Happy Birthday MLK

and happy mlk day; that speech was what probably led to his death warrant; speaking out against war and economic injustice

I think we all just project our psychological issues onto the blog. I watch my mom real closely since she lives with me and I try to learn from her in terms of how I want to be when I get older. She is critical of everything it seems except for Amy Goodman. She likes things that fuel her negativity and I think her negativity makes her feel smarter than everyone else as if she can see more than the rest of us see.

I don't want to be like this when I get older. I want to be discerning but at the same time able to see the glass half full. What bothers me is how we get so angry at each other here. I find it best to just scroll over the peeps that piss me off because I don't want the inner agitation that I get when I focus on irritating bloggers. I am as judgmental as anyone, but I just don't want to carry that poison inside me if I can avoid it.

When it gets nasty here, I just go away over to facebook where so far people don't attack each other.

Martin Luther King was a promoter of non violence and love....It is a very good thing to think about today.

that would be a good resolution for the new year... glass half full and tolerance and scrolling past

right now i am finding that very hard to do as i share space with my sister.... very hard to get along... deep seated incompatibility... i'll try to look at the other half of the glass the next few days

mud fights on the blog are nothing compared to the stuff we are throwing about in this household

For me, going around anger is resisting what's so...

Polar Bear Cubs need our help .....
new
Submitted by smcgee43 on Mon, 01/18/2010 - 10:36am.

In Washington, DC, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski is preparing to unleash a dangerous amendment as early as this week, authored by top polluter lobbyists, to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from fighting climate change -- even as polar bears in her state are literally drowning from the effects of global warming.
And in Alaska, Governor Sean Parnell and other officials are amassing a war chest of more than $1.5 million to hire lawyers and lobbyists to take away crucial protections for polar bears and other wildlife struggling to survive.
If they win, wealthy trophy hunters will be able to kill polar bears abroad and return with polar bear carcasses and other parts to adorn living rooms and trophy cases.

We have a plan to stop these vicious attacks on polar bears.
Defenders has a three-point plan to save these magnificent animals and their homes:

* Defeat the harmful Murkowski amendment in Congress that stands in the way of real progress in the fight against global warming -- and pass critical legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions and provide programs to help these struggling bears.
* Win in the courts against Gov. Parnell, Safari Club International and their allies to defend crucial protections for polar bears and the vital habitat they need to survive.
* Stop the international trade in polar bears and their parts through CITES[1], the powerful international conservation agreement.
We can’t do any of this wildlife-saving work without the caring support of people like you. Will you donate today to help save our struggling polar bear cubs and other wildlife?
Without drastic action, this season’s polar bear cubs could be one of the last generations in the United States [2]. And with sea ice well below average [3], their mothers will likely struggle to find adequate food to feed them in the coming year.
But there is hope. With your help, we can stop the attacks on their future by polluter politicians, lobbyists and trophy hunters to ensure these cubs have a fighting chance at survival.

Please help save polar bears and other wildlife today.

http://www.defenders.org/

Hi sweetie - I received the package u sent -
Take a BIG hug from me & Thank YOU so much.
Love Ya, me oxox

is still okay.

I REALLY hope it brings you some 'lit up brain cells'....I spray peppermint around the circulation area at work and the patrons SEEM to 'lighten up' instantly...

One reason I trust essential oils to "do things" is because I've seen them do something when people sniff them on my biofeedback friend's machines..and the first time I tried them was in Carmel, CA at a group meeting...they passed around all these oils...I sniffed every one..so did P...we stayed up talking until the next morning..without fatigue..it was a feeling of having my brain "lit up"...

that's something - I do believe in au-natural medicine.
I still have the "Jojobe Oil" that u sent me. I'm sorry
....but I forgot what that was 4. Could u re-fresh my
short term memory bank please.? Tanks

to human skin oil..it allegedly can be used on skin without clogging pores..I make the jojoba oil with essential oil blends to use on my face, neck, hands, elbows, feet...my hands get very dry schlepping books...so I imagine that skin absorbs the essential oil properties...

I will start using it on my face (especially around my little crows feet area's) shhh - don't tell anyone.

I do that too.. :)

were very much into oils & natural items.

And I'll bet the word natural meant something then...not like now..Ya can't even trust the word organic these days..

Good Morning Sederville! It's a cloudy 29F.

Cecil Rhodes

Submitted by nora on Sun, 01/17/2010 - 7:10pm.
watched the Daily Show rip Rachel Maddow
----

I've posted before about Jon Stewart's cheap pot shots at Rachel. Stephen Colbert also made a comparison of Rachel's appearance to that of Kim Jon Il. I don't think it has much to do about Rachel's interpretation of the truth. It probably has more to do with ratings.

Keith and Rachel's show repeat during the same time slot as Colbert and Stewart. Perhaps, they've stolen some of Comedy Centrals audience. On the other hand, Stewart may feel the need to play fair and balance. After all, he has compared MSNBC liberalism to Fox's conservatism. This of course is intellectually dishonest. It is also cowardice. MSNBC is certainly not a liberal network; and Stewart knows it!

------

Rachel defitnitely downplays her Rhodes Scholarship. Perhaps this is because Cecil Rhodes was a murdering racist. On the other hand, that scholarship may confirm for her corporate bosses- that she is one of them. Hell, I don't know. But, in corporate media, she is about as liberal as we're going to get!

By the way, here's a little excerpt about Rhodes:

Unlike the African press, the Western media rarely invoke the name of Cecil John Rhodes: nearly a century after his death ­ on 26 March 1902 ­ his name is more associated with Oxford Scholarships than with murder. It's easier to focus on the region's more recent, less Anglo white supremacists: Ian Smith, for instance, who despite his Scottish background ­ seems cut from the same stuff as those Afrikaner politicians who nurtured and maintained apartheid farther south.

But it was Rhodes who originated the racist "land grabs" to which Zimbabwe's current miseries can ultimately be traced. It was Rhodes, too, who in 1887 told the House of Assembly in Cape Town that "the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of South Africa". In less oratorical moments, he put it even more bluntly: "I prefer land to niggers."

For much of the century since his death, Rhodes has been revered as a national hero. Today, however, he is closer to a national embarrassment, about whom the less said the better. Yet there are plenty of memorials to him to be found. In Bishop's Stortford, his Hertfordshire birthplace, St Michael's Church displays a plaque. The town has a Rhodes arts centre, a Rhodes junior theatre group, and a small Rhodes Museum ­ currently closed ­ which houses a collection of African art objects. In Oxford, his statue adorns Oriel College, while Rhodes House, in which the Rhodes Trust is based, is packed with memorabilia. Even Kensington Gardens boasts a statue ­ of a naked man on horseback ­ based on the central feature of his memorial in Cape Town.

con't

http://www.ipoaa.com/cecil_rhodes.htm

about Rhodes...never thought about him at all actually...

-But, in corporate media, she is about as liberal as we're going to get!-

I agree with this...sad, unfair, non-representative, but true.

murder and land grabs though....

"Ya can't even trust the word organic these days.."

Will Scott Brown Ruin Republicans' (Secret) Plan to Pass Obamacare?

It is now a given that if he wins a Massachusetts Senate seat on Tuesday, Scott Brown will destroy the Democrats' plan to pass health care reform. But he will also destroy the Republicans' not-so-secret plan to pass health care reform.

In Washington, where everyone is desperate to know what's happening behind closed doors, all you have to do to keep something secret is do it out in the open, preferably on C-Span. Mitch McConnell did exactly that when he entered a unanimous consent agreement with Harry Reid about how to proceed on the health care bill. McConnell knew that agreement was going to make it impossible for Republicans to amend the bill and would put it on a fast track toward passage.

McConnell accepted an agreement brilliantly designed by Reid that required 60 votes to pass an amendment. McConnell did that without anyone noticing anything odd after a year of saturation coverage of the importance of 60 votes in the Senate. Everyone outside the Senate now thinks it takes 60 votes to do anything. Not amendments. Amendments pass by a simple majority, 51 votes. Amendments are usually debated for a couple of minutes or hours or days, then voted on. Once in a while, a 60-vote cloture motion is needed to end debate on an amendment. What McConnell agreed to was an implicit cloture motion in every vote on every amendment, thereby completely surrendering the minority's real power. In all my years in the Senate, I never saw a leader make such a mistake. If it was a mistake.

There are no real filibusters in the Senate anymore. The way you "filibuster" a bill that you want to kill is offer an endless stream of reasonable sounding amendments that have to be debated and voted on. It's easy to come up with one amendment per page of legislation. That's why the Republicans offered hundreds of amendments during the Senate committees' debates on the bill. When the majority leader brings up a two thousand page bill, the minority would normally come up with at least five hundred amendments that could drag out the debate for several months. That's what the Republicans did in 1994 when they killed the Clinton health care reform bill on the Senate floor. No filibuster, no forcing the Democrats to clear 60-vote procedural hurdles, no forcing a reading to the bill, just an endless stream of reasonable sounding amendments -- so reasonable that some of them passed with votes of 100 to 0. And the Democrats, seeing this could go on forever, surrendered. Fifty-seven Democrats were defeated by forty-three determined Republicans.

continued>>>

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-odonnell/will-scott-brown-ruin-re...

toniD's Ya Think?

I listened to an old interview on Stern with the Belz, Richard Belzer...He said something about everything is a conspiracy until it's proven to not be a conspiracy... ;)

Submitted by Alice on Mon, 01/18/2010 - 11:06am.
never thought about him at all actually...
__________________

I'm going to be Cecil Rohdes blunt: you're not alone. Does anyone even care about him-- even Rhodes scholars?
What does Rhodes have to do with Stewart and Colbert poking fun at her?
You would probably be better off citing some obscure passage from an obscure psychologist to explain it or something. ("As William James wrote... ") No offense.

"You look so tired-unhappy
Bring down the government
They don't, they don't speak for us"
-Radiohead.
www.sigzone.blogspot.com

everything is a conspiracy until it's proven to not be a conspiracy... ;)
»

"

more right wingers to watch the show, possibly..and then they have more of a chance of seeing the majority of Jon's quizzlings? And then like Scrooge they get all soft-hearted and change their meanie ways...

Or something...

are Donald and Olive....

Hey, Alice... did you know that Olive Avenue springs up from Barham Boulevard unexpectedly in Burbank? How/Why did that happen? Maybe Olive Avenue is named after Marie.

....Never mind me. I'm continuing the crazy-ass non sequitor theme.

"You look so tired-unhappy
Bring down the government
They don't, they don't speak for us"
-Radiohead.
www.sigzone.blogspot.com

projection isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Mostly, it is just people trying to defend their vulnerabilities...

The hard part is realizing when we are doing it and taking responsibility for our own issues instead of only focusing on others for triggering our reactions....not an easy task...

personally, I enjoy being a work in progress... even as screwed up as I am....if I were perfect, I think I would just get bored....

and has never had oral sex with her, nor she with him...He said she has saved him from a lot of emotional turmoils and that she has always had an orgasm when they have sex.

King's teachings can help us see Israel's state violence in a new light that illuminates the deep, often unnoticed links between violence and irrational fear.

Every year, apologists for Israel’s occupation of Palestine eagerly await Martin Luther King Day. Then they trot out these words, spoken by Dr. King shortly before his death: “When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews; you are talking anti-Semitism."

King, who repeated the themes that really mattered to him -- justice, freedom, human dignity, nonviolence -- over and over again, mentioned anti-Semitism only once, in an informal question-and-answer session. Nobody asked him what he meant, and he never explained. (A lengthy letter of “his” expounding on the theme has been proven a hoax.) Yet, year after year, Israel’s apologists rush to use those once-spoken words as the capstone for a line of reasoning which goes something like this:

Israel uses violence in the “disputed territories” to protect its own security. If you criticize that violence, you don’t care about Israel’s security; so you don’t care if Israel ceases to exist; so you are against Zionism. And Martin Luther King himself said that that’s anti-Semitism. In other words, only anti-Semites oppose Israel’s occupation policies.

http://www.alternet.org/story/145222/martin_luther_king%27s_legacy_and_i...

and yeah it was boring...I smiled more then though...

of that word match at all..

4-Year-Old Boy Suspended From School for Months Because His Hair Is 'Too Long'

So what's this really about? Messed up cultural norms.

First the facts. This kid is 4-years old. Four! He's in pre-kindergarten. His name is Taylor Pugh but he prefers the nickname Tater Tot. Do you not love him already?! All he wants to do is go back to the classroom and be with his friends. But he has been suspended since November because his hair is considered too long by his public school (which is Floyd Elementary School in suburban Dallas). His hair, by the way, barely touches his shoulders. From what I can tell, it's also clean and brushed.

http://www.alternet.org

It is like a patina eh?

"If he were still alive, King would surely be working with unions, clergy, and community groups to raise the federal minimum wage, enact local living wage laws, expand health insurance to all Americans, and help America's working poor -- hotel workers, janitors, security guards, hospital employees, grocery workers, farmworkers, and others -- unionize for better working and living conditions".

con't
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=12380

"Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love."- MLK, Jr.

That's a mouthful.

yes...usually well earned too...

Love you too michele...

Great quote steve....kinda covers it all....

UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE DAY.... On CNN's "Reliable Sources" yesterday, host Howard Kurtz noted the preponderance of high-profile personalities who go back and forth between media and politics. Conservative radio host Michael Medved highlighted the line-up on one cable network in particular.

"I do think that one thing that is going to be tougher now with Sarah Palin playing such an active role [on Fox News] is the slogan 'fair and balanced,'" Medved said. "What does that mean, when the two leading Republican candidates, according to polls, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin, are both on your network regularly?"

I don't mean to nitpick, because Medved's point is a good one, but I have to wonder -- it's going to be "tougher" to justify "fair and balanced" now that Fox News is paying Palin? Wasn't it pretty tough to defend the silly slogan before the network hired her?

We're not just talking about GOP figures who are on the network regularly. At this point, the Fox News payroll includes Palin, who certainly intends to run for president; Rick Santorum, who's practically thrown his hat in the ring; Newt Gingrich, who keeps talking up his interest in the campaign; and Mike Huckabee, who by some accounts is the still-really-early frontrunner for the GOP nomination.

Then there's the stable of Republican operatives also on the Fox News payroll, including Karl Rove.

Will it be "tougher" going forward for Fox News to pretend the pretense of professionalism and independence? Yeah, I suppose you could say that.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_01/021967.php

toniD's Ya Think?

Sunny and beautiful....

Looks like it is going to be that way for most of the week too....finally back up into the mid 50s for a few days in a row...

Opened the windows and doors...FRESH AIR!!!!

more coffee needed here, just got up, couldn't sleep last night.

i wasn't smacking Rachel, though i'm not a super fan of hers, i was lauding nora for digging deep enough to tumble onto the hypocrisy of Rhodes and the Rhodes scholars who have turned out to be major assholes.

like i said me and N did a coupla days of research on it back in the days of Majority Report.

Submitted by Sunshine Jim on Mon, 01/18/2010 - 1:26pm.

I don't begrudge your research. I encourage people to research topics (i.e.: Hartmann: "Hamilton put this system in place, then Reagan destroyed everything.")
I think the issue was relevance to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert mocking her.

Hey, guys... Have you noticed the news coming out of the Elizabeth Edwards camp about the "Game Change" book?
"You have to understand the stress she was under at the time."
"Oh, so it's not really all true."
"Oh, yeah. It's all true... But.. You know.. The stress and stuff..."

gonna get back to screenwriting now

"You look so tired-unhappy
Bring down the government
They don't, they don't speak for us"
-Radiohead.
www.sigzone.blogspot.com

tell ya who i really dug was Liz Winstead.

There are times when I am low on tolerance and when that happens, I let loose and then I feel better.

But then I'm using My freedom of speech on the blog. Usually I post without comment trying to get others to comment.

But there are times when I reach my limits on the direction of some posts.

So there!

toniD's Ya Think?

If the Mass. thug gets elected won't that be irony, directed at Us by the Washington crowd and the Brown machine?
[the voters are pissed off because the form of "health care reform" isn't. So they vote against the "progressive" and give the key for any possibility of further change away.]

[in all the examples given in the wiki, I think it is also IRONIC that the article gives example after example of irony, but never defines the actual structure of irony.]

[As I understand it, the essence of IRONY is this. There are three parts. Two that get it and one that doesn't.

Of the two that get it, one of them knows because the other just told them and therefore, my feeling is, that IRONY is also just a 'moment' in time.

It approaches, it happens, it goes past and then we can talk about it. I see this as an essential element of IRONY in that it always involves looking back in time.]

[that could be a new type of irony for that list at the infra link. Pre-Irony. The watchful person can shout out "Hey, look over there, there's and irony-front approaching and chances are 60% we will have some irony soon."]
""
("The Concept of Irony"). Briefly, it insists that irony is, in Kierkegaard's words, "infinite, absolute negativity". Where much of philosophy attempts to reconcile opposites into a larger positive project, Kierkegaard and others insist that irony — whether expressed in complex games of authorship or simple litotes — must, in Kierkegaard's words, "swallow its own stomach". Irony entails endless reflection and violent reversals, and ensures incomprehensibility at the moment it compels speech. Not surprisingly, irony is the favorite textual property of deconstructionists.
==
deconstruction [ˌdiːkənˈstrʌkʃən]
n
(Literary & Literary Critical Terms) a technique of literary analysis that regards meaning as resulting from the differences between words rather than their reference to the things they stand for. Different meanings are discovered by taking apart the structure of the language used and exposing the assumption that words have a fixed reference point beyond themselves

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 6th Edition 2003. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

==================================

Or in other words, irony is a destructive form and eats on itself.

When one is surrounded by irony how does one escape it?
"News" is prefabricated entertainment, Politicians lie to us when they speak about honesty [i.e faux news et al.]

~`ordinary's just not good enough today - olp`~
Jamesbenet

Blue Roots Radio

the painter said he doesn't wear gloves...I will though..he said the more of the surfaces I can clean myself the more money I will save...He works alone and he thinks it will take 7 days. I think he will charge 40 per hour but we will get the estimate in a couple days...

What are you working on lately? What's new?

GENEVA (Reuters) - The H1N1 flu pandemic appears to be easing, but a third wave of infections could yet strike, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BL2ZT20100118

snip
"This is probably the biggest speculation. We simply do not know."

free speech is what it's all about.

people are a lot like playing pinball, if yer making an effort you occasionally TILT!

personally and generally speaking i always enjoy some acute and thoughtful criticism and assume that of everyone else.

heh! naturally enough i found that i was the epitome of tolerance and fairly unique in this culture.

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/24664

over and above a first amendment right, to do that every now and then. It's not as though you were really rude, just emphatic. ;)

What I can't get out of my mind is what possessed that doc not to "freeze" your foot before he took the pin out. Do you think it was an issue of cost containment or his convenience, or could there have been a legit explanation?

(Not that I'm here. But I'll check back for your answer tomorrow.)

Actually have been able to get some stuff done. Ear's good while the weather's warm. Tonight it may start up again.

Something else I found...if you don't want to have to fool with maybe getting olive oil too hot, etc. for an eareache, you can put oil in (actually I am using a dedicated tincture that I bought at the natural food store) and then hold a hot-water bottle or the like against the ear. That seems to work just as well, along with any combination of other things that may need to be done (repeatedly) on any given day. (Face massage [mechanical or manual], take various decongestant pills [usually in combination], sprays, pain pill that is supposed to be for something else, etc.)

I also bought some stylish faux-fur "ear-mitts" that should arrive Wednesday.

----
Yes, SJ, Lizz Rocks. She also tweets, quite frequently. But I've mentioned this before. Talks a lot to other kewl peeps like Shannyn Moore. Not a lot to Rachel, for whatever reason. The other day she said: "So Haiti gets Blackwater before it gets fresh water? WTF?" Or something very close to that.

Is Brett who is JIK's cousin (?)/ boss {?} {it was confusing) the same Brett who used to be here and still sometimes drops by? I think he might be gone to Haiti now (JIK). Last time I checked no tweets for a while.

oxy clean might be an option.[gloves with that too, but not so bad as tsp.] Something to cut the grime and rinse off. The idea is to get rid of the microscopic surface gunk that would otherwise be a layer between the new paint and the wall.

I got the impression you are talking just the inside, right?
==
What am I up to? Struggling with being angry with the idea that anger is not a profitable path.
==
Might think about a contract arrangement. -- I'll give you this much to do the job -- Not an open ended pay by the hour. That's what I struggle with at work. Hourly pay vs a contract. I can't help myself but work well and efficiently and it's the idiots that end up getting more money.

~`ordinary's just not good enough today - olp`~
Jamesbenet

Blue Roots Radio

Wall St. Weighs a Challenge to a Proposed Tax (Bank Tax Is Unconstitutional?) Updated at 11:26 AM

Source: New York Times

By ERIC DASH
Published: January 17, 2010

Wall Street’s main lobbying arm has hired a top Supreme Court litigator to study a possible legal battle against a bank tax proposed by the Obama administration, on the theory that it would be unconstitutional, according to three industry officials briefed on the matter.

In an e-mail message sent last week to the heads of Wall Street legal departments, executives of the lobbying group, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, wrote that a bank tax might be unconstitutional because it would unfairly single out and penalize big banks, according to these officials, who did not want to be identified to preserve relationships with the group’s members.

The message said the association had hired Carter G. Phillips of Sidley Austin, who has argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court, to study whether a tax on one industry could be considered arbitrary and punitive, providing the basis for a constitutional challenge, they said.

Administration officials and other legal experts have called those claims dubious.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/business/18bank.html?hpw

i wonder what he would have to say about some of the current events in the world.

Obama, Stumping for Coakley, Picks a Fight with the Right Villains — A Little Too Late?
By: Blue Texan Monday January 18, 2010 10:30 am

Just so there’s absolutely no ambiguity, let me get something out of the way: Democrats and progressives and anyone who doesn’t want crazy people running the country should get off their asses tomorrow and vote early and often for Coakley.

“Punishing” the Democratic Party by helping elect a Bush/Cheney Republican is the equivalent of cutting off your head to spite your nose hairs.

Grow the fuck up, please.

That out of the way, when I read these remarks by President Obama from yesterday’s appearance with Coakley, I cringed.

You know, we always knew that change was going to be hard. And what we also understood — I understood this the minute I was sworn into office — was that there were going to be some who stood on the sidelines, who were protectors of the big banks, and protectors of the big insurance companies, protectors of the big drug companies, who would say, you know what, we can take advantage of this crisis — because it’s going to be so bad, even though we helped initiate these policies, there’s going to be a sleight of hand here because we’re going to let Democrats take responsibility. We’re going to let them make the tough choices. We’re going to let them rescue the economy. And then we can tap into that anger and that frustration.

Ya think?

Yes, Mr. President. People are seriously pissed off at Wall Street. That’s why appointing a bunch of Masters of the Universe types to run treasury and your economic team — while telling the public their outrage is inappropriate — is problematic.

Yes, Mr. President. People hate insurance companies. That’s why delivering a health care bill that forces people to become their customers is problematic.

Yes, Mr. President. People hate the drug companies. That’s why cutting sweetheart backroom deals with them while you’re supposed to be reforming health care is problematic.

These universally loathed industries make excellent villains. People despise them, for plenty of good reasons. And as a bonus, going after them forces the other side to rush to their defense. Win-win.

But after you’re perceived — fairly or unfairly — of cozying up to them, it’s very tough to play that game.

Are Geithner and Summers in the pocket of Goldman? Was the health care bill a sellout to Aetna and Pfizer?

Maybe, maybe not. But the optics have been absolutely terrible.

http://firedoglake.com/2010/01/18/obama-stumping-for-coakley-picks-a-fig...

toniD's Ya Think?

Biden: “No Democracy Has Survived Needing A Super-Majority”
By: David Dayen Monday January 18, 2010 8:00 am

Joe Biden used a Florida fundraiser to talk straight about structural dysfunction in the US Senate.

“As long as I have served … I’ve never seen, as my uncle once said, the constitution stood on its head as they’ve done. This is the first time every single solitary decisions has required 60 senators,” Biden said. “No democracy has survived needing a supermajority.”

Despite that dire warning, Biden said he’s “optimistic” the country will appreciate the administration’s accomplishments: “The American people are very smart, and we’ll demonstrate by November that the project is working.”

My fear here is that Biden’s solution to this would be to ask his former Republican colleagues really, really nicely to stop with all the filibustering and delay. That would be particularly disappointing since Biden, as the nominal President of the Senate, would be in a position to change Senate rules by ruling in favor of the nuclear option, or overruling the Parliamentarian in a reconciliation process, or accepting new organizational rules of the chamber in the next Congress. Of course, even the Bush Administration couldn’t pull any of that off, so I don’t see this one making such an effort.

Nevertheless, it’s good to see powerful politicians thinking seriously about how their agenda is beholden to antiquated rules. That’s a first step to getting those rules altered.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/01/18/biden-no-democracy-has-survived-n...

toniD's Ya Think?

Robert Kuttner

Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect

How could the health care issue have turned from a reform that was going to make Barack Obama ten feet tall into a poison pill for Democratic senators? Whether or not Martha Coakley squeaks through in Massachusetts on Tuesday, the health bill has already done incalculable political damage and will likely do more. Polls show that the public now opposes it by margins averaging ten to fifteen points, and widening. It is hard to know which will be the worse political defeat -- losing the bill and looking weak, or passing it and leaving it as a piñata for Republicans to attack between now and November.

The measure is so unpopular that Republican State Senator Scott Brown has built his entire surge against Coakley around his promise to be the 41st senator to block the bill -- this in Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts. He must be pretty confident that the bill has become politically radioactive, and he's right.

It has already brought down Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, a fighter for health care and other reforms far more progressive than President Obama's. Dorgan championed Americans' right to re-import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada, a popular provision that the White House blocked. Dorgan, who is one of the Senate's great populists, began the year more than twenty points ahead in the polls of his most likely challenger, North Dakota Governor John Hoeven. By the time he decided to call it a day, Dorgan was running more than twenty points behind. The difference was the health bill, which North Dakotans oppose by nearly two to one. The fact that Dorgan's own views were much better than the Administration's cut little ice. He was fatally associated with an unpopular bill.

So, how did Democrats get saddled with this bill? Begin with Rahm Emanuel. The White House chief of staff, who was once Bill Clinton's political director, drew three lessons from the defeat of Clinton-care. All three were wrong. First, get it done early (Clinton's task force had dithered.) Second, leave the details to Congress (Clinton had presented Congress with a fully-baked cake.) Third, don't get on the wrong side of the insurance and drug industries (The insurers' fictitious couple, Harry and Louise, had cleaned Clinton's clock.)

But as I wrote in Obama's Challenge, in August 2008, it would be a huge mistake to try to get health care done right out of the box. Obama first needed to get his sea-legs, and focus like a laser on economic recovery. If he got the economy back on track, he would then have earned the chops to undertake more difficult structural reforms like health care.

Deferring to the House and Senate was fine up to a point, but this was an issue where the president needed to lead as only presidents can -- in order to frame the debate and define the stakes.

Cutting a deal with the insurers and drug companies, who are not exactly candidates to win popularity contests, associated Obama with profoundly resented interest groups. This was exactly the wrong framing. This battle should have been the president and the people versus the interests. Instead more and more voters concluded that it was the president and the interests versus the people.

As policy, the interest-group strategy made it impossible to put on the table more fundamental and popular reforms, such as using Federal bargaining power to negotiate cheaper drug prices, or having a true public option like Medicare-for-all. Instead, a bill that served the drug and insurance industries was almost guaranteed to have unpopular core elements.

The politics got horribly muddled. By embracing a deal that required the government to come up with a trillion dollars of subsidy for the insurance industry, Obama was forced to pursue policies that were justifiably unpopular -- such as taxing premiums of people with decent insurance; or compelling people to buy policies that they often couldn't afford, or diverting money from Medicare. He managed to scare silly the single most satisfied clientele of our one island of efficient single-payer health insurance -- senior citizens -- and to alienate one of his most loyal constituencies, trade unionists.

The bill helped about two-thirds of America's uninsured, but did almost nothing for the 85 percent of Americans with insurance that is becoming more costly and unreliable by the day -- except frighten them into believing that what little they have is at increased risk of being taken away. more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/a-wake-up-call_b_426467.htm...

toniD's Ya Think?

simply great.

He is a treasure.
Here's the link:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html

COMPETING NARRATIVES.... The root of the nation's economic problems aren't hard to discern. And intellectually, most Americans probably realize that the systemic failures -- lack of oversight, lack of accountability, flawed tax structure, mindless fiscal irresponsibility, minimal infrastructure investment, a weak foundation on societal pillars such as health care, education, and energy -- are the result of years of poor decision making and misguided priorities.

But as we struggle with the consequences, President Obama bears the brunt, not because the crises are his fault, but because he's in charge as we deal with the wake of the Bush/Cheney debacle. Obama is the fire chief cleaning up after arsonists, with an impatient public wondering why the fires are still simmering. That Obama wasn't responsible for lighting the fires doesn't matter -- he's stuck with the mess, even if the other guy dropped the match.

E.J. Dionne Jr. has an interesting column today, arguing that a large part of the problem is the competing narratives of American politics. Dionne suggests, persuasively that conservatives' narrative -- government, spending, and services are necessarily bad -- keeps winning, even after conservatives attempts at governing fail. It's this success that serves as a drag on the president's poll numbers and even the unfolding fiasco in Massachusetts.

"[T]he success of the conservative narrative ought to trouble liberals and the Obama administration. The president has had to "own" the economic catastrophe much earlier than he should have. Most Americans understand that the mess we are in started before Obama got to the White House. Yet many, especially political independents, are upset that the government has had to spend so much and that things have not turned around as fast as they had hoped.

It's also striking that most conservatives, through a method that might be called the audacity of audacity, have acted as if absolutely nothing went wrong with their economic theories. They speak and act as if they had nothing to do with the large deficits they now bemoan and say we will all be saved if only we return to the very policies that should already be discredited. [...]

Yet the truth that liberals and Obama must grapple with is that they have failed so far to dent the right's narrative, especially among those moderates and independents with no strong commitments to either side in this fight.

The president's supporters comfort themselves that Obama's numbers will improve as the economy gets better. This is a form of intellectual complacency. Ronald Reagan's numbers went down during a slump, too. But even when he was in the doldrums, Reagan was laying the groundwork for a critique of liberalism that held sway in American politics long after he left office.

Progressives will never reach their own Morning in America unless they use the Gipper's method to offer their own critique of the conservatism he helped make dominant. It is still more powerful in our politics, as we are learning in Massachusetts, than it ought to be."

There are, of course, competing ideas about how to change the nature of the narrative competition -- Dems can start by rejecting with confidence some of the underlying premises, such as the inherent merit behind lower taxes, less spending, and fewer services, and stop being defensive about being right -- but Kevin Drum's point about the persistence of the right's narrative through the media "noise machine" is worth emphasizing:

" There's simply no liberal counterpart to Drudge and Fox and Rush: a conservative commentariat that concedes nothing, pounds home its points like a jackhammer, repeats its themes relentlessly, and has the ear of the Washington mainstream press in a way that liberal commentators don't."

Also note that leading liberal media figures approach the discourse in an entirely different way. The conservative machine -- Fox News, Limbaugh, et al -- serves to help Republicans, carrying GOP water when it has to. Progressive media voices, on the other hand, tend to be some of the Democrats' most persistent critics, rebuking President Obama and other leading Dems for falling short of progressive ideals and expectations.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_01/021977.php

toniD's Ya Think?

THE TEXAS TEXTBOOK TUSSLE, CONT'D.... Over the last several months, the Monthly has been keeping an eye on the Texas Board of Education, which has been working on a social studies curricula steeped in conservative Republican ideology. It's a rather remarkable story: board members -- 10 Republicans to 5 Democrats -- have recommended downplaying the contributions of civil rights leaders, minimizing an "emphasis on multiculturalism," and trying to "exonerate" Joe McCarthy.

The first draft of the standards mandated that Texans be taught to "identify significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals" -- with no comparable progressive leaders or groups.

The ridiculous crusade continues apace.

"The conservative bloc on the Texas State Board of Education won a string of victories Friday, obtaining approval for an amendment requiring high school U.S. history students to know about Phyllis Schlafly and the Contract with America as well as inserting a clause that aims to justify McCarthyism.

The board also voted to delay further debate on the nationally influential standards until March, with a final adoption vote now scheduled for May."

In the meantime, the draft curriculum is practically a parody of itself. Students, for example, will be asked to "describe the causes and key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association." The proposed standards mandate lessons on McCarthyism include "discussions" on "confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government."

References to the word "imperialism" were replaced with "expansionism." Ironically enough, Republican board members also demanded that references to "propaganda" in a section on World War I be removed .

The Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based group which monitors public education in Texas, complained about "blatant politicization of social studies curriculum." The TFN's Kathy Miller added, "When partisan politicians take a wrecking ball to the work of teachers and scholars, you get a document that looks more like a party platform than a social studies curriculum."

There may be a temptation for those of us outside Texas to dismiss this as a localized setback for knowledge and modernity, which will undermine schools in the Lone Star State. But let's not forget, as Mariah Blake explains in the new print edition of the Monthly, Texans won't be the only ones who suffer as a result of this board's ignorance and ideological agenda: "McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come."

(History rewritten!)

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_01/021976.php

More about this subject here:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1001.blake.html

toniD's Ya Think?

http://proulxguitars.com/prices.htm

I like the OM/D guitar

highly recommended by other luthiers (quietly)
------
http://proulxguitars.com/images/dread/IMG_1337.jpg

another beauty eh?
======
http://proulxguitars.com/j5.htm red mando in the snow!!

Fernando check this builder's other interests
http://proulxguitars.com/images/fun_photos/burnout.jpg
--------------
the luthier likes his dogs too
http://proulxguitars.com/images/fun_photos/Adeline%20&%20Molson%202006.j...

Saudi's Alwaleed, Murdoch Discuss Alliances
By MOHAMMED ALY SERGIE And ANDREW CRITCHLOW

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—Saudi billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal held meetings this week with News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch to discuss investments, including Rotana Media, according to a statement from the prince's office Saturday.

The meetings, which took place in New York on Jan. 14, "touched upon future potential alliance with News Corp.," the statement said, adding that Rotana and LBCSAT, 90% owned by Prince Alwaleed, were discussed.

Nezar Nagro, president of Rotana Media Services, said in December a deal that would see News Corp. buy 10% of the existing shares in the company could be completed this month.

The statement on Saturday from Prince Alwaleed's office gave no further details of a potential deal. A spokesperson for News Corp. was unreachable for comment.

Rotana, which hosts News Corp.'s Fox channels in Saudi Arabia via its television network, owns rights to more than 2,000 Arabic movies and the world's largest Arabic language music library, according to Zawya.com data.

The company manages some of the Arab world's most popular artists, including Egyptian pop star Amr Diab and Lebanese divas Elissa and Haifa Wehbe. According to Ipsos MediaCT, Rotana ranks amongst the top five channels for advertising revenue in Saudi, the Gulf's most populous Arab nation.

Over the past two decades Prince Alwaleed, through his Riyadh-listed conglomerate Kingdom Holding Co. , has focused his investments on banks, hotels and media firms, building sizable stakes in companies like Citigroup Inc., News Corp., Apple Inc. and Time Warner Inc.

News Corp. owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and WSJ.com.

On Dec. 7, Zawya Dow Jones reported that News Corp. was close to completing a deal to buy a stake in Rotana, which is wholly owned by Prince Alwaleed. A News Corp. spokesperson in London declined to comment at the time.

Shares in Kingdom Holding, majority owned by Prince Alwaleed, were amongst the biggest risers on the Saudi Tadawul exchange Saturday, up 10%.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870395980457500679012366318...

The Show Must Not Go On

Political theater and public scolding are good ways to draw attention to important issues and bad behavior, and Phil Angelides, chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, made use of both last week. As he swore in four of the nation’s top bankers, it was impossible not to think of that famous scene with executives from the tobacco industry. During the questioning, he rebuked Lloyd Blankfein, head of Goldman Sachs, for his firm’s practice of selling mortgage-related securities and at the same time betting they would fall in value.

Now that he has everyone’s attention, Mr. Angelides and his fellow commissioners can get to the hard part.

Inconclusive sparring at hearings will not fulfill the mandate Congress gave the panel to investigate the causes of the crisis. Indeed, the bankers who testified last week did not say much they had not said before.

The commission must uncover what bankers, investors, government officials and other people in positions of power, past and present, would prefer not to say — or perhaps do not know or understand — about the crash and the bailouts. The primary aim is not to air issues and foster debate, but to test views, resolve contradictions and arrive at evidence-based conclusions.

Yet the commission — which is supposed to file a final report by Dec. 15 — has not issued a single subpoena for documents. Instead, investigators have apparently been relying on voluntary cooperation, public records and information-sharing agreements that have been negotiated with federal agencies. A thorough investigation requires source documents that reveal what people were thinking and doing at the time of the events and that illuminate, buttress or contradict testimony.

Take, for example, Mr. Blankfein’s explanation that the clients Goldman bet against were sophisticated investors who demanded the doomed securities that Goldman sold them. Apart from the fact that the notion of “sophisticated investors” has been discredited by the crisis, does that explanation go far enough?

Without peering into the internal workings of Goldman and other financial firms that engaged in similar practices, it is hard to know how far bankers went in creating demand rather than responding to it, or if the securities were purposely designed to perform poorly.

The answers could cast light on when Wall Street practices cross the line from prudent hedging to excessive speculation.

A crucial related issue is whether Wall Street’s role as the underwriter of securities, which implies a level of approval of the investments being offered for sale, misled investors into buying questionable securities, and thus contributed to the credit bubble. If so, that would make the argument for barring too-big-to-fail banks from operating hedge funds all the more compelling.

Given the stakes, the chances seem remote that Wall Street will voluntarily hand over the papers that could get to the bottom of it all.

The inquiry is getting under way at a critical moment. The House has passed a financial regulatory reform bill that was enfeebled in important respects by bank lobbyists. The Senate banking committee recently rejected a generally robust proposal by Senator Christopher Dodd. It has yet to produce an alternative, but it is likely that lobbying and partisan politics will generate a weak bill. President Obama’s call for a new tax on big banks is a good idea, but must not pre-empt other needed changes, including a tax on bankers’ bonuses and more direct regulation to limit the size of financial firms.

Serious investigative work is the only way to counter the banks’ political power and alter the course of a reform effort that is headed in the wrong direction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/opinion/17sun1.html?pagewanted=print

toniD's Ya Think?

Obama is right to clobber Wall Street

Published: January 15 2010 20:35 | Last updated: January 15 2010 20:35

The American public dreams of putting bankers on trial. The hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which started this week, are a spectacle that comes close to that fantasy. With camera flashes firing, the bankers’ journeys to take the stand have had the drama of the “perp walk”. The quasi-defendants were quizzed, among other things, on the White House’s new plan, revealed this week, for a $90bn tax on banks.

The proposal is political. That much is clear from the timing. The administration announced it ahead of bank bonus season. With US unemployment continuing to rise, the spectacle of Wall Street plutocrats reporting multimillion dollar earnings from bailed-out companies will trigger geysers of rage. This policy should soothe and exploit that popular anger.

But this is not mindless populism. Crisis interventions made US bank creditors and shareholders hundreds of billions of dollars richer. But, for its part, the commonweal is expected to lose $47bn on its initial $125bn equity injection into the banks alone. The American state has a right to correct that imbalance.

The details of the proposal will necessarily be a cause of argument. The White House has settled on using the levy to pay for losses on the troubled asset relief programme. But the reasoning for targeting this amount of money is muddled. Some Tarp losses are nothing to do with the banks, notably expected losses from the car industry bail-outs. And some financial sector costs are excluded, particularly the price of insurance policies that were put in place, and acknowledged in banks’ funding costs, but never called upon. A further complication to the levy is that customers will probably end up paying it.

There is much for reasonable people to disagree on here – and even more for politicians to dispute. But the levy is justified, and it will force the banks to cover the cost they have imposed on society. This tax will draw in cash from banks backed by foreign governments. But other states should follow suit, as Tim Geithner, the US Treasury secretary, has said.

Debate about the levy, however, must not distract from the question of how to construct a financial system where banks can fail safely. In future, it must be easier for bank debt to be turned into common equity in a crisis, and the fate of insolvent banks’ counterparties must be made clearer to prevent the panic that followed the Lehman bankruptcy. Capital requirements must also be raised.

For cases when regulators fear a bank may be too big to fail, the authorities should work out a model for ex ante insurance premiums, payable to the state. Such a structure, combined with extra-high capital requirements for these overgrown institutions, should create strong incentives for these companies to slim down. It should, in addition, make sure that they cannot profit from the public guarantees that their bloatedness brings them. States must not continue acting as omniline insurers, guaranteeing everything for free.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/54b1a434-0211-11df-8b56-00144feabdc0.html?ncli...

toniD's Ya Think?

It was the Best of Mexico night. Horses came out with riders each holding either a Mexican flag or an American flag. Many in the crowd were actually from Mexico who traveled to see the show. Most of the others had relatives there.

They were announced as the two most beautiful flags in the world. Mexico went first in a tribute of all things Mexico. Afterwords the attention was turned to the American flag as the announcer called for "the greatest country in the world".

The cheers were insane. It was an amazing show of patriotism from the crowd of mostly indigenous people. I nearly stepped in horses business however.

Another BLM Wild Horse Roundup: Submit Comments Today!
Comments Must Be Received By Jan. 27

Removal of 550 horses in eastern Nevada set to begin next month
Just When We Thought It Couldn’t Get Worse – Government Claims More Than 670,000 Acres Can Only Support 100 to 200 Horses

We told you this was going to be a long, hard fight – thank you for sticking with us to take action on each and every unacceptable assault by the Obama Administration on our wild horses. We are up against the deeply entrenched special interests who want wild horses removed from public lands so they can conduct business as usual. That means cheap usage of our public land for their private profits at the horses’ and taxpayers’ expense.

It’s time to get public comments in on another large removal of wild horses which is planned by the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM). This time the BLM intends to remove over 500 of the estimated 645 horses living in or near the “Eagle Herd Management Area” in eastern Nevada outside of Ely. While 500 individuals is fewer than the 2,500 horses currently being rounded up and removed from the Calico Complex in northwest Nevada (click here for Calico update), the Eagle roundup is even more ludicrous because it is 125,000 acres larger than Calico, but the government will only allow 100 horses to remain! In Calico, by contrast, 500-900 horses will be left behind in the approximately 500,000-acre public land complex.

Please fill out this form, and send it with one click to all the relevant decision-makers. Take the time today to submit your comments and protest against another massive Obama Administration wild horse roundup. And after you fill out the form, please use the "tell-a-friend" link you will be automatically directed to, to ask your friends and family to submit comments as well. We need to let the government know that Americans oppose these unnecessary and cruel roundups.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Yesterday evening our local PBS station had a program about the music and dance of Mexico. They showed the folkloric dancers in colorful costumes and sombreros and the music was Mariachi with violins and harps and guitars and the big guitar with popular singers from Mexico.

Great program

http://www.pbs.org/previews/fiestamexicana/

toniD's Ya Think?

My daughter turns 20 next week and she gets what she wants for a week on her birthday. She just stormed downstairs and demanded I make Chili crack for dinner tomorrow then Sloppy Ho's on Wednesday. Welcome to hell week.

That's all done up in any Charriada, or Mexican rodeo. That's where it comes from. It's a stark demarcation between the two local styles of rodeo. It's a big deal in my family as my dad's sister's husband and her children were national champion Charros. They have their own arena and huge horses just like the ones I saw last night.

I have often wondered if the fascination for the public is about the style or the amount of community work required to pull off such an event. I mean just cleaning the hats, which I've done several times is a giant chore. And you will hear about it if you do it wrong. I think the work binds people together like a dough or some concoction into what we call a social fabric.

There is one of those fabrics here but it's rarely acknowledged. It's importance is often cast aside for our own need to be validated. You, toniD, do so much to keep this fabric together.

who chose Coakley to run for Senate in Mass? And wasn't there anyone else? I know the other Kennedys didn't want to run but there must have been another Dem in Mass!?!

toniD's Ya Think?

USGBC commits to helping rebuild Haiti
The U.S. Green Building Council is committed to helping rebuild Haiti.

The U.S. Green Building Council, home of the LEED green building rating systems, has announced its commitment to help rebuild Haiti after the country was devastated by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake. Specific details are not yet available, but the USGBC is encouraging those who can help to do so through the Clinton Foundation Haiti Relief Fund.

The USGBC has experience with rebuilding communities after natural disasters. The USGBC was involved in rebuilding efforts after a massive F5 tornado destroyed the entire town of Greensburg, Kansas, as well as green rebuilding efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the levee breaks wreaked havoc on the city.

The green building organization is already familiar with the unique challenges they will face when undertaking such a massive effort in the impoverished island nation. In the spring of 2009, USGBC CEO Rick Fedrizzi was part of a United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti that included former President Bill Clinton. Fedrizzi’s knowledge of the country will be valuable as the focus switches from recovering from the earthquake to rebuilding the nation.

Rebuilding plans are already underway and as more details about the USGBC’s involvement in Haiti are released, I will be sure to provide updated information.

http://www.mnn.com/business/commercial-building/blogs/usgbc-commits-to-h...

toniD's Ya Think?

by landslide....

Massachussetts Dems nominate Martha Coakley
Published
by
Taniel
on December 8, 2009
in MA-Sen
.

Just had all public polls had predicted, Massachussetts Attorney General Martha Coakley prevailed by a decisive margin in the state’s senatorial primary: With 90% of precincts reporting, she leads Rep. Mike Capuano 47% to 28% - a difference of 100,000 votes - with Alan Khazei receiving 13% and Steve Pagliuca 12%. Coakley moves on to the January general election, where she’ll be the overwhelming favorite against Republican state Senator Scott Brown.

[Update: Gerard very rightly points out that 660,000 voters participated in the Democratic primary, versus only 160,000 in the Republican primary; put otherwise, Brown received fewer votes than Capuano. That goes to show the huge challenge the Republican faces just to keep the general election competitive; Brown can't even hope that turnout patterns will compensate for the state's Democratic loyalties.]

State Democrats passed on the opportunity to send to the Senate someone who would have been one of its most progressive members, but they chose to give Coakley a chance to be the Bay State’s first female senator. Unfortunately, the electorate remained generally apathetic and turnout was low, hovering around 20%.

[...]

Link

I wish I could get more excited about the Mass vote.

I feel so betrayed by all of the bull shit we've put up with and the back stabbing back room deals, I don't blame the electorate for staying home or turning against.

The greedy Democrats deserve to rue the day they took us for granted. And we will be the ones who suffer of course.

Suffering is life and we are getting to know it well.

White House To Make Major Regulatory Reform Push After Health Care: Goolsbee
Sam Stein

One of the president's top economic advisers pledged a major push on financial regulatory reform once health care legislation is done with, citing the need to "not live again through" the perils of the financial industry's collapse.

"We're coming to the closing chapter of health care," said Austan Goolsbee, a close Obama confidant and member of the president's Council of Economic Advisers. "The president has been pretty clear that when health care is done he wants financial regulatory reform, the holding accountable of financial institutions, and now he's setting the stage [for that]."

An energetic presence on the White House's economic team (in addition to being, as rumored, one of its more forward-looking thinkers), Goolsbee tackled a wide variety of financial policy topics in an interview with the Huffington Post. Beyond laying out the timeframe for a ramped up effort on regulatory reform, he also hinted at details of what the administration hoped would emerge in the final package.

Asked about news that Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) was considering dropping plans to create a wholly independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency, Goolsbee reiterated that the president wanted the new body (tasked with protecting consumers from credit card, mortgage and financial product abuses) to stand on its own.

"The president has always said he thought a consumer authority was important, that there is a tendency when it is spread over seven different agencies at it is now -- when nobody's primary responsibility is that -- that it can fall by the wayside, as you saw in past years," Goolsbee said, while cautioning that he had not read Dodd's remarks. "That's certainly central in that component of the president's white paper, that [the CFPA] being spread over seven agencies is not a good idea."

News of the CFPA's potential peril has not been well received among market-wary economists or progressive political activists, who see it as another step in the watering down of the broader consumer protection objective. One official who has worked extensively on regulatory reform negotiations suggested to the Huffington Post that it might be better for legislation to fall by the wayside than to pass something that would be ineffective.

At the same time, the president gave this official and others a bit to cheer about this past week when he announced a new tax that he wanted levied on big banks as a means of collecting un-repaid TARP funds. Goolsbee called the proposal a "sensible" approach to getting money returned to the taxpayer. Projected to bring in up to $117 billion, the recollection measure is also required under the statute of the TARP. All of which, Goolsbee said, makes criticism from some conservatives and the banking lobby (mainly, that the tax will be passed down to consumers and shareholders) all the more difficult to rationalize.

"[These banks] are flush with profits. They're talking about setting record bonuses. When they announced those things there was no discussion about those bonuses costing consumers or reducing lending," Goolsbee said. "So I find it a little unusual that when asked to pay back the money that the government and the American people are owed for the rescue, that now the argument is 'Oh, they don't have the money.'"

Pressed as to why it took the president so long to announce this tax -- and, in the process, adopt a populist approach to the banks that many in his party have long pined for -- Goolsbee replied:

"I don't think the president has changed. His emphasis from the beginning was he wanted accountability from the banks. We had to get through a period of rescue, we're getting through a period of health care, we're now putting direct focus on, our key priority is, financial regulatory reform, and people are starting to notice that."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/18/white-house-to-make-major_n_427...

toniD's Ya Think?

with their choices. I wish more would do their homework on people running for office.

That reminds me. I have to research Illinois and see who I will be voting for Feb 2.

I'm an election judge again.

toniD's Ya Think?

Wednesday’s news today because you have more important things to do
By: TBogg Sunday January 17, 2010 9:41 pm

You can look it up...If Martha Coakley loses this week it will be because Barack Obama has failed America and turned us into a socialist wasteland worse than North Korea which has given rise to a tide of populist anger which has been harnessed by a resurgent Republican party who then will win the war on terrorism, revive the economy that Obama has single-handedly destroyed, and bring back commonsense conservative principles that made this country great, won all of our wars, and freed the black man… although conservatives are still kind of split over that last one.

If Martha Coakley wins it will be because of ACORN.

There. Now you can just jump ahead to Wednesday and watch Cougar Town.

You’re welcome.

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2010/01/17/wednesdays-news-today-because-yo...

toniD's Ya Think?

These Were Not Suicides At Guantanamo
By: Spencer Ackerman Monday January 18, 2010 11:00 am

A major new piece from Scott Horton at Harper’s about the alleged suicide of three detainees at Guantanamo Bay in September 2006. After obtaining a long-secret investigation from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Horton notices the official explanation for the deaths is absurd.

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

An autopsy performed at Guantanamo on at least one of the men is similarly incredible, explaining away in an improbable manner the determination that a bone in one of them was broken in a manner that typically suggests manual strangulation.

Four former GTMO guards spoke out to Horton about what they believe was a black site — an undisclosed detention facility — at the base they termed ”Camp No.” It’s long been believed, and even loosely reported, that the CIA operated a short-lived separate prison at GTMO. Unsure whether Camp No was that facility, but the guards who spoke with Horton say that “one theory” amongst the guards is that its wardens were CIA.

There’s so much in this piece. You really have to read it. But this account of an apparent cover-up by the contemporaneous commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, Col. Mike Bumgarner, is really something else. After the “suicides,” Harper reports, Bumgarner assembles his guards at the open-air theater in Camp America (the larger camp surrounding Camp Delta), a place that I’ve visited, to tell them this:

Bumgarner told his audience that “you all know” three prisoners in the Alpha Block at Camp 1 committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death. This was a surprise to no one—even servicemen who had not worked the night before had heard about the rags. But then Bumgarner told those assembled that the media would report something different. It would report that the three prisoners had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. It was important, he said, that servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and email communications were being monitored. The meeting lasted no more than twenty minutes. (Bumgarner has not responded to requests for comment.)

I met Bumgarner briefly during my reporting trip to Guantanamo in July 2005 and thought him to be eye-rollingly corny, insisting his soldiers return his “Honor Bound” salute by saying “To Defend Freedom.”

Oh, and the Holder Justice Department has apparently decided to close an investigation into these deaths.

http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2010/01/18/these-were-not-suicides-at...

toniD's Ya Think?

How;re you doing?

toniD's Ya Think?

Deconstructing Myths of America: Matt Taibbi & RFK Jr. on the mind-warping power of Ayn Rand’s mythology
By: knowbuddhau Sunday January 17, 2010 10:59 am

Matt Taibbi and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently summarized the mythos of Wall Street types. Taibbi’s analysis is nearly perfect, except that he falls prey to the fashion of dressing up our psyches in outdated APA-style vestments. The word for the function he describes is "mythos."Ayn Rand is credited with being the queen of the myth of self-interest as the highest social good. Her tome, Atlas Shrugged, is the bible of Gordon Gecko-type greedheads. Ellis Weiner calls it a "deeply adolescent piece of science fiction." It’s the myth that shapes the cosmos of Wall Street in the minds of bankers even before they act in it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excerpted from AlterNet:
Matt Taibbi and RFK Jr. on Obama’s Sellout to Wall Street
part 2, c.3:40-end.

Matt Taibbi and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Go Left TV. January 11, 2010.

RFK Jr.: What’s your opinion of recent developments around Goldman Sachs: the apology they issued, the $500 million that they contributed to charity; I think was largely a result of your article.

Matt Taibbi: Well, I think it was interesting, because, before I wrote my piece, and before you know Jeff Hogan from New York Magazine wrote a piece about them, suddenly there was all this media attention on them this summer.

[…]

So Goldman is clearly feeling some heat in the public relations arena, but what’s interesting about it is how tone deaf they’ve been. You know, these comments from Lloyd Blankfein that they’re doing god’s work, and that other guy in England who said that Jesus would’ve approved of their, you know, the bonuses and all that stuff. I think it just shows that these guys are really tone deaf, because, at some level, they really believe in that sort of Ayn Rand philosophy, that self-interest is ultimately sort of beneficial for all of society. I think they have to believe that in order to do the stuff they do, and it’s interesting, when they try to explain themselves, it’s just hitting the ear so terribly wrong>/b>. And it’s even kind of entertaining, I think, to watch.

RFK Jr.: It’s Gordon Gecko stuff.

[Laughs.] Matt Taibbi: Exactly!

RFK Jr.: But there are—yeah, “greed is good.” But Goldman has been more in the Democratic camp than in the Republican camp, I would say—

Matt Taibbi: Oh yeah, absolutely.

[…]

In my experience, most of these guys genuinely believe that what they’re doing is justified. And they’ve been raised in an environment that’s extremely narrow, and they’re around the same kinds of—of y’know the same socioeconomic class all the time and they’re not exposed to the real world out there, and so they kind of pursue what they do as just sort of, making money , harvesting fish like a fisherman would from the ocean. They don’t really see that the money they’re making is coming from somebody else, and so they genuinely don’t understand why everybody is so upset that they’re making money in the way that they are, they seem to think that, you know, why are people so, you know, angry that we’re so good at what we do. And I think it’s because they’ve never really seen that there are consequences to their actions, and you know it’s probably a psychological protective mechanism that they all have. I don’t think that they’re cynics, I don’t think that they’re doing this because they get off on robbing people, I just think that they’re kind of blind.

That’s it right there, the cosmogenetic power of our beliefs to create our cosmos prior to our acting in it.

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/24557

Read on for:

Ellis Weiner’s review of Atlas Shrugged is the best I’ve found.

Excerpted from
On Atlas Shrugged as a guide to our times
Ellis Weiner, The Huffington Post January 12, 2009

In short, Atlas Shrugged is one of the worst books ever written–and, in the words of Gore Vidal, "nearly perfect in its immorality." Still, Moore proudly notes that "…as recently as 1991, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that readers rated ‘Atlas’ as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible."

more at link above

toniD's Ya Think?

Jim Hightower busted our lords of FIRE as cultists back in 2008.

Excerpted from
The five most wanted men from Wall Street to Washington
Jim Hightower, The Hightower Lowdown
November, 2008

Why was Greenspan so insistent on no regulation? Because he is the hardest of hardcore laissez-faire ideologues, holding a blazing disdain for government. An avowed worshiper of libertarian novelist Ayn Rand, he views public oversight of business as an evil force that deters the creativity of smart elites. He is so psyched by his religious-like faith in the "free market" that he fervently believes in what he considers to be the innate good will and moral superiority of investors and bankers. He asserts that these self-interested individuals can simply be trusted to do the right thing, and that government should not second-guess their decisions.

Even the faith of snake handlers is not as devout as Greenspan’s. Unfortunately, however, he was able to hitch our nation’s economic well-being to his own absurdist ideological fancy. The guy who was lionized as the smartest, most- stable economic thinker in the land essentially turns out to have been a quasi-religious nut.

Link to original post:
http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/1801

toniD's Ya Think?

agreed...a totally boring and predictable piece of crap...

These people will worship anything that feeds their petty selfish worldview....If I remember correctly "The Turner Diaries" was pretty popular with certain conservative types for a while too...

nice design and execution, almost flawless wood choice.

cute mutts too!

Submitted by Sunshine Jim on Mon, 01/18/2010 - 12:52pm.
...i was lauding nora for digging deep enough to tumble onto the hypocrisy of Rhodes and the Rhodes scholars who have turned out to be major assholes.

like i said me and N did a coupla days of research on it back in the day of Majority Report.
-----------------------
I have three questions.

1.) Do you believe that "the hypocrisy of Rhodes and the Rhodes scholars who have turned out to be major assholes" exceeds the hypocrisy found in other populations?

2.) Do you believe that the ratio of "major assholes" in the Rhodes program exceeds the ratio of "major assholes" in other populations?

3.) What conclusions, if any, did you and Nobody reach about the population of Rhodes Scholars?

Before you answer, keep several things in mind. I was present when you and Nobody were posting your Rhodes comments.

Wikipedia states, "There have been more than 7,000 Rhodes Scholars since the inception of the Trust. More than 4,000 are still living."

I am confident that you cannot name 70 Rhodes Scholars off the top of your head (.01%), let alone research the lives of 7,000 Rhodes Scholars in two days.

For whatever it is worth, which ain't much, I scrolled through the Wikipedia list of "notable" Rhodes Scholars from 1904 through 2008 (approximately 300). 139 Rhodes Scholars from several different countries have at least a mention of noteworthiness for politics, military, bureaucracy, public policy, diplomacy, law or big business. More than half are noteworthy for other reasons, like art and science and academics and sports and journalism, etc.

If I understand your term "major asshole" correctly, an attorney would be more likely to qualify than a novelist. In my count of 139, any attorney DID qualify as a major asshole whether he was or not. So did a New Zealand prisoner of war and and a Canadian Liberal Party leader. I weighted the major asshole evidence as far as possible in your direction and it still did not score well enough to win an election.

I can't help but wonder how many "major assholes" could be included among the more than 6,700 Rhodes Scholars who have not been placed on Wikipedia's noteable list.

Jesus, don't cry
You can rely on me honey
You can combine anything you want

I'll be around
You were right about the stars
Each one is a setting sun

Tall buildings shake
Voices escape singing sad sad songs
Tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
Bitter melodies turning your orbit around

Don't cry
You can rely on me honey
You can come by any time you want

I'll be around
You were right about the stars
Each one is a setting sun

Tall buildings shake
Voices escape singing sad sad songs
Tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
Bitter melodies turning your orbit around

Voices whine
Skyscrapers are scraping together
Your voice is smoking
Last cigarettes are all you can get
Turning your orbit around

Our love
Our love
Our love is all we have

Our love
Our love is all of God's money
Everyone is a burning sun

Tall buildings shake
Voices escape singing sad sad songs
Tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
Bitter melodies turning your orbit around

Voices whine
Skyscrapers are scraping together
Your voice is smoking
Last cigarettes are all you can get
Turning your orbit around

Last cigarettes are all you can get
Turning your orbit around
Last cigarettes are all you can get
Turning your orbit around

-Wilco

After the injured are treated, the dead buried and the survivors fed, clothed and sheltered, Haiti must rebuild. As this country faces the challenge of starting over – and building homes, neighborhoods and infrastructure that can withstand future earthquakes – the last thing Haiti will need is to be saddled with debt.

Let's get the IMF, World Bank and other global creditors to cancel Haiti's $890 million international debt »

The United States has already forgiven Haiti's past debts and now only gives assistance in the form of grants. But we need Haiti's other creditors – the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and countries like Taiwan and Venezuela – to follow our lead and do the same.

Fortunately, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has the power to help make that happen. It all starts by calling on Secretary Geithner to use his influence to persuade international lending institutions and countries to do the right thing and drop Haiti's debt.

Haiti needs an international effort to make sure that, as it begins the long road to recovery, it is not burdened with unpayable debts. We must also be vigilant that any new aid from the IMF and other sources doesn't come in the form of loans that would create new debt for Haiti.

Please sign the petition to Secretary Geithner and urge him to use his influence and help free Haiti from debt »

Thank you for taking action,

Natasha
Care2 Campaign Team

http://www.care2.com/go/z/e/AFt8B/zkfu/bacoq

toniD's Ya Think?

good try crank.

since you were in on the discussion me and N had why don't you dig out ALL the links we posted and we can all re read them and make up our own minds?

seems fair to me.

i was some what careful in my criticism about the scholarship by the way. i don't think i said all of them were assholes.

flog away bud i think i may have saved a few of those articles but that was then and this is now.

on the other hand what difference does it really make? just my opinion and it certainly is'nt enough by itself to improve the shituation but i'd like you to do enough research yourself to see what i was commenting on.

in other words, are you still beating your wife and when you quit prove me wrong.

was a QB from WVU. He's now a doctor in North Carolina.

..never trust a guy with a mustache

Notification Alert:

Due to recent budget cuts and the rising cost of electricity, gas, oil, as well as current market conditions, The Light at the End of the Tunnel has been turned off.

We apologize for the inconvenience

toniD's Ya Think?

Do you remember when you commented about the power steering in your car? Did you end up talking with a mechanic about that?

- this?

The power steering was fine. It was my weak wrists. I was going through a bad RA flare and I had no strength in my wrists. Since then the flare has left for awhile and I am not having problems with the steering.

Thanks for asking.

toniD's Ya Think?

http://www.healthfreedomusa.org/?page_id=187

Submitted by Sunshine Jim on Mon, 01/18/2010 - 10:36pm.
since you were in on the discussion me and N had why don't you dig out ALL the links we posted and we can all re read them and make up our own minds?

//Bait: I was reading along at the time. I remember thinking "These guys must have some kind of super secret decoder ring and a road map to all of the whackjob sites on the net." As it turns out, populist anger is a cheap commodity on Internet websites and you two were in the market for something that would piss you off.//

i was some what careful in my criticism about the scholarship by the way. i don't think i said all of them were assholes.

//Bait: You have made sweeping implications by using innuendo. You can pretend it ain't so but, remember, I was there while you and Nobody worked up a lather. You have not made just one statement about Rhodes Scholarships. You have made many. The tone of your subjective view is unmistakable. I didn't dredge it back up. You did.//

flog away bud i think i may have saved a few of those articles but that was then and this is now.

//Bait: It is interesting that you used the same sidestep when I challenged one of your perennial claims about 9/11. You said, "I'm past that, bud. I've moved on." But you don't hesitate to repeat a claim when it suits your purpose and then refuse to engage a challenge because you are "past that" subject that you just finished repeating moments before.

Nice work if you can get it.

What is past is the conspiratorial information that you gobbled up like candy years ago. It is obsolete. You stopped learning and information kept coming.

I don't know how you got the idea that all of the facts were packed into angry websites in the few years after 9/11?

Neither do I know why you would entertain the idea that a Rhodes Scholar poet and a Rhodes Scholar President are both evil minions trained at the boot camp for the Bourgeoisie.

If they are not, then any bad person who is also a Rhodes Scholar is a bad person of his/her own volition. The connection between dastardliness and Rhodes Scholarship is as absurd as the connection between shiftlessness and Negroes.

Bigotry, anyone?

William Tam runs away from same-sex marriage courtroom...

I still am trying to figure out why our state officials and courts have such a hard time spotting the chauvinism of Theocrats and can't seem to throw these bigots out on their ear in the first place when they present an unConstitutional initiative. Wouldn't it have been easieer to fight this BEFORE an election?

Also, this was a carpetbaggers' initiative, their invention and their money. It's time to protect the state initiative process and keep it sacred for the citizens of the state, not a tool for outside bullies hiding behind the process.

Anyway, here is whining Tam:

http://www.queerty.com/prop-8-supporter-william-tam-wants-out-of-the-per...

you win crank

i'm more than willing to admit i know nothing at all and that i have no perceptive ability and that i'm gullible and stupid.

"whats it all mean Mr. Natural?"

"It don't mean shit."

"Rhodes Scholars have been involved with the CFR, United Nations, International Monetary Fund, international Banking, Congress, and federal administrations since Woodrow Wilson. President Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar, has appointed at least twenty-two Rhodes Scholars to high positions in his administration. Dr. Dennis Cuddy reveals the source of the conspiracy that has been dedicated to erasing nationalism and replacing it with a world government."

Ooop! did i just write that? scuse me, just a bit of conspiracy gas. musta been something that disagreed with me.

I hope your ear is better.

Just wanted to relate my friend's situation. My friend had recurrent ear infections until he finally went to a specialist who prescribed personal ear plugs for him and told him to wear them to prevent getting moisture in there during bathing/showering, swimming. The plugs are made for one's ear canal shape. Just thought this was very interesting. It sure helped my friend.

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timelin...

Green Party of Texas hopes for revival this year

http://txgreens.org

Now I'll get the newsletter....thank you!

I see Rhodes' racism as a servant of his imperialistic vision. (I guess his biographer did too.) AND, since IMPERIALISM hasn't missed a beat for the last century, I am assuming Rhodes' endowment was of some assistance. Just a guess.

This is something interesting in an old book of 1913. I gather it is legit--

http://www.archive.org/stream/rhodesscholarsh00parkgoog/rhodesscholarsh0...

[excerpt]

The first of these dominating ideas was the ex-
tension of British influence over the vast uncivilized
areas of Africa stretching northwards towards the
equator. He believed that in bringing their bar-
barous populations under the reign of law, and in
developing the great natural resources of these re-
gions, he would be serving the higher interests of
humanity as well as opening up new fields for Brit-
ish enterprise and settlement. Chiefly through his
initiative and under the influence of his compelling
purpose, this dream has in large measure been
realised.

The second of these ideas was the unification of
the various colonies of South Africa, with the two
European races that controlled them, into one
political system under the British flag. In ways un-
thought of by him, but on the whole in accord with
his views, that ideal also has now been attained.

But behind these purposes, which mainly affected
South Africa, were conceptions larger still, of which
they were but a part. While still a young man, fresh
from the University, his reflections had convinced
him that the closer consolidation of the British Em-
pire into an organic whole was an object of supreme

12 THE RHODES SCHOLARSHIPS

political importance for his own nation and for the
world. The dream that floated before his vision, as it
floats before the wisest and best of British people
everywhere, is of an empire recognizing its enormous
mission and responsibilities in the world — with
wisdom and trained ability adequate to governing
rightly and justly the hundreds of millions of weaker
races dependent upon it — with strength sufficient
to maintain its position and protect its people in
every part of the world.

The Imperial idea, as it is understood by English-
men, was the point from which Rhodes started.
He believed in the British Empire and in its effi-
ciency for good. He was convinced that its main-
tenance was among the supreme interests of man-
kind. He wished to see its various parts drawn more
closely together, not as an agency of aggression, but
in the interests of peace, industry, and civilization.
For the attainment of this end he looked only to the
free force of free men trained up in the largest atmo-
sphere of liberty. Nor did he in this connection
think of his own race alone. He wished the full
advantages of citizenship in the Empire and a full
share in its work to be extended to civilized men of
any race who came within its bounds and accepted
its ideals of free government. At a later stage his

THE FOUNDER 13

thought advanced much further, and aimed at draw-
ing the people of the United States and the kindred
German race into a common circle of sympathy and
mutual understanding for the same great end.

It will be conceded that dreams like these indicate
the workings of a large mind. Of their absolute sin*
cerity there can be no reasonable doubt, and I men-
tion them here because an understanding of this
side of his nature furnishes the only true key to the
career of Rhodes, and establishes at least its con-
sistency. Through every stage of his life his work
was inspired by the vast vision which he first out-
lined in writing when alone on the African veld,
a poor and comparatively friendless youth, but
already inflamed with ambitions for his country, his
race, and mankind that come with such living and
inspiring force to but few men, and to fewer still
who have the strength of will resolutely to pursue
them through good and evil report, through mis-
takes and failures, to the end.

That schemes of a world-wide policy were at work
in the mind of the young diamond digger and Oxford
undergraduate who in 188 1 took his seat in the Cape
Legislature, would probably have come as a surprise
to the colonial politicians with whom he now became
associated.

[end excerpt]

over to the last thread. Be back later....

Atta-boy Attaturk
Submitted by maggiesboy on Mon, 01/18/2010 - 8:54am.

..more

p.s.

Rudeness comes in many forms Alice and cent. There's "in your face" rudeness and there's the "passive aggressive" rudeness of turning everything into a conspiracy which many on this blog find offensive and extremely rude. Personally I find it to be cowardly. It's particularly offensive when the remarks are made at someone who is unable to defend themselves. So, if you want to hide behind passive aggressive conspiratorial remarks (same tactic the rightwing uses) you will probably be offended by me and my "in your face" rebuttals. I'd rather be confrontational and try to resolve an issue than to hide behind it. I'm trying to work on it but for now this is how I am, but I'm always aware of other people's feelings and will never dismiss them out of hand, or worse ignore them.

So sorry nora, if I offended.

We'll wait for your apology and maybe why it is you need to turn nearly everything into an unknown? You too SJ. Insinuating something nefarious about Rachel Maddow??!?!?!? C'mon you have to admit that's over the line or your cred is dead.

===================

I looked at your link (repeated below), and, sorry, I can't agree. The credentials are those of a war criminal and slimey sadist, and I can see no benefit ('Christian' or otherwise) to giving him media exposure and resulting benefits by association with any efforts to alleviate the suffering caused by this tragic event. I cannot fathom how anyone might consider his high visibility right now a benefit to this cause. Making nice with bullies, liars and thugs is twisted etiquette and a disservice to those counting on our assistance.

Your link:

http://firedoglake.com/2010/01/18/it-cant-be-all-disdain-all-the-time/

-----------------

Moving on--

I think you have a right to your opinions, don't you? I don't choose to be offended.

Lately, from my point of view, sometimes the way CB gets cranked-up and then others blow-off steam afterwards seems like an energy-transfer sort of thang going on like goes on in some families; strange but hardly unusual.

Most people do not like having their tidy worldviews challenged. I've experienced it myself when someone who has not looked at the fuller 3-D aspects of a topic, but only accepts unquestioningly the one-dimensional P.R. veneer of a topic, and then portrays my opinion as the one that is uninformed; that does grate because most of the time my perspective is "the more information, the better the understanding", and I have a hard time seeing that as a detriment. Maybe for medical triage decisions or other such time-sensitive endeavors it would be a detriment. But for figuring out who holds power, how the power flows, how it is possible to shift power in times like ours -- I think every bit of info we can put in order becomes valuable.

I certainly don't want to jump to premature conclusions. That's not my intent. At the same time, I don't enjoy being berated by those who seem to have reached conclusions which they appear willing to hold on to even if they have to berate someone to accomplish that feat.

Therefore, I do not consider opening a file (like a file called the "Maddow -- Dissonant Notes File" or something) and having it about the place so that I or others are not bowled over consistently by Public Relations images, sales pitches, marketing, etc. -- P.R. that may prove to be a veneer for all we know.

This isn't the first time I mentioned something about Maddow. It's the first time I shared my curious distrust about 'fast risers', and I can't recall mentioning the Rhodes scholar stuff before, but perhaps I did. But I clearly remember being disgusted by the at least two times I saw Rachel cooing all over Zbigniew Brzerzinski when he was on her show and posted about it. That's because I consider Bzrerzinski to be (to borrow a Malloy phrase) a blood-sucking zombie. He is Barack's advisor on Afghanistan, and in doing that job Brzerzinski returns to the scene of his crime where his mujahideen machinations resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and the death of Afghan democracy. Why Rachel chooses to kiss the hem of Brzerzinski's garment I cannot fathom factually. But I can speculate it might have something to do with an appreciation of the unending cunning of the imperialist machine; but like I say, that would be speculation based on the dissonant items in that file.

Speculation is usually what occurs when there is a lack of fact and transparency at the source. I do my best to notice stuff that someday might be considered a "dot", and I apologize in advance if I jump the gun and connect a few dots prematurely. But I don't think that occurred this time. And I cannot remember Maddow indicating just why she was showing so much respect and appreciation to Brzerzinski when she had him on her show. Was it just schoolgirl awe that he was actually on her little old show? or does she really think he is such a great human being (as in a human with a big heart or something nice or 'successful')? It's beyond me.

My distrust of the amazing 'fast riser' comes from working at a company where I had a tangential role in seeing to it that the aging owner's son got good press about his rise in the company. Now that's one that could be debated from the outside, right?: He's moving up because he is dynamite, a chip off the old block, a new force in the company. But from the inside it was obvious to everyone he was mediocre and the advancements were an INEVITABLE part of how the system was run. So I have an experience that makes me suspicious; I can't help it. But I know things are not always what they seem, and that may be coloring my viewpoint here and distrust of the image of the 'fast riser'.

I'm sorry you misunderstand me and consider me a passive-aggressive rude person. (Is that a new category, by the way? I always thought obvious/blatant/in-you-face and rude usually go hand-in-hand.)

I don't have the time or patience to scroll around to find out who called me a 'conspirator', but it just goes to show how gummed up all the dictionary definitions of 'conspiracy' and related words have gotten. You'd think Cass Sunstein himself was here blogging and trying to confuse the role of conspiracy trackers with those conspirators whom they track!

...That Paul Thompson guy did some major work...
Submitted by Alice on Tue, 01/19/2010 - 2:42am.
http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timelin...

» =====================

This will keep me reading for a while!

Thank you, Alice.

G'nite.

So, which story will we get facts on now if any -- Haiti or Israel?

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2010-01/18/content_12827209.htm

timing is everything and you can't say the israelis ever miss an opportunity to exploit it.

Is the U.S. Military handling this like somekind of New World Order practice drill instead of a REAL life and death emergency?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/17/us-accused-aid-effort-haiti

[excerpt]

US accused of annexing airport as squabbling hinders aid effort in HaitiPriority landing for Americans forces flights carrying emergency supplies to divert to Dominican Republic

The US military's takeover of emergency operations in Haiti has triggered a diplomatic row with countries and aid agencies furious at having flights redirected.

Brazil and France lodged an official ­protest with Washington after US military aircraft were given priority at Port-au-Prince's congested airport, forcing many non-US flights to divert to the Dominican Republic.

Brasilia warned it would not ­relinquish command of UN forces in Haiti, and Paris complained the airport had become a US "annexe", exposing a brewing power struggle amid the global relief effort. The Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières also complained about diverted flights.

The row prompted Haiti's president, René Préval, to call for calm. "This is an extremely difficult situation," he told AP. "We must keep our cool to co-ordinate and not throw accusations at each other."

The squabbling came amid signs that aid was reaching some of the hundreds of thousands of people in desperate need of water, food and medicine six days after a magnitude 7 earthquake levelled the capital, killing more than 100,000, according to Haitian authorities.

The UN was feeding 40,000 and hoped to increase that to 1 million within a fortnight, said the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, as he arrived in Port-au-Prince yesterday. "I am here with a message of hope that help is on the way," he said, speaking outside the severely damaged national palace. He also acknowledged "that many people are frustrated and they are losing their patience."

Ban said he has three priorities in Haiti: saving as many lives as possible, stepping up humanitarian assistance and ensuring the co-ordination of aid coming into the country. "We should not waste even a single item, a dollar," he said.

...

[end excerpt]

Photo ops for the Bigwigs causing tightened security and bumping actual emergency assistance to a lower priority? Is that what's happening?

Whatever, it sounds unacceptable. Hardly a 'squabbling' matter; sounds like justified protest that should be heeded.

A small part from the post on FDL by David Dayden. I have been reading & thinking about this alot. It't the progressive's dilema, we can't let our passions turn us into a circular firing squad

http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/01/18/the-obama-year-one-retrospectives...

--Some would say that the proper response to this all is to burn the President, hope for the derailing of his agenda, and move on. History has not been entirely kind to such a stance, from the perspective of moving the country forward. It’s not necessarily a “pre-buttal,” but Chris Hayes’ piece in The Nation is pretty important in this regard. He explains pretty perfectly the corporatism that has disappointed many on the left about the health care bill. He combines the broken government with the outsized influence of the corporate sector to produce a dispiriting picture of the political landscape. He recognizes the trap of pragmatism that has left Obama at the brink of progressive abandonment. This is precisely the locus of all the frustration, in my view – Obama promised a bottom-up movement for change and has acted top-down, mediating debates between stakeholders and only winding up with the limited success of the “politically possible.” He worked within the existing structures and made little effort to alter them after massively over-promising a transformative opportunity to use mass action to realize a progressive agenda.

But then Hayes makes an important turn, reminding readers that, for the most part, it was ever thus, and working within the system for an agenda that doesn’t align with moneyed interests is bound to produce heartache and disappointment
"...What the country needs more than higher growth and lower unemployment, greater income equality, a new energy economy and drastically reduced carbon emissions is a redistribution of power, a society-wide epidemic of re-democratization. The crucial moments of American reform and progress have achieved this: from the direct election of senators to the National Labor Relations Act, from the breakup of the trusts to the end of Jim Crow.

So in this new year, while the White House focuses on playing within the existing rules, it’s our job as citizens and activists to press constantly for changes to those rules: public financing, an end to the filibuster, the breakup of the banks, legalization for undocumented workers and the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, to name just a few of the measures that would alter the balance of power and expand the frontiers of the possible.

If I had to bet, I’d say that not of one of these will be won this year. The White House won’t be of much help, and on some issues, like breaking up the banks, it will represent the opposition. Always searching and never quite finding is grueling and often dispiriting work. But there is simply no alternative other than to give in and let the field turn hard and barren."

Frustration is truly the enemy of progress. And disengagement is only a trip into a cul-de-sac.

all my little angels - hope ya all r doing well.

Whats this I read... Israel is in Lebanon??

Top Ten Counter-Terrorism Scandals 2010

The new year is not very old, but several recent revelations cast the the US fight against al-Qaeda (a tiny if deadly fraternity of a couple thousand fanatics spread in dozens of countries) in a bad light, if not to say a scandalous one. The entire premise of combating al-Qaeda as though it were an enemy army, using the Pentagon as the lead agency, while simultaneously militarizing the CIA, needs to be questioned. But so too do a lot of other premises about a so-called American 'Long War' with parts of the Muslim world, including drone strikes, secret bases, and torture. Worst of all, embarrassing revelations are coming out about damaging or even criminal actions and policies that can only harm any genuine counter-terrorism program.

www.juancole.com

"There have been allegations of torture of inmates, including of teenagers.

Citigroup Reports a $1.6 Billion Loss in 2009

Even as it untangles itself from the federal government,
Citigroup has shown few signs of a quick recovery. On
Tuesday, the banking giant announced its second consecutive
yearly loss.

The bank said that it lost about $1.6 billion in 2009 --
after a $18.72 billion loss the year before. It also reported
$7.6 billion loss in the fourth quarter, the result of a
$10.1 billion accounting charge tied to the repayment of its
bailout money, which ended any chance of a profit. Last year,
the bank had a fourth quarter loss of $8.29 billion or a
$1.72 a share.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/business/20bank.html?emc=na

toniD's Ya Think?

Afghans paid $2.5bn (£1.5bn) in bribes over the past 12 months, or the equivalent of almost one quarter of legitimate GDP, a UN report suggests.
Surveying 7,600 people, it found nearly 60% more concerned about corruption than insecurity or unemployment.
More than half the population had to pay at least one bribe to a public official last year, the report adds.
The findings contrast sharply with a recent BBC survey in which the economy appeared to top Afghan concerns.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8466915.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8466915.stm

Mexico's Cave of Crystals stunned geologists when it was first discovered in 2000. The underground chamber contains some of the largest natural crystals ever found - some of the selenite structures have grown to more than 10m long. Professor Iain Stewart got a rare glimpse of the subterranean spectacle while filming for the new BBC series How the Earth Made Us.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8466493.stm

WOW...good stuff...excellently laid out arguments...and not too nasty...my admiration all the way around...great job peeps...a long passionate discussion, and no real blood drawn...awesome.

my turn, short and sweet....

"...content of their character..." (h/t MLK) I wouldn't care if it was called "The Adolph Hitler Final Solution Scholarship Fund", people still deserve to be judged by their individual actions...that does not mean I wouldn't keep one eye on it to see what kind of people were coming through it...or if a substantial number of them were related to ex-Nazi Party members...and in the end, even if they were, they are still entitled to be judged on their own merit....it is entirely possible to maintain separate and parallel trains of thought on any issue without allowing one to poison the other...and openly exploring one does not necessarily affect the course, or cognitive purity, of the other...

Some people process verbally, I am one of them, so occasionally I babble while trying to distill info into a lucid thought...that does not make me a total idiot, just partial, and only for the moment...it is always the final product that counts...much of the fierce disagreement here seems to be about process. IMO, that is a complete waste of time...

Not all people learn the same way, every process produces learning for someone, and, so far as they are not personally coercive or repressive, they are all valid, IMO...better to debate conclusions and their truth or fallacy...even failed experiments teach us something, but only if we keep an open mind....

Malloy read this last night...

http://www.alternet.org/story/145226/is_the_haiti_rescue_effort_failing?...

Destructive creativity

I don’t always agree with Naomi Klein, and I don’t always disagree with David Frum, but Klein wins this one hands down: Frum worries that financial regulation might crush “the creativity of the system,” Klein counters that “we could all do with them being a little less creative.”

This is usually framed, less colorfully, in terms of “financial innovation”, but the point needs to be repeated again and again: at this point, there is no reason to take it on faith that cleverness in the financial industry is a net social good. Unless you can provide some clear evidence of productive innovations since regulation began to unravel — and ATMs don’t count — the balance of the evidence suggests that smart people have been devising ingenious ways to concentrate risk and direct capital to the wrong uses.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/destructive-creativity/

toniD's Ya Think?

Politico buries fact that pollster predicting Coakley's demise is a former Gingrich staffer
by John Aravosis (DC) on 1/18/2010 05:16:00 PM
Nice of Politico to let us know, in the sixth paragraph of the story, that a pollster who is claiming that Coakley is in a "free fall" just happens to have worked for Newt Gingrich. Mind you, we're not talking just that he's a Republican. We're talking he worked for a rabid, no holds barred, take no prisoners Republican who would do pretty much anything to win. Nope, no bias there.

Time for a blogger ethics panel.

UPDATE: Brad Woodhouse at the DNC weighs in on why you shouldn't trust this poll:

1. It was conducted in one night -- which is notoriously unreliable
2. It has a 20 percent Republican sample -- which is 5-8 points more than most polls. Obviously skewing the sample more Republican than the electorate is -- is going to skew the result in Brown's favor.
3. The poll was conducted, and the charged quotes in the article are attributed to, a former aide to NEWT GINGRICH -- which Politico pointed in the 6th paragraph.
4. Does anyone really believe -- as this skewed poll shows -- that Brown is going to win 77% of Hispanics and 26% of blacks? Those results alone should ring alarm bells about the accuracy of this poll.

http://www.americablog.com/2010/01/politico-buries-fact-that-pollster.ht...

toniD's Ya Think?

Gun control groups give Obama an 'F.' I'm not so sure they don't deserve the same grade.
by John Aravosis (DC) on 1/18/2010 01:30:00 PM
Fair enough, but where have gun control groups been the past ten years?

President Barack Obama received a failing grade from the a gun control advocacy group on Monday.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence blasted the president, whom the group endorsed in 2008, for not having taken significant steps to advance gun control laws.

"It's been a very disappointing year for us, especially considering what he campaigned on," the group's president, Paul Helmke, said during an appearance on MSNBC. "This year they ran away from the issue, and actually signed two repeals of good gun legislation."

Every year or so we have a major gun eruption in this country, whether it's the DC shooter, Fort Hood, Columbine, the shooting at the school in Virginia, the shooting at the Holocaust Museum, and where have the anti-gun groups been to channel the anger and fear over these tragedies into greater gun control? It's time our gun control groups, if they even still exist, started borrowing a page from the GOP playbook. A Republican would know what to do. Then again, the gun control groups are no different than any other liberal advocacy group over the past decade. Missed opportunity is their middle name.

..

http://www.americablog.com/2010/01/gun-control-groups-give-obama-f-im-no...

toniD's Ya Think?

Brad Friedman isn't too hopeful about the fate of the election results since it is in the hands of Diebold and friends...

http://www.bradblog.com/

SEC protecting AIG secrets

Did we really indirectly bail out Société Générale?

The "out of touch, want their pony, fringe liberals" labeling

It doesn't even make sense. Last I checked many people in the US aren't doing so great. Even some of the teabaggers are struggling but they are too deluded to realize the very people they are cheering are at fault.

The political establishment deliberately scapegoats the "fringe left" because the "fringe left" has the audacity to expect elected officials to represent the public. In fact it appears that the "fringe left" is the only group in the country that isn't ok with corporate fascism. So it makes all the sense in the world for the political establishment to try to portray the "fringe left" as out of touch.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&add...

And read the comments. You find it interesting. Dissent even at DU.

toniD's Ya Think?

5.8 earthquake shakes Cayman Islands
Source: Miami Herald

A 5.8 earthquake shook the Cayman Islands, south of Cuba on Tuesday morning, reports said.

On Monday morning, a strong earthquake rocked Guatemala and parts of El Salvador, but no there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage in either country. The U.S. Geological Survey says the quake had a preliminary magnitude of 6.0.

The USGS says it hit Monday morning about 60 miles (97 kilometers) southwest of Guatemala City, where it was felt by many residents. There were reports of shaking in the Guatemalan countryside and in El Salvador as well.

Civil protection officials in the two countries says so far there are no reports of injuries or damage, but authorities are still checking.

http://www.miamiherald.com/854/story/1433247.html

toniD's Ya Think?

MA report from the ground: Turnout HUGE Updated at 10:25 AM

MA report from the ground: Turnout HUGE
by firenze
Tue Jan 19, 2010 at 06:53:13 AM PST

My heart sank when I got up this morning and saw that it was snowing steadily. Would voters turn out? Then I went to vote, and the scene exceeded my hopes. It looked like a busy presidential election day. Turnout was MASSIVE at my polling place, which is a good liberal Democratic stronghold. There was still a cop directing traffic in and out after 9 am.

A friend who voted when the polls opened said he had the hardest time parking at his polling place as he's ever had. I know it's not over until the votes are counted. But if this election is truly about turnout, and those 2 precincts are any indication of what's going on statewide, there are going to be a lot of happy Democrats tonight.

You're all heroes. All of you, everywhere. Every one of you who phonebanked and contacted people you know in Mass and did all the hard work of getting turnout. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Because here's the thing.

more:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/1/19/826773/-MA-report-from-the-g...

toniD's Ya Think?

Fishy Ballot In Cambridge? “Scott Brown’s bubble was already filled in”

Edited on Tue Jan-19-10 10:21 AM by jefferson_dem
Fishy Ballot In Cambridge?

A software engineer in Cambridge tells he was handed a fishy ballot at the polling station in a local firehouse — it already had the bubble next to Scott Brown’s name filled in. But doesn’t think it likely that it was fraud.

“Scott Brown’s bubble was already filled in,” the software engineer, Aaron Kemp, 28, tells me by phone. “I handed it back to them and asked, `Can I have a clean ballot, please?’”

The workers at the polling place in the Lexington Avenue Firehouse “were very surprised,” Kemp says, adding that he asked them to look through the other ballots to see if any others had a bubble filled in. “They looked through and they didn’t see any other ones,” he says.

Kemp says the area is very Democratic, and he worries that other voters might get a similar ballot without noticing, fill in Martha Coakley’s name, and submit a ballot with two names filled in, rendering it ineligible. But he says he thinks it was more likely a foul up than fraud. And, obviously, this is only one example.

http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/senate-republicans/fishy-ballot-in-cam...

toniD's Ya Think?

All the more reason to try to stay focused on individual issues...

it is in all our best interests not to address the ideological minutia right now... we are arguing about the color of the drapes in a burning house.

toniD's Ya Think?

and that is why we should concentrate on the issues and set aside conspiracy theories right now.

any ideas on catchy memes we can use?

toniD's Ya Think?

FBI broke law for years in phone record searches

By John Solomon and Carrie Johnson
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, January 19, 2010

The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.

E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats.

A Justice Department inspector general's report due out this month is expected to conclude that the FBI frequently violated the law with its emergency requests, bureau officials confirmed.

The records seen by The Post do not reveal the identities of the people whose phone call records were gathered, but FBI officials said they thought that nearly all of the requests involved terrorism investigations.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/18/AR201001...

toniD's Ya Think?

no, but I have some conspiracy theories specifically about why Lobbying Reform will be so difficult to achieve. :)

...just kidding...

That's fact!!

So the plan will be important. And the carrying out of the plan is imperative. And we have to get people to stay diligent.

Big Job!

toniD's Ya Think?

it occurs to me any campaign message that might include teabaggers or even less Liberal Democrats needs to be carefully crafted as to not give people who would object to that message a means of countering it without directly opposing it...

for instance, a sign that says Campaign Finance Reform now! will be far less likely to be pulled out of someones hands by a teabagger than a sign saying "Public Campaign Financing now!" due to the issue of tax dollars...

We have to start paying close attention to what the "Loyal Opposition" might object to and be careful to word our message to work around it.

"oldies but goodies" memes from history that we might be able to borrow from and/or enhance for our purpose. Where's Jim Hightower when you need him?!?!?!

he has been telling us for years how to form a united front on issues, I am sure he has a few goodies laying around somewhere...

I have heard kateanne invoke Thom when talking about messaging, she might have some good input here too...

Beautiful Canadian guitars& mandolins
Submitted by taozen on Mon, 01/18/2010 - 5:36pm.
http://proulxguitars.com/images/fun_photos/cold.jpg
=

On The Rhode Again

Blue Roots Radio

all the time unless they're "Big"

But don't you think the seismic action of the Earth is over-active of late?

Yellowstone earthquake swarm continues into third day, intensifies

Source: Denver Post

The swarm of earthquakes that started Sunday at Yellowstone National Park continued this morning with the magnitude of the tremors increasing last night and today.

At 9:48 a.m. today, a magnitude 3.3 tremor was recorded. A magnitude 3.3 tremor was also recorded at 8:39 p.m. Monday night followed by a magnitude 3.0 earthquake at 9:42 p.m. Monday. Prior to the 3.3 at 9:48 a.m., the park had seen tremors of 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 this morning.

As of 9:20 a.m. today, 424 earthquakes had been recorded in the swarm, according to Jamie Farrell, a doctoral student in geophysics at the University of Utah, which operates more than two dozen earthquake recording stations in the park.

=snip=

Prof. Robert B. Smith, a geophysicist at the University of Utah and one of the leading experts on earthquake and volcanic activity at Yellowstone, said that the activity is a "notable swarm."

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_14221601

toniD's Ya Think?

Yogi Bear made that (you know) pact with the devil.

Where's Pat Robertscum now?

We asked for it when we made that pact with Ranger Hal?

toniD's Ya Think?

exit stage right

"I don't know Yogi...The Ranger's not gonna like this..."

...and btw, it was Ranger Smith. ;)

The Labor Unions can not be in the lead role...the right has been brainwashed into patent distrust, and even hatred of the Unions by almost 100 years of propaganda...

Labor must agree to a support role in any multilateral protests...even the signage must be devoid of Union affiliation...that does not mean we can not accept help or money with the organizing, just that we can't advertise it....I am confident the right will be willing to look the other way with regard to union involvement, but not if it is in their face...

Jon Stewart Makes Fun Of Martha Coakley, Scott Brown, And Their Race For Kennedy’s Seat.

“The Republicans are playing chess and the Dems are in the nurses office because, once again, they glued their balls to their thighs.” – Jon Stewart.

“I’m sorry, I thought I was in good enough shape to get through an explanation of how f*cked up the Democrats are but, they are really f*cked up. It’s not your fault Democratic party leadership. No one should have raised the bar of expectations for you. We should just leave the bar on the ground. Wait for you to trip.” – Jon Stewart.

Must watch video at link:

http://storyballoon.org/videos/jon-stewart-weighs-in-on-the-massachusett...

toniD's Ya Think?

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_all.htm...

~`ordinary's just not good enough today - olp`~
Jamesbenet

Blue Roots Radio

I remember a NatGeo special about that whole area being in the mouth of one Gigantic Volcano...

sure 'slpians the quakes....

and this goes to the anti-union brainwash/mindfuck too...

If we could just find a meme/paradigm to really fuck with how they've fucked with the concept of privilege and "over-priviligedness" until it has come to apply to everybody but who it should...So that rights are what get taken away or not expanded for everybody but those who get more privileges as supposed rights.

I think that would link to just about every area you/we think is important.

I think that's kind of what the "Billionaires For" groups are doing, but apparently we need more.

Thinking hard about the concepts of privileges and rights.

But I don't know how (else) to get that on a sign or whatever.

-----

This is not exactly all of that point, but I remember something I read in a UU mag a long time ago that was in the specific context of dialogue around racism.

One woman's contribution started something like: What is there were a certain number of people who had one arm ripped off at birth and then they just had to live like that. Does that make the people who still have two arms privileged, or is there a more accurate way to describe that position?

"Frankly," in terms of racism/ white privilege I think it undercomplicates a little, but then there is something about it that has always stuck with me so maybe there is something useful.

And I thought...no because add in the people who have two arms and they are full of gold and diamond bracelets.

As you can tell, this is just rambling. Still won't fit on a sign and probably not nearly as practically oriented as what you seem to be talking about.

Will The Banks Win Again? Bailout Watchdog Rallies Support For Consumer Protection Agency

The battle in the Senate over a proposed consumer financial protection agency is the final show-down between banks and American families, bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren wrote to supporters Monday night.

The outcome "will show whether we are going to let the industry continue to write the rules -- to keep the cops off the beat -- or whether the financial crisis actually changed something."

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) is said to be considering dropping the proposed independent agency from the Senate's financial reform bill.
(Why would he do this if he isn't running again? Now's the time for Dodd to push it in their face! Screw the GOP!!!)

But Warren isn't giving up. "We have all worked hard to make the CFPA into a reality, and the next few weeks will determine whether our hard work will make a difference for families or whether families will lose once again," the Harvard Law professor and advocate for the middle class wrote. "The next few weeks will determine whether families will have to play by rules written by the banks and for the banks -- rules that let the industry get away with anything. In my view, we cannot let families lose again."

The new agency would be equipped with the power to write rules governing basic consumer credit products like home mortgages and credit cards, and would have the authority to regulate big banks and monitor their compliance.

Federal bank regulators, who focus on the safety and soundness of the country's banking system, are mostly concerned with bank profitability, consumer advocates and law professors say. Consumer protection has not been a priority.

But there's been a growing recognition that the lack of adequate protection for consumers helped cause the financial meltdown of 2008.

President Obama and his advisers have repeatedly called for such an agency, arguing that it's the best way to protect consumers from the big banks. The House passed a financial reform bill modeled on his proposal in December.
Story continues below
(He must speak up that he wants this, strongly! He must tell the Dems to pass this! Not the time to be passive!)

Republicans have vowed to defeat any bill creating such an agency, arguing that its proposed powers are best left to the bank regulators. Federal banking regulators also oppose it, arguing that it's hard to separate bank regulation from consumer protection. (They are all for failed policies because they can fill their pockets!!!)

Blocking the CFPA has been atop the banking industry's legislative agenda since last summer. The industry has spent millions lobbying and campaigning against such an agency, which they argue would lead to increased costs and less credit for consumers. (Institute large fines for any improprieties, don't call it a tax, call it a fine!)

The power of the bank lobby on Capitol Hill cannot be understated. As Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) put it in April, as a bankruptcy bill he championed went down in flames, "they frankly own the place." (So do something about this)

According to multiple news reports, Dodd is proposing to ditch the CFPA as an independent agency. The goal, he says, is to secure Republican support for the overall legislation. Rather, he would ask Republicans to support a consumer-protection division within another federal agency, such as the Treasury Department or a regulatory agency. (Oh sure, give Treasury more power to screw up!)

But it's not lost on reformers that federal regulators and those they regulate appear to be in lock-step with one another. Just last week, the head of the country's second-biggest bank, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, praised federal banking regulators.

"I have been completely clear throughout that regulators should not be blamed," Dimon said of the bank regulators and their perceived role in the near-meltdown of the nation's financial system. The regulators, after all, allowed banks like Dimon's to do whatever they wanted, critics allege, like giving mortgages to unqualified borrowers and then securitizing them for sale to unsuspecting investors, spreading risk throughout the system. (Bullshit)

The lack of effective regulation was one of the main drivers behind the collapse. Now the question is will the new regulations be any better. (Better than nothing, but better to put in good regulations that will prevent the banksters from gambling with our money!)

Warren writes in her letter: "The fate of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency will be the best way to follow the story moving forward because consumer products were the most abusive and because the CFPA has real muscle to stop those abuses," she wrote. "The CFPA would hire new cops and change the way big banks do business.

READ the entire letter: at link

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/will-the-banks-win-again_n_4276...

toniD's Ya Think?

The Devil Sues Pat Robertson for Breach of Contract
* January 18, 2010 – 12:14 am

EP: Virginia Beach – The devil filed a lawsuit in the Virginia Beach district court on Thursday suing Pat Robertson for breach of contract. “Pat Robertson has broken the terms of our agreement with him” said Arthur B. Ellzebub, an attorney for satan, “His public comments regarding various pacts we may or may not be involved in is in clear violation of the non-disclosure agreement we signed with him 36 years ago.” Ellzebub went on to explain that the controversy surrounding Robertson’s comments about the recent tragedy in Haiti is creating significant confusion as to whom exactly has a contractual relationship with the devil. Ellzebub clarified the issue when he explained that “Mr. Robertson first approached us seeking fame, fortune and power,...
==
The 'Devil' Writes Pat Robertson A Letter
By Frank James at NPR

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action.
But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.
Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"?
If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.
You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan
==============================

Something else we can agree with the baggers on,
Sarah Palin should run for president;)

~`ordinary's just not good enough today - olp`~
Jamesbenet

Blue Roots Radio

High Voter Turnout For Brown-Coakley Senate Race

BOSTON (WBZ) ― It's time to go to the polls, even if you have to wait.

Voter turnout is heavy for the special election today to fill the state's vacant U.S. Senate seat.

Many faced backups at polling stations around the Commonwealth.

A win by Republican Scott Brown over one-time front-runner Martha Coakley would eliminate Democrats' 60-seat supermajority in the Senate and likely kill President Obama's overhaul of health care.

[...]

Link

h/t HuffPo

Conventional wisdom says high voter turnout always favors Dems...it will be interesting to see just how true that truism actually is these days....

By Philip Stephens

Published: January 18 2010 20:15 | Last updated: January 18 2010 20:15

When Lloyd Blankfein met politicians in London a little while ago he brushed aside warnings that investment banks faced higher taxes if they ignored the rising public outcry about multibillion-dollar bonus pools. The Goldman chief executive seemed to believe governments would not dare.

That misjudgment – a measure of the breathtaking hubris that, even after all that has happened, continues to separate bankers from just about everyone else – may explain Goldman’s response to the British government’s decision to apply a 50 per cent tax to this year’s payouts.

In the description of Whitehall insiders, Goldman executives reacted with anger and aggression. The threat was that the bank would scale back its business in London. For a moment it seemed Gordon Brown’s administration might wobble. In the event, Goldman’s lobbying failed to persuade it to soften the impact of the tax.

Britain, of course, is not alone. France has imposed its own bonus tax. Barack Obama’s administration has just announced a levy to recover an estimated $90bn (£55bn, €63bn) over 10 years. The centre-right government in Sweden has gone further by introducing a permanent “stability levy” to discourage excessive risk-taking.

It is a measure of how far the political debate has shifted against the financial plutocrats that George Osborne, the Tory shadow chancellor, has applauded the Swedish plan. If the Tories win the coming general election, they would support a worldwide levy along similar lines. It is “unacceptable”, Mr Osborne remarked the other day, for the banks to be paying big bonuses rather than building resilience against future crises.

So far, so encouraging. But the process cannot end here. Irritating as it may be to Mr Blankfein, a one-off bonus tax is not going to change anything in the medium to long term. Levies such as that in Sweden mark a recognition that the profits and remuneration policies of the banks are more than a fleeting problem. But forcing bankers to strengthen balance sheets with money they would rather put in their own pockets addresses only part of the problem.

The next stage must be scrutiny of the structural distortions that allow these institutions to rack up such huge profits. Broadly speaking, the leading players in at least three areas of investment banking – wholesale markets, underwriting and mergers and acquisitions – have been operating natural oligopolies.

Their profits have been in significant part a reflection of the absence of robust competition. There are different reasons for this in the different areas of business – what economists call asymmetries in some and market dominance in others. But as long as they are not addressed, the banks will make profits – or more accurately, extract rents – out of all proportion to any contribution they make to the wider economy.

During the good times no one worried too much about these oligopolies. Markets were booming and the investment banks persuaded policymakers that they made a big net contribution to economic dynamism. That myth has now been exploded. (Oligopolies!)

The absence of sufficient competition has been raised by Lord Turner, the chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority. He has suggested a transaction tax to deal with the problem in wholesale markets. Christine Lagarde, France’s finance minister, has recently circulated a more detailed paper to governments and regulators. But too many policymakers have so far ducked the issue.

Even if the banks can be forced to take fewer risks they will likely continue to make excess profits. The issue is one of competition rather than regulation. A possible answer might be a move by competition authorities to lower barriers to new entrants. More likely, a serious examination would conclude that the excess profits are best dealt with through taxation.

Many in Mr Blankfein’s world want to pretend the backlash against the banks is a conspiracy between the mob and populist politicians. They hope, and expect, the pressure will go away when prosperity returns.

Tax and regulation should not be used as weapons to settle scores, however tempting that might be. But the banks have had it too good for too long; and the rest of us are now paying the bill. Institutions in the vanguard of spreading liberal market economics around the world were all the while making fortunes in markets that were rigged to their advantage.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d2424f46-0461-11df-8603-00144feabdc0.html

toniD's Ya Think?

Back to the ole grind!

Here's something you might want to read....

Fed's AIG Bailout: Bernanke Requests A 'Full Review' From Government Accountability Office

toniD's Ya Think?

~`ordinary's just not good enough today - olp`~
Jamesbenet

Blue Roots Radio

Bring In the Lawyers

Tea party activists in Florida file lawsuit against a GOP consultant and his ally over who has the right to use the name "Tea Party."

Gotta love this quote that one of the plaintiffs gave TPMmuckraker:

We have a very successful movement, similar to the Civil Rights movement, or women's suffrage. And we have a political entity that's trying to take advantage of that. They're trying to take that success and momentum and hijack it for their own political and/or personal needs.

As Arlo Guthrie would say, "Friends, they may thinks it's a movement."

--David Kurtz

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/whats_in_a_name_tea_pa...

toniD's Ya Think?

Barney Frank: 'God Didn't Create The Filibuster'

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) suggested that the Senate abolish the filibuster in recent interview with Air America Radio.

"It is time to shut it down," Frank said. "God didn't create the filibuster, it's part of the Senate rules."

He continued: "We have a serious constitutional problem. Tthere has been a de facto amendment of the U.S. Constitution in an anti-small-D democratic direction."

"It is outrageous," Frank said. "It tends to be, in many cases, the senators from those smaller states that aggregate to get up to be the 40." Less populous states, he argued, end up with a disproportionate amount of power.

Watch The Video: at link

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/barney-frank-god-didnt-cr_n_428...

toniD's Ya Think?

If coakley loses...Tim Kaine will be handed his hat as DNC Chair...

not a very high limb as limbs go, but with this crowd one tends to avoid the longshots...

but, this next limb is quite a few branches higher...he will be replaced by Donna Brazille.....

[cent dabs the sweat off his brow]... Come on Coakley......

fire and brimstone
human sacrifice
dogs and cats sleeping together

She truly is a wonder, isn't she? I'll be stunned if she pulls out this special election tonight, based upon my simple rule that candidates who make the most structural campaign mistakes tend to lose elections. The larger media narrative -- that this is a referendum on health care reform -- has long been in motion, and is well nigh unstoppable. But I wouldn't take away the lesson that the country opposes health care reform. Rather, I'd take away the lesson that in the current economic climate, you shouldn't run candidates who act complacent and entitled.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/democrat-martha-coakley-a_n_428...

Jane Hampshire was on, Nate silver and another guy, I missed his name because I caught the very end of it.

And the Dylan did his own comment, ala Keith O, re the bought for politicians. If we don't like what's happening, tell the politicians, if they don't act on it, vote them out, but don't not do something.

Hope the vid's up later. I'll have to catch it after work/

toniD's Ya Think?

a harbinger of foul play to come? I seem to remember in 2004 the exit polls becoming obsolete or rather a hindrance in fixing the votes by the foul machines

Massachusetts Exit Polls For 2010 Senate Race: There Are None

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/massachusetts-exit-polls_n_4286...

more bullshit

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/health-stocks-up-as-inves_n_428...

Health Stocks Up As Investors Sense GOP Victory in Mass.
First Posted: 01-19-10 02:20 PM | Updated: 01-19-10 04:30 PM

digg Huffpost - stumble reddit del.ico.us

Read More: Health Care, Health Care Reform, Health Care Stocks, Health Insurance Companies, Health Insurance Industry, Martha Coakley, Massachusetts Senate Race, Scott Brown, Stock Prices, Business News
This story was updated at 4:30 p.m. ET to reflect the market's close.

Wall Street is already betting that a Republican win in Massachusetts will complicate efforts to get a strong health care reform package through Congress.

Six major health insurance company stocks went up Tuesday as pundits and reporters began writing off the candidacy of the state Attorney General Martha Coakley. Republican State Senator Scott Brown appears to have won before the votes have even been counted.

Investors are counting on it.

Health insurance companies would presumably benefit financially if the current legislation is further watered down or even killed. Without a 60-vote super-majority, so goes the thinking, Democrats would have to start negotiating away hard-won concessions or face defeat.

As of Tuesday's market close:

Coventry Health Care, Inc. was up 6.0 percent;
CIGNA Corp. was up 2.9 percent;
Aetna Inc. was up 4.2 percent;
WellPoint, Inc. was up 2.1 percent;
UnitedHealth Group Inc. was up 4.1 percent;
And Humana Inc. was up 7.1 percent.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, by comparison, was up just 1.1 percent.

Have a great afternoon/evening.

Later

toniD's Ya Think?

Gunsights' biblical references concern US and UK forces

Coded references to biblical passages are inscribed on gunsights widely used by the US and British military in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has emerged.

The markings include "2COR4:6" and "JN8:12", relating to verses in the books of Corinthians II and John.

Trijicon, the US-based manufacturer, was founded by a devout Christian, and says it runs to "Biblical standards".

...

~`ordinary's just not good enough today - olp`~
Jamesbenet

Blue Roots Radio

This crappy health care bill buys the citizens of Massachusetts nothing and costs them money. Why wouldn't they want to torpedo it?

AGAIN, President Obama craps on his supporters then he thinks they will follow him or his agenda? People aren't that crazy.

Vincent Jackson arrested Sunday

San Diego Chargers wide receiver Vincent Jackson has already been convicted of DUI...So you figure that Jackson would just carry a quiet profile. But apparently the music in his car wasn't quiet enough Sunday and that put him in handcuffs again. The San Diego Police Department confirmed Monday that Jackson's vehicle was pulled over because he was playing loud music as he headed to the team's facility early Sunday morning...Jackson was taken out of his vehicle and handcuffed for a short period of time. With the choice to take Jackson to jail or cite him, the officer cited the wide receiver and impounded his vehicle, Jackson caught a ride from quarterback Philip Rivers to Sunday's playoff game against the New York Jets.
http://www.fftoolbox.com/football/nfl_news.cfm?news_id=1161

I cannot get Google, Yahoo, or MSN. I must say that living in Ohio makes me a little uneasy- when something goes wrong during an election.

Who is your ISP? I'm WOW subscriber myself..

Submitted by maggiesboy on Tue, 01/19/2010 - 8:00pm.
-----

THAX Maggiesboys

Those wiley bandwidth bandits! ;-)

First we create a market for Haitian rubble jewelry.

Then we sit back and wait for the humanitarian awards.

http://www.boston.com/news/special/politics/2010/senate/results.html

there's a new windows update out

~`ordinary's just not good enough today - olp`~
Jamesbenet

Blue Roots Radio

Rahm and the DNC really might lose!!!

Complete 911 Timeline
1980-1992

Thanks _Alice_

Still down by 5. She's toast.
Now bo can turn to the right.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/haiti/a-once-sleepy-airport-is...

A once sleepy airport is now Haiti's overstretched lifeline

A scant 28 minutes after landing, the special emergency airport operations teams from the U.S. Air Force had taken control of Haitian airspace...

...That was barely 24 hours after the massive earthquake levelled much of Port-au-Prince but miraculously left the country's longest runway unscathed. That ribbon of concrete is now Haiti's overstretched lifeline.

Since then, nearly 1,000 large aircraft have landed, unloaded and taken off again in seven days, on a single runway at an airport normally so sleepy that it usually handles three passenger jets a day.

Today, more than 180 flights – included several dozen hulking C-17s capable of carrying 100 tonnes of aid – are expected to arrive in an intricate aerial and constantly re-choreographed dance...
----------------------
1,000 aircraft in-and-out in 7 days is 142.85 per day or 5.95 aircraft per hour or one every 10.08 minutes.

180 flights arriving in 24 hours is 7.5 flights per hour or one flight every 8 minutes.

Even if the totals include helicopters and small aircraft, the talent on display is stunning.

As long as the Democrats trust the Republicans to count the vote, expect to lose. If you noticed, the vote percentages have been the same for about an hour. I've seen this numerous times in Ohio. The fix is in.

Coakley Pollster Defends Campaign Against White House

The blame game is fully underway. A top pollster to Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley told HuffPost on Tuesday that the White House, in attempting to blame the Coakley campaign for a potential defeat today in Massachusetts, underestimates the wave of populist fury among Massachusetts voters.

Pollster Celinda Lake said Coakley was hampered by the failure of the White House and Congress to confront Wall Street. That failure, she said, means that Democrats are being blamed by angry independent voters worried about the state of the economy.

"If Scott Brown wins tonight he'll win because he became the change-oriented candidate. Voters are still voting for the change they voted for in 2008, but they want to see it. And right now they think they've got economic policies for Washington that are delivering more for banks than Main Street."

Asked about reported criticism from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Lake said she had seen the stories. "I think it's a circling squad to protect the White House. I don't think it's very useful," she said, mixing a metaphor while getting across a clear message.

Lake said that the problem for Democrats is that voters are blaming them for the nation's poor economic conditions. "2010 is fast turning out to be a blame election and I think that either we are going to characterize who deserves the blame - whether that's banks and lobbyists and people who still want to hold on to national Republican economic strategies - or we're going to get the blame. And that's a very different tone than, often, the administration is comfortable with," she said.

The feeling among voters, said Lake, is that Washington prioritizes Wall Street over Main Street and that, despite Coakley's credentials as a state attorney general who has taken on and beaten Wall Street banks, sending her to Washington would not make a difference. "On the eve of the election, Martha Coakley had a 21-point advantage over Scott Brown on who would fight Wall Street and deliver for Main Street. But it didn't predict to the vote, because voters thought, even if they sent her down here that it wouldn't happen. 'Fine, she had done it in Massachusetts, but no one was doing it in Washington,'" Lake said. "Voters are voting for change and we have to go back to that change message. And we have to deliver on change, especially an economic policy that serves working people."

Lake pointed to polling released by the Economic Policy Institute showing that 65 percent of Americans though the stimulus served banks interests, 56 percent thought it served corporations and only ten percent that it benefited them. "That is a formula for failure for the Democrats. We have to deliver on economic policies that take on Wall Street and we have to do it for five months, not just five days. We really have to deliver on the policies," she said.

The tit-for-tat over tactics, said Lake, risks missing the wave that is headed toward Democrats. "There's a lot of blame to go around, but the point of the matter is there's a wave. And that wave: it hit Virginia; it hit New Jersey; it hit Massachusetts," she said.
Story continues below

Lake also said that electing a woman statewide in Massachusetts is a difficult project. "People aren't processing [that] Massachusetts is an incredibly difficult state to elect a woman in. And Massachusetts is not that Democratic a state in behavior," she said, citing its choice of a number of statewide elected Republicans, including former Governor Mitt Romney.

But if party leaders wanted to point fingers, they should remember that they made tactical mistakes, too, she said. Lake argued that the underfunded campaign didn't have money for tracking polls, and so didn't see Republican Scott Brown's comeback until it was well underway. The campaign also didn't have money, she said, for television ads that could have shaped a populist message and defined her opponent as a friend of Wall Street. The party establishment didn't back the campaign with significant resources until the closing days of the campaign.

"I think [the criticism from Emanuel] ignores -- there were a lot of mistakes made all the way around, but number one, we had no tracking data. Number two, we said to the campaign, we have to get up [with ads on TV] earlier. Number three, in the primary, when we had money, we ran a populist economic message," she said. "And number four, we had no money and there may be lots of critiques about that, but we should remember that there were [Democratic] institutions" that could have kicked in campaign cash.
More...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/coakley-pollster-defends_n_4286...

toniD's Ya Think?

i don't wanna poop all over the place so i'll withhold my opinion

not looking forward to the gop's unbearable gloating the next few days

but maybe a wake up call for the spineless worthless dems? HOPE that will be the case

and as for Mass, shit, i did live there and loved the state, they will be in need of some waking up

first it was california with the schwarzenegger crap, and now massachusetts they will have their porn star teabagger asshole

hard to phatom, but what will it take for this country to finally see the path to sanity?

sorry, maybe i should have just shut up

howard dean up on rachel's show

Too much to hope for that the Dems primary o,
but this should be the last straw for some:

Thanks a lot, bipartisan Barry! (0+ / 0-)

He just had to take our entire party down with his magical, whimsical quest for bipartisanship that anyone with a brain cell could tell WOULD NEVER HAPPEN EVER.

by Paul White on Tue Jan 19, 2010 at 06:06:24 PM PST
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/19/827018/-MA-Sen:-Results-Thread-#...

noisy for elections. The background noise is driving me crazy!

toniD's Ya Think?

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-athanasiadas17-2010jan17,0,480...

Iran's political winds are shifting

The opposition movement is gaining strength, and signs are emerging that the government could collapse.

By Iason Athanasiadis

January 17, 2010

I'd like to personally take this moment (7+ / 0-)

Recommended by:
Collideascope, davidkc, Sleepwalkr, bluedonkey08, mirandasright, Theston, littlebird33

to thank Mass for taking away Cali's "OMG How Are These People So Stupid Aren't They Supposed to be Liberal?" Trophy.

but getting paid to hangout in a Boston Pub and talk politics all night is a job I could live with. :)

IT'S OVER!

GPTX Announces Slate of Candidates

Jan 14, 2010

Green Party of Texas Announces Candidates for Public Office

The Green Party of Texas announces that 21 candidates have filed to run for nomination by the Green Party in 2010 for a variety of state, district and county offices.

Thomas Muhammad, Co-chair of GPTX, spoke on the quality of the candidates as a whole. "The Green Party of Texas is extremely excited about the wonderful slate of candidates who've put themselves up for our 2010 election cycle. We look forward to an aggressive campaign through the June convention. We will then work with our final slate to run hard as our party moves to break the dominating two-party system in our state. This is the type of work our party was created for, so we say to all Greens and to Texans one and all who love true democracy let the campaign season begin!"
http://txgreens.org/drupal/

The Dems only have themselves to blame.

mire, I hope you are right and it's a wake-up call to the Dems and Obama's Admin. He won because the nation leaned liberal, even the independents but he didn't stay true to change. SOS is not good enough.

What a time and opportunity for people to start marching and pushing!

Rachel is arguing with Tweety!

toniD's Ya Think?

Should be fun watching Lieberman and H Ford "interpret" the results for the next two weeks.

With the size of the turnout and the split of the vote anyone who says this was not a mandate for the Right needs to think it through again...

The only question is how will the Dems respond...will they fold and chase the poll numbers or stand and fight and try to bring the votes to them?

Magic 8 Ball says..."The Future is uncertain"

Kiss the country goodbye!

toniD's Ya Think?

how did the Libertarian do?

"Riddles of the Sphinx"

Lieberman Urges Party To Go Centrist After Mass. Election

Eager to prove that the Democratic Party left him and not the other way around, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) urged his colleagues on Tuesday to move to the "center" following a humbling Senate race in Massachusetts.

"I think the message is from the voters of Massachusetts that people are anxious about the future and they're unhappy about what's happening in Washington," said the Connecticut Independent Democrat, during an interview on Fox News. "They're anxious about the economy, the continued high unemployment. They don't like all the partisanship and deal-making here in Washington. And they're really skeptical about the health care bill."

"So this is going to be a loud message from Massachusetts and whether it's right or wrong, I was impressed again by one of the national polls I saw yesterday that said two things; one is opposition to health care reform is very large among independents, unregistered with the party voters, and Massachusetts is thought of as a blue state and it generally does vote Democratic but almost 50% of the voters are unaffiliated so they've got the liberty to..."

Asked whether he was giving any additional consideration to formally leaving the Democratic Party to caucus with Republicans, Lieberman repeated that his intent was to remain in his current standing.

"I was elected as an independent but remained a registered Democrat so I'm with the Democratic caucus. So I call myself an Independent Democrat. I think the independents are speaking loudly around the country today and they're telling us: one, to get together in Washington [and] get some things [done]... Second thing is to do something about the economy and move to the center and worry about things that they're worried about."

The potential loss of Attorney General Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate election is going to spark a major debate about the future direction of the Democratic Party. Undoubtedly, conservative Democrats like Lieberman will make the case that health care reform has effectively scared away a huge swath of Democratic-leaning independent voters. But the data, if anything, points to equal, if not more, concern over the inability of the administration to deliver on legislative promises. New numbers from the polling firm founded by Democratic consultants Stan Greenberg and James Carville reveals that while 46 percent of Republicans are intensely enthusiastic about the 2010 election, just 33 percent of Democrats feel the same way.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/lieberman-urges-party-to_n_4286...

toniD's Ya Think?

Had Coakley won it would have reinforced the complacency that has filled the party at the top. All they want to do is court corporate donations and write corporate friendly legislation.

This loss is a win for all of us who have been getting crapped on and told to shut up and like it. I don't give a shit how much the Republicans gloat, they just elected another Clown-Dick to the Senate and he'll fit right in.

Will the current crop of Democrats get serious, get a message and get real? I don't have the feeling they will because I don't see how they can snuggled so nicely in the pants of the corporatocracy.

didn't take Lieberman long:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/lieberman-urges-party-to_n_4286...

http://www.samsedershow.com/comment/reply/5603#comment-form

Liberal Bloggers to Obama and Dems: We Told You So
Peter Daou

It took more than half a decade, countless American and Iraqi deaths in a war based on lies, a sinking economy and the drowning of an American city to finally kill Bush-Cheney-Rove's dream of a conservative realignment.

Democrats, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, have managed to kill their own dream of dominance in 12 months.

How did it happen?

Theories abound, but two diametrically opposed narratives have taken hold:

The first, promulgated by conservatives, is that the new administration has moved too far to the left and alienated a large swath of independent and moderate voters.

The second, pushed by progressive activists and bloggers, is that the administration hasn't been true enough to fundamental Democratic principles, has embraced some of Bush's worst excesses on civil liberties, and has ditched popular ideas (like the public option) in favor of watered down centrist policies, thus looking weak and ineffectual.

The conservative argument is unpersuasive. After years of a systematic effort by the right to use Overton-style tactics to radicalize our national discourse, the center has moved so far right that the left is barely recognizable. With a military surge in Afghanistan, a denuded health insurance bill limping through Congress, Bush-era detainee policies reinforced, a deflated climate summit, and a windfall year for bankers, among other things, it's almost ludicrous to claim that the new administration is run by a gang of lefties.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-daou/liberal-bloggers-to-obama_b_429...

toniD's Ya Think?

Liberal Bloggers to Obama and Dems: We Told You So
Peter Daou

It took more than half a decade, countless American and Iraqi deaths in a war based on lies, a sinking economy and the drowning of an American city to finally kill Bush-Cheney-Rove's dream of a conservative realignment.

Democrats, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, have managed to kill their own dream of dominance in 12 months.

How did it happen?

Theories abound, but two diametrically opposed narratives have taken hold:

The first, promulgated by conservatives, is that the new administration has moved too far to the left and alienated a large swath of independent and moderate voters.

The second, pushed by progressive activists and bloggers, is that the administration hasn't been true enough to fundamental Democratic principles, has embraced some of Bush's worst excesses on civil liberties, and has ditched popular ideas (like the public option) in favor of watered down centrist policies, thus looking weak and ineffectual.

The conservative argument is unpersuasive. After years of a systematic effort by the right to use Overton-style tactics to radicalize our national discourse, the center has moved so far right that the left is barely recognizable. With a military surge in Afghanistan, a denuded health insurance bill limping through Congress, Bush-era detainee policies reinforced, a deflated climate summit, and a windfall year for bankers, among other things, it's almost ludicrous to claim that the new administration is run by a gang of lefties. More...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-daou/liberal-bloggers-to-obama_b_429...

toniD's Ya Think?

maybe THIS country needs to be kissed goodby

or rather than kissed maybe kicked in the ass

i am so disgusted

the libertarian, cent? do you mean the guy that trafficked in the kennedy's good name? shit!

sandy's got the right idea (the riddle of the sphinx)

me, i am still plowing through the WIRE that 60th street got me hooked on

i have all the episodes through season 5 already downloaded and up there for the watching... still at mid-season 3...

last weekend i really grossed out

watched from 6pm through midnight - 6 episodes in a row,yeah folks that's 6 HOURS

i had to find out if they nailed "the greek" (they didn't)

60th, where are you?

fuck this massachusetts fuckup

"A Death in Tehran"

I had to turn off rachel too...the noise!

watched a bunch of Frasier instead. We all laughed hard. We needed that.

nobody is watching the Barret Jackson auction live on Speed Channel?