Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) There are moments when history palpably turns a page. Today is just such a moment.

2) In the event Nelson Mandela does not survive much longer, I would like to throw my wishes into the air and hope they drift on a gentle breeze to his bedside. As I live in a nation that is sitting idly by while the rights of minorities are ripped from their grasp, while we actually wonder whether a bloodthirsty racist is guilty of killing a young man whose only crime was walking down a sidewalk, and the murdered child’s girlfriend is mocked for her command of English, I look to Nelson Mandela and pray to my Lord that somehow his spirit finds its way to America. We have apartheid of the worst kind: hidden, nearly-invisible. And this apartheid is not just racial or ethnic, but economic, egged on by people who would stand to most benefit from true freedom.

3) Irony of ironies: A group of South African Muslim lawyers has called for President Obama to be arrested for war crimes by the Pretoria regime.

4) For me, Sunday will be a day where I am either out on my bike or glued to my TeeVee: the Tour de France will televise its second stage, and then a dream match of reigning World Champion Spain v. 2014 World Cup host and perennial powerhouse Brazil in the finals of the Confederations Cup. In Brazil. Where there have been major protests.

5) The Egyptian Spring seems to be turning into a long hot summer.

6) As odious as provisions of the newly-passed immigration bill are, it seems that Chuck Schumer laid some mines for House Republicans. Good on him.

7) The universe may be stranger than we can know.

8) Could Rand Paul, who pisses off just about everyone except his fanbois, be the 2016 Republican Presidential candidate? God, I hope so! It would be like going into the lion’s mouth and pulling all his teeth to kick his ass.

9) Now that he’s about to be suspended for, well, basically forever, whither A-Rod?

10) The freude, it schadens.

Can We Stop Calling Them "Gay" Now?

I mean, Jeez, they’ve earned the right to be as miserable as the rest of us!

With the expected addition of California’s citizens after Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling, some 30 percent of Americans will live in states offering same-sex marriage.

Now the two sides of the marriage wars are gearing up to resume the costly state-by-state battles that could, in the hopes of each, spread marriage equality to several more states in the next few years, or reveal a brick wall of traditional values that cannot be breached.

There is wide agreement from both sides on where the next battlefields will be.

I want to point out something that has gone unnoticed in the coverage of these decisions. While I could not be happier that there is an overt acknowledgement by the SCOTUS that gay people are as human as I am, I’m disheartened by the time it took to get here. We still have a long way to go.

DoMA was passed in 1996. It is now nearly twenty years later that the Court has overturned key provisions of the Act. Keep that in mind as the focus shifts to the states, not just on this issue but on abortion.

It’s hard to believe in the 21^st century that we’re still battling for individual sovereignty, for the individual’s right to live life unmolested by antediluvian mores and customs of other people who happen to have a megaphone.

And don’t think the right wing is going to go quietly on any of these issues. Same article:

The opponents of same-sex marriage, while unhappy that the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act and opened the door to gay marriage in California, are taking heart that the court did not declare same-sex marriage a constitutional right.

After a recent succession of stinging defeats in Delaware, Maryland, Maine, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Washington State — after political campaigns in which they were heavily outspent — the groups have also vowed to step up fund-raising for advertising and mobilizing supporters.

“These court decisions could be a real boon to our fund-raising,” said Frank Schubert, a conservative political consultant and vice president of the National Organization for Marriage. “People tend to react when the wolf is at the door.”

And this isn’t nearly as big an issue as a women’s right to choose. After all, one has merely to look at the heroic efforts of Texas state senator Wendy Davis the other evening, and the concomitant reaction of Hair-for Brains governor Rick Perry, his lieutenant governor David “Do The” Dewhurst, and state senator….ummmmm…uhhhhhh….I forgot. Oops!

That it took DoMA, a prima facie unconstitutional law, three decades to be overturned means we have to double down to protect the rights we supposedly cherish, particularly in this day and age when we’ve given so many of them away for free.

Dear Senator Reid

It ain’t working.

That’s the way you do it.

Helped by a marathon speech, Texas Democrats have managed to block a bill that would shut most of the abortion clinics in the state.

Democratic state Senator Wendy Davis spoke for more than 10 hours, in a stalling speech known as a filibuster, at the state capitol in Austin.

Republicans then scrambled to pass the bill, but the vote was ruled too late for a midnight deadline.

The bill would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

You probably thought it was quaint when Rand Paul stood up and filibustered for 13 hours. Of course, it didn’t help that Paul couldn’t help but aggrandize his actions. It makes it easy to minimize the effort when he inflates its importance.

But here, here we have a bona fide filibuster that actually accomplished what it set out to do: to establish a firewall for a basic human right, the right to decide what to do with one’s own body.

You want to weed out the nonsense “filibusters” just being done to screw with the Democratic agenda? Force Senators who oppose a bill to stand their asses up and start talking about why. Passionate filibusters have a time honored place in American culture, not just in politics. Americans respect, even if they ultimately don’t agree with, someone who has strong and deep feelings about something.

Your mealymouthed status quo-centric pass on the whole issue of filibuster reform was ludicrous. It’s not about what happens when Republicans take back power (if not them, then someone.)

It’s about believing in your cause. It’s about knowing that the legislation you bring to bear is important enough to withstand tactical attacks like a filibuster.

It’s about, in the end, honesty. Honesty is a quality you seem to minimize as much as you minimize Rand Paul’s rage.

You ought to try it, Senator. It does a body politic good.

Probably Not An Admission He'd Want To Make

I’m actually beginning to feel sympathy for the fate of Glenn Greenwald

Attention: American Labour

This is the way you do it:

Beijing (CNN) -- Dozens of Chinese workers angry over a pay dispute have held their U.S. boss hostage for five days, the American businessman said.

Chip Starnes, co-founder and president of Specialty Medical Supplies China, has been trapped in the company's suburban Beijing factory since Friday. He told CNN it's all because of a misunderstanding about layoffs and severance packages.

"I tried to leave a day and a half ago, and there was like 60 or 70 of them here inside every entrance, and every exit was barricaded," Starnes said Tuesday from behind the gates of the factory. "I can't go anywhere."

Starnes decided his labor costs would be lower in India, so he outsourced 30 jobs and laid off a concomitant number of Chinese workers. Naturally, there are disputes over what happens next to the plant: workers say no materials have arrived in many days and so they fear the plant is closing, Starnes says the plant is fully operational, and so on.

There’s a lesson here for American workers: if you don’t want your job outsourced, don’t go gently into that goodbye. Fight, claw, kick, scratch. You care about your job, and failing the job existing any longer, you care about how you’re treated.

Hell, this is China, fercrissake! A land filled with people who are obeisant to authority and who value even the crappiest jobs, and these folks are putting up a fight!

So why won’t you?

Just Wondering

It seems as though Edward Snowden, the NSA “whistleblower” who has secreted documents to Glenn Greenwald in exchange for his moment in the spotlight, has decided the spotlight was too harsh for him. He has left Hong Kong for parts unknown.

He could be – probably is, at least temporarily – in Moscow.

He might end up in Ecuador.

He apparently “false flagged” an escape to Cuba.

The best guesses are that he is in Russia and looking for asylum in Ecuador. Russia refused to extradite him, probably because the United States had nothing to offer in exchange, and Snowden has far more valuable intelligence to give up in exchange for the cooperation of Russian authorities. Iceland threw up roadblocks to his asylum request, which scared him off it seems.

One thing seems pretty clear from events over the weekend: there are a lot of people very angry at Edward Snowden, people he believed would embrace him with open arms and wallets. Hong Kong authorities, no doubt with significant input from the Beijing government, all but expelled him over the weekend, after he revealed American attempts to hack the Chinese and Hong Konese government. He's a hot potato and no one will want to be left holding him.

I’m not sure what he was thinking through all this: as more and more of his revelations fall flat in terms of the value of their intelligence, and as more and more of his backstory falls apart under the smell test, it begins to look as if Snowden is an incompetent flunky who stumbled across what he thought was vital intelligence and decided to take the money and run, literally.

He’s no hero. He’s no Bradley Manning or even Daniel Ellsberg, people who stayed and faced the consequences, despite Ellsberg’s vocal support. For one thing, Ellsberg was a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, a Ph D in Economics who worked closely with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. When he leaked documents, he thoroughly understood what he was leaking. Snowden, a high school dropout with less than three years’ experience in any job, has dumped and pumped.

The endgame here looks pretty simple: Snowden in a ditch after a “car accident”. The government may not be able to bring him home but there’s no way he can’t be touched.

Droning On

This should come as no surprise to anyone, even without the recent foofaraw about NSA grepping phone numbers:

WASHINGTON — FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged Wednesday that the agency has deployed drones to conduct surveillance in the U.S., and that the bureau was developing guidelines for their future law enforcement use.

Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the unmanned aerial vehicles, whose use by law enforcement has raised questions from privacy advocates and civil liberties groups, are deployed in "a very minimal way and very seldom.''

"Our footprint is very small,'' the director said. "We have very few.''

I don’t really have a problem with this, although I suspect that this will merely serve to irritate a whole lot of “libertarians.” After all, there’s very little difference between this operation and a guy sitting in a van with a dish antenna and a telephoto lens. Of course, a lot of that “don’t have a problem with this” relies on the FBI to develop guidelines that remain sensitive to the freedom of innocent people from unnecessary surveillance.

Yes, the FBI, along with the Treasury Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, is a proto-domestic military force and they have been used in the past in that fashion. Part of the reason that is revolves around the Second Amendment nutbags who insist they have easy access to all kinds of formidable weaponry under the guise of “arms.”

Think about it: a nutbag has an arsenal and is suspected of a crime. Does he really think the government is not going to a) weapon up their own troops and b) survey the hell out of him in order to ensure their agents’ safety?

In a day and age when even corporations use drones for surveillance – as well as delivering pizzas – that the FBI doesn’t avail themselves of this technology would in itself be negligent.

 

Echoes of Nam

Lemme see….lengthy war, delicate negotiations, frustrated allies…yup! Sounds like Nam all over again!

WASHINGTON -- President Obama is expressing guarded optimism about the Taliban's announcement Tuesday that it will sit down for direct peace talks with U.S. and Afghanistan officials.

In comments at the Group of Eight summit in Northern Ireland, Obama said the direct talks are an "important development."

"This is an important first step towards reconciliation, although it is a very early step," Obama told reporters. "We anticipate there will be lots of bumps in the road."

The Taliban will open an office in the Gulf nation of Qatar as early as Tuesday to facilitate direct peace talks with Afghanistan and the United States.

That last line is the most interesting, you see, because…

The Afghan president on Wednesday suspended talks with the United States on a new security deal to protest the way his government was being left out of initial peace negotiations with the Taliban meant to find a way to end the nearly 12-year war.

The move by Hamid Karzai raises tensions significantly and could derail the peace process even before it has begun.

In a terse statement from his office, Karzai said negotiations with the U.S. on what American and coalition security forces will remain in the country after 2014 have been put on hold. The deal was expected to define the future of American troops here and also pave way for billions in aid to the Afghan economy.

And….

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan's president says he will not pursue peace talks with the Taliban unless the United States steps out of the negotiations and the militant group stops its violent attacks on the ground.

Hamid Karzai is upset over a U.S. and Taliban announcement the day before that they would begin preliminary peace talks in Qatar without the Afghan government.

According to a statement from Karzai's office, he says that his High Peace Council would "neither attend nor participate in the talks" until the process is "completely" in the hands of Afghans.

So basically, the talks will end up being three separate discussions of how to make peace between the Afghan government and the Taliban, while allowing the Unnited States a graceful exit.

And Henry Kissinger thought he had a challenge, appeasing the South Vietnamese while negotiating with the North. Eventually, he threw his hands up and we just pulled out. The North won. Game over.

If that’s the end game here, then what did we spend 12 years fighting for? OK, we got Osama bin Laden, but in Pakistan. We got rid of the mullahs who supported bin Laden, but not the fanatical hierarchy they created.

It’s possible we taught the Taliban a lesson, true. It’s possible that we’ve exhausted both their resources and their spirit.

It’s also possible we’ve created another Saddam Hussein, who licked his wounds for almost twenty years, and forced us to expend massive resources to keep him in check until we got tired of that too.

We are a war-mongering state. We don’t do peace, we do war (“Peace through strength” is about as Orwellian a saying as they get.) We don’t talk, we threaten.

We suck.

I can understand Karzai’s anger.

Dear Chairman Bernanke

I have an idea that might help ease the transition from the “Quantitative Easing” (QE) policy of the Fed over the past five years to a more free market oriented capital market. More after the break:

Here in the U.S., one thing is clear: The market is so accustomed to stimulus from QE that it is poised to retrench if it is cut off. And it is unduly fearful that the Fed would be short-sighted enough to suddenly turn off the spigot.

The market is such an extreme QE junkie that, perversely, whenever there's talk about the economy improving, stocks go down. Clearly, the market is afraid that the Fed would be cruel enough to put it on cold turkey.

Investors who react this way aren't thinking about a sound economy in which QE wouldn't be needed any more than a heroin addict thinks in terms of life without a fix.

OK, so here’s my thought: Methadone.

Methadone, in that you’d substitute one fix for a more controllable, sustainable fix that would give the addicts a chance to wean themselves off the socialist crutch you’ve been providing them.

My proposal is simple and will even cut the debt you’re piling up in half. Give the people $45 billion a month. $150 bucks in tax free spending each month. If you’d like, you can add the string, as you do for the banks, that it be used to pay down existing debt.

You have a $2,000 mortgage payment? It’s now $1,850. Let’s take the pressure off our poor middle class. You have payday loans that you roll over every month because you need to buy food? We’ll pay for a week’s worth of groceries.

See, capitalism does not work – and never has – on a trickle down basis. It works on a trickle up basis. I buy a thing in the store. The shopkeeper pays the manufacturer, and keeps a bit for him or herself. The manufacturer pays his workers and suppliers, and so on.

Giving it to banks only freezes the money at the upper echelons of the economy and it does not get spent or invested. Period. Programs like HAMP have only been used by banks to cherry pick mortgages for refinancing, often given to people who can easily afford their current mortgages, and denying almost 95% of requests. Basically, the rich are getting richer.

As usual.

Give the money to we, the people, and I can promise that within a year, the economy will be set to rights.

The Trouble With Red Lines Is...

….they often get crossed. And then what you gonna do?

White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said Sunday that “the scope and scale” of assistance to Syrian rebels will expand, based on evidence that the Assad government is gaining ground in the protracted civil war and that it may have used chemical weapons in the conflict.

Speaking on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” McDonough did not say whether arms shipments to Syrian rebels would include artillery and other heavy weaponry that could help reduce the military regimes advantage. In the shadow of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has to tread carefully, McDonough said.
“We have to be very discerning about what's in our interest and what outcome is best for us, and the prices that we're willing to pay to get to that place,” he said. “We've rushed to war in this region in the past; we're not going to do it here.”

So basically, Obama wants to play this as the Opposite Iraq, and find a balance between Syrian autonomy and American influence and assistance.

Good luck with that, but I suppose he feels we have to be involved somehow. But this is why you don’t draw lines in the sand and decide that factor A is what will determine your foreign policy. That places your nation in the hands of someone else.

Needless to say, the bloodthirsty warmongers among us seem to have a problem with his handling:

Republicans such as Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, faulted the administration for not providing the kind of detailed plan needed to get congressional approval for the military aid to Syria.
“The administration needs to come up to Congress and make a comprehensive case. What is the plan? Where are we going on Syria? And what do you want to accomplish?,” Rogers said on “Face the Nation,” after McDonough spoke. “Some of the things that they've told the Intelligence Committee in the past doesn't comport with what they're presenting as the direction they want to go. It seems to me they have a great media strategy; they don't have a great Syrian strategy.”

So a strategy of incremental adjustments is not enough for a body politic that swallowed the lies of the last President whole and even gave him a blank, off-budget- check to write to pay for it, using our children and our children’s futures.

Obama’s strategy admits of two things: first, we can’t know beyond any doubt that the situation is what we say it might be, and second, we’re certain beyond a reasonable doubt that Assad is gassing his people. The President’s strategy seems to be flexible enough to withdraw once we have that last problem under some form of control.

Of course, this completely ignores the 100,000 Syrians whom Assad has killed using conventional weapons. Somehow, we’re OK with that under some warped Prime Directive-type strategy.

Either you’re in or you’re out, is my feeling.

He’s caught between a rock and a hard place of his own creation, is my guess, and he’s trying to navigate the very narrow straits he’s left himself.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) It seems that the whole PRISM “scandal” rests on more than a few lies and misunderstandings. By the way, if Greenwald was accurate last night on MSNBC, and if the Booz Allen Hamilton claim that Snowden worked for them only a few months, where did he find the time to get “outraged” over the not-secret program and then download the documents? Could it be he walked into the job specifically to steal secrets?

2) Pretty big SCOTUS decision yesterday means that your body is yours, and cannot be trademarked by anyone else.

3) I guess they’re desperate for money. Maybe if, you know, you don’t go around shooting innocent kids…

4) I disagree with E. J. Dionne here: I don’t think the conversation we need to have now is “liberty v. security,” at least not at the level he suggests. No, the conversation we have to have now is what is an acceptable risk? How likely is it that even September 11 could be recreated by a terror network—much less a more deadly and brutal terror attack -- given the tightening the nation has done legally and publicly? Once that conversation is had, then we’ll know if we need to edit the Constitution.

5) Not content with the Panama Canal, China has a man, a plan, a canal: Nicaragua?

6) The solar powered plane flying across the country is about half-way, leaving St. Louis today for Cincinnati. So far, it’s taken about five weeks.

7) The new Superman movie opens today, and people who know me well will know that I’m going to see it this weekend, for reasons that should be obvious to those cognoscenti, but is it time for him to retire? Side note to any producers who would be intrigued by this idea: I’m available.

8) Technology and labor mix about as well as capitalism and democracy: that is, not at all.

9) And so it begins…

10) Finally, if you’re upset about the looks of the hooker you hired, take a page from the Secret Service: pay your money, and shut your mouth.

Big Whoop

OK, I mean, it’s nice that this highly intrusive program has paid dividends. That’s great that we can get some bang for our bucks.

No pun intended.

There is a point where we have to wonder if there wouldn’t have been any other way of getting around to stopping terror attacks that this program netted. Couple that with the fact that it also failed to net the Boston Marathon bombers, as well as any number of terror-like attacks (the recent Ricin mailings come to mind, as well as the assault on the Sikh temple massacre last year) puts a bit of a damper on General Alexander’s boasts:

In a robust defense of the phone program, General Alexander said that it had been critical in helping to prevent “dozens of terrorist attacks” both in the United States and abroad and that the intelligence community was considering declassifying examples to better explain the program. He did not clarify whether the records used in such investigations would have been available through individual subpoenas without the database. He also later walked back the assertion slightly, saying the phone log database was used in conjunction with other programs.

In his testimony, General Alexander said he had “grave concerns” about how Mr. Snowden had access to such a wide range of top-secret information, from the details of a secret program called Prism to speed the government’s search of Internet materials to a presidential document on cyberstrategy. He said the entire intelligence community was looking at the security of its networks — something other government officials vowed to do after the WikiLeaks disclosures three years ago.

Under the Prism program, the N.S.A. collects information from American Internet companies like Google without individual court orders if the request is targeted at noncitizens abroad. That program derives from a 2008 surveillance law that was openly debated in Congress.

Oh. Well. I see now. The program doesn’t track terrorists per se. Only brown-skinned ones. Well, that’s much better. We white people are free to bomb marathons,  abortion clinics, and murder Arabic and Arabic-looking folks to our hearts content.

Terrorism is terrorism, whether it’s 19 Saudis flying planes into buildings, a couple of lunatics with rifles picking off passersby, or the NRA threatening your daughter with rape if you don’t buy her a gun. Period. It’s only security theater to think that only Muslims mean us harm.

World Leaders Should Probably Tape This To Their Walls

A Haaretz Op-Ed opines that Israel should follow Nelson Mandela’s lead in trying to come to grips with the Palestinian question:

The first and clearest lesson one can learn from Mandela is that peace is only achievable if the putative peacemakers believe in it. “One cannot be prepared for something while secretly believing it will not happen,” Mandela once said. Does Israel’s current leadership truly believe in peace? Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett are on record as saying that they don’t. Netanyahu maintains that he does, though I can’t help looking for the fingers crossed behind his back whenever he says it.

Peace is both an abstract concept – “a winner is a dreamer who never gives up,” according to Mandela – and a very finite calculation of profit and loss. Peace means making compromises – and Mandela came perilously close to losing his base of support among South Africa’s blacks in compromising to the extent that he did. He was prepared to take significant risks in the interest of peace. Are Israel’s leaders prepared to do likewise?

Mandela was able to take risks and make compromises because he believed in what he was doing and he had a clear vision of the South Africa that could emerge. Addressing the court at the conclusion of his trial for treason in 1964, he said: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

And there it is: one has to wonder what the Israeli leadership really wants. Hegemony? Over a billion Muslims, most of whom could care less whether Israel lives or dies, and a minority of whom want to destroy that nation?

Mandela did take risks, but then he was willing to lose it all, even after his release from prison, even after his ascendancy to president. He had courage, which Mandela defines as not the absence of fear but the strength to overcome it. It seems odd to me that a nation whose people have courage in boatloads can’t bring themselves to use that courage to create a niche for themselves that doesn’t involve the constant vigilance of armed forces.

It is a courage that I wish America would show, too, in its own struggle against many of the same adversaries that Israel faces (possibly because we support Israel so strongly.) We lost three thousand citizens in one day from an Islamist terror attack and we’ve lost a few dozen since in this country, most notably the Boston Marathon bombing.

Yet, this year more toddlers have killed using guns than were killed by a couple of backpack bombs. More Americans died “taking the fight to the terrorists” – as if Iraq had anything to do with 9-11 – than died on September 11, even if you include the first responders and residents who subsequently got sick and died. And never mind the 500,000 Iraqis who died at our hands.

That’s not courage. Courage is the ability to take a punch and still stand. Courage is saying “You bloodied me, and while I will not forget, my get-even will be to become even stronger, even better, and a brighter beacon to the world of what freedom really means.”

I mean, if the terrorists hated us for our freedom, we must be on pretty friendly terms now, with all the recent revelations. We gave away our precious Bill of Rights in exchange for…nothing.

Courage seems to be in short supply in the world: from the NSA scandal here to Israel’s fear of a black burqa, to Turkey’s Prime Minister warring with his own people over a public park, echoing our own response to Occupy Wall Street, but much much bloodier.

And I’m not even counting Syria or Egypt or Iraq or Afghanistan. We are sitting on a powder keg and all this grandstanding is merely inciting someone to light a match. Someone needs to defuse at least their corner of the world.

Take the message of Mandela, leaders. We can’t stop being afraid until you are.

 

Reality

It’s all donuts

A Few Thoughts on Freedom

The non-scandal scandal – OMG! You mean the government is doing what it’s been doing for the last decade since we as a people told it that it could do it? – has raised some interesting dynamics in American society and culture.

For instance, for all the foofaraw you hear in Blogtopia (© Skippy, the Bush Kanagaroo) and the rightwing blogosphere, the American people seem reasonably OK with the revelations that the government can pretty much know who we’re talking to at any time.
We don’t just get the government we deserve. We seem to get the freedom we deserve. Here, I have to give the bloodthirsty monotonous savages at the NRA and the Gun Owners of America some credit: they’re putting up a real fight for a freedom, even if it’s an antiquated and misguided freedom at best in a modern society.

For another thing, it’s been interesting to see some of the same folks come out now, arguing against the NSA program as well as the government intrusion into the Associated Press phone records and giving full throated support to Edward Snowden, who also stood behind the Bush administration when Valarie Plame was being skewered and castigated for being involved in essentially the same whistleblower activity (via her husband, no less).

I’m of two minds about this: as someone who was vocal in his opposition to the war in Iraq, I suspect my name came up in at least one database under the Bush administration and while I was probably given a surveillance miss – altho for reasons unrelated to my politics, I know I was vetted at least once last decade – that part of me is tempted to say “Welcome to the party, pal!”

On the flip side, the Libertarian in me – the kind that actually cares about the rights of everyone and not the greedy selfish pigdog kind like Rand and Ron Paul – believes this is an incredibly dangerous program and I was against it before I was even more against it.

The sad thing about rights is, we don’t get to pick and choose from a menu: if you abandon a right, and she abandons her right, and he abandons his right, I don’t get a choice to keep mine in a democratic society. I’m under the same dictatorial knife edge that you are. I don’t get a card that gives me a privilege.

It’s not even like we received a benefit in return. Security? We have had one major terrorist attack in the past century that killed thousands, and one that we could have easily prevented at the time (President Clinton did it for eight years). In essence, we abandoned a whole slew of rights in exchange for a retroactive promise to never let what shouldn’t have happened in the first place happen again.

It’s as if your son or daughter break curfew and your response is, “Well, what time would you like to come home next time? Here, take my car keys!” (pace Jon Stewart)

I think it’s too late now for any recovery of these rights, barring a major uprising in a country of people easily distracted by the next sports championship or The Voice or Kim Kardashian’s breasts. Or even distracted by the petty bickering of partisans over a very narrow range of opinions.

Noam Chomsky says it best: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

Sound familiar?

I Don't Buy It

Today, published reports reveal the identity of the purported whistleblower, Edward Snowden:

An ex-CIA employee has said he acted to "protect basic liberties for people around the world" in leaking details of US phone and internet surveillance.

Edward Snowden, 29, was revealed as the source of the leaks at his own request by the UK's Guardian newspaper.

Mr Snowden, now believed to be in Hong Kong, said he had an "obligation to help free people from oppression".

The recent revelations are that US agencies gathered millions of phone records and monitored internet data.

Admittedly, this story is unfolding and all the details have not been revealed about Snowden or his responsibilities, but here’s what he’ll admit to:

He told The Guardian he never received a high school diploma and didn't complete his computer studies at a community college. Instead, he joined the Army in 2003 but was discharged after breaking both legs in an accident.

Snowden said he later worked as a security guard for the NSA and then took a computer security job with the CIA. He left that job in 2009 and moved on to Booz Allen Hamilton, where he worked as a contractor for the government in Hawaii.

He told The Guardian that he left for Hong Kong on May 20 without telling his family or his girlfriend what he planned.

So he’s a high school drop out (CNN’s wording), never got even an associate’s degree in computer science, was discharged from the Army at age 20, and was hired by the CIA to do computer security work...after spending most of his adult life shouldering a gun only.

Does any of that even begin to make any sense to anyone? The CIA requires experts in their field, either from experience or from education, neither of which appears to be the case for Snowden, unless he did some bang-up job for the Army fresh out of high school.

And somehow, we’re also expected to buy his story that he had pangs of conscience over the “oppression” of American citizens, after years of data mining, even after he left the CIA and went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton (which is going to suffer an awful lot of consequences over this, I should add.)

A less cynical man than me would think that Glenn Greenwald has been set up.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) So the bag of salted rat dicks that is my boss has been quieted with a ball gag and hood by my superior software and editing skills, so I am free to do a little light blogging. It’s Friday, so…

2) The NSA surveillance of telephones and e-mails scandal is a ten-year old bugbear of mine and while I appreciate the fact that the rest of the fucking nation woke up to it, it would have been more helpful if you asshole had before we actually stopped terror attacks using this tool. Now, we’re stuck with it. Welcome to the party, pals! We liberals were surveilled and tracked to kingdom come under Bush but did you fauxbertarians give a crap? Noooooooooooooooooooooo!

3) Odd that the unemployment rate goes up even tho more jobs were added last month than in April. But it’s a good sign that people who stopped looking for jobs are looking once again. They can have mine. It comes with a free bag of salted rat dicks.

4) Now that he’s divorced, look for him to run as a “family values Republican” in the 2016 primaries.

5) It’s National Donut Day. Scales nationwide shudder.

6) And if you’re too elitist to have a donut, try one of these.

7) I can foresee only good coming out of this meeting, much like our own Bohemian Grove.

8) Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Well, we can be sure it wasn’t the rooster.

9) Bad News: There’s an Archie comics movie in the works. Good news: it features zombies.

10) OK, the Obama drone program has gone TOO FAR!

Administrative Note

Because I work for a bag of salted rat dicks, blogging will be light for the balance of this week, possibly into next. Please accept my apologies.

The Old Ball Game

This is pretty sad, if you’re a baseball fan:

Major League Baseball will seek to suspend about 20 players connected to the Miami-area clinic at the heart of an ongoing performance-enhancing drug scandal, including Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun, possibly within the next few weeks, "Outside the Lines" has learned. If the suspensions are upheld, the performance-enhancing drug scandal would be the largest in American sports history.

Tony Bosch, founder of the now-shuttered Biogenesis of America, reached an agreement this week to cooperate with MLB's investigation, two sources told "Outside the Lines," giving MLB the ammunition officials believe they need to suspend the players.

One source familiar with the case said the commissioner's office might seek 100-game suspensions for Rodriguez, Braun and other players, the penalty for a second doping offense. The argument, the source said, is the players' connection to Bosch constitutes one offense, and previous statements to MLB officials denying any such connection or the use of PEDs constitute another.

Twenty players, including at least two league MVPs, one a probable Hall of Famer (sans performance enhancements).

I understand the need to cheat, particularly when the stakes are really high, and big money is a stake you can’t get much higher than. I can even understand that many of the cheaters involved started doping long before the issue was taken seriously at the major league level.

However, once it became clear that there was a new attitude in town, you have to ask yourself what kind of idiot would expose himself that way.

I suppose it was a matter of believing you could never be caught. Too, the clinic billed itself as an anti-aging clinic, a new code I suppose for less steroids, more biologic enhancements. You can rationalize cheating a million different ways.

But then there’s some ancillary issues that need to be addressed, and primarily, those involve the teams of these players: they get most of the benefit from these now-used up husks of humanity, but bear none of the responsibility or the consequences. It seems unfair for, say, Alex Rodriguez to be condemned and suspended – and likely stripped of any personal accomplishments in the time frame covered – but the New York Yankees get to keep their pennants and championships.

You want steroids out of sports? Hurt the teams. Hurt the sponsors of those teams. Athletes are interchangeable. They are cogs in a machine, albeit really well-paid and shiny cogs. They are, however, no different than the front office secretaries or the groundskeepers, and if any of them had been found to be breaking the law, they’d be summarily dismissed in order to minimize damage to the team.

Yes, players are under contract and the union will work hard to protect them, but a team that stands around and does nothing while it has to have some knowledge of what was going on ought to pay a price now.

Managers, both general and field, and owners may claim ignorance but as officers of an organization, that argument holds little water. After all, even the head of the IRS had to throw himself under the bus when that scandal broke, even if he had no personal knowledge of events beforehand. Punish the team, end the problem.

A New Hope

There’s a really interesting study that’s been released by the College Republican (Inc.) National Committee that bears a little discussion:

The College Republican National Committee released a report on Monday outlining the major challenges facing the GOP as it seeks to rebrand and redefine itself in the aftermath of the 2012 election. The survey criticizes the party’s singular focus on “big government” and “tax cuts” and calls on Republicans to become more tolerant and open on issues like same-sex marriage and women’s reproductive health.

Keep in mind, this report was released as a memo to the Republican, Inc. partyleadership to outline recommendations as to how the GOP, Corp. can fix not only its image but its ideology.

You can view the full report here (pdf). Skip ahead to page 84 and beyond for some eye-popping stuff. Let me highlight a few of the bulletpoints for you:

1) Focus on the economic issues that affect young people today: education, the cost of health care, unemployment.

3) Don’t concede “caring” and “open-minded” to the left.

4) Fix the debt and cut spending, but recognize that messages about “big government” are the least effective way to win this battle of ideas with young voters.

Those are practically progressive ideas. Those are warning shots to the future. But there’s more: young Republicans want the party to stop concerning itself with the issues of the far right religious right, particularly on unwinnable issues like marriage equality and the nuts (literally) and bolts of the anti-abortion crusaders. These issues, the College Republicans feel, are nearly irrelevant and only serve to reinforce the existing image of the party as scary and terrorizing. Likewise, the party positions on Latino voters and on rape and other women’s issues is driving people into the arms of the Democrats.

Which, as a lifelong Democrat, should make me feel good, but it really doesn’t. Let me explain why.

Should the Republican, Inc. party die, and it will, at this rate, voters will be left with two choices: Democrats and Teabaggers.

The dynamic that arises at that point is pretty ugly: the nation as a whole will be dragged rightward, as the Democrats no longer even have to give a passing thought to the progressive flank, while the Teabaggers engage in their own brand of terrorism and stultification of the national dialogue. Even if progressives could somehow grasp the Democratic leadership, we’d never be able to drive a progressive agenda, even with the surge in membership of frustrated and scared Republicans who seek refuge in our party from the putsch.

We need to work now to find a path to liberal enlightenment that will move the country leftward and more in line with the rest of the civilized world, and not be some weird hybrid mutation of Third World democracy and First World aristocracy.