Monday Mourning
Filed Under Cloud gazing, history, Orwellian, Politics | Leave a Comment
Another thin-skinned GOP asshole caught being an asshole — Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback got his panties in a bind when a high school student Tweeted that the good governor, “#heblowsalot:”
Emma Sullivan, 18, was hauled into her principal’s office and ordered to write letters of apology after one of Governor Sam Brownback’s office contacted the tour organizer to complain about the offending note on the social networking site Twitter.
Ms Sullivan, however, will not backtrack, saying she isn’t sorry and doesn’t think such a letter would be sincere.
And her mother agrees: I raised my kids to be independent, to be strong, to be free thinkers. If she wants to tweet her opinion about Gov. Brownback, I say for her to go for it and I stand totally behind her.”
(Illustration found here).
Reportedly, young Emma had disagreed with Brownback’s veto of the Kansas Arts Commission’s entire budget, making it the only state in the nation to eliminate arts funding — join the crowd, Emma.
“I think it would be interesting to have a dialogue with him,” she said.
“I don’t know if he would do it or not though.
And I don’t know that he would listen to what I have to say.”
And Emma is most-perceptive about the two-faced GOP — Think Progress reports Brownback’s baby-like over-reaction caused Emma’s high school to violate her First Amendment rights: Moreover, because the school district violated Sullivan’s clearly established federal constitutional rights, she is likely entitled to have the district or the principal pay her attorney’s fees if she decides to bring a lawsuit challenging this unconstitutional disciplinary action. In other words, the district could be wise to settle this case immediately if Sullivan decides to bring them to court.
Republicans don’t seem to care about the US Constitution, the rule of law or even for the general welfare of US peoples — the GOP is most-likely the most anti-American group in existence today.
And maybe, too, anti-life-as-we-know-it.
The biggest catch for action on climate change comes from the right-sided GOP, even as COP17 starts today in South Africa.
From Agence France-Presse via Raw Story:
When lawmakers cannot agree that climate change is a problem for which solutions must be sought, gridlock ensues, according to Democratic lawmaker Henry Waxman.
“During this Congress, the Republican-controlled House has voted 21 times to block actions to address climate change,” he said at a hearing this month.
“History will look back on this science denial with profound regret.”
Henry, it’s a profound regret right this freakin’ now.
And even right-wingers know it — Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, says the GOP needs to get a good beating: “The best way to reach a deal for Obama is to pull out the partisan cudgel and slam them between the eyes repeatedly,” says Ornstein. “They’ll only come to the table if their political brand is damaged. They’re not coming for the good of the country.”
The dollar, they’re coming for the dollar.
One must also keep in mind the kind of country the US is today, thanks to Republicans with aid from spineless, chickenshit Democrats.
From Peter Van Buren at Tomdispatch yesterday:
As the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, like those pepper-sprayed at UC Davis or the Marine veteran shot in Oakland, recently found out, the government’s ability to limit free speech, to stopper the First Amendment, to undercut the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances, is perhaps the most critical issue our republic can face.
If you were to write the history of the last decade in Washington, it might well be a story of how, issue by issue, the government freed itself from legal and constitutional bounds when it came to torture, the assassination of U.S. citizens, the holding of prisoners without trial or access to a court of law, the illegal surveillance of American citizens, and so on.
In the process, it has entrenched itself in a comfortable shadowland of ever more impenetrable secrecy, while going after any whistleblower who might shine a light in.
Read the whole post, it gets even more shitty.
Anything the GOP does should be scorned and pushed way-aside, or else the mourning will be in earnest.
‘Lone Wolf’ — Update
Filed Under Bullshit, Orwellian, Terror | Leave a Comment
(Off my post this morning)
The case against that guy arrested in New York City yesterday and charged with plotting to blow up U.S. targets, including American soldiers returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of preparing to launch a one-man holy war in New York City — 27-year-old unemployed ‘lone wolf‘ Jose Pimentel — was apparently considered way-too dicey and not serious-enough for the FBI.
Hence, Pimentel was arraigned on state, not federal charges.
From TPM this afternoon:
The 27-year-old accused of plotting to attack New York with pipe bombs was operating a website that espoused his beliefs in committing terror against the U.S. and was relatively well known in law enforcement circles.
Federal authorities passed on the case — with one source telling TPM on Sunday night that the FBI passed several times, and an official telling the Associated Press on Monday that Pimentel “didn’t have the predisposition or the ability to do anything on his own.”
That’s leaving observers wondering what exactly the feds didn’t like about the case and setting up another squabble in the long-running turf war between the New York Police Department and the FBI.
In the scope of modern life, hard to imagine anything more dangerously dumb.
And incompetently useless.
The tale sounds like the bullshit in September when Mansour Arbabsiar, a naturalized US citizen with an Iranian passport from Corpus Christi, Texas, a failed used-car salesman, “sort of a hustler,” though, “no mastermind,” and “was likable, albeit a bit lazy,” was charged this time by the FBI with plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in a Washington DC restaurant.
And Mr. Arbabsiar was supposed to do this via a complicated plot involving murderous Mexican drug lords and Iran.
On more occasions nowadays, reality seems to have taken a holiday.
‘Lone Wolf’ in the ‘Twilight Zone’
Filed Under Bullshit, Orwellian, Terror | Leave a Comment
The zealous approach to law enforcement in this age of protest and terror has created a strange and dangerous notion that a shitload of stuff is bad, when in reality, bad is self-perpetrating.
Last night, a new ‘lone wolf’ terrorist, Jose Pimentel, was arraigned in a New York court on charges of targeting U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan servicemen, and also intended to strike U.S. postal facilities and police in New York and Bayonne, New Jersey.
Pimentel’s attorney, Joseph Zablock, begs to differ:
“As they admit, he has a very public online profile, and that flies in the face of everything that they’ve said,” Zablocki said at the hearing.
“This is not the way you go about committing terrorist attacks.”
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: “There is no evidence he worked with anyone else…He appears to be … a lone wolf.”
(Illustration found here).
Since Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists are hiding under just about every rock in the US and all around the world.
And a lot of these so-called ‘lone wolf’ terrorists have been goaded on by the very peoples who are supposed to be watching out for such things — a situation similar to leaving keys in the car, hoping an attempt would be made to steal it, then jump the perpetrator.
Glenn Greenwald has a most-excellent overview of these FBI-inspired terror operations here.
Even the ‘lone wolf’ category was added to the infamous Patriot Act in 2004.
So scared shitless, the FBI creates terror where once there was just poverty, much injustice and unemployment — job security at its zenith.
Mother Jones magazine conducted an investigation last August on all these supposedly ‘lone wolf’ incidents and found that 10 percent of all these cases were led by an “agent provocateur,” and exposed several as weak examples of terrorism “instigated” by the FBI.
Furthermore, from The Investigative Project on Terrorism:
The FBI has nearly tripled its use of informants since 9/11, the report says.
That surge in the number of FBI informants, according to Mother Jones’ Trevor Aaronson, is worrisome.
“The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic attack,” a teaser atop Aaronson’s article “Informants,” which includes those statistics, reads.
“But are they busting terrorist plots-or leading them?”
…
“I think in many of these cases nothing would have happened were it not for the FBI going in and making a plot possible,” Aaronson told NPR.
But in a post 9/11 world, informants must be sent in before a plot is in the works with real bad guys.
Former FBI counter terrorism official Arthur Cummings told Aaronson why.
“We’re looking for the sympathizer who wants to become an operator, and we want to catch them when they step over that line to operator.”
Despite all this, the FBI and other agencies failed to do anything in October when a ‘lone wolf’ terrorist threw a bottle containing volatile liquids into a crowd at an OWS gathering in Maine.
From emptywheel:
In other words, the attack in ME — even if it was as pathetic as Mohamud’s alleged attack or that of any number of aspirational Muslim terrorists — was an attempt to use a WMD, since explosives qualify as a WMD.
And even more than Mohamud’s alleged attack, this was an attempt to achieve political ends through violence.
Terrorism.
…
And yet, somehow, in the absence of a young Muslim man goaded on and provided explosives by the FBI itself, the FBI doesn’t see it as terrorism.
A point of selective action, I guess.
This over-reaching by US authorities might have a day in court.
In 2010, four poor guys from a US horror hole, Newburgh, NY, about 60 miles north of New York City — a place of drugs and crime — were arrested on charges of terrorism, and eventually three were sentenced to 25 years in prison.
According to firedoglake: US District Judge Colleen McMahon understood the men were only in her court for sentencing because the FBI “created an act of terrorism.” She understood the FBI scripted the plot from “start to finish.” But, afraid to upset superiors or government officials, she condemned the defendants’ anti-Semitism and their willingness to “kill, maim and destroy for money.”
Those guys were used as ‘counterterror lab rats.’
And these guys were apparently easy pickings by the FBI.
From UK’s The Guardian last week:
Lawyers for the so-called Newburgh Four have now launched an appeal that will be held early next year. Advocates hope the case offers the best chance of exposing the issue of FBI “entrapment” in terror cases. “We have as close to a legal entrapment case as I have ever seen,” said Susanne Brody, who represents another Newburgh defendant, Onta Williams.
Some experts agree.
“The target, the motive, the ideology and the plot were all led by the FBI,” said Karen Greenberg, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, who specialises in studying the new FBI tactics.
…
Even more shocking was that the organisation, money, weapons and motivation for this plot did not come from real Islamic terrorists.
It came from the FBI, and an informant paid to pose as a terrorist mastermind paying big bucks for help in carrying out an attack.
For McWilliams, her own government had actually cajoled and paid her beloved nephew into being a terrorist, created a fake plot and then jailed him for it.
“I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone,” she told the Guardian.
…
This year the jailed Liberty City men launched an appeal and last week judgment was handed down. They lost, and officially remain Islamic terrorists hell-bent on destroying America. Not that their supporters see it that way.
“Our country is no safer as a result of the prosecution of these seven impoverished young men from Liberty City,” said Batiste’s lawyer, Ana Jhones.
“This prosecution came at great financial cost to our government, and at a terrible emotional cost to these defendants and their families. It is my sincere belief that our country is less safe as a result of the government’s actions in this case.”
Wonder what J. Edgar would have thought — he’d most-likely be overjoyed.
The ‘Fretful Zone’
Filed Under Bullshit, Everything, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
Headline-writers at the New York Times found a verb this morning in the middle of the third graph of a story on the US Census Bureau and its new measure of gauging just how bad the epidemic of being poor:
Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government has not yet published, showing 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line.
That number of Americans is 76 percent higher than the official account, published in September.
All told, that places 100 million people — one in three Americans — either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.
(Illustration of Picasso’s “Poverty” found here).
Online NYT head: “Older, Suburban and Struggling, ‘Near Poor’ Startle the Census” — as in to alarm, frighten, or surprise suddenly, the Census Bureau.
In the lives of most-ordinary, walking-around US peoples, that fact most-likely doesn’t ‘startle‘ at all.
And the NYT story also comes up with another ‘startling‘ factoid, though, already well-understood by a way-big chunk of Americans: Perhaps the most surprising finding is that 28 percent work full-time, year round. “These estimates defy the stereotypes of low-income families,” Ms. Renwick (Trudi J. Renwick, the bureau’s chief poverty statistician) said.
And sometimes, startlingly so, a chunk of that chunk works two jobs.
The feeling evoked by one lady interviewed by the Times: “I try to work as many hours as I can, but my salary, it’s not enough for everything,” she said. “I pay my bills with very small wiggle room. Or none.”
A good overview/recap of children involved with US poverty can be found at Daily Kos — The poverty rate for children under 18 increased from 20 percent in 2009 to 21.6 percent in 2010. That translates to 1.1 million more children living in poverty.
Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported in an economic survey, that US peoples’ incomes have dropped in the past decade, and is continuing to descend, and won’t get back up for another decade, if then.
From 2000 to 2010, median income in the U.S. declined 7 percent after adjusting for inflation, according to Census data.
That marks the worst 10-year performance in records going back to 1967.
On average, the economists expect inflation-adjusted incomes to rise over the next decade, but the 5 percent projected gain isn’t enough to reach prerecession levels.
“Standards of living in the U.S. will continue to decline as we deleverage and emerging markets take over as the growth engine of the global economy,” says Julia Coronado of BNP Paribas.
And these stagnant wages don’t help any kind of economic growth, though, it does keep the decent slow, and not-so-easy — the only real, true way to achieve and keep growth is by increased wages for working peoples.
In fact, this US wage/income downer has spread — from the UK’s The Guardian on Saturday:
The British middle class is in danger of suffering prolonged American-style wage stagnation as a result of widening income inequality and a weak jobs market for skilled employment, a top US economist says.
…
The summit will highlight how the incomes of middle-class, working-age households in the US fell marginally from $56,000 a year in 1989 to $55,200 in 2010.
Over the same period, the US economy grew by 60 percent.
For men in full-time employment the median earnings level was about $49,000 in 1973 and $48,000 in 2010.
While the trend in the US has been established for far longer, economists say a similar pattern has begun to emerge in the UK, where median wages flatlined between 2002 and 2008 – despite it being a period of 16 percent economic growth.
Those ‘near poor’ people just might be the new middle class.
Meanwhile, the US Congress is getting fatter, still, with nearly half the bunch being millionaires — The estimated median net worth of a current U.S. senator in 2010 stood at an average of $2.56 million.
From ABC News and a report from the The Center for Responsive Politics: “Despite the global economic meltdown in 2008 and the sluggish recovery that followed, that’s up about 7.6 percent from an estimated median net worth of $2.38 million in 2009 … and up 13 percent from a median net worth of $2.27 million in 2008. …
And the shitheads are immune from financial crime — trading stock on insider information would require jail time for anybody else.
The problem brings us around to OWS, again — the 1 percent is striking back at the 99 percent.
And the horror-hypocrisy on the right stymies everything.
Witness near-bonkers Rick Santorum (via Think Progress): If “you’re lower income, you can qualify for Medicaid, you can qualify for food stamps, you can qualify for housing assistance,” Santorum complained, before adding, “suffering is part of life and it’s not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life.”
What an asshole.
Or Newt Gingrich, blubbering nonsense against hecklers: “Hold on,” Gingrich told the crowd. “I want to answer you very directly. There is no such thing in America as 99 percent! We are 100 percent Americans! We are all part of America!”
Gingrich has some harassment problems, too — the media is after him on his Freddie Mac bullshit.
And last week, of course, the police-state images of police breaking-up OWS sites around the country — Berkeley to Denver to New York — with a visual vengeance not often seen in the good-old US of A.
A good post on a nasty, one-sided confrontation at UC Davis is found at The Dish.
And glimpse a near-perfect photo of the reality of the moment at Digby’s — maybe OWS has had a much-bigger impact.
However, the near-normal response of the police/military is over-reaction, they’ll do it just about every time.
Timing is near-about everything, and the nationwide crackdown on OWS occurred as if set by schedule, and for the most part, it was, though, few officials will discuss these ‘conference calls‘ at depth — yet.
And in a similar vein, a Washington lobbying firm has proposed a kind of Nixon-like ‘dirty tricks” program to undermine OWS and those sympathetic to the movement.
From msnbc’s Up w/ Chris Hayes (h/t Balloon Juice): CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. The memo also asserts that Democratic victories in 2012 would be detrimental for Wall Street and targets specific races in which it says Wall Street would benefit by electing Republicans instead.
In the midst of a shitload of problems from climate change to the Eurozone is a possible movement/revolution — at least some of the 1 percent are taking it seriously, hopefully putting them in a fretful zone.
OWS — Yes, Yes, Yes!
Filed Under Bullshit, Lying, Madness, Media, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s greatest philosopher, visited Thoreau in jail.
Emerson asked: “Henry, why are you here?”
Thoreau replied: “Why are you not here?”
– In protest of the Mexican War, 1846
In those crackdowns this week on the OWS, a deep, sinking feeling of nefarious, dark workings:
Questions about the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) potential involvement in the violent crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street protests nationwide continue to grow today, with new reports that not only were they sighted at several of the crackdowns but in one case photographic evidence of DHS forces arresting a photographer at a Portland rally.
Apparently, for the powers that be, OWS got too hot for the kitchen.
(Illustration found here).
In the last few days, the operation of the US government in ‘closing down’ the OWS movement in cities across America would have given George Orwell a ‘I-told-you-so’ belly ache.
Reports indicate the nationwide police actions were coordinated events: And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.
The 1 percent strikes back, huh?
And the pure nasty, mean-spirited approach to clearing New York’s Zuccotti Park makes a situation worse when authority does its so-called duty with glee.
Via Raw Story:
“Everything, everything we had: gone,” said Chris Carter, a New Jersey native and firefighter who has been part of the “Occupy” medical staff since the second day of the protests.
“All the medications we had: Tylenol, cough machine, two AED Defibrillators units, vitamins, an asthma inhaler. Nothing left.”
Carter pointed out that the medical staff lost more than $4,000 of equipment during the raid, raising a level of frustration in his voice where they likely will have to contact hospitals to handle simple tasks.
…
New York University law student Dee Armstrong observed how the sanitation department and police were aggressively dealing with all items, not just sleeping equipment.
“Police were cutting the tents so they couldn’t be re-used,” she said.
“And I kept hearing people say, ‘Give it to the homeless, give it to the homeless.’
Then they would throw them into a pile, and I think you could see on any of the footage that they just throw them into this huge dumpster, with claims that it was going to the storage unit.
But how on Earth are you suppose to find your items?”
She added: “Some people’s backpacks, textbooks, laptops, there was people’s laptops that were just thrown in the sanitation truck where you could see it on the livestream footage.”
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said OWS is welcomed back to the park, but no tents and other type gear.
And what about Bloomberg?
Matt Taibbi covered that already: Well, you know what, Mike Bloomberg? FUCK YOU. People are not protesting for their own entertainment, you asshole. They’re protesting because millions of people were robbed, by your best friends incidentally, and they want their money back. And you’re not everybody’s Dad, so stop acting like you are.
Yeah.
The entire nationwide/worldwide OWS movement is the neatest single event(s) I’ve seen (and felt) in a long, long time — in fact, the protests might be on a level of the Vietnam-era shenanigans 40 years ago.
Indeed, OWS has opened that nasty can of worms of badly-skewered financial dealings and revealed the banks run the country, and the world.
And despite US peoples’ attitudes about OWS has wavered in the last few days — mainly due to outside interests crashing the party — the bottom line is that now everybody knows there’s a humongous divide between the haves and the have-nots, creating a violent undertaste.
And in response to all this ugly shit by DHS and the like, OWS is calling for “mass non-violent direct action” today in cities across the US — in New York, planned events included “shut down Wall Street;” “occupy the subways,” a plan to gather at 16 hubs, and “take the square,” a reference to Foley Square, across from City Hall; in Portland, Oregon, plans include “occupy banks;” in Los Angeles, organizers called for a protest downtown, shutting down an intersection; and events are also planned in Boston, Minneapolis, and other cities.
Go get ‘em!
In capturing this OSW sense, Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture has some passionate words for the state of the US, a passion titillated by anger.
The heated scoop:
In America, we are too busy dropping the kids off at soccer, running around looking for sales and bargains, racing to keep our heads above water.
We seem to forget to get outraged.
Our control over our once Democracy — the one we had a revolution against a monarchy dictating decisions from afar — slips away from us.
Not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with a 1000s acts of gradual ceding of power to the new Monarch.
We have given up hard won rights to a coordinated attack from all three branches of government; Our Congress has become the legislative branch of eBay — Congressmen are auctioned off to the highest bidder; they even have a Buy It Now button to get specific legislation passed.
The executive branch has fallen under the sunk cost fallacy, afraid to prosecute banks because we spent so many billions bailing them out.
It turns out that even our once venerable Supreme Court is just as corrupted, with lobbyists partying with Justices and backdooring ethics by hiring their wives.
In short, our new overlords are enormously well funded, well connected, relentless and perhaps most of all, patient.
This new King was not appointed by primogeniture, or even Divine Right, but by acquiring enough profits in the free market that they can buy control over society, even as they thwart that free market ideal for their own ends.
We have become, in short, a Corporate Monarchy.
The right question isn’t why am I angry, sad and outraged.
The proper question is, why aren’t you?
Thoreau would have screamed, “Fuck Yeah!”