Ain't that peculiar?

This week's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays were Avedon Carol and Dave Johnson, who argued about why the Democratic leadership keeps sabotaging the Democratic Party and democracy. Homework for this one includes:
WikiLeaks, "Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA)"
"Secret Rahm memo to Clinton: Step up attack on immigrants. Be Nixon on crime".
Digby on "Triangulatin'90s style"
Populist Majority
"Why Blue Dog Mike Ross Will Lose His Run For Arkansas Governor"
"The Lamest Operation in America" - or how Emily's List siphons off liberal donations for losers.
(Also at Down With Tyranny!"Vive la libération: St. Louisans celebrate as their city is declared a George F. Will-free zone.")
David Atkins talked about his blog post "Wherein I sympathize with Erick Erickson" on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd. (Related story: "Crazy Mississippi runoff turns ugly: 'Poll watchers' head to black voting sites.")

"Obama alums join anti teachers union case [...] The Incite Agency, founded by former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and former Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt, will lead a national public relations drive to support a series of lawsuits aimed at challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections that teachers unions have defended ferociously. LaBolt and another former Obama aide, Jon Jones - the first digital strategist of the 2008 campaign - will take the lead in the public relations initiative." (via)

David Dayen, "Wingnuts and liberals' bizarre role reversal: Why Export-Import Bank politics are so perverse: Nowadays, Democrats are defending Ex-Im, and the right is calling it "corporate welfare." It wasn't always that way: A fascinating game of role reversal is playing out in Congress, where Democrats are teaming up with the Chamber of Commerce, and Republicans are using phrases like 'stop corporate welfare.' Many of the same politicians lined up on the other side of the debate just a few years earlier. What has turned Washington into a wonky remake of Freaky Friday? The reauthorization of the Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank, a government-run enterprise that grants loans and insurance at below-market rates to facilitate large trade deals. [...] But pre-Internet liberals might want to get out their back issues of the Nation and Mother Jones at this point to jog their memory, for they will see article after article condemning the 80-year-old institution as a slush fund that allows the government to fund a series of nasty activities. Here's one from 1981 ('The Ex-Im helps sell nuclear reactors to dictatorships like the Philippines'). Here's another from 1992, about the Reagan administration using Ex-Im to funnel loans to Saddam Hussein's Iraq during their war with Iran. Even more recently, in 2011, Mother Jones reported on how Ex-Im loan guarantees helped build one of the largest coal plants in the world, in South Africa. (Ex-Im subsequently announced it would stop facilitating coal plant production - but only in December of last year.) [...] And Sanders certainly did not believe that financing for multinational trade deals would dry up without Ex-Im. He questioned the head of the bank in 2004, asking, 'General Electric, which itself is one of the largest financial institutions in America, cannot get loans anyplace else but from the taxpayers and the workers of America? Are you going to tell me with a straight face that GE is a struggling small business, a minority business in the barrio of New York, and they just cannot find financing?'" So, looks like we're lucky we have Republicans in Congress to finally refuse re-authorization of this piece of crap.

And here's a little reminder that stop-&-frisk and marijuana possession laws criminalize being black, because it's routine to stop and search black males, and to ignore whites who are at least as likely to be in possession of marijuana.

On The Majority Report:
Beth Schwartzapfel discussed her recent piece, "The Great American Chain Gang." Yes, there is legal slavery in America, they just call it something else.
Philip Mirowski talked about How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown.

Of course, it could be worse. You could, for example, be a 95-Year-Old WWII Vet who the police shoot to death for refusing to go to the hospital. Will these cops be held to account? Even if the UK, it just doesn't happen. The police are the most dangerous people on the streets.

Digby on the exoneration of the Central Park 5: "This case is actually one of the few that has a satisfying result but a lot of the credit has to go to the DA's office which actually endorsed the fact that they had wrongfully convicted these men. That is an anomaly."

Democracy Now!, "The Guantánamo 'Suicides' Revisited: Did CIA Hide Deaths of Tortured Prisoners at Secret Site? In one of the great mysteries of the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, three prisoners, two from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen, died the night of June 9, 2006. Authorities at Guantánamo said the three men - Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, Salah Ahmed al-Salami and Mani Shaman al-Utaybi - had killed themselves. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, described their deaths as an "act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." But explosive new evidence shows there may have been a cover-up on how the men actually died. Recently discovered pages from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service suggest that the men died not from suicide, but torture."

Thanks to esteemed commenter jcapan for reminding me of why Bernie Sanders should not run for president: "In other words: We recognize this guy won't win - we're implicitly acknowledging that in the very petition calling on him to run - so don't worry, loyal Democrats, after we blow off some steam during the primary we will turn out in force for whoever isn't the Republican."

Hm, who would be deliberately committing voter fraud? Oh, right. "Now we learn about the curious case of Robert Monroe, a 50-year-old health executive who is accused of voting a dozen times in 2011 and 2012, including seven times in the recalls of Scott Walker and his GOP ally Alberta Darling. Wisconsin officials say it's the worst case of multiple voting in memory. Oh, and, did I mention he's a Republican?"

Why, yes, if Detroit is really planning to take people's water away, I see no reason why they shouldn't dump their unflushable waste on toney golf courses. I liked the first commenter's inventory of rights: "Things that are, according to conservatives, not a right: drinkable water, breathable air, food, jobs you can earn enough to survive on, health care, education, functioning infrastructure, voting. Things that are rights, according to conservatives: hoarding as many guns as possible, the legal standing to refuse to serve someone whose race or sexual orientation you don't like, sexual harassment of women, publicly exposing one's racism and bigotry and not getting fired for it, shooting people who look like criminals and getting away with it, the entire media and entertainment industry catering to you and only you, and, of course, delivering college graduation commencement speeches."

"Mass. abortion clinic buffer zones ruled illegal"
The Rude One says, "You Wanna Keep Harassing Women at Clinics? Then Let's Play." Great idea!

"City to fine owners of Little Free Libraries" - I hadn't seen this idea before but I love the thought of having a little "library" on your front lawn where people can just pull out a book and sit down and read it. "'We came back to find a letter from the code enforcement telling us it was an illegal dwelling or structure,' Brian Collins said. Collins put up a Little Free Library on Mother's Day in his front yard near the intersection of 89th Street and Ensley Lane. 'Given that nothing can dwell in here except maybe mice, I really didn't understand what that was all about,' he said."

John Oliver makes a deal: Sit through his discussion of the death penalty and be rewarded with a video of a tiny hamster eating a tiny burrito/

After everything sex has done for the internet, it seems an awful lot of important sites are biting the hand that fed them. Paypal cracking down on adult sites, a big image-hosting site banned adult content, Amazon weeding out porn books, and now Google refusing to make shortlinks for "adult" content.

Last month's feelgood story: "Ivan Fernandez Anaya, Spanish Runner, Intentionally Loses Race So Opponent Can Win"

I've really been enjoying these "This is what anti-pot messages look like to me" mock-ups.

Costume party

17 British accents (via)

This article on Merry Clayton's recent car crash injury includes a clip of just the vocal track on "Gimme Shelter".

I admit, I did not get why this old ad was supposed to be funny, at first.

"I want to imagine that this is what Fernando de la Jara intended all along when first constructing the sculpture. 'Someday,' the artist must have mused, 'years after all of Germany has come to marvel at the beauty and wonder of my work, some kid will jam his legs right in there 'for the vine,' and his cries for aid will briefly awaken the bright soul of Georgia O'Keefe from death's cold embrace, and her ghost will laugh so hard that her face falls off.' You know, something poignant like that."

More Firefly .gifs.

Marvin Gaye at The Bitter End

Who was that man? I'd like to shake his hand

Marcy Wheeler and BMAZ on Virtually Speaking Sundays about the military's war on media freedom, after Chelsea Manning's op-ed in the NYT, " The Fog Machine of War".

Lina Khan in The Washington Monthly, "Thrown Out of Court: How corporations became people you can't sue [...] All this may seem like an archetypical story of our times, combining corporate misconduct, cyber-crime, and high-stakes litigation. But for those who follow the cutting edge of corporate law, a central part of this saga is almost antiquarian: the part where Target must actually face its accusers in court and the public gets to know what went awry and whether justice gets done. Two recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings - AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion and American Express v. Italian Colors - have deeply undercut these centuries-old public rights, by empowering businesses to avoid any threat of private lawsuits or class actions. The decisions culminate a thirty-year trend during which the judiciary, including initially some prominent liberal jurists, has moved to eliminate courts as a means for ordinary Americans to uphold their rights against companies. The result is a world where corporations can evade accountability and effectively skirt swaths of law, pushing their growing power over their consumers and employees past a tipping point." Khan discussed the article with Sam Seder on The Majority Report.

Sammy also talked to Jack Schneider about The War on Teachers & Democracy. He diplomatically didn't say anything about his co-blogger, Michelle Rhee. Meanwhile, Alan Bennett wrote an attack on private education in the Guardian.

Sterling Newberry has a paper up on economics, "Recession and unemployment", which I haven't finished reading yet, but it's good to see him back in the saddle.

It seems Justice Scalia has a little trouble discerning the difference between not liking something and, you know, an establishment of religion. As a matter of personal offense, of course, the people who should be most outraged at public displays of false piety that harness the trappings and talismans of faith to political posturing and tribalism would be the Christians who should recognize this blatant flouting of the teachings of Jesus for cynical purposes. That is personal. But letting the government do it is an affront to the 1st Amendment, which one would think a Supreme Court justice might find just a bit, you know, unconstitutional.

On the other hand, the Supremes unanimously did something intelligent: they curbed software patents.

In The American Conservative, a thoughtful piece on Bowe Bergdahl as a GOP scapegoat for a host of warhawk/chickenhawk failures, and of course Obama.

I just love the way Charlie Pierce writes. "Here's Some Stupid For Lunch: We've kept a weather eye on Ruth Marcus, who writes a column at Fred Hiatt's House Of Hopeless Hacks, ever since she explained that 'potty-mouthed' teenagers - Her word, by the way - should know their place, and that their place was not mocking Sam Brownback, the Papist loon currently turning Kansas into Mordor. Recently, she joined the mourning over the loss to the Republic of the genius that was Eric Cantor." I don't know what the fuss is about, they just exchanged one No vote for another.

I expect a walk-back update momentarily, but it seems Glenn Beck admitted on the air that liberals were right about Iraq. I'm not holding my breath for the "liberal media" to make the same admission on CBS or in the Newspaper of Record. Of course, Beck's analysis of why liberals opposed the invasion are at about 180 degrees from anything any liberal actually ever said, but still.

An alert from ql at Eschaton: "One of our pals has launched his own news site, The Halifax Examiner. Even though I don't live anywhere near Halifax, I subscribed because the issues covered are the same whether they occur in Philadelphia, Seattle or Halifax. From juicing the numbers as to how much revenue a convention center will generate to how a contract for a sewer plant is awarded, it's almost as if they are all using the same playbook. It seems no one else in the main stream press is covering these stories and they have a direct impact on our quality of life. I look forward to seeing how this develops. Good luck! "

"Recovered Economic History: ''Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious' [...] Yep, despite what you might have learned, the transition to a capitalistic society did not happen naturally or smoothly. See, English peasants didn't want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith's own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It's really not much of a choice, is it? But in order for capitalism to work, capitalists needed a pool of cheap, surplus labor. So what to do? Call in the National Guard!"

"PRIVACY BREACH: Oklahoma posts ALL of your personal info online if you get arrested: Online court records in Oklahoma reveal your social security number, birth date, telephone number, address, and much more personal information before you're ever convicted of a crime."

Richard Wolff: We Need "Democracy in the Workplace"

Should politicians wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers to identify their corporate sponsors?

Iggy Pop Praises Justin Bieber (Under Torture) in Amnesty Ad

"Hobby Lobby Fires Employee For Divorcing Husband"

Quiz: How Well Do You Know America?

Obama's first term: a reminder.

Churchill on democracy

Leonard Cohen's Seven Immutable Laws of Business

Jeff Schalles dug up this old photo he took of me and John Shirley and Tess Kissinger.

Imagine my surprise upon learning that Frank Zappa was once a guest on The Steve Allen Show.

The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot - The Sequel: Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann in the Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. Photo: BBCPaul McGann has reported that a sequel to last year's online/red-button anniversary special, The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot has entered production. The actor, who appeared briefly in the original, was speaking at an event for Cambridge Union Society, which also saw "Reboot" co-star Sylvester McCoy speak back in May.

Whorhythmics

Congratulations: Andi Schecter and Stu Shiffman got married - woohoo!

RIP Gerry Goffin, 75. The Guardian has its own Six of the best, but here's some more breadth:
The Animals, "Don't Bring Me Down", Goffin-King 1966
Bobby Vee, "Take Good Care of My Baby", Goffin-King 1961
The Righteous Brothers, "Just Once In My Life ", Goffin-King 1965
Freddie Scott, "Hey Girl", Goffin-King 1963
Barry Mann, "Who Put The Bomp", Goffin-Mann 1961

It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry

How gay activists - led by GetEQUAL and Service Members United - won in the Obama era, when other progressive communities were stymied by Democratic inaction and hostility. AmericaBlog former Deputy Editor Joe Sudbay talked with Contributing Editor Gaius Publius on Virtually Speaking.
Dave Johnson and Joan McCarter talked about game-changers on last weekend's Virtually Speaking Sunday.

On The Majority Report, David Huyssen discussed his book Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890-1920, about why the progressive movement wasn't what was needed and was failing the public.

When It Came To Wall St., David Brat Actually Ran As Elizabeth Warren: "Brat told Internet radio host Flint Engelman that the 'number one plank' in his campaign is 'free markets.' Brat went on to explain, 'Eric Cantor and the Republican leadership do not know what a free market is at all, and the clearest evidence of that is the financial crisis - When I say free markets, I mean no favoritism to K Street lobbyists.' Banks like Goldman Sachs were not fined for their role in the financial crisis - rather, they were rewarded with bailouts, Brat has said."

Chris Floyd: "US and European politicians won't explain it because any honest explanation would expose the emptiness at the core of all their proffered reasons for the Terror War. They can't explain it because the Terror War system -- including the increasing militarization and repression in their own countries -- has now become organizing principle of Western society. Or rather, it is the latest incarnation of what has been the guiding principle of Western society since World War II: organizing society and the economy around war, either active war or the ever-present "threat" of war (assiduously exaggerated -- or even manufactured -- at every turn). For government and big business, the immense power and profit and control they inevitably accrued from conducting total war on a global basis was far too enticing to give up once the war was over. The full mobilization of society's resources for war simply carried on; indeed, was expanded and amplified."

"Republicans Aren't The Only Anti-Gay Members Of Congress [...] On April 29, 2009, the House passed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, 249-175, 18 Republican abandoning their hate-filled and bigoted leaders, crossing the aisle and voting with the Democrats. Boehner, Cantor, Ryan and McCarthy were against the bill and they had support from 17 of the most racist and conservative Democrats in the House"

"China Laughed When It Saw How Cheap Solar Could Be: Do you remember when Dr. Evil was going to hold the world ransom for $1,000,000? This is what we are facing today in Solar - the Dr. Evil ultimatum. The cost to get Solar to coal parity is going to be laughably tiny."

The technocrats who want to eliminate cash - and why we need to oppose them: "So there you have it: Let Yglesias and his technocrat-manager friends bring all money under the control of government and corporate financial institutions (never mind their recent performance record) and hard times will be a thing of the past! Does that sound too good to be true to anyone else?" I'm sure the idea of never having to use cash at a counter must sound great to anyone who has never, ever needed to send someone else out to the shops for something, but I have had days when I simply couldn't have functioned if I'd been unable to hand someone some cash. Like those times when you need to have someone pick up your prescriptions and you don't want them to have to pay for it, or those moments when you just don't have time to do two things at once. And when I buy something directly off of a friend, I don't see why I should have to find some way to make an electronic transfer to them instead of just pulling a couple of quid out of my pocket. And that's just what's on the surface, the everyday stuff. There could be a lot more important reasons to deal untraceably among honest people. Especially when you know how dishonest your government is.

The Mass Murderers' Conference

Adam Roberts in the Guardian, "War of the worlds: who owns the political soul of science fiction?: In the sci-fi genre, two diametrically opposed ideologies are battling it out as leftwing writers embrace otherness, while the rightwingers look up to authority"

"Bill Watterson's Strips For Pearls Before Swine", and "‘Calvin and Hobbes' creator Bill Watterson returns to the comics page - to offer a few ‘Pearls' gems".

"Saskatoon honours Joni Mitchell with new parking lot: After years of contemplation on how to pay tribute to an iconic Canadian musician, the City of Saskatoon will honour Joni Mitchell with a 400 space parking lot. The Joni Mitchell Paradise Parking Lot will be located beside a Wal-Mart and several other box stores located in the city's East End." (Okay, it's a parody site, but it was good for a laugh. Waitin' on the Tree Museum.)

This is from 2008, but still: "Where Are They Now - WKRP in Cincinnati".

The Band, featuring Paul Butterfield, "Mystery Train"

Paul Butterfield, "Two Trains Running"

Al Kooper and Steve Stills

Money for nothin'

David Margolick, senior contributor at Vanity Fair, discussed his book Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd. "He takes us back to 1939 when Billie Holiday first performed, and then recorded, one of the most extraordinary songs of the 20th century. The book reflects wide-ranging interviews, from Lena Horne to Pete Seeger, all of which describe how they were affected by the song." (.mp3) "Strange Fruit" has, of course, since been covered by a remarkable range of artists (I had some surprises looking around YouTube), but it almost never got recorded at all, because no record company would touch it.

Jim Hightower: "5 Signs That America Has Gone Bonkers - And a Glimmer of Hope [...] It might appear that the U-S-of-A has gone bonkers. So let me clear up any confusion that you might have: Yes, it has! Yet, it hasn't. More on that in a moment. First, though - whether looking at the 'tea party' congress critters who've swerved our nation's political debate to the hard right, or at the peacocks of Wall Street who continue to preen and profit atop the wreckage they've made of our real economy - it's plain to see that America is suffering a pestilence of nuts and narcissists in high places. These 'leaders' are hell bent to enthrone themselves and their ilk as the potentates of our economic, governmental and social systems and they are aggressively trying to snuff out the light of egalitarianism that historically has been our society's unifying force. [...] Most people know that things are screwy, that this is not the America that's supposed to be. And therein lies the good news: The USA hasn't gone crazy - its leaders have and they can be changed." Hightower is always more optimistic than I am, but some part of me needs to believe.

As to what's actually happening, Sirota, "If the Left Had a Tea Party: Suburban Albany is not known for its rip-roaring weekend scene, but this most recent Saturday night, it was the momentary center of the political universe, as an underfunded political party was using its quadrennial convention to try to force America's most powerful and best-financed governor to submit to its demands. Though the Working Families Party's conventions are typically low-key affairs, this one had drawn 800 activists and operatives and most of the New York press corps - all to see if the party would endorse conservative Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo or run a third-party candidate against him." In the end they endorsed Cuomo, but maybe they got something for it. He should still be run out of town on a rail, though.

NY Times reporter faces jail time after Supreme Court refuses to hear appeal: A New York Times journalist faces jail time after the US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal on Monday over whether the First Amendment gives him the right to protect his confidential source. James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has repeatedly refused to name the source for his 2006 book entitled the State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration exposing CIA abuses he had discovered. In particular, chapter 9 of that book disclosed an attempt by the CIA to have a former Soviet nuclear scientist subvert the Iranian nuclear program. Arguments presented in Risen's book, forced the US Department of Justice to search his phone, credit card and bank records to compile a case against a former CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling, charged under the Espionage Act, for allegedly leaking the Iranian story to the reporter.

Amazon plays Monopoly: "But the fact that it's entirely normal doesn't mean that we should casually dismiss this particular spat. Amazon's influence over the book business is now greater than anything Barnes & Noble ever enjoyed. The retail landscape is vastly different than it was five or 10 years ago. There are far fewer options for buying books. What Amazon's most virulent critics feared has come to pass. Having consolidated its power over the book publishing industry, Amazon is now exploiting it. If it continues to do so, unchecked by antitrust enforcement or meaningful competition, there's a very real chance that the quality product at the center of all this - the book! - will suffer."

"Pepper Spray Cop's Settlement Sets Dangerous Precedent [...] Lt. John Pike of the UC Davis police pepper-sprayed a group of sitting protesters in 2011. Amidst an autumn of federally-coordinated, violent police suppression of the Occupy movement, the incident in Davis was clearly one of the most heinous cases. A group of students had linked arms, sat down, and refused to move when the police came to evict their encampment. Lt. John Pike then casually exhibited a red can of military-grade pepper spray, nonchalantly strolled past the protesters, and doused them in orange gas, which led to the hospitalization several of the students. International outrage ensued. "Pepper Spraying Cop" became a widely-shared meme, and Pike was originally put on paid leave and eventually fired. The students sued, and a $1 million settlement was split between all 21 of them. Pike was just awarded $38,058 in disability payments, after claiming he suffered "emotional and psychological damage" from his attack on UC Davis students."

Matt Stoller on "The Con-Artist Wing of the Democratic Party" and Geithner's self-serving book: "There's another serious omission about this period in Geithner's career: his time as a Treasury lobbyist. As documents unearthed by financial analyst Josh Rosner show, in the late 1990s, Geithner, Summers, and Rubin lobbied for World Trade Organization rules forcing the liberalization of financial services across borders, at the behest of large bank CEOs. This matters because the entire book is about Geithner's reflections on financial crises, and one of the central causes of these crises was 'hot money.' 'Globalization had unleashed enormous sums of ‘hot money' that could instantaneously flow across borders,' he warns, 'while the aspects of human psychology that had helped produce financial booms and crises for centuries remained unchanged.' By presenting globalization as an inherent natural force, and not mentioning his role in crafting the policies that led to hot money flows, he misleads by omission. In other words, Geithner wasn't just a firefighter, but an arsonist. You wouldn't know this, because Geithner in the book laments free capital flows. But he wasn't lamenting them when it mattered (and the position of the US government's trade representative today is still that hot money is good)."

David Dayen, "Summers: Helping Homeowners Would Have Hurt Banks: I have a review of Mian and Sufi's House of Debt out today, and so does Larry Summers. His review is very strange. It starts off with almost unvarnished praise for the book, saying 'it could be the most important book to come out of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession.' He celebrates their data collection, largely agrees with their alternative rendering of the causes of the crisis, and pronounces it 'a major contribution' that should give pause to what Mian and Sufi call 'the banking view' of the crisis, essentially that the economy hinges on protecting and saving the financial system. And then, Summers calls them naive and says they didn't understand the reality of what policymakers faced in 2008 and 2009. Specifically, he says that 'We all believed in 2009 what Mian and Sufi have now conclusively demonstrated - that reducing mortgage debt would spur consumer spending,' saying they did not have a narrow banking view of crisis response. Yet almost every one of Summers' objections - to supporting bankruptcy judges rewriting terms of primary mortgages, to forcing principal write-downs, to buying underwater mortgages through a Home Owners Loan Corporation-type structure - comes with the warning that the preferred policy of mortgage debt relief would hurt the banks." There's a more detailed analysis of Larry Summers' Attempt to Rewrite Cramdown History here from someone who actually understands bankruptcy, unlike, apparently, anyone in the Obama administration.

Elizabeth Warren And Thomas Piketty Discuss Nature, Causes Of Economic Inequality

The price of austerity is one those who won't pay it are always willing to pay.

I suppose Stiglitz is being circumspect in his calls for higher taxation of capital, but surely everyone has figured out by now that there's a level of wealth that no one should have.

Torture isn't torture in California prisons, either.

"There is a certain ironic symmetry in the resignation of General Eric Shinseki as Secretary of Veterans Affairs" - but of course, it's so much easier to short-change the VA and blame everyone else than it would have been to simply fund it - and fix it.

John Oliver on Net Neutrality. Update, the FCC website couldn't handle it.

Theory And Practice - Conversations With Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn

Here's the FULL PREMIERE of Lee Camp's new weekly TV show.

The Ansible obits tell me Ken Brown has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 57. Damn, I liked him. He even occasionally commented here at The Sideshow.

I really miss Steve Gilliard. I just can't help thinking it would have been better if he'd been here these last seven years.

The Absurd Reason Why America Circumcises Baby Boys

When George Clooney made Roseanne work overtime

Wouldn't you know, the Anxiety Arts Festival London 2014.

The Comics Curmudgeon

Mark Evanier has a nice clip up of Holbrook's Mark Twain.

The Jazz Photography of Bill Gottlieb

Dire Straits

Madness takes its toll

I meant to have posted this piece from the Bread and Roses page earlier, but I didn't get around to it. They're on Facebook, which many people are justifiably allergic to, so here's the full text:

"We are coming up on the anniversary of the MEMORIAL DAY MASSACRE - one of the bloodiest days in labor history: On May 30, 1937, outside Republic Steel in Chicago, heavily armed police and company thugs attacked workers and their families with impunity, as they peacefully marched across a field to picket at the steel mill after a holiday picnic. At the time, mill owners were refusing to recognize the Steelworkers union. Many workers were shot in the back, others were beaten while bleeding and on the ground. Police bullets killed four marchers right away; six more would die from their wounds. Thirty more people were seriously wounded, with 100 more clubbed by police. Nobody responsible was ever prosecuted and newspapers called the massacre 'a labor riot', claiming it was led by 'Red Chiefs' and a 'Mexican Army.' Mill bosses and their govt. supporters suppressed film footage of the event. The U.S. Senate eventually held hearings on what happened that revealed most strikers were shot in the back while fleeing."

RJ Eskow and Stuart Zechman talked about ACA, the VA, and Democrats' disappointing election strategies as they emerge, on Virtually Speaking Sundays.
Steven Durlauf discussed the Piketty data and Durlauf's 2008 paper Are Growth Theories Robust? on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd.

Michael Kinsley has turned into the cranky old man who gets trotted out to yell at the kids, I think. But he started down that road a while ago, and I don't suppose we should be surprised that he came out waving his golf club at Glenn Greenwald. Still, it's always bizarre to see a journalist advocating giving the government veto power over what the press can publish and suggested that somehow prior restraint is preferable to letting Glenn Greenwald decide that he's got a story the public needs to hear. So you would expect lots of journalists - especially those who supposedly have liberal credentials - to be recoiling in horror. I just hope we can put to bed once and for all the fantasy that any of these people are part of anything liberal. Oh, but that Glenn Greenwald, he just makes those "liberals" So mad!

Las Vegas cop cleared after shooting unarmed man [...] This is the consequence when we put a premium on officer safety, giving it more value than the rights and safety of citizens. When I was researching my book, I talked to Neil Franklin about this. Franklin is a former Maryland state trooper, a former narcotics cop and was once in charge of curriculum at the Maryland State Police Academy. 'I think there are two critical components to policing that cops today have forgotten,' Franklin told me. 'Number one, you've signed on to a dangerous job. That means that you've agreed to a certain amount of risk. You don't get to do start stepping on others' rights to minimize that risk you agreed to take on. And number two, your first priority is not to protect yourself, it's to protect those you've sworn to protect. But I don't know how you get police officers today to value those principles again. The 'us and everybody else' sentiment is strong today. It's very, very difficult to change a culture.'"

The Washington Post continues to be a voice for the warmongers, and Charles Pierce has a rather good rant about Fred Hiat's War.

On the other hand, good on the NYT for looking at The Price of a Sex-Slave Rescue Fantasy. It's very difficult to get across to people that the figures we have are unreliable and usually heavily inflated. Not to mention the people who just make stuff up. It's even harder to tell people that general economic issues, not kidnapping, account for large numbers of girls and women going into prostitution when they'd rather not - just like it accounts for many, many people all over the world staying in employment they can't stand. (via)

Could aspirin be an anti-cancer drug?

Union workers see only part of big hourly markups at Convention Center - and middlemen get 150% more than the workers. The "new economy", generates a special kind of thinking, where being a middleman is worth more than actual work.

Maya Angelou on the Black Side of the Tracks, 1982, with Bill Moyers.

"New STEM Education Initiative Inspires Girls To Earn Less Than Men In Scientific Career"

"Permission Slip" - Father versus "Christian Volunteer" (via)

A Great Big Bunch Of Game Of Thrones Interviews To Help Tide You Over

Best privit hedge ever

The Worst Waiter in History

Alien retro

The Necronomithong

Let's do the Timey-Wimey Time Warp again.

Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong

Marcy Wheeler was this week's guest on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd. For background, you might want to check out Marcy's "Why USA Freedumber Doesn't End (What You and I Think of as) Bulk Collection", "The Source of the Intelligence Legitimacy Problem", "No Protection For International Communications: Russ Feingold Warned Us" and all the other stuff on spies she has up at Emptywheel. Of note is "The Disturbing Paradox of the David Barron Nomination". It's amazing how helpless Obama is to appoint good nominees and yet still manages to appoint bad ones.

Stephanie Kelton joined Sam Seder Thursday to talk about how money works, on The Majority Report.

"Barack Obama, Wall Street co-conspirator" - It's nice to see Sirota has come to grips with the issue. "Of course, that many can and do see him as something else is proof that Obama's cynical political formula works - and works well. As I wrote in my column last week, he seems to know that in a short-attention-span country where the electorate focuses more on TV packaged rhetoric than on reality, he can give tough-sounding speeches and be widely credited as 'tough on Wall Street' - even if he isn't doing anything to stop financial crime. He also seems to know that liberals, in particular, want to believe 'their guy' is trying to do the right thing, even when he's trying to do the opposite. He knows that for many liberals, it is simply too painful to admit 'their guy' is often as duplicitous and destructive as their sworn GOP enemies - and so he knows he probably will face no real opposition movement among the voters who put him in office. "

Dean Baker, "Robert Samuelson Wants Us to Default on the National Debt: Actually, he probably doesn't, but that would be the logic of his complaint (taken from Gene Steuerle) that "dead men" have established priorities for federal spending. After all, dead men made the decision to borrow the money that constitutes the debt, which thereby obligates the country to pay back the interest and principal. But Samuelson's complaint is not about the interest and principal being paid back to rich people like Peter Peterson, Samuelson is upset about the money being paid out to ordinary workers (mostly retirees) for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid."

It's pretty amazing that a grown man could believe some of the crap that comes out of the Chicago School boys. The idea that health care is exactly the same as the automobile market is so bananas that even David Cameron - David Cameron! showed them the door when they proposed it.

New Obamacare Loophole Shows Failure of For-Profit Health System: "This new rule to limit payments for needed medical procedures is a reminder of everything that is wrong with our profit-driven healthcare system."

Digby says there's "No hope and change for mortgage relief: If you've been reading Dave Dayen's work over the past few years (and I know you have) then you already know the details of what went wrong with housing policy in half a dozen different ways. It's not a pretty picture. Today legislative expert Sarah Binder summarizes one of the more depressing aspects of the failure: the administration's strange unwillingness to push for "cramdown" --- the mortgage relief program which had been widely assumed, even by the banks, to be a done deal."
Also at Hullabaloo, David Atkins alerts us to a worthy NPR report on increasing court fees that further disadvantage the poor. The logic of the poor house seems to have overtaken our "justice" system with startling effectiveness. "Defendants are charged for a long list of government services that were once free - including ones that are constitutionally required."
Also from Digby, collusion between the NSA and the DEA - spying on everyone in the world is not just for terrorism anyone. As if it ever had been.

Commenter ksix points to an article on "Five things you need to know about Credit Suisse's criminal charge" and notes that, yes, it's hard to want to see your friends go to prison, but you do choose what kind of friends you will have.

If you want to know why southern Republicans think the Democratic Party is a thing of evil, you might ask why the Democratic Party keeps working so hard to push Democratic candidates who are too right-wing for the Tea Party.

To recap: Obama tried to get Congress to have a commission to worry about the important work of "reducing deficits" (aka cutting or privatizing Social Security). Congress wanted nothing to do with it (because it's a stupid idea) and was smart enough to ignore him. So Obama put his own commission together stacked with anti-Social Security crackpots and housed by uber-SS-hater Pete Peterson. Even they couldn't manage to agree to screw up Social Security, so Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson wrote a letter saying we should really do some nice destructive things to the economy and, fortunately, nothing happened except some windbags continuing to insist that we really really really need to do something about "entitlements". And David Brooks apparently thinks that's just what we need more of!

Ohio Prison Shows Pirated Movies to Prisoners Convicted of Pirating Movies

50 years on: The reason conservatives hated Great Society programs is because they worked.

It's just amazing to me that it's taken this long for women to be included in pharmaceutical testing. I've been complaining about this since at least the '70s and I really had thought by now that no one would assume that tests on males were sufficient to account for female responses to drugs. Just another example of how people are so busy inventing false differences between men and women that they keep forgetting the real ones. (And now I see PZ Myers has picked up on this one, too. This reminds me of the argument about using "he" as the default general pronoun, even though it produced nonsense sentences and phrases.)

"Fine Line Seen in U.S. Spying on Companies" via Atrios, who notes that this service is not going to be available to a little guy with a big idea, but to a big guy with a a lot of power.

"AR-Gov: Asa Hutchinson (R) Turned Away from Polls Because of Voter ID Law: Asa Hutchinson was turned away from the polls because he didn't have proper ID as required under Arkansas's Voter ID Law. Given Asa's support for making it harder for Arkansans to cast a ballot, you'd think he would have been prepared to produce his ID at the polls."

Valued Sideshow commenter Jcapan recommends "Western intervention will turn Nigeria into an African Afghanistan" the "best thing I've read about Boko Haram", and Ian Welsh's "Equal Rights to Profit from Impoverishing People and Causing a Great Extinction Event" as the best reaction to the firing of Jill Abrahmson.

Everybody hates Comcast.

Ohio Replaces Lethal Injection With Humane New Head-Ripping-Off Machine

My favorite headline of the week

Dracula's castle for sale.

Law & Order Game of Thrones

Sudden extreme homesickness: I just made a typo on YouTube and accidentally discovered an advertisement for something I had never seen an advertisement for previously. It used to just be one restaurant I first learned about when, um, well, when my friends were stoned and had the munchies and remembered that I had a car and phoned me up and convinced me to come pick them up and drive them to Adelphi. When I was in college and feeling flush and wanted to treat myself - or a friend was feeling flush - we would stop there on the way home to pick one up. (But only if we had enough time on our hands for what seemed an excruciatingly long wait.) Then at some point we discovered that another restaurant had been given a franchise to serve the miraculous dish. And one day, after I moved to London, my brother picked me up at Dulles when I went home for a visit and drove directly to something that hadn't existed before: They'd opened a restaurant in Wheaton, not far from his house! Wait, they have an advertisement now? But Wikipedia tells me that, "There are now over 100 restaurants in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, West Virginia, Delaware, South Carolina, and Florida." I can't believe anyone living within a 20-minute trip to a Ledo's would even think of going anywhere else for pizza. How could you?

I'm pretty sure I already posted the original link to this, but I'm posting this one because David Bowie or his lawyer or someone is being a jerk.

Please, Mr. Postman

David Waldman and Stuart Zechman will probably be talking about guns and gunfail on this week's Virtually Speaking Sundays. Stuart may very well take issue with the idea of being anti-self-defense. But actually, despite Jay Ackroyd's obsession with KagroX's #gunfail habit, David is good on some other issues I hope they'll be talking about, too.
David Cay Johnston discussed Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality on Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd.

Well, Geithner managed to score Atrios' World's Worst Human award, and he links to Michael Hitzik's article in the LAT, "What Tim Geithner doesn't know about Social Security is ... shocking : Could Tim Geithner really not know that Social Security doesn't contribute to the deficit?"
Meanwhile at Salon, David Dayen continues his mission of making sure no one believes the story the World's Worst Human is trying to tell about himself, with "This man made millions suffer: Tim Geithner's sorry legacy on housing."
Felix Salmon says Geithner is an unreliable narrator.
I'm thinking Geithner's book doesn't say much about how he and Summers engineered the crisis in the first place.

The FCC's Net Neutrality Proposal Is Out: It's Time to Make Our Voices Heard
House Democrats aren't supporting Big Cable like they did in 2010
Somehow, Activists Have Put Protecting Net Neutrality Back on the Agenda

"The touching, eternal optimism of liberal hawks: As the response to the kidnapping of several hundred Nigerian schoolgirls has grown from hashtag activism to full blown international incident, the calls for action have become increasingly bellicose. Some of those calls have revealed (once again) a deeply rooted militaristic streak in America, one that transcends political affiliation. [...] "

Glenn Greenwald on Democracy Now!: U.S. Corporate Media is "Neutered, Impotent and Obsolete".

"Kidnapped Girls Become Tools of U.S. Imperial Policy in Africa" - Glen Ford tells you more than you're supposed to know about the madness of Boko Haram, and how it got that way.

Mad Cops:
"Cop Shoots Dead an Unarmed, Tased and Subdued Teen, 'We don't have time for this' Bang!"
"Cop Who Zip Tied, Tortured, & Beat His Daughter Daily is Trying to Stay Out Of Jail"

We know that the spy program was going on at least as early as February of 2001. It's well-known. We don't get to forget this. So why does everyone - and I do mean pretty much everyone - talk about it as having been instituted "because of" or "after" September 11th of 2001? Because that just isn't true.

Obama's Worst Judicial Nominee - Maybe it's time we all ask Pat Leahy why he is so busy giving so much power to the Republicans?

"Why a Principled Left Should Support the Benghazi Inquiry [...] One would think that those on the left would support this inquiry, as limited and partisan as it will be, on the democratic principle that the people have a right to know what occurred before, during and in the aftermath of the attack. But even more importantly, by demanding a more comprehensive examination of all the activity of the U.S. in Libya in the aftermath of the destruction of that state, including the mission of the CIA in Benghazi, the left can and should raise serious questions that expose the dangerous strategy of empowering anti-democratic, right-wing forces, from al Qaeda-connected jihadists in Syria to neo-fascists in Ukraine."

"Jill Abramson fired for seeking equal pay: Report: The announcement, today, that Jill Abramson was departing her job as executive editor of the New York Times prompted much speculation across the media. Abramson, appointed in 2011, had enjoyed a relatively brief tenure and one riven by nasty, critical coverage, particularly in Politico. Howard Kurtz, a Fox News media reporter, noted that there's 'Gotta be a backstory there.' Ken Auletta of the New Yorker has reported on Abramson in the past, and today reports that there indeed was: that Abramson recently learned her pay package was not commensurate with that of her predecessor, Bill Keller, and sought parity. Auletta reports: 'She confronted the top brass,' one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management's narrative that she was ‘pushy,' a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect.' The counterargument to Abramson's pay request, predictably, is that ownership did not want to outlay more money in a difficult time for print media, but in an update, Auletta notes that a deputy of Abramson's, a man, made more money than she did while she was managing editor." Romenesko has more. Pierce has a few words of his own for the Times brass. But Wonkette wins this one.

"The court that created the patent troll mess is screwing up copyright too [...] The Federal Circuit is the court that hears appeals in all patent cases. Over the last three decades, it has shown a consistent bias in favor of patent holders, setting legal precedents that made the current patent troll problem possible."

Henry A. Giroux | Noam Chomsky and the Public Intellectual in Turbulent Times

RIP HR Geiger

Correlations - This is fun.

Browsing an Incredible New 'Social Atlas of London'

I just love this picture.

Cool steampunk dragon-eye jewelry and stuff

Jazz for Cows

The Marvelettes

You got me so I don't know what I'm doing

.

Dave Johnson and Jay Ackroyd were this week's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays, talking about the trade deficit, tax extensions vs infrastructure bank, profit repatriation and the $2 trillion held offshore.

Cecily was found guilty - A strange man reached around Cecily McMillan and grabbed her breast - something any normal person would recognize as a sexual assault. Cecily elbowed him back, which is pretty much what any normal woman would do. Manhattan DA Cy Vance prosecuted Cecily for assaulting an officer, since the molester turned out to be a plainclothes cop. The judge suppressed evidence and prejudiced the jury.

WTF, Amazon? More patent craziness, and this one's a doozy. More at Boing Boing.

From Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism:
"No Evidence Justice Department Will Prosecute U.S. Banks Responsible for Financial Crisis: "Bill Black is in particularly fine form in this Real News Network video. Black recounts the various excuses for not prosecuting the parties that blew up the global economy, and gives a new one from the Justice Department: that regulators told them that yanking bank charters would blow up the global economy. Of course that's a straw man; Black and others who've been serious about prosecution have stressed the importance of targeting individuals. [...] In case you've got friends and colleagues who'd like better talking points as to why the banks (or more accurately banksters) got away with murder, this segment is a great place to start."
"SEC Official Describes Widespread Lawbreaking and Material Weakness in Controls in Private Equity Industry: At a private equity conference this week, Drew Bowden, a senior SEC official, told private equity fund managers and their investors in considerable detail about how the agency had found widespread stealing and other serious infractions in its audits of private equity firms. In the years that I've been reading speeches from regulators, I've never seen anything remotely like Bowden's talk. I've embedded it at the end of this post and strongly encourage you to read it in full. Despite the at times disconcertingly polite tone, the SEC has now announced that more than 50 percent of private equity firms it has audited have engaged in serious infractions of securities laws.

Amazingly, Politico actually published a piece by David Dayen, and while it doesn't pack the punch of most of his stuff, it does say you already know what kind of self-serving claptrap to expect from one of the architects of America's economic catastrophe and what you should read first: "What Timothy Geithner's New Book Won't Tell You: Don't accept the former Treasury secretary's account without reading Elizabeth Warren's take on all the people he left behind."

"Majority Of U.S. Millionaires Say They Should Be Taxed More To Reduce Inequality: In one of the first surveys of its kind, a CNBC poll has revealed that 51% of millionaires in America believe that inequality is 'a major problem', and nearly two-thirds advocate being taxed at a higher rate. [...] One of the most surprising findings was that a tiny minority, just 6%, believe that poor people do not work as hard as the rich." I'm guessing that you'd get a different result from a survey of billionaires.

"Lopsided Approach to Wall Street Fraud Undermines the Law: After the failures that led to the financial crisis, many taxpayers expected that the government would take a hard stance against those who had committed egregious violations." But something else happened....

Glenn Greenwald highlights a quote, saying, "Larry Summers explains Washington to Elizabeth Warren in one sentence:" - and the quote is from "The Warren Brief" in The New Yorker and looks like this: "In the spring of 2009, after the panel issued its third report, critical of the bailout, Larry Summers took Warren out to dinner in Washington and, she recalls, told her that she had a choice to make. She could be an insider or an outsider, but if she was going to be an insider she needed to understand one unbreakable rule about insiders: 'They don't criticize other insiders.'"

Bill Moyers, "Is Net Neutrality Dead? [...] For most Americans, they have no choice for all the information, data, entertainment coming through their house, other than their local cable monopoly. And here, we have a situation where that monopoly potentially can pick and choose winners and losers, decide what you see"

Regular listeners of The Majority Report know that Sam Seder takes great delight in getting calls from libertarians and challenging them to make their case. And from time to time people suggest to him that he ought to have someone on the show as a guest who is a bit more coherent than some of the libertarian callers (nearly all of whom seem to have issues with their telephones). So it came to pass that someone recommended an actual College Professor to debate him, and...it wasn't any better than random wankers, except for the comedy of him expecting Sam to behave like a student listening to a lecture instead of treating it like it was, you know, his own radio show.

Glenn Greenwald on "Keith Alexander Unplugged: on Bush/Obama, 1.7 million stolen documents and other matters" - This long "interview" with the recently retired NSA chief generated many quotes, and gave Glenn plenty of meat to get into: "There are few things in life more ironic than being accused by U.S. Generals, including those who participated in the war in Iraq, of being responsible for the loss of lives. For that sort of irony, nothing will beat that episode where the US Pentagon chief and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff announced that WikiLeaks - not themselves, but WikiLeaks - has 'blood on its hands' by virtue of publishing documents about the U.S. war in Afghanistan. In the world of the U.S. National Security State and its loyal media, those who go around the world killing innocent people over and over are noble and heroic, while those who report on what they do are the ones with 'blood on their hands'."

Digby posted a good little discussion on Twitter between Glennzilla and Billmon about the new anti-Russia hatefest. Here's one from Glenn I quite liked: "Yep - been a neocon tactic for years (save the gays by bombing Iran! - war in Afghanistan for the women!) - it's working well here."

Thomas Piketty's 'Capital' in 3 Minutes

Fact-Checking Hillary Clinton's Comments About Edward Snowden and the NSA
How Bill Clinton is going to help remind Democrats not to vote for a Clinton

One teacher's answer

A quick history of racial policy in America - clip from the half-hour documentary Legalize Democracy, which you can watch in full for free.

Everything Obama says.

This cartoon made me think of Obama's speeches.

Important chocolate news

R. Crumb's short history of America, in 52 illustrated seconds

I apologize for this animated .gif.

The quick brown fox jumps....

Librarian Rap

Somebody make me a framed copy of this for my wall.

The laid-back smooth jazz of Professor RJ Ross

20 minutes of live Rascals, makes me feel good.

The papers loved the musical about The Kinks.

"You Really Got Me", live

Only the echoes of my mind

Avedon Carol and Stuart Zechman are tonight's panelists on Virtually Speaking Sundays. We will probably talk about net neutrality and maybe this:
I actually listened live to the Munk Debate with Glenn Greenwald and Alexis Ohanian versus Michael Hayden and Alan Dershowitz, which was action-packed adventure. You can watch it on YouTube, and the debate vote results are here. I think it's fair to say that Hayden talked rubbish and Dershowitz was sheer sophistry. Glenn gets in a nice kicker toward the end that completely refutes any arguments about the security of the system, which is simply that Snowden did what he did and there was nothing in the system that prevented that. Marcy Wheeler has posted a little fact-check on Hayden.

"Justice Scalia Makes Epic Blunder In Supreme Court Opinion [...] The problem: the EPA's position in the 2001 case was exactly the opposite. The agency was defending its refusal to consider cost as a counter-weight to health benefits when setting certain air quality standards. It was the trucking industry that wanted the EPA to factor in cost. The 9-0 ruling sided with the EPA. The author of the ruling that Scalia mischaracterized? Scalia himself." Musta been one of them senior moments.

"The Rise of Corporate Impunity [...] But the crackdown never happened. Over the past year, I've interviewed Wall Street traders, bank executives, defense lawyers and dozens of current and former prosecutors to understand why the largest man-made economic catastrophe since the Depression resulted in the jailing of a single investment banker - one who happened to be several rungs from the corporate suite at a second-tier financial institution."

"US death row study: 4% of defendants sentenced to die are innocent: Deliberately conservative figure lays bare extent of possible miscarriages of justice suggesting that the innocence of more than 200 prisoners still in the system may never be recognised."

"Alex Pareene Joins Matt Taibbi's New Digital Magazine as Executive Editor" - First Look seems to be scarfing up every journalist who's worth the candle. I hope Rolling Stone and Salon nurturing new ones to replace them who will be in the same class, 'cause I hate to see all the eggs end up in the same basket. (Also, I hate it that FL's homepage doesn't link directly to The Intercept. It should have links to any of its magazines right there.)

Atrios has Free Advice For Republicans - with a handy graphic!

"Why can't we just get back to the good ol Reagan times?"

Toles on the fundamentals of the economy

"The curious tale of the economist and the Cezanne in the hedge" - Thank you, Mr. Keynes.

Optical illusions at the beach

The version of "Everybody's Talkin'" that isn't a cover.

Date it tomorrow but mail it today

John Nichols in The Nation, "Net Neutrality Will Be Saved Only If Citizens Raise an Outcry" - Candidate Obama sounded like he supported net neutrality, but President Obama appointed an industry lobbyist to head the FCC. It's time for the public to exert its influence, and yes, we do still have some influence - but only if we get together and do the business.
David Dayen talked about the FCC's position on net neutrality, and what you can do to try to get them to do the business, on Wednesday's Majority Report.

Digby and RJ Eskow were this week's guests on Virtually Speaking Sundays.

Matt Taibbi was an The Majority Report talking about The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.

Matt Stoller is saying America is not an oligarchy - yet, which I might argue with, but he does make this point:

A lot of people are misreading this Princeton study on the political influence of the wealthy and business groups versus ordinary citizens. The study does not say that the US is an oligarchy, wherein the wealthy control politics with an iron fist. If it were, then things like Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, veterans programs, housing finance programs, etc wouldn't exist.

What the study actually says is that American voters are disorganized and their individualized preferences don't matter unless voters group themselves into mass membership organizations. Then, if people belong to mass membership organizations, their preferences do matter, but less so than business groups and the wealthy.

He heads the article with that great quote Martin Sheen has in Wall Street that goes, "The rich have been doing it to the poor since the beginning of time. The only difference between the Pyramids and the Empire State Building is the Egyptians didn't allow unions." (Yep, they told you all this back in 1985, but not enough people were listening.)

Ian Welsh on "The Prelude to the End of the American Era: And so it begins. Russia is not restraining the separatists, the Kiev government is finally really sending in the troops, Barack Obama and EU leaders claim they will impose real sanctions and Russia and China are set to ink a deal to export Russian Gas to China, the world's industrial heartland. If the sanctions are imposed, for whatever reason (Russian invasion or not), they will force the creation of a second economic, non-dollar bloc. Russia is not Iran, and China is not going to cut off Russia to please the West, rather the contrary. The creation of a real non dollar bloc which can make almost anything people want, and which has access to essentially all key resources from oil to rare minerals, metals and food is an existential threat to the hegemony of the West and its allies like Japan and Korea."

On All In, Chris Hayes talks to Thomas Piketty: "capital is a multi-dimensional concept'".
Krugman on The Piketty Panic from the right: "No, what's really new about Capital is the way it demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we're living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved."
"Elizabeth Warren Simplifies Thomas Piketty: 'Trickle Down Doesn't Work. Never Did'."

"Obama Administration Argues in Favor of Right to Fire Public Employees Who Testify at Corruption Trials [...] Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked, 'What are you doing about the truth finding functions of a trial setting when you're saying or telling people, employee, don't go and tell the truth because if the truth hurts your employer you're going to be fired?' And, 'What kind of message are we giving when we're telling employees, [who are] subpoenaed [for] any reason in a trial, go and tell a falsehood otherwise you can be fired?'

The Fourth Amendment Takes Yet Another Body Blow [...] More important is Navarette vs. California, which has real potential to do some long-term damage. In this case, a 911 caller reported an erratic driver, who was then pulled over and eventually convicted of transporting four bags of marijuana. The police had no probable cause to stop the driver except for that one anonymous phone call, but the Court upheld the conviction anyway. Justice Scalia is typically apoplectic in his dissent, but nonetheless makes some good points" - Scalia being right for a change is itself big news.

Jonathan Cohn wrote an entire article called "Cause for Concern: Health-care costs are rising - and the experts aren't sure why prices keep rising" that doesn't mention the secret committee that decides how much to overcharge you for health care, with the connivance of our government: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Perhaps Cohn needs to study the subject.
"Obamacare: The Biggest Insurance Scam in History [...] The industries that profit from our current health care system wrote the legislation, heavily influenced the regulations and have received waivers exempting them from provisions in the law. This has all been done to protect and enhance their profits."

Radley Balko and Policing and the deaf, and Marlee Matlin on what everyone should know about dealing with the police - especially if you are deaf.

"Pork" is the stuff that, in theory, your legislators bring back to your state to spend on its people - that is, on you. No matter that we know it doesn't seem to be happening that way at the moment, the whole idea that "earmarks" are necessarily wasteful is just another right-wing meme that works for them because it says that bringing money back to the people is actually not a good thing. Kudos to Atrios for trying to get people to remember this.

The New York Times finally figures out what David Dayen said two months ago: that the economy can't recover if people have no money.

"Parents Call Cops to Stop Kids From Handing Out Banned Book [...] Earlier this month, parents convinced Idaho's Meridian school district to ban Sherman Alexie's National Book Award-winning Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian over the objections of 350 students who signed a petition to keep it. According to the local paper, the Statesman, adults argued at a meeting that the book contains offensive words 'we do not speak in our home,' while others objected to a 'reference to masturbation,' and called the book 'anti-Christian.'"

If this sounds almost like something George Carlin would say, that's because he said something like it, but not about government.

"How to Starve the For-Profit Prison Beast [...] Introducing a cell phone into a correctional facility used to be a misdemeanor in Oklahoma. Now, it's a felony. This change did not happen for any reason other than a private prison lobbyist provided his client with a good way to make even more revenue off of people already imprisoned. Bumping this crime up from a misdemeanor to a felony means that when a person is caught with a cell phone in prison, he or she will end up staying in prison even longer; in most cases the new sentence will be added to the end of the existing one, instead of allowing people to serve time for both the crime that landed them behind bars and the cell phone infraction simultaneously. More prison time, more profits."

Dean Baker looks at the latest contribution from The Washington Post to the age war: "Robert Samuelson Is Badly Confused About the Well-Being of Retirees." Apparently, $12K a year makes you rich or something, so old people are really rolling in it.

Yes, what we really need is another Democratic presidential candidate who mocks Snowden. But then, we didn't really need another DLC troll, anyway. Just leaving aside the dynasty part.

This cartoon caught my eye - there's no longer anything radical about thinking the NYT belongs in the fiction section - but if you can stand Facebook, there's a story that goes with it.

Matt Bruenig on the incivility of the way Megan McArdle and David Brooks write about the poor. (via)

Was David Graeber evicted for political reasons? That's the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and his tweet says, "There is a pattern here: almost everyone mentioned in press as involved in early days of OWS has been getting administrative harassment."

Political cartoon: The most transparent administration in history

The Donald Sterling thing really kinda defies credulity. I honestly don't think I've ever heard anything like it, and I've met a number of interesting racists in my life. It does expose a way of thinking that you really can't imagine any normal person having, and it's not just about race. This is what happens when you let people get way, way too rich. Fortunately, the NBA players all threatened to boycott playoffs, and now Sterling is banned for life from basketball, but jeez.

Headline that looks like it was create from MadLibs: "Arkansas ex-cop killed while trying to set anti-corruption blogger's hot dog cart on fire."

Vox Day's Hugo nomination has caused a bit of a dust-up in science fiction fandom, which has not escaped Brad DeLong's notice. But I'm linking to this because it gives you easy access to Lois McMaster Bujold's thoughts on the reader as the unsung collaborator in an author's work, which is really worth readying. For more on the kerfluffle, check out John Scalzi, PNH, TNH, and the ensuing comments.

"Original Chaucer manuscript in Aberystwyth goes online"

Anna tells me it's time to write a letter to Santa: "DEAL ALERT/John Martyn: the Island Years 18-disc box"

Cake Wrecks for National Princess Week

You know exactly what was going through Bruce's mind when he was doing this.

Acyrologia - now you know a high-falutin' name for it.

Treehouses

Jerry Butler, "Western Union Man"