Michael Moore & Rachel Maddow Discuss Right-Wing Election Violence

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An Urban Legend Captured Aborning? Like A New Star

A report of some strange doings in France recently has been circulating on Facebook and elsewhere, I'm sure. The headline is garish: "Baby Dies As Group Jumps From Window Fleeing The Devil."
The story unfolds:

Baby Dies In Mass Jump To 'Flee From Devil'

1:43pm UK, Sunday October 24, 2010
Alex Watts, Sky News Online
A baby has died and 10 people have been injured after they jumped out of a second-floor flat window, apparently thinking they had seen the devil.

Police are investigating the incident which took place in the early hours in the small town of La Verriere, west of Paris.

(This foto appears exactly as it did, free of context, and floating in the story)

The baby was four months old and officers said many of the injured were children.
"Thirteen people were in an apartment on the second floor when, at around 3am, one of the occupants heard his child crying," said Odile Faivre, the deputy prosecutor in Versailles.

"The man in question, of African origin, who was completely naked, got up to feed his child, at which point the other occupants took him for the devil.

He was seriously wounded in the hand after being stabbed with a knife before he was thrown out of the apartment, via the door."

The 30-year-old man then tried to force his way back into the room.
"That's when the other occupants tried to escape by jumping out of the window, panicked by a fear of the devil," said Ms Faivre.

Police are questioning the naked man as well as another man who jumped from the window with a two-year-old girl in his arms.

Seven of those injured - who were African, possibly from Angola - were taken to hospital for emergency treatment.

Detectives are trying to find out if the group jumped voluntarily or were forced to jump.

My first reaction to reading this was that it had to be some kind of a send-up, a satire of some sort. The provenance of the story is Britain's Sky News, also a Murdoch property, if memory serves; sort of Faux Nuze--East. It veritably reeks of archetypal urban legend material: naked, hysterical Africans acting abysmally stupidly in some really obscure, yet plausible locale in the West, and tragedy, involving an "innocent baby" ensues. A sort of reverse Babar?

Of course it is possible that it is a true account of a real event, too. Independent verification could not be established. Google only produced references from other sites to this story.

Who DID NOT KNOW This Was Coming?

Via Crooks&Liar VideoCafe:


Woody is satisfied simply to repeat the discourse C&L employed:

Boy, this is getting ugly. Rachel Maddow talked with Eugene Robinson about the voter suppression and intimidation tactics coming from this group the King Street Patriots last night. Here's more on the latest turn of events from TPM Muckraker.Voter Registration Group Targeted By TX Tea Party Group Received Threats:

A group trying to register voters in Houston received threats and emails containing racist slurs after being targeted by a local tea party group accusing it of "voter fraud."

In emails obtained by TPM, the group Houston Votes was accused of being "a bunch of white guilt ridden assholes, NIGGERS and greasy mexican spics," "fraudulent Marxist pigs," and "American hating A-holes."

"We received a couple of threats and several harassing e-mails," Maureen Haver of Houston Voters told TPMMuckraker. "There have been several efforts, I think, just trying to race-bait and stir racial tension and part of that I think is just based on what we've received in messaging from them."

"It's really had a chilling effect on our office," said Haver, adding that one of the e-mails was reported to the FBI

.
You can read the emails at TPM's site. They're not safe for work.

As Digby noted:And lest we think this is just some unaffiliated cranks:

King Street Patriots leader Catherine Engelbrecht even went as far to as to accuse the group of being the headquarters of the New Black Panther Party.

The good news is that the Tea partiers don't have a racist bone in their bodies. Just ask them They'll tell you so. (It's just the "bad ones" they don't like.)

And from TPM:

True The Vote also put together a video raising the threat of voter fraud which features soaring music. "Think it can't happen in your town? Think again!" reads one message. "Our elections are being manipulated. By the RADICAL LEFT," the video says.

The video originally featured a doctored photo of an African-American voter holding a poorly photoshopped sign -- featuring Comic Sans font -- that read "I only got to vote once." That part of the video has since been edited out.

Aftershock: Robert Reich on his NEW book

Still in the pay of the Owners, Reich says "Murka" will overcome these divisions. He has to be "optimistic." It's what he gets paid for.

Me? I doubt it. Obama's election REALLY WAS a "Rubicon" of sorts. After it, White folks can see the end of their dominance looming in the distance (20-30 years until they lose the 'majority' and all that that means), and it scares the living shit out of 'em... Even the most obdurate, troglodytic of 'em has some vestigial awareness of the evils and injustices the White power structure visited upon the "others." They KNOW if they'd beenj treated the ways they treated the "others," they'd be primed for revenge once they got power. And they don't expect any different from those whm the Whites have formerly oppressed.

The Pukes are the party of White Power. Whites, finally, aren't gonna concede without a bloody fight.

Public Understanding of Wealth Disparity in the USA: Case Study in the Successful Application of Hegemonic Propaganda

I know that sounds a pretty pretentious, up there, all those tendentious words.

But I, who have had the opportunity to ask, and to analyze the answers, can attest that if you ask 100 random Murkins in the Mall if they think they are susceptible to propaganda, 90 of 'em will deny they are or would be influenced by propaganda. The graph above radically dispels that conceit.

Americans have a really distorted view of how wealth is distributed in this country.

This chart is from a paper called "Building a Better America One Wealth Quintile at a Time" by Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton.

The top row shows the actual distribution of wealth in America. The richest 20 percent, represented by that blue line, has about 85 percent of the wealth. The next richest 20 percent, represented by that red line, has about 10 percent of the wealth. And the remaining three-fifths of America shares a tiny sliver of the country's wealth.

Below that, the "Estimated" rows show how different groups think wealth is distributed. As you can see, in people's misinformed minds things are much more equitable.

Matt Yglesias explains what's interesting here:

What’s interesting here is the extent to which the public vastly overestimates the prosperity of lower-income Americans. The public thinks the 4th quintile has more money than the median quintile actually has. And the public thinks the 5th quintile has vastly more wealth than it really has.

You can easily see how this could have a giant distorting effect on our politics. Poor Americans are simply much, much, much needier than people realize and this is naturally going to lead to an undue slighting of their interests.

Indeed. It's fine if reasonable people have different ideas about whether we should extend the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $250,000. Or think estate taxes are unfair. But when we have those debates, it's critical that everyone has a clear understanding of how things really are. We're becoming a plutocracy.

An interesting chap called the Yorkshire Ranter (DOTOF, Moonboo) registered a viable contrary opinion.

MEANWHILE...From MoJo comes this useful display:

If actual money were represented in Congress--
--this is how the House of Representatives would look, where "Big Labor's" (the rust-colored dots on the left) share is about 37%, and "Big Money" controls the rest.

Here's the summary of how many members of the House would be owned by each sector of the economy based on donations/contributions.

Sector | # of members:
Labor 159; Finance, insurance, and real estate 159; Health 26; Agribusiness 23; Lawyers and lobbyists 20; Miscellaneous business 18; Energy and natural resources 10; Defense 7; Transportation 6; Communications and electronics 4; Construction 1; Unfilled seats 2

Message to My Congresscritter, Martin Heinrich

Breaking with usual sentiment and tradition, I tried to engage in a bit of actual communiction with my congresscritter today, to discover--to receive reassurance that--if he were one of the approximately 100 brave souls who have publically pledged to reject the recommendations of Prez. Shamwow's Catfood Commission if those include raising the retirement age, or reducing Social Security/Medicare benefits. His web-site leaves one with the impression that the LAST FUCKING THING IN THE WORLD he wants is to hear from constituents. I sent this message to his campaign office, but they ignored it. So here is, an open letter to my Congresscritter:

Sir:
I am a 'senior," retired constituent who agrees with the sentiment expressed by Dean Baker in a column today. "The Social Security Pledge v. The Old Politics," in which he points out (the money quote for our purposes here):

If President Obama believed in "new politics" then he would encourage members to say where they stand on cutting Social Security benefits. Then voters would be given the opportunity to set the country's agenda, not a bunch of political hacks and Wall Street cronies who were too incompetent to see the $8 trillion housing bubble that wrecked the economy.

Of course, the public does not have to wait for President Obama to pass judgment. There is a pledge to protect Social Security that has already been endorsed by more then 100 members of Congress. The pledge is very simple. It commits members of Congress, or candidates, to oppose cutting Social Security benefits or raising the retirement age.

It doesn't get any simpler than this - even a member of Congress can understand it. The full text is available at the Campaign for America Future's web site.

Given the simplicity of this statement, it is reasonable to assume that any member of Congress or candidate who does not sign on supports cutting Social Security benefits. There really is no other plausible conclusion.

There is really no arguing with that. So it was to reassure myself that, if Mr. Heinrich has not yet signed such a pledge, it is a mere oversight which he will repair post haste now that the opportunity is presented so handily, that I take the opportunity to make this inquiry.

Please assure me that Mr. Heinrich has indeed pledged to protect the bought-and-paid-for "benefits" already won for the Nation's workers.

RSVP.

Sincerely, etc...

Reverse CitUnited? Nah. Dat Boat Done Already Sailed!

Correspondent and FBriend Kevin Gosztola, who writes on OpEdNews blog, opined there today:
Too Late for Democrats or Voters to Do Anything About Corporate Money This Election Cycle

In it, he lays blame for the failure of even the miserable, petty compromise, the DISCLOSE Act, to get through the Senate this year on the Democrats. But this is only partially right.

The cause of the crisis lies, greasy and reeking, in the robed laps of the SCROTUS.

All 59 of the Dim/Ind Senators voted for cloture. Two Pukes (the Mainers?) didn't vote, and 39 Pukes voted against. I am not an apologist for the Dims or St. Barry, but this seems not to be explicitly at their feet.

However, it is also true that nobody in the Senate, Dim or GOPuke, really WANTED it to pass. But that is the consequence of the acknowledged venality and corruption of the institution as a whole, of the corpoRat colonization of the Legislature, not merely the mendacity of the (arguably weaker, inferior) "party."

And since it didn't pass this time, there's no way it will pass later when those who benefited from the deluge of unregulated funds will be loathe to strangle that goose with "unnecessary" regulation.

In any case, it's moot. It's a done deal. It's over. This is now settled law, once through one election.

The only way to reverse is if one of the Opus Deists is rendered incompetent ("dead" would work, but there are other conditions such as dementia and/or catatonia which would suffice) such that St. Barry --who I am certain will be the LAST "Democratic" president of my life-time (I'm 65)-- may nominate the replacement and break the fucktard/wackloon Opus Deist bloc's corpoRatist stranglehold... It's really the only hope we have to reverse CU; a vain hope in the extreme. We have passed the point when there was any political solution to this issue.

We passed that point on the very day the decision was issued.

The puzzling thing to me in ALL of this was the way the Obama DoJ kept the case alive, despite an Appellate decision against CU, which they COULD have let stand. St. Barry was under no legal or precedential compulsion to pursue it. The case was granted cert under the Busheviks, was argued once in March '09, and again in Sept, 09. There was ample opportunity for the Shazamers to drop the case. Elena Kagan argued the Gummint's case, iirc.

That they did NOT abandon the case when there was such opportunity to do so suggests to me that the Shamwow and the Dims saw some advantage in it for themselves.

Banksy Does "The Simpsons"

Not so far-fetched...

Just Sheets Short of a Full N.B. Forrest

David Niewart, via C&L:

Gummint Is Defective: It is at least potentially democratic

Corporations, on the other hand, are perfect...tyrannies: forP. yksmohC on "Antipolitics."

Since the end of the Second World War, at least, relentless corpoRat propaganda has blamed the Gummint for EVERYTHING.

Whyzatt, do ya think?

Quantum Theory: The Simultaneity of A and Not-A

Minds "trained" to strict Aristotelian logics are often derailed by the assertion that something "material" can both be what it is and what it is not at the same time. Robert Anson Wilson offers some intriguing insights and persuasive examples (see, also, Count Alfred Korzybsky and "General Semantics"):

RT (formerly Pravda) Investigates Endemic USer Financial Chicanery

There is no shortage of irony that dispassionate analysis of USer corruption and official incompetence in dealing with it should come most reliably from Russian and Arabic (Al Jazeera) media. (I first heard the Joe Walsh hit, "Life's Been Good..." on shortwave on Radio Moscow. True story.)

Michael Moore Joins The Symphony of the Obvious

Yes, as Moore and dozens of others quite rightly recognize, Obama & the Dims should be, in fact, pointing daily to the fact that they are STILL struggling to correct conditions left cavalierly behind by the vanquished Busheviki--who, of course, are not "departed" at all, due to Cheney's chicanery in getting a lot of political jobs reclassified as civil servants, but still retain no small amount of local autonomy within the bureaucracy.

This is wise advice. But overlooks a couple of important points. One is that, because they were (understandably, if also deplorably) unwilling to bring the Bushevik war criminals to the bar, Obama's do not have a daily public reminder of the malfeasances and high crimes of which the current conditions are the direct consequences.

Another, and to me the more salient difficulty for this analysis is the uncomfortable fact that the real reason Obama's even IN office at all is to make the people FORGET the decades of clusterfux promulgated by the WHITE oligarchy. He's quite simply a (willing?--Is the Nobel Peace Prize his reward?) scapegoat.

If he were to make the "Bush (Clinton/Bush/Reagan) Did It" complaint stick, as he would have to do to retain his cred with his base, he'd be defeating the very reason for his presidency, which is to allow himself to be MADE the author and responsibility for the failures.

So that's his dilemma (tri-lemma?: He & the Dims have to (rightly) insist that they were left a mess, and the Pukes have obstructed every effort to clean it up, but he can't without 1) a constant provocative reminder such as a trial, which he won't pursue for understandable but cowardly reasons. Besides if he did, he'd be essentially undoing the very work he was put in place to effect.

Yeah, it's complicated

This Is NOT Good! The Energy/Water Aporia: Not Enough H2O = More War

Water is moving closer and closer to the center of the contentions around the intersection of two vital human needs: energy and hydration. Perhaps people tend to overlook how MUCH of the power upon which they depend is provided by water, either captured behind a dam, or boiled and pushed through vanes a steam. There may--many experts do not qualify it; they say there WILL--soon be warfare to determine which interest prevails when there is not enough for both.

Rising Energy Demand Hits Water Scarcity 'Choke Point'

by Peter Boaz and Matthew O. Berger

WASHINGTON - Meeting the growing demand for energy in the U.S., even through sustainable means, could entail greater threats to the environment, new research shows.

The study was carried out by Circle of Blue, a network of journalists and scientists dedicated to water sustainability, and could have implications not just for the relationship between energy demand and water scarcity in the U.S. but elsewhere in the world, as well. "It is not just that energy production could not occur without using vast amounts of water. It's also that it's occurring in the era of climate change, population growth and steadily increasing demand for energy," explained Circle of Blue's Keith Schneider, who presented the findings in Washington Wednesday.

"The result is that the competition for water at every stage of the mining, processing, production, shipping and use of energy is growing more fierce, more complex and much more difficult to resolve," he said. About half the 410 billion gallons of water the U.S. withdraws daily goes to cooling thermoelectric power plants, and most of that to cooling coal-burning plants, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Meanwhile, climate change is leading to decreased snowmelt, rains and freshwater supplies, says Circle of Blue.

One of the things missing from the discussion, then, is the recognition that saving energy also saves water, the group contends.

The U.S. government has not been blind to the conflict between energy and water needs. The first part of a report commissioned by the U.S. Congress in 2005 laid out the consequences of not paying enough attention to water supply issues in increasing energy production. The second part, which would have laid out a research agenda and begun developing solutions, has yet to be made public, says Schneider.

He says the U.S. Department of Energy has declined repeated requests to explain why the report has not been published.

Energy demand in the U.S. is expected to increase by 40 percent as the U.S. population rises above 440 million by 2050. The water supply will not be able to support that growth, Schneider says.

Renewable sources of energy will certainly be a large part of trying to meet that energy demand, but these, too, come with a hidden water cost.

In 2009, the U.S. dedicated 23 million acres of public lands in six states for new solar electricity-generating plants as part of its economic stimulus package, which apportioned nearly 100 billion dollars for clean energy projects. Though the plan appeared promising, environmentalists soon began to point it could have damaging, unintended consequences. Schneider notes that criticism of the impact the water-cooled solar plants could have on water priorities in the U.S. Southwest even came from within the government.

"In arid settings, the increased water demand from concentrating solar energy systems employing water-cooled technology could strain limited water resources already under development pressure from urbanization, irrigation expansion, commercial interests and mining," wrote Jon Jarvis, then head of the National Park Service's Pacific West Region, in a February 2009 internal memo. "Solar generating plants that use conventional cooling technology use two to three times as much water as coal- fired power plants," Schneider noted.

In other countries, the threat of water scarcity is even more pertinent.

Egypt, for example, has a population of approximately 82 million, but an annual water quota of about 86 billion cubic meters - and the population is expected to rise by more than 10 million people in the next decade.

Yet 30 European blue chip companies are set to invest 560 billion dollars over the next 40 years to build solar power plants in North Africa as part of the Desertec Industrial Initiative. Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia have agreed to work with the initiative. Comparing this project with the U.S.'s, Schneider notes that in an environment that faces even greater water scarcity than the southwestern U.S., such projects could prove disastrous. Circle of Blue calls the intersection of a rising demand for energy and diminishing supply water a "choke point", but energy development - whether of the fossil fuel or renewable variety - is just one aspect of the water scarcity crisis that is unfolding in various regions of the globe.

Yemen is widely seen as the place where this scarcity will hit first and hardest.

"Analysts are worried Yemen could be the first country in the world to effectively run out of water," said Christine Parthemore, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where she studies the intersection of natural resources and security issues. She spoke at a separate event Wednesday.

Yemen, which has no rivers and cannot afford desalination, is drawing water at around 400 times its replacement rate, she says, and this looming crisis is compounding other issues in the region, like the fact that Yemen has become a key recruiting spot for groups like al Qaeda.

"We are about to see water wars in the future," said U.S. General Anthony Zinni. "We have seen fuel wars; we're about to see water wars."

(Published on Thursday, September 23, 2010 by Inter Press Service)

Well, Do Ya?

Copyright, Sept. 2010, by John Konopak (with the skilled assistance of pal/foto-shopper extraordinaire, Forest Taber, Searsport, ME.)!

X : You Are Here

Via BAD SCIENCE/Discovery Mag:

That’s here, that’s home, that’s us.

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there [...]

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.”
- Carl Sagan

Ted Rall's America: Epi # 64~~Price at the Pump

"Mook Court": Two Outta Two On TDSWJS Sept. 9

Staten Island Supreme Court Justice

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Why "We" Were/Are STILL In Iraq.

As the story immediately below here on this blog, and many more, over the last several weeks, announces, the USer "combat" role in Iraq has been "reduced." This reduction while mainly cosmetic, still bolsters the insistance on understanding why "we" were there in the first place....

Some folks think it was a personal vendetta, GWB vs. Saddam. Others still maintain it was to get rid of Iraq's (non-existent) WMD. Still others repeat the falsehoods about the 9/11 attacks. Not true, any of it.

The PNAC--which got was the power behind getting Shrub appointed--took us into Iraq to play their part in the Great Game: the geo/energy politics of Central Asia, which has diverted--and beggared--"Euro" empires (including ours) for 300 years.

The PNAC-loaded Busheviks invaded Iraq for four reasons, mainly, all implicated (dictated) by "that old Kissingerian real-Politik":

1) To (re-)establish a USer military presence in the oil-belt, after Usama bin Laden sent his pals to politely ask us to leave Saudi Arabia; which we did, peremptorily...

2) To control the distribution of Iraqi oil. (OIF--Operation Iraqi Freedom--really WAS originally scheduled to be called Operation: Iraqi Liberation. No, really. Would I shit you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
You can't make this shit up!)

3) Protect Israel's northern front from Saddam. The original plan was to divide Iraq into three sectors which would then be so fragmented and splintered that they'd never again pose a threat to Tel Aviv.

4) Put pressure on Iran's regime, and foment unrest among rest of the Kurds not in Iraq. The partitioning scheme--which Biden favored, to protect Israel-- would also have wrecked serious havoc in the border provinces of Turkey, Syria, and Iran.

I enumerate these only for accounting, not hierarchical purposes.

Associated Press Issues "Style" Edict on Obama Admin's "End of Combat"

Anyone who's ever toiled at any desk on any newspaper anywhere in the country, and possibly in the whole world, knows what the AP (Associated Press) Stylebook is: the wire-bound gospel of newspaper/reportorial usage; the 'last word' on what it was and was not acceptable to call, name, or describe anyone and anything; the unarguable authority on punctuation, abbreviation, anagrams, and citations. For journalists for the last 75 years, at least, the AP Style Book was The LAW!

So, when AP issued a whole, quite long and extensive "Stylebook note," amending the Stylebook to account for certain awkwardnesses, inconsistencies, and dubious claims in discourse surrounding the much ballyhooed withdrawal, last week, of the "last of the US combat troops from Iraq, it is significant. Via Huffpost:

At some point in the last two weeks, you may have been told by someone in the news that combat operations in Iraq were over, and that the last combat troop had left the country. Well, the Associated Press is not having any of it, and in a memo from their standards editor, Tom Kent, the law in this regard has been laid down, in no uncertain terms: "To begin with, combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials."

The rest is highly instructive.