"The President is not a progressive – he is not what Americans still call a “liberal.” He is a willful player in an epic drama of faux-politics, an operative for the money power, whose job is to neutralize the left with fear and distraction and then to pivot rightward and deliver a conservative result.
What Barack Obama got from the debt deal was exactly what his sponsors have wanted: a long-term lock-in of domestic spending cuts, and a path toward severe cuts in the core New Deal and Great Society insurance programs – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And, of course, no tax increases at all."
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"And the President too is a young man. Unlike say Lyndon B. Johnson or Jimmy Carter, when his term ends he won't be able simply to go home. He'll need a big house in a gated suburb, with high walls and rich friends. And a good income, too, from book deals and lecture fees. He may be thinking about that now.
The good news is: it won't save him. For if and when he ventures out, for the rest of his life, the eyes of all those, whose hopes he once raised will follow him. The old, the poor, the jobless, the homeless: their eyes will follow him wherever he goes."
"The continued systematic pursuit of obviously bad public policy is baffling. It's not like it's good politics. Does the Obama campaign staff really think they are gonna hold PA or OH with trade concessions to Korea? Do they think they will turn out voters in New Mexico on a deportation platform?
This isn't hard. Hire people to build things with the free money the world is offering us."
"Why all the subterfuge? You won. Do progressives really need 'roping in'? Obama 2012, your campaign, has already put out its strategy. Obama is better than the Republicans, and you should prefer a list of Boy Scout achievements to Republican tea party garbage. And, hey, even if the Republicans win next year, you can run against them while enjoying the fruits of their neoliberal policies. And if you are a Democrat, you can blame the progressives for your defeat, which was the whole point of the game in the first place. So where's the victory celebration?"
"Operating the telescope array costs about $1.5 million a year, according to The Associated Press.
SETI has other telescope arrays at its disposal, but the Allen Telescope Array is the biggest and, unlike other facilities, is dedicated to the institute's operations.
The shutdown comes after NASA announced that its space telescope Kepler had discovered 1,235 new possible planets, some of which were in the 'habitable zone,' where liquid water could exist.
'There is a huge irony that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen,' SETI Director Jill Tarter told Mercury News."
"Why, angry progressives seem to be asking, would Obama ignore the views of his so-called 'progressive base' while seeking to please those who are his political adversaries?
But it's perfectly rational for Obama to do exactly that. There's a fundamental distinction between progressives and groups that wield actual power in Washington: namely, the latter are willing (by definition) to use their resources and energies to punish politicians who do not accommodate their views, while the former unconditionally support the Democratic Party and their leaders no matter what they do. The groups which Obama cares about pleasing -- Wall Street, corporate interests, conservative Democrats, the establishment media, independent voters -- all have one thing in common: they will support only those politicians who advance their agenda, but will vigorously oppose those who do not. Similarly, the GOP began caring about the Tea Party only once that movement proved it will bring down GOP incumbents even if it means losing a few elections to Democrats."
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That is exactly what progressives will never do. They do the opposite; they proudly announce: we'll probably be angry a lot, and we'll be over here doing a lot complaining, but don't worry: no matter what, when you need us to stay in power (or to acquire it), we're going to be there to give you our full and cheering support. That is the message conveyed over and over again by progressives, no more so than when much of the House Progressive Caucus vowed that they would never, ever support a health care bill that had no robust public option, only to turn around at the end and abandon that vow by dutifully voting for Obama's public-option-free health care bill. That's just a microcosm of what happens in the more general sense: progressives constantly object when their values and priorities are trampled upon, only to make clear that they will not only vote for, but work hard on behalf of and give their money to, the Democratic Party when election time comes around.
"Hebert said he believed that in wanting to appear nonpartisan, they instead weakened the Justice Department, sending a consequential message to the American people.
“It’s one thing to want to appear like you’re above the political fray and your cases aren’t motivated by politics,” Hebert pointed out. “But it’s another to not hold people accountable and to not bring justice.”"
---
"Hebert said he believed that in wanting to appear nonpartisan, they instead weakened the Justice Department, sending a consequential message to the American people.
“It’s one thing to want to appear like you’re above the political fray and your cases aren’t motivated by politics,” Hebert pointed out. “But it’s another to not hold people accountable and to not bring justice.”"
"LEAVE RICH CRIMINALS ALOOOOONE
I'm sure the Very Serious People response to anti-rich people leaks to wikileaks will be the same as their response to leaks embarrassing powerful people in governments. It's just wrong to hold powerful people accountable for anything.
Look forward people!"
"With no time to do anything but say 'Oh, my God!' Coetzee was gone, hauled beneath the green water never to be seen again."
"If the last two years have taught us anything, it's this: never put your faith in a politician. The only way for citizens to find their power in our present corrupt governing system is to band together outside the corrupt party apparatus and demand change from without. When even Al Franken goes along to get along, there seems no other choice."
"While the upcoming Rally To Restore Sanity, and its opposing March To Keep Fear Alive, marks an exciting high point in the lives of 'The Daily Show' and 'The Colbert Report', respectively, the combined event can best be seen as something that deepens and extends a challenge that the two shows have long sought to meet -- that a debased and frantic public discourse needs to be confronted head-on by the cool reason of rational minds.
Comedy, which harvests laughs by juxtaposing the life we're left with against the ideal, is a genre that loves reason above all else, and the two hosts have plowed the field carefully."
"Carbon pollution and over-use of Earth's natural resources have become so critical that, on current trends, we will need a second planet to meet our needs by 2030, the WWF said on Wednesday."
The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.
"From the inadequate stimulus of 2009, to the deficit 'concerns' (see the catfood commission) of today (among many other issues), the flinching and cowering of the Obama Administration and the Dems has damaged the country and, ironically, the political fortunes of the Dems. The reflexive hippie punching, the constant refrain of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, the ever present concern of being labeled a gasp, liberal, has led to great suffering in the nation. Simply put, the Dems have not been up to the job. L'Affaire Sherrod has put a face to the cost of this attitude. I hope that the transcendence of this problem is recognized and addressed."
"Appearing alongside Newt Gingrich, Dean was blunt with his accusation. 'I don't think Newt Gingrich is a racist and you're certainly not a racist but Fox News did something that was absolutely racist,' said Dean.
'They had an obligation to find out what was really in the clip. They have been pushing a theme of black racism, phony Black Panther crap and this business and Sotomayor and all this other stuff. The Tea Party called out their racist fringe and I think the Republican Party has got to stop appealing to its racist fringe,' Dean continued."
"Handled correctly, the BP spill should have been to climate legislation what September 11th was to the Patriot Act, or the financial collapse was to the bank bailout. Disasters drive sweeping legislation, and precedent was on the side of a great leap forward in environmental progress. In 1969, an oil spill in Santa Barbara, California – of only 100,000 barrels, less than the two-day output of the BP gusher – prompted Richard Nixon to create the EPA and sign the Clean Air Act. But the Obama administration let the opportunity slip away.
Early on, Obama failed to challenge blowhards such as Senator Jim Inhofe who distorted the science of global warming. Revkin points out that the president has not invited researchers and climate analysts to the White House (as even Bush did). And after BP's well blew out, Obama's infamously milquetoast address from the Oval Office never connected the disaster with the need for a cap on carbon. All of this wasn't for a lack of pressure from his allies. Nine high-profile environmental groups wrote a letter to the president pleading that 'nothing less than your direct personal involvement' will break the logjam in the Senate. Al Gore ultimately said what Obama wouldn't:"
"So it wasn’t the science, the scientists, or the economics that killed action on climate change. What was it?
The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.
If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines."
"Hundreds of new planets have been discovered by Nasa's new space probe, sparking new hope of life outside our solar system.
Up to 140 of the newly-found planets are rocky and Earth-like containing both land and water, conditions which could allow simple lifeforms to develop."
"GULF SHORES, Ala. - Dolphins and sharks are showing up in surprisingly shallow water just off the Florida coast. Mullets, crabs, rays and small fish congregate by the thousands off an Alabama pier. Birds covered in oil are crawling deep into marshes, never to be seen again.
Marine scientists studying the effects of the BP disaster are seeing some strange — and troubling — phenomena.
Fish and other wildlife are fleeing the oil out in the Gulf and clustering in cleaner waters along the coast. But that is not the hopeful sign it might appear to be, researchers say."
"A punitive society is not the best kind of society: there's a real virtue in forgiveness, in second chances. But for years we've been applying Rand Paul's 'accidents happen' principle to those at the top while heaping blame, scorn and draconian punishment on those at the bottom. Punitive damages are capped for corporations, while punitive policies proliferate for citizens. This tears the social contract apart, and the only way to repair it is to apply the same principles of accountability up and down the social hierarchy. We should start with BP."
"I can't get this song out of my head. You know the lyrics.
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
I just keep thinking about these lyrics.
Here's another thing I keep thinking about. How this corporate boot-licking band of board room-loving reactionaries that are calling the shots from the Republican side of the Supreme Court are going to rule on any BP-related litigation that may make it to their chamber. This is the court that, on behalf of making sure that CEO's continue their death grip on legislative reform, ruled that corporations have the same rights as individuals vis a vis campaign contributions."
"Defense companies put billions into PR campaigns for the necessity of this or that project that runs over cost. Legislators have every career incentive to lard the defense budget with job-creating bloat for their districts. The media treats civilian and military spending as two entirely different entities, with military spending emerging from a magical, never-ending fountain of cash. And then there’s the general jingoism that equates curbed defense spending with a deficit of patriotism."
They may not have won, but discontented Democrats sent an important message to the Obama administration on Tuesday by mounting an unexpectedly strong primary challenge to Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. For the White House to minimize the efforts of unions and others who helped support that challenge suggests a tone-deafness to the growing restlessness in the Democratic Party."
"In Lancaster County, Rawl won absentee ballots over Greene by a staggering 84 percent to 16 percent margin; but Greene easily led among Election Day voters by 17 percentage points.
In Spartanburg County, Ludwig said there are 25 precincts in which Greene received more votes than were actually cast and 50 other precincts where votes appeared to be missing from the final count.
'In only two of 88 precincts, do the number of votes Greene got plus the number we got equal the total cast,' Ludwig said.
Greene also racked up a 75 percent or greater margin in one-seventh of all precincts statewide, a mark that Ludwig notes is even difficult for an incumbent to reach."
"MONTGOMERY, AL—In a major scandal that could cast doubt on his political future, U.S. Senate candidate Chris Wilfred came under fire this week for comments he made alleging he had died heroically while fighting in the Vietnam War."
"The Kepler space telescope seeking Earth-like planets in a far-off region of the Milky Way has discovered more than 700 planetary 'candidates' - some that just might be the right size and in the right places for life to be possible."
"And, as a result, today everyone freaks out too damn easily. 'Oh noes! We don't know what he was going to do!'
Well, yes, we do know. In all likelihood, he was going to run around like a loon. Stupid, yes. Harmless, nearly certainly so.
But we can't leave it at that. Oh no, not in today's America. Today, we all piss our pants in terror and cheer when security uses a taser.
Stupid fucking ESPN jocks and stupid fucking cowardly over-reacting America."
"Here’s a fact for you, Portfolio magazine named Fiorina the “19th Worst CEO of All-Time”—placing her in the top 20 along with the likes of Dick Fuld, Ken Lay, Roger Smith and Bernie Ebbers. Why? Because her tenure as CEO of Hewlett Packard was a disaster.
The magazine described Fiorina as “a consummate self-promoter” who “paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005.”"
"I'll give it to you straight, right from my inner Trotsky:
You don't replace the party in power; you take over the party in power.
Tape it to your wall.
It wasn't Lenin who toppled the Czar, it was the Mensheviks. Once Kerenski and his group had set up the revolutionary government, Lenin grabbed control. The Texas Chainsaw Conservatives didn't topple the Republican Party, they took it over, one county office at a time. The Baptist Church fell to the pseudo-godly in the same godless way. (I hear other churches are fending off similar assaults from the cadres; God help them.)
Primaries, lots of them, until the Democratic party is ours. We'll need an entire party if we expect to go toe-to-toe ourselves. Yes, Obi-wan, it really is our only hope."
"“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”"
"Meanwhile Costner's company is moving toward leasing 16 more oil sucking and separating machines to Plaquemines Parish officials directly. They say if BP won't pay for that, they may sell the oil local officials pull from the water and fund the machines that way."
It is the first time that a spacecraft has successfully landed on an asteroid and returned to Earth.
"If a bank is too big to fail, it’s way too big to exist. If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it’s too deep to be drilled in the first place.
When are we going to stop behaving so stupidly? We nearly wrecked the economy and we’re all but buried in debt. But we can’t break up the biggest banks, and we can’t raise taxes. Now we’re fouling the magnificent Gulf of Mexico and ruining entire communities along the southern Louisiana Coast."
"New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's appeal to what he called 'common sense' at a congressional hearing Wednesday morning failed to sway two Republican senators who said that giving the government the ability to block the purchase of guns by suspected terrorists would undermine the Second Amendment's right to bear arms.
'Shouldn't FBI agents have the authority to block sales of guns and explosives to those on the terror watchlists -- and deemed too dangerous to fly? I actually believe that they should,' Bloomberg told senators. Federal law currently only allows the government to block guns sales for a very limited number of reasons, and being on that list is not one of them. (For more background, see Tuesday's article on the subject.)"
"The financial crisis that grips our nation's states and cities has a malicious source, and Governor Tim Pawlenty recently named that source: public school teachers.
'It used to be that public employees were underpaid and over-benefited. Now they are over-benefited and overpaid compared to their private-sector counterparts.'
The school teacher, the policeman, the firefighter - these are now the faces of what is wrong with America today. It doesn't matter that studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics say otherwise, America can no longer afford their overpaid, middle-class salaries.
At least that is what the right-wing media is telling us."
"'The Republicans are having difficulty determining how they're going to continue making love to Wall Street,' Reid, the Senate majority leader, said in a press briefing."
"The Skimmer Economy
Some day I hope more people realize that large segments of our economy don't actually do anything (health insurance, much of finance/real estate), they simply position themselves in the middle of transactions and take their cut. That isn't to say there are no transactions which legitimately require skilled middlemen, or that there is no legitimate function for the finance and banking industries, but to a great degree the skimmers just don't do anything productive at all. Except take our money."
"I'm not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.
What would Arizona's revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made 'any lawful contact' and about whom they have 'reasonable suspicion' that 'the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?' Wasn't the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?"
"Isn’t the whole premise of the Tea Party movement that overreaching government poses a grave threat to individual freedom? It seems to me that a law allowing individuals to be detained and interrogated on a whim — and requiring legal residents to carry identification documents, as in a police state — would send the Tea Partyers into apoplexy. Or is there some kind of exception if the people whose freedoms are being taken away happen to have brown skin and might speak Spanish?"
"He explained: 'We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.'"
"After four rounds of bloody battle against some of the most publicly reviled businesses in America, Comcast can now run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and hold its hands high in victory -- it has bested everyone else to earn the title of Worst Company In America for 2010."
"This is the story of three drugs. Except one is not really a drug at all and is merely an illusion, a nifty construct, an intense belief that it might be a drug, even though, as mentioned, it is very much not. We just think it is. Isn't that strange? Wonderful? Both?
The three drugs -- which, sorry, are not so much drugs as they are modes of comprehending our own weird little minds, needs and inherent psychoses -- are presented here by way of two recent studies that essentially reinforce what similar studies have been declaring for years and decades and, in the second case, since the ancient mystics suckled wild plants in the forest, licked God, found the source of the soul, and said, you know, holy f--."
"‘‘He pushes himself into madness,’’ says Tomaz Kovsca, a journalist for Slovene television. ‘‘He pushes too far.’’ Rajko Petek, a 35-year-old fellow soldier and friend who is on Robic’s support crew, says: ‘‘What Jure does is frightening. Sometimes during races he gets off his bike and walks toward us in the follow car, very angry.’’
What do you do then?
Petek glances carefully at Robic, standing a few yards off. ‘‘We lock the doors,’’ he whispers."
"Margaret, please tell Howard that I love him because he loves you. But that is about all the reaching across the aisle that I can handle. A few years back, millions of people across this nation and across the globe marched for peace. George Bush ignored us and we had to endure his lazy ass being in the White House for eight years.
So now a black man named Barack Obama, elected by the will of the people, has decided to fight for the poor, and work for world peace… and a bunch of white guys who think Fox really is News just can’t stand it.
Well, they can kiss my ass because I am tired of their belly aching."
"Employees of the CIA-connected private security corporation Blackwater diverted hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47 assault rifles, from a U.S. weapons bunker in Afghanistan intended to equip Afghan policemen, according to an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee."
"The Senate is holding a hearing today where several current and former Blackwater employees will be testifying, but honestly the only way Congress would stop giving Blackwater money is if it started registering black people to vote."
"The risk – and it is real – is that the response will be waves of bitter cynicism, particularly among the young people for whom the Obama campaign was their first taste of politics. Most won't switch parties, they'll just do what young people used to do during elections: stay home, tune out."See:
"WASHINGTON — Whither the youth vote? A year after backing Barack Obama by an overwhelming 2-to-1 ratio, young adults are quickly cooling toward Democrats amid dissatisfaction over the lack of change in Washington and an escalating war in Afghanistan.
A study by the Pew Research Center, being released Wednesday, highlights the eroding support from 18-to-29 year olds whose strong turnout in November 2008 was touted by some demographers as the start of a new Democratic movement."
"A Houston Chronicle analysis of congressional campaign contributions in the 2010 election season found that Texans are shipping millions of dollars to out-of-state candidates this year, and most of the recipients are Democrats.
Eight of the top 10 non-Texas recipients of Lone Star State political money are Democrats. Overall, Democrats are receiving about 60 percent of the $6,823,766 in Texas money headed to Senate and House candidates in other states, according to Federal Election Commission filings through Feb. 10."
"I wrote a diary recently comparing the life of a progressive to trench warfare. This cause, of using the government to improve the world, is the work of a lifetime. And the fight is not a fair one.
There are three factors at play; the values of the people, the policies of the government, and the politics which (theoretically) turns the values into the policies.
Values change slowly, but they do change. When I was young, the idea of gay marriage was inconceivable. When my father was young, the idea of a black President was inconceivable. And yes, Inigo - that word does mean what I think it means. The work of changing the values of your friends and families and neighbors moves at glacial speed, but it does move. The one thing you cannot do is abandon your values and remain quiet. Every day, in a million conversations, values are changing. Don't stop."
"Instead of fraying under the strain of imperial overstretch, we’re paralyzed by procedure. Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland.
A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.
Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison."
"It is a per-capita fact that one city has more surf shops and the other has more college graduates. But there's more to this choice than that.
One of these cities gives you reliable sun, a world-class zoo and kid-friendliness, accompanied by the occasional reminder that the 1982 film 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High' was based on a true story.
The other city doesn't seem to care as much about your kids, but it will feed, entertain and edify you with such verve and sophistication that you'll barely notice the arctic breezes.
One is forever winning popularity contests, but the other is cheaper, has less crime and attracts more than twice as many overnight guests countywide."
"Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported Thursday they have taken a major step toward harnessing the forces that power the sun in an effort to create unlimited energy on Earth."
