On Our Backs

Ronald Wilson Obama, ladies and gentlemen, with a dash of pussified Carter.

Citing deficit, Obama to freeze federal worker pay

The dumbest move politically AND economically. That's a hard feat to accomplish.

Horrible for the middle class and horrible for our overall economic clusterfuck.

Say it with me "To make money, one has to SPEND money".

The Page by Mark Halperin | Trumka Torches Bam for Fed Freeze:

"Today’s announcement of a two-year pay freeze for federal workers is bad for the middle class, bad for the economy and bad for business. No one is served by our government participating in a “race to the bottom” in wages. We need to invest in creating jobs, not undermining the ones we have. The President talked about the need for shared sacrifice, but there’s nothing shared about Wall Street and CEOs making record profits and bonuses while working people bear the brunt. It is time to get our nation back on track, but we should not do so by placing an even greater burden on the middle class."

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Daily Kos: Austerity is the New Hoovernomics, a Grover Norquist wet dream come to life

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Maybe the v-chip will get revived! Oh, boy! School uniforms become the top issue while the rest of us fucking starve.

President Gimmick:

"And with that symbolic gesture we witness President Obama's unfortunate alter-ego, President Gimmick. President Gimmick isn't serious about solving any of our problems, he's only serious about demonstrating his desire to solve our problems.

President Gimmick doesn't offer up plans designed to do anything, he only offers up plans designed to give him zingers for his 2012 debates.

If President Gimmick actually cared about governance, we'd have a comprehensive fiscal plan. Instead, we're getting cheap applauses lines. You think announcing a federal pay freeze represents toughness? Ha!

Confronted with the choice between making the tough decision to defend federal spending during a recession or to develop a plan to actually slash spending, President Gimmick takes a third way: pretending to do something. In the process, he concedes that he believes his critics are right on the merits, but far from signaling strength, he signals that he's too weak to do anything serious about it.

The worst thing about President Gimmick isn't that he plays politics, though. The worst thing about President Gimmick is that he's not very good at it.

Let's hope it doesn't take President Obama long to realize that President Gimmick isn't going to do him or the nation any good. And then he -- and we -- can put President Gimmick back in the closet, where he belongs."

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Excellent choice:

Daniel Day-Lewis Will Be Steven Spielberg's Abraham Lincoln - MOVIE TALK on Yahoo! Movies:

"For what seems like forever, director Steven Spielberg has talked about wanting to do a biopic on Abraham Lincoln from a script by 'Angels in America' playwright Tony Kushner. But for the past decade, Spielberg has instead focused on other projects while Liam Neeson remained committed to playing our 16th president. When Neeson announced this summer that he was finally leaving the project, that seemed to be the end of it ever happening, but now the film is very much back on track: Daniel Day-Lewis is going to play Lincoln."

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A Better Chocolate

I was stoked to see this with all of the Unions bashing by Republicans and the Obama Administration.

Video: Saints and Vikings players show union solidarity - Shutdown Corner - NFL� - Yahoo! Sports:

"Minutes before the New Orleans Saints and Minnesota Vikings kicked off the 2010 NFL season, players from both teams stepped on the field and raised one finger into the air in a show of union solidarity.

The move was a public message to owners that players are united in negotiations for the upcoming collective bargaining agreement, which threatens to derail the 2011 season."

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Of course all of the uber rich, announcer assholes got all uppity about it, because in their Taliban like view, Unions are like women and children.... not seen and not heard.

Tiabbi takes them to task. Read the entire article, it is a good.

This country needs much more union protest. Voilent, if need be.

On ESPN and "Replaceable" People -- RollingStone.com

So it seems the whole sports world is abuzz about the decision by the Minnesota Vikings and New Orleans Saints players to raise a finger in the air before the season-opening game as an expression of union loyalty -- "We are one" -- in a year in which the players and the owners are negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement. I watched that gesture during the game and knew it was going to inspire the usual sneering (it started almost immediately, with Al Michaels chirping, "There's nothing like starting an NFL season with a labor statement"), as voices from all corners (including, unbelievably, many former NFL players) denouncing the absurdly brief, silent, and inoffensive demonstration as a tasteless interruption of our God-given right to nonstop mindless entertainment.

Forget about people actually supporting unions in a labor disagreement: they apparently don't even want to see them, not if it's going to delay a football game by three whole seconds. There were actually arguments across the media landscape to the effect that NFL players were out of line bringing their labor disagreement into our living rooms, the implication being that any display of union activity is somehow unseemly or ( I love this) selfish. We have a whole reality-show culture celebrating the cause of people eating centipedes and stabbing each other in the back for cash prizes and fame, but football players quietly showing union solidarity is tasteless. If you can explain that one to me, please don't hesitate to write in.

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Here is the anti-union folk's agenda.

This is What Class Warfare Looks Like � Main Street

AMERICAblog News: 64% of US wealth went to top 10% since Reaganomics

Op-Ed Columnist - The Tax-Cut Racket - NYTimes.com:

"How did we get to this point? The proximate answer lies in the tactics the Bush administration used to push through tax cuts. The deeper answer lies in the radicalization of the Republican Party, its transformation into a movement willing to put the economy and the nation at risk for the sake of partisan victory."

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Hows about another vaca down to the Gulf, Obama. Another swim with the daughters, perhaps? Enjoy some of the toxic seafood.

Heckuva job.

Shocking Fish Kill Reported In Plaquemines Parish (PHOTO):

"Over at The Upshot, National Affairs Reporter and Louisiana native Brett Michael Dykes has some shocking photos of a massive fish kill that Plaquemines Parish Billy Nungesser has been distributing to the media. Dykes ably sets the scene: 'What you see above isn't a rural gravel road. It's a Louisiana waterway, its surface completely covered with dead sea life -- a mishmash of species of fish, crabs, stingray and eel.'"

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Why do we not have glass cathedrals honoring science. If there is every an alter I would worship at it is the one that has the power make chocolate even tastier. Water to wine? Fuck that. Give me a chocolate that I can't even imagine.

BBC News - Cacao genome 'may help produce tastier chocolate'

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Death of the Middle Class

I feel like-wise.

Daily Kos: The Words I Never Thought I'd Write Here (UPDATED):

"What I do know is that it has all added up. Not prosecuting torture. Not protecting privacy rights. Trading away any negotiating room on health care by refusing to acknowledge single-payer. Less-than-fierce advocacy for LGBT rights. Demonizing the left. Drill baby drill.

All of those things tarnished the dream. Those things, and many others.

But there were two things that finally did it in for me. Two small things, really, compared to the big picture and compared to some of the core issues listed above.

One, understandably, was education. Understandably, because I am a teacher. My horror at the Obama education policy has only been growing stronger since the beginning of this adminstration. Recent articles and comments have pushed me to the tipping point on that issue.

But the final straw, the one that broke the camel's back, was his response to the Simpson outrage, in combination with his own remarks in the weekly address. What I realized in reading about this issue and about Obama's history is that in the guise of 'saving Social Security,' protecting us against it being dismantled, he is going to allow a reduction in SS benefits, in service to the ideal of 'cutting the deficit.' Maybe I'm reading the signs wrong, but I doubt it."

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Nothing 'free' about the 'free market'.

I doubt theirs a Neo to save us, though.

Free market has turned us into 'Matrix' drones - Business News, Business - The Independent:

"A leading economist has likened the nation's acceptance of free-market capitalism to that of the brainwashed characters in the film The Matrix, unwitting pawns in a fake reality. In a controversial new book, the Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang debunks received wisdom on everything from the importance of the internet to the idea that people in the United States enjoy the highest standard of living in the world; an iconoclastic attitude that has won him fans such as Bob Geldof and Noam Chomsky."

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We don't do 'accountable' and it will be our down-fall.

'Inside Job' A Must See Film for Every American:

"The Economy Won’t Recover Until We Prosecute

So there was a little fraud, no big deal, right? Wouldn’t looking backwards at fraudulent conduct be distracting for the people, the government, and the economy? Shouldn’t we look forward so we can recover? No. Specifically, the Wharton School of Business has written an essay stating that restoring trust is the key to recovery, and that trust cannot be restored until wrongdoers are held accountable. The Wharton paper states:

The public will need to 'hold the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible and take what actions they can to prevent them from harming the economy again.' In addition, the public will have to see proof that government and business leaders can behave responsibly before they will trust them again. For more on the importance of trust in the economy, see this. The stakes are high. As Pam Martens, who worked on Wall Street for 21 years, writes:"

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What Tiabbi says... pretty much always.

Wall Street's Big Win | Rolling Stone Politics:

"But Dodd-Frank was neither an FDR-style, paradigm-shifting reform, nor a historic assault on free enterprise. What it was, ultimately, was a cop-out, a Band-Aid on a severed artery. If it marks the end of anything at all, it represents the end of the best opportunity we had to do something real about the criminal hijacking of America's financial-services industry. During the yearlong legislative battle that forged this bill, Congress took a long, hard look at the shape of the modern American economy – and then decided that it didn't have the stones to wipe out our country's one �dependably thriving profit center: theft."

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Arianna Huffington: Memo to America's Middle Class: Obama Is Just Not That Into You:

"Those in the 'disappointed' camp maintain that Obama presented himself one way to gain their support during the campaign and then, once he had it, ended up governing another way, turning his energies to winning over Republicans instead of changing the game in Washington. As Paul Krugman puts it, 'Why does the Obama administration keep looking for love in all the wrong places? Why does it go out of its way to alienate its friends, while wooing people who will never waver in their hatred?'"

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Capitalism, not 'job-ism'.

Wash Post business writer hits on the biggest problem in American economy:

"It is only in the world of Chamber of Commerce propaganda that businesses exist to create jobs. In the real world, businesses exist to create profits for shareholders, not jobs for workers. That's why they call it capitalism, not job-ism. There's no reason to beat up on business owners and executives simply because they're doing what the system encourages them to do."

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Death of the Middle Class:

And then he kicked the chair out from underneath his feet.:

"For all the faceless statistics we read every day - I wanted to add a face. A man who loved his sons. A man who got up and went to work everyday. A man society kicked to the curb. And, in turn, a man who felt his best option was to kick the chair out from underneath his feet."

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I'm on Fire

The redistribution of wealth in this country has been going on for some time now. The problem is that the wealth is being sucked to the top, thus eliminating the middle class. And let's face it, there's nothing more pain-in-the-ass for rich fuckers than the middle class.

Stupid basis for our Democracy (NeoFeudalism: Coming Soon!)

Income Gap Between Rich and Poor Is Highest in Decades, Data Show:

"The gap between the wealthiest Americans and middle- and working-class Americans has more than tripled in the past three decades, according to a June 25 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

New data show that the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest parts of the population in 2007 was the highest it's been in 80 years, while the share of income going to the middle one-fifth of Americans shrank to its lowest level ever."

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Obama and Arn's 'Race to the Top' is as big a piece of crap as 'No Child Left Behind'.

Just like its predecessor, RTTT's goal is to eliminate public education thus privatizing all education as charter schools.

It takes a Fake Democrat to enact the NeoCons agenda.

Daily Kos: Somebody Explain This to Me:

"But reading the popular press, and listening to the chatter from Washington, I have just found out that we are not part of the movement to ‘reform’ schools.

You see we did not do all the stuff that the new ‘reformers’ think is vital to improve our schools. We did not fire the staff, eliminate tenure, or go to pay based on test scores. We did not become a charter school. We did not take away control from a locally elected school board and give it to a mayor. We did not bring in a bunch of two-year short-term teachers.

Nope, we did not do any of these things. Because we knew they would not work."

Keep pissing off the base, Obama/Rahm but don't cry like little bitches when we stay the fuck home.

Administration Officials Not Invited To Teachers Convention; Probable Heckling The Reason | Crooks and Liars:

“If the teachers sit on their hands this fall, it would be a disaster for Obama and the Democrats,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has studied the teachers’ unions."

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Jesus.

Obama To Open Up 1.8 Million Alaskan Acres To Oil Drilling:

"ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- The Interior Department is offering oil and gas leases on 1.8 million acres of Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve while promising to protect critical migratory bird and caribou habitat.

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Hello? Feds? Anybody home?

BP buys up Gulf scientists for legal defense, roiling academic community | al.com:

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Good man. Doesn't welch on his bets.

NM man set on fire after losing drinking bet:

"A 47-year-old man's friends set his prosthetic leg on fire after he lost a drinking bet, causing him to suffer severe burns to his buttocks and lower back. Dona Ana County sheriff's deputies found the man naked on the side of U.S. Route 70 with his prosthetic leg in flames. Deputies learned that the man and his friends were drinking Monday and bet that whoever drank the least would be set on fire."

The man told investigators that at six beers, he drank the least, and agreed to let his friends set him on fire.

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6 mln views in less than a month. damn.

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