Weasels (them) v Chickens (us)

David Sirota on the latest 'weasel word':

Over the last few days, Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have made the case that Harvard professor and Congressional Oversight Panel chairwoman Elizabeth Warren is essentially too controversial (potentially not "confirmable," in Dodd-speak) a figure to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). This, then, raises the revealing question of how Washington defines "controversial?"

Yada, yada. Cut to the chase:

The message to both today's generation and the future generation of citizens who may aspire to work in government is pretty clear: If you are personally/financially connected to private for-profit corporations that underwrite political campaigns - even the ones that helped destroy the economy - then Washington has no problem with your appointment to a position overseeing those same private corporations. But if you forge an independent path and are not connected to those corporations and to that sluice of corporate campaign cash, you are suspect - and probably will have trouble getting a job in government. Why? Because the former cadre of insiders poses no real threat to the economic status quo - while the latter kind of independent outsider like Elizabeth Warren might actually rock the boat. Defining "controversial" this way, thus, creates a perverse incentive system: Going through the revolving door is rewarded as noncontroversial, while refusing to go through the revolving door is effectively punished as too controversial.

This is how corruption tends to work most often in D.C. On a day to day basis, it's far less the brazen money-for-votes schemes, and far more the narrowing of the political debate and the distortion of political language itself. In this case, it's the hijacking of the concept of "controversial" so as to marginalize an agent of change. And if that hijacking ends up preventing Elizabeth Warren from heading the CFPB, then, indeed, the status quo will - once again - have won.

In Ms. Warren's case, 'controversial' is literally a 'weasel word' - a word used by the weasels who want to be in charge of the henhouse and look out for the best interests of the weasels as opposed to someone who might actually do what they're supposed to and look out for the best interests of the chickens.

Shorter: same old, same old.

What I don't get ...

Well, I get it, but the rank, obvious hypocrisy of it just boggles the mind.

Opposition to the construction of mosques has skyrocketed in cities and towns across the country, scholars and advocates of Muslim culture tell The Upshot.

Public protests against three planned mosques have made news in the past week: Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin joined others in opposing the building of a mosque a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. Hundreds demonstrated against a proposed mosque in a small town in Tennessee (pictured above). And some residents of Temecula, California, are opposing the local Muslim community's plan to build a bigger mosque, saying it could become a hotbed of radical Islam.

...

Now, aren't these the same people who wrap themselves in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, and all those other good documents the Founders turned out? Aren't they the ones who claim there has been a bias against Christianity in America?

And yet, assuming an answer of "affirmative" to those questions, they wish to deny the right of worship to their fellow Americans despite every admonishment within those documents.

I guess, what I don't get, is the fact regular folks who vote Republican (not the apparatchiks) can't make the reach, can't see they are protesting against every principle they supposedly stand for. It would be like me saying everyone I don't agree with should be silenced (one way or another), when the freedom of speech is something I hold most dear. While I wouldn't mind seeing the likes of Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, and especially Breitbart spend some time in a hole in the deepest, darkest prison in Turkey, I won't deny them their right to say what they will provided they don't incite violence. What works for me should work for them, and vice versa.

The right to worship as you please, or not, or where you please, or not, is one of the things that makes us Americans. To deny a particular group that freedom is morally equivalent to denying them their freedom of speech. How people can support this discrimination is beyond me. It diminishes us* as a nation.

*And we've been diminshed enough in the last decade thanks to the conservatives.

Thanks to Dr. Attaturk for the link.

Update:

Seems I overlooked something:

...

So, just to clarify, apparently the only Amendment that means anything is the second half of the Second Amendment.

Silly me ...

Question of the Day

Comrade Misfit:

So Why Not Fire Tom Vilsack?

Yeah, why not?

Quote of the Day

Herr Doktor Krugman:

...

What’s shocking here isn’t the behavior of the right, which was par for the course. It’s the seemingly limitless credulity of the inside-the-Beltway crowd. I mean, there’s a history here: ACORN, Climategate, Vince Foster, Whitewater, and much much more. (Someone recently reminded me that the GOP held two weeks of hearing on the Clinton Christmas card list.) When the right-wing noise machine starts promoting another alleged scandal, you shouldn’t suspect that it’s fake — you should presume that it’s fake, until further evidence becomes available.

...

Fool me once ...

Yeah right ...

Chris Matthews is still an idiot:

Sadly Chris Matthews gave his Fox "News" counterpart Bill O'Reilly far to much credit for possibly being capable of doing the right thing and not towing the Fox line that Andrew Beitbart's heavily edited videos in his hit piece on Shirly Sherrod should be considered credible now that the full video has come out.

Ol' Chris has been a part of the Village for 35 years. The only thing he knows is The Game.

Shopping Day

'Tis over the hill and through the woods to Costco we must go. It's a nice day. Even Mark Morford is pretty calm today. Enjoy. See yas later.

The heroism of Shirley Sherrod

Glenn Greenwald on Ms. Sherrod:

As much value as Sherrod's NAACP speech has for everyone, her conduct in the face of this massive onslaught is even more instructive. It ought to serve as a template for how people respond to all of these low-life, right-wing smear campaigns: with unapologetic clarity and resolve about who the actual wrongdoers are. To the extent the gross injustice of her firing is reversed, if the grotesque slander to which she was subjected is nullified, it will only be because she stood up to the right-wing smear machine, the establishment media, and even the Executive Branch, which were all jointly operating -- with different motives -- to destroy her. That isn't easy to do, but this is obviously a woman with uncommon courage and principle -- exactly what is required to stand up to and expose the group of thuggish bullies trying to smear her and the cowardly government officials willing to play along. This will be an extremely valuable episode if her conduct inspires future targets of such smears to respond similarly.

She should be an inspiration to us all - never back down or apologize when you're right and have done nothing to apologize for. Stand up to the bastards.

White House, take note.

You know ...

When the Roman Empire fell (which didn't happen overnight), the first thing to go was the infrastructure farthest away from the power center (Rome ... generally). Out in the lands where the Barbarians lived - England, France, Germany - the great Roman road system turned back to nature and the aqueducts began crumbling due to lack of maintenance. From this article, I figger the "heartland" will go back to horses and buggies any time now:

SPIRITWOOD, N.D.—A hulking yellow machine inched along Old Highway 10 here recently in a summer scene that seemed as normal as the nearby corn swaying in the breeze. But instead of laying a blanket of steaming blacktop, the machine was grinding the asphalt road into bits.

"When [counties] had lots of money, they paved a lot of the roads and tried to make life easier for the people who lived out here," said Stutsman County Highway Superintendant Mike Zimmerman, sifting the dusty black rubble through his fingers. "Now, it's catching up to them."

Outside this speck of a town, pop. 78, a 10-mile stretch of road had deteriorated to the point that residents reported seeing ducks floating in potholes, Mr. Zimmerman said. As the road wore out, the cost of repaving became too great. Last year, the county spent $400,000 on an RM300 Caterpillar rotary mixer to grind the road up, making it look more like the old homesteader trail it once was.

...

But heaven forbid we go and raise taxes on anybody. I can't wait until someone will get the idea that they don't need indoor plumbing anymore. If this weren't so sad it would be laughable.

By the way, I wonder which county official has a brother-in-law who's in the heavy equipment sales business?

Thanks to Gaius Publius for the link.

Dear Mr. President ...

Oliver Willis:

You screwed up. Secretary Vilsack may have been the one who executed the decision, but the buck stops at your desk. Cabinet secretaries don’t work in a vacuum. Even if you were never consulted on a decision, the decisions they make are done with the full imprint of your office. The decision to fire Shirley Sherrod was a mistake, and it happened with your authority.

...

With the exception of a handful, most Dems are fucking wimps.

Unwieldy ...

Stays on top today - G

At best. Our national intelligence apparatus is beginning to rival our military industrial complex:

...

What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest -- and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. In interviews last week, both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta said they agreed with such concerns.

The Post investigation uncovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America created since 9/11 that is hidden from public view, lacking in thorough oversight and so unwieldy that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

...

Like I've said since I began blogging here (6 years so far), the War on Terror was won on 12 September 2001 by Al Qaeda. They managed to turn the United States into a cowardly, bankrupt, quivering gelatinous mass. In our quest for "safety", we've willingly given up our civil rights and given the government almost complete control over our lives. We've thrown away our money in two theaters of war and given the rest to billionaires and corporations, yet we can't help out the worst off among us.

I have a friend who was with MI-6 during the Cold War (probably still is), covered as a western businessman working behind the Iron Curtain (fighting an enemy with millions of times more resources than a couple goat fuckers in a cave). Some of the things I've become privy to were amazingly simple, cheap little operations that netted high-value intelligence. To this day, he can never get over the way we (CIA) operated. The term that comes up most is "cowboy", the second most popular is "arrogant". He couldn't believe the amount of money and resources we wasted in order to achieve questionable ends, so this article comes as no surprise to me.

If there's anything we do well in this country it's bureaucracy. There is probably some kind of theorem that states American bureaucracy expands relative to the amount of money available to it. After September 11th, the doors to the Treasury were thrown open. In a delirium that allowed us to abandon common sense, we bought into any suggestion that promised "more safety".

So, 9 years later, we have a military engaged on 5 continents with no clear mission aside from "get the bad guys" and an intelligence infrastructure that is so big, information coordination, distribution, and oversight happen at sloth-grade speeds. We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars for a system that does not operate any better than it did on September 10th and we are no safer than were were on that date.

It's time for streamlining of the intelligence services and a complete rethink of our military's mission (it sure as hell ain't anti-terrorism and counterinsurgency) but I can't see that happening when the Republicans can make political hay over "surrendering to the terrorists". Until a bigger portion of America reaches out and embraces reality, we will never get out from under.

Think about this. In the past 9 years, thanks to a single terrorist attack (bad as it was), we have completely changed our way of life and not for the better. To me, that defines success for a terrorist. We have yet to define what winning means to us.

Update:

I put the word "safety" in quotes because we've allowed it to be defined by the scare mongers and disaster capitalists. What exactly is safety? Who the fuck knows. A terrorist could blow your ass up in a train or a bus, or you could get run over by a bus stepping out your front door. You can die in a plane flown into a building by a terrorist or you can die in a car hit, or driven by a drunk. You wanna be "safe"? Buy a Michelin Man suit and stay in your house for the rest of your life.

My career change ...

If D.I. Ermey can do it, so can I. I'm gonna be a therapist. Heh ...

Heh ...

Ran into my old buddy Jimmy D today. He imparted this on me:

Guy is running down the street, huffing and puffing. He comes upon a nun, in full habit, and stops; looks at her and says "Sister, I'm requesting asylum, the cops are chasing me and I need a place to hide. Can I crawl under your skirts until they go away?"

The nun looks around and sees a couple Army MPs turning the corner. She says "Quick, get under there."

The MPs get to her and the sergeant asks "Sister, did you see a guy come running past here?"

The nun says "Yes, he went that way." And she points up the street.

The sergeant doffs his cap and says "Thank you, Sister." And they take off up the block.

Guy crawls out from under the nun's skirt and says "Thank you, Sister, I'm gonna make a donation this Sunday."

Nun considers him and asks "If you don't mind me asking, what do they want you for?"

He says "I'm a GI and I'm AWOL. I've done two tours in Iraq and two tours in Afghanistan and I ain't going back. They've been chasing me for a week."

Nun says "God will forgive you. God wants peace."

He says "Thank you, Sister, that means a lot." He looks her up and down and says "If you don't mind me saying, while I was under your skirt, I noticed you had a nice set of legs."

She looks at him and smiles, and says "If you would have looked a little higher, you would have seen a great set of balls too. I ain't going back to Afghanistan either."

We've Got Empire Stress Disorder

William A. Collins

One day the deficit will force us to bring all those troops home, like it or not

Whatever works...

It's a lot of work being an empire. Expensive, but well worth it. Americans make up only 4 percent of the world's population, but we get to use up 25 percent of its resources. That's pretty high living and you don't get to pull it off by being a wimpy socialist nonentity. We also get to spew 25 percent of the earth's unsustainable pollution. Sure, this all has to come to an end eventually, but no matter; it's been a great ride.

In addition to military bases, any empire needs management infrastructure. Thus the Mothership of World Domination is now moored in Baghdad. It's the largest embassy on earth, covering 104 acres. In true Iraq War fashion it was shoddily built by corrupt contractors, but will henceforth serve as our Middle East and Central Asia nerve center. Presently it's busy insinuating U.S. corporations into Iraq's juicy, if decayed, oil fields.

There's more too. Iraq is now viewed as Asia's rail gateway to Europe, with deepwater harbor plans being drawn for Basra and rights-of-way being organized for trains all the way from there to Germany.

But such domination can be messy. There is always stuff like having to bribe the rulers of Kyrgyzstan to keep our air base, supporting coup plotters in Honduras so as to hang onto our base there, paying Ethiopia to occupy Somalia, etc. Plus the wars. It's all so terribly expensive.

Indeed, it's the cost that will probably take our empire down one day. We have built this global fortress on financial sand. Despite our momentary debt reprieve when Europe went bust, our deficit can't keep mounting forever. One day it will force us to bring all those troops home, like it or not.

Just like Rome, The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire is well underway.

CIA now pretending contractors are CIA officers

Raw Story, with links.

The Washington Post's Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Dana Priest drove another stake into the heart of the US military industrial complex in today's Post:

In June, a stone carver from Manassas chiseled another perfect star into a marble wall at CIA headquarters, one of 22 for agency workers killed in the global war initiated by the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The intent of the memorial is to publicly honor the courage of those who died in the line of duty, but it also conceals a deeper story about government in the post-9/11 era: Eight of the 22 were not CIA officers at all. They were private contractors.

For-profit mercenaries are now being enshrined as selfless patriotic public servants. God help us.

I wonder if the four Blackwater idiots who got themselves killed in Fallujah and caused the death and injury of hundreds of Marines are chiseled into the wall?

Just as an aside, go read about the First Battle of Fallujah, which was called off for political reasons when it was nearly won at great cost to the Marines, which led to the Second Battle of Fallujah after the bad guys had time to regroup, and which was won at great cost to the Marines. I read No True Glory and it made my blood boil at the political incompetence and disregard for our troops by Bush and everybody else involved in that clusterfuck. Still does.

Wrapped around portrayals of men at combat, West has written an insightful account of how high strategy, low politics and obstructive bureaucracy dictated the bloody fight for Fallujah.
...

The singular lesson of the Fallujah campaign is almost intuitive: when troops are committed to battle, let them finish the fight. This axiom was violated by virtually everyone in the confused civilian and military chains of command stretching from Washington to Baghdad to the Fallujah theater. [...]

I would gladly trade the lives of every mercenary we've ever hired for the lives of the fine young and not-so-young military men and women who've been unnecessarily killed in the service of corporate and neocon America.

Mercenaries as CIA officers? The CIA and the mercs can kiss my ass.

Headline of the Day dos

68% Say Political Class Doesn’t Care What Most Americans Think

Like duh. I'm glad that, just for once, when 2/3 of Americans agreed on something, they got it right. Not that it matters.

Headline of the Day

A BuzzFlash headline:

BP To Up Iraq Rumaila Field Output By 100,000 Barrels a Day. Hey, Why Do You Think Tony Blair Joined Bush and Cheney in Seizing the Oil Fields in Iraq?

It was all about the oil. Never forget.

BP's Secret Ticket Request Line

MoJo

For more than a decade, BP has operated a hush-hush phone line that California lawmakers can call to request box seats to NBA games and concerts at the Sacramento stadium named after its West Coast subsidiary.

In the past five years, BP has given state officials more than 1,200 complimentary tickets to the Arco* Arena, hosting them in its corporate suite to see Sacramento Kings games, World Extreme Cagefighting matches, and Britney Spears and Lil Wayne concerts. Getting the tickets is as easy as calling the BP ticket request line, an exclusive, unpublished phone number that appears to exist for the sole purpose of granting freebies to lawmakers, regulators, and their staffs.

"You make a request, leave it on the voicemail, and at some date the tickets either magically appear or they don't," says a legislative consultant who gave me the ticket line's number and spoke on condition of anonymity. "They don't talk to you; you just see 'em or you don't." The ticket line's message was taken down sometime in the past week, shortly after I began my reporting. You can still listen to the original recording below.

*Acronym for Atlantic Richfield Co.

Stern says the ticket giveaways illustrate why California's ethics rules need to be tightened. "These tickets, in a sense, are worth more than their face value," Stern says. The third-smallest stadium in the NBA, the Arco Arena has some of the basketball league's highest ticket prices and sells out nearly every game. It's also unclear whether the face value of the free tickets, which BP has reported as being as much as $170 for Kings games, reflect their actual cost to the company. Arco Arena would not disclose the price of a corporate suite.

Now that the BP ticket request line isn't picking up, lawmakers may have to find a new way to score free tix from the world's most-hated oil company. But the persistent can always give it a try: (916) 444-7968.

Everything BP does pisses me off. They're not the only ones doing this kind of bribery either, just the only company that's coming under scrutiny right now, and this is just one insignificant little offshoot of just one Hydra-like company.

The corporate-political system is rotten and corrupt from top to bottom. I think we'd have to destroy the village to save it.

The Mogi Doughnut - Fire in the Hole!

The news about D.C.'s "largest ever recorded earthquake!" is amusing. A 3.6 is about the same as a freight train going by and not nearly as loud. Since I quit drinking and am no longer prone to taking naps on the railroad tracks, I don't wake up for either of them.

I grew up with earthquakes. I'm used to them. I'm thankful that California gets those instead of tornados and hurricanes. Here's the only two things you need to know to survive them:

1. Earthquakes don't kill people. Falling things that get shaken loose by them do. That's why there aren't many brick houses out here and why savvy folks don't have heavy stuff anywhere above their beds. It's also why I get a little nervous in tall buildings. Top floor, bottom floor, you're dead either way.

2. If an earthquake opens up a fissure in the earth between your feet, pick a side. Don't dawdle!

Interesting article in the LATimes, but this photo says volumes. I've been to Parkfield (Pop. 18, sometimes as many as 2 or 3 are visible at any given moment). If it wasn't for earthquakes and their bluegrass festival, nobody would ever go there. The nearest actual tourist destination is the James Dean Monument at the Jack Ranch Cafe in/which is Cholame (pronounced 'Show-lahm'). Busloads of Japanese tourists stop there, but they don't go to Parkfield. The Japanese are much more blasé about earthquakes than we are. Heh.

The 'Mogi doughnut hole' is a new concept to me. Then again, so was plate tectonics years ago.

Signs in Parkfield, Calif., alert tourists that they are passing over the San Andreas fault. The area is so prone to earthquakes that scientists have wired it extensively to collect data. The San Andreas, along with the Elsinore and San Jacinto faults, would be enclosed in Southern California's so-called Mogi doughnut hole. Northern California’s doughnut hole includes the San Andreas and Hayward faults. (Spencer Weiner, Los Angeles Times / July 18, 2010)

Yo, refudiate this...

WASILLA (The Borowitz Report) – Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin today defended her use of the word "refudiate," telling her critics, "Look it up in the fictionary."

While claiming that "refudiate" is a real word, she reserved her right to make up new words in the future.

"Everyone makes up words – Shakespeare, George W. Bush, Levi Johnston," she said. "The only person I know who doesn't do it is my husband Todd, who doesn't speak."

Gov. Palin also lashed out at those who criticized her use the word "refudiate," calling them "incohecent."

In a related story, Gov. Palin would defeat President Barack Obama if she ran in 2012, according to a poll published in Mayan Prophecy Weekly.

Headline of the Day

Right Wing Apoplectic That Montana School Is Teaching Tolerance, Safe Sex, And Anti-Bullying Measures

Understandably so. It goes against their entire agenda, particularly bullying.