saga of santorum

Closing my eyes and going to sleep this afternoon, I listened lazily to an NPR piece about the progress of Rick Santorum's stumping in Iowa, where he is polling five percent.

His brag today was that he's now visited all 99 of Iowa's counties, and speaking to a small crowd, he bravely asserted that he is "within striking distance," but what he's within striking distance of he didn't specify;

This is scary. Santorum is polling five percent. That means some people like him, and that he has actual fans.

horndog smackdown

Herman Cain and Newt the Galoot decided to cut themselves loose from the rest of the herd and did a televised one-on-one 90-minute debate this past Saturday.

They touted it as a modern-day version of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and though I didn't watch, I imagine it got even funnier than that once it started.

the kids

If nothing else, the 99 percent movement has succeeded in shifting the national conversation from obsessing over the phony "debt crisis" to our real problems -- income inequality, the drying up of decent-paying jobs, and the fact that there are now over 49 million Americans living in poverty.

The chattering classes on the cable news networks are now forced to play catch-up with the national conversation actually occurring in people's living rooms rather than taking their cues from Republican spewers of "free" market propaganda.

Thank God for the kids who are out there in the streets putting their bodies on the line, getting arrested (over 3,300 so far), getting their faces pushed into the pavement, and getting shot with rubber bullets. They've gone to ground now, like Washington at Valley Forge, but will return in the spring redoubled in numbers and energy, and I hope to be with them.

They're just naive enough to believe they have the power to fundamentally change things. And you're naive if you think God favors those who aren't.

a few good men

Dennis Kucinich demonstrated yesterday that there are still a few good men in Congress.



Another such is Seattle's congressional rep, Jim McDermott, who in 2002 financed his own fact-finding mission to Iraq, then came home and told his constituents the truth -- the Bush administration's rationale for invading Iraq was a steaming crock of b.s.

We need to stop recruiting for al-Qaida with our homicidal drone aircraft attacks, bring these wars home, and turn our attention to the two gorillas on our back, one named "Wall Street" and the other called "Pentagon."

cain in the brain

I hate to waste my beautiful mind on anything so sleazy and pedestrian as the ongoing Herman Cain saga...

BUT, today another woman -- this makes four -- came forward to accuse him of sexual harassment, AND she held press conference. Gloria Allread is her attorney, of course. We've reached that stage.

This is really pretty good, and it sounds more like sexual assault than sexual harassment to me.

dictator's demise

Jon Lee Anderson, assigned by the New Yorker to write up Qadaffi's final days, begins with a review of the ignominious ends of a number of modern despots, giving us at the same time a generic overview of how these things usually finish -- badly.

How does it end? The dictator dies, shrivelled and demented, in his bed; he flees the rebels in a private plane; he is caught hiding in a mountain outpost, a drainage pipe, a spider hole. He is tried. He is not tried. He is dragged, bloody and dazed, through the streets, then executed. The humbling comes in myriad forms, but what is revealed is always the same: the technologies of paranoia, the stories of slaughter and fear, the vaults, the national economies employed as personal property, the crazy pets, the prostitutes, the golden fixtures.

The situation is a little different in the US than it was in Libya or Iraq under Saddam. The tyranny here is wielded by an oligarchy who have seized control of the finance "industry" rather than a single strongman, and there are no mass graves full of nameless victims, although millions of anonymous lives have been permanently wrecked by our own home-grown despots.

Now that a clear majority of US citizens has awakened to the true state of affairs, the eventual fall of the banksters is assured. And when they've fallen, what will be their fate? At the very least their palaces and mansions will be opened to public scrutiny and the vain treasures inside exposed to view -- in Jon Lee Anderson's words, "the national economies employed as personal property, the crazy pets, the prostitutes, the golden fixtures."

As for the oligarchs themselves, who cares what happens to them?

corporatism

A resident fascist ideologue at BNet asks, "How are the Koch Brothers any different from George Soros?"

George Soros doesn't control any state legislatures.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a front group for the Koch brothers, major corporations, and right-wing lobbying groups, all elements of the hidden fascist rule of the fascist USA, controls the legislatures in most of the states with Republican majorities.

If George Soros had anything comparable to the Koch brothers' power, the US would not be the fascist nation/empire it has become. Contending and/or pretending he does is ludicrous, a game played by fascist ideologues or repeated by their gullible and credulous dupes.

domestic violence

Here are a few items from Naomi Wolf's latest piece.

America's politicians, it seems, have had their fill of democracy. Across the country, police, acting under orders from local officials, are breaking up protest encampments set up by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement - sometimes with shocking and utterly gratuitous violence.

She then describes the police riot of armored and helmeted guys that looked like the tac squad in Star Wars, that we all saw in Oakland. Then she goes on to say:

America is waking up to what was built while it slept: Private companies have hired away its police (JPMorgan Chase gave $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation); the federal Department of Homeland Security has given small municipal police forces military-grade weapons systems; citizens' rights to freedom of speech and assembly have been stealthily undermined by opaque permit requirements.

Suddenly, the United States looks like the rest of the furious, protesting, not-completely-free world. Indeed, most commentators have not fully grasped that a world war is occurring. But it is unlike any previous war in human history: for the first time, people around the world are not identifying and organising themselves along national or religious lines, but rather in terms of a global consciousness and demands for a peaceful life, a sustainable future, economic justice and basic democracy. Their enemy is a global "corporatocracy" that has purchased governments and legislatures, created its own armed enforcers, engaged in systemic economic fraud, and plundered treasuries and ecosystems.

She's right. It's just now starting to dawn on people everywhere that this is a global conflict, or universal fight for democracy, and we're all up against police and security forces who everywhere look like evil robots, sent out to stomp us down.

oaktown, usa

humble servant

Follow the money, and all will be revealed.

From the Democracy Now website:

New figures show President Obama continues to pull in huge donations from the financial sector, with more money from Wall Street this year than all other (sic) Republican presidential candidates combined. According to the Washington Post, Obama has raised a total of $15.6 million from banks and other financial firms, with nearly $12 million of that going to the Democratic National Committee. Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney has raised less than half that much from Wall Street, around $7.5 million. A top banking executive and Obama fundraiser told the Washington Post that reports of Wall Street antagonism toward Obama "are exaggerated and overblown ... [but] it probably helps from a political perspective if he’s not seen as a Wall Street guy."

Even the error in that paragraph is instructive.

There's no comment necessary for such a sad and tawdry revelation, but Ifthethunderdon'tgetya at Whiskeyfire provides a good one anyway:

"If Wall Street got the idea that Obama was no longer in their back pocket, you'd see a serious GOP run for President. For now, having these fools bark and bray about 'Socialism' while B.H.O. collects his pay is all they need."

things that are longer than kim kardashian's marriage

The wait at a DMV office.

"The Scarlet Letter."

A Seahawks game.

A Baptist sermon on "The meaning of I Corinthians."

Republican explanations of why income inequality is a manifestation of God's will.

Feel free to add your own.

live free or die, mofo

Wick Pewwy's presidential run is sinking beneath waves like a sack of coal.

It doesn't get much weirder than this.

droid phone

I've been having trouble typing lately. So today I saw a Motorola droid phone, with built-in voice-to-print capacity.

Very slick. I think there's one of those in my near future.

can't trust that day

Since I started debating politics about nine years ago, there's been exactly one (1) major issue that everybody agrees on, and that is bank bailouts. From Michael Moore to Glenn Beck, nobody likes em.

Monday there was a lot of movement in the financial world. The Greek PM said he's going to submit the deal the Germans offered his country, to a referendum, which means "No deal." At the same time, there was a big Wall Street bankruptcy by Jon Corzine's MF Global, a derivatives trader, and one of their executives said that client's money was thrown away along with the company's money -- a criminal violation.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/10/jon_corzines_firm_mf_global_de.html

(Corzine is a former Democratic governor of New Jersey whose mis-rule was synonymous with corruption and machine politics.)

So the questions of the day are: will there be more bailouts when the shock waves from the Greek default start shaking the largest US banks? And will Corzine get bailed out? AND get away with it?

#OWS has one demand: that's why it's called "Occupy Wall Street."

See where this is going?

annals of moranitude

So we got Cain the Brain making wild and demonstrably false claims about Planned Parenthood's gencidal plots, Wick Pewwy trying to pump up the Iraq War so it can be held over for another year or so, Michele Bachmann muttering incoherently -- something about the Holy Ghost and the fire -- and the Obama administration trying to float embarrassingly phony stories about Iranian plots to use a debt-addled used-car salesman to assassinate ambassadors and partner with al Qaida.

The clowns of our political circus have been refusing to deal with the country's real problems for years now, but only recently has their show degenerated into neanderthalish grunts and crude gestures calculated to appeal to whom? Who is the intended audience for this kind of pathetic idiocy? Morons and mouth breathers?

The American political system is now deader than a smoked oyster. Big changes are coming, but they're going to come from the bottom and percolate upward -- from the grassroots.

The most important thing now is for each of us to take our lives back, to live the way we see fit, free from megabanks and poisonous agribusiness pesticides and lobotomizing televised moranitude, all of which can easily be replaced by habits and activities which promote life and confer dignity -- organic gardening and reading for pleasure, for example.

And of course, a large part of composting the rotted-out remnant of our political system will only occur when we confront their domestic police army of aggression, out in the streets.

old scenes revisited

Today as I was going home I was briefly held captive at the Hood Canal Bridge, because the drawbridge had opened to let a nuclear submarine go through. I'm sure I'll sleep better tonight having been reminded that we have a nuclear submarine fleet based out of Bangor, to ward off the Soviet threat and keep those dirty commies over there from trying anything funny with Uncle Sam.

Like I said, the captivity was short, but not short enough, because the ferry was pulling away from the dock just as I and a bunch of other people arrived at the tollbooths. But what the hell, I'm retired now, and have nothing but time so it don't make no nevermind.

The reason I was over there on the other side of the Great Water of the Salish Sea, attempting to negotiate boat schedules and the Hood Anal Bridge was because I spent another weekend over there in the enchanted forest. It's lovely in the enchanted forest, and it's also getting to be a habit. And that's OK.

pluto's rule

Like anything else, if there's only a limited amount of good journalism available, we have to import some. Al Jazeera ran a very good program on the Kochs last night on their series "People and Power."

In the 2010 congressional elections, the Kochs and their partners spent at least $40m, helping to swing the balance of power in the US House of Representatives towards right-wing Tea Party Republicans. It has been reported that the Kochs are planning to raise and spend more than $200m to defeat Obama in 2012. But the brothers could easily kick in more without anyone knowing due to loopholes in US law.

The Kochs founded and provide millions to Americans for Prosperity, a political organisation that builds grassroots support for conservative causes and candidates. Americans for Prosperity, which has 33 state chapters and claims to have about two million members, has close ties to Tea Party groups and played a key role in opposing Obama's health care initiative.


It was Americans for Plutocracy Prosperity that got that little weasel Scott Walker installed in the Wisconsin governor's office, and it's no exaggerration to say that these overcompensated, nefarious clowns. through their control of state houses, have usurped the rule of large parts of the country. They're said by al Jazeera to be on the verge of unseating Obama and getting one of their fascist tools installed in the White House. Pwesident Wick Pewwy?

They will soon experience a head-on collision with a rapidly-percolating revolution.

po townsend

The well-preserved and impeccably Victorian tourist destination of Port Townsend, perched at the far northeast tippy-toe of the Olympic Peninsula, is experiencing a sign of the times -- a cash crunch.

The reasons for all the deficit, revenue, and spending problems plaguing localities all across the country are too well known already to rehash here: lack of revenue sharing from the fed to the states means states have less money to share with municipalities, but by far the biggest problem is declining tax revenues due to the collapse of real estate values in the Great Recession of 2007 to the present.

So now, with very low cash reserves and a $21-million-dollar debt, the city administration's political opponents are sharpening knives and grumbling that Port Townsend is on the verge of bankruptcy.

“I am not apologizing for the decisions this council has made,” (Mayor Michelle) Sandoval said at Monday night's City Council meeting, referring to city investments in utility and infrastructure upgrades. “We have shown leadership in tough times. The city is not on the verge of bankruptcy, despite the fact that the detractors in the community relish the thought of that.”

Infrastructure and utilities upgrades are certainly worthy of municipal spending since they put people to work, but if the two traffic roundabouts recently installed presumably to slow traffic on the city's main access road and highway into town are an example of the type of spending the mayor is talking about, I would question the city's choice of projects.

But I, like most of the people around here, have a lot more to learn about this situation, which has been kept quiet up until now.

journalism = history

The best daily, comprehensive coverage of the 99 percent movement that I've seen is at the Think Progress blog.

1%

From Juan Cole's blog (juancole.com)