Links, 8/9/11
Our Dying Economy
Update: Reid just named his three picks for SuperCongress: Patty Murray, Max Baucus, and John Kerry. IMO, Kerry is actually a worse choice than Baucus (yeah, that’s me saying that), since Kerry was in favor of the 4T bargain but Baucus voted against the Catfood Commission recommendations. And frankly, we’re probably better off without Durbin, who was bad on these issues.
All those Republicans (and the President) calling on sucking up to the “job creators” to convince them to maybe, one day, create jobs, have Adam Smith’s version of capitalism all wrong.
Jared Bernstein makes an argument that every single Democrat should be making: our problem is not in Medicare, per se. It’s in health care costs (and Bush’s war and tax cuts). As Bernstein says, “An honest analysis of fiscal sustainability would point toward a larger, not smaller, role for publicly provided health coverage.”
A single mother of two from St. Louis rented a plane so she could fly by Wall Street with a banner reading, “Thanks For The Downgrade. You Should All Be Fired.”
H&R Block just agreed to modify $115 million worth of home mortgages in which it discriminated against black and Latino borrowers (presumably meaning it pushed people of color into subprime loans when they qualified for prime). This follows a similar, national settlement from Wells Fargo.
Justice and Injustice
Apparently, you can set out in your F250 after a party, saying, “let’s go fuck with some niggers,” find the first black man you see, beat him repeatedly, run him over with your full-size pickup and kill him, and not be charged with a hate crime. Or, if you weren’t driving the truck, charged with anything more than assault. (What I want to know is why no one at the motel stopped this before James Craig Anderson got killed.)
Back in 1994, Multiple Choice Mitt believed abortion should be safe and legal. Justin Elliott explains why: because when Mitt was 16, Mitt’s sister’s husband’s sister, Ann Keenan, died from an infection caused by an illegal abortion. She was 21 when she died in 1963. (h/t Susie)
The IRS was going to investigate whether a bunch of rich Republicans were evading gift tax laws by donating to 501(c)(4)s. But Republicans like Orrin Hatch and Dave Camp said “boo.” So the IRS backed off its investigation.”Boo!”
Our Dying Empire
The Council for Foreign Relations’ home journal confirms what we’ve heard elsewhere–al Qaeda is weaker than we’ve been led to believe. As it describes, al Qaeda didn’t even have the resources to wire Najibullah Zazi any money to buy hydrogen peroxide.
Carol Rosenberg and the Miami Herald have put together a list of everyone left at Gitmo.
Patty “The Koch Brothers – who did you say they are?” Murray?
Pathetic.
EW – tell me if I have this figured out correctly. If you are poor and unemployed in London and do a little rioting they will throw the book at you for your youthful shenanigans but if you are a bankster and/or a torturer then you can steal, rape and pillage to your hearts content and absolutely nothing will happen to you. Except, of course, the government will give you more money for more pillaging since we can’t have your previous pillages affect the economy.
Am I missing anything? I bet when Jean LaFitte is reincarnated he comes back as a bankster.
Why no one stopped it? Have you ever been to Mississippi?
Gov. Walker uses the chaos of election day to mask his signing of Republican-protection maps into law
Carol Rosenberg has done her typical fine work again.
In reading through her list of Gitmo detainees, she has identified those who were detained in CIA “Black Sites”, those who are considered “High Value Detainees”, and those who are therefore being detained in “secret camp where the Pentagon segregates so-called high-value detainees.”
Those so identified are at the end of Carol’s piece with “secret U.S. military intelligence summaries provided by WikiLeaks” that are worth the read.
Post-dinner musical interlude on a theme:
@GulfCoastPirate: I’ve spent way more time Mississippi in the last three years than I wanted to and can attest to how hopelessly racist they still are there. I was tweeting the shit out this story yesterday and bringing in that this is how teens in Haley Barbour’s Mississippi entertain themselves. I got some pretty heated responses…
@GulfCoastPirate: Gosh, I dunno, LaFitte had a lot more class and grace, and cared more about people. Not sure he could be a bankster. We could use a man like The Buccaneer to take them down though.
Gulf Coast Pirate:
Jean Lafitte ,along with some Texas heroes were heavily involved in the slave trade in South East Texas, mainly to provide slave labor to the neighboring Louisiana sugar cane plantations.
Here from the Beaumont.Texas Enterprise,circa 1999:
Pirate Lafitte, Bowie dealt in slave trade via SE Texaswww.usgwarchives.org/la/calcasieu/block/slaves.htm – Cached-
Pirate Lafitte, Bowie dealt in slave trade via SE Texas … And that history also mars the image of two Republic of Texas heroes, James Bowie and James …
I think Lafitte would fit in quite nicely with Wall Strret overseers.
LaFitte is who you would want on your side if you ever hoped to defeat titans.
Jim White:
Deryl Dedmon, an… | Facebookwww.facebook.com/globalgrind/posts/202888069763126 – CachedDeryl Dedmon, an 18-year-old from Jackson, Mississippi, ran over 49-year-old James Craig Anderson and bragged about killing a ni**er to his friend. …
Mississippi Teen Deryl Dedmon Charged With Hate Crime In Shocking …www.huffingtonpost.com/…/mississippi-teen-deryl-dedmon-hate-crime-vid…7 hours ago – JACKSON, Miss. — CNN released surveillance footage Monday showing the death of a Jackson, Mississippi man in what police and prosecutors …
Get more results from the past 24 hours
Deryl Dedmon and Racist Teens Hunt Down, Kill Black Manwww.opposingviews.com/…/deryl-dedmon-and-racist-teens-hunt-do… – Cached1 day ago – Eighteen-year-old Deryl Dedmon of Brandon, Mississippi, is accused of beating then savagely smashing 49-year-old James Anderson with a …
The way to stop Obama from gutting SSI, Medicare, and Medicaid is simple.
Push the GOP to impeach him. This will get him off track real quick and give someone else a chance at the Dem primary.
It will also make the GOP & Tea Party even more unpopular.
@allan:
I’m wondering who’s going to pick JoeL for the
PolitburoState Central CommitteeSupercongress.@Mad Hemingway:
Maybe not that much more unpopular, as Mr O isn’t doing well with the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, either.
Hello, EW, and off-topic. I spent the day calling for Shelley Moore in Wisconsin’s 10th S.D. recall election. She got a shellacking (copyright Obama, 2010) from the incumbent Republican. There was a big drop-off in Dem voting from the April Prosser-Kloppenburg State S. Ct. race in college districts of Menomonie and River Falls. The Republican also turned out twice as many votes in St. Croix County as the Justice Prosser got in April.
At this writing (10:15 CDT), the Dem is called the winner in the LaCrosse district; there is a close race in Oshkosh/Fond du Lac, which is surprising because that’s the one where the Republican incumbent left his wife for a 26-year-old bimbo and said wife signed the recall petition; the last one out is Milwaukee/North Shore with little reporting from Democratic county Milwaukee and Republican bastions Ozaukee, Washington, and Waukesha. Dems could yet pick up the magic three seats.
Well, worthy work you did, irrespective of the outcome. Salute!
“al-quaeda is weaker than we were led to believe”
well, well,
what a surprise.
anybody remember how the soviet union was finally assessed as weaker than we were LED (by the cia”s reporting) to believe?
but only after we had spent decades and hundreds of billions “competing” to make ourselves safer from the “warring hoardes” of commies – presented to us by pols and media as kinda like attila and ghengis, but with the bomb,
and how the whole “the commies are coming, the commies are coming” crap was instituted, in the early 1950’s by the john birch society?
i used “instituted” advisedly because right-wing versions of the old “the commies are coming” have now long been funded and institutionalized, e.g. AEI, and have cost this society trillions (probably) of dollars and many, many tens of thousands of lives since the early 1950’s –
specifically including the iraq invasion and occupation instituted by pnac members.
right-wing crackpots have had a field day for 60 yrs against gutless, inarticulate democratic congresses, congressmen, and presidents.
The bogeyman is never as big as painted to gin up the war to go slay him.
From the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access): Continued warming could transform Greater Yellowstone fire regimes by mid-21st century
…Our findings suggest a shift to novel fire–climate–vegetation relationships in Greater Yellowstone by midcentury because fire frequency and extent would be inconsistent with persistence of the current suite of conifer species.
Translation: Enjoy it while you can.
Why does dylan Ratigan get so little mention in the Progressive community?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dylan-ratigan/im-mad-as-hell-how-about-_b_922881.html
@bailey: In this case, maybe because he misunderstands how a growing economy would do more to fix this deficit than screaming his head off.
@bailey:
Ratigan was supurb in that segment.
@emptywheel:
You’ll never again have a growing economy until you stop the ‘extractions’ of which he speaks. The country is being systematically looted and the more you input into that system in an effort to grow the more looting that will occur. It’s a negative feedback loop and the only way you stop it is by one day getting a president who confronts both the Congress and Supreme Court directly by forcing the appropriate changes.
Corporations are people? That should have been all of our’s wake up call.
@bmaz:
Indeed.
It certainly ‘looks’ like there’s an upper crust that truly believes they’re above the Law.
There’s likely to be a lot of Anger when people realize that they’ve been misled into a Dependency-relationship with Money called ‘indebtedness’…
…by Pimps who keep the ‘authorities’ paid-off and enjoy every ‘vice’ without concern for accountability themselves.
People won’t long tolerate the public display of ‘money buying honor’ on every street corner without the intervention of law enforcement.
In our current environment, Trust is broken with the apparently lawless ‘money’ people – and, now, that newly-sparked Mis-trust is only looking for confirmation of un-contained corruption to explode.
Like a burning fuze sizzling towards Rage, it’s a torch capable of ‘setting-off’ the Tea Party, for instance, imvho, and then leading to general disaffection with ‘the system.’
Far better – and a lot less bloody – to start filling the docket with Rich Criminals Now, than to have them ‘crowd-sourced’ for ‘justice’ later…
Failure to demonstrate that the Law applies to All *equally* – including the privileged wealthy – could very well constitute a gut-level opt-out of confidence in the government by the People, which could be tantamount to a declaration of war.
Now is the time to raise the bar of the Law against those who would corrupt our system of government, and economy, by trading Money for Honor on the backs of the People.
@Jim White:
Well, not ALL teens but you are correct in that far too many of them are nothing more than two bit punks who think they want to refight the Civil War. I can only imagine the responses you must have received.
@bmaz:
The Buccaneer – I loved that movie. :)
@Mad Hemingway: Rep. Burgess, Republican from Texas, called today for the impeachment of Obama, saying it would tie up his agenda.