My favorite corporate media whore was so special tonight. He asked a really hard question from those asshole people. I get so sad because my media whore usually doesn't have time to ask the really hard questions.
Questions like, why did my network allow Donald Rumsfeld to put all those military media whores on tv to propagate lies? Or why does my network constantly make me talk about shit that has no relevance to the public interests? Or what relationship does my producer have with top Public Relations firms and how does that affect what stories we do?
Or..., and this is a good one, why were those asshole people on television in the first place considering they are utterly irrelevant to anyone but nutbags?
Oh media whore, so many questions I know you are curious about, if only you had more time. Here's a picture of a cat:
John McCain is an embarrassment. I don't think anyone would have predicted he would be such a horrible campaigner. He's like Fred Thompson redux.
His brain can't keep up with the heavy information load a presidential campaign imposes, so he looks like a moron daily.
He can't give a speech to save his life. He can't even pull off a statement to the press. I've really never seen a worse presidential candidate.
Then, there's the country. John McCain is a Republican. People are sick of Republicans. Our country is - sorry, there's no better word for it - fucked. And most Americans seem to understand that the Republicans are responsible for it.
I won't name names. But this is a shoutout to all you perfect people, and Dr Phils, and relationship experts, and psychics who think they know all about John Edwards' "secret lust for power":
Ah, the good old days before our party was bought and sold to the highest corporate bidders (No, I don't mean Obama). Listening to this interview on Bill Moyers' Journal harkened me back to the days before seedy little corporacrats invaded our party with the Third Way which it turned out was really just the First Way painted up like a pony.
Fritz Hollings, who resigned from the Senate in 2003, explains to Bill Moyers in pretty blunt terms one of the more obvious ways in which our government has been overthrown. The old fashioned way, with bribery.
So what if I told you that the powers of financial capitalism (bankers etc.), had a far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands, able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.
This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations?
You won't find anyone here who's been more critical of the FISA capitulation than I. I did my best to try to incite a riot for a week - and got troll rated for it plenty.
I had hoped that we could muster up enough angst to scare Obama's campaign and perhaps some in the leadership to abandon this vote by thinking that it was going to cost Obama too much political capital. But alas, for our Democratic leadership, no cost is too high to protect their masters in the telecom industry, and the national security state.
But as disappointed as many of us have been over Obama's reversal, there's some things to keep in mind. I didn't express this in the last week because it wasn't in our interest to do so. But now that the vote is over, a little perspective is warranted.
A commenter said that there are consequences to us FISA fanatics (my term), making fun of Democrats.
What are those consequences exactly? Seriously. For the last 2 years we've had the House and the Senate, and what have we gotten from it? More SYFPH.
What this FISA vote demonstrated clearly, just like the votes on the Military Commissions Act, the Patriot Act, and the Iraq war, is that on certain key issues, the Democrats and the Republicans are almost identical.
And this delusional strategy of continuing to keep our mouths shut so we can elect more and better Dems without being willing to lose a few elections will never have a chance.
We the people only have two forms of political power: our ability to get someone elected, and our ability to cost someone an election by either not voting or voting for someone else.
In game theory, this correlates roughly to a threat/reward matrix. You do good, we reward you with money and votes. You do bad we cost you votes and perhaps make you lose.
One of the most important aspects of this whole FISA mess has been largely overlooked. That is that it is not just about privacy. Or principle.
It is about political power.
The power of the Executive to spy on Americans is an incredible political weapon. Our Founders understood this even back in the 18th Century - information is power.
And if one has any doubt about the dangers of such power, one has to look no further than the presidency of Richard Nixon. There's a great scene in the movie All the President's Men where Woodward finally gets Deepthroat to talk. It is not, as far as I know, taken from an exact quote. But it is an accurate depiction of what Woodward learned:
Woodward: I'm tired of your chickenshit games. I need to know what you know.
Deepthroat: ... Mitchell [Nixon's attorney general] started doing covert stuff before anyone else. The list is longer than anyone can imagine. It involves the entire US intelligence community. FBI, CIA, Justice. It's incredible.
The cover up had little to do with Watergate. It was mainly to protect the covert operations. It leads everywhere. Get out your notebook. There's more.
A while back I sent an email to a friend and fellow Kossack expressing my concerns about Barack Obama. This is what it said:
"Obama has become code for anything and everything people hope to accomplish. The danger of course being that he will not succeed in even many, if not all of these expected changes.
"I'm guilty of this myself. I have no idea what to expect from an Obama presidency, and often find myself hoping for a miracle. But I fear when code-Obama is replaced by real-Obama, the one with real policies, real compromises, and real limits of power, a backlash will occur. Obama is the most dangerous politician in generations. He's dangerous to, at the very least, the fundraising establishment who are used to a receipt with with their politicians. Or he's dangerous to the people power movement because of the potential backlash if he fails, for whatever reason, or, God forbid, turns out to be a fraud."
THis is a short film narrated by Naomi Klein and based on her book The Shock Doctrine, which is probably the most must-read book to come out in years.
I'm not going to comment on it too much. I'll let the video speak for itself. But I will say, Klein's book is not just another well crafted depiction of how screwed up things are. There are plenty of those. This book, however, is, as Tim Robbins says, "a revelation". I've yet to see another work so completely encapsulate the dark forces shaping our world, and their origins. This little movie, while shocking in itself, is just hint of what the book contains. It is required reading for any citizen who desires to be informed.
The groupthink on display among the Washington babbling class is something to behold. Amidst all the rife speculation about "what Hillary wants", complete with pop psychoanalysis and endless tidbits of gossip, our beloved press corps appears to have forgotten to report what actually happened last night.
So, for the record, this is it: On an historic night, where the first African American candidate for the Democratic nomination for president was to give his victory speech, marking the official kickoff of the general election, Ms. Clinton went before the nation, surrounded by her most loyal supporters and staff, and sought to delegitimize that victory, and, the party's process under which that victory was achieved.
Put aside what Ms. Clinton will do, or why. This is what she did. And she did it by reiterating her same cynical and dishonest talking points: Votes for her weren't counted, and she won the "popular" vote.
Here are the words she used to undermine the validity of Obama's victory:
I'm not even sure if this warrants a diary. But I've searched the net over and have not found one reference to it and it deserves to be, at least, noted.
As we now know, Hillary has been going around invoking the RFK assassination for months. Even when she didn't use the word assassinate, as Olbermann pointed out, she invoked RFK's assassination just by mentioning RFK and the 1968 California primary. Robert Kennedy Jr., in a phone conversation from his car on Friday night, somewhat defended Hillary by pointing out that he had "heard her make that argument before". He didn't say when or where so, perhaps, he reads Time.
And, as we all know by now, if she were merely trying to cite cases of primaries running long, she could have chosen much better and more accurate examples.
A kind of political correctness has set in - "We need West Virginia. We need Kentucky. Calling them racists is not productive."
There's a point there, of course. Problem is, it disarms us of correcting a lie. A very popular and widespread lie. As Markos pointed out today, Obama has won a buttload of predominantly white states. And yet, as soon as we got into the final round, Ohio, Pennsylvania and beyond, a narrative was developed that Obama has a white, working class problem.
No. Obama has a white, racists problem.
This is a fact of life. I am from Tennessee. I have been to Kentucky more times than I can remember. I have been to W. Virginia more times than I can remember. As a musician and a professional traveler, I been throughout the entire South more times than I can remember. I was born here, and I grew up here. Racism permeates this place.
I just want to get this on the record while it still matters a little bit. I have a dissenting view of the Florida and Michigan dilemma. As much I like Barack Obama, I want Hillary to lose far more than I want him to win. Not because I hate her. Because I believe that her brand of politics, and her allegiance economically to the so called Washington consensus, is bad for the Democratic party, and most importantly the country and the world.
But as badly as I want, and have wanted for years, for the Clinton machine, and the DLC bloc in general to be extirpated from the Democratic party, I would be a hypocrite if I didn't express my views now, while the Florida and Michigan primaries are still a point of contention.
One of the few things from Bill Clinton's vacuous presidency that George Bush wasn't able to undo within three months of taking office was the progress he help foster in healing racial relations in this country. I have argued for years that Bill Clinton did more to damage the Democratic brand then a thousand Rush Limbaughs could ever do. His DLC, New Democrat inspired abandonment of our most fundamental principles--from the belief that democratic government is more than a shopping mall for "services", to the foundational principle that social responsibility is as important as personal responsibility--left our party lost and without purpose.
But there is one area of the Clinton presidency that left a truly virtuous and lasting legacy - healing the racial divide in our country.
I was so excited this morning when I got up. Yesterday, I thought I saw a light. Some may remember a not very happy post I did a while back called, Time to Tell the Truth About Global Warming. In it I explain how global warming is so much worse than most people realize because once CO2 gets into the atmosphere, it stays there, to varying degrees, for centuries at least. And I explained how even if we stopped the engine of the world tomorrow, and reduced CO2 emissions to exactly zero, it would not avert the climate catastrophe that has begun, and will continue to get much much worse over the next 40 years and beyond.
This is incredibly important because it means that the only way we can really avoid the climate catastrophe is to not only cut emissions, but to remove the CO2 we've already put into the atmosphere.
This is the largely untold story of how the Harper government, with the help of a television reporter, sought to sabotage the candidacy of Barack Obama. Many of the facts of this story are on the record, in pieces, from disparate sources. What is untold is how those pieces fit together into a coherent narrative. And it is only with this narrative that the severity, and maliciousness of this incident is revealed.
Ian Brodie was probably exhausted. "Budget day" was winding down and prime minister Stephen Harper's chief staffer had spent weeks negotiating a deal that would stave off an election challenge from the Liberal opposition. Now he was standing around chatting with reporters from CTV who were enjoying a rare bit of face time with the normally inaccessible Mr. Brodie. These were the circumstances in which an off the cuff remark would create an international crisis.
Oh what a mystery. Pat Buchanan and many, many others just can't figure out how Obama could have spent so much money and not "closed the deal." Is there something wrong with him? We need to spend the next two weeks discussing it.
This is why Obama lost PA:
(Note: I included a few allies in this graphic. They are exceptions.)
Ian Brodie was probably exhausted. "Budget day" was winding down and prime minister Stephen Harper's chief staffer had spent weeks negotiating a deal that would stave off an election challenge from the Liberal opposition. Now he was standing around chatting with reporters from CTV who were enjoying a rare bit of face time with the normally inaccessible Mr. Brodie. These were the circumstances in which an off the cuff remark would create an international crisis.
