Saturday, August 31, 2013

We've come too far to turn back now

It wasn't so long ago that Republicans won an election by fearmongering about gays destroying "traditional marriage." So it's rather stunning that we've evolved so quickly to this level of public acceptance of equal marriage rights for gays.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will become the first Supreme Court member to conduct a same-sex marriage ceremony Saturday when she officiates at the Washington wedding of Kennedy Center President Michael M. Kaiser.

The gala wedding of Kaiser and economist John Roberts at the performing arts center brings together the nation’s highest court and the capital’s high society and will mark a new milepost in the recognition of same-sex unions.
I imagine it will make the society pages. Wonder if Sally Quinn will be there.

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Your moment of Zen

Life is a highway. [photo via Harry Hunsicker]

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Friday, August 30, 2013

Your moment of Zen

At the Minneapolis Peace Garden.

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Republicans ban Heritage Foundation from Capitol Hill

This is the most amusing story I've seen this week. The crackpots at Heritage are no longer welcome at GOP strategy sessions.
According to a report Wednesday in National Journal, the Republican Study Committee is no longer allowing employees for the Heritage Foundation to attend the meetings. Heritage, currently led by former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), had been a fixture at the meetings until last month when the RSC, comprised of 172 conservative GOP House members, made the change.
Apparently the establishment GOPers are not happy with Heritage's role in screwing up the vote on the Farm Bill, which ultimately failed on the House floor after the crackpot agitators at Heritage meddled in the negotiations, leaving John Boehner looking like an idiot.

This of course is a disaster in terms of good governance on behalf of the people, but admit I'm taking untoward pleasure in watching the GOP suffer the consequences of having enraged the crackpots with their medancious propaganda in the first place.

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Poverty is not healthy for children and other living things

A new study shows poverty is bad for your brain:
The mental strain of living in poverty and thinking constantly about tight finances can drop a person’s IQ by as much as 13 percent, or about the equivalent of losing a night of sleep, according to a new study. It consumes so much mental energy that there is often little room to think about anything else, which leaves low-income people more susceptible to bad decisions.
Previous studies have shown it is also bad for your health and diminishes a child's chances to escape the cycle of poverty:
Poverty has other negative impacts. The chronic stress of growing up in poverty has been found to impair children’s brains, particularly in working memory. A study of veterans found that poverty is a bigger risk factor for mental illness than being exposed to warfare. The mental stress of being poor is also a major reason for why low-income people tend to have negative health outcomes like high blood pressure and cholesterol or elevated rates of obesity and diabetes.

Poverty takes its toll on health in a number of other critical ways: It prevents people from buying healthy food, makes people more likely to smoke, means they are more likely to live in areas with poor air quality, and can cause health problems that begin in the womb.
I've long been astounded that so many people believe living in poverty is a willing choice because, free government cheese. I can only believe these people have never been poor or spent any significant time among the poverty stricken. Poverty hurts. The poor have to work ten times harder just to accomplish the simplest tasks of daily life. Small wonder they seek to escape the pain and fear in short term pleasures when their future prospects are so harsh and uncertain.

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Thursday, August 29, 2013

Your moment of Zen

In Maeve's magic garden the hummingbirds have no fear.

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Seriously. Thanks Obama

Busy with real life stuff so outsourcing all my posts today. Betty Cracker finds a bucket full of good news:
1. Colorado, Washington get OK from feds on marijuana

2. Federal Tax System Will Recognize Married Gay Couples Even If Their States Do Not

3. HHS Extends Medicare Benefits To Married Gay Couples

Plus the executive order on guns. Not a bad day’s work. Thanks, Obama!
The gun order closes a loophole that allowed convicted felons to subvert background checks by taking possession of firearms through a corporation and shut down the reimportation of military weapons from abroad. Click over for the supporting posts.

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Government waste on welfare

This has happened in every state that has tried this trick. It's wasteful and the money would be better spent on helping people rather than trying to feed bogus stereotyping. Why drug testing people who need welfare assistance is stupid.
Utah has spent more than $30,000 to screen welfare applicants for drug use since a new law went into effect a year ago, but only 12 people have tested positive, state figures show.
The idiots in the Statehouse who sponsored this bill were (shockingly) unavailable for comment. [image via]

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What's in a name?

Via Charlie Pierce, this is really a brilliant idea for naming major storms.



And while you're at it, just click over and read everything Charlie has to say. Perfect place to catch up on the news that matters when you've been offline for a while.

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Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Your moment of Zen

A flying car The Convair Model 118, a prototype which unfortunately never made it into mass production, 1947. [photo via Historical Pics]

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Public confused about Obamacare

A new poll from Kaiser Family Foundation shows a majority oppose defunding Obamacare. Only 36% would approve, whereas 57% would disapprove. Which makes the GOP's grand plan of shutting down the entire federal government rather than pass any appropriation bill  funding the ACA even more tone deaf than they usually do.

Meanwhile, Americans remain entirely confused about what Obamacare actually does, which is not surprising given the enormous amount of disinformation and outright lies circulating about the law. Especially egregious are the number of mega-corporations lying about Obamacare forcing them to cut their workforce and/or dropping coverage. As Think Progress points out at the link:
Large companies are blaming this move specifically on the health law. But in reality, Obamacare just serves as a convenient scapegoat for anti- labor practices. Employers have been attempting to shift more health costs onto workers for the past decade, and workers’ health care costs have been skyrocketing as the same time as their wages have stagnated. Indeed, studies have shown that large employers were trying to slash workers’ hours long before Obamacare was around. Most large companies aren’t actually planning to slash their employees’ benefits specifically in response to health reform, despite the headlines proclaiming otherwise.
The Kaiser poll also finds only 8% consider BigMedia as a trusted source of information. Ironically fully 81% are getting information from BigMedia. Small wonder everybody is so confused.

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Monday, August 26, 2013

Your moment of Zen

Moonflowers in my friend's garden.

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Sunday, August 25, 2013

When silence speaks louder than words

Most brilliant protest ever:



Haddockmopnger tells us the tickets were actually free. No idea if this is true. Don't really know any of these guys. It was retweeted into my stream by Jay who was a random follow back. Might add he's been a pleasant addition to my timeline. He rarely posts politics. Most of his tweets are beautiful photos.

But whether it's true or not, it's a brilliant idea for a silent protest.

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No liberals need apply?

News isn't doing it for me today, so cleaning up a few amusing links. Rachel Maddow picks up on an odd Heritage Foundation event
What you need to know about the event
Date: August 19, 2013

Time: Registration begins at 6:00 p.m. Town Hall Meeting begins at 7:00 p.m.

Location: Pratt Place Inn & Barn, 2231 West Markham Road, Fayetteville, AR 72701

Cost: Free for conservatives. RSVP required.
Rachel wonders, "Have Heritage events always been listed as 'cost: free for conservatives'? or is this new for the DeMint era?"

I have no idea but I wonder how they figure out if you're a real conservative. And if you admit you're a liberal do they refuse to give you their "exclusive opportunity to meet Heritage President Jim DeMint?" As in, you're only to free to attend if you agree with DeMint's crackpot scheme to defund the entire federal government in order to overturn a duly passed law of the land?

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Your moment of Zen

Wild Iris. [photo via The Garden Oracle]

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Cyber-stalkers of the NSA

I don't find LOVEINT terribly shocking:
We have HUMINT, or human intelligence gathered from agents. We have SIGINT or signals intelligence. And now we have LOVEINT or NSA analysts occasionally reading the emails of ex-lovers. It doesn’t happen a lot, the NSA told the WSJ, but often enough that there is a word for it.
I don't even think it's necessarily always being done with bad intentions. Who hasn't done an internet search on an ex-lover or even a long lost friend to see what happened to them? Which is not to say LOVEINT isn't a concern.

The difference with LOVEINT is they have so much information at their disposal and have the ability to cause trouble for an ex and/or the new love interest of a lost love. Beyond that, if they can check on old lovers, they can also stalk current enemies and that has a great potential to not end well.

The thing about domestic surveillance is it really has been going on as long as I remember. What makes it urgent now is technological advances have made it so easy for them to accumulate all the data about our lives. I don't think our government is using it to stalk us all 24/7 -- yet. I don't think they can yet but with the speed of new advances, it's only a matter of time before we could find ourselves living in a real life version of 1984.

I'd also guess this cyber-stalking is a lot bigger than "just a handful of rogue agents" since the ones they caught were mostly self-reported. And of course we now know they've been illicitly sharing their data scoops with law enforcement which was once forbidden under the Fourth Amendment. So the question is, how do we stop them? I'm not sure we can but I am sure we're never going to be able to even diminish it to keep it within some less invasive parameters as long as internet fights keep the focus of the story on the players and the politics instead of the policy.

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Saturday, August 24, 2013

Your moment of Zen

A peace garden in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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The Canadian Candidate

Or is it the Cuban Candidate?

By Capt. Fogg

Birthers, or at least the ones I've heard from, like to disassociate their theory about Obama's African origins from racism and pretend instead a real concern for constitutional propriety, but the lack of enthusiasm for pursuing the same line of  'thinking' as it applies to Ted Cruz's eligibility for Canadian citizenship and perhaps even Cuban citizenship is a bit like a porthole in a septic tank.  All the shit is on display.

But a cynic has to be grateful for having the Tea Party to quote, its members being far, far too stupid to conceal the opinions they'd like to deny. I read with delight the Texas Tribune article that has one Tea Partootie insisting that there's no comparison between their lack of concern for Ted Cruz' conflict of interest or his eligibility for the presidency and the obvious problem of Obama since Obama - wait for this - was born in Kenya and has strong ties to that country. Facts be damned.

The fact that you can damn all you like but is here to stay, is that Cruz is a Canadian citizen. Constitutional or not, this is a conflict of interest, but since "Canada is not really foreign soil" according to one Tesas TP twit. we can ignore it.  And why pray tell is there no concern that a Canadian Candidate might have a hidden agenda including Health Care Reform and forced hockey game attendance?  Because Canadians are more likely to be white or whiteish? Ya think?

Look, Cruz can't just promise to deny his citizenship and make it so.  The government of Canada may have something to say about that. According to Reuters, Cruz has to prove to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service they are or will become a citizen of another country, do not live in Canada and are not a security threat. They must also explain in writing why they do not want to be a Canadian anymore. A Canadian judge must sign off on it and it can take 8 months, so until and unless that happens, Mr. Cruz is campaigning not only stupidly, but dishonestly -- in other words in true Tea Party style.

And then there's the matter of his father having been a Cuban citizen at the time and a Cuban citizen who fought with Fidel Castro before coming to the US. That makes him eligible for Cuban citizenship.  Is he going to deny that too?  The plot thickens, but not so thick as the skulls of his supporters.  Racist supporters I might add.

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Friday, August 23, 2013

The world according to Derp

Damn Dimmocrats:
[I]n Lincoln, Ill., GOP Rep. Aaron Schock told an audience at a coffee shop that the Democratic-controlled Senate had "sat on their hands" while the House sought to repeal Obama's health care law. "The president right now is doing a very good job of trying to make it look like the House is dysfunctional," Schock said. "Really what we're trying to do is carry out the wishes of the people."
Because surely, the American dream has always been overpaying insurance corporations for crappy health care.

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Dueling charts - Updated

Well, this is an editorial so clearly it "was not intended to be a factual statement." For one thing this is not "Obama's Recovery," this is your future under Republican economics.

You might think the editors of the Investors Business Daily would have some interest in telling the whole story because rising tide lifts all ships or something like that. Oh wait, no they don't. The recovery has sucked for almost everyone except the very wealthy investor class, who want corporate friendly Republicans in power. So they won't mention the GOP's obsession with austerity and draconian cuts in government spending they extorted have greatly impeded recovery that benefits all the lower income classes.

Neither will the concern trolling editors at IBD mention how Big Banksters impede the growth of small business.
Neil Irwin highlights these charts from Hyun Song Shin’s comments at the monetary policy summit in Jackson Hole, WY, which provides an “interesting analysis that goes a long way toward explaining why growth has been so disappointing over the past four years.” The chart on the left shows that credit for the corporate business sector has picked up since the recession, while the chart on the right shows credit continuing to flatline for the non-corporate business sector.
Big Banksters got megatons of money on the cheap from the Fed for the express purpose of lending to non-corporate businesses. But they didn't, and still don't, lend to anyone but their corporate cronies because, profit. They like the recovery just the way it is but they're happy to keep the little people angry with half truths so they won't notice who's really screwing them.

Update: Explosive addition to this story by Greg Palast, who has the Bankster's secret end game memo that tells the story of how they invented and enshrined casino capitalism.
The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.

The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama’s leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world’s central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn’t be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world.

The memo is authentic.
Fair warning. Do not read the nauseating details on a full stomach.

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Give the people a living wage

Alec MacGillis asks a good question:
Liberals have spent years now agonizing over why it is that many working-class white Americans vote for the party whose policies on taxes, organized labor and much more work against their own economic interests—the "What's the matter with Kansas" problem. Well, here is an issue where lower-income people who vote Republican are quite clear about what's in their own interest—that is, they state a preference at direct odds with their party's line. Maybe it would be a good idea for Democrats to try to peel them away by actually talking up that issue?
Raising the minimum wage polls well with pretty much everybody except crackpot cons who are against anything that doesn't piss liberals off and the people who make a living exploiting minimum wage workers. All the focus inside the Beltway bubble is on the well off and reasonably secure but the working poor are the fastest growing demographic in our country. They're not feeling any grass shoots recovery in those circles.

Championing this demo could not only win back the House but a successful push to raise the damnably inadequate wage would actually help all the people. Hell, it might even restore the people's faith in government.

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Your moment of Zen

A butterfly in the hand...

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Thursday, August 22, 2013

Name Change by Bradley Manning

I suppose Bradley Manning's statement this morning was shocking to most people. For me, well, I lived for 15 years in lovely downtown Northampton where we elected an openly lesbian mayor several times and the local public college had a center for transgendered students. Natural reproduction in all species is imperfect. Wrongly assigned gender at birth is more common than you might imagine.

So believe me when I tell you, it's not complicated to deal with Bradley Manning's gender shift to Chelsea Manning. It's just ordinary etiquette. She's declared her choice of gender so from now on simply refer to her as Chelsea Manning and use the customary pronouns you would use for any other woman.

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Terms of impeachment

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn dangles impeachment to soothe the angry base at a home district speaking event.
“No, I agree,” Coburn said. “My little wiggle out of that when I get that written to me is I believe that needs to be evaluated and determined, but thank goodness it doesn’t have to happen in the Senate until they’ve brought charges in the House. Those are serious things, but we’re in a serious time. I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to high crimes and misdemeanor, but I think they’re getting perilously close.”
Translation: Happy to feed your impeachment fever. Get back to me when John Boehner's House of Dysfunction gets their shit together.

A year ago I would have laughed derisively at the notion the GOPers would try for it. Thing is, they won't be able to pretend they can kill Obamacare for the next three years and all their other faux scandals are falling apart. They're going to need a new chew toy for the rubes to gnaw on and the angry base loves them the taste of impeachment.

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Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Your moment of Zen

A lotus blossom. [Birgit.Juergen Pictures]

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Why Americans are so uninformed

Not sure if this says more about the media, or the markets.


Each week, TIME Magazine designs covers for four markets: the U.S., Europe, Asia and the South Pacific. Often, America's cover is quite, well – different. This week offers a stark example. [...]

This is not an isolated incident, for perusing TIME's covers reveals countless examples of the publication tempting the world with critical events, ideas or figures, while dangling before Americans the chance to indulge in trite self-absorption.
Click over to see more.

It's easy to blame Time for dumbing down the public but they're in the thankless business of selling magazines. I'm not sure who reads Time in the paper version these days but my anecdotal experience is far too few Americans care about world politics anymore. Time's US cover stories reflect what they think the US market will buy. I'm not sure they're wrong.

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Woodward and Bernstein did it without computers


[Guardian photo]

Adding a bit to my earlier post on trusting BigMedia, here's The Guardian on the destruction of their computers. Not sure which iteration of the story this might be but I'm told this is not a photograph of destroyed hard drives.

Read it and see if it makes more sense to you, but for me the real tell was the last graf:
"I hope what [the Miranda detention row] will do is to send people back to read the stories that so upset the British state because there has been a lot of reporting about what GCHQ and the NSA are up to. What Snowden is trying to do is draw attention to the degree to which we are on a road to total surveillance."
As I said when the story broke, Miranda's detention was entirely predictable. And as I asked John Cole, who would have known Mr. Miranda was even traveling if he hadn't been detained? I didn't. And really? No other route  to Brazil available except going through Heathrow?

Clickbait journalism is all about traffic. As Politico editor-in-chief John F. Harris said in an interview, "We have an obligation to be interesting. We don’t think of ourselves as the electric company or the water company: Well, we have a responsibility ...”2 That was a mindset in a previous generation of journalists. That mindset might have even been legitimate."

In other words, the big money is in infotainment. It's about amusing the people for profit, not some quaint, last century concept about a responsibility to inform the public.

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Blaming Obama

This takes Obama Derangement Syndrome to a new level.
The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government's post-Katrina blunders.

Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren't sure who to blame.
To be clear, the question specifically asked, "Who do you think was more responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina: George W. Bush or Barack Obama?"

In other words 73% of Louisiana Republicans don't remember who was president when Katrina hit NOLA. And people wonder why we can't have an informed debate on anything in this country anymore?

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Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Your moment of Zen

An xray of poppies and a pitcher plant. [Yahoo photo, more at link]

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Who do you trust?

I have never trusted any government to tell me the whole truth. All my life they've lied to me. Sadly, outside of handful of responsible journalists and bloggers, now that click bait journalism has become the accepted business model, I don't trust the media to tell me the whole truth either.

I do trust Charlie Pierce. I don't always agree with him entirely, but I always listen to what he has to say because he's honest, he's smarter than me and his institutional knowledge is deep. I completely agree with him about the NSA:
...(There is simply no logical reason to take anything the NSA says on this topic in good faith.)

I would like to believe that this is not simply another salvo in the ever-escalating Toobin-Greenwald pissing contest. The issues are simply too important to get buried under a mudslide of personal pique, even though they're half-interred in that already. But, Green Room hooleys aside, Toobin here fundamentally is telling us, again, that they are all honorable men. I don't care what you think of Glenn Greenwald or Edward Snowden. In this democracy, "trust us" is not half good enough any more.
So then the question becomes, what's a concerned citizen to do? Where do we get the facts? Are we seriously supposed to trust a media that rushes to print every wild rumor, (often from an unnamed source), they can dig up in their frenzy for a ten minute exclusive on the internets? The media standard for publication is no longer are we sure this is true, it's now if it's at all plausible -- run with it and maybe make corrections later.

Take the instant matter of Greenwald's spouse and his troubling detention at Heathrow. The Guardian rushes the story to print, inciting instant mass hysteria about innocent spouses of journalists being detained for no reason. But they omitted a couple of pertinent facts. Within hours the NYT tells us Mr. Miranda was acting as a courier for secret documents between Glenn and Lynn Poitras and his trip was financed by The Guardian. Only then did The Guardian amend its story and I'm told they didn't bother to note anywhere it had been amended. So most people who read their story in the hours before that wouldn't be aware of those salient facts. This does not make for an informed public or a reasonable debate.

Meanwhile, Atrios posts today that "the lack of noise about the destruction of the hard drives has been a bit unsettling." He's referring to the Guardian's story about the UK government destroying their hard drives. Well, at least that's what the first story implied. The second story today tells us they actually destroyed the drives themselves, voluntarily, under the watchful eye of a couple of agents, rather than force the government to get a court order. Which doesn't really make sense to me on any level. But the really weird thing is this happened a month ago. Have to wonder why are they just printing it now?

It's not like this is an isolated instance and it's not confined to The Guardian. Every major story in the last few years has played out the same way. The first 48 hours (or longer) are complete chaos with conflicting reports. Anything incendiary enough to drive traffic gets posted immediately. The subsequent mitigating information is downplayed or sometimes ignored. It takes an enormous amount of effort to glean the complete story from numerous news orgs. Frankly, I'm tired of it. In fact, I'm just plain tired of the hysteria, of the in-fighting, of being told what I'm supposed to feel and do. So sorry if it makes me a bad liberal that I just watch and wait from the sidelines instead of immediately jumping into the melee but I just don't the see the point of adding to the noise.

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Monday, August 19, 2013

Personal trivia

My friend and former employer gets invited to the occasional White House function but this encounter on the Vineyard happened by chance. Tom has spent every August there for many years.



Boston Globe tells me:
One diner who kept his distance was Northampton attorney and Obama fund-raiser Tom Lesser, who happened to be at the restaurant with his wife, Maggie Spiegel, and their daughters Grace and Elisabeth. Obama stopped to say hello and, before leaving, took a quick selfie with the girls. Patrons applauded as the president and first lady departed.
I watched those girls grow up. I still have a note from Gracie that she left for me when she was about five years old. They're both gorgeous young women with fabulous careers now. [photo credit Martha's Vineyard Gazette]

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Simply so predictable

Glenn Greenwald says this is a misquote:
"I will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now. I am going to publish many more documents. I am going to publish things on England too. I have many documents on England's spy system. I think they will be sorry for what they did," Greenwald, speaking in Portuguese, told reporters at Rio's airport where he met Miranda upon his return to Brazil.
He's right. It wasn't an exact quote. Nonetheless, having read Glenn's version, I think Reuters captured the general sense of Glenn's statement. Even in his own words, it reads like a not so subtle threat. And I can't help but recall a similiar threat Glenn made against the US government on behalf of Snowden. But this isn't about the stolen NSA documents.

In case you somehow didn't hear, Glenn's spouse was detained for nine hours at Heathrow yesterday. They questioned him at length and then they took all his electronics and let him go without charging him. This is apparently legal under British law and to avoid confusion, let me stipulate the law they used is as troubling, if not more, than our own anti-terror overreach. Steve M has more on the law and the thousands of people who endured to varying degrees, the same horrible detention as David Miranda. These overly broad laws in all countries need to be clarified and narrowed, if not abolished. But this isn't about odious anti-terror laws either.

What I find most appalling about this incident is I can't help but think this was entirely predictable. Joshua Foust supplies the full backstory but if here's the short: Glenn has publicly stated he sent the leaked docs to David in the past. In the instant matter, The Guardian paid David to fly to Berlin to courier some sort of documents from Glenn to Laura Poitras, (the other journo on the Snowden story) and then return to Brazil with her docs for Glenn. So they book the return flight through Heathrow? Glenn is not stupid. Thus I'm forced to conclude Glenn set up his own spouse to take this fall and I wonder why.

Joshua articulates my current state of mind rather well:
More immediately, too, the instinctive reaction of far too many journalists to shriek about their own spouses being targeted is going to have a downside. Few journalists would treat their spouses as authority-bait the way Greenwald did this past weekend, and few would tell other reporters, for a profile, that they used their spouses to help them avoid intelligence agencies. Glenn Greenwald is a very smart man — he knew what he was doing. While we should all condemn the British authorities for holding Miranda for so long, we should also keep in mind exactly why he might have been singled out — and there a whole new set of complications and questions emerge.

There’s also a bit of historical literacy we should perhaps add to the discussion. Histrionics aside, most governments, and many more unsavory groups, treat secrecy very seriously — sometimes with deadly seriousness. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of his decision to help pilfer and distribute the treasured secrets of several governments, to do so openly, with such braggadocio, is not only arrogant it is misguided. This is not a game, especially to the governments being exposed, and casually involving a spouse to take a hit when he won’t risk it is a bizarre and troubling decision.
I remember, respect and appreciate Glenn's work during the Bush administration but it feels different now. It's like I don't know who he is anymore and sadly, I'm not sure I can trust him.

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Your moment of Zen

Morning in the Meadows, Northampton, MA. [George Lenker photo]

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Sunday, August 18, 2013

Grimm assessments

New York Congressman Michael Grimm is appalled Obama would use his executive power to do nice things for the peoples because, founding fathers never intended that to happen.
Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.) said recent executive actions by President Obama, including a plan to extend high-speed Internet connections to virtually every school in the nation, demonstrate a "blatant" attempt to subvert the will of the American people.

"It's just a flagrant, you know, arrogant disregard not just for the current Congress," Grimm said in an interview with Fox News. "Look, it's not about me personally. That's not what this is about. You think about who is the Congress? It really — it is the voice of the people."
Or, if you're a Republican Congressman in John Boehner's House of Dysfunction, you're the voice of a handful of crackpots, but hey -- they're loud . But what's more interesting is new evidence of the GOP's emerging plan to blame their planned government shutdown on Obama.
"I really do believe because of political reasons, it's more advantageous for the president to keep us divided so that he can make these end runs and use these administrators and the people he puts in charge to just go around the Congress to do an agenda that he knows ultimately the people are not going to support," Grimm said.
Greg Sargent flagged the first inklings of the GOP's bizarre strategy last week and the GOPers are staying on message. They're floating this theme among the pary faithful while they're home in their districts. Last week in Virginia:
U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.-10th), speaking in Loudoun County today, said he believes President Barack Obama wants a federal government shutdown in the fall.

If the government shuts down, Obama, a Democrat, will use the closure to score political points against Republicans and "stick it to them," [U.S. Rep. Frank] Wolf said. “I believe the president wants us to shut it down … I think he'll literally come at us,” Wolf, a 30-year incumbent, said.
And I believe Frank Wolf is "literally" either a flagrant liar or a raging lunatic who shouldn't be allowed within 50 miles of Capitol Hill. But the point is the GOP felt it necessary to come up with a ploy to shift the blame for a government shutdown using the defense: Obama made us do it. Finding that simultaneously hilarious, pathetic and terrifying.

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Voice inflection is everything

Internet outrage of the moment is Michael Grunwald's loaded tweet in which he said, "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange."

Maybe it's because I'm inclined to think the best of people unless they've proven to be vile. Maybe it's because I don't really know who Grunwald is. He's not on my regular read list. I vaguely recall reading a post of his some time back that somebody linked to that I thought was quite good. So in the absense of knowledge about his general ideology, I took it as sarcasm rather than the expression of actual murderous intent. I mean, I've seen bloggers I do follow and know well post countless requests to DIAF (die in a fire) and don't take those as serious threats either.

Of course, it's August. The news cycle is mostly trivial. The poli-junkies are bored. Many pick somewhat silly internet spats and instant outrage rules the twitter.

That tweet could have been read in several ways. Could just as easily been a diss on the drone program or subtle dig at the state of media today. Which is not to say it wasn't stupid to post it. That statement desperately needed voice inflection to make its intent clear. Maybe Grunwald really meant it murderously, (in which case I would condemn it too even though I've always found Assange to be creepy and self-interested), but I've seen nothing to suggest Grunwald is prone to violent ideation. So I guess I'll save my outrage for things that really matter rather than some awkwardly worded tweet probably posted after a couple of drinks on a Saturday night.

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Saturday, August 17, 2013

Your moment of Zen

An allium in the garden. [photo via The Garden Oracle]

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Defeating the propaganda

Where I come from we call it lying, but as President Obama points out, it's perfectly clear the GOPers are trying to confuse the public about the benefits of Obamacare. Of course, they wouldn't have had so much success in doing so if our "liberal media" was willing to point out the inaccuracies (if they need a polite word) instead of simply acting as stenographers for the GOP's false claims. Our insider media is perfectly willing to analyze the political implications (and subsequent benefits of lying) but only Obama is willing to point out the obvious adverse consequences of the GOP's perfidy.
A lot of Republicans seem to believe that if they can gum up the works and make this law fail, they'll somehow be sticking it to me. But they'd just be sticking it to you.
Fortunately for America, albeit unfortunately for the Republican party, the GOP propaganda is not working like it used to. Leaping in where the media fears to tread, the people are calling the Republicans liars to their faces. Far cry from the summer of the angry mob in 2009. To paraphrase Charlie Pierce, at least this summer they're hollering at the right people. So there's that.

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Friday, August 16, 2013

Your moment of Zen

Cygnets on the water. [Back to Earth - Artworks photo]

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Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Shades of Jim Crow

It's been more than a little embarrassing to live in North Carolina since the easily deluded voters here turned the joint over to the crackpot con Republicans who are now in a race to turn the place into the wingnuttiest state in the union. The latest attack on voting rights in Raleigh is geting national attention. As it should. They mandated onerous voter ID requirements, cut down early voting and made voter registration as difficult as possible among other odious ploys to suppress Democratic voters. But these two provisions are being largely overlooked though they're likely to turn out to be the ones which affect the election the most.
It also empowers election vigilantes like True the Vote—who have been accused of voter intimidation—giving ample room to anyone who wants to challenge the voting credentials of their fellow citizen. It authorizes poll observers, expanding their range and authority, an expands the scope of who can examine registration records and challenge voters, and it allows voters to be challenged by any registered voter in their county without cause. [...]

And, as the icing on the cake, the law also makes room for independent groups to spend as much as they’d like in North Carolina elections, ending public financing programs, raising contribution limits, and eliminating disclosure requirements. It’s a wet kiss to powerful interests as well as an attack on voting.
Meanwhile, our creepy crackpot Governor is out on the bobblehead circuit spewing unadulterated horseshit about the law.

But that's just at the state level. The real work of voter suppressing is conducted by the yahoos on the County Commissions. What happened in Watauga County this week should be national news. It's a mystery to me how this can even be legal.

Read the gory details at the link to get the full scope of this travesty in governance but the shorter short is this. A three person county Board of Elections (2 GOPers, 1 Democrat) held a meeting and the majority membership of two announced the secret deal they made behind closed doors to benefit the candidacy of one of their relatives. They refused the Democratic member's request for the materials prior to the meeting and of course the voters were kept in the dark as well. These are the changes they announced as fait accompli:
1. Rewrote the duties of the elections supervisor, specifying that Jane Anne Hodges is prohibited from being involved in "the discussion or debate of political or discretionary decisions [!]... regarding the location or number of polling places or early voting sites and hours." She is further required to keep a log "of all telephone calls and visitors," and must never be allowed to be in the elections office alone during any polling period.

2. Resolutions to establish a public comment provision: This new board decrees that only written comment will be acceptable.

3. One-Stop Implementation Plan for the 2013 municipal elections: ASU Student Union site, closed. One site only: Commissioner's Boardroom.

4. Resolution to combine three precincts, Boone 1, Boone 2, and Boone 3 into a single precinct with the polling place at the Agricultural Conference Center. This would put over 9,000 voters into a single mega-precinct, when state voting guidelines recommend no more than 1,500 voters per precinct.

5. Move the Meat Camp polling place to the new Meat Camp fire department and move the New River 3 precinct polling place from the Armory to Mutton's Crossing on Bamboo Rd.
You have to familiar with the geography and the demograhics of this county to appreciate just how brazen this move was. Watauga, a rural county, has the only real concentration of progressive Democrats outside of the big cities in NC. These two GOP meatheads effectively made it as difficult as possible for Democrats to cast ballots by moving the liberal district's voting venues to locations that are the least accessible and lack sufficient space and parking to house the voting booths. One venue lacks the 25 foot setback required for political signs, meaning it will be impossible for voters or candidates to pass out informational material outside of the polling place. The only way their intentions could be more obvious is if they had arrived at the meeting wearing sandwich signs saying -- Fuck you Democratic voters. The local newspaper has more coverage and photos of the GOP's smug gerrymandered thugs. May we all live long enough to see their karma kick them in the ass.

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Your moment of Zen

A late afternoon egret at Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. [Pam Leavey photo]

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Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Your moment of Zen

The Perseid meteor shower at Stonehenge. [via The Guardian photo gallery]

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Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies

Encouraging the misplaced outrage was all fun and games until the "angry mob" turned on them. Now Republicans run from holding Town Hall meetings in order to avoid their angry base. And yes there's a few conservative Democrats who have been voting with them who are doing the same.
Though Republicans in recent years have harnessed the political power of these open mic, face-the-music sessions, people from both parties say they are noticing a decline in the number of meetings. They also say they are seeing Congressional offices go to greater lengths to conceal when and where the meetings take place.

Members of Congress and their aides were reluctant to talk about the lack of town halls on the record, mindful of the pressure from liberal and conservative groups alike. “Ninety percent of the audience will be there interested in what you have to say,” one Senate Republican aide said. “It’s the other 5 or 10 percent who aren’t. They’re there to make a point and, frankly, to hijack the meeting.”
Wannabe internet stars are a problem to be sure. Also I imagine even the legislators who can defend their record with good conscience might be reluctant to appear unprotected in public in light of the rise of gun rights paranoids and their firearm arsenals. You never know when one deluded crackpot who believes the government is coming to take his guns might show up and exercise his Second Amendment rights. Watering the tree of liberty and all that jazz.

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Monday, August 12, 2013

Your moment of Zen

Another butterfly in Maeve's magic garden.

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Let their freak flag fly high

I don't suppose the baby Jebus loves me enough to let this happen. Responding to a birther's question at a town hall a Texas Congressman confides they have the votes in the House to impeach Obama, but the crackpot cons should not be getting the hopes up.
“You tie into a question I get a lot: ‘If everyone’s so unhappy with the president’s done, why don’t you impeach him?’” [Rep. Blake] Farenthold continued. “I’ll give you a real frank answer about that: If we were to impeach the president tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it. But it would go to the Senate and he wouldn’t be convicted.”

The Texas congressman then described the impeachment process, mentioning the vote in the House and the trial in the Senate. Farenthold then said that the failed attempt to remove President Bill Clinton from office through the impeach process actually damaged the country.[...]

“What message do we sent to America if we impeach Obama and he gets away with what he’s impeached for and he is found innocent? What then do we say is OK?” the Congressman concluded. “Aside from the fact that it wouldn’t be effective, I think there’s some potential damage to society that would be done with a failed attempt at impeachment.”
Haven't seen any mention of what grounds he thinks they might conjure up for said impeachment. Pretty sure one of them isn't "we hate this black President so kick him out even though he legitimately won twice by a landslide."

But it's not just birthers who have the NRSC dancing on the thin edge of sharp knife. The Tea Party spawned a legion of big time grifters who are making a very good living bucking the establishment GOP and they know exactly what prime cuts of raw red meat to throw to their slavering base to keep them thirsting for more blood.

To which I say, please proceed... The more blood they draw, the weaker their chances are at the ballot box. We may yet be able to dislodge them from the broken gears of our government despite the shameless gerrymandering that allowed them to grind good governance to a halt for the last few years. [Think Progress image]

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Send in the creepy clowns



I usually ignore these sort of lame-ass stupid crackpot shots at Obama but this show of disrespect to our POTUS at a Missouri rodeo wasn't just an obscure and brief reference in some movie. This was a sustained charade at a family event with lots of children in attendance.
"The announcer wanted to know if anyone would like to see Obama run down by a bull," the posting said. "The crowd went wild. He asked it again and again, louder each time, whipping the audience into a lather."

Another clown then apparently joined the performance.

"One of the clowns ran up and started bobbling the lips on the mask and the people went crazy," the posting said. "Finally a bull came close enough to him that he had to move so he jumped up and ran away to the delight of the onlookers hooting and hollering from the stands."
Real lesson for the kids in civil discourse and tempered political disagreement there. Of course it's nothing new and not really worth making a huge deal over it. The main reason I'm mentioning it at all is because nobody has asked, "WTF is that broomstick in the photo all about?"

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Sunday, August 11, 2013

Your moment of Zen

A forest cottage in Efteling, Holland. [photo via The Oakwheel]

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Saturday, August 10, 2013

GOP jokesters

I'm sure Maine's crackpot Gov. Paul LePage's expressed desire to blow up the local newspapers was meant to be taken as a joke, but it's not funny. While he was at photo op, manning a fighter jet simulator in the local Pratt & Whitney factory, he told the crowd, "I want to find the Portland Press Herald building and blow it up."

And if it was meant as an offhand remark, one wonders why he repeated it twice:
Later in the event, a television reporter from WMTW asked LePage again if he had any targets. The governor answered: "The Press Herald and the Bangor Daily News."
This was after the Bangor Daily News posted about the first "joke." This isn't the first time he's expressed contempt for the press. He does it regularly.
LePage has had a tense relationship with the media -- newspapers in particular -- since he took office in January 2011.

At least twice, he has told students that his biggest fear is newspapers. He once said that buying a copy of a newspaper is like paying someone to lie to you.
Because facts have a well known liberal bias and quoting him accurately is a threat to his freedom. Or something.

I'm sure he didn't mean he actually would blow up the newspapers. Not so sure he really wouldn't like to if he thought he could get away with it. But the real danger of this kind of violent ideation by the highest officeholder in his state is he was elected by well armed sovereign citizen types who might want to do their hero a favor and blow up the buildings for him. This kind of reckless "joking" only encourages the truly unhinged to act out violent fantasies. One hopes the good people of Maine will realize their error and get this man off the public stage in the next election.

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Your moment of Zen

A hand drawn goodbye card for a departing employee at Persephone Books with a charming backstory.

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Friday, August 09, 2013

What the left could love about the NSA Presser

Time was when President Obama's forceful style at today's presser would have had "teh left" exploding with approval on the social nets. Those days are over. Opening with the appointment of a blue ribbon commission to study the NSA didn't thrill the spectators. We've seen that movie many times before and it rarely has a satisfactory ending.

That's not to say there wasn't a couple of (largely ignored) satisfying moments hidden in the Q & A. The two standout quotes for me came first in answer to Major Garrett's question on appointing a new head for the Federal Reserve. Obama answered in part:
But the other mandate is full employment. And right now, if you look at the biggest challenges we have, the challenge is not inflation; the challenge is we’ve still got too many people out of work, too many long-term unemployed, too much slack in the economy, and we’re not growing as fast as we should. And so I want a Fed chairman who’s able to look at those issues and have a perspective that keeps an eye on inflation, makes sure that we’re not seeing artificial bubbles in place, but also recognizing, you know what, a big part of my job right now is to make sure the economy is growing quickly and robustly, and is sustained and durable, so that people who work hard in this country are able to find a job.
Seem to remember many calls for exactly this statement from the bully pulpit. Saw the sum total of one tweet from someone else having noticed it. Neither have I seen any recognition for the strength of Obama's defense of the ACA outside of one tweet afterward from Ed Henry, who asked the question.
[Obama]: Now, what’s true, Ed, is, is that in a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the Speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law -- it has to do with, for example, are we able to simplify the attestation of employers as to whether they’re already providing health insurance or not -- it looks like there may be some better ways to do this; let's make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. [...]

Now, I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail, their number-one priority. The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don't have health care and, presumably, repealing all those benefits I just mentioned...

And let me just make one last point about this. The idea that you would shut down the government unless you prevent 30 million people from getting health care is a bad idea. What you should be thinking about is how can we advance and improve ways for middle-class families to have some security so that if they work hard, they can get ahead and their kids can get ahead.
Read the transcript for the full remarks. Our POTUS delivered as brilliant a defense of Obamacare as is possible for a black President leading during the biggest resurgence of institutional racism since the days of Jim Crow. That deserves more notice than it's likely to get.

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Your moment of Zen

Fill me up, buttercup. [photo via Soulful Nature]

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Thursday, August 08, 2013

Koch's quiet coup

What do Ryan and Cantor have to hide? It's not like they're the first bright lights of the GOP to speak at one of the Koch Brothers' periodic ultra-exclusive confabs. So why are Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor so secretive about their star turn at the podium of this prestigious event?
Neither Ryan nor Cantor were willing to talk about the appearance, before or after attending, and when a reporter from the NBC affiliate in Albuquerque tried to cover the event where the New Mexico governor was speaking, he was turned away at a checkpoint -- a mile from the resort.
Good to remember while everyone is obsessing about government surveillance that these uber-rich egomaniacs and their bought insider lackeys are hatching plots to take over the world. They may be crackpots but they're not idiots. They answer to nobody. It's no secret their master plan is to fuck the rest of us over so they can have all the things for themselves.

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Hold your nose touting

How embarrassing for Mitch McConnell. Somebody managed to get a recording of a private telephone call made by his campaign manager.
In the recording, obtained by Economic Policy Journal, Jesse Benton — who ran Paul's successful 2010 campaign before joining McConnell's team — told conservative activist Dennis Fusaro that he has an ulterior motive in working the GOP leader's 2014 campaign.

"Between you an me, I'm sorta holding my nose for two years," Benton said in the recording, "'cause what we're doing here is gonna be a big benefit to Rand in '16."
And yes, it's real:
Benton confirmed the authenticity of the recording telling the Weekly Standard, "It is truly sick that someone would record a private phone conversation I had out of kindness and use it to try to hurt me."
I'm not comfortable with such invasions of privacy but must admit my extreme disgust with Mitch McConnell leaves me more amused by this than I probably should be.

Adding: Alec MacGillis was in Kentucky recently and discovered McConnell's trouble in Kentucky runs much deeper than just a reluctant campaign manager.

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Bye, bye black sheep

The only reason I'm mentioning this nothingburger of an anti-Obama protest in Arizona is because it's a perfect illustration of how click-bait journalism is destroying the former profession of news gathering. The deceptive headline at the link screams -- "Hundreds protest Obama" -- but not all of them were crackpots singing "Bye, Bye, Black Sheep" or hollering about impeaching the 47% Negro. Which by the way, is not at all racist because somebody had a Mexican grandson there.

And "hundreds" would be stretching the description of the turnout. The TV cameramen are good at framing the shots to make the crowd look bigger, but Steve M finds video from the anti-Obama group, that isn't as skillfully skewed.


By the end there may have been a couple hundred or so people, but many of them were there to protest on behalf of their pet causes, (like killing the XL pipeline), and you could hear the competeing cheers for Obama across the street while the crackpots were booing right in front of their little videographer.

This non-story was picked up by all the local affiliates of the national networks. So okay, it's August and there no other "news" to cover, but what really rankles is if this had been a pro-Obama rally of 10K, you could bet money none of the big media would have even mentioned it.

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Your moment of Zen

Waterski team. [Artist unknown]

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Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Your moment of Zen

Lotus flower. [photo via Robert MacCollum]

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Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Taking care of Bezos

By now you've heard that the gazillionaire owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, bought the WaPo. (Moment of silence for the untimely end of Kaplan test prep daily jokes.) This of course will be a topic of endless fascination among the insider media types for the duration of the summer.

Henry Blodget at Business Insider has already been living life under a Bezos investment at his publication and tells us it's not a bad thing. He offers up his own speculation on why Bezos decided to make the purchase.

Over at The Week, Peter Weber surveys the internets and collects the five best reasons why Bezos bought the WaPo.

For myself, damned if I know why he did it or what's going to happen to it now. The vindicative bitch in me would love to see some of the smug pundits have to deal with the reality of unemployment they so blithely dismiss when it happens to other people. Rather doubt that's going to happen, at least to those who deserve a pink slip the most.

As for Jeff's reasons, I suspect he did it a) because he could and b) because he who controls the information delivery to the masses can control public opinion. He's a uber-rich guy with an agenda and so far, I'm told, had only a small footprint inside the Beltway bubble. This buy enlarged that with a speed and weight that couldn't be achieved so expeditiously any other way.

What he intends to do with it remains to be seen but I don't have high hopes that he's going to change anything for the better. Would be thrilled to be wrong though. The optimist in me lives in hope.

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Your moment of Zen

Hadrian's Wall, Great Britain. [photo via Pam Leavey]

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Politifact still useless after all these years

I stopped reading (and especially linking to) Politifact years ago. After they gave the Dems "Lie of the Year" for something that was absolutely true, I was hoping the very serious important people would do the same. They didn't but maybe today's Politifact idiocy will do the trick. Steve Benen catches us up:
Cantor said that the federal deficit is "growing." Annual federal deficits are not growing right now, and they are not projected to grow through 2015, a point at which the deficit will have shrunk by three-quarters since 2009. By this standard, Cantor is wrong. However, unless policies are changed, deficits are projected to grow again in 2016 and beyond, according to the CBO. On balance, we rate his claim Half True.
In other words, Cantor's bogus claim might be true someday if the planets align perfectly and nothing ever changes in the whole world from this hot minute. As Steve points out, that's sort of like saying: Imagine we're driving down the highway in a car and I step on the accelerator. I then assure you, "Don't worry, the car is slowing down," despite the fact that the car is speeding up. PolitiFact would apparently say my claim is "half true" because sometime soon, the car will probably decelerate.

Or the car might crash into a tree in which case it would certainly stop accelerating. Politifact started out with a good idea and for a while they did a good job. But it's been long since they realized all the biggest lies were coming from one side so they invented false balance so as to look like a neutral observer. Because we all know the truth has a liberal bias.

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Monday, August 05, 2013

Your moment of Zen

Meave's garden is a magical place.

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Sunday, August 04, 2013

McConnell and Graham face Tea Party flack

Don't want to get my hopes up too high but it's not impossible that we could get rid of both Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham in 2014. To begin with, McConnell's Dem opponent Alison Grimes delivered a sharp blow to McConnell at the annual Fancy Farm hoedown in Kentucky. She's polling ahead of him already. Here's hoping that will hold.

More importantly, McConnell is facing a Republican primary challenger who speaks Teabonics and is likely to win over the hard core angry cons who demand purity. Could split enough of the GOP vote to give Grimes the win. One can dream anyway.

Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham now has a Tea Party challenger and she's a hot ticket. Nancy Mace, "a small business owner and the first female graduate of The Citadel," opened her candidacy with a fiery little speech:
"Washington thinks it knows better than the people," she said. "The federal government has worked its way into nearly every corner of our lives, trying to solve every problem for us. And yet, we are still not better off for it.”

She joins businessman Richard Cash in challenging the two-term senator for the GOP nomination. Republican State Sen. Lee Bright has also said he will run.
Not sure who to root for here. We can be sure a Republican is going to win the seat. Any one of these folks is likely to be even worse than Lindsey. Still, it might be worth it just so we don't ever have to listen to his pathetic pandering to the crackpot cons anymore.

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Your moment of Zen

In Maeve's garden.

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Saturday, August 03, 2013

Oh deer, overkill in Wisconsin



The militarization of local law enforcement reached a new low this week with the senseless slaughter of Giggles the fawn. In a scene reminiscent of a SWAT team raiding a criminal cartel's headquarters, nine fully armed wildlife cops and four local sheriffs descended on an animal rescue farm in search of illegal contraband -- to wit, one tiny baby deer. What happened next defied logic.
“I said the deer is scheduled to go to the wildlife reserve the next day,” Schulze said.

It was to go to a wildlife reserve in Illinois that allows the rehabilitation of deer. Schulze said agents corralled workers near the picnic area and then set out in search of the fawn.

“I was thinking in my mind they were going to take the deer and take it to a wildlife shelter, and here they come carrying the baby deer over their shoulder. She was in a body bag,” Schulze said. “I said, ‘Why did you do that?’ He said, ‘That’s our policy,’ and I said, ‘That’s one hell of a policy.’”
Granted, it apparently is illegal to harbor a wild animal in Wisconsin but they could have taken the poor little creature to the legal shelter themselves. Or fined Schulze and allowed him to transport it himself in the morning. Hard to see what was served by killing it. Fucking barbarians.

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Your moment of Zen

My former neighbor Geoff Lagadec of Jaya the Cat at Sozopol Beach, Bulgaria.

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Friday, August 02, 2013

Scandalmania

Alec MacGillis at TNR finds the charts on media scandal mongering on the IRS nontroversy. This is how truthiness becomes gospel among the many victims of Obama Derangement Syndrome.



Click bait "journalism" is going to destroy this country. They shouldn't even be allowed to call themselves news orgs anymore.

Addendum: Steve Benen adds:
If the political world took a keen interest in this controversy when it first came to public light, then moved on when there were no new developments, it'd be fairly routine. But that's not quite the case here -- rather, the IRS story broke, news organizations pounced, and then proceeded to ignore new developments that undermined the legitimacy of the story itself.

Outlets didn't move on when nothing happened; outlets instead made a conscious decision not to report when all kinds of things happened -- things that made the story itself appear baseless.

In other words, in this case, the media only cared about the allegations from Republicans, not the evidence that proved those allegations false. The political world was obsessed for weeks with the questions, then found the answers boring and not worth sharing with the public.
And worse, never having admitted the "scandal" was a nothingburger, the media will continue to refer to it as one in a string of scandals, as if the false allegations by the GOP should have been afforded any credibility whatsoever. The real scandal -- that Republicans invented this fakery -- will never be told by our so called liberal media.

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RIP Doghouse Riley

I'm back on line but I have a new computer and I have to learn a new OS now that my trusty little Dell with my beloved XP is dead and gone. So blogging is still likely to be light today and I'm outsourcing the eulogy to Edroso who knew Doghouse Riley better than I did. Sadly, I had only recently discovered his blog.

It's a great loss to the internets and everyone who cares about saving what passes for democracy in our country. He was a fabulous writer. According to the obit, his death was unexpected and came tragically too soon. May his friends and family find peace.

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Your moment of Zen

Mosaic walkway. [photo via La Bioguia]

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Thursday, August 01, 2013

All in the Republican family


By Capt. Fogg




Remember Richard Nixon?  Who?  You know, the guy they tried to rehabilitate after he fled the White House ahead of the prosecutors, the guy they built a museum about with fake exhibits showing how he really was a great guy who was victimized by the Liberal Press? 

Well as long as we have Dick Nixon's words on tape we don't have to kick him around any more, since his unique talent for kicking himself in the ass with both feet in his mouth relieves us of the burden.

Watching All in the Family and completely failing to get what it was about, all the trickster could get out of it is that it "glorified homosexuality" made a hippie out to be a better man than a "hard-hat" and was likely to destroy America.  CNN plans to air this clip and more Nixon outrages tonight.  I don't plan to watch it.  I don't need to listen to this shitweasel, this piece of snake dung talking about how Rome and Greece were destroyed by "fags."  I had enough many years ago when I heard him talking to Billy Graham about how the Jews were destroying America.  I've had far more than enough of the party that supported him for decades, that attacked truth and justice to protect this horror, committed crimes to re-elect him and who now thinks he's way too far to the left for the modern tea-stained Republicans.

Watch this (my apologies for the ad) and ask yourself how this piece of human garbage ever got elected, how anyone would debase themselves and their country by supporting him in full knowledge of his words and deeds.  Ask yourself how low a person has to be to be a Republican.  Listen to his words America, and despair.

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