It’s hard to disagree with any of this. Paul’s attack on Obamacare is problematic, because he doesn’t offer a practical alternative — no Republican ever has — but this line should warm the heart of any progressive . . . “I say, we will not cut one penny from the safety net until we’ve cut every penny from corporate welfare.”
Obama’s State Of the Union speech tonight was curious. It laid out a series of progressive initiatives that have absolutely no chance of being taken up by the current Republican Congress in the next two years.
So who was he talking to?
I got a funny feeling that he was starting off the debates for the 2016 Presidential race, and starting them off with an implicit endorsement of Elizabeth Warren. He spoke in her voice for the middle class, on the issues that she has been championing, like reform of the student loan system.
I think his executives orders about immigration were also about the 2016 race — creating a controversy designed to attract Latino voters to the Democratic Party in 2016, an opportunity for Republicans to shoot themselves in the foot with Latino voters.
This is just a hunch, but I think Obama is going to use his last vestiges of power to try and subvert Hillary Clinton’s run for the Presidency and put Warren in the White House.
Obama has been a bad President but he’s a genius when it comes to Presidential politics. I think he’s got one more unlikely ambition in mind in that realm — the destruction of Hillary and the elevation of Elizabeth.
You heard it here first.
. . . won’t be showing you this image, the cover of the first post-massacre edition of Charlie Hebdo. Keep in mind that The New York Times also failed to expose the WMD fantasy that the U. S. used to justify the war in Iraq, or the Wall Street corruption that led to the crash of the world economy in 2008.
Isn’t it time for The New York Times to just go away? The moral and professional collapse of the Times is more disturbing to me than Islamist assaults on the free press.
As R. Crumb recently put it, “You don’t have journalists over there [in America] anymore, what they have is public relations people. That’s what they have over in America now. Two-hundred and fifty thousand people in public relations. And a dwindling number of actual reporters and journalists.”
That’s the great irony of the Islamist assault on the free press in the West — it’s attacking a hollow puppet of the plutocracy.
. . . who lives in France, is putting his life on the line publishing cartoons like this.
But, hey — we in the West are hypocrites, with plenty of innocent Muslim blood on our hands. Who are we to condemn radical Islam for placing a great artist like Crumb in that kind of jeopardy?
Click on the image to enlarge.
The greatest calamity to befall America in the 21st Century was not 9/11 but the collapse of the world economy in 2008, a collapse instigated by outright criminality, blatant fraud, on the part of Wall Street financial institutions. This calamity ruined the lives and brought misery to millions of people around the world. In terms of scale, the depredations of al-Qaeda pale by comparison.
The perpetrators of this calamity not only acted with impunity but received remarkable rewards for their infamy. They made money from their crimes, some of it at the expense of American taxpayers, the victims of their outrages. It was one of the greatest scams in human history, almost beyond imagination.
Obama’s unwillingness to bring the Wall Street criminals to justice, or even to enact measures to prevent similar crimes in the future, represents the second greatest failure in American Presidential history — the greatest being James Buchanan’s failure to deal in a meaningful way with the issues that led to the Civil War.
Both Obama and Buchanan can be described as decent, weak, cowardly men whose dearest wish was to kick the can of disaster on to the next resident of the White House. We’ll be lucky if another Lincoln arises to fill the moral vacuum Obama, like Buchanan before him, created.
This speech given by Elizabeth Warren recently on the floor of the Senate has been compared to Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic Convention in 2004 in its potential to influence her future political prospects.
In retrospect, Obama’s 2004 speech was fluff — feel-good stuff that showcased his eloquence, his supposed ability to bring America into a new unity of purpose by rhetoric alone. It was long on vision, short on practicalities.
Warren’s speech, by contrast, was pure brass tacks. It more resembles Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860, the speech that made him a national and not just a regional phenomenon. Lincoln was not a candidate for the Presidency when he made the speech, but the speech in some ways made his candidacy inevitable.
Lincoln’s speech was long and minutely technical, touching on the Federal right to regulate slavery in Federal Territories. Warren’s was short but equally practical. She reminded us of irrefutable facts — that Americans of both parties resent the bail-outs of Wall Street firms in 2008, necessary, so we were told, because these firms were “too big to fail” . . . that these same firms are bigger now than they were in 2008, just as capable of crashing the world economy again, and that Americans will still be on the hook if they do so.
Warren’s speech is less than ten minutes long — listen to it. It’s important. It may be the only important political speech delivered in America this year. One thing is certain — if malfeasance on Wall Street crashes the world economy again, this speech will be remembered, and those who didn’t listen to it will rue their recklessness.
. . . goes out this season to all the good cops in America, who do tough, dangerous work — whose families never know if they’ll be home for Christmas.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Wall Street criminals and the perpetrators of war crimes walk the streets freely — unarmed black men are murdered with impunity.
The last days of America are at hand.
The last resort of a nation in near-total moral collapse.
I understand that Bush and Obama and their CIA teams were working under extraordinary and in some ways unprecedented pressures when they committed war crimes. A case can be made that they should receive pardons after their convictions for those crimes, and I’d be more than willing to listen to it — but first, the convictions.
I spent some of the happiest times of my youth in public libraries. I loved books, and I never lost my wonder over the fact that I could go someplace and find hundreds of books to browse through and the even more amazing fact that I could take any of them I wanted home to read.
Above is one I spent many hours in when I was a kid in Washington, D. C., in the Cleveland Park section of the city.
The public libraries were open to all but I felt totally at home in them, as much as I felt at home in my family’s living room. I felt as though they existed just for me. As civic institutions go, it just doesn’t get much better than public libraries.
I went to a prep school with high academic standards but I got half my education, at least, at the excellent school library (above, with the red roofs), checking out and reading whatever I wanted to read.
The Ferguson Public Library, which has stayed open through the troubles there, gives me hope — a center of quiet and peace and reflection and inquiry and knowledge in a town wracked with grief and rage and plain bewilderment. The library has been on the news a lot and it has been deluged with contributions — so many that it may be able to hire a second full-time staff member. It currently has one, plus a lot of volunteers.
I just sent a small contribution myself, and you should, too, here:
Ferguson Municipal Public Library
It’s not much to do, in the big picture of things, but it’s something, and it’s real.
I don’t know where we’re going to find the keystone to finish the arch above, but I’m sure we’ll find some clues about it down at the library.
O. k., I’m a fiction writer. When presented with disassociated but intriguing facts I have an irresistible urge to turn them into stories. This is my story about the Michael Brown shooting:
Brown (above), feeling insecure and powerless, for whatever reasons, robbed a convenience store, violently assaulting the convenience store clerk in the process. This made him feel powerful, virtually invincible, after the fashion of 18 year-olds.
Ten minutes later, he and his accomplice in the robbery, Dorian Johnson (above), were walking home down the middle of a street, defying convention, feeling like the lords of the earth. A nerdy cop drove up to them and dissed them, telling them to “get the fuck onto the sidewalk”. He used the tone that white cops with guns often use towards uppity black men.
Brown snapped, either scared that he was about to be arrested for the convenience store robbery or unable to come down from his high derived from the robbery. He swore at the cop, punched him, then, when the cop drew his gun, Brown tried to get the gun away from the cop.
Brown failed, was shot, and ran. The cop, feeling humiliated by Brown’s assault, pursued. Brown stopped eventually, severely wounded, and turned back towards the cop, maybe took a step or two towards him, hardly able to think clearly at this point.
The cop, enraged, feeling violated and afraid, wanted to kill Brown, needed to kill Brown. The step towards him gave him, in his mind, legal authority to kill Brown. He did it to preserve, not his life, but his dignity as a competent male.
It was a confrontation between two people howling on the margins of nonentity — two boys uncertain of their own identity as men.
The grand jury proceedings in the Michael Brown shooting case were highly unusual, to put it mildly. Prosecutors normally present their best evidence for an indictment to a grand jury, which normally returns the indictment the prosecutor wants. Though nominally independent, grand juries generally act as a rubber stamp for prosecutorial decisions.
St. Louis prosecutor Robert McCulloch (above) departed radically from precedent by presenting the Michael Brown grand jury with every single bit of evidence in the case, making no prosecutorial recommendation himself and letting the grand jury make its own judgement about it. When they failed to return an indictment against Officer Wilson, McCulloch then released to the public all the evidence the grand jury had reviewed, again a highly unusual move.
Why would McCulloch handle the case this way?
My guess is that McCulloch took a look at the evidence and decided in his own mind that it wasn’t sufficient for a successful prosecution of Wilson (above) — didn’t warrant putting Wilson through the ordeal of a trial or justify the expense of a trial to the state.
But this was problematic. McCulloch didn’t have the trust of the black community in Ferguson, was seen as biased in favor of the police, which is why many in the community had called for a special prosecutor to be appointed. McCulloch had refused to step aside. Now, if he exercised his independent judgement not to prosecute Wilson, he would be vilified by many.
So he threw it all into the lap of the grand jury, and ultimately the public, asking them on the basis of the evidence to decide if justice had been done. It probably seemed like a reasonable course to him. But it wasn’t.
If he wasn’t willing to make his own independent judgement about prosecuting Wilson, and take the heat for it personally, he should have recused himself from the case. Giving the case unusual treatment only reinforced the community’s belief that police shootings always get unusual treatment, that the standards applied to other suspected citizens don’t apply to police officers.
McCulloch tried to have it both ways. Recusing himself would have implied that he couldn’t deal with the case impartially. Isolating himself from the ultimate disposition of the case, via the grand jury, implied that he didn’t want to take responsibility for the disposition of the case.
One can feel a certain amount of sympathy for his predicament — but only up to a point. The very nature of the predicament suggests that appointing a special prosecutor was from the outset the only reasonable course. Justice must be done but justice must also be seen to be done, and the oddness of the proceedings in this case insured that this wouldn’t happen.
