By David Swanson

Add Congressman Bill Delahunt to the list of misrepresentatives who claim to oppose wars when a Republican is president but agree to support them when a Democrat moves into the White House.

When Bush was president, Delahunt sometimes voted for war funding bills and sometimes voted against them. The inclusion in the bills of lipstick measures, such as relief for hurricane victims, etc., was not a decisive factor. Delahunt appears to have voted No when the Democratic leadership was most accepting of that action. But, with all the Republicans voting Yes, there was never a chance of a No vote actually helping to block funding.

Given that O's SOTU will propose a vile goulash of war, neo liberal austerity, abridgements of civil rights, foot dragging on climate change, meaningless tax cuts double talk on Wall Street bonuses, vague, but increasingly apparent gestures in the direction of cutting Medicare and Social Security, etc.

Why the hell is there absolutely no organizing or even discussion of massive protests against the slide into barbarism which O is willingly and enthusiastically presiding over?

Jon Walker over at Fire Dog Lake makes a very effective argument about why learning the wrong lesson from the defeat of Martha Coakley in Tuesday's Massachusetts Senate race will lead to disaster.

By David Swanson

Having denounced for years the presidential practice of altering laws with signing statements, I now want the practice restored, because the current president has created something even worse.

When Bush and Cheney left the White House, they left in place five general ways to make laws: instruct Congress what to do, rewrite what Congress does with a signing statement, by-pass Congress with an executive order (or executive decree, or unratified treaty), by-pass everybody with a secret memo from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and simply create illegal practices without any justification.

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

The bumbling Nigerian “terrorist” who set his lap on fire on board an airliner in Detroit Christmas day will provide days or weeks of conveniently hysterical headlines, along with excuses to target West Africa and Yemen for extra special attention from the American military, and the usual host of justifications for existing US policies in what used to be called 'the war on terror'. But the similarities between his case, and that of incompetent “terrorists” in Fort Dix New Jersey, in Miami's Liberty City and elsewhere raise serious questions about the whole incident.

If you cannot see the video above, click here.

Note: For those people who "know me" in the blogosphere, they know two things about me: 1) I write satirical one-act political plays, and/or 2) I wrote "The 30% Solution" and interviewed Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney. This is a recent play about my favorite type of economic theory, Libertarianism. Thought it might be appropriate at this point in time. (wink)

SCENE I: A busy urban street. Two middle-aged white men, BOB and JOE, are waiting at a stoplight, having a spirited political discussion. They have been friends for years and the discussion has the feel of ritual.

How we look at things matters.

How we choose to look at things matters.

How we think about things matters.

If we assume, as our fearless unelected leaders in the occult cabal clique-who-must-be-obeyed have, that outcome A is hopeless, we will clearly be unable to take steps to achieve outcome A.

This is negative future projection, and it is a cognitive style with behavioral implications.

Weirdly enough, this aberrant cognitive style has gone viral, and has nearly wiped out Medicare Equality for All, as an outcome.

It's like one of those dog-torture scenarios: delivering electric shocks that are unavoidable, so the dog sinks deeper and deeper into hopelessness, then goes belly-up, and submits and dies.

I'm sure you all recall the early days of the NSA Hoovering up all domestic data warrantless wiretapping scandal, when they referred to it as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and assured us that they were only targeting Al-Qaeda operatives.

Naturally, this turned out to be a lie enhanced duplicity technique, because it turns out they were spying on all of us everyday American citizens. Nobody was off the target list, and we were all potential Al-Qaeda operatives.

Now, there's a big hubbub about some sketchy CIA assassination ring, apparently answering to Cheney himself. Nobody's willing to talk about the nitty-gritty details, but it's enough to have even Nancy "off the table" Pelosi spooked or pissed off enough to start publicly discussing how fucked-up it was, whatever "it" was.

The public justification for this shadowy, super-classified, apparently reprehensible death squad?

They were only targeting Al-Qaeda operatives.

Yeah, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit. Does anyone seriously doubt that what we'll eventually learn is that they formed a group to assassinate American citizens in the National Interest? Consider this, via TPM:

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told TPMmuckraker that because we've been in a state of war against al Qaeda since just after September 11, there would have been no need for a secret CIA program that received special legal authorization...

As for what the program did involve, Cannistraro suggested that it involved Americans as targets, and that it went beyond surveillance, but declined to elaborate. He added that, though Cheney may have directly ordered the CIA to keep Congress in the dark, the veep wasn't acting alone. "The approval was from the president," said Cannistraro.

Hmm, I wonder...

I am, at this moment, so damn glad I am not represented at the state or national level by the subject of the video below that you're glad of it too. This ... nasty-nice Republican Representative stood up to speak on a hate crimes bill, and announced to the world that Matthew Shepard's death had nothing to do with his sexuality.

What you need to do   Read more…

Interesting times:

(TPM link)

So, as far as I can tell, Rep. Jane Harman [D-Ca] was conspiring with the Israelis to drop some spy charges in exchange for some lobbying on her behalf, and Alberto Gonzales had an NSA warrantless wiretap™ (wait for it) on her phone and overheard the deal.

In exchange for not investigating, Gonzales asked her to attack the NYT's exposé on (wait for it) NSA warrantless wiretapping. The one she had personally requested be held back until before after the 2004 election (Department of With Democrats Like These, anyone?)

And so she goes free, although the Israelis didn't get her that committee chair she wanted in the first place.

One has to wonder just how much dirt Hoover Gonzales and Rove had on everyone in Washington, and more importantly, how many other favors they blackmailed out of people. And it certainly explains some of those bizarre, neo-Maoist ritual apologies.

Trawling through the Pravda web site reveals more juicy amusingness. Yes, I know, it is not news that it is a buffet of nuttiness. This time it is Sir Cabbagemallet, keeping the dream alive:

Having thus bravely rallied the international community and summoned the United Nations -- a fiction and a farce, respectively -- what was Obama's further response? The very next day, his defense secretary announced drastic cuts in missile defense, including halting further deployment of Alaska-based interceptors designed precisely to shoot down North Korean ICBMs. Such is the "realism" Obama promised to restore to U.S. foreign policy.

As discussed below, and especially considering Lambert's comment here regarding "hooked noses".

How about this recent one from Switzerland?

From Macro-Man (Feb. 4th):
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Dear Mr. President,

What Sara said.

This is a life or death situation and it is deteriorating. The history and the pathologies that got us to this point are well-documented by organizations like SPLC and by independent scholars. Some of us are trying to understand and deal with the situation in a sane and appropriate manner. We could use some support from our government and some leadership from you right now.

Until 1947, the United States habitually told the truth about at least one thing. The job title of the Pentagon's highest ranking civilian was the Secretary of War. But the recent slaughter of tens of millions in the Second World War had given the Pentagon's real function a bad name. So Democrat Harry Truman rebranded the Department of War, naming it the Department of Defense. From that day, the Secretary of War became the Secretary of Defense. War plants, war expenditures and bloodthirsty war industries became more benign-sounding defense plants, the defense expenditures and the patriotic defense industry.

Here is the second part of my review of Manfred Steger's The Rise of the Global Imaginary (part 1 here). In the last part of the book, Steger focuses on the sometimes conflicting ideologies derived from the global imaginaries.

Starting from the collapse of the USSR, Steger argues (correctly, I think) that the first winning ideology in the decontestation game was market globalism, the ideology that managed to decontest "globalization" in the limited sense of deregulated markets on a global scale.

To explore the tenets of market globalism, Steger reviews the writings of one of its main proponents and popularizers: Thomas Friedman. Needless to say, this is painful to read as is anything related to Thomas Friedman (hence no links), however he is indeed a central figure in the promotion of market globalism. He is also a good representative of the way this ideology was promoted by the political, economic and corporate elites in the 1990s (or the transnational capitalist class as Leslie Sklair calls this group, Friedman belongs to the ideological sub-group of the TCC).

  Read more…

So I saw The Dark Knight, and I liked it. I admired its seriousness among the bombast, but did not love it. I had bones to pick about its plot --

A DA is the salvation of his city?
And he uses RICO, a Federal instrument? Without Federal intervention?
And offers himself up as bait, endangering the prosecution of hundreds of criminals to catch one psycho?
And houses his star witness with the psycho in a corrupt precinct house? And orders no metal wanding of the psycho's henchmen with cellphones visibly sewn into their flesh?
Really?

I know, I know, Susie's good people, and she's been patient with one very persistent troll. (She's also got car trouble, so she has more important things on her mind.) But when I read this post and saw the exact same paragraphs quoted by two different trolls -- one full force nasty, one concern-like -- I lost my sense of decorum and good taste.

Troll A:

I suppose you could follow the lead of historiann, anglachel, riverdaughter, and the rest of the PUMA dead enders and claim that obama is really another hitler, worse than bush, planning a totalitarian takeover of the US of A, etc. etc.

or, if you read the original article you find this:

It has been kindly pointed out to me that there is an error (in good faith, based on not checking the facts on another post and/or misreading the post) in my last post on flags. I feel obliged to correct this with another post, because I feel the content of my post still stands even after the factual error has been corrected.

Hillary Clinton did not participate in the attempt at adding a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution. She instead attempted to defuse it by proposing a non-amendment that very narrowly fit the Constitution as interpreted generally by the courts. Consequently, this paragraph,

There are reasons to prefer Clinton to Obama. There are easily arguable reasons to be angry that Clinton is not presently likely to be a Presidential candidate in the general election. You can even make a case for not voting for Barack Obama. You can make an even better case for not voting at all.

But there are a few moderately popular reasons for preferring Clinton to Obama that disturb me. A variant of one of these is present in this post at The Confluence.

Wow. Graves goes even lower. If you listen closely, the ad does refer to her as "Gay Barnes." I bet they thought that was funny -- and you know the folks in Graves's office say that to each other several times per day.

Wow.

Of course, the mastermind behind all this is "media consultant" Jeff Roe, who is about as reprehensible a campaigner as I'm aware of at any level of politics -- and I'm including Karl Rove. He's one of the major reasons that Missouri politics is rapidly becoming a cesspool.

Ok, yes I saw the Wright speech on CNN tonight. I know I saw it because I just saw another thread on corrente where Wright talked about the right-brained creative black child vs the wrong brained who-gives-a-damn white child. I thought that I had fallen asleep on the couch and dreamed that. Now I have to reconcile reality with um reality. Yes, Virginia this is 2008 not 1846.
Letting that sink in.
Wright went on to say in a tone that was as if all whites during desegregation ran and met in a big assembly room and said "we know what to do, they are right-brained creative AFRICAN children, we will desegregate thus keeping them down forever and ever!"

I'm sure this may come as a shock to you, but military is hiring bloggers to work as moles, "verbally attack[ing] specific person[s] or promot[ing] a specific message."

Wait, sorry, wrong link.

Here's the article.

Bill-O writes:
The American people need to wise up. Yeah, the presidential horse race is fun and interesting. But on vital questions of the day, the candidates spit out flimsy general rhetoric and walk away. To protect my family, I want the “waterboarding” option included among presidential powers. As for Musharraf, I want this guy held accountable. Sorry if that interrupts the hope train.

Bill O'Reilly is scared again. This fear-mongerer -- a witless moran with Faux Noise's biggest microphone -- wets his bed, afraid the US government might stop torturing (brown) people to make his (wealthy WASP) "family safer". Where do they find these notions? And since he's painting GOP front-runner John McCain (whose shoes O'Reilly is, truly, not worthy to tie) with the same panic-stricken

My niece gave me a cold yesterday while we were playing with stuffed animals and numbered legos, and I'm so sorry as I meant to blog heavily today and just don't have the energy. But I was thinking of writing more about "why we fail," or perhaps better put, "how we can win" or even "learn from your enemies/those who have beaten you/to fight again another day and win this time." Joe noticed a good one.

The telemarketing campaign, run by a nonprofit organization called "Faith, Family and Freedom" begins its pitch by asking the callee if they were opposed to same sex marriage. If the callee responds positively, they are then transferred to a United American Technologies representative who will explain to them how the more common telephone service providers, such as AT&T, MCI and Verizon are supporters of gay marriage and child pornography, and that United American Technologies is "the only carrier that is taking an active stand against same sex marriages and hardcore child pornography".

Wow. This is just uneffing believable.

I don't really even know what to say. As one of the commenters so aptly put it:

It's good to know that not all Republicans are crooks. Some are just assholes.

Indeed.