Yesterday I spent the bulk of the day working on the website for my volunteer group. I did keep up on comments and even started to visit other blogs, but I made the error of closing my eyes to take a small cat nap. That was it for the day. I’ll try to get some visiting in today.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
It took me 3:32, but the subject matter gives me an unfair advantage. To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
In spite of a spate of sectarian violence, the people of Iraq voted yesterday in their parliamentary elections. Results will not be available for several days. I wonder if Diebold ink company managed to deploy invisible ink.
From an article in the Huffington Post, “When the most radical person on the scene is Paul Volcker, it tells you just how politics have moved to the right.”
Since it’s a slow news day here’s a brief update on the blog. Although I’m sure I’ll be tweaking here and there, this is format for the immediate future. I have added a Rules page an an About Me page. They can be accessed by clicking the Pages tab on top or using the widget at the top of the right sidebar. Please read the rules page. Clicking the Blog tab on top will return you from any other page.
It’s not often that we get the kind of honesty displayed by a high-profile New York Times reported in an interview with Michael Moore.
In his film Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore squares off with the free-market system for its role in leveraging the United States’s wealth into the hands of a few.
But in one clip cut from the documentary — which Moore provided exclusively to RAW STORY — he interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, who explains how capitalism is actually contributing to the very downfall of the human race and the "degradation of the planet."
"All sorts of people who have spent their lives studying climate change, from Bill McKibben on down, have warned us that we don’t have a lot of time left," Hedges said. "So it’s not just that capitalism has destroyed our economic system and hijacked our political system, but it literally is extinguishing the system that sustains life. If that’s not thwarted soon…then we will begin to see massive dislocations, environmental refugees, further depleting of natural resources. Overpopulation is also an issue. The UN estimates that by 2050 the size of the planet will double."
The very concept of capitalism, Moore declares in the film, is the problem because it inevitably leads to a system where the richest few control the means of production as well as the levers of power — leading to a "plutonomy," a term used in a leaked Citigroup memo from 2005, in which the finance juggernaut concluded that the United States is no longer a democracy.
In the interview, Hedges decries America’s turn toward supply-side economics over the last three decades as the cause of stagnating middle class incomes, contrasting it with the increasingly lavish fortunes of the wealthy and the aid they often receive from the government at the expense of working people… [emphasis added]
What can I add to this? Very little, I think. The one hair I would split is that our corporate plutocracy has nothing in common with Capitalism as envisioned by its creator, Adam Smith. In his concept, monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels were not allowed. He never considered the notion of a corporation. They came after his time.
I believe that a free market system is preferable to a planned economy, but in order for it to function long term, it must be heavily regulated to protect consumers against corporate predators, to protect the planet from corporate attempts to externalize the cost of their damage to the environment, and to ensure that wealth produced is distributed equitably.
Yesterday I stayed caught up on comments, but got no visiting done. I spent almost the entire day on website design for my volunteer group. I’ll do at least as well today. I still have a lot of work left to do.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
It took me 4:28. To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
Michael Moore has sent a letter to President Obama offering to replace Rahm Emmanuel. Forget it, but what a lovely thought.
Donors have started to desert the GOP, following the revelation of their unconscionable fundraising strategy.
Just three days ago I posted an article about the potential for right wing violence. It did not take long to come true.
John Patrick Bedell, whom authorities identified as the gunman in the Pentagon shooting on Thursday, appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings.
If so, that would make the Pentagon shooting the second violent extremist attack on a federal building within the past month. On Feb. 18, Joseph Stack flew a small aircraft into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. Mr. Stack left behind a disjointed screed in which, among other things, he expressed his hatred of the government. (For more on this incident, click here.)
Details of Mr. Bedell’s case are still emerging. But writings by someone with his same name and birth date, posted on the Internet, express ill will toward the government and the armed forces and question whether Washington itself might have been behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
However, law enforcement officials have yet to publicly state their theories as to Bedell’s motives.
“I have no idea what his intentions were,” said the chief of Pentagon police, Richard Keevill, in a Friday press conference…
…According to the Associated Press, an Internet posting made by someone using the name JpatrickBedell expressed a determination to see justice served in the case of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in his California home in 1991. Authorities have ruled this case a suicide, but it has become a cause célèbre among extremists who consider that ruling a coverup by the government.
The posting expressed general hatred of Washington and added that exposing the Sabow case would be “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolition,” according to the AP.
The Pentagon attack and the destruction at the IRS building in Austin, Texas, come at a time of explosive growth in extremist-group activism across the United States, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks such organizations.
The number of US extremist paramilitary militias grew from 42 in 2008 to 127 in 2009, according to a just-released SPLC annual report.
So-called “Patriot” groups, steeped in antigovernment conspiracy theories, grew from 149 in 2008 to 512 in 2009 – an increase that the SPLC report judges as “astonishing.” [emphasis added]
In addition to this, Think Progress has revealed that Bedell posted a request for collaborators from an email address from Ludwig Von Mises Institute, a right wing group with ties to Ron Paul.
I have long claimed that the GOP love of violence as expressed by Michelle Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and too many more to mention would take root in the hearts of wing nuts and blossom in violence and death. That does not make me a prophet. That call was a sure bet. Because of them, two police officers have been wounded.
Many have called on the GOP and their Teabagger accomplices to end their violent rhetoric. They have refused. If the GOP still refuses to change, their party must go the way of the dinosaurs into extinction.
First here is video of Liz Cheney’s attack ad, condemning Eric Holder for hiring lawyers who had previously represented detainees held in the GOP Gulag in Guantanamo.
The backlash is growing against Liz Cheney after she demonized Department of Justice attorneys as terrorist sympathizers for their past legal work defending Gitmo detainees — and now it’s coming from within deeply conservative legal circles.
On Friday, the conservative blog Power Line put up a post titled, "An Attack That Goes Too Far." Author Paul Mirengoff, called Cheney’s effort to brand DoJ officials the "Al Qaeda 7," "vicious" and "unfounded" even if it was right to criticize defense lawyers for voluntarily doing work on behalf of Gitmo detainees.
Reached on the phone, Mirengoff offered an even sharper rebuke, contrasting what Cheney is doing to the anti-communist crusades launched by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and, in some respects, finding it worse.
"It could be worse than some of the assertions made by McCarthy, depending on some of the validity of those assertions," Mirengoff said, explaining that at least McCarthy was correct in pinpointing individuals as communist sympathizers. "It is just baseless to suggest that [these DoJ officials] share al Qaeda values… they didn’t actually say it but I think it was a fair implication of what they were saying."
Mirengoff isn’t alone among conservative legal theorists who think the ad campaign by Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, is distasteful. In a statement to the American Prospect, John Bellinger III, a former legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, called the effort "unfortunate."
"It reflects the politicization and the polarization of terrorism issues," Bellinger said. "Neither Republicans nor Democrats should be attacking officials in each other’s administrations based solely on the clients they have represented in the past."
Likewise, the Huffington Post reported on Thursday that back in 2007, Ted Olson — who served as a lead counsel in Bush v. Gore and solicitor general of the United States — co-authored an article for Legal Times in which he said that efforts to demonize detainee defense lawyers are antithetical to American values.
"When government officials are called ‘war criminals’ and when public-interest lawyers are called ‘terrorist huggers,’ it not only cheapens the discourse, it scrambles the dialogue," Olson wrote, along with Neal Katyal, currently a DoJ Deputy Solicitor General and one of the lawyers who represented Gitmo detainees. "The best solutions to these difficult problems will emerge only when the best advocates, backed by weighty resources, bring their talents to bear. And the heavy work of creating solutions for these complicated issues can only move forward when the name-calling ceases."
Cheney, for her part, shows no signs of relenting…
Lawyers are professional liars. It’s their job, so we have to cut them some slack about it. In our adversarial justice system zealous representation is both a right and a necessity. Even if lawyers believe the exact opposite of what they are saying, it is their sworn duty to say it as though it were their most cherished belief.
For Lizard Cheney to produce this attack ad is a despicable shot below the belt. While it says nothing genuine about the integrity of the lawyers she accuses, this ad speaks volumes about hers.
As a side note, given their professional expertise, perhaps lawyers should be excluded from running for public office as legislators. Only the most successful lawyers do so and to achieve that success, they must be the most accomplished liars.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s Open Thread, Bart ‘Coat Hanger’ Stupak is at it again, trying to hold heath care for millions of Americans hostage to destroy women’s right of choice over their own bodies. Here Rachel Maddow further exposes Stupak’s connection with C Street, Washington’s theocratic bastion, infamous for sex scandals and attempting it to impose the death penalty in Africa for the crime of being gay.
In the interest of disclosure, I admit that I personally believe abortion is wrong. However, I also believe that in some circumstances there are no right choices available, and of those that are, abortion may be the least wrong. I also believe that I do not have the right or prerogative to impose my belief on anyone other than myself. Therefore, I have no right to tell a woman what medical choice she should make, let alone try to impose it through legal means. Neither does Stupak. Women must remain free to make this choice for them selves, in consultation with their doctors, according to their own consciences and beliefs, with no interference from me, Stupak, or anyone else. I want Abortion to be safe, legal, available, and as rare as reasonably possible. The best way to achieve that is through education about and availability of other methods to prevent pregnancy.
Yesterday I kept up with comments, but fell behind on returning visits, because I was working on the blog and on the volunteer website. Today, I should at least stay abreast of comments.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
It took me 3:35. To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
If we did not already know that Faux Noise is the GOP Reichsministry of Propaganda, Sean Hannity just proved it. In an arse kissing interview with Jim Bunning, Hannity inquired, “How many votes do we have?”
