Bits and Pieces for the Week of December 26 - January 1

Nothing says mirth and merriment like the MIC (Military Industrial Complex). "From 2004 through 2008, 80 percent of retiring three- and four-star officers went to work as consultants or defense executives, according to the Globe analysis. That compares with less than 50 percent who followed that path a decade earlier, from 1994 to 1998." Must be nice, on the Taxpayer dime no less! (7 of 6)

Life expectancy vs income over the past two centuries:

Bits and Pieces for the Week of December 19 - 25

Kiss your Presidential chances goodbye Haley Barbour... after his comment on Mississippi's Jim Crow days... “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.” Balloon Juice's, John Cole tells us what he thinks about Barbour's comment. “BECAUSE YOU’RE FUCKING WHITE, ASSHOLE.” (7 of 6)

How's that Supreme Court of the United States working for the normal worker? It's not, it's working for Corporate America though! Just as Liberals predicted it would! (7 of 6)

Bits and Pieces for the Week of December 12 - 18

Arab news network Aljazeera pays more attention to 9/11 first responders than senate Republicans and US news (Mike)
"New" photographs of the American Civil War.
Incredible use of stop-action photography and a bag of coins. (Mike)
The year in pictures (really awsome ones) courtesy The Boston Globe. (Mike)
Kimono blues (video) (Mike)
Had to steal this from Daily Kos... You believe what FOX News has to say, you're very misinformed. (7 of 6)

The Voting Block Dominoes Will Fall

Dear Mr. President:

I understand "the long view" plan for the recovery of this country. The current tax cut bill only delays this country's recovery and compromise comes at a heavy political cost to you personally.

You broke a campaign promise of doing away with tax cuts for the wealthy. The Republi-cons who you negotiated in good faith with, will no doubt, throw you under the bus upon your run for reelection. Only you will get blamed for the continued budget increase. I fear you will lose a huge voting block of moderates, independents and Progressives who held you to this promise.

This compromise on the tax cut bill only emboldens the Republi-cons with future fights on Social Security and Medicare. The people are witnessing capitulation and will take full advantage. Unfortunately, unless congress approves it... this new tax cut bill will prevent disabled Veterans, Social Security recipients and military retirees from receiving a Cost of Living Adjustment for at least 2 years. This blows another voting block for you.

The people will say, the Republi-cons made a good tactical move... they got the tax cuts for the rich for 2 years, and only gave up unemployment extensions for 13 months... this will be approximately 9-10 months before the 2012 Presidential election. Who else will this voting block blame for a bad compromise? Plenty of time for them to remember the bad deal they received. Undoubtedly Sir, the finger of blame will be pointed at you. Another voting block down.

Americans know this tax cut bill comes at a time when corporations have had their best 3rd quarter in history, yet, corporations still refuse to hire. The bailed out and protected Wall Street executives are getting record bonuses for 2 straight years, CEO's continue to reap rewards and all the interlocking chairpersons of the boards have their coffers full. U.S. Government workers have had their wages froze. The American people are taking cuts in wages, hours, pensions, health benefits; while they continue to increase productivity. Who do you think they will vent their frustration at... yes, you Mr. President. There goes another major voting block.

This is not a good compromise for you politically, for "the long view" or for the long term needs of the American people... show some prescience, please, it is your turn to just say "NO". Stress JOBS, JOBS, JOBS! If you make that your mantra for the next 2 years, it might save your Presidency.

If of course, the republi-con congress doesn't try and impeach you for something first.

Sincerely, Seven of Six

Remembering how things have changed in exactly ten years:

Ten years ago today, the world changed. At the time, we just didn't know it yet.

Ten years ago today, in a baffling and overtly political 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court decided that the only way to protect the equal voting rights of the people of Florida was to stop counting their votes--but only in this particular instance and no other, because they only wanted the votes to stop being counted when George W Bush was ahead.

The Bush legacy is one written in the red ink of debt, greed and death. An occupation of the nation hosting that did attack us, botched from an overweening desire to wage a preemptive war against a country that did not. Thousands of American lives and potentially hundreds of thousands of native lives lost in the process. Torture prisons in the name of national security. Warrantless wiretapping and other forms of surveillance and entrapment against United States citizens and nonviolent peace groups.

Not that the nation was just morally bankrupt: George W Bush did a number on our nation's fiscal health as well, with massive transfers of its wealth into the hands of those who needed the least help, and permission for private entities to loot the land and natural resources of this nation with no return to its taxpayers. And ten years later, virtually nobody has paid the price.

Many progressives--myself included-- felt that the Bush years should have been a national nightmare that we would just wake up from. That the immoral, absurd and illegal practices of those times were just a mere interregnum permitted by the ascension of a Manichean president operating during a time of national crisis, and that once he was out of office, we would instinctively revert to the comparative sanity we had under Bill Clinton. But we haven't yet, and it's likely that without systemic structural change, we never will.

In American governance, some things move very easily in one direction, but not so easily in the other. Taxes, for instance: The current "negotiations" over whether or not to extend the fiscally devastating tax cuts for the wealhiest among us demonstrate that there is almost no such thing as a temporary tax cut because once taxes are lowered, it is almost impossible to raise them again.

Also fitting into that category, however, is executive power. From a structural point of view, it is shocking that even though the Constitution expressly grants to Congress the power to declare war, the United States has not seen a formal declaration of war since World War II. In the wake of the conflict in Vietnam, we now have a so-called "War Powers Resolution"--whose constitutionality has never in fact been tested--that tries to form a compromise that still allows the Congress a certain amount of authority over a procedure over which the Executive has no explicit Constitutional control.

George W. Bush arrogated unprecedented executive powers to himself, primarily in matters of national security. He reserved for himself the right to use the armed forces without limit as he saw fit; to spy on Americans without warrants using no more than his own auspices; and even to torture prisoners without Congressional or judicial oversight. These philosophies of governance were anathema to civil libertarians and the progressive movement, and many of us likely expected those policies to go by the wayside on January 20th of last year.

But executive power is a tricky thing: once there is a precedent, it is not easily relinguished. After all, why would any executive willingly limit his own power, especially when faced with an opposition party already seeking to portray him as weak on national security issues?

President Obama had two fundamentally opposite choices: to oppose in the most vehement terms the claims on executive authority of the Bush administration, repudiate them publicly and be unafraid to pursue prosecutions against those who abused their newfound executive powers; or he could have simply accepted a status quo in which he maintained control over those powers, but just chose not to use them in the perverse fashions of his predecessor.

He chose that latter. And while Obama may not be choosing to abuse these powers, what he has done is cemented a legacy that he most likely did not hope to inherit.

Ten years ago, George Bush was installed in the White House by one vote. Today, what should have been an interregnum is now a permanent part of the American political landscape.

I've lived long enough now to know that the good old USA really is forever changed.

Bits and Pieces for the Week of December 5 - 11

I'm sure MasterLock had something to do with this fashionable trend. (Mike)
A love letter for the digital age. (Mike)
This looks like a great "guy" movie. Too bad we have to wait almost a year to see it. (Mike)
Senses Challenge - See if you can beat my score of 11 out of 20. (Mike)
Why we must defend WikiLeaks (Mike)

More happenings in Arizona: Governor Brewer's reason for denying people aid for transplant operations and organs... “The state only has so much money and we can only provide so many optional kinds of care. Those were one of the options that we had taken liberty to discard...” Really! Those "compassionate conservative" Republicans certainly are concerned for the health of the poor and uninsured. Now if they were making money off transplants, like private prisons, I'm sure they would be stumbling over each other to provide coverage!

"Documentary" of Julian Assange's recent troubles:

Die, Rudolph, DIE!

President Obama thinks that just doing things means success:

"....So this notion that somehow we are willing to compromise too much reminds me of the debate that we had during health care. This is the public option debate all over again. So I pass a signature piece of legislation where we finally get health care for all Americans, something that Democrats had been fighting for, for a hundred years - but because there was a provision in there that they didn't get, that would have affected maybe a couple million people, even though we got health insurance for 30 million people, and the potential for lower premiums for a hundred million people, that somehow that was a sign of weakness and compromise.

Now, if that's the standard by which we are measuring success or core principles, then let's face it, we will never get anything done. People will have the satisfaction of having a purist position, and no victories for the American people. And we will be able to feel good about ourselves, and sanctimonious about how pure our intensions are and how tough we are. And in the meantime the American people are still seeing themselves not able to get health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, or not being able to pay their bills because their unemployment insurance ran out. That can't be the measure of how we think about our public service. That can't be the measure of what it means to be a Democrat...."

No, Mr. President, It's what you DIDN'T do. You got us slightly less bad health insurance, but you failed to get the public option that you promised. You didn't close Gitmo, you put the banking industry ahead of the people, you escalated the Afghan War, and you've wimped out on nearly every progressive issue on which you campaigned (and we supported).

As a "sactimonious" and "purist" progressive, I say to you, President Obama, today you can go fuck yourself. You are compromising, god knows why, with people (Republicans) who just don't give a shit about any of us. Why do you give a shit about them (more than us)?

Sometimes, even a conservative makes sense:

Conservatives seem unfazed by the cost of Afghan war Richard W. Vague is cofounder of Energy Plus, a Philadelphia-based energy company, and is a founding member of the Afghanistan Study Group. My fellow fiscal conservatives are letting me down. At a time when we desperately need to cut the deficit, they are standing by while the Obama administration spends $119 billion per year in Afghanistan, which is a country with a gross national product of only $14 billion a year. Conservatives fought tooth and nail against the health-care program, which costs far less than our occupation of Afghanistan. Yet when our military plans for a multiyear commitment in Afghanistan - a trillion-dollar commitment even with a gradual drawdown - fiscal conservatives barely raise an eyebrow. In 2000, the U.S. military budget was $370 billion. For 2011, it is $707 billion. And that's before any unforeseen emergency supplements. And much of this is for a war where even a cursory review reveals that al-Qaeda is largely gone from Afghanistan - and where the underlying conflict is a civil war in which negotiation among all the relevant parties will get us further, faster, and at a much lower cost. Defining Afghanistan as a military problem rather than a political one has led us to mistakenly conclude that it requires a military solution. A negotiated political solution is a much more effective and much less expensive approach. I had mistakenly hoped that President Obama and the Democrats would be able to reverse the runaway increases in military spending - and lent them my support in that hope. Instead, Obama - acquiescing to the generals - has dramatically escalated troop levels in Afghanistan to a point where it can now rightly be called an occupation, Obama's Occupation. A purely economic calculus does not take into account the tragedy of the deaths and disablements that happen there every day - but have largely disappeared from media coverage. Nor does it take into account the debilitation to our military apparatus and the distraction to our other foreign-policy priorities. I only want to speak of this war with the proper respect and gravity, but the cost and benefit are egregiously out of balance, and the solution being pursued won't work. I respectfully submit that if Obama and Gen. David Petraeus can't successfully handle a largely political problem in a country with a GNP of $14 billion for far less than $119 billion a year, let's find someone who can. Conservatives got us out of Vietnam and Korea. My hope now is that they can do the same in Afghanistan.

Oops, he forget to mention that conservatives got us INTO Iraq and Afghanistan. Simple oversight, I'm sure...

I think this graph speaks for itself:

Bits and Pieces for the Week of November 28 - December 4

WikiLeaks has been moving its home all over the internet this week. Today you can find it here. (Mike)

How this first paragraph should read... "The House of Representatives, in... Democratic control, passed an extension on Thursday of... tax cuts for the lower and middle classes in a... vote that would let tax cuts for the wealthiest expire." Love how the media twists shit! (7 of 6)

Non-DNA based life form discovered. (Mike)

Canned unicorn meat is having difficulty getting through customs. (Mike)

How many Californians have died so far from being denied transplant coverage? The difference between a Democratically controlled state and a Republi-con controlled state. What a disgrace... Arizona Republi-cons have no shame? (7 of 6)

Republi-con Obstructionists are at it again! They will "...block all bills until tax cuts..." for the wealthy are made into law! How's that bipartisan effort going President Obama? (7 of 6)

Thanks to the clueless and heartless Republicans in Congress, over 450,000 unemployed Californians will lose combined monthly unemployment benefits of $600M starting January. HAPPY NEW YEAR! (Mike)

The atmosphere is due to warm up another 4 degrees Celcius over the next 50 years. I won't be alive by then, but the journey to get there (increasing extremes in weather) will be quite a wild ride. (Mike)

11 Reasons Sarah Palin WILL Win the Presidency. Of course, 7 and 6 are my favorites. ;) (7 of 6)

The "Lost" Doctor Who Intro from The Late Late Show

Recently, The Late Late Show had a Doctor Who special. For some legal reason CBS nixed the show's intro. Here it is: