ask Americans of modest means to forgo in Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits."

Tim Carney: How corporate tax credits got in the 'cliff' deal: "The "fiscal cliff" legislation passed this week included $76 billion in special-interest tax credits for the likes of General Electric, Hollywood and even Captain Morgan. But these subsidies weren't the fruit of eleventh-hour lobbying conducted on the cliff's edge -- they were crafted back in August in a Senate committee, and they sat dormant until the White House reportedly insisted on them this week." Got that? The White House insisted on them this week.

On Twitter, Charlie Savage says: "Obama signed NDAA but issued signing statement claiming authority to lawfully bypass detainee transfer restrictions" - the .pdf is here.

Dave Johnson says "Don't Feed The Debt-Ceiling Trolls." But of course, that's Obama's whole MO - feed the trolls and maybe he can find an excuse to roll on "entitlements". Even Bruce Bartlett has admitted that Obama is a Republican.

Down With Tyranny! "For Once Congressional Republicans Are Right And Obama Is Completely Wrong" - guess who Obama wants to give a raise to?

Interesting article from Kevin Drum in Mother Jones on what he calls "America's Real Criminal Element: Lead", on research suggesting that lead may be even more toxic than we thought, both physically and criminalogically. One might still find reasons to question it, but it would explain a number of curious things. (I've always been confused, for example, with why violent crime seemed to be declining at a time when economic and other factors should have been driving it up. It's up in Detroit, apparently.) (On the other hand, it doesn't explain all those nasty little younger folks who even physically intimidated people in the Dem primary caucuses and write ugly comments at blogs when you don't fall in love and in line with Obama.) The blog post version is here. (via)

"Conjuring a High-Tech Labor Shortage [...] It's worth noting that Microsoft is currently campaigning to flood the high-tech labor market by dramatically opening our immigration system to foreign high-tech workers. Microsoft's talking points align with their policy demands for more foreign workers. However, labor market statistics and graduation rates say we have plenty of workers, a conclusion backed up by the life experience of thousands of unemployed and underemployed domestic workers."

It may be kind to refer to it as a "myth" or "illusion", but the idea that there is a "skills gap" between the needs of businesses and workers is very simply a lie. If you want more workers than you can find, you supply training and better salaries and then you have them.

How Peter Baker at the NYT sees us: "While Mr. Obama got most of what he sought in the agreement, he found himself under withering criticism from some in his liberal base who accused him of caving in to Republicans by not taxing the rich more. Just as Speaker John A. Boehner has been under pressure from his right, Mr. Obama faces a virtual Tea Party of the left that sees his compromise as capitulation." Or are those really just Peter Baker's words?

Jeff Stein at SpyTalk says the directors of Zero Dark Thirty "may go down as the Leni Riefenstahl of their time."

7 Facts About Government Benefits and who gets them

13 Wall Street voices to ignore (or not) in 2013

Bargain books: hundreds of pictures of the Beatles from unusual views - only $500!

F. Scott Fitzgerald in drag - and again.

Dammit, my favorite kick-ass radio station is down for lack of funds. If you wanna hear some great music, maybe you can send a few bucks to BellyUp4Blues to bring them back.

RIP: "Beate Gordon, Long-Unsung Heroine of Japanese Women's Rights, Dies at 89: Beate Sirota Gordon, the daughter of Russian Jewish parents who at 22 almost single-handedly wrote women's rights into the Constitution of modern Japan, and then kept silent about it for decades, only to become a feminist heroine there in recent years, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89."
"Gerda Lerner, a Feminist and Historian, Dies at 92: Gerda Lerner, a scholar and author who helped make the study of women and their lives a legitimate subject for historians and spearheaded the creation of the first graduate program in women's history in the United States, died on Wednesday in Madison, Wis. She was 92."
Fontella Bass, 72s, whose biggest hit was "Rescue Me", but here she is doing one of my all-time favorite torch songs to a video that, ah, wasn't what I expected.

A passel of links

I saw this post before I went to bed on New Year's morning: "A Deal has been reached says CNN. Biden on way to brief Democratic Senators before announcement." It's at DKos, so I'm assuming that it's putting the deal in the best possible light, but I'm still not straight on what's in the Deal. As near as I can tell, Obama made sure to enshrine "the Bush Tax Cuts" for everyone who isn't in the top .07 percent, or something, even though "the Bush Tax Cuts" had already expired. Krugman has a bad feeling, but doesn't go into the details. I'm hoping Ryan Grimm and Sam Seder can clarify it all for me later on the first live episode this year of The Majority Report in a few minutes.

Panelists this week on Virtually Speaking Sundays were Stuart Zechman and Jay Ackroyd, discussing the fact that important policy negotiations were going on in the dead of night when everyone is out partying instead of in the light of day with everyone watching (as would happen in a democracy).
Back in the spring of 2011, our friend The Raven did a post about the then-recent Brad DeLong interview on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd. Apparently, DeLong saved that link for later use and referred to it recently, generating (to the sheer delight of The Raven) a post from Paul Krugman quoting from it. The gist is that people like Krugman thought they were having a debate on "freshwater" vs. "saltwater" economics with opposition that was operating in good faith - but (as people like me could have told them), that wasn't the case. It's worth listening to just to see how naive these geniuses of the "progressive" Democratic wonk council were even at that late date.
VSS producer Sherry Reson has posted individual clips of Culture of Truth's "Most Ridiculous Thing" from the Sunday talk shows that you can currently find on the front page here.

Charles Pierce: "Of course, while everyone in Washington, and the courtier press that serves them, were endlessly droning on and on about the Gentle Fiscal Incline, the Bill Of Rights closed out 2012 by having one of the worst weeks it's had in the two centuries of its existence. But the courtier press paid that little mind, possibly because selling out the Bill Of Rights was done on a "bipartisan" basis, and the denizens of the various Green Rooms would endorse cannibal murder if both parties agreed to subsidize it."

Dean Baker disputes the NYT CW that it's all the fault of the Tea Party faction: "Actually, the vast majority of Tea Party backers agree with the vast majority of Democrats in their opposition to cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The main difference is that the Tea Party backers seem to believe that there is some other area of government spending, other than defense, that can be cut back to reduce or eliminate the budget deficit. Of course this is not true. However the nature of the gap between most Democrats and Tea Party backers is informational, not ideological."
Baker buries the lede when he headlines this as, "David Brooks Reports that the NYT Can't Find Conservative Columnists Who Know Arithmetic." It could just as easily be called, "David Brooks reports that he hates democracy."

"David Sirota: The White House Has Said to a Right Wing Lynch Mob They Will Accept Their Political Terrorism" - I'm amazed CNN even let Sirota on long enough to say this stuff, frankly. But notice how everyone accepts the idea that suspicion of Bush White House complicity in 9/11 is a more outrageous lie than, well, almost anything. It's indisputable that, whether by negligence or intent, the Bush administration did indeed let 9/11 happen by its deliberate refusal to take any positive action in light of repeated warnings of an imminent al Queda threat. Whether they were genuinely incompetent or saw an attack as serving their own purposes is certainly a more legitimate question than whether, say, we ought to cut Social Security benefits (we should not) - but you still can't talk about that.

Lauren Feeney interviews Geoffrey Nunberg on political buzzwords, the Word of the Year, the post-truth era, and semantic sleight-of-hand.

"California Newspaper Defies Trend to Shrink Costs: "New and expanded sections to cover business, automobiles and food. A nearly five-fold increase in community news pages and more investigative reporting. Even daily color comics. [...] It's too early to know whether he's right. Kushner said advertising revenues have grown, though he won't say how much. Average daily circulation rose 5.3 percent as of Sept. 30 from a year earlier to 285,088 on weekdays and 387,547 on Sundays, bucking an industry decline of 0.2 percent, according to the Alliance for Audited Media."

Interesting article by John Lanchester in London Review of Books, "Let's call it failure", on how austerity hasn't worked too well in Britain: "Saying ‘I told you so' is supposed to be near unbeatable fun, so it's disappointing to report that, in the case of the government's handling of the British economy, speaking for myself, no fun is being had. As George Osborne's autumn statement made clear, the scale and speed and completeness with which things are going wrong are numbing. The Tories went into the 2010 election with a manifesto commitment to reduce the structural deficit - the amount by which the government's spending in any given year exceeds its income, excluding temporary effects from the downturn. The first point in their economic policy read as follows: ‘We will safeguard Britain's credit rating with a credible plan to eliminate a large part of the structural deficit over a Parliament.' How? It's on the next page: ‘We will cut government spending to bring the deficit down and restore stability.'"

Sam Seder has been reposting podcasts of his best 2012 interviews while he's on holiday - listen again to the Chris Hayes interview on The Majority Report.

"Who gives a damn what the ratings agencies say?"

NYT: "F.B.I. Counterterrorism Agents Monitored Occupy Movement, Records Show"
Rebel Institute, "FBI Considers the 'Occupy Movement' as a 'Terrorist Threat'"
Naomi Wolf: "Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy"

Via Skippy:
"Rasmussen: Alcohol Perceived More Dangerous Than Pot"
"Banks Look To Roll Back Nevada Law Preventing Foreclosure Fraud"
Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2012

The Fed and Interest Rates - The Details

I dunno, Dave Barry's shtick doesn't really work for me in his year in review piece.

When Gloria Steinem and Samuel Delany clashed over Wonder Woman

Stamp collecting, Doctor Who edition

How to talk like a Dalek

Local color: Those who've done the IndiaTown tour with me may or may not recognize the Queen's Market, home of The One Pound Fish Man.

Who knew it was something I had in common with Sean Hannity? (Some of the rest are pretty cool, though.)

The Ghost of Christmas

Ooops, looks like Christmas distracted me so much I didn't get around to doing the traditional Christmas post. Well, our old friends know that for me, Christmas goes right on up through the 6th, and last year's post is much the same as what I would have posted this year, although I did find "Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime" with an American Sign Language interpretation by Stephen Torrence, and Mark Evanier has posted a photo of the setting of his wonderful Mel Tormé story, for those who've never seen the Farmer's Market in Hollywood.

And thanks to Digby for digging up this old classic on the War on Christmas. (Yes, there is a war on Christmas, and Bill O'Reilly is its general.)

Michael Moore tells you everything you really need to know about economics: "Celebrating the Prince of Peace in the Land of Guns [...] Clearly, we are no longer our brother's and sister's keeper. You get sick and can't afford the operation? Not my problem. The bank has foreclosed on your home? Not my problem. Can't afford to go to college? Not my problem. And yet, it all sooner or later becomes our problem, doesn't it? Take away too many safety nets and everyone starts to feel the impact. Do you want to live in that kind of society, one where you will then have a legitimate reason to be in fear? I don't."

EU accuses Samsung of patent abuse in Apple lawsuits

The Majority Report: Sam Seder's interview with Chrystia Freeland on Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.

Ten Reasons Why the Chained CPI Is Terrible Policy

Atrios: "But They Will Always Smash It On The Floor [...] But Republicans will inevitably see a balanced budget as an opportunity to give money to rich people (tax cuts and crony capitalism). The reward for liberals for this well done very important work? Tax cuts for rich people and unpaid for disastrous wars. Liberals should spend their time in office figuring out how to implement a sticky liberal agenda, one which is hard to dislodge, not figuring out how to create a pot of money for Republicans to steal when it is their turn."
"There's Another No Work Option: Laid Off [...] This isn't really mysterious stuff. Someone is 61, has a moderate disability, and loses his/her job. There is no work option." And yet, people act like the only reason you might not get a new job is that you'd rather skive off and collect that juicy disability check.

RIP Jack Klugman, last of the 12 Angry Men, who to some of us will always be Oscar Madison, (even though the first death notice I saw for him mentioned only Quincy); actor, and hero who beat Orrin Hatch.

Snow pic from Ruth Calvo.

An Irish boy band that rocks old school - The Strypes, with their first original track, "Blue Collar Jane." Of course, they do covers, too.

Damn You All to Hell. {A letter from Tom Hanks.}

Strax the Sontaran sings Christmas songs. (I have no idea what "The Red Red Robin" is doing in there.)

Watch Sita Sings the Blues - a free gift from the creator.

Posted, of course, while listening to Brian Brink's amazing performance of "The Carol of the Bells".

I heard there was a secret chord

This week's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays were Digby and David Waldman (KagroX).

Interviews by Sam Seder on The Majority Report:
David Dayen on the Raw Deal and how Obama is trying to raise your taxes and cut your Social Security and Medicare, and on David's hiatus from the blogosphere. (You can read all his FDL stuff here, and of course his final post.)
Matt Taibbi on the big bank drug money launderers.
Max Blumenthal live from Egypt

Another datum in why we need to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security: "U.S. government seizes artist's paycheck as suspected terrorist funds: The U.S. government reportedly has seized an advance payment to artist Tim Hamilton for his work on nonfiction graphic novel detailing the activities of notorious Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony in the Congo, claiming the money was being laundered for a terrorist organization. [...] Cartoonist Matt Bors, who edited Army of God, offers: 'OFAC hasn't responded to my request for comment yet, but their answering machine urged me to visit the U.S. Treasury's website. Comics wouldn't be a great way to fund terrorism. They don't pay very well. But now we know no one fighting terrorism knows how to use Google, which sure makes me feel safe.' Hamilton, who's worked on titles ranging from Green Lantern to Deadpool to MAD, illustrated the Eisner-nominated adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451."
Atkins, "If Congress is looking to save money, here's a place to start" - because Homeland Security is one expensive boondoggle.

Enacting Democracy: "After months of circular debate that never quite managed to result in meaningful action, the vast majority of the protesters were convinced that their concerns would not be addressed and their efforts were wasted, and simply went home. This would be significant enough if it was new; in point of fact, it's been the outcome of nearly every attempt at organized protest since the early 1980s, when the current suite of manipulative pseudoconsensus methods were adopted across most of the activist Left. If you want to know why the Left accomplished next to nothing for thirty years, while activists on the right were getting candidates into office and laws on the books, that's an important part of the reason. This is all the more embarrassing in that the toolkit of democratic process has been sitting on the shelf the whole time, waiting for somebody to notice that liberal and radical groups in the past used to use methods of organization that, however unfashionable they have become, actually work. There are a lot of details, and entire books in fine print have been written on the minutiae, but the core elements of democratic process can be described in a paragraph."

Richard Eskow Asks: Which Side Are You On? "This is a moment of moral clarity. Right now there are only two sides in the Social Security debate: the side that says it's acceptable to cut benefits - in a way that raises taxes for all income except the highest - and the side that says it isn't."

Right to Work for Less and the Destruction of Solidarity [...] Trade unions originally arose because workers understood that selling their labor on the open market only led to poverty. Unlike other 'things' that could be sold, human labor was indivisible from human beings. Workers could not simply store their labor until they could sell their labor for a better price. Capital of course wanted to pay as little for labor as possible, using competition between workers to drive the cost of human labor down. So of necessity, successful trade union efforts required stopping or altering the market in human labor. Unionists did that by asserting that an employer did not have the right to buy an individual's labor for cheaper than the union set standard, and relatedly that individual workers did not have the right to undercut union labor. The collective rights of workers outweighed the individual 'rights' of scabs and business owners. Unions fought for industry-wide agreements designed to take labor out of competition."

Naomi Wolf: "But were Chase, TD, Bank of America and others, which had been targeted by activists, actually now employing our police forces directly? The answer is yes."

Yves has more reasons to be doubtful about the Rolling Jubilee.

Dean Baker: "Fareed Zakaria is Unhappy That "The American Left" Chooses Arithmetic Over Peter Peterson: Fareed Zakaria is very unhappy that "THe American Left," by whom he means the vast majority of people across the political spectrum who oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare, insist on taking arithmetic seriously. They are refusing to join Peter Peterson and his wealthy friends in the Campaign to Fix the Debt in their crusade to cut these key social insurance programs."

As I've noted before, the groups most likely to commit the most odious crimes are the people we are least likely to acknowledge fit the profile. The people who believe most in profiling are the ones who scream the loudest when anyone points that out - it's heresy.

Do I understand this correctly? Obama is Time's Person of the Year for winning an election?

From Michael Rosenwald in Business Week, a Book Review: Against Thrift by James Livingston: "One key complexity in Livingston's argument is that private investment by business is not the kind of spending that creates jobs and spurs growth. All the clamoring about companies needing lower taxes because the resulting increase in profits will drive them to build more factories and create more jobs is, Livingston writes, a two-syllable word that includes the letters b and s. He argues that all the surplus profits - such as the ones still accruing on the books of America's biggest corporations - are really invested in speculative bubbles like the ones that helped cause the Great Depression and the current global crisis. (He has a 19-page appendix with numerous graphs to bolster his points.)" Noted with some amazement atCorrente.
Also, "Was the Sandy Hook Massacre a Failed Rebellion?" - rage killings don't just come from nowhere.

Krugman in 2007: "As a policy matter, I don't understand why Obama would choose to make a big deal of the small Social Security funding shortfall - which may not even exist. As a political matter, I don't understand why he would essentially try to undermine the first big victory progressives won against the Bush administration and the rightward tilt of the Beltway consensus. This isn't 1992. The DLC isn't the Democratic party's leading edge. The center isn't somewhere between Joe Lieberman and John McCain. I can't understand how Obama can be this out of touch."

It still baffles me that everyone doesn't want to learn how to do this.
How The Doctor Puppet Saved Christmas
Susie got a job that doesn't start paying for several weeks. In the meantime, maybe you could throw her a little dosh to tide her over.

And this just bites. I hate to think I've met all these nice people on the internet just to see them slowly get eaten by our rotten economy.

The Vanishing - gorgeous photos of the terrifying. (via)

Leonard Cohen's favorite cover of "Hallelujah"

I was completely unaware of "Christmas Time is Near Again".

"Stille Nacht", The Vienna Boys Choir

So I was trawling around for a decent version of the song, which is a popular (and powerful) piece of Christmas music, and all the versions I could find were, well, wimpy. In desperation, I clicked on the version by the famous singer whose work I find generally unmemorable, and... well, at first I couldn't be sure, but she was obviously starting way at the bottom of her range, where control is hard, so she could make full use of the rest later. It was worth it. "O, Holy Night", performed by Mariah Carey.

If "everyone has to "sacrifice", why isn't Congress eating catfood?

Maya Rockeymoore of Global Policy Solutions and We Act Radio talked about bad policy like chained CPI - which represents a cut in benefits right now, by the way, not just to "future retirees" - and what it's like to talk to Steny Hoyer, on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd. (Background: Her open letter to Alan Simpson on selling out America's youth.)

Atrios: "Violating The Pledge: If we switch over to the chained-CPI, it isn't just about Social Security cuts. It'll impact other federally set things, including tax brackets, meaning it will be a tax increase on those earning less than $250,000 per year. Like Matt I don't really care about that, but it has been one of the few guiding principles of the administration, so..." Even Yglesias can figure out that it raises taxes on the non-rich, just aside from its other evil qualities. (More on chained CPI from Dean Baker.)

Jon Walker says, "Obama Again Proves Why the GOP Should Always Bet on Him Folding: During this fiscal cliff fight, the Obama team has only \drawn two lines in the sand. The first was on raising the tax rate for people making over $250,000 a year. The other was refusing to allow raising the debt ceiling to be used for political gain. On both of these demands Obama has already folded like a tissue in a rainstorm. A compromise on the tax rate is not that surprising. While the Obama team was firm on this point it always seemed more like a negotiation ploy than a real line in the sand. The fold on the debt ceiling, though, has basically destroyed any negotiating creditability Obama might had left with Congressional Republicans. President Obama repeatedly said he was not going to 'play that game.' His team said they see the debt ceiling issue has have historic significant. The White House claimed they had a duty to the future to break this dangerous habit. The President used the strongest possible language to say he would not hold on this issue, yet two weeks later he completely folds. This is just the latest in a long pattern of behavior by Obama. Obama always seems to blink first. By this point it would frankly be idiotic for any Congressional Republicans to believe Obama will hold firm during a negotiation." And it's a great tactic for Obama, who is plainly playing for the other team. And, yes, he really is. He has telegraphed this from the moment he entered the White House.

"A Different Kind Of Democrat-- A Republican Kind [...] That's what we're up against-- and Obama and his conservative allies have every intention of remaking the Democratic Party in their own image. Standing up to him and pressuring your two senators and your congressman to reject the Obama-Boehner sellout to the wealthy and their mania to balance the budget on the backs of the middle class is going to be very serious over the course of the next few weeks and months. Just think of Obama as Bush and proceed accordingly."

Glenn Greenwald: "Glenn Greenwald: Woman Imprisoned for Life for Minor Drug Offense; Banking Giant Immune to Justice for Massive Drug Laundering."

Erik Loomis used a metaphor. Apparently, the president of the University of Rhode Island doesn't know what one is. (via). Via Thers at Eschaton.

Guns don't kill people. Estrogen kills people.

No one could have predicted that Restrictive laws make it harder for teens to get abortions: "If a 17-year-old girl in the state of Virginia needs to have an abortion, she has the option to bypass the state's parental consent laws by obtaining written permission from a judge. But court employees in many parts of Virginia are overwhelmingly unprepared or unwilling to provide correct information on the judicial bypass option, a new report finds, making it exceedingly difficult for teen girls to exercise their right to abortion care."

Alex Gibney on Zero Dark Thirty's Wrong and Dangerous Conclusion

"Why the Pundits Are Wrong About Big Money and the 2012 Elections" - see, they both spent a lot of money.

Alex Pareen's 2012 Hack List is complete, with the top ten winners correctly skewered.

Were you wondering what would happen to the Olympic Stadium? Yes, it's just like in America - taxpayers pay for this stuff, and the rich guys get the benefit. (And finding this blog was a fascination - just the kind of local reporting I wish we were seeing more of and that we were paying more attention to. A bit disappointed to see the loopy Liberal Fascism as a recommended book on the sidebar, but glad to know someone is keeping an eye on the weird blurring between cops and not-cops, among other things.)

And, speaking of East London, Whitechapel Bell Foundry has put up a Christmas greeting with a click-through about the story of how that enormous bell got from their design boards to the Olympic Stadium.

There is more writing around than I realized about the Christmas Truce.

I enjoyed the Christmas Sermon On Not Believing in Canada (and boy was Molsen's a disappointment - no wonder!). And a nice little comment from Scott Martens that followed in the ensuing thread: "But as for the main point: Among the non-empirical arguments to be made on behalf Canadianism is the moral virtue of believing in the existence of place where people don't freak out so much about the terms of dispute between their various beliefs and mostly just try to get along. Even if no such place exists, it's better to assert its existence as an example to encourage moral virtue than to abandon virtue altogether. If people need to believe in a fictitious former British colony to do what is right, then arguing against their beliefs is incredibly counterproductive." (via)
Also: Tower Bridge forced to open for 50 foot rubber duck.
And: Dear Slate: Buy a map..

I am charmed to learn that Dan Savage bought Ann Landers' old desk.

NASA Johnson Style

Doctor Who Christmas special prequels:
1. The Great Detective
2. Vastra Investigates

Another Elf's Christmas Playlist

People are talking

Avedon Carol and Dave Johnson (of Seeing the Forest) were the panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays. Background reading:
"What the 'right to bear arms' really means: As long as there have been guns in America, they have been regulated -- even in Dodge City."
Taibbi on banks in the drug war: "It doesn't take a genius to see that the reasoning here is beyond flawed. When you decide not to prosecute bankers for billion-dollar crimes connected to drug-dealing and terrorism (some of HSBC's Saudi and Bangladeshi clients had terrorist ties, according to a Senate investigation), it doesn't protect the banking system, it does exactly the opposite. It terrifies investors and depositors everywhere, leaving them with the clear impression that even the most "reputable" banks may in fact be captured institutions whose senior executives are in the employ of (this can't be repeated often enough) murderers and terrorists. Even more shocking, the Justice Department's response to learning about all of this was to do exactly the same thing that the HSBC executives did in the first place to get themselves in trouble - they took money to look the other way." People who've been caught holding two joints have suffered a great deal more than this. Let the law treat these bankers the way they treat ordinary Americans who get busted for drugs and then maybe they'll learn to behave.
"Where is Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy on Big Bank Crimes and Obama? Last week's big revelation on banking is that it is now official Department of Justice policy under Obama that big banks and their executives are above the law. HSBC was caught laundering money for both terrorists and drug dealers, and DOJ officials told the New York Times that they would not prosecute the bank under money laundering statutes, lest the financial system be destabilized. This was shocking, but consistent with policy made explicit by DOJ's Head of Criminal Division Lanny Breuer back in September. One key question is why it is that Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, a former prosecutor, is utterly unwilling to do any investigation or oversight into this critical policy question? Leahy runs the Judiciary Committee in the Senate, and it would be impossible to find a more obvious topic for that committee to address."
"FCC Boss Julius Genachowski Has Been a Timid Failure: Engaged in Pro Consumer Theater, Folded When it Counted [...] Genachowski's biggest failing however was his timid failure to reclassify broadband operators as telecommunications carriers (against the advice of his staff), putting the agency on unsound legal footing for a generation of broadband battles to come. [...] The truly frightening part? Genachowski is the most consumer friendly FCC boss the agency has had during the entire lifespan of this website. With a long string of FCC chiefs who have ignored competitive issues, buckled to the whims of the biggest players, laughed off consumer interests, and jumped into posh telecom-industry lobbying gigs after their tenures ended, that's certainly not saying much."

Stephanie Kelton does MMT: "The U.S. government is not revenue constrained. The U.S. government is the only American economic agent that can act counter-cyclically. If the government did decide to act counter-cyclically, it could either increase spending or reduce taxes. Not employing people who want to work is wasteful. No one seems to understand this."

"Why You Can Kiss Public Education (and the Middle Class) Goodbye [...] But up until the Reagan "reforms," public education had avoided this same ghettoizing fate. Historically, our public education system was a marvel for the rest of the world, producing generations of scientists, doctors, and engineers from all races and socio-economic classes. Whether you came from a wealthy family or a poor family, the American public education system didn't discriminate. As much as possible, it was a multi-racial, multi-cultural, and multi-class public institution that produced great results. But as state governments embrace for-profit charter schools, traditional public schools will be neglected and see their funding cut until eventually they, too, will suffer the same fate that ghettoized public housing and public hospitals."

Atrios is Bringing It Old School: "Time for this little blog to do a bit of activism like the old days. Get your dialing fingers ready for tomorrow. White House, Reid's office, your senators, and your member of Congress. No cuts to Social Security. There will be a list, we will be checking it twice, and it will be called The Social Security Shit List."

Good for Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who said of the Medicare eligibility age, "We should be lowering the age, not raising it." That's exactly right. Good for America's economy, good for Americans. (via)

"UK record industry seeks to financially ruin leaders of the Pirate Party: Rather than seeking an injunction against the proxy, or suing the party, it has individually sued the party's executives, seeking to personally bankrupt them and their families. It's an underhanded, unethical, and unprecedented threat to democracy -- essentially a bid to use their financial and legal might to destroy a political party itself."

Susie asks: "What's the rationale? Here's the really puzzling thing about this whole fiscal-cliff, 'let's sacrifice a virgin on the mountain top' adventure we're on. No one really wants this, except rich people and the politicians they own. No one. Tell me one good reason why non-profits should, in effect, slit their own throats - particularly at a time when we really need them, because of that aforementioned ritual sacrifice to the austerity gods. It's like a giant game of Whack-A-Mole - as soon as they try to cut one thing, people rise up and say, 'No way, pal!' That's because we still want clean air, safe food and prescription drugs, trains that run, roads without giant potholes, good schools with enough books, and programs that help the vulnerable. You know what we don't want? A massive black hole of a military budget. You want to talk about austerity? The Pentagon owns over 200 golf courses around the world - 234, the last time a reporter counted. (They hide the numbers, just because of stories like this.) Four-star generals live like kings."

"I am Adam Lanza's Mother [...] A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan - they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me. That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn't have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist. We still don't know what's wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He's been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work."
Roger Ebert on how the press reports mass killings
Garry Wills on Moloch
A Carefully Measured Response from tristero.

"This pre-Internet chatroom conversation between Jim Henson, Ayn Rand, Yoko Ono and Sidney Nolan is fake.."

Christmas Caroling with the Roches.

Jack Frost nipping at your nose

David Atkins (thereisnospoon) was the guest on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd. I was interested to see how he would acquit himself, and actually, he wasn't bad. And what he says about getting involved in local politics is absolutely true, and people ought to pay attention. Seriously, if you clean up nice and have not been convicted of anything more serious than marijuana possession, you should consider putting your skills to work in local politics. There's a huge rats nest infesting the Democratic party and it needs to be cleaned out. You won't fix that just by staying home and blogging, even though staying home and blogging may have its virtues.

Robert Scheer on The Shameful Exploitation of Bradley Manning: "Keep an American soldier locked up naked in a cage and driven half mad while deprived of all basic rights, and you will be instantly condemned as a barbaric terrorist. Unless the jailer is an authorized agent of the U.S. government, in which case even treatment approaching torture will go largely unnoticed. Certainly if a likable constitutional law professor happens to be president, all such assaults on human dignity will easily pass muster." And The New York Times, which published many stories based on the Wikileaks material that Manning allegedly passed to them, just as they did when they earned their "credibility" with Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, couldn't be bothered to send a reporter to cover Manning's first public testimony. "What is protected in the First Amendment is not the right of commercial enterprises to exploit the news for profit, but rather of citizens to become informed. That requires the courage of heroic sources, including Bradley Manning."

The Sad Saga Of The Estate Tax: "So, here we are, two years later, at another lame-duck session and with the same Barack Obama working with the same congressional Republicans on the estate tax again. A post-election poll for Americans for Tax Fairness found that by a margin of 58 to 32%, people support 'increase[ing] the estate tax, also called the inheritance tax, on estates of more than seven million dollars for a couple.' Obama is, as usual, aiming very low and asking for way too little. Even as much of a corporate shill as former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, currently cochairman of Goldman Sachs, thinks Obama should step up his proposal. 'A substantial estate tax," explained this week, "can provide revenues at a time when our federal government badly needs additional revenues." " Of course, revenue isn't the real reason for the estate tax - it's about preventing individual families from building dynasties that become more powerful than government. From becoming, as the Waltons and the Kochs have, so powerful that their whims can overwhelm the needs of the entire country.

"How Organizing for Change Is Very Different Than Winning Elections: [...] The point I'm really trying to raise is that the Democratic Party has way too much control over what the AFL-CIO and the other unions are doing. Instead of labor telling the Democratic Party what they're going to do, the Democratic Party scripts out for labor what they're going to do. Which isn't really working for unions very much at all." (This called to mind an interesting thing Becky Bond said to Sam Seder on The Majority Report the other day, about how when Chris Van Hollen 's office calls complaining about how they've got their members screaming at them to say the right thing, the answer was basically: If you're not going to say the right thing, then we're going to keep screaming. She also refers to "the fiscal bluff" - a neat pun and probably one we should all start using. That show is also worth listening to for the interview with Ken Burns about the documentary he's made with his daughter about The Central Park Five.)

Peter Maass says, "Don't Trust Zero Dark Thirty [...] Much of the pre-release debate about the movie has focused on whether it portrays torture as effective, in the sense of prying information out of al Qaeda suspects. Yes, the movie conveys that view, and I think it's inaccurate. Many experts, including key senators who oversaw an extensive congressional investigation, have concluded that torture did not play a significant role in finding bin Laden, and that torture in general is a counter-productive way to get information from prisoners. But the heated debate on torture misses what's far more important and troubling about a film that seems destined for blockbuster and Academy Award status. Zero Dark Thirty represents a new genre of embedded filmmaking that is the problematic offspring of the worrisome endeavor known as embedded journalism. [...] The fundamental problem is that our government has again gotten away with offering privileged access to carefully selected individuals and getting a flattering story in return. Embeds, officially begun during the invasion of Iraq, are deeply troubling because not every journalist or filmmaker can get these coveted invitations (Seymour Hersh and Matt Taibbi are probably not on the CIA press office's speed dial), and once you get one, you face the quandary of keeping a critical distance from sympathetic people whom you get to know and who are probably quite convincing. That's the reason the embed or special invitation exists; the government does its best to keep journalists, even friendly ones, away from disgruntled officials who have unflattering stories to tell." And there goes the value of the 1st Amendment. Add that to the already disturbing fact that Hollywood has been increasingly willing, over the last two or three decades, to tell stories that encourage us to be callous toward others and to punch our better angels in the face, and you have an ugly brew bubbling up from our entertainment industry.

Here's Riverdaughter on the STEM-worker shortage scam and a number of other things she may not realize I've bitched about before. Yes, I'd rather have them get real green cards (not just the carrot that never reaches the teeth) and the same real rights that US citizens are supposed to have to act against abusive employers than have them here as pure guest-workers. But, right now, the idea that there is a dearth of educated Americans who can fill those jobs just infuriates me. As I've said before, I know far too many out-of-work people with experience and good degrees to believe any of this nonsense about how we just need to "educate ourselves to compete". They don't want us competing for good jobs and good wages, they want us competing with slave labor, and to do that they need to keep us away from jobs and other sources of income. The H1B visa exists for jobs where there are genuine labor shortages or there are only a tiny, tiny handful of experts and a few people who get paid not so much for what they do but for being who they are, and yet it's used to replace people who could easily be found in the US in their thousands. You don't need to hire a random foreign mathematician from a foreign country when we've already got plenty of them; you do need to hire Whit Diffie to be Whit Diffie (certainly not for mathematics skills which he himself describes as "indifferent"). If you decided that what we really needed were musicians, you wouldn't have to go to a foreign country to hire unknown musicians to fill slots on the bill of a place that just needed some music time filled up, but you have to hire Mike Jagger to be Mick Jagger, because he's the only The Mick Jagger there is. If the only true expert in the world on the cultivation of a certain plant that we just discovered can cure cancer is an African, it makes sense to give him a special visa to come to America and work on it (and teach Americans to do that same work), but when it's a gig where literally thousands of people already have the training and experience you need and are available to work right at home, then by the gods you'd better be hiring those people instead of complaining that you can't find them and need to import foreigners.

Tom Tomorrow on the bipartisan adventures of Simpson & Bowles

"The Christmas Song", performed by the Temptations

Weather report

It's cold and rainy and grey, which means, it's London, only colder.

Bill Black (among other things, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One) was the guest on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd, but technical difficulties in the early minutes of the show led to Albert Gainsborough stepping in to fill some airtime with a few words about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Both are worth listening to. Black explains the argument the Very Serious People are having: We have to impose austerity to avoid austerity. (BTW, Bill and Jay have missed the boat on the difference between "outsourcing" and "privatization". Both involve paying other entities to do your institution's job, but privatization is when the government does it while pretending they have simply sold the entire enterprise to a private firm while continuing to subsidize it, largely by continuing to take responsibility for the things that make it work. It should also be noted that Margaret Thatcher's "selling" of utilities involved practically paying commercial entities to take them off "the government's" hands. There is simply a limit to how many sweeteners you can lard a deal with before it becomes obvious that your goal has nothing to do with trying to make money. And much of "privatized" industry in the UK is still directly subsidized; they just don't admit it.)
Cliff Schecter and David Dayen were panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays. (And Why Neil Borofsky should be made head of the SEC - and won't be.)

Kristof took a break from bemoaning the sad fate of people in foreign lands to tell us the sad fate of Americans who are helped by the US government. This earned him Atrios' coveted Wanker of the Day award and The Worst Person In The World on the same day, thanks to these stunning words: "Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire. Some young people here don't join the military (a traditional escape route for poor, rural Americans) because it's easier to rely on food stamps and disability payments." More from Pierce. Kristof made my skin crawl even before there was an internet.
"Nobody Has To Own It: The real reason for bipartisan deals is so Congress can pass horrible things that the public hates and it isn't clear who you can blame. Throw in a bunch of retiring members of Congress in a lame duck session, and you have a recipe for accountability-free democracy. Otherwise known as not democracy." - Atrios
Also: State lawmakers find out why people use birth control.
Why the US is so far behind on solar power. Even in Britain people are powering their entire homes with solar, and it's not like we get all that much sunlight here. But protecting the energy monopolies is more important to Americans' "representatives" in government, lately, so they make it as hard as possible for you to do that.

Michael Hoexter at Naked Capitalism, "Obama and Boehner's Grand Bargain: : Gullible Democrats are Falling for the Ol' 'Good Cop, Bad Cop' Routine." (And don't forget to click this link.)

Obama's quest for bipartisanship has been in part the quest for a 'bad cop' who would push his agenda in a manner so that his 'good cop' image could remain relatively unsullied in the view of the public and perhaps even to himself. It is likely that Obama thinks of himself as essentially a pragmatist without political allegiance to a fundamental ideology or vision, a man who simply moves society and its constellation of social forces along as they seem to tend rather than push them according to commitments to abstract principles that would bend the trajectory of society. However to be this pragmatist and also a political leader, he has the need to be perceived by others as representing 'larger than self' ideals, even though he himself may not share those ideals.

The Republicans, now led by Boehner, have been fairly consistent in playing the 'bad cop' role, as least as regards the Democratic base. They carry with them so many signifiers of 'political enemy' to liberals that they can be easily blamed for whatever is considered objectionable. We still have left of center bloggers who are attributing to Republicans all of the animus against social programs, thereby exonerating Obama of any of this desire. Howard Dean's Democracy for America just sent me a fundraising email in which he attributes the interest in cutting Medicare to Republicans, which is misleading and naïve to say the least. The current media landscape on the supposed political left in the US results from a triumph of misdirection by Obama and his handlers. He is experiencing very little pressure at this late date from progressives, in a situation where he has a number of 'outs' out of the fiscal 'cliff' he has gotten himself into but instead pursues his quixotic 'Grand Bargain'

Another function of Republicans as 'bad cop', is that Obama needs a foil against which to agitate for what ultimately is a relatively lightweight concession of higher taxes on the rich that, in our economy overreliant on high-end good sales, could in isolation do economic harm. The 'good cop, bad cop' routine provides the appearance of conflict and displaces political conflict away from where the conflict of interests really are, between the Washington and Wall Street establishments and the American people and businesses tied to the real economy. In economic terms, the discussion is at a complete remove from what Modern Money school economists and consistent Keynesians are pointing out: that both cutting spending and raising taxes drains demand from the already-weak economy, slowing it and pushing it back into recession.

A lot of people need to go to school on what "right to work" laws are really about, but I'm not so sure they don't know what they're doing. This is, after all, just the sort of thing the Powell Memo prescribed.

Yeah, What Athenae said.

This is important. We had people all during the health insurance "negotiations" telling us to calm down, 11-dimensional chess and blah blah blah, and anyway the PPACA was wonderful and would give millions of people health insurance. And of course, since the outcry from the public was muted at best, we got just what Obama wanted - a shoddy piece of crap that people still can't afford. So, the more people tell you that all this Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security cutting is "just an unsourced rumor", the more you know they are trying to mute the push-back so they can get it done. Which means it's a really good idea to scream bloody murder about how unacceptable it is. Ditto when Jonathan Chait and any other nitwit tries to tell you that it's no big deal to do it (in exchange for a tiny adjustment in tax rates on the rich that actually ends up being another tax cut for the rich). There are no right-wing plans that save money, and these "concessions" the Third Way New Dem Centrist DLC "moderates" keep touting are just expensive ways to steal from and murder Americans. Of course you should be "shrill". Digby also talked to Sam Seder about this on The Majority Report.

"If We Did Not Share in the Prosperity, Why Should We Have to Share in the Sacrifice?"

"Ready To Kiss The Social Contract Bye-Bye?

How the Territorial Tax Cut Destroys Jobs: There is a little-discussed proposal that was introduced into the 'fiscal cliff' discussions by the CEOs of the 'Fix the Debt' campaign. This is for a 'Territorial Tax System' idea that lets multinational companies off the hook for taxes on offshore profits. This plan is particularly dangerous to American wages and jobs - YOUR wages and job - as well as any American companies that don't export their profit centers. This threat is not limited to the blue-collar jobs that have been disappearing, it also threatens the professionals, 'knowledge workers,' designers, innovators and others who contribute to corporate profits here in the US.

DCblogger noticed that AEI actually noticed the idea of minting a trillion dollar platinum coin enough to dismiss it.

Xylitol: Should We Stop Calling It Natural?

"Anarchy in the U.S.A." - on books about Emma Goldman and her sweetie.

"Am I Free to Go?" - a new short story by Kathryn Cramer, free online at Tor.com. "The line between utopia and dystopia...is, often, who you are. Or who your neighbors think you are."

Maybe it's the BBC's cut for the merchandising license that makes this computer so overpriced, but it's a cute idea if you were looking to design your own case - or maybe a Christmas present - for someone who geeks that way.

A new one for my list: "Carol of the Bells" performed by Pentatonix.

One seems to hear words of good cheer

A bit late out of the gate, but I just can't get started without "Carol of the Bells." (Yes, it's true: I play that particular version over and over while I do the Advent list.) Now, let's see who still has Advent calendars....
Electric December
Christmas Magazine
Busted Halo Woodlands Junior School
North Pole
St. Mary Margaret
Your Punk Rock Advent Calendar
Chris' Invincible Super-Blog's Advent posts aren't strictly an Advent Calendar, but it's great fun and you really shouldn't miss December 6th.

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My thanks to commenter someofparts for tipping me off to this chilling article that traces the predictable rise and fall of empire and reminds us what "irredentism" means, among other things. And how Toynbee tipped us on what our future may look like:

The first phase of that unfoldment begins with the rise and successful expansion of the imperial power. That expansion quite often involves the conquest of lands previously owned by less wealthy and powerful nations next door. For some time thereafter, neighboring societies that are not absorbed in this way are drawn into the imperial power's orbit and copy its political and cultural habits - German tribal chieftains mint their own pseudo-Roman coins and drape themselves in togas, people very far from America copy the institutions of representative democracy and don blue jeans, and so on. A successful empire has a charisma that inspires imitation, and while it retains its ascendancy, that charisma makes the continued domination of its borderlands easy to maintain.

It's when the ascendancy fails and the charisma crumbles that things start to get difficult. Toynbee uses a neat if untranslatable Latin pun to denote the difference: the charisma of a successful imperial power makes its borderlands a limen or doorway, while the weakening of its power and the collapse of its charisma compels it to replace the limen with a limes, a defensive wall. Very often, in fact, it's when a physical wall goes up along the border that the imperial power, in effect, serves notice to its historians that its days are numbered.

Once the wall goes up, literally or figuratively, the focus shifts to the lands immediately outside it, and those lands go through a series of utterly predictable stages. As economic and political stresses mount along the boundary, social order collapses and institutions disintegrate, leaving power in the hands of a distinctive social form, the warband - a body of mostly young men whose sole trade is violence, and who are bound by personal loyalties to a charismatic warlord. At first, nascent warbands strive mostly with one another and with the crumbling institutions of their own countries, but before long their attention turns to the much richer pickings to be found on the other side of the wall. Raids and counter-raids plunge the region into a rising spiral of violence that the warbands can afford much more easily than the imperial government.

Highly recommended: Read the rest.

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For a good read, you should go to Corrente right now and read the whole front page. Aside from several important news stories I should have gotten around to but haven't, yet, there's a bunch of music and other smart stuff. (Also, of course, give if you've got it - it's one great blog.)

"Movie Studios Ask Google To Censor Their Own Films, Facebook and Wikipedia" - including legitimate sources. A sort of anti-advertising campaign for their own work? Or maybe it's just time to stop all this take-down notice mania and make studios think twice about sending such infringement requests. Copyright law is now so out of control anyway that nobody sane could support its current application.

"How could 'cuffed' suspect possibly shoot himself? [...] According to police, Carter somehow managed to get a gun and fired a single shot into his head. Just how the police officer who searched Carter was able to find what amounted to a dime bag of pot but missed a small-caliber handgun is a mystery to a lot of people. And so, too, is how Carter could have shot himself in the head, even though "his hands were still cuffed behind his back," according to the police report. His mother, Teresa Carter, told a Memphis, Tenn., television station that police said her son was shot in the right temple. But, she said, Carter was left handed."

Florida murders 14-year-old disabled girl. Apparently, they "couldn't afford" to do something that they could afford to do. Or was killing her the whole "money-saving" plan?

Who is Grover Norquist? That's what most of us used to wonder - why was Grover Norquist, who is no more than a political operative and certainly not an economist - let alone one who cared about whether ordinary Americans could afford their taxes - on television all the time and taken seriously by all the big mouthpieces in Washington? Why should anyone feel they had to sign Norquist's anti-tax pledge? Why did people come to his meetings all the time, and how did he end up being such a big deal? But they made him a big deal, and now that they have, they're trying to walk it back as his famous pledge now stands in the way of the Grand Bargain to steal your national economic security benefits.

TOM THE DANCING BUG: A HOSTESS TWINKIES AD - CAPTAIN INDUSTRY VS. UNION-MAN (Thanks for the heads-up, Kip!)

Oh, no! One of the best reporter-analysts in the blogosphere is stepping back. Gonna miss you, Dday.

RIP: Dave Brubeck, 1920-2012. Just a day short of his 92nd birthday, one of the greatest names in jazz is gone. Ivan Hewitt in the Telegraph said he had "Endless curiosity combined with stubbornness. WaPo news video. A nice surprise for me when I went to davebrubeck.com and heard seasonal music playing. More obits from Auntie Beeb, the Guardian, The San Francisco Chronicle. And here is his YouTube channel.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Parody is not my kinda music, but it's fun anyway.
Ditto this Shot-for-shot remake of the intro for The Prisoner.

Among the many wonders currently showing at The Mary Sue, Neil Patrick Harris tells Doctor Nathan Fillion Mayfair about his Puppet Dreams. Also, a nice picture of Neil Gaiman having breakfast with Matt Smith, Lego characters from The Hobbit, and the exciting news that the trailer for Star Trek Into The Darkness is narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Christmas lights