This is just another sign of the incivility and really the vulgarity of modern American campaigns. These campaigns have gotten so ugly and so nasty, that they’re now tarnishing the whole system.
I think it also underlines the coarseness of our culture in this age of social media when it is so easy to say anything about anybody and get no penalty for saying it.
…
I’ve watched a lot of presidents over the years but I can never recall a president stepping off Air Force One, which is itself a symbol of the presidency and American democracy, and being subject to such rudeness.

(Illustration found here).

Of course, Schieffer was discussing the incident between Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and President Obama on the tarmac involved in what seemed an intense conversation, with Brewer at one point pointing her finger in Obama’s face.
No audio, but the video/picture painted a scene not very cordial.
Brewer said later: “I respect the office of the president,” she said. “I was there to welcome him.”
Also later, Brewer reversed the action, putting a lie on top of a lie, claiming Obama treated her like an asshole: “It is what it is. I proceeded to say that to him, and he chose to walk away from me,” she said Thursday. Asked whether she regarded that as disrespectful, she replied: “Well, I would never have walked away from anybody having a conversation. And, of course, that is what it is. It is disrespectful for me.”
Such total bullshit.

A lie within a falsehood, from real-time to book time:

The argument stemmed from Obama’s feelings about Brewer’s 2011 book, “Scorpions for Breakfast.”
In it, she refers to the president as “patronizing” and claims he lectured to her as if she were a child during a 2010 meeting in the White House.
At the time of the meeting, the White House described their encounter as a “good meeting,” and even Brewer said it was “very cordial.”
But, later, in her book, she accused Obama of being extremely “condescending.”
“I said to him, you know, I have always respected the office of the president and that the book is what the book is,” Brewer said.

Back to Schieffer’s view on political rudeness — he still played the MSM line and didn’t tell the entire truth about the ugly rudeness now apparent in US politics : This vulgar, shithead activity stems from one, and only one,  nasty corner of the room — Republicans.
The GOP is the party of the rude, of the sneering asshole remark, of the racist, of the zilch compassion for the ordinary US person, and the absolute rude behavior in all workings in things political.
Since becoming aware of politics via the 1960 election between Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon, I’ve never seen such total bullshit spewing from the lips of one group of assholes — and the big, massive problem is that the MSM will not point it out.
Just like John King of CNN and Newt Gingrich’s rebuttal of an opening question about Newt’s tangled martial operations — instead of slapping back at Newt’s lying hypocrisy, King MSMed himself, back stepping.
The GOP has been on this nasty forum awhile.

From Time magazine in September 2009 and the “You lie” incident:

So when Representative Joe Wilson, a little-known Republican and Army Reserve veteran from South Carolina shouted them at the nation’s Commander in Chief on the night of Sept. 9, heads snapped.
The House chamber took a collective gasp.
Nancy Pelosi, sitting behind Obama, tensed and scowled as if she had just witnessed a crime, her disgust unhidden.
Even President Obama, who had just dismissed conservative claims that illegal immigrants would be able to take advantage of health-care reform, was taken aback.
He looked to his left, adjusted his arm, part nervous twitch, part macho posturing, and shot back at Wilson, “That’s not true.”
And there, for a moment, the nation watched two men, elected to lead, call each other the worst thing in politics — dishonorable deceivers.
At the moment Wilson exploded, the outburst seemed like an assault on the President.
Soon afterward, it was clear that it had been a gift.
Wilson had, in an emotional expression, proven Obama’s point: the summer of town halls had been less a discussion than a circus, a forum where misinformation was vindicated by passion, where disrespect was elevated to a virtue.
Now the circus had come inside Congress.

Where it has mutated into a living, breathing creature eating at the US.
The problem is the MSM doesn’t call it out — the GOP gets away with it — even taking the circus out onto an Arizona tarmac.

Today is a kind of watershed moment when the Internets respond to attempts to censor shit by banging down the back door, but a load of ‘Net peoples have chosen instead to go black.

Daily Kos  has an action line to protest the twin online-control orbs SOPA ‘Stop Online Piracy Act,’ (US House) and PIPA ‘Protect Intellectual Property Act” (US Senate), which reportedly are designed to shut down access to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods, but like a lot of other surveillance-state-of-affairs, there’s more than just bullshit flying.
Copyright law can be a step away from censorship: “Like many other tech companies, we believe that there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking U.S. companies to censor the Internet,” a Google spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday.

And today (Wednesday) Google has a black band over its name on its search site, and Wikipedia leads to a Gothic-looking spot which proclaims “Imagine A World Without Free Knowledge,” in protest of the upcoming Congressional bills.
Along with Wiki, Reddit and Boing Boing, among others were also going black for awhile to protest.
Even HuffPost had a huge, black box at the top of his home page (where a photo/headline usually appears) early Wednesday, and supplies a factoid page here.

All authority hates freedom — one wonders how the popular uprisings in the Middle East, even the Occupy movement here in the US would fare under these laws, and how would freedom really be effected because as it is now, the real freedom is in the ability to get the truth out there.
Even in the most totalitarian regimes on earth, a little iPhone camera can change the outlook of the whole, entire world — in a real sense, currently there can’t be a total news black out and we need to keep it that way.

An understanding via the LA Times:

Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, said the bills set “a horrendous precedent globally” and that much of the content users put online — such as open publishing, crowd-sourced information gathering or comments sections — could all become “incredibly dangerous” if the bills passed.
“We would end up in a situation where we’re trying to do needlepoint with harpoons,” he said.
“You can’t target only pirated information, content or media without getting tons of collateral damage that removes entirely legal content.”
As a screenwriter, East Hollywood resident Steven Darancette, 40, uses Wikipedia often for background information. But he isn’t too concerned about the website going dark Wednesday, saying he supports the protest.
“If I need to get research, I’ll just Google,” he said.
“There are also these things called books.”

The way-big problem, though, is once that door is opened, then locked back again by SOPA/PIPA there’s no going back, the freedom of pure communication will be lost in an Orwellian influenced society, and that ain’t good at all.

Yesterday, Mitt Romney blubbered so boldly: “We’re going to win this thing with all of our passion and strength…”

Is he another Newt Gingrich?

Newt early last month: “They’re not going to be the nominee…I’m going to be the nominee. It’s very hard not to look at the recent polls, and think, odds are very high, I’m going to be the nominee.”
And yesterday: “I don’t think I’m going to win. I think if you look at the numbers, I think that volume of negativity has done enough damage.”
Maybe he’s talking about all those nabobs of negativity culled from his own antics.

And through the last few months, each of these clowns had their time in the prime — Michele Bachmann, the early obvious nominee; then Rick Perry, but oops; then Herman Cain and his wonderful way with females; then Newt with intellectual history punching the airwaves and odds so high it’s way-hard to see the ground; and now the guy nobody wants — Romney.

However, they have attempted with much success to ignore a huge, nasty-faced elephant in the room — the last Republican in the White House.
In all the mindless squawk on taxes, war, and President Obama during all the ludicrous campaigning, the entire GOP apparatus has maintained a blissful silence on the guy who near-single-handily put the planet in the shitty spot it is now — George Jr.

One thing Republicans are hoping for is a giant, collective memory loss by US peoples.
Under George Jr.’s tenure, the whole show went to shit in a wire basket and the GOP seeks to put that whole episode in the way-background and focus on Obama, but will the trick play out among the 99 percent who saw their lives shattered by eight years of arrogant incompetence.

The problem, though, is what George Jr. did created such a enormous gap in any kind of GOP reasoning that one could easily drive an entire herd of elephants through with room to spare.

(Illustration found here).

Just take the money and run.
From the New York Times:

In 2001, President George W. Bush inherited a surplus, with projections by the Congressional Budget Office for ever-increasing surpluses, assuming continuation of the good economy and President Bill Clinton’s policies.
But every year starting in 2002, the budget fell into deficit.
In January 2009, just before President Obama took office, the budget office projected a $1.2 trillion deficit for 2009 and deficits in subsequent years, based on continuing Mr. Bush’s policies and the effects of recession.
Mr. Obama’s policies in 2009 and 2010, including the stimulus package, added to the deficits in those years but are largely temporary.
…
First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect.
If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels.

And those mangled, horrible wars?
Bob Gates said it all: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”
Hundreds of thousands dead, at least two counties — Afghanistan and Iraq — have been for all purposes destroyed and literally trillions of dollars flushed down the graveyard drain.
As this political season starts to heat up, all Obama has to do is point to George Jr. and say, ‘Remember and Beware.’

Never has so, so few caused so much damage.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Republicans talk a lot about losing their way during the last decade, and when they do they’re talking about the Bush years,” said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont-McKenna College.
“For Republicans, the Bush administration has become the `yadda yadda yadda’ period of American history.”
…
The former president himself has been all but invisible since leaving office in 2009 with a Gallup approval rating of just 34 percent.
His predecessor, Democrat Bill Clinton, had a 66 percent approval rating in early 2001 when he stepped down after two terms marred by a sex scandal and impeachment.
In a presidential contest dominated by concerns over the weak economy, government spending and the $15 trillion federal debt, the Republican candidates have been loath to acknowledge the extent to which Bush administration policies contributed to those problems.
Republicans also controlled Congress for six of the eight years Bush was in the White House, clearing the way for many of his policies to be enacted.
…
Bush still has loyal supporters who believe his legacy will be vindicated by history.
But even they say the GOP field won’t be embracing him anytime soon.
“Sad to say, they’re looking at polling data that indicates they’re better off not bringing him into the campaign,” former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said.
“I think President Bush has made America a safer nation and better nation and I’m proud of it.
But politics isn’t about what’s fair, it’s about winning.”

In other words, little Ari, it’s okay to cheat, lie and don’t speak ill of even a criminal.

Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis.
This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”
– Donald H. Rumsfeld memorandum, Nov. 6, 2006

(Illustration found here).

In the annuals of world history there’s near-about no match for the horror of the US invasion of Iraq and all its far-flung ugly consequences.
Despite any rational reasoning beyond greed, George Jr.’s little party tipped the world into the hellish crevasse it now finds itself and murdered thousands of Iraqi innocents in the process — and despite the guffaws, a tribunal in Malaysia right-recently found George Jr. and his suck-buddy, Tony Blair, guilty of war crimes for their instigation of the slaughter: The Malaysian tribunal judges ruled that the decision to wage war against Iraq by the two former heads of government was a flagrant abuse of law and an act of aggression that led to large-scale massacres of the Iraqi people.
Why hasn’t the rest of the world jumped?

Nobel Peace Prize nominee, political scientist Michael Haas on  just the noncompliance of rational, humane justice:

First, however, it is useful to recall that when the Afghan War began, General Tommy Franks ordered compliance with the Geneva Conventions on October 17, 2001.
On November 13 he was countermanded by an executive order in the form of a military order from President George W. Bush regarding prisoners who were then being collected, though no specific mention was made of the Geneva Conventions.
When the first prisoners arrived at the Naval Base on January 11, 2002, the commanding general, Brigadier General Rick Baccus, ordered compliance with the Geneva Conventions.
His order was then rescinded on February 7 by another executive order signed by George W. Bush making specific reference to the inapplicability of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 but not the 1929 Geneva Convention.

On Guantanamo alone George Jr. and ‘The Dick‘ Cheney should be jailed with the keys thrown into the muddy Potomac River.

And so today, in fanfare and a shitload of lying bullshit, the US ended its “official” military presence in Iraq with a so-called flag-casing ceremony in Baghdad — US defence honcho Leon Panetta added his body weight in bullshit, too.
From Aljazeera English:

Nearly nine years after the start of the controversial invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and sparked years of violence, Panetta told Iraqis “Your children will have a better future”, and said the US and Iraq would have “a new relationship rooted in mutual interest and mutual respect”.
“We are not about turn our backs on all that has been sacrificed and accomplished in Iraq,” Panetta said.
“Iraq will be tested in the days ahead by terrorism, by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues … by the demands of democracy itself,” he said, while adding that the US would be a “committed friend and … partner” to the country.
General Lloyd Austin, the commander of US forces in Iraq, said that the country would be “a source of stability and inspiration in the region”.

And the locals?

“If the Americans have achieved anything, they have achieved it to their own benefit in the first place.
They are the ones who get benefits from this issue.
As for Iraqis, maybe they have the change they have been waiting for, but they paid high price for it as you can see the killings, devastation and sectarian violence.
And up to now the situation is still unstable,” said Qassim Abdullah, an Iraqi citizen.

What benefits?

The Iraqi people see the benefit — a yearly celebration of the US departure.
Via Pakistan’s Daily Times:

Shouting slogans in support of the “resistance,” the demonstrators held up banners and placards inscribed with phrases like, “Now we are free” and “Fallujah is the flame of the resistance.”
In the centre of the city surrounded by the Iraqi army, demonstrators carried posters bearing photos of apparent insurgents, faces covered and carrying weapons.
They also held up pictures of US soldiers killed and military vehicles destroyed in the two major offensives against the city in 2004.
The demonstration was dubbed the first annual “festival to celebrate the role of the resistance.”

In the place of flowers.

President Obama traveled yesterday to Fort Bragg, N.C., to add his two-cents worth to the madness, claiming the Iraqi adventure “an extraordinary achievement,” and let it go at that.

And, of course, the US will continue to have a presence in country: The embassy compound is by far the largest the world has ever seen, at one and a half square miles, big enough for 94 football fields. It cost three quarters of a billion dollars to build (coming in about $150 million over budget). Inside its high walls, guard towers and machine-gun emplacements lie not just the embassy itself, but more than 20 other buildings, including residential quarters, a gym and swimming pool, commercial facilities, a power station and a water-treatment plant.
Along with all this shit, a staff of 16,000.

Iraqi Parliament Speaker Osama Al Nujaifi has called that high number of personnel “illogical.”

Not by warped, horrifying US logic, however.
Again, one wonders, why the jails aren’t full of George Jr.’s lackeys.

After seemingly being stuck at $3.99 a gallon for months, it was odd to see a difference in the numbers.
Prices are down in California and the rest of the US, but way-higher than last year.

From the LA Times: The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in California today is $3.710, according to AAA. Prices in California have fallen by 13.1 cents a gallon over the last month, but a gallon of gasoline cost only $3.164 on the same day last year. The current price is also 29.5 cents a gallon higher than the old record for this day, which was set in 2007.
National average is down 5.6 cents over the last month to $3.295 a gallon, although just one year ago at this date the price was at $2.86 a gallon — still nearly 20 cents higher than the old record.

(Illustration found here).

Beer prices at my store carries a similar characteristic as gas at the pump — the cost goes up by a dime one week, drops a nickel the next, providing a happy incentive to the buyer for the moment, seemingly unaware total price has gone up a quarter the past month.
Way up, a little down, up again, then down a little less — a process which eliminates price shock.

Oil itself is also getting banged around.
From liveoilprices: In London, Brent crude oil futures for January 2012 delivery was trading at $109.01, 08.30 GMT this morning on the ICE Futures Exchange.
And WTI: US Light crude oil futures for January 2012 delivery was trading at $97.79 a barrel, 08.15 GMT this morning in electronic trading on the NYMEX.
Prices are choppy due to the horror of the 17-nation Eurozone blow-out, which forecasters seem to think will lead to a break-up of the confederation, and eventually-quickly to a break-up of whatever kind of global economy the world is experiencing right now — investors continue to shun European government bonds, driving interest rates up and thereby digging a deeper hole for countries that need to refinance debt.

The US is hiding, or just too scared to come out and play.

In deflecting the shit across the pond, the US received a temporary/smoke-screen-bounce for the economy from Black Friday/Cyber Monday, which pumped up retailers for the upcoming big-spending holiday season.
Reportedly, last Friday was the largest single-day sales in US retail history — Overall, Black Friday 2011 sales set records, pulling in $52.4 billion, according to figures from the National Retail Foundation.
And yesterday, a record again with nearly $1.2 billion (yes, that’s billion) spent on Internet buying — nearly half-a-billion dollars more than last year.

Despite overall records for the weekend, which now includes Thanksgiving, (was) up 16 percent from $45 billion last year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation, the money may not be there for the next month.
From CNN Money:

“Black Friday is only one piece of the puzzle,” noted NRF spokeswoman Ellen Davis.
“You could have the best Black Friday in the world but the rest of the season wouldn’t match up and that’s what happened in 2008.”
Typically, sales over Black Friday weekend comprise 10 percent of total holiday sales.
But, in 2008, experts believe many consumers rushed out during Black Friday weekend to take advantage of the best bargains then hunkered down for the rest of the season.
“A lot of people went out as a result of desperation because they knew the deals were really good,” Davis said.
“In some ways, the economic environment is very similar to 2008 but shoppers are acting very differently.”

The difference is in cash on hand:

“The strong holiday sales figures thus far underscores how bargain conscious American consumers still are and it doesn’t guarantee those strong results will hold over the next several weeks,” said Greg McBride, Bankrate’s senior financial analyst.
“Consumers are still worried about their savings, job security, debt and net worth,” he said.

All ingredients for staying alive.

And all this could be just another wad of bullshit — Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture says: If it’s the Monday after Black Friday, then its national hype the fabricated data day!
In other words, all that information in the above might be just inflation of results.
And Ritholtz, who’s one of the better dudes putting financial shit together, even goes so far as to wager a bet:

Here is my challenge to the CEOs of the National Retail Federation and ShopperTrak: $1,000 to the charity of the winners choice that your forecasts for Black Friday, the Thanksgiving weekend and the entire holiday shopping season are wildly off.
I bet you your forecasts miss the mark by at least 10 percent-20 percent (though I believe its closer to 40-50 percent).

Pump it up, then pump it down, shake the facts all around.

Hence, the supposedly GOP presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich on OWS:

“Now, that is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them, ‘Go get a job right after you take a bath.’”

(Illustration found here).

This the guy sharp-tongued Rachel Maddow most-rightly called a “bottom feeding” scammer, full of “hypocrisy moment(s)” and who’s full-time profession has been selling access to himself as someone who is influential because of his time as a public servant. He has been marketing the Speakership of the House for his own private financial gain to anybody who will pay him.” (h/t Raw Story)
Maddow is cool, but for me only in short doses, little bursts of energized, well put-together tid-bits, which after awhile rags the nerves somehow — she does, however, a good job tearing a gut-sized, new asshole on Newt.
And I agree — but the bigger shit-pile notion is the strange state of the US of A when someone as obviously detestable as Newt could be anywhere near where he’s at in the shape of things.

Newt is a bluster-master of idiot bullshit.
On Friday, at a talk at Harvard, Newt said child law labor laws are “stupid,” and “entrap” youngsters into poverty.
Via Politico: Newt also revealed how to save failing schools — fire the janitors, hire the local students and let them get paid for upkeep.
And the bottom-line to all this buffoonery — “…give people a chance to rise very rapidly.”
Man lives not by bullshit alone and hot air rises.

And my most-favorite actress, Natalie Wood, died on my birthday in a boating accident off Catalina Island, California.
Two decades later to the day, my most-favorite Beatle, George Harrison, would die on my birthday — odd that.

On Thursday, the LA Sheriff’s Department announced the re-opening of the investigation into Wood’s death: Homicide investigators are taking a new look at one of Hollywood’s most enduring mysteries after they were contacted by people who claimed they had “additional information” about the drowning, the sheriff’s department said in a statement.
A puzzle to be sure, but not that so ‘enduring.’

(Illustration found here).

Wood was a multi-talented actress who was going through a dry period at the time of her death.
She was then working on a two-bit science-fiction movie, “Brainstorm,” and had been involved in a string of bad TV movies and theater junk — her last really good flick was more than a decade in the past, “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon were nominated for supporting Oscars).

Wood was married to a jerk (I think), Robert Wagner — always felt she could have done a lot better — and she and Wagner always sailed their boat, Splendour, all over south California waters.
On this particular trip, Wood’s co-star in Brainstorm, Christopher Walken, was invited along.
Reportedly, Wood and Wagner got into a big argument, and later Wood wound up dead.

This whole affair seemed to have been settled decades ago, but Wood’s sister, Lana Wood, said that although she believes no foul play was involved, there might be something else: “I just want the truth to come out, the real story,” she said last year.

No matter, the results of the newest investigation could be interesting.
A press conference on the matter is set for today.

Wood was also in just one movie with my favorite actor, Steve McQueen (no, he didn’t die on my birthday, though, he was short a couple of weeks in 1980), in 1963′s, “Love with the Proper Stranger,” which Wood was nominated for an Oscar.
The artwork above was from that film.

Meanwhile, back to the more-horrid events of 2011…

And today is for the future — Kids Speak Out Day — as the swelling demonstrations starts its 24th outing to put the spotlight on the horrors of modern finance, and the most-incredible income disparity amongst civilized peoples.

(Illustration found here).

These protests, which have now spread across the county — Occupy Denver, Occupy San Francisco, and points in between — started off just about in the dark as the media (lovers of high finance) decided to black the demonstrations out until they grew to such a size they were hard to cover up.
The movement’s motto: “We are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”
A take on the enormous financial gulf between rich and poor and the arrogance it embraces.
Do the math:

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands.
As of 2007, the top 1 percent of households (the upper class) owned 34.6 percent of all privately held wealth, and the next 19 percent (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5 percent, which means that just 20 percent of the people owned a remarkable 85 percent, leaving only 15 percent of the wealth for the bottom 80 percent (wage and salary workers).
In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), the top 1 percent of households had an even greater share: 42.7 percent.
…
Edward Wolff, the economist we draw upon the most in this document, concludes that there has been an “astounding” 36.1 percent drop in the wealth (marketable assets) of the median household since the peak of the housing bubble in 2007.
By contrast, the wealth of the top 1 percent of households dropped by far less: just 11.1 percent.
So as of April 2010, it looks like the wealth distribution is even more unequal than it was in 2007.

And to make matters worse, US household incomes declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself.
There’s no winning, so hence people are in the streets.

Anyone with any moral, financial sense knows the problem — even Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, from the very bowels of one those protest points, does indeed have a clue.
Last week, during a congressional hearing, Bernanke let it slip out:

“Like everyone else, I’m dissatisfied with what the economy’s doing right now.
They blame, with some justification, the problems in the financial sector for getting us into this mess, and they’re dissatisfied with the policy response here in Washington.
And at some level, I can’t blame them.”

You know what level, Ben, don’t be shitting us.

After the crowds swelled, and some innocent-looking, pretty young girls were pepper sprayed by a nutcase New York cop, the movement gained the lede on network nightly news and people started commenting on the situation — Michael Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Penn Badgley, among a host other big names threw in their support.
One such voice (via the modern mode of protests/revolutions): Yoko Ono voiced her support on Twitter: “I love #OccupyWallStreet. As John said, ‘One hero cannot do it. Each one of us have to be heroes.’ And you are. Thank you.”
The movement is moving right along.

However…
Those with their nose up the ass of Wall Street have come out slinging nasty.
One of the great jerks/assholes of our time, Republican Rep. Peter King lashed out not only at those Wall Street protestors, but at US history, and in doing so, defined the fear of the rich:

“It’s really important for us not to give any legitimacy to these people in the streets,” said King on Laura Ingraham’s radio show Friday evening.
“I remember what happened in the 1960s when the left-wing took to the streets and somehow the media glorified them and it ended up shaping policy.
We can’t allow that to happen.”

And pure nit-twit Paul Ryan: “I think this divisive rhetoric is fairly–is divisive. I think it’s troubling. Sowing class envy and social unrest is not what we do in America.”
Paul, Paul, Paul — oh, such hypocrisy, such tripe from someone who has been doing that sort of thing for nearly three years now.

Paul Krugman in his column this morning in the New York Times takes to task all those clowns and discovers these people are scared shitless.
Some bits:

And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot.
And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.”
The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.”
My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.
Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.
And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”
…
What’s going on here?
The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is.
They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs.
They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price…
…
This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny.
Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage.
In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.
So who’s really being un-American here?
Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard.
No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

Hear, hear — and as I’ve said it before, those 99 percenters are 100 percent correct.

Only one-quarter of those surveyed say news orgs get the facts right, a new low since 1985 when the question was first asked.
Two-thirds (66 percent) say stories are often inaccurate, a new high.
And nearly three-quarters of Americans believe that journalists try to cover up their mistakes, rather than admit them.

(Illustration found here).

Also in the Pew Research survey: …and 80 percent say news organizations are often influenced by powerful people and organizations.
And local news are trusted more than those national organizations — 69 percent vs 59 percent.
No wonder the US (and the world) is going to shit in a wire basket — much better information, and less biased information can be gathered from the foreign press, at least from what I’ve gathered.

In an example from The Daily Howler on the execution of Troy Davis last week — no real details on evidence were presented by anybody, including the fabled Gray Lady:

The headline on Wednesday’s editorial called the impending execution “a grievous wrong.”
Among other things, you read this:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (9/21/11): Seven of nine witnesses against Mr. Davis recanted after trial.
Six said the police threatened them if they did not identify Mr. Davis.
The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime.
There are other reasons to doubt Mr. Davis’s guilt: There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime introduced at trial, and new ballistics evidence broke the link between him and a previous shooting that provided the motive for his conviction.

Say what? The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime? And Davis was executed anyway?
What happened to the guy who confessed? The editors didn’t say.

Some mess there.

A mega-major problem is media attention span.
Firedoglake on Sunday looked at the nearly-unreported dust-up on Wall Street last week via an interview with Paul Weiskel, a photographer who has been taking photos of the occupation.
Weiskel talks reality:

They had to continually bring in more people and towards the end I honestly felt like it was very close to a police state.
I’ve been very hesitant to say the phrase “police brutality” because we don’t live in Syria.
We don’t deal with that type of police repression but today the New York Police Department did violently crack down on peaceful protesters, who definitely have legitimate claims, and I was flat out disgusted.

And the media interest tends to be non-so-called professionals:

I think with the increase in technology the ability to exchange this news, what’s going on, is pretty much equal if you look at the quality of video coming out, if you look at the quality of pictures coming out—if I could say that.
The main difference is the audience that you have.
There were a lot of tweets saying that right now CNN is running a segment on have dating rules changed in the best decade while people are getting pepper sprayed and beaten by cops on street corners in New York. So, it is a very orchestrated blackout by the media but once we get the audience they’re going to see the images and they’re going to be very high quality and very thought-provoking images.

And black outs?
One must remember that if the national media don’t want you to know something, you won’t know it.
Case in big point: In 2008 the New York Times ran a massive expose on those TV “military analysts” who gave most-wonderful commentary in the opening days of the Iraqi war and how they were in fact on the payroll of the Pentagon in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.
The NYT even won a Pulitzer Prize for the story, but a vast, huge chunk of US peoples haven’t a clue — the TV news outlets, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, etc., all blacked out the story — and the only news report on the expose was a segment on PBS.

In the mid 1970s when I started at the Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama, right out of J-school into the entry-level slot of police reporter, journalism was in its golden age buzz.
On the strength of Watergate, us news room types were a proud bunch as we thought what were doing was not only the neatest job in the whole-wide world, but we were there for the public’s right to know and understand.

That was way-long ago and really far, far away.

Beyond ironic crazy is the hacking of the hacker: The hacker gang LulzSec, after declaring retirement last month, cracked the Rupert Murdoch–owned New Times on Monday and used it to host a fake news story declaring that the embattled media mogul had been found dead at his home.

(Illustration found here).

And today, the living Murdoch, his fancy-faced, red-haired heroine, Rebekah Brooks (arrested over the weekend, but released on bond) and young Murdoch junior, Jimmy, will come before the UK’s House of Commons Culture Media and Sport Select Committee (an all-encompassing-name for frivolity) to testify on the shit-storm sprayed across the phone-hacking world.
This trio of elitist twits will undergo the Dick Nixon inquiry mode: What did they know, and when did they know it — ‘it’ of course being all the jacking-off telephone hacking that comprised journalism at Murdoch’s News Corps.
Should be fun.

One real crazy item that caught my eye this morning induced a trip down the “what if” path.
At AlterNet, writer and anti-war activist Fred Branfman muses on what would have happened if Jackboot John McCain would have won in 2008, and instead of Barack Obama in the White House, it’d be the maverick of mavericks.
Branfman ledes:

Democrats were united on one issue in the 2008 presidential election: the absolute disaster that a John McCain victory would have produced.
And they were right.
McCain as president would clearly have produced a long string of catastrophes:

– He would probably have approved a failed troop surge in Afghanistan, engaged in worldwide extrajudicial assassination, destabilized nuclear-armed Pakistan, failed to bring Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to the negotiating table, expanded prosecution of whistle-blowers, sought to expand executive branch power, failed to close Guantanamo, failed to act on climate change, pushed both nuclear energy and opened new areas to domestic oil drilling, failed to reform the financial sector enough to prevent another financial catastrophe, supported an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, presided over a growing divide between rich and poor, and failed to lower the jobless rate.

Nothing reveals the true state of American politics today more than the fact that Democratic President Barack Obama has undertaken all of these actions, and even more significantly, left the Democratic Party far weaker than it would have been had McCain been elected.
Few issues are more important than seeing behind the screen of a myth-making mass media, and understanding what this demonstrates about how power in America really works—and what needs to be done to change it.

The big problem with Branfman’s imagined synopsis is that he doesn’t discuss McCain being a self-centered, mental case without a brain or a moral compass — the US and the world would be in far worse shape as all our current troubles would have stacked themselves up against a guy unable to comprehend reality.
We’d currently be right in the middle of the horror still awaiting us just a few months down the road.

Obama, however, does have some failed surprises.
Yesterday, he bypassed Elizabeth Warren to head the newly-formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (a department she thought up and developed) and instead named some legal bureaucrat as the bureau’s chief.
Michelle should have bitch-slapped her husband while screaming, “Barry, you dumb ass!”
Warren has come across as one of the extremely-few people in the DC swamp-hole with any sense and integrity — and now apparently her only recourse is to become one of the swamp people herself and run for the US Senate in Massachusetts.

Life is just bat-shit crazy.