Nobody Asked Me, But...

1)  Unemployment dropped to 7.5%. You’ll hear a lot of blathering about people out of the workforce and so on, and that’s true, the real number is higher, but even that figure has dropped and even faster than the official rate.

2) The NRA and Gun Owners of America have grossly underestimated the amount of anger the nation feels towards them. They’re about to get what Mitt Romney and the Republicans got last year: a very nasty, painful awakening. By the way, Mark Kelly, Gabby Giffords husband, needs to go one step further and join me in calling the NRA a terrorist organization.

3) The US is between Iraq and a hard place on Syria: nobody wants a military intervention, nobody wants to arm the rebel factions to beat Assad, and nobody wants to do nothing. It’s time for Putin to step up and disown this morass.

4) How well have we fought the “war on terror”? We’re putting 35 year fugitives on the FBIs Most Wanted list.

5) No matter what the crisis, there’s always a douchebag or two running around.

6) Boomers are offing themselves at an alarming rate. Refer to item 1 for the reason. BTW, suicide is not painless. Note that firearms accounted for a plurality of suicides. If you’re having thoughts of suicide, please seek help now. Hell, e-mail me. I’m a sympathetic listener and a really smart guy. If I can’t help, I’ll get you to someone who can.

7) I knew the number was high, but I never imagined it was this high.

8) Dusty world of red

     A mote in God’s eye, for war

    Faraway poetry

9) This ought to set tongues wagging (Possibly NSFW)

10) I think the world could have given this a miss.

The Spy Who Fed Me

Intriguing little item in the news today: Bolivian President Evo Morales expels USAID

Bolivian President Evo Morales has said he will expel the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Mr Morales accused the agency of seeking to "conspire against" the Bolivian people and his government.

US state department spokesman Patrick Ventrell rejected the allegations as "baseless and unfounded".

USAID has been working in Bolivia for almost five decades, and had a budget of $52.1m (£33.4m) for the country in 2010, according to its website.

USAID’s mission is to provide basic humanitarian and civilian foreign aid to developing countries. USAID was created in 1961 under President Kennedy as a restructuring of what up to that point had been a morass of foreign aid agencies, sometimes working at cross-purposes. It was, at the time, viewed as both a Cold War tool – likely many covert CIA operations in Latin America and worldwide were executed – as well as a way to shore up Latin American support for the United States, which had taken a massive hit under Eisenhower.

Nominally. It has also used its influence and foreign contacts to…well, they term it “promote freedom and democracy abroad,” but that can be interpreted in many different ways and often has, particularly under a certain yahoo from Texas who was our President during the 2000s. For instance, in 2005 USAID spent $95,000 on a seminar in Brazil designed to foment dissent among the Worker’s Party, a leftist party that was ruling the nation at the time, as well as other liberal political organizations. This was done under the guise of promoting a United States perspective in Brazil and her politics. Nice rationale. Should have been handled less clumsily.

Morales terms this recent action, taken after the ALBA nations issued a call in 2012 for the expelling of USAID, as a way to “nationalize dignity”. I take that to mean he finds the USAID mission to be demeaning in a sovereign nation on its face, but is also polite cover for kicking out what he might rightly view as a subversive foreign influence within his borders.

Now that we no longer have Chavez and the Castros are merely a footnote, is Morales our next “evildoer”?

 

 

Some Good News

We might end up dragging this nation into the 21^st Century after all:

Slightly more voters say they’ll vote Democratic in the 2014 congressional elections than Republicans, bucking a historical trend of the president’s party losing seats in his sixth year, a new poll Wednesday shows.

Forty-one percent of voters said they’ll vote Democratic while 37 percent said they’ll vote for Republicans, according to a Quinnipiac University survey.

Overall, 48 percent of voters want one party to control both the Senate and House, while 43 percent would like it split. Sixty-four percent of Democrats want complete control, while 30 percent of them want it split. Meanwhile, 50 percent of GOPers want complete control while 44 percent it split. Among independents, 53 percent want complete control and 35 percent want it split.

So there you have it: people are tired of the obfuscation that Republicans, Inc. have engaged in for the past thirty years, and have ramped up in the past five.

But this is particularly good news this late in the second term of a President: traditionally, in the sixth year of any administration, his party ends up losing seats (see: 2006).

They look at recent history, when Democrats controlled Congress for 40 years, and see progress. Progress on civil rights, progress on peace, progress on science, progress on the economy.

Things got done, in other words. Now? Not so much. And they’re disgusted with the partisan blockade that lets this country burn while Republican, Inc. leadership fiddles. They see history and they are deeply discouraged for the future, not because it’s going to be hard work to fix this nation, but because roughly half of Congress stands in the way, blocking that work from getting underway.

It’s kind of like building a house, only to have the half the zoning commission throw up roadblock after roadblock, simply because they are afraid of what you’re doing.

It’s time to retire Republicans, Inc. for good.

Inelegantly Pursued

But then, this was Mark Sanford, who needed to be called on it:

As the NRCC’s move suggests, Sanford’s recent history is the main reason the race is so competitive. In 2009, he admitted to traveling to Argentina for an affair with his mistress without informing the public he was out of the state. The scandal sparked a state investigation that ended with Sanford paying a $74,000 ethics fine for misusing taxpayer dollars for personal use.

Colbert Busch brought the issue up sparingly but directly. At one point she questioned Sanford’s understanding of fiscal prudence, saying “it doesn’t mean you take that money we saved and leave the country for a personal purpose.”

There were, I think, more pointed ways of reminding the voters of Sanford’s moral failings – including  the recent dust-up with his ex-wife where she claimed he was trespassing in her house – without coming across as a bluenose accountant, but then I’m not running in South Carolina, and to be honest, the video of the exchange seems to show that Sanford was quite rattled by the charge, claiming he didn’t hear it.

Perhaps Colbert’s larger point was that she wasn’t judging his personal adventures walking in the woods (which is how I would have phrased it) but focusing on the fiscal impropriety (again, my turn of phrase would have done the same thing but would have been more direct than Colbert-Busch’s.)

When prepped, Sanford could actually turn a decently scripted pirouette:

Sanford brought the Argentina episode up at times himself, claiming “you don’t go through the experience I had back in 2009 without a greater level of humility.” And he slickly rebutted a question from the debate moderator over whether he regretted his vote to impeach President Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky given his own personal history.

“I would reverse the quesiton to you and I would say this: Do you think that President Clinton should be condemned for the rest of his life based on a mistake that he made in his life?” he said.

That was a very nice way of asking forgiveness of the voters without seeming cloying or begging, but notice that it doesn’t address the real problem with his wanderings: the fact he used public money to enjoy a little private something-something, even tho he technically was cleared of criminal charges.

This is not to say that Colbert-Busch should automatically get anyone’s vote: she’s come out opposed to Obamacare, altho that’s pretty much a moot point now, and she’s bucked the party on unions, which is really troubling, considering her brother made his millions under the auspices of SAG-AFTRA.

This debate was Sanford’s one and only opportunity to portray Colbert-Busch as an amateur with a famous brother and no ideas, and instead failed to present himself as a credible candidate. I think this is his last step on the road to being a FOX News commentator.

 

A Tale of Two Cities

So, it was the best of times last week as I took a week’s break from the news and the grind of ordinary life and went on a tropical vacation to central America. Specifically, I went to the Honduran Bay Island of Roatan. And I couldn’t help but take a critical eye to my surroundings.

Now, none of this should in any way, shape or form being construed as a reflection on either the people of or the government on the island. Everyone I met was very nice, hard-working, and friendly. But it was hard not to notice one glaring problem.

A little history is in order.

Honduras was originally two nations: Spanish Honduras, and British Honduras (now Belize). As you can imagine, Hondurans spoke Spanish, and Belizeans spoke English.

However, the Bay Islands were mostly populated by the Caracol people, originally black slaves from Jamaica and the Caymans who moved to the Bay Islands when Great Britain repealed slavery in the mid-1800s.

That population has moved out in large numbers over the past twenty years, primarily due to the devastation caused by 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, which devastated the island. Mainland Hondurans then moved in, as Roatan is one of the few places in Honduras where work is plentiful and easy to come by. It is a huge tourism destination, and has a deep water port that fits a cruise ship nicely.

Also, as part of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the second largest in the world, the waters off the island are teeming with fish. And scuba divers.

Now, most Caribbean islands I’ve been to exhibit some signs of extremes between poverty and wealth, but Roatan is unique in this regard. At any random point along the landscape, you can see aging and decaying mansions cheek by jowl with communities of rusted tin-roof shacks that house multigenerational families that number in the dozens.

And the coastline is littered with properties “under development,” or rather being exploited by foreign interests looking to snatch cheap Caribbean real estate for profit. It looks like many of the developments were abandoned after the 2008 economic collapse, but as the global economy picks up, one would imagine these will proceed full steam.

But it’s a fragile, even tenuous, proposition: one good hurricane or earthquake (there was a small temblor on my last day there) would be enough to knock Roatan back into a Haiti-like existence for a very long time.

This is on my mind this morning as I read about my home city, one of the wealthiest in the world, and the difficulties we’re having simply rebuilding a few homes.

Tens of thousands of people remain homeless, while business, tourism and coastal protection are still major concerns with the summer vacation and hurricane seasons almost here again.

New Jersey suffered $29.5 billion in damage, and the repair job is slow going. There are just four weeks left before Memorial Day, and many homes and businesses are still in shambles.

Officials admit the $19 billion in tourism revenue generated along the Jersey shore last year won't be matched this year.

On Staten Island, the changing seasons don't represent much change on the ground. In Oakwood Beach, many neighborhoods are still ghost towns with no sign of new life.

Many shore communities hope to rebuild, but Oakwood Beach is different because it will be the test site for Governor Andrew Cuomo's new buyout program. Residents will get 100 percent of their home's pre-Sandy value, plus an additional 5 percent if they agree to then remain on Staten Island.

We took a hit on September 11, to be sure. It was eleven years before we’ve been able to patch over everything that was destroyed that day and yet we continue to try. And if Sandy, which wreaked even more havoc and across and even bigger swath of our metropolis, takes one-tenth that time, it could leave a permanent economic hole in the town.

And then, there’s Roatan.

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) As you probably have heard, police have shot one of the Boston marathon suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and are hot on the trail of the second, identified as Dzokhar Tsarnaev. Both are from Chechnya, living here legally for about ten years now. Ten years ago, I’d be remiss not to point out, we bargained with Vladimir Putin to allow him to invade Chechnya to put down an incipient revolution, in exchange for his silence on our invasion of Iraq. I’ll just leave that stand for you to ponder, but to say, “Well, George, here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us in.”

2) Michael Bay has already optioned the rights to the battle on the streets of Watertown, by the way.

3) In other news that wraps up old wounds the US opened…

4) I’m really beginning to think the world skipped back to 2006…bird flu? A new strain?

5) Hot on the heels of a big one in Iran earlier this week comes a magnitude 7.0 earthquake off Japan. If Jesus is coming, he’s picking a good time to do so.

6) Beat the haters at their own game, I say.

7) Scott Walker: Even bigger douchebag than you imagined.

8) Once more, science saves your sex life.

9) If things are getting a little too weird for you around here, you can always move.

10) No, really! You CAN move!

The Song of the Furies

Witnesses to them that died,

The blood avengers at his side,

The Furies' troop forever stands.

Aeschylus was more right than he knew.

I’ll leave it to Gabby Giffords to explain what this post is about:

SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.

On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms — a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count.

Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents — who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.

The Congresswoman is far more eloquent than I could be in reaction to the cowardly, blood-thirsty vote that took place in the Senate yesterday, as 45 traitors voted to block a yes or no vote on…and here Congresswoman Giffords and I differ in what she defines as “common-sense”…on a bill that amounted to the Democrats throwing up their hands and saying, “Fine! YOU write a gun control bill!”

President Obama was rightly angry at the 45 Senators saying, “And unfortunately, this pattern of spreading untruths about this legislation served a purpose, because those lies upset an intense minority of gun owners, and that in turn intimidated a lot of senators.”

There it is: he called them “cowards” to their faces.

Mr. President, it’s time to put some noses to the grindstone. It’s time to make Senators pay for standing up for the deaths of innocent children. It’s time to hurt them where it will hurt the most: in their home states. Pull funding from them. Close military bases. Ramp up whatever discretionary methods you have to make those Senators know that votes have consequences.

Many have said that this bill will do nothing to prevent criminals from getting their hands on more weapons. That tiny minority are idiots. By this logic, we should dismantle all drug laws. All traffic laws. All laws of any kind because good people will obey them anyway, and bad people will ignore them. In other words, we should become Somalia.

Our schools already are, thanks to a domestic terror organization known by the initials “N R A”. And it’s about time we recognized them as such. There’s a reason they won’t even support these pathetic safeguards: many of the members, if not most, have ties to organizations that would be and likely are on domestic terror watchlists.

They are traitors and deserve a traitor’s fate.

I call on Michael Moore to sue under the Freedom of Information Act, for the release of the crime scene photos from Sandy Hook and to feature them in a film that follows up Bowling For Columbine. Make people see the ghastly horror of what’s left of the bodies and faces of those tiny children. Why not? The anti-choice movement does that all the time, with their protest posters. Let’s make those bastards as uncomfortable as they think they make us.

With three years left in your second term, there is precious little you can do legislatively to make your second term bigger than your first, but you can take actions outside of legislation, and I urge you to implement those now. Use that bully pulpit. Bring your oratorical skills to the forefront and begin to change the dialogue in this nation about guns from one of “We’re too scared to stand up to you,” to “There are many more of us than there are of you. Put away your guns.”

And to you, my readers, and to the American people, it’s time now to act. It’s time now to find these Senators and get them out of office, to show that votes have repercussions, and to support whomever runs against them. To do the work that those children no longer can. There are 4 million NRA members. That means there are 326 million Americans of whom more than 90% believe in stronger gun control and putting an end to the tyranny of the NRA.

It is time for us to release our Furies.

 

 

Shades of Failures

In the wake of the national focus on the Boston bombings, you may have missed the other act of terror that was committed this week:

WASHINGTON - Police have a suspect in mind as they investigate a letter mailed to Sen. Roger Wicker that tested positive for poisonous ricin, a Senate colleague said.

"The person that is a suspect writes a lot of letters to members," Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said Tuesday as she emerged from a classified briefing.

Authorities declined to comment on a suspect or any other aspect of the investigation being led by Capitol Police and the FBI after tests indicated that a letter mailed to the Mississippi Republican's Washington office contained the potentially deadly toxin. The letter was intercepted at a Senate mail facility in Prince George's County, Md., just outside Washington, said Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a member of the Senate's Democratic leadership.

First, let’s note that no one was in danger from this attack – except for the union men and women who deliver your mail. Once again, union members are on the front lines.

Second, for all the bluster and braggadocio that right-wingers have displayed this week about Obama’s “lack of oversight” in homeland security (as if), we were reminded of the single unsolved terrorist incident in the past century: the anthrax attacks.

Among senators there was a mix of apprehension and appreciation that security protocols — put into place after anthrax mail attacks following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — seemed to work.

The 2001 anthrax-laced letters appeared in post offices, newsrooms and the offices of then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Two Senate office buildings were closed during that investigation. Overall, five people died and 17 others became ill. The FBI attributed the attack to a government scientist who committed suicide in 2008.

Five people dead, no outrage. Three people dead from an apparent domestic act of terror? Outrage.

I highlight the domestic terror angle, because if it is, for Obama to have no blame would require the Federal government to do the job of local and state law enforcement officials.

You may as well blame Obama for the Wall Street bombing, too, if you’re going to pick nits. After all, he has a time machine.

 

 

Keep your cool Though you can't see what's in front of you

Some random thoughts on the Boston bombing yesterday:

 

-          Road running is about as egalitarian a sport as there is. All you need is -- well, I was going to say a pair of sneakers, but you don’t even need that. Or feet. But most people can do it for free, with minimal equipment. That an event like that is terrorized speaks volumes about the cowardice of the bomber(s).

-          That said, a few things should be noted about this particular race:

1.    While marathons are generally viewed as peace time activities, we should not forget that they have their roots in war. The first marathon was run to celebrate an Athenian victory. Was the bomber aware of this? Who knows?

2.    It was the celebration of Patriot’s Day, the day when the American Revolution kicked off (actually, that’s April 19, but the celebration is always the third Monday of the month.) The bomber most certainly was aware of this.

3.    The race is run in the city most synonymous with an event that probably instigated the fierce British response that triggered the Revolution full stop: the Tea Party. I’ll let you draw whatever conclusions you may from that, but it’s an eerie note to make.

-          Already on Twitter, some morons on the right are comparing Boston to Benghazi and complaining about the “tepid” response to yesterday’s act of terror. They’ll even blame Obama for lax oversight on homeland security, conveniently forgetting that even George W Bush screwed the pooch any number of times in his administration and was bailed out only by the incompetence of potential terrorists. From the Virginia assassinations to the anthrax mailings to the Times Square bombing, Bush was ineffectual about all these events. He was worse than Obama, who is trying to maintain a calming influence on the nation. To call this a terrorist act (as opposed to an act of terror) is to raise the spectre of, let’s face it: Islam, when it could just as easily be any number of domestic morons or moronic organizations on both sides of the political spectrum. For instance, as I noted above, just because it’s the city of the original Tea Party, this does not mean the bomber was celebrating the right. It could just as easily have been an attempt to associate the Teabaggers with death, and emanated from the left. We don’t know, and Obama is correct not to label anything prematurely.

-          Which of course, is contrasted with Bush’s cowardice (ignore the ridiculous rhetoric at that link and focus on the facts of his reaction) in the aftermath of 9/11, when he flew across country twice to avoid any possible plane attacks (there were none) on Air Force One, then lashed out at a nation that had nothing to do with the destruction, all in the name of appearing strong. It was America’s weakest moment, and we should make a strong note of that. We allowed terror to rule our actions. And that’s being charitable towards the then-President.

-          Police are questioning a Saudi national who was detained at the scene of the explosion by a bystander, who might have made a terribly bigoted mistake. He saw a swarthy man running and tackled him. That’s all we know right now. Did the bystander see something or was he reacting to “bomb/Arab”? This is why the President’s caution is warranted.

-          You know those people running towards the bombs? Union men and women. All paid for with our taxes. Those people are in danger of being cut by the Republicans, Inc.

-          Most of the injuries were caused by flying shrapnel, specifically some form of BB or ball-bearings encased in the bomb itself.

-          Finally, today, we are all Bostonians. I know I’ve spent more time in Boston than any other city in America save my home town. I know this area. I’ve been in Copley and on Boylston and it was a dream as a younger man when I was a runner to run the marathon. There was an innocence shattered yesterday. This was not a Federal building or a building on a college campus associated with a war, or a bank. This was a group of people, some American, some not, who had their most innocent pleasure ripped from their hands.

In Charge of the Six Hundred

Not the Light Brigade, but the remaining families who are still homeless after Hurricane Sandy devastated and destroyed their homes.

They’ve been living in city-provided shelter, basically hotel rooms, since the disaster clean up began. On April 30, the city is pulling funding for that program. They will for all intents and purposes, be homeless:

Many families who fell victim to Sandy will be left with no place to go when the city pulls the plug on its hotel program at the end of the month, advocates warn in a new report.

Some 592 families are still in hotels six months after the storm, and the city is trying to get them into other housing by the April 30 end of the program.

Advocates are urging the city to scrap the deadline.

I’m not one of those advocates. The city can’t possibly be expected to finance their living arrangements indefinitely.

But here’s the thing: Where are all the free marketers who claim that private enterprise will step in when times are tough? These people live less than fifteen miles or so from the greatest concentration of wealth in this hemisphere, if not the world. You mean to tell me that those billion dollar bonus packages that bankers and brokers dole out annually couldn’t have gone towards helping to fund relief in these areas?

Instead, these folks take a “Let them eat cake” attitude towards the very people who likely are assigned to make their lives a little easier. Many of the displaced are firefighters and police officers and other middle class families…after all, they could afford houses….who make the income that buys the things that make the money that gets invested in banks and investment accounts.

And there aren’t that many families. 600 is a meaningless, insignificant number in the grand scheme of things, and about half of that number will be leaving the program shortly anyway, as their homes are in the final stages of repair. We can presume the other 300 or so will also be out sometime in the near future.

And so this, THIS, is why the government has to spend my tax money in places it really shouldn’t have to, because the people who can help, won’t.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Hey, Sheriff Joe? Maybe if you did your job with a little less douchiness, you wouldn’t be on someone’s hit list?
 

2) Iran has invented a time—wait, suddenly it’s GONE! How in the hell…?
 

3) For an incident involving two people on a dark and rainy night, George Zimmerman sure pulled a lot of witnesses out of his ass. I mean, hat. He’s toast, anyway, and it’s the lawyer who’s merely making a name for himself while living off that right-wing money teat.
 

4) Say, you know why I love reading about the Hack In A Box conference…?
 

5) Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook makes his case for immigration reform. Unwittingly, he also points out the dire need for education reform.
 

6) Mitch McConnell is taking a page out of the book of South Carolina’s Republican Inc. party.
 

7) And when I diiiiiiiiiie…..and when I’m dead, dead, and gone…..my dataaaa will live on…to carry on, to carry on!
 

8) It’s not surprising to me that, ahead of the rumoured revelation by a major American sports star of his homosexuality, that the NHL is trailblazing in tolerance.
 

9) OK, so maybe they’ll need to send it Fedex, but….
 

10) Finally, I humbly volunteer to assist with any follow up studies needed to support the scientist’s theory.

Freedom Is Free. Fascism Has A Price

 

So it turns out that Mayor Mike Bloomberg has yet another black eye in his third term: Occupy Wall Street:

After eleven months of talking in the courts, New York City has agreed to pay Occupy Wall Street almost a quarter of a million dollars.

The lawsuit, filed on May 24, 2012, by lawyers representing OWS, claimed that 3,600 of 5,000 books in the free People's Library were destroyed during the violent raid and eviction of the protest camp in Zuccotti Park.

In addition to books, also destroyed were computers, live streaming equipment and bicycles which were owned and operated by an environmental nonprofit, Time's Up.

It’s barely a victory…after all, people were harassed and arrested and injured for the crime of protesting and assembling peacefully, and $186,000 of that is eaten up by attorneys’ fee …and yet, it’s a start.

The greater victory is this: the city actually acknowledged responsibility for the actions of its police officers. This is diametrically opposed to the usual, “Who? Him? Don’t know him. Rogue cop.”

I can sympathize with the city, but to a limited extent. The administration of a city the size of New York demands some corner-cutting somewhere, and the fact that rights were trumped is indicative of that. Safety and health have importance, too, as well as the rights of other people.

With OWS, however, we see a situation where – some sanitation issues aside – peaceful protestors were using a public space, admittedly provided by a private corporation but in exchange for zoning variances, effectively making it a public space. It was this company that demanded OWS be removed, which started the whole mess back in 2011.

The funny thing is, dispersing OWS was probably the wrong thing to do, since the movement was then forced to scatter about the city and find other ways to raise consciousness. Has it been more or less effective?

That depends on how you view it. If you look at the mass-media news feed, it’s been less effective. When it was consolidated in one location, it became a visible presence on a regular basis.

But, if the mission is to get the message out to people who can be attracted into joining and spreading the message, or even just carrying the message to people who would most benefit from it, then they’ve done some pretty amazing work under the radar. For instance, elements of OWS were among the first responders to the recovery efforts after Hurricane Sandy, bringing food, water, clothing and medical assistance to the very New York Post-reading people who just a year earlier probably laughed at those hippie freaks down on Wall Street. The very working and middle class people OWS needs in order to transform the political landscape of America.

And maybe that won’t happen in our generation, but think about the kids, both who showed up to help and who benefited from the aide. Those are powerful images those folks were left with.

And after the Sandy Hook slaughter, OWS branched off into Occupy the NRA to bring facts to the people who needed to learn the truth about gun control and gun ownership in America. You can find them on Facebook, if you want to read more.

This really has turned into a people’s movement, despite what growing pains it endures. It does my heart good to know this.

 

Give A Thought To This

Next time you’re leaning on your horn because the street is blocked by these guys, you might want to thank them instead.

He Just Don't Get It, Do He?

President Obama, I mean:

 

WASHINGTON – In his fifth annual budget proposal to Congress on Wednesday, President Obama once again has put forward a fiscal mix of investments in infrastructure, education and research with further deficit reduction through tax increases and spending cuts. But for the first time he has included changes to Medicare and Social Security intended to entice Republicans back to the bargaining table.

The main new element of the budget is his proposal, offered previously in private negotiations with Speaker John A. Boehner, for a new cost-of-living formula that would reduce future Social Security benefits. On the spending side, Mr. Obama wants to help states make prekindergarten available universally, paid for by higher taxes on tobacco products.

 

Mr. President, they don’t care. They. Don’t. Care. If you propose it, it’s bad. You could repeal taxes on everything and Republicans, Inc. would still find a way to try and paint you as a tax-and-spend liberal. You could declare war on Islam, and Republicans, Inc. would still find a way to call you a Muslim. Hell, you could resign your office today, and they’d start impeachment proceedings!

They are not going to come back to the negotiating table, not now, not ever. You need to offer a budget proposal that realistically reflects your values and then persuade what few Republican senators that you can to your argument.

You did it in the fiscal cliff negotiations and you can do that again.

And look, the deficit has already started to decline – despite the fact that if the economy tanks again, it will balloon – and you’ve already essentially achieved the Simpson-Bowles target of four trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years.

Why won’t they negotiate? It’s really simple: they were literal when they said they want to kill the government. They weren’t kidding. That wasn’t a negotiating ploy as a moment’s reflection on the past decade will show. If it hadn’t been for the economic collapse proffered by their greedy bankster buddies, they very likely would have succeeded.

They want to turn the nation into an island of little habitats, each more vile and brutal than the last. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the people living in it, except that they be just healthy enough to serve as fodder for corporate profits.

Please get your head out of your ass and start dealing with them for the traitors they are. Your daughters will thank you.

It's Days Like These...

…I wish I was an ignorant Republican, Inc-er.

I did my taxes last night. It was not pretty.

I had an instructor for Tax Accounting when I was Actorino212, and he once said something really profound.

Which is to say it would mean nothing to a Teabagger.

He said, “Never regret having a large tax bill at the end of the year. It means you made a lot of money and the IRS let you hang onto it for a few more months.”

I don’t mind paying taxes, although I cringe every April. See, I earned that money in the greatest nation on the planet. I consider it the price for furnishing this great nation with the tools and people who make it great for me to live and work in.

When I was a kid, I watched my dad struggle to put food on the table. He was a union man, and work was spotty. Some weeks we made do on a ham cooked on Sunday that lasted us until the following week. He never took a vacation, opting instead for long drives on long weekends, despite the fact that he was up at 4 to get to work by 6.

He banked all his vacation time, as well as sick time and whatever other days he could bank in the union coffers, in order to build a nest egg for his retirement. The first sick day I remember him taking was when he tore his bicep clean off his arm, trying to lift a steel beam that had fallen on one of his workers. The next one was when he had a heart attack.

As much as I disliked the man – you weren’t his son, you couldn’t know – I admired and respected his work ethic. He broke his ass in order to set up a comfortable retirement, even if it meant the family as a whole sacrificed.

He helped build schools, public schools, in an age where that meant something. An age where education was respected, and was mandatory if you wanted to get ahead in the world. In fact, all the schools I attended right up until high school had his fingerprints in the concrete. But he had a fourth grade education, and he knew we, his children, had to do better.

I suspect if he was alive today, assuming he was coherent, he’d blanch at the current environment where schools are seen as day-care until you can ship a kid to jail. Where public schools, the buildings he built, are mocked and denigrated as places of evil that teach our children all manner of Satanic beliefs like fair play, sharing, and tolerance.

Those schools were built with taxpayer money. The same bill I blanch at each April helps pay for those schools, and the roads the school buses drive on, and the police who protect those students as they walk the blocks to their schools and home again. It helps pay for the fire fighters who thrill those children when they go racing by to protect a home, maybe one of theirs. It helps pay to supply water to the school, and to take the waste, the trash and sewage, out so they can learn in a safe, clean environment.

Unfortunately, that bill also helps these savages. And when you deprive the people of their God-given right to liberty and freedom from the ravages of predators in corporate offices, you get this.

I was terrified by my tax bill. Now, I’m furious.

 

Good Riddance

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1)    Better get ready for some whining this week. First, let me start with that hideous new book, Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg. In an interview with Jon Stewart this week, she talked about how women executives are more unlikable when they behave like alpha male executives than men are. Lemme sum it up for you, Sher: What a load of horseshit.

That’s not to say that women don’t have it worse than men, or that they aren’t repressed and held back by an old boy’s network. They certainly are, and I’ve seen it first hand and close up. It’s also not to say that an aggressive women is not less popular for being aggressive or bitchy. They are. What I am saying, is nobody likes a douchebag, full stop, and to say that somehow, aggressive men are perceived better than aggressive women is to completely ignore labor history of the past 5,000 years.

If you are looking to make friends at work, go work with animals. The pure, unadulterated truth of corporate America is NO ONE likes ANYONE ELSE. Yes, there are some small exceptions to be found, anecdotes about life-long friendships growing out of a co-worker relationship and even long term marriages. But perform a simple experiment and you will see what I’m talking about.

Think back over your work career. It doesn’t matter if it’s been nearly 40 years like mine, or only 5 years. Think of how many hundreds, thousands, or as in my checkered work history, tens of thousands of people you’ve worked with, and ask yourself this question: How many of them could you pick up the phone and call right now, and pick up a conversation you had the last time you saw them? Me, I can’t count that low and while I’m not the easiest person to friend, I’m not hard to talk to or find.

That’s not to say you should go out of your way to be unlikable in order to further your ambitions. You do need to grease the wheels of the culture you are in. What it does say is that all those carefully cultivated contacts and your network are good for work only, and if you try to treat them as “friends,” if you even believe them to be friendly, you’re deeply in denial about who you are and who they are and why you are there. Corporate America is a zero sum game. There are no friends, there are only enemies and enemies-in-waiting who masquerade as allies as convenient for them.

2)    If, as I posited yesterday, the North Korean bellicosity is a staged dance for his domestic purposes, then this is performance art trolling of the finest kind.

3)    There’s a disturbing trend in America this week: white supremacists gunning down local officials in assassinations. But hey! We need more guns, right, because these folks were not armed or trained in the…I’m sorry, what’s that? The victim was armed. And trained. And adept? Oh.

4)    Listen, if your deadly and dangerous –  and proven unsafe, by the way – nuclear power plant can be brought down by rats? Maybe you should shut the damn thing down.

5)    One possible side effect of the North Korea dance could be the destruction of the global economy. Again. But hey! Let’s outsource jobs to tiny nations that we can bully which are located in really unstable sections of the planet! You know, for profit!

6)    I’ve played in a lot of sports leagues and on a lot of teams. I’ve run into this kind of coach, and have quit teams because of them. The most delicious vengeance is to sign up with a rival and beat the crap out of his team when I’ve faced them. College athletes are slaves, and while some are well-compensated and looked after – illegally, I should point out – the vast majority are struggling to stay on the team, stay in the school, and because they’re on scholarship and subject to NCAA rules with respect to transfers out (they have to sit out a season of eligibility), they’re stuck on the plantation, even if Massa whips them.

And we should keep in mind that this is the same school that just emerged from the Tyler Clementi tragedy. That the coaches bullied and harassed players, especially using homophobic slurs, at a school that was so sensitized to homophobia speaks volumes to a cover up.

7)    It took 1600 years to build. It took 25 to melt. But hey, let’s ignore renewable energy because Solnydra!

8)    I can see the erectile dysfunctions ads in Best Buy already.

9)    Dude. Ur doin’ it rong.

10) Chris Hayes had a great piece on this last night on All In with Chris Hayes. Fast food workers barely make $150 a week, and while you might think that’s not bad for a school kid, many of these folks are adults trying to support families.

North Korean Agonistes

A true test of a nation’s mettle comes not in how it deals with “existential threats” (i.e. a force equal to or greater than its own) but with the niggling trouble-makers.

Thus enters North Korea:

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s defense chief said on Thursday that North Korea had moved to its east coast a missile with a “considerable” range, but that it was not capable of reaching the United States. The disclosure came as the Communist North’s military warned that it was ready to strike American military forces with “cutting-edge smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear strike means.”

That last likely should be taken with a grain of salt, but clearly not discounted completely. We know they’ve been working on a nuclear capability for some time now, they have a reactor that is not hooked up to the power grid (so we know it’s not for energy), and they had been in touch with our old fiend, Abdul Qadeer “A. Q.” Khan, who likely advanced their ambitions by several decades.

Too, North Korea has been gearing up for some time to “battle” the United States and South Korea.

I put “battle” in quotes for a reason: there’s significant cause to believe that Kim Jong-Un is sabrerattling not for international purposes but in order to clamp down dissent domestically. Precious little news of the North ever really gets out, so we have to infer a lot, but here’s my thinking in support of this notion.

Periods of transition after long-term dictatorships, or even benevolent monarchies, creates turmoil and chaos, opportunities that dissidents will seize upon. See, like it or not, a moron like Saddam Hussein or Hosni Mubarak might be the worst thing to happen to a people, but he stays in office as long as he does precisely because he brings a form of stability to a nation. Take away that brutal reality, and the people will flex their muscles.

While Kim did inherit his office from his father, history teaches us that is no guarantee of stability among a people. We have only to look into the past of one of our closest allies, England, to see that any transition in a monarchy, even the most placid ones, can cause instability in a culture.

Say what you will about democracy and term limits on a President, we never see this kind of radical behavior, mainly because we select our next leader, like him (or her) or not.

There is no reason to expect that North Korea would be any different, so we can make an assumption here that, indeed, Jong-Un ran into a little dissent after he assumed power.

I should point out that there are no known dissident groups to Kim’s government and any political parties that do exist (three, if memory serves) are all controlled by the Kim family. That doesn’t change the fact that there must be some form of dissent. After all, we have Teabaggers here in the greatest nation on the planet.

Plus, tens of thousands of North Koreans cross the borders into China and South Korea annually. You don’t risk your life, literally, to leave a country until you’ve exhausted your efforts at carving out something safe at home.

Kim is very young, as well, which might lead a dissident to assume that he’s weak and foolish. Which he may very well be, if this amounts to anything more than sabrerattling.

It’s conceivable that this posturing is an attempt to whip up patriotic feelings among his people, who are trained from early on to hate and fear America and Americans. Claim they are about to attack you, your people ramp up their patriotism, and start turning against dissent.

Think it won’t work? Then you haven’t been paying attention, even to your own nation. Hello, PATRIOT USA Act!

From The Frying Pan Into the Fire

I guess Malcolm Smith (nominal D-NY) can be forgiven. After all, he watched as Michael Bloomberg purchased the mayoralty three times.

Smith’s problem is, he tried to buy the office of the Mayor at the five-fingered discount:

At one stage, Mr. Smith was part of a Democratic power troika that lavished goodies on an openly crooked state senator, Pedro Espada Jr., in the process of getting Mr. Espada to vote with them. Mr. Smith himself recently jumped with a small group of Democratic senators to shift power to the Republican minority. Along the way, an inspector general’s report said he had finagled a casino land deal in Queens. The F.B.I. was also investigating nonprofit groups that he helped obtain government funds.

Undaunted, Mr. Smith set his ambitions on becoming the Republican candidate for mayor of New York City. Strictly speaking, as a Democrat, Mr. Smith had no business on a Republican ballot, but, understandably for a person practiced in the customs of Albany, that seemed like a small obstacle. In fact, he could get a spot on the primary ballot by special dispensation from three of the city’s five county Republican leaders.

These not-so-longish-shot hopes brought him into a series of negotiations that, a federal complaint charged, moved beyond the horse-trading of ordinary legal-graft politics into the realm of outright bribery.

What it seems to boil down to is that federal authorities claim that Mr. Smith swapped road improvements in Rockland County for a spot on the ballot in the Republican primary for mayor in New York City.

 

For the record, Rockland County is not near the city by a good stretch. It does give one pause.

It sort of boiled down to this, so bear with me, because it gets a little convoluted, but is an interesting read for those who want to read up on the machinations of local government.

There’s a real estate developer. He owns a project in Rockland County. That project could stand an infrastructure upgrade to make his gated community a little more attractive.

This developer, he has the ear of many in the state Republican party, because, you know, rich and Republican buys you a lot of access, even in a state as hostile to the GOP as New York.

Unfortunately, that’s not enough to buy the necessary permits to buy the road improvements. Luckily, there’s a guy in Albany who’s got his eyes on a bigger prize who would be willing to help: former State Senate Leader Malcolm Smith.

Smith wants to run for mayor of NYC, but the Democratic field is packed, from current City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, among several others, all of who are term limited out of their current jobs.

The Republican field, however, is pretty wide open, and the only serious threat to Quinn et al has abandoned the race.

Sounds like a marriage of convenience to me!

On the face of it, not the worst thing in the world, however. I mean, you know, tit for tat, nothing illegal about asking for a favor in exchange for another favor and I’m sure the developer would behave above board in approaching his friends for the favor to Smith.

It’s just how the developer got the favors done. After all, favors don’t come for nothing.

It’s a fascinating story, and points out the need for campaign finance reform up and down the government, but also much more oversight in how deals are developed.

But ponder for a moment this: in an age when more and more governance is pushed down the ladder to the states and local governments, how many Malcolm Smiths are out there, hiding in the woodwork, who will never ever be caught because there’s no oversight and the local newspapers are often in cahoots with the corruption?