Nobody Asked Me, But...



1) They say history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce. The Weiner scandal has careered well past this point to reach all the way around to tragedy again.

2) Also, the young lady in question is going to milk this for all she’s worth, it seems. James Carville had it right: if you drag a dollar through a trailer park, you can get a lot of nibbles. Perhaps she and Edward Snowden can start dating.

3) As predicted immediately after the verdict was rendered, we’re starting to hear buyers’ remorse from the Zimmerman jurors.

4) And yet, Trayvon Martin’s parents continue to act with dignity and grace.

5)  All I can say is, thank God Michael Bloomberg is leaving, so we don’t have to listen to anymore crap like this. Your banker friends, the ones who made you fabulously wealthy, deserve every ounce of contempt we can muster and much much more. If it was up to me, there’d be a hot tar and feather concession at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets.

6) The driver of that train in Spain has been charged. The train was going twice the maximum rate of speed for that track.

7) This seems like a dumb publicity stunt, but you know what? Let Australia elect him, then see what happens.

8) The reason airplanes land butt-first.

9) Remember pepper spray cop? He’s appealing Worker’s Comp for emotional damage caused by, um, pepper spraying college kids.

10) BAN FOURTH TRIMESTER ABORTIONS! SIGN THE PETITION NOW!

Bad News/Good News

Altho it’s hard to find good news in this:

In a 205-217 vote, lawmakers rejected an effort to restrict the National Security Agency's (NSA) ability to collect electronic information.

The NSA's chief had lobbied strongly against the proposed measure.

The vote saw an unusual coalition of conservatives and liberal Democrats join forces against the programme.

I’m going to try.

Yes, the measure was defeated, but look at that vote total: if only six votes had swung the other way, this bill passes – and probably dies a slow painful death in the Senate. But for once, we could have been proud of the House.

Second, a coalition of ideologues from both wings of the nation – liberal and conservative – banded together. We finally found something to agree upon.

Given Congress’s abysmal ratings – HIV probably polls higher – the fact the House could get anything done is to be commended, which is a little like clapping for your tyke when he hits the toilet while sitting down.

But even in this good news lies a dark, nasty secret: this bill, supposedly advanced by a “renegade” conservative Republican…and really, how conservative do you have to be for Boehner to turn his back on you?...had some surprisingly establishment assistance:

Boehner opposes the NSA amendment. Leadership doesn’t care much for Justin Amash. But they were listening to complaints from a broad swath of Republicans who wanted to vote against the spying program, exposed by former security contractor Edward Snowden.

And even after GOP leadership privately determined Amash’s threats were likely empty — that he didn’t have the votes to keep the Defense appropriations bill from coming to the floor — top aides to Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) staff spent the week holding Amash’s hand, helping him turn an unworkable amendment into language that would effectively quash one of the spy agency’s most effective tools.

“Amash was out there acting like he was fighting against the leadership trying to shut us down,” one Republican involved said. “The reality is [leadership was] twisting ourselves in knots for a week trying to craft language that was germane and got at the issue.”

Oh. So it wasn’t that he was too radical for them, he was too big an iliterate douchebag nutcase. Got it now.

Darrell Issa Moron

Darrell Issa has a long-standing reputation as a self-indulgent obsessive criminal creep. This story might take the cake:

But Rep. Darrell Issa, the California Republican leading the House effort to save the postal service, wants more. He has made doing away with doorstep delivery a key part of his bill, which would require everyone to get mail at a curbside box or from a cluster box.

"A balanced approach to saving the Postal Service means allowing USPS to adapt to America's changing use of mail," said Issa, who is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Moving away from door-to-door delivery saves a lot of money. Right now, 35 million residences and businesses get mail delivered to their doorstep.

It costs $353 per stop for a delivery in most American cities, taking into account such things as salaries and cost of transport. By contrast, curbside mail box delivery costs $224, while cluster boxes cost $160, according to a report from the Postal Service's Office of Inspector General.

Issa has been called a “pathological liar”, so it will come as no surprise when he goes all Nathan Thurm on this story as the backlash builds when he’s reminded that the USPS is the only government agency – hell, the only entity of any kind in the history of the nation – which has to fully fund in cash its pension obligations, and if we allowed them to do what every other frikkin’ entity uses, the USPS would be profitable: "I know that! You don't think I know that?"

He’d rather see the American people inconvenienced and their mail put in jeopardy: stolen checks, lost bills, important documents misplaced, than pony up and fix the real problem for the average American’s benefit. Issa moron. Nuff said.

Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...

Aren’t they supposed to prevent burns?

Third World Country?

Try savage jungle

First World Problems

Spoiled wine, from Hurricane Sandy

 

Look, when even the judge gets pissed off at you, you probably ought to just eat your losses:

Even the federal judge hearing the case scolded lawyers for the wine owners for their level of urgency. “There were thousands of victims of Hurricane Sandy,” he said, “most of which suffered a great deal more than your clients have.”

 

One Step Closer to Pitchforks and Torches

A curious little item in Time Magazine this issue:

If you are in any doubt about how little has changed on Wall Street since 2008, check out yesterday’s front page New York Times story about how banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley profited wildly by hoarding and slowing the supply of various commodity metals like aluminum, driving up prices on the global market in the process. It was a truly ingenious profit-making scheme, involving sophisticated arbitrage of complex global regulations, all of which resulted in lots of money for banks, and higher prices for companies and consumers.

This story put me in mind once again of the fact that many of the best minds on Wall Street still spend the majority of their time figuring out new and smarter ways to game the system, rather than how to grease the wheels of the real economy. Just look at the record profits posted by a number of the world’s largest banks last week. The six largest are on track to post a 20% earnings increase in the second quarter of this year. But the vast majority of that money came not from lending, but from trading. While the money spigots to the small and new businesses that create most of the jobs in this country are still tight — like last year, small business lending was down again this year, according to the Small Business Administration — trading profits are way up.

Clearly, finance is still disconnected from the real economy, which is one reason that the regulation battle rages on. A new proposal issued jointly a few days back by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency would require some of the country’s largest banks to hold double the amount of reserve capital that they currently do. This has prompted all the usual complaints from the industry about too much regulation. Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, now the head of bank advocacy group the Financial Services Roundtable, said the new rules would make “it harder for banks to lend and keep the economic recovery going.”

Think about that anecdote again: a cartel of banksters collude (possibly conspire) to artificially jack up commodity prices, not on gold or diamonds, but on everyday items like aluminum, thus gouging an enormous profit from society.

OK, some basic economic theory here first: the theory is that market competition and free enterprise will expose inefficiencies in prices, thus creating opportunities for a company to step in and profit.

Theoretically, this occurs when a competitor steps in and, seeing how he can work more efficiently, sells his product for a lower price or with better features of some sort. That’s the basis of capitalism, as Adam Smith envisioned it. Smith must be rolling in his grave to think that industries are no longer run by entrepreneurs but by financiers, people who have zero concept of production, distribution or service.

They only know profit. The sole measure of their value to society is in a dollar figure. If anyone wonders whether that viewpoint erodes a society, one has only to look around oneself: clearly, it does.

Business schools pay lip service to reversing this trend by including courses on ethics and management strategies that don’t involve raping a community or its resources, but let’s be honest: the world is run by vulgarians, who mock ethical people.

Until, of course, they run afoul of the law as they inevitably do. Unfortunately, they’ve left a whole cadre of apostles behind who are more than happy to pick up the slack, buy off more of the government and media, and measure their lives in money.

New regulations, and a return of Glass-Steagal, will help, to be sure, and I fully support those, but here’s the thing: corporations now have enough money and enough entrenched power that they can afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get around those legally. We have to find a way to defuse the mindset that they should. We can put up obstacles, but at the end of the day, persuading them not to try is our best inoculation against future economy catastrophies.

And make no mistake: we have many many more in the near future.

Ahhhh, the Republicans Must Be Back In Town!

Giant corpse smell pervades DC

Royal Baby

I’ll be very disappointed if a) they don’t name it Zaphod or Biggus Dickus or b) it’s not a squid.

Race to the Bottom

Wow. Such a busy news day. So many things I could write about: a royal baby, earthquakes in China, the name “Cheney” back in the news…but I want to focus on the powerful words of our President from Friday:

“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” Obama said, during extensive and deeply personal remarks that lasted for 18 minutes. “And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that — that doesn’t go away.”

Obama continued: “And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.”

I wrote something similar to put the murder of Martin into a context even white people could understand, but perhaps this columnist can say it better than I can:

Trayvon Martin, the president said, could have been him 35 years ago. That would have been Barack Obama at age 17, then known as Barry and living in Honolulu. He had a bushy Afro. Hoodies were not in style then, or often needed in balmy Hawaii. His customary hangout outfit was flip-flops, called “slippers” on the island, shell bracelet, OP shorts and a tee.

Imagine if Barry Obama had been shot and killed, unarmed, during a confrontation with a self-deputized neighborhood watch enforcer, perhaps in some exclusive development on the far side of Diamond Head after leaving home to get shave ice. The news reports would have painted a complicated picture of the young victim, a variation on how Martin was portrayed decades later in Florida:

Lives with his grandparents; father not around, mother somewhere overseas. Pretty good student, sometimes distracted. Likes to play pickup hoops and smoke pot. Hangs out with buddies who call themselves the Choom Gang. Depending on who is providing the physical description, he could seem unprepossessing or intimidating, easygoing or brooding. And black.

On the inside, the young Obama had already begun a long search for identity — and by extension a study of the meaning and context of race. His mother and maternal grandparents were white. He was not. He lived in one culture, and the skin color passed along to him by his absent father placed him inalterably in another, in the eyes of others. How and why did race define him, limit him, grace him, frustrate him, alienate him, propel him and connect him to the world?

The President’s words had much impact: even a former opponent of his, Sen. John McCain, lauded the president and suggested that, indeed, perhaps Stand Your Ground is bad law and ought to be discarded. It’s a step. A small step.

Sadly, the reaction of other reactionaries is neither as measured or as sane.

The right wing is missing the forest for the trees: It’s not about the verdict per se. That’s defensible as the law is a bad law, and the jury made a bad decision, but the legal one. I’ve argued in the past that they could have, and perhaps should have, looked past the law, past the immediate crime, to the context and I still believe that is what might have transpired in a fairer state.

But the football spiking of the right wing, particularly whites, has been astounding. The one thing we can be sure of is it will motivate blacks and Latinos and women across the nation to vote next year, and vote the fascists out.

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Detroit filed bankruptcy yesterday. Yes, you read that correctly. I’ve visited that city, if you can call it that. No, this isn’t going to be a diatribe about the people who live there or who left there…well, maybe a little of the latter. It’s going to be a diatribe about a city that forced itself to be the car capital of the world.
It’s less of a city than a series of island-towns connected by enormous highways and broad boulevards. There’s downtown, right on the waterfront, with its monorail and arenas and hotels made famous in the movie Robocop.

If you want to get anywhere, say the industrial section of town (which is why I was visiting, doing an investigation), you have to get on a freeway and drive. And as you drive, you get a sense of place: inner cities, burned out and abandoned, littered along the highway like so many dumps, and then these grand and glorious suburbs, like Grosse Pointe. Beautiful little towns that suck the life out of the city proper.

So long as GM and Ford and Chrysler stayed local, in Dearborn and especially River Rouge, there was work to be had (yes, I know, Rouge is still there which may be the only thing that kept this from happening earlier.) And those plants didn’t just employ their own, they were responsible for lots of businesses around the city, which benefitted from the good union wages paid to workers, and in turn employed huge numbers of people.

The shame of Detroit is not mayors like Kwame Kilpatrick. The shame of Detroit is that folks like Roger Smith couldn’t give a damn about Detroit. Or America.

2) Stay classy, Batboy. Perhaps some “philanthropist” would be kind enough to start buying guns for the minorities in Florida. That’s what got gun control passed in the first place. Watch the NRA suddenly demand it.

3) Speaking of Florida, the DoJ has asked that the evidence in the Trayvon Martin case, including Zimmerman’s gun, be held while they investigate a civil rights case.

4) It was 84 degrees when I woke up at 4AM this morning. I think I moved to Nicaragua.

5) Speaking of New York, these may be the coolest photo-art I’ve ever seen.

6) As goes China, so goes the US economy. This may be a smart move for us.

7) Monkeys remember.

8) Do you smell a sex scandal? I smell a sex scandal.

9) Bankstahs may still do time.

10) John Hinckley did it better.

Hm. Buyer's Remorse?

An interesting interview on Anderson Cooper’s show last night with one of the jurors on the George Zimmerman panel:

The woman, known as Juror B37, told CNN's Anderson Cooper that when the jury began deliberations Friday, they took an initial vote. Three jurors -- including B37 -- were in favor of acquittal, two supported manslaughter and one backed second-degree murder. She said the jury started going through all the evidence, listening to tapes multiple times.

"That's why it took us so long," said B37, who said she planned to write a book about the trial but later had a change of heart.

Said “change of heart” was forced upon her, by the way as first her publisher, then her agent, dropped her like a shit-covered rock.

People disgust me, but I digress…or maybe not a digression. Let’s look further into the AC360 interview.

When they started looking at the law, the person who initially wanted second-degree murder changed her vote to manslaughter, the juror said. Then they asked for clarification from the judge and went over it again and again. B37 said some jurors wanted to find Zimmerman guilty of something, but there was just no place to go based on the law

Now, all that may be true, but it seems to me that if you stood your ground – no pun intended – the judge would accept the verdict, and appealing that verdict would be very hard for the defense. It’s easy to appeal errors in the trial, errors of procedure, but if a jury sifts through the evidence and determines that, despite the law, a crime was committed, then there’s nothing to be done about it.

Better legal minds than mine (e.g. actual lawyers…I’ve only played them on the TeeVee) have told me that the law gives this jury cover, and it’s true, it does.

Still, it wouldn’t be the first time a jury has broken ranks with the law to do the right thing. And that’s something this woman and the other two will have to spend the rest of their lives living with: a young man died, and they had the chance to punish the killer, but let him walk free.

Shameful. Absolutely shameful.

 

The Tragedy of the All-Too Common

As the anger builds over the verdict in the George Zimmerman case, one thing leaps off the page to this actor and public speaker: the prosecution.

Before I get to my thoughts on that, let me just say that it’s fortunate, I think, that the protests and demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful, with scattered violence. It makes it hard for the right wing to paste “savages” label over this and forces them to move mountains to do so.

Moving on…

The facts supported one slam-dunk verdict: manslaughter. A case could be argued for murder in that Zimmerman saw Martin, started stalking him, aggravated an assault then in a panic shot Martin dead, meaning that he brought this on himself with at least a felonious assault. Killing someone in the commission of a crime is by definition in most states murder, and I’m sure Florida has had enough fatalities during bank robberies and such that this statute exists there, too.

That’s a hard case to make when the victim can’t speak for himself, can’t give his side of the story and there’s precious little evidence – either forensic or eyewitness – that conclusively determines this is what happened.

Which brings me to my point.

The prosecution attempted to try this case strictly on facts, but they missed a golden opportunity to get the jurors’ sympathy for Martin, leaving Zimmerman and the families to be the only emotional totems in the entire courtroom.

His opening statement focused on the actions of Zimmerman, which it should, but he presented it from an objective, third party standpoint, and threw in a few obscenities to boot. On a jury of six southern women, this was a mistake. He needed to make an emotional connection with them, make them feel for Martin. Here’s what I would have said:

“Ladies of the jury, I want you to put yourself on the streets of Sanford that rainy, dark night. You’re walking home from the store, carrying a few groceries. Maybe you’re chatting with a friend on the phone, minding your own business, when you notice that creeping up behind you is a car you don’t recognize. It’s moving slowly. It makes no effort to pass you. If anything, it seems to be following you. You walk a little faster. Maybe you mention to your friend on the phone that there’s this car creeping behind you. You duck down a side yard, hoping to get away.”

You walk on a little further and realize now there’s a man walking behind you, following you. You don’t know who he is, but you recognize him as the driver of the car. You don’t know what he wants, but you’re scared, terrified. It’s a cold night and windows are closed, no one else is out on the street. You shout at him, more to get him to leave you alone than to find out what he wants. He yells back. Words are exchanged and you panic out of sheer terror, trying to force him to stop following you.”

“We’ve all been in situations like this. We’ve all been stalked, hunted, by someone who means to do us harm, no matter how nice we might be. It’s frightening.”

Imagine now, six women jurors. They’ve been to pools and beaches, walked past construction sites. Maybe they’ve had *that guy* as a boyfriend, the one who follows them after they break up, demanding answers. It made them angry. It was terror of the most personal and destructive kind.

And you’ve just won your verdict by being honest about Trayvon Martin.

A Bitter Pill

I fell asleep last night just as the jury in the George Zimmerman trial reached a verdict. I knew it would take another hour or so for all parties to gather and to announce the actual verdict, and I was pretty tired already. I'm glad I did. As it was, I only read about it this morning when I looked at my phone to see what time it was around 4 AM, and got so angry that I couldn't fall back to sleep.

A few thoughts:

1) Finding someone guilty on a charge of manslaughter entails two conditions: first, someone has to be dead and second, that death has to occur because of the deliberate actions of the accused. Unless you buy the ludicrous self-defense charge, that's clearly what happened here.

2) To buy the ludicrous self-defense charge means willfully ignoring the entire incident up to the point where the struggle between two men begins. It also means that the prosecution failed miserably to put the jurors in the scenario. A young boy is walking home, minding his own business, when a creep starts stalking him, first in his car, then on foot. He's terrified, not knowing who or what this is about. As he is still just a teen, he acts first and questions his actions later (sadly, he never gets that chance.) He turns and confronts his assailant, and demands to know what his problem is. Things escalate.

3) The trouble with the jury system is jurors. When your jury pool is the state of Florida, you are going to be hard pressed to find even six modestly intelligent people. That they asked to have the charge of manslaughter read back to them and then didn't respond to an admittedly stupid request of the judge, that told me the prosecution was in trouble.

4) My suspicion is the jury, unable to find sufficient cause to convict on murder (I might give them this. It's hard to know for sure that Zimmerman set out to kill this particular kid.) and completely confused about what constitutes manslaughter, threw up their hands because they wanted the trial over and to go home.

5) Zimmerman is far from off the hook. For one thing, the parents have recourse to a civil suit -- you may recall this was the trial that actually did find O. J. Simpson guilty -- which only needs a preponderance of evidence that Zimmerman caused the death of Trayvon Martin. For another, the Federal government could pursue a hate crimes case against Zimmerman, although that's a little unlikely given the paucity of evidence, some garbled phone transcripts.

6) Speaking of OJ, it's a bit ironic that just about twenty years after that verdict shocked America, here comes the Zimmerman verdict. I think the parallels will not end there. You may recall that OJ never really "got away with it," and although he gained his freedom, it didn't last. He's currently serving a prison sentence for another crime he committed and was convicted of and the judge in that case was none too kind in sentencing. Given the Zimmerman family propensity for criminal behavior, this is probably not the last time we'll see him in court. He'll try to get a book deal out of this, and in a worst case scenario, a movie, but in the end, he'll crash harder believing he got away with murder.

So a piece of advice, George: Not guilty is not the same thing as innocent. You killed a boy. You're going to have to square yourself with that.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) The trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin wraps up today, and the case goes to the jury. Many pundits believe that Zimmerman will be found not guilty and indeed, the prosecutors asked the judge (who said yes) to allow the jury to consider lesser charges, which indicates they think the case may not be as solid as charged. However, the summation given by the prosecutors yesterday – including a point made about Zimmerman being terrified of Martin, yet knowing he had a gun in his pocket, so he could equalize any confrontation -- was very forceful and punched holes in the story Zimmerman's defense team spun out. I think this is a 70-30 case with a guilty verdict rendered pretty quickly once a few hesitant jurors are persuaded.

Under any circumstance, I think Zimmerman's civil case will be the more damaging to him.

2) ♪ It's raining….glass?

3) If I'm reading the tea leaves correctly, it looks like Duchess Kate's baby will be born over the weekend.

4) The very Catholic Ireland has officially become more sophisticated than Texas.

5) If you were worried about being bored the next sixteen months, I have good news for you: Sarah Palin is running for Senate from Alaska. Assuming she lasts that long. Comedy gold, I tell you.

6) Well, I mean, you know….Mussolini made the trains run on time, too…

7) Frackquake!

8) Don't let the Potomac hit ya where the good lord split ya!

9) Terrorists, global warming, black teens with hoodies, squirrels. What are things Floridians are terrified by? I'll take paranoia for $1,000, Alex.

10) Finally, people putting solar panels on their roofs in Arizona may end up paying more for power supplied by the power company. This is not a typo.

Water, Water, Everywhere

And not a drop to drink. But you may drown:

Researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, funded by ice2sea, a European Union project, tackled the question of how both processes will evolve and interact in the future.

This was done with a computer model, which projects the future ice sheet evolution with high accuracy using the latest available techniques and input data.

 They devised a method to generalize projections made in earlier research which concerned just four of Greenland's outlet glaciers. By doing so they could apply the earlier findings to all calving glaciers around the Greenland ice sheet.

Their results indicate a total sea-level contribution from the Greenland ice sheet for an average warming scenario after 100 and 200 years of 7 and 21 cm, respectively.

Well, this all seems…horrible. I mean, 21 cm doesn’t sound like much, not even a foot, but…

So why does it matter what happens to the ice sheets? Well, estimates from the National Snow and Ice Data centre (NSIDC) suggest that total melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets would, between them, release enough fresh water to increase global sea level by approximately 66m, of which Greenland’s contribution would be around 6m (other estimates vary).

Since it seems that the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet is proceeding at a pace that outstrips earlier projections, it’s safe to assume scientists here are being more hopeful than helpful. Now, look at those numbers again in that second quote. 6m is roughly 20 feet, so 66m is…about the height of a 20 story building.

I think there might be a problem, and it might be worse than even that:

A massive iceberg, larger than the city of Chicago, broke off of Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier on Monday (July 8), and is now floating freely in the Amundsen Sea, according to a team of German scientists.

The newborn iceberg measures about 278 square miles (720 square kilometers), and was seen by TerraSAR-X, an earth-observing satellite operated by the German Space Agency (DLR). Scientists with NASA's Operation IceBridgefirst discovered a giant crack in the Pine Island Glacier in October 2011, as they were flying over and surveying the sprawling ice sheet.

Keep in mind, it’s the coldest part of the year down there. This calved because of warmer sea water, driven by winds from the north, slid into the cracks and split the berg off. It would have happened eventually, but more likely when it was Antarctic summer.

Leading Indicators

I’m not sure what all this means, but certain events happened over the weekend that could be foreshadows of things to come:

1) Dozens Reported Killed In Egypt – Clashes between pro-Muslim Brotherhood protestors, angered at the ouster of President Mohamed  Morsi, and pro-democracy protestors, supported by the Egyptian military, clashed several times over the past few days. The Obama administration has wisely stayed above the fray, opting to wait and see before picking the wrong side to back.

As Egypt was one of the first of the Arab Spring protests to rise up a few years back, this is indeed troubling, particularly as Egypt (specifically its military) has been a long—standing ally to us in the region.

2) 5 Dead, 40 Missing After Train Explosion – Yes, the XL pipeline will be safe, huh? In case you missed it, a freight train derailed near a town in eastern Quebec province in Canada, leveling a small town. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper described it as a “war zone”.

3) Tales of Flying Cinnamon Buns, iPods, and Gaping Exit Holes – How does a Boeing 777 with presumably enough fuel to make the flight and then some, manage to crash flying at less than the minimum speed a jet that size should be descending at?

Given Boeing’s problems with its Dreamliner (the 787) are passengers now beta testing airplanes? Or pilots?

We’re sort of seeing a period of troubling instability across the globe and spanning economics and infrastructure as well as politics. Given the turmoil in the Middle East, including Turkey, and now in South America, it will be hard for anyone to focus on things like ensuring our bridges stay up and the trains and planes run on time safely.

Well, maybe our rescue will come from off-planet…

Delayed, But Not Denied

I’m not sure if this is a brilliant tactical move on the part of the President or a tacit admission that getting Obamacare fully enacted will be more difficult than anticipated:

(CBS News) The delay of a key provision in President Obama's health-care law is being called a major setback for the president's signature issue.

The controversial provision that requires companies with more than 50 employees to provide coverage or face fines is being delayed by a year. The rule is now on hold until 2015 - after the 2014 midterm elections.

That last clause is the key: “after the midterm elections.”

This move prevents Republicans in Congress from running against the rollout of the legislation, especially as there will likely be hiccups and false starts along the way at the beginning of implementation.

And it gives the Democratic heir to the Presidency – because let’s face facts, no Republican is going to win in 2016 – a leg up to point to the successes of the Obama legacy, including his signature advance in progressive thinking.

Not surprisingly, Max Baucus, who is to Democratic politics what Vidkun Quisling was to Norwegian sovereignty, has called the entire piece of legislation a “train wreck.”

It probably wouldn’t have been such a train wreck if serious efforts to bring you and the other party-unfaithful into the fold.

Indeed, it’s particularly galling to see this parallel:

With next year's midterm elections looming, that kind of feedback troubled leading Democrats like Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, who staked a lot of political capital on the law. He said, "I just see a huge train wreck coming down."

On Tuesday night, Republicans who remain staunchly opposed to the law, which passed without a single GOP vote, said the announcement was vindication. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, "Even the Obama administration knows the 'train wreck' will only get worse."

Weaker Boener. Senator Baucus. Both use the same blast-fax metaphor.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…

Hoist On His Own Petar

The problem with becoming the story rather than a part of the story is this:

Snowden has been stuck in a Moscow airport's transit zone since arriving there on June 23 from Hong Kong after releasing explosive allegations about Washington's vast global spying programme.

The 30-year-old lashed out at the United States late on Monday, accusing US officials of pressuring foreign leaders to refuse him refuge after Washington charged him with espionage for going through with his leaks.

"These are the old, bad tools of political aggression," Snowden said in a statement published by the anti-secrecy WikiLeaks group.

"Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me."

Actually, I think the purpose is to pressure you to come home and face criminal charges. Just like Daniel Ellsberg did. Just like Andrei Sakharov did in the Soviet Union. Just like Bradley Manning did.

Had you done that, stayed behind and took the heat, you could have given far more encouragement to future whistleblowers to come forward. You would have had a steadier platform to orate from.

Instead, you decided that wasn’t diva-ish enough. Meanwhile, your actions, including the leak, have done little if nothing to move the needle of public opinion. We were sheep before you revealed known facts, and we are sheep now. If anything, the backlash against you comes not from the government, but from the citizens of the United States.

And for what? You’re like the little boy in the back of the station wagon who points out the cop by the side of the road after he’s already turned on his lights and started his siren when dad is speeding. Gee…thanks for pointing that out, Captain Obvious!

You took an unnecessary risk, in other words, and then ran like a scared rabbit. And now that the trap has been snared, you don’t have a whole lot of ground to stand on here, whining about how unfair it is that your privilege to escape has been revoked. In other words, you planned to go in and steal “secrets” from the government without planning one step further down the road, there ain’t no one to blame but yourself.

Now you’ve become the story. Now any real discussion of the things you re-revealed will get lost because you’re just another fame-seeking moron look for his fifteen minutes.

Picture This

It’s January in the South. Two teams are gearing up to play a professional football playoff game, the semi-finals. The winner gets bragging rights to be the conference champion. The host city spent billions in taxpayer dollars on a stadium to keep the team local. Worldwide television is covering the game, Tens of thousands of live spectators and millions around the globe are watching two of the premier American football teams square off.

Meanwhile, outside, the masses of poor residents gather. They have signs protesting the amount of money the city has spent on this spectacle, and how it could have been spent creating jobs, or feeding and housing the poor. The police move in. Teargas flies, some of it filters into the stands, causing spectators to choke.

It would never happen here. But it did happen in Rio de Janeiro last night:

Mood changes do not come much more dramatic than the shift within two hours and four blocks near the Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday night.

Inside that small window, one neighbourhood was choked with angry protests, clouds of teargas and volleys of rubber bullets, while a short walk away joyful crowds sang, danced and exploded in celebration at Brazil's victory in the Confederations Cup final.

It was an odd sensation strolling from one to the other, past recently fired cartridges and fallen placards to garage forecourt TV screens where locals and police stared up together at the events on the pitch, in reality only a stone's throw or two away.

But it also brought home the contrast between the local street and the global stadium, which has been at the heart of the remarkable events in Brazil over the past two weeks as a series of largely spontaneous, somewhat inchoate but often huge demonstrations have coincided with and overshadowed Fifa's tournament.

The World’s Game. Not a crappy little “sport” that is mass marketed to the world as the best of America (really? An actual athletic endeavor every five minutes or so punctuated, or rather punctuating, beer and truck commercials is the best we can export?) The people protesting were the very population that provided many of the players on the pitch for the Brazilian team. Brazil bills itself as “o Pais de Futebol”  -- the country of football. More than 10,000 Brazilians play the game professionally worldwide.

And yet, the working classes protested. And protested for the entire tournament. And will protest next year when the World Cup is held in Brazil. And in 2016 when Rio hosts the Summer Olympics.

Sports are sports. Why do Americans treat them as if they are life?