Michelle: Barack Knows What It’s Like to Struggle Talking Points Memo
Brazil to boost import taxes again to help local industry Reuters. Trade War, baby!
Republican Convention Ratings Plummet From 2008 Huffington Post
Banker Plan Would Fund Super-PACs To Sway U.S. Senate Elections Bloomberg
Banks Face Suits as States Weigh Libor Losses New York Times
Can Someone Explain Why Facebook’s CFO Should Be Fired For Getting An Awesome Deal? Techdirt
To Chinese, Obama and Romney Aren’t So Different Bloomberg
More than 100,000 refugees flee Syria in one month CNN
All eyes on Draghi over bond proposal FT
Iran Supplying Syrian Military via Iraqi Airspace New York Times
Money market funds look to pass on losses FT. What a great way to start a bank-style run in the multi-trillion dollar money market fund industry. Just tell depositors they may not get all their money back. What could go wrong?
US accuses BP of gross negligence in gulf FT. BP is one of Holder’s designated election year fights. Meh. I hope he gets them, but I’m guessing that isn’t really the aim.
Facebook CEO Won’t Sell Shares For At Least A Year Bloomberg
Netflix Would Like Very Much to Change the Channel Businessweek
Leave Your Cellphone at Home, N+1
Once all our cars can talk to each other, what will they reveal about us? IT World
Honeytrap reveals mass monitoring of downloaders New Scientist
First Black President Can’t Help Blacks Stem Wealth Drop Bloomberg
Elizabeth Warren a winner at DNC, underdog in Massachusetts Senate race Politico. Warren is down by five, and it’s an ugly race, with the Democratic establishment in Massachusetts lining up against her.
Is Drug War Driven Mass Incarceration the New Jim Crow? Forbes. Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow” is quickly becoming the conventional wisdom on the drug war and its racial implications. But…
Black Out: Michelle Alexander’s Operational Whitewash Joseph Osel. Be skeptical, because Alexander’s book has significant problems.
* * *
lambert here:
D – 2 and counting*
“Would you like to stay and have a drink? We’ve got Kool-Aid.” “I’d love to,” Y.T. says, “but my diabetes is acting up real bad.” — Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
DNCon. The feel, from the normally astute Charles Pierce: “This convention, for the moment anyway, doesn’t march so much as it flows.” Yes, I can think of a lot of substances that flow. … The hall: “One cannot easily walk out of the Arena and back to other convention facilities. Forty-five minutes later, I was still walking, trying to get outside the security perimeter in some hope of a cab.” Feature? … Platform: “The distance between the 2008 and 2012 platform shows just how hard it has been, and starkly illustrates the extent to which the Democratic Party has given up on its 2008 promises to roll back the national security state that emerged and expanded in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.” Yeah, but a bait and switch isn’t strictly lying. Let’s be fair. … Banning: “For the second day in a row a handful of moms bearing flyers and large yellow pencils made out of pool noodles were denied admission to an event sponsored and/or featuring the corporate-focused education ‘reform’ groups Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and Students First, headed by Michelle Rhee.” … Roach motel: “Scores of DNCC delegates, media folk, and supporters gathered in the Charlotte Convention Center to discuss the formation of a formal, recognized DNC Progressive Caucus and to brainstorm ways to strengthen the [“]progressive[“] movement at the state and local level.” … Charlie Christie: “Palm Beach County Democratic Chairman Mark Alan Siegel[:] ‘There’s a lot more he has to do to convince people… Being a D is more than just switching uniforms.’“…. Castro: “Castro is a rare D unfazed by R intimidation*, refusing to beat around the bush about his views. On abortion, Castro told the New York Times that ‘The pope and I disagree on this one.'” Great. Run him then. [* Do not accept narratives of Democratic weakness! Aristotle said: “We are what we repeatedly do.”] … Castro speech: “Ours is a nation like no other — a place where great journeys can be made in a single generation … no matter who you are or where you come from, the path is always forward.” Let’s play “Spot the forward!” … Michelle Obama speech: “Stand together for the man we can trust to keep moving this great country forward, my husband, our president, Barack Obama.” Let’s play “Spot the forward!” (full text) … Michelle Obama: “He believes that women are more than capable of making our own choices about our bodies and our health care.” Which would be why He signed the Hyde Amendment into ObamaCare via Executive Order 13535. … Michelle: “‘You see, at the end of the day, my most important title is still ‘mom-in-chief,” Michelle Obama said, as her eyes teared up.” A new sheen of consummate professionalism. … Michelle: “I hear the determination in his voice as he tells me, ‘You won’t believe what these folks are going through, Michelle…. It’s not right.’ ” I can just hear him saying that! … Michelle: “Being president doesn’t change who you are — it reveals who you are.” Indeed. … Great teasers of our time, Charlotte Observer: “Speakers take turns insulting Republicans and Romney; first lady shares Obama’s soft side.”
Conventions. “Conventional wisdom”: Thumbsucker.
CA. Food pantries: “As federal, state and local safety-net programs are slashed, the Food Bank is losing funding and commodities while more people need our help.”
FL. Foreclosure: “Palm Beach County ranks second among large metro regions for its percent of vacant homes. [W]ith 6.7 percent of all housing units vacant as July, only Detroit is ahead with a 12.1% vacancy rate.” … Swing state: “To carry Florida, with its R north and southwest and its D southeast, candidates must win the swing area in the middle of the state — the famed Interstate 4 corridor, including the state’s biggest media market, the Tampa area.” … Disemployment: “Earlier this year, the Office of Economic and Demographic Research said that 69% of the drop in the unemployment rate was due to people dropping out of the labor force. The state lost 715,200 jobs during the recession, and has only recovered 96,600 or 13.5%.” Mission accomplished. …. Food pantries: “A year ago, the food bank at Religious Community Services got 2.3 million pounds of government food for needy people in the area stretching from St. Petersburg to Tarpon Springs. The allotment has plummeted this year. ‘We rejoice when there’s peanut butter.'”
IA. Stimulus: “The real failure of the stimulus was that it should have been larger and more targeted toward spending with the biggest ‘bang for the buck’ in a weak economy.” Strong but Kool Aid-free D.
IN. Austerity: “The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, one of only 17 full-time orchestras in the nation, is proposing shifting to part-time status as part of a plan to address longstanding financial problems. As of Tuesday afternoon, the ISO wanted to cut musicians’ annual pay by almost half as part of a plan that would reduce the orchestra’s schedule from 52 to 36 weeks a year.” … Food pantries: “Delaware County’s pantries aren’t getting enough food into the hands of the area’s hungry [due to] lack of volunteers, a 300-percent increase in demand for some pantries, a drop in the amount of food donated and federal requirements.”
MI. Convention: “In addition to me being a delegate, Anne and I have DNC media credentials and have also gotten credentials to The PPL, a netroots-focused space.” Credentialism?
MN. Police state: “The parents of a St. Paul man said they were outraged that officers gunned down their unarmed son early Friday as he fled a hotel room where a gunman was holding seven people hostage. ‘They shot my son down like a dog,” said Tawana Henderson, the mother of 19-year-old Mark Eric Henderson. ‘… If I never saw another police officer again, I would be happy.'” … Convention: “One of the many things I’ve really enjoyed here in Charlotte is the food – to give you an idea of what’s here, here’s a quick YouTube – let’s look!”
NC. Convention: “The journalists and others being held back started pressing to be allowed to resume their traffic flow, but that earpiece in my ear was telling me to hold my position. So I did.” Very interesting picture of the convention floor.
NJ. Food pantries: “[F]ood supplies are down now while the demand is increasing. ‘It’s not letting up,’ [Kathleen] DiChiara said. ‘If there’s a recovery the people that we’re seeing are not experiencing it.'”
NY. Fracking: “If this is what a best practice management failure looks like, I wonder what a complete disaster would be. But maybe we can use our imaginations here without much of a stretch. Add some dead belly-up brown spotted and feminized male fish, or some greasy-looking dead flora, or some methane bubbles, or somebody’s kid swimming a mile away getting really sick.”
PA. Wretched excess: “The Kimmel Center reopened its Dorrance Hamilton Rooftop Garden today, after more than $6 million in renovations. [T]the room seats about 200 people and will be used for weddings and other private functions” (where the money came from). …Extractive economy: “[I]f Royal Dutch Shell builds a petrochemical plant along the Ohio River [it] means jobs. This cracking plant, fed by the Marcellus Shale natural gas boom, would take the place of a zinc smelting plant moving operations to a new smelter in NC. The school district would lose $275,000 in property taxes if the plant site becomes a Keystone Opportunity Zone. If the plant does what it’s supposed to do, many of the children of this plant’s workers will be landing in a district that already has its middle and primary schools at capacity. Of course, managing an enrolment boomlet beats watching an exodus. The cracker plant would be exempt from state taxes, too, a break that would last 15 years. There’s another 25-year tax break on the ethane purchased for the facility, too.” At the state level, taxes do fund spending.
TX. Voting: “So as you know, [TX] had its rear end handed to it in both the redistricting and voter ID preclearance lawsuits. Both of these rulings will be appealed to the Supreme Court, with the ultimate goal being a constitutional challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which is the provision that requires Texas and some other former Confederate states to undergo preclearance. The argument that Texas and these other states are making is that it just isn’t fair that they have to go through these extra steps and get subjected to this extra scrutiny that other states do not. The irony, of course, is that these two ruling should make it abundantly clear why Section 5 is still needed.” OK. … Climate: “West Nile virus illnesses in TX continue to rise dramatically, state health officials said Tuesday, with the number of cases this summer rising to 1,013 — with 40 deaths — as an Austin man became the second in Travis County to die from the mosquito-borne disease. That is a 58 percent increase in cases and 74 percent increase in deaths.”
VA. Resource extraction: “But when I asked Bill Chadd, who mined uranium for twelve years, lived in Uravan for ten, and suffers from lung disease, if he thought that a proposed new uranium mill would be good for the area, he said, ‘You bet. It would open up about 300 jobs.'” …. Constitution Party: “VA election officials placed a former Republican congressman [Virgil Goode] on the November ballot as a minor-party candidate for president, in a potentially worrisome development for Mitt Romney.”
WI. Walkeristan: “[C]ounty employees recently received checks of as much as $8,000 in back pay, plus interest, for lost wages as a result of mandatory unpaid furloughs. Not bad pay for time the staffers didn’t actually work. The furlough days were imposed in 2010 as an emergency measure by Gov. Scott Walker, then the county executive, and the County Board. Courts have since ruled that the furloughs violated the terms of county contracts. Total doled out this month by county taxpayers as a result: $4.5 million.” See, there’s your problem. Contracts.
Grand Bargain™-brand Catfood watch. That was fast: “Durbin just told Andrea Mitchell he *knows* that the president will use Simpson Bowles as a template in 2nd term.” So much for Biden’s “flat guarantee” [NC 08-16].
Outside baseball. Affirmative action: “Empirical evidence that we and others have carefully laid out shows [t]hat many universities are using racial preferences that are larger and more mechanical than those used before Grutter, and that — whether schools call their admissions “holistic” or not — race is being applied in a uniform way to all persons who can plausibly (and sometimes implausibly) be counted towards racial balancing objectives.” Sounds like NCLB. … Under the Surface: “Running from southern WV through PH Ohio, across central and northeast PA, and into NY through the Southern Tier and the Catskills, the Marcellus Shale formation underlies a sparsely populated region that features striking landscapes, critical watersheds and a struggling economic base. It also contains one of the world’s largest supplies of natural gas, a resource that has been dismissed as inaccessible–until recently.” … Adequate emotion: “Yuck!”
The trail. Democrats: “The real target, the non-base ‘undecideds,’ are not quite getting it, the real nature of the choice. Most of them are bumbling along, uneasy about the economy [Shocking!], thinking (even if they voted for Obama in ’08) ‘where’s the change?’ [good grief!] and ‘Obama’s had his chance, maybe it’s time to let the other guys have a turn.'” I don’t know why Ds consistently insult voters whose support they seek. But they do it over and over again. “Bumbling”!?!?
Green Party. Censorship: “Google TV ads changed its mind and agreed to submit a Jill Stein TV ad [here] to various media outlets. Google TV had originally rejected the proposed ad because it had a slight bit of implied obscenity” ;([bleep] on the audio; “bull$%t” on the CC). Smart PR, tweaking Google and then winning…. Censorship: Green Party argues, “[W]hat Google does not seem to understand is that federal law prohibits broadcasters from censoring ads submitted by candidates for public office.” Once again, code is law, or tries to be.
The Romney. Management fee waiver: “Mitt Romney appears to have dodged a bullet after his lawyer said last week that the GOP candidate never engaged in a tax practice that’s now being investigated by New York’s attorney general.” Poor Eric. Another damp squib.
The Obama. Golf, Ryan Lizza: “Obama phoned Clinton and invited him out for a round. Several Clinton associates say that this was the moment they realized that Obama truly wanted to win in 2012. Why else would he spend hours on a golf course being lectured by Clinton?” Well, how about money, win or lose? (Stoller)
* 2 days until the Democratic National Convention ends with great barbecue and official sauce for everyone on the floor of the Bank of America Panther Stadium, Charlotte. 2, as in binary thinking.
* * *
And the antidote…
62 comments
Comments are closed.
Don’t you worry about Warren. She’ll scalp ’em.
Warren isn’t going to make much of a difference at all. Just what exactly did has Bernie Sanders and Paul Wellstone accomplished in the long term? Zippo. The establishment still rules.
What’s the story behind the “Dem establishment in MA not backing her”?
anyone else aggravated by meaningless MSM links?
for instance, in the blacks under obama article, BLM links to at least a half dozen different “richard brown”s, including the 40 year old black story lead…
ok. so i got up on the wrong side of the bed this AM…
I agree that today’s links are a pretty boring MSM lot.
Friends;
Here in the Deep South, one of the young women I work with at the DIY Boxxstore was coughing and miserable last night.
“How you feeling T?” I ask.
“Miserable, the doctor told me this morning the tests say I have that West Nile.”
“Shouldn’t you be home in bed?”
“Nah. I can’t afford to. Plus, they’re giving me these antibiotic injections.”
“Injections plural?”
“Yeah, plural.” ‘Cough, cough.’
Ambrit, that is a very interesting story. May I ask where you are located? FL?
Mr. Strether;
I’m located in Hattiesburg MS, half way between the Gulf Coast and Jackson MS, the state capitol. The young woman I referred to lives in a rural area just Northeast of here called Sumrall.
As to the symptoms, she did have a cough, but also the killer headache and chills. When I see her again, I’ll ask her if the doctor did the blood test or not. There has been an explosion of mosquitoes around here due to the wet and hot conditions. Lots of standing water about. I kill a bunch every time I go out back to dump the compost from our kitchen into the pit. Usually when they are biting me! The state government has admitted to there being a ‘larger than usual’ number of West Nile cases this year in the state.
As to the implied medical serfdom theme in my earlier comment; yes indeedy folks! I’m not the only geezer who admits to keeping an admittedly rotten job just for the medical insurance benefits! I hear a lot more younger folks sounding that plaint too.
My wife tells me I should write a book about the picaresque adventures encountered in my labours for the big Blue Box Store. I’m sure that I’m not alone in this.
Anyway, as I tell my wife when she laughs at my frantic attempts to flail away the miserable mosquitoes, she being possibly unpalatable to them, they seldom bite her; “Here now, you tell me how to live in the South and not get bitten up!” She just laughs harder. Blast!
Yeah. Health care (as distinct from health insurance) is really going to become important when some disease like SARS gets dug in amongst the busboys and parking valets. People living in the range where paying for effective treatment — or maybe even just taking time off work while sick — could mean going without food or living in the street.
Well, I mean, it’s important now, but the nation will pay attention once that finally happens.
The symptoms of West Nile, as explained to me by my doctor one year when I presented with something similar, are severe stomach ache, killer headache, fever, chills, and eventually vomiting and dry heaves. No cough. The only way to diagnose West Nile is with a blood test. If you get a good case of it, you are horribly miserable and could not go to work, no way. But some do catch West Nile and have no symptoms. They develop the antibodies but are not sick.
West Nile is not contagious; you get infected by a mosquito! You can’t catch it from a human, unless you get the infected person’s blood inside you somehow.
In addition to which, antibiotics as the term is commonly used are for bacterial infections. You’d never give them for viral infections like West Nile, unless there was concern about a bacterial infection piggybacking on the viral one.
Antibiotic injections? For a virus? What’s the logic?
Is Drug War Driven Mass Incarceration the New Jim Crow?
I doubt it was a conspricy just as I doubt prohibition was designed to start organized crime. But whether it was designed to or not, it obviously doesn’t work, and it costs a fortune. The damage to the constitution is the unseen but greatest cost.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all
http://www.economist.com/node/16640389
“Yeah, but a bait and switch isn’t strictly lying. Let’s be fair. ”
Nor is pre-rogating, it’s choosing amongst .. choosings.
[utter BS]
re: Elizabeth Warren a winner at DNC, underdog in Massachusetts Senate race
Of course she is… she was hand picked by the elite Dem establishment, she has no political experience and she comes across as too lecture-y (being a Hahvahd prof not advantageous here). When the prez didn’t give her the job she should have gotten, her consolation prize was to run for the MA senate. How does any of this qualify her to represent the people of Massachusetts? or endear her to them? This is very much a Washington elite versus local-boy-done-good election.
And when Obama & co. put her into the MA senate race, that sucked all the air out of the room for all the local MA Dem politicians who wanted to run for that seat. I have noticed that none of the other potential Dem candidates have done any political ads for her. She’s a national figure, not so much a local one.
This article from the Lowell Sun from last month is very informative…
Menino is ‘X’ factor in race for U.S. Senate http://www.lowellsun.com/editorials/ci_21335515/menino-is-x-factor-race-u-s-senate#ixzz240qLZY4B
This is not to say I don’t like Warren, and if she ends up winning I’ll be fine with that. But I’m voting for Brown, again. When I voted for him the first time it was an FU vote. Now I’m voting for him because I find him an interesting character and I want to support the local guy who worked his way up the state ranks and has more loyalty to MA than to DC (even though I don’t agree with him on everything). Also Brown is NOT a typical Republican (a good thing) and Warren is a very typical Dem (boringly predicatble liberal).
IMO, this senate race is not ugly (in comparison to many others I’ve seen)… though it has often been petty. But that’s politics for you!
Quick! Get Ilya Sheyman on the line!
OK, I looked the guy up… but I have no idea how you think he relates to my comment, so I’m wondering if there’s a good story there. Please explain :)
Losing “the Liberal Lion of the Senate” Ted Kennedy’s seat to an unknown in 2010 was another of Obama’s many signature achievements — a glaring signpost to the death of the Democratic Party (as we knew it). That event and Obama’s single-handed resurrection of the GOP in 2010, when just a primitive wooden cross would have sufficed to mark the bones, was a remarkably underappreciated coup for Wall Street by their Trojan horse Achilles.
Anyway, why vote for a Republican disguised as a progressive when you can just vote for the real deal? Unless it’s just a sympathy vote. Warren is indeed a pitiable character, having sold her soul to the great deceiver as cheaply as Schneiderman.
I don’t live in MA, and I’m not that acquainted with the story, but my impression was that it was the MA Dem Party that screwed up, not Obama.
Today’s very local story is indicative…
Waltham city councilor, a Democrat, to endorse US Senator Scott Brown, a Republican http://www.boston.com/politicalintelligence/2012/09/05/waltham-city-councilor-democrat-endorse-senator-scott-brown-republican/khV1FREXltbQnYE34x5VdL/story.html
If this piece of sh*t doesn’t get her arse ripped out i’m giving up on this website.
Right! Because it’s important to always shoot the messenger.
It’s effectively a one party state. What did you think was going to happen?
It looks like you support the things Sen. Brown has done in office and you approve of what he supports.
Since this is the case I don’t see why you wouldn’t vote for him.
If it isn’t the case, and in reality you disagree with his actions and positions, maybe you should consider someone else. Hagiography is for suckers.
Don’t think I said that, so I’m guessing you and I approach political language differently. btw, I do not use words like “support” or “approve” when talking about politicians, I only use them with friends and family. Those words imply tribal loyalty, something I no longer do when it comes to politics. I belong to no political tribe and never will again. I am not looking to politicians to meet any sort of idealistic expectations nor to be foci for blame. To me politics is not so much about principles and ideology as it is about power and money and realpolitik. My voting for Scott Brown only means that after some analysis I prefer him over Warren, given the existing conditions, and nothing more. Actually I feel fortunate to have 2 decent candidates to choose from. Besides if Warren loses this election she can run again soon when Kerry resigns to become the next Secretary of State. I’d be happy with both Warren and Brown as MA senators :)
OK… my bad rezlez… I have to confess using the word ‘support’ in my original comment. Damn, I’ve been trying not to do that… it’s hard to shift paradigms… my only excuse is the context… I said I was the supporting “the local guy” meaning that ended up being the deciding criteria.
Boston mayor goes after Mitt Romney at DNC http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/boston-mayor-goes-mitt-romney-dnc-214729767–election.html
Crickets on Lizzie… despite the prime speaking spot…
Democratic convention erupts over reinstatement of Jerusalem to policy http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/06/democratic-convention-reinstatement-jerusalem?newsfeed=true
Of course they recanted… they remembered the Golden Rule: ‘thou shalt not upset AIPAC”
The stupid, it burns.
From Joseph Osel’s commentary on The New Jim Crow:
There is no connection to any of this because when Nixon and Agnew cooked up the evil idea of a federal war on drugs, they didn’t give a flying fug about ‘colonialism’ or any of the intellectual pocket lint on Osel’s half-baked laundry list.
Nor did New York’s little general Michael Bloomberg take the slightest notice of ‘black criticism’ in authorizing the NYPD to order random black and hispanic pedestrians to empty their pockets, and then arrest them for violating a New York statute prohibiting the public display of drugs.
New York’s harsh law is designed for the eminently pragmatic purpose of keeping upstate prisons filled to ‘create jobs,’ not to provide fodder for pseudo-intellectuals to bloviate about Frantz Fanon and Richard Wright.
Jealous of Alexander’s book’s mainstream success, Osel argues that she should have larded it with the stale radical rhetoric of 1960s academia. This would have ensured sales of perhaps 300 copies, with the remainders flogged off on Amazon for $0.01.
What a bitter black loser.
‘Broadly my interests include continental philosophy, critical theory, African American literature, imperialism and capitalism, psychoanalysis, hegemony and media studies.
‘My expertise are [sic] in metaphysics, ideology and the black diaspora.’
http://seattleu.academia.edu/JosephOsel
Jim, I wouldn’t be so derisive toward Osel. I agree, his field is kind of fluffy, but that fluff can be powerful. I wouldn’t be surprised if Alexander read much of, and drew ample inspiration from, Fanon, Wright, Malcolm X, et al. She’s a radical like them, just a different type of radical.
You’re right regarding the NYPD’s shocking unfamiliarity with afrodiasporic metaphysics, but that doesn’t mean Alexander couldn’t have paid more lipservice to black radicalism. That criticism is relevant given, for instance, the fact that Alexander made little mention of COINTELPRO and its attack on black radicals as a prelude to militarization of inner cities. The importance of black radical thought is essential to this and other episodes in the creation of the New Jim Crow.
All of that said, yes, Osel’s criticism is silly; but no, you shouldn’t call him a “bitter black loser.”
Before segregation most Americans were happy to ignore the sky-high black crime rates since most of it was black on black. But with the invisible walls of segregation falling down, such disparities in crime rates (both perp and victim) were too much for non-black communities to live potentially in close proximity to. So the “war on drugs” was launched as a euphemism for what it really was: a war on black crime (since that branding would have obviously been harder to sell). And at great expense, there has been some success. Even as late as 1990, 40 blacks per 100,000 were getting murdered compared to 6 per 100,000 for whites. And the murder offending rate was 51 per 100,000 for blacks which was ten times higher than the white rate of 5 per 100,000. With a huge policing effort disguised as a “war on drugs” that stains the civil liberties of all; black murder rates have been HALVED to about 20 per 100,000. Some of this reduction would be due to improved emergency room techniques, but still, there is no doubt that black violent crime has shown some reduction – the white rates have stayed stable all this time. In any case that’s a whole lot of black people each year who are NOT getting killed. What does Professor Osel have to say about this?
So it must be nice to be a black studies professor; even if people took what he said seriously and stopped the war on black crime and emptied the prisons of all brothaz, the result would be skyrocketing murder rates in black communities and then this professor could bitch about how evil YT refuses to spend any resources policing black communities and protecting black victims of crime!
I’m more offended by the Linker’s editorial approval of Osel’s review than the pompous review itself. Mr. Osel asks — “Could one write a book about the rain, but never mention the weather?” Yes, if you show that it gets you wet.
Re: local safety-net programs are slashed
Lambert, thanks for the links related to slashing local safety-net programs, such as to the Tampa Bay article on Food pantries:
“The allotment [of government food] for the needy plummeted this year….We had been getting six or seven items, protein, carbohydrates, vegetables, fruit. Sometimes there is milk. We rejoice when there’s peanut butter…Since the middle of July, we’ve seen a significant increase in the number of women and children…”
Yeah, they just can’t seem to find any money to give milk or fruit to women and children in dire straits, but
when it comes to bailing out the bankers or buying another F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (expected to cost $1 trillion for development, production and maintenance over the next 50 years), well, that’s another story, the money’s always there for things like that.
In Matthew Arnold’s poem “West London”, he describes a destitute woman who uses her daughter to beg for her, but does not expect any help from the rich. She looks to the labouring classes for help, as they’re the ones who understand her need:
“Crouch’d on the pavement close by Belgrave Square
A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied;
A babe was in her arms, and at her side
A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.
Some labouring men, whose work lay somewhere there,
Pass’d opposite; she touch’d her girl, who hied
Across, and begg’d and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.
Thought I: Above her state this spirit towers;
She will not ask of aliens, but of friends,
Of sharers in a common human fate.
She turns from that cold succour, which attends
The unknown little from the unknowing great,
And points us to a better time than ours.”
“Leave your cell phone at home”
looked mostly good – good advice. But the one line
” Bamford projects that its processing-capacity may aspire to yottabytes, or 1024 bytes”
I don’t think so. I want to see him back that up. We are nowhere near 10^24 OPS.
And I’d like to hear the TOR guys answer to possible vulnerability issues. I’m not up on it myself.
yep. this paper is recent
http://www.syverson.org/tor-vulnerabilities-iccs.pdf
from this guy http://www.syverson.org/
Black Out: Michelle Alexander’s Operational Whitewash Joseph Osel. Be skeptical, because Alexander’s book has significant problems.
From the review:
Doh I hate it when I do that. Take 2:
Black Out: Michelle Alexander’s Operational Whitewash Joseph Osel. Be skeptical, because Alexander’s book has significant problems.
From the review:
Double doh. I shouldn’t try complex formatting before coffee. My apologies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TrFDlbxp4
“Dr Cornell West Tavis Smiley Breathtaking” (Uploaded by repairman56 on Apr 17, 2011)
Yes, well, conscription for Vietnam led to a bloom of radical Leftist critique of the modern capitalist State, the MIC and so on (remember Marcuse?), and also to some extent helped radicalise the Civil Rights movement (“Why should I go to Vietnam? They never called me a nigger!”) but fundamentally the opposition to the war remained opposition to the war. From what I know about the US, there wasn’t much of a continuing legacy of leftist thought or radical race critique. Instead, there seems to be a legacy of “stab-in-the-back” myth – “We would have won if we hadn’t had one arm tied behind our back!”
Maybe Osel regrets this. If so, he is probably right, but trying to raise the ghosts of my generation (I am old) isn’t likely to work in the contemporary US scene.
A more trenchant Left criticism of Alexander’s book might be along the lines that it does little to correct the racial Balkanisation of the US working class. For a long time, driving wedges between the black, hispanic and white segments of the working class has been a successful tactic of the US ruling class. A unified (non-racist) working class movement is probably a nightmare for the 1% in the US. Maybe the sudden appearance of the Occupy movement attracted so much hostility precisely because it wasn’t racially fragmented. And I have often wondered whether the assassination of MLK wasn’t driven by the broadening of his movement (OK it wasn’t exlusively “his”, but I’m trying to keep this short) to include the poor of every race.
What person or movement in the contemporary US is trying to constitute a unified, non-racist working class consciousness?
Hey, past-it dogfaced egomaniac Tom Hayden’s yelling at you to eat your shit sandwich, http://www.zcommunications.org/saving-obama-saving-ourselves-by-tom-hayden . On and on about why the affordable care act sucks (it’s the right!) and he manages never to mention executive abuse of function for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Also blah blah antiwar blah blah, while managing never to mention the legal definitions or norms. It seems there are all these invisible secret leftists who don’t like programmatic wilful killing but they’re fine with aggression, and you just have to have peace on earth, and then US crimes of concern to the international community will take care of themselves. Or something.
Roach motel indeed. You can get another peek into the DLC’s fistula from David Atkins’ posts on Digby. The pampered soap-opera heir is cock-a-hoop with his earthshaking comological importance as he undergoes ego-up indoctrination at the Dem’s big Nuremberg Rally. He gets to lick the shoes of prominent ward heelers and factotums. He deigns to speak ex cathedra in homeschool verities about why you are a nihilist. After him, the deluge. Wave, David wave! Cheer, David, cheer! Yay! Yes, they really give a shit what you think, they really, really do!slsl
To Chinese, Obama and Romney are so different – Bloomberg.
Thus subtly, we are being brainwashed into becoming Chinese.
Thanks to my tinfoil hat, I see through the plot.
Sorry, it should be ‘not so different.’
Dear MLTPB;
So sorry, but proper metaphor is “Turning Japanese.” Cue the Vapors! [Turning Japanese as in Lost Decade etc.]
Who knows? It’s a big tent and so, maybe we can turn Japanese economically and Chinese politically.
All our cars talk to each other…
Maybe one day, a human is just a brain surgically attached to an electric car that is hooked to a smart phone.
Has this been covered in a sci fi somewhere?
Dear MLTPB;
Yes indeed! Try “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die!” Or the Star Wars B’omarr Monks. Or my favourite, Arther Clarks meditation on sentience encapsulated in the HAL 2000 sub plot in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” [A paranoid computer?]
It’s a scary thought, but is it paranoid to think one day, the government will replace all DMV workers with robots or postal delivery workers with solar powered drones?
And if the smart car traffic masters want to kill you, they can just instruct your car to “have an accident”.
lambert,
Here is info on your insect. I tried posting it on your blog which is a real pain in the ass to log into!
http://www.musicofnature.org/songsofinsects/iframes/specieslist.html
From the Toledo Food Bank: “12.4 million American kids are unsure where their next meal will be. 98,800 of them are here in our area.
That is just bull-shit. Michele is growing all the food they need (it’s orgnic!) and will be distributing it to every child because she and Barack really care.
Money market funds look to pass on losses FT. What a great way to start a bank-style run in the multi-trillion dollar money market fund industry. Just tell depositors they may not get all their money back. What could go wrong?
Yikes, this will definitely get the ‘man on the street’s attention as it did when Reserve Primary Fund broke the buck in 2008. Although this time may be more like an MF Global experience rather than the backstopping similar to an FDIC guarantee which was temporarily put in place then.
This could begin the game of musical chairs. Chasing risky yields will increase. Negative 1% interest is a lot different from 1% interest. Will cash become more attractive than equity risk?
Both the Fed and the ECB have essentially just announced unlimited QE. This is sounding like the end game with a harsh ending.
Or we could just relalize that we need to come to terms with debts that can’t be repaid and that we need to focus our attention on the well-being of the 99%.
“Barack Knows What It’s Like to Struggle”
OK, so we’re talking his golf game, but still…
“You won’t believe what these folks are going through, Michelle…. It’s not right”
OK, he’s talking about bankers, but still…
“Democratic progressive”
An oxymoron or simply Orwellian?
“First Black President Can’t Help Blacks Stem Wealth Drop”
Can’t or won’t?
“US accuses BP of gross negligence in gulf”
The con here is that this is a civil case. If Holder were serious, he would have filed criminal charges.
Warren is a typical Establishment liberal:
She’s too Establishment to be populist, and just liberal enough to make her anathema to the Democratic leadership and their corporate sponsors.
“the ISO [Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra] wanted to cut musicians’ annual pay by almost half as part of a plan that would reduce the orchestra’s schedule from 52 to 36 weeks a year”
Isn’t that more like a 65% reduction in pay? 45% of the money for 70% of the work? .45(52/36) And they are cutting the orchestra size by 28% and doing away with the pension fund in favor of essentially 401k’s. Maybe in a few years, they can whittle the orchestra down to a one man band and charge him for playing on street corners. What? You didn’t think that the arts were immune from kleptocracy, did you?
“69% of the drop in the unemployment rate was due to people dropping out of the labor force”
If the real unemployment rate is 12.8% (my calculation), then people being defined out of the labor force would account for 35% of this rate (1 – 8.3/12.8) So the rate in Florida is twice this. Interesting.
“Durbin just told Andrea Mitchell he *knows* that the president will use Simpson Bowles as a template in 2nd term”
Well, dah! Like we haven’t been saying this for an age, or that all this election is about is whether the people screwing us over have a D or an R after their name.
“I don’t know why Ds consistently insult voters whose support they seek”
Because they can, and they know they can get away with it.
Sorry, I think I misread the Symphony article. That would be 55% of the money for 69% of the work so they would be paid at about 80% of their current rate overall.
Glen Ford quotes from this week’s “Blackagendareport.com”
And now for a little Michelle O:
OUCH!
Good catch on Durbin. Here’s the link to Susie Madrak’s reporting of Andrea Mitchell harassing Durbin into admitting they will use Simpson Bowles to reform entitlements.
http://susiemadrak.com/2012/09/05/andrea-mitchell-demands-simpson-bowles/
Re.”keynote speaker” at the Democratic convention.
From her hometown newspaper, the San Francisco
Chronicle. They know about her there.
“Kamala failed her Brady Law requirements as our SF DA, in what can only be classified as “gross negligence.” As State AG, she “settled” for $26 billion for the bank robbery of America, comprised of over $12 trillion in questionably worthless paper now owned by the US Treasury, the FHA, Fannie May, and Freddy Mac. She settled charges against Obama’s Wall Street friends for less than 1% of the criminal systemic control fraud. This failure to reset the principal ballances on these millions in fraudulent mortgage backed securities is accomplice to the wholesale felonies and very core reason there is no “Pecora Commission” solution to the crimes of Wall Street! Arguably, Kamala is the reason 5,000 to 10,000 bankers are not in prison. How are the Counties supposed to reestablish clear title on any of the millions of MERS clouded properties required to reset our legal basis of property taxation? As hundreds of counties and thousands of cities face real bankruptcy, we now can all thank Kamala Harris for her incompetence. She is part of the San Francisco Political Machine worthy of recall and prosecution.”
re: Brazil to boost import taxes again to help local industry Reuters. Trade War, baby!
Is a “trade war” necessarily a bad thing?
Most nations have a defense department/ministry. They don’t call it war department/ministry.
I think some things a country can do for her people have nothing to do with trade wars but more to do with trade defenses.
You don’t want to initiate a war, trade war or otherwise, but when someone war on you, and you have to defend yourself.
Make that ‘when someone wars on you…’
Now this is, umm, interesting: l33t haxors claim to stole oodles of Romney’s returns from PwC servers in Tennesse, demand $1 million Bitcoin ransom or they’ll release the file a decryption keys.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/pricewaterhousecoopers-on-romneys-ransomed-tax