Cliven Again

Well, all of a sudden the Fox News hero Cliven Bundy (the grazing fee jerk, you remember) has lost his luster. As he was bound to the minute they started to find out what's really in this guy's mind. Two articles elucidate: here and here. Sean Hannity, that prince of fools who trumpeted Bundy and his defiance of the feds just about all day on Wednesday, is now on record as saying: "“His comments are beyond repugnant to me. They are beyond despicable to me. They are beyond ignorant to me.” He cannot get away from this guy fast enough.

And what comments would these be? Well, Mr. Bundy's opinion on "the Negro" that were picked up by the NY Times. To wit:

They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton,” Bundy was quoted as saying to a group of supporters last Saturday. “And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.

So this hero of the right turns out to be a despicable ignorant racist, as you can be certain almost all right-wing nut cases are. Maybe now that this idiot has opened his mouth and removed all doubt about what and who he is, and now that all of his erstwhile supporters are jumping off his ship as fast as they can, it will make it easier for the taxpayers to get the $1 million this freeloader owes us.

My Kinda Pope

Pope Francis is causing an absolute furor among all those pious (and impious, too) free market capitalists out there. Fox News, for example. He has said what needed to be said by the Church long since. In effect that the trickle-down nonsense that's been served up by the conservatives since before Reagan--you know what I'm talking about: the notion that wealth will trickle down from the rich in society to the less rich and poor by some sort of magical process involving tax cuts for everybody, but especially the really well off. See Wiki article.

In a new 85-page "apostolic exhortation," (You can find a good summary of the document's salient points here.) Pope Francis has basically played the bullshit card. A couple of samples:

The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings. (So much for Wall Street.)

How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. (So much for income inequality.)

And this beauty, which no one can misunderstand:

Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.

I like this guy. How can you not like him when he gives Rush Limbaugh apoplexy?

 

Encouraging News of a Sort

Results of some recent polls (source)

A Fox News poll : “Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce the threat of terrorism?”

45 percent said NO, which is good. But 43 percent said yeah, OK. Be glad. This is a great improvement on a month after the 9/11 attacks when 71 percent of Americans were willing to sacrifice their liberties for the promise--not the actuality--of safety from terrorists. This is also the first time since 1996 that more people are saying NO than are saying OK.
 
A separate Washington Post poll: Almost half (48%) of Americans are worried that the government has gone too far in investigating terrorism. 41% don't think it's gone far enough! Who in the hell are these people? Logically enough, 57 percent of people don't have a great deal of faith in the government's ability to halt terrorism. But 15 out of a hundred have a high degree of confidence. Again: who in the hell are these people?

Related articles

• Americans troubled more by governmental abuse than terrorism (rt.com)

Habits

Susan and I get the USA Today newspaper. It's not a great paper, and we almost did not renew this year, but then it occurred to me that without that paper I won't be able to keep up during the fantasy baseball season. That I cannot abide since I'm determined to win at least one of the two leagues I'll be in this year. I've had enough break-in period now. It's time to get serious.

But back the paper . . . I'm in the habit when I sit down to read it in the mornings of handling the "state-by-state" page this way. I read the entries for all the states I've lived in. (Can't devour the whole thing. Takes too long. Besides it's mostly "Like, who cares?") Anyway, this give me a bird's eye view every day of the run-of-the-mill going on in the country, just the everyday stuff, which, I would submit is not a very uplifting exercise usually. But today was kinda bland. 

• Alabama -- the state's at war with electronic bingo. They just shut a casino down and are suing three more. What the hell is wrong with electronic bingo? If you're going to have gambling casinos, doesn't make sense to me.
• Florida -- Dufuss Tea Party Governor Rick Scott has decided he's gonna take the federal Medicaid dollars under the Affordable Health Care Act despite his histrionic announcement some time ago that Florida was not going to. What kind of dummy is going to turn down 3 years of 100 percent funding of Medicaid from the fed? This move covers an additional 900,000 people in the state.
• Louisiana -- A judge has stopped the town of Homer from abolishing its police force. Apparently the meeting of mayor and board of selectmen that decided to do it took place in violation of an open-meetings law in the state. There's more to it than this, you can bet.
• Maine -- The governor signed a bill keeping data on the state's concealed weapons permit holders secret. It was a hurry-up measure to head off a request by a newspaper, which later withdrew the request.
• Mississippi -- The first lady is going to visit an elementary school in Clinton later in the month puffing nutritional improvements in school lunches.
• Missouri -- State lawmakers in Jefferson City endorsed bills honoring Stan Musial and Andy Gammon by naming the new Mississippi River bridge after the former and a stretch of I-70 after the latter. (Gammon died working on the bridge.)
• Oklahoma -- In one of the extremely rare instances of good sense, the state legislature passed a law making it illegal to text while driving.

Related articles

• Florida's Medicaid retreat a 'tipping point' in health battle, reformers say (guardian.co.uk)
• Widow of Man Killed While Working On Bridge Wants It Named After Him (fox2now.com)
• Missouri Rep. Proposes State Holiday For Musial (stlouis.cbslocal.com)

And Yet a Final Word on Mittens

He's goodbye forever now, he and his boring prevaricating self plus his phony, vapid wife can both drift off to their palaces in four locations and hobnob with their like-minded contemporaries. They are all as rich as Croesus, so they don't have anything in the world to worry about. But the rest of us have at least some small pleasure to enjoy. Romney won't ever waste our time again. (But don't worry, after a decent wait, the Republicans will doubtless find somebody equally as irrelevant and clueless to lead the party.)

I could not bid final farewell to Mittens without sharing this little thumbnail character portrait of him from James Kuntsler. (The URL for his piece is listed in the additional reading below.) Good stuff to remind us of how blessed we all are that this man did not become president of the United States.

I just don't like Mitt Romney. He's the over-eager twerp in the classroom with his arm always sticking up. He's the missionary bozo in a necktie ringing your doorbell to sell a fairy-tale cult religion dreamed up in the 1820s by another over-eager con artist. He's obviously using the national stage to work out his father issues (George Romney ran for president in 1968, blundering his way out of the race early on). He shamelessly panders to the worst elements of his own party - the ignorant, militaristic, punitive-minded Nascar evangelicals - and dissembles so automatically that there is nothing left of whatever core beliefs he might have theoretically developed earlier in his career. He's too chicken to engage with the realities of climate change, so visibly on display this season. He's spoiling to rumble with China, apparently oblivious to the fact that China's leader-in-waiting, Xi Jingping, is an army brat.

It's utterly amazing to me how such a person could get anybody's endorsement, but just a week ago we were actually wondering if somehow this loser would win the election. It didn't seem impossible at the time, although it does now.

Related articles

• Team Mittens Launched Victory Website... After Electorate Gave Him The Shaft (newsone.com)
• Fox News Puts Mittens Voters On Blast When They Use A Dumb Azz Graph To Make Their 'Point' (bossip.com)
• The Tides of Event (kunstler.com)

When in Doubt . . .

. . . post a list. Here, verbatim from a site (blogger) called "Buffalo Beast" is the first five of fifty loathesome Americans. I cannot say I have any violent disagreement with this. Listed in reverse order. Fifth to first and worst.

5) Mitt Romney
Crimes: The Schrödinger’s cat of American politics, Mittens is simultaneously on both sides of every issue, and no one truly knows his position until he opens his mouth. He’s so incapable of honesty that he’s even lied about his own name. Morally dissonant, too, much of the seed money for Bain Capital — which made Mittens millions by gutting companies, killing jobs and raiding pensions — came from an El Salvadorian family that financed death squads in the ’80′s, but when it came time to do business with Artisan Entertainment, Romney refused because they produce R-rated movies. But what can you expect from a guy who purports to believe that Native Americans descended from Jews and hung out with Jesus, God lives on the planet Kolob, the devil invented coffee, and underwear can be magic. And he’s so damn white he makes Justin Bieber seem like Gil Scott-Heron.
Smoking Gun: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”


4) Jon Corzine
Crimes: As the Goldman CEO who made the firm public, Corzine scored an instant $400 million, and then spent $100 million becoming senator then governor of New Jersey. He managed the state so poorly that he floated the idea of privatizing the Turnpike, which sent New Jersey running into the fat arms of Chris Christie. Obama’s biggest Wall Street fundraiser reentered the world of high finance in 2010 as CEO of MF Global brokerage firm, where he repeated the shady dealings that led to the ’08 economic collapse — using a billion in client cash to cover insane gambles like some compulsive OTB degenerate raiding his child’s college fund.
Smoking Gun: “I never intended to break any rules.”


3) Grover Norquist
Crimes: Born with money and without decency, young Norquist got into politics as a Nixon campaign volunteer, and his filthy mitts have been picking the pockets of the poor and working class ever since. A coauthor of Gingrich’s Contract With America, and integral in designing the Bush tax cuts, Norquist is best known for his anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform — a member of the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (which crafts corporate-friendly legislation for state reps to pass off as their own). All but two Republicans in D.C. have signed Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” which binds them through implied shaming and character assassination to never raise taxes on the rich, thus ensuring a return to a better time in America when children worked in coalmines, got black lung and died hungry without whining about it. Although complicit in the illegal schemes of swine like Oliver North, Jack Abramoff, and Tom Delay, Norquist’s naked duplicity is best summed up with his take on two recent tax issues: He was fine with raising payroll taxes, which would’ve hurt average Americans, but if Obama lets the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy expire, Norquist thinks he should be impeached.
Smoking Gun: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

2) Rupert Murdoch
Crimes: Who’d have thought that a country founded as a prison, and inhabited by the world’s deadliest snakes, could produce such venomous turpitude? News Corp.’s phone-hacking scandal, wherein their Brit tabloids snooped the voice mail of celebs, royals, relatives of terrorism victims, and a missing girl (also erasing her messages and giving her family false hope that she was still alive), can safely be counted among Murdoch’s least offenses as the modern-day William Randolph Hearst. In fact, it’s probably the closest thing resembling journalism his media empire’s done in some time. Back in ’03 a Florida court unanimously ruled that FOX News has the legal right to lie, and, as evidenced by the profound ignorance of its viewership, they’ve since made Goebbels seem a small-time fibber  – beating the drums for war, reporting innuendo and racist opinion as fact, and subverting public understanding on every basic issue from Obama’s citizenship to man-made global warming. Fox News is no longer a propaganda arm for the Republican party; it’s the brain, fanning the flames of extremism, and exploiting white middle class prejudice to the point of economic cannibalism. And he’s ultimately responsible for subjecting you to the intolerable smarminess of Piers Morgan.
Smoking Gun: “I do not accept ultimate responsibility.”


1) David (and Charles) Koch
Crimes: Heirs to a fortune created largely by their John-Birch-crazy father’s oil deals with Stalin, the putrid fruit didn’t fall far from the hypocritical tree. The billionaire Kochs are still profiting from business with America’s enemies in Iran and, as the Tea Party’s sugar daddies, spending big to trump reason at home. Their cash and ideology can be found lurking behind nearly every “free market” think tank, anti-labor front group, global warming-denying sophist, and malfeasant politician hellbent on making the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. Perhaps the most sinister Koch-bankrolled endeavor is the American Legislative Exchange Council. As mentioned above, ALEC drafts corporate-approved legislation for state representatives to introduce as their own. These model bills primarily focus on union busting, instituting discriminatory voter ID, and privatizing every state institution imaginable. There’s a multi-front war being waged on the middle class in which these guys are the generals. And in a fitting tribute to the disingenuous gods of irony, Koch scaremongering over socialism and wealth redistribution is subsidized in part by the American taxpayer.
Smoking Gun: “If I called up a senator or a congressman to discuss something with them, and they heard ‘David Koch is on the line,’ they’d immediately say, ‘That’s that fraud again — tell him to get lost!’”

Drums in the Distance

They are not as faint as they used to be. Those war drums just over the horizon. You can hear them more clearly. Those drumbeats for war with Iran. You don't have to go any further than CNN. That's CNN. I didn't say Fox--which, and this is a total aside, it totally confounds me every time I hear confirmed once again that this right-wing propaganda machine, this organ of Rupert Murdock, is the top news source in this country. What does that tell you about this country? Anyway, have a look at this jeremiad by what Matt Taibbi calls "CNN's resident blockhead." "You can just feel it." he writes, "many of the same newspapers and TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms." (Source) This is very scary stuff, brothers and sisters. Does anybody recall that this is just the sort of media campaign that proceeded our catastrophic preemptive war against Iraq?



Danny Schecther at "The Smirking Chimp" delivers more really bad news: "Officials in key parts of the Obama administration are increasingly convinced that sanctions will not deter Tehran from pursuing its [alleged] nuclear program, and believe that the US will be left with no option but to launch an attack on Iran or watch Israel do so." (This article which mostly bemoans the state of the corporate state media is worth your time.)

So gird yourselves. We're on an increasingly gloomy downward slope. I, for one, don't think there is anything to arrest our slide.

Related articles

• In din over Iran, echoes of Iraq war (mercurynews.com)
• Runaway Train: Stop the War Against Iran -- Now (chris-floyd.com)
• In Din Over Iran, Rattling Sabers Echo - New York Times (nytimes.com)
• Hardhitting, Dissenting Journalism -- Without the Hardhitting, Dissenting Part (powerofnarrative.blogspot.com)

The One Percent

Every week The New Yorker has a humor column entitled "Shouts & Murmurs." To be honest with you, lots of times I just skip it because, as I have mentioned before, my reading burden in heavy, if not back-breaking. This week though I was caught by the title of the piece by John Kenney, "We Are the One Percent." It begins "We, too, have mobilized," and continues in the voice of a fat cat. I have to tell you, it's been a while since I read such brilliant satire. Here are a couple of samples, but I commend the piece to you for full appreciation.

We're angry. We're angry at something we're calling "imagined frustration." By this we mean that, except for Congress, the White House, banks, major lobbyists, and the editorial boards of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, no one is listening to us. And we're tired of it.

And more:

Here is our manifesto, still very much a work in progress, as it's cocktail hour and several of our protesters are out at the pool:

• All wealth should be shared equally among the wealthy.
• Eradicate poverty. (Note: Maybe a clearer way to say this would be "Eradicate the poor." Need to discuss.)
• End business as usual. (Note: several members like the sound of this, but they don't know what it means. A suggestion has been made to add the word "hours" after "business.")
• Implement a rule whereby the public cannot look at us and must keep a distance of at least twenty feet at all times.

 And so on. Like all effective satire, this bites enough to be felt, but not to break the skin. Great stuff.

Related articles

• Wall Street Journal Staffers Push Back: We're Not 'Fox-ified' (huffingtonpost.com)

Long Live Socialism!

Title of the post grabbed you, didn't it? As did the title of this piece by Jack Lessenberry at "The Smirking Chimp." I'm still in the frame of mind I was yesterday. Disgusted with the nonsense, the tripe, dispensed by Fox News 24-hours a day, every day. And it is the most popular news on TV, by far. I tell you again. We are a doomed people.

Lessenberry makes all the points I've scattered all over the place here at "Powderfinger" over the years. So I thought I would just put all these points in one post. For convenience. Doesn't mean I won't be making them again. I can almost promise I will. But at least here you will have everything conveniently summarized.

• The rich rail against socialism, but in fact they are in favor of it . . . for the rich.
• And they approve other aspects of socialism such as police protection, roads, agencies protecting food, for example.
• Libertarianism which favors virtually no government, except maybe for defense, is "a great philosophy for teenage boys."
• National debt now is not as large as "right-wing howlers in Congress" would have us believe. But is cause for concern. Only $1 trillion when Reagan took office.
• Deficit is $14 trillion and growing by $1 trillion a year. Yes, Obama added $2 trillion in "narrowly successful" effort to stave off a second Great Depression.
• Big lies the Republicans proclaim about the cause of the deficits:
• "entitlements" too high; can't afford health care, and maybe not even Social Security
• wages and benefits of public employees
• Raising taxes, especially on the rich, is no solution to lowering the deficit.
• This is "bullshit and blatant hypocrisy"
• But remarkable they have convinced "an astonishing number of us to believe this."
• Myth that we can all be rich "another howler we've been sold."
• Mess we're in is in large part because of huge redistribution of wealth in the country, starting with Reagan. 
• We have been transferring wealth from poor to rich, especially the richest one-tenth of one percent of the population.
•  Budget surplus at the close of Clinton presidency and were beginning to reduce national debt.
• George W. Bush ended surplus, had Congress enact massive tax cuts, "vast majority of which went to the rich."
• None of this in dispute.
• Defense of tax cuts that rich use tax cuts to produce jobs and they spend money to stimulate the economy is "nonsense." Top earners who get the tax cuts don't spend as much of their income as the lower earners. They sock it away.
• Back in the '50s and '60s, the rich paid as much as 90 percent on incomes above a certain level, and they "still got richer."
• "We can fix this if we have the guts, or we can go on becoming a society with a very few rich and a whole lot of poor." 

Karl Marx said that was bound to happen someday. And guess what he said was bound to happen next?

A List

Things I find hateful:

• broccoli
• hyper-patriotism
• roaches
• people who abuse sales clerks and waiters/waitresses
• the New York Yankees
• being clumsy
• watching the Texas Rangers or LSU Tigers lose (especially to the New York Yankees and Alabama or Florida, respectively)
• incomprehensible poetry
• hypocrisy
• political
• religious
• moral
• the idea of Wal-mart
• Wall Street fat cats
• wildlife poachers
• all varieties of people and institutions that despoil the environment
• liars generally
• boredom
• being hurried up when I'm already hurrying
• people who blather on the telephone
• Fox News
• vincible ignorance about ordinary stuff
• militarism and racism
• sweet potatoes
• knowing that I will never, ever be caught up on reading
• sex traffickers 
• the entire airport/air travel experience
• people who are cruel to animals
• waiting somewhere with nothing to read
• anti-immigrant nut cases
• knowing that I've left probably half a dozen things off this list

Google Lab Tools

Don't know about you all, but every so often I go poking around in the Google labs to see what those guys are cooking up lately. I always find something interesting, and quite often I find tools that are more than just interesting. Take, for example, Google Squared. You can use this to list characteristics of an item or facets of a subject. The home page has examples. I tried "kitchen spices" and "chess grandmasters" and "pork chop recipes" among others. You can save the lists, share them if you want. More than just entertaining.

Really downright useful for information junkies like me is Google News Timeline. The name is a bit of a misnomer, not because it doesn't describe the tool, but because it gives no indication of its vast scope. You can push the dates of queries back on this thing for centuries. And wonder of wonders, one the magazines it gloms in on is Baseball Digest, which is really slick for a guy who does baseball research. Best thing to do with this one, and with all of these tools, I suppose, is to play around with them. Push buttons, add and subtract categories. See what happens.

Like many Google tools, things that aren't meant to be tools are very cool too. Take for example Chrome Experiments. You can just get lost in this thing. Try Ball Pool, for example, and tell me this thing doesn't hook you in. Experiments will only work for you if you use the Chrome browser to access the Net--and just as an aside, if you have not given Chrome a whirl, you should. Only Firefox comes close to it in quality. Forget Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It's been out of the race for a long time.

Related articles

• "Google Labs Launches Page Speed" and related posts (geeknewscentral.com)
• New Google Tool Lets You Preview Instant Previews In Webmaster Tools (searchengineland.com)

Good Guy? Yes. Saint? Nope.

This was inevitable. The Catholic Church is rushing the late Pope John Paul II to sainthood. He was beatified today before a throng of over a million people in and around St. Peter's Square in Vatican City. (This means John Paul is now "Blessed" and only a step away from sainthood. You may expect this soon also. This is the fastest anybody has ever moved to sainthood in the long history of the church.) And tomorrow will the the celebratory mass there. The longest reigning pontiff, 27 years, as well as the most traveled, JPII made a huge impression on the youth of the world. He materially assisted in the overthrow of the communist regime in his native Poland. His outgoing personality was perfect for the media age. He was probably the best-known, most beloved pope in the Church's long history.

He also presided over the Church during the flood of worldwide revelations about heinous sexual crimes committed by Catholic clergy against children. JPII wrote about all kind of subjects; he spoke out on a raft of issues. But you will search in vain for a pronouncement about pedophilia. You will also come up empty-handed if you search for any strong action, or any action at all, for that matter, by that pope to address these crimes.

And for this reason alone, the man should not be made a saint. Worldwide impact and worldwide visibility do not cancel out worldwide coverup of literally thousands of crimes against children and papal silence, much less papal remedial actions, in the face of these unspeakable sins. I can only conclude that this past pope, just as certainly as the present pope, was part and parcel of the Church apparatus that enabled these crimes, paid hush money to silence victims, erected obstacles to investigation of the crimes, fought paying compensation to victims of these crimes, and in general made itself odious by acting like any other self-interested institution when it's criticized.

But this isn't going to hinder the Saint John Paul express.  It's going to roll into that holy saint station before you know it. While the countless victims of Catholic pedophile priests remain quite uncelebrated.

Saint? I don't think so.

Related articles

• Pope John Paul's Path to Sainthood: A Rush to Judgment? (time.com)
• Bill Briggs: The Rush to Beatify John Paul (huffingtonpost.com)
• Sainthood Not Easy Ride for Pope John Paul II (foxnews.com)
• Fast-Track Saint (thedailybeast.com)

Dead Dolphins

A lot more dolphins than normal are dying in the Gulf of Mexico. But don't expect to be hearing about this on your evening news (especially if you watch Fox). The NOAA, the government agency supposedly looking out for the nation's interests in the wake of last year's horrendous oil spill in the Gulf, has not only banned independent study of the phenomenon but also clamped a lid on news about the unusual number of dolphins--about 200 so far this year, far more than normal--which have been turning up dead in the Gulf. The agency banned any publication of any findings by independent scientists of this on the transparently flimsy grounds that the ongoing lawsuit against BP precludes divulging such information. (See story here.) According to the story the agency has completely squandered its creditability in the months since the spill. It's painfully obvious that it's more concerned with downplaying the extent of the damage to the Gulf, which, of course, stiffs the public and all the people who make their livings fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, and offers a giant assist to BP.

The early disclaimers coming out of the federal government have centered on the (false) claim that an “exact” cause of death cannot be determined, which is to say that we’ll never be able to hold BP accountable. Again, total nonsense from a scientific perspective. You can, in fact, determine causation in this matter. But first, you have to want to.

The best thing about the gag order is that maybe, just maybe, it will make the “more transparency” Obama Administration such a laughingstock that real change is made. Otherwise, the outrages will just continue.

When are the American people going to wake up to the fact that their government belongs to the multinational corporations and that the function of everyday citizens is simply to due their bidding, and oh by the way, continue shoveling hundreds of billions into their pockets?

Worthy Tools

Snippet of an AllmyFaves screen.
Easy links to everything you need.

Every so often I feel moved to write about the computer as computer. Or to be more specific, to tell you about something that specifically pleases me about working with a computer. Today is one of those days. And it's not so much working with the computer--what a commonplace subject that would be since half the world works with a computer--as tools I've discovered (or that someone else has and told me about it) for working with the computer. I find the following worthy tools that would have wide application. Perhaps you could use them too.

I don't know about you, but I'm an organization freak. I like to categorize and sort and file. Consequently, there's an underlying order to things on my computer. I use Chrome (from Google) as my browser*, and I have a bunch of folders on my bookmarks bar. This is so I can have various categories such as "Tools," "Google," "News," "Reference," "Search," and several others with a whole bunch of links stuffed in them. That way I can get to them quickly. I also have on that toolbar a link to AllmyFaves.com, which is yet another way to access categorized links. It's one of my essential programs. Links are laid out in some 50+ categories, some that you would have never thought of but you're glad they did. Like: Courier, Compare, Movies, Translation, Pets. Like any decent program it's customizable if you register with them, so you can set up your own AllmyFaves page if you want. This let's you put as many of your own use-all-the-time links right up a the top of the page. Once I put AllmyFaves to work, I was able to simplify my Cool.

A program that my sister just turned me on to is one that immediately became integral to my work on the computer. This program is LastPass, as in the last password you will ever have to remember. For years I have kept a list of my PINs and passwords on an electronic Post-It note. It used to take me several clicks to get to the information I needed. Now that requirement is gone. LastPass is all I need. What it does is securely store all of your sign-in information: passwords, PINs, and form fill-in information in one secure vault. Once the information is in your vault, you can instruct it to fill in this stuff automatically when it's needed. Poof! Done. The program is free and it works on all browsers.

Speaking of Post-It Notes, I recently retired by Post-It notes program with honors. It gave way to a more modern note taking program called Evernote. Evernote is really slick. It lets you save virtually anything to a note: your own stuff (like a list of PINs and passwords), clippings from web pages, photos, research. Best feature is that it works on all your platforms: the Web, your phone, your laptop, etc. Keeps all the info synced everywhere. It will work on any browser, and it's free.

*I'm giving a look, however, to Firefox 4 which just came out. It's really, really fast--faster than Chrome--but may have some deficiencies that would be show-stoppers for me. I'm still looking.

Word of the Day: Words Matter

"Words matter." You bet your sweet bippy they do. Hell, any poet, any serious writer, can tell you that. They matter a great deal. They can lift or lower, enrage, frighten, raise to the heights, bring one to tears, take you away to worlds that don't exist. "Words matter." We've been hearing this a lot lately. The news and blogosphere and TV are all still full of chatter about the horrific shootings in Tucson last Saturday. Among other things, the pundits, scribblers, and talking heads are considering the question of the quality and tone, especially the latter, of political discourse in this country. What we need they say, is more civility. To tell you the truth, I'm getting sick of hearing the word civility. We don't need more civility, although more of it would be nice; civility is nothing more than good manners. Good manners aren't going to get to the heart of the problem in this country. The heart of it is hate. And it ain't going away, I greatly fear. Sometimes I think we hate our domestic "enemies" more than we do all our invented foreign enemies.

Here is an article my son Stu sent me some days ago that I just got around to reading. This writer, William Rivers Pitt, says better exactly what I would say. And he minces no words. Here's the way his piece begins:

To:       Palin-lovers, Fox "News," the "mainstream" media, and the Far Right, et al. 

From: William Rivers Pitt

Date:   Monday 10 January 2011

Re:       The blood on your hands

Here's a key paragraph:

You false patriots who bring assault rifles to political rallies, you hack politicians and media personalities who lied through your stinking teeth about "death panels" and "Obama is coming for your guns" and "He isn't a citizen" and "He's a secret Muslim" and "Sharia Law is coming to America," you who spread this bastard gospel and you who swallowed it whole, I am talking to you, because this was your doing just as surely as it was the doing of the deranged damned soul who pulled the trigger.  The poison you injected into our culture is deeply culpable for this carnage.

There it is. The share of blame, the huge share, that the hate-mongers in this country have earned for this tragedy. I could not agree more with Pitt's assessment of this situation. Plus he points out something that may have escaped you. And that is the complicity of the mainstream news media in this horror. Have you noticed how swiftly the "truth" about the killer got out there, i.e., he is a deranged loner? Certainly not the inevitable spawn of the hate-churners on Fox and right-rant radio. Naw.

Think about it. How many times have you heard or read the commentators explicitly make the point that blaming the right-wing crazies of the media and their incessant hate speech, their never-ending stream of lies and distortions, their vicious character assassination of anyone on the left . . . how many times have these media mavens intoned the mantra that our poisoned, hate-twisted political speech had nothing to do with these killings? That it was the work of crazy man.

Well, yeah . . . but the lunatics are listening, Fox News, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Coulter, and the rest of you despicable, opportunistic liars. And like Pitt, "I'm talking to you, "mainstream" media people, who created this atmosphere of desperate rage and total paranoia out of whole cloth because of your unstoppable adoration for spectacle, and ratings, and because the companies that own your sorry asses agree with the deranged cretins you helped make so famous and powerful." 

And those deranged cretins spew their hate bile into millions of minds. Every day. All day. It is a relentless stream. And this has nothing to do with atrocities like Tucson? Are you serious? Those of us who realize what's really happening have a good reason to be fearful. First of all, I think we're seriously outnumbered. For the pathetic yet dangerous population of dupes just seems to grow exponentially. And you better believe that this armed-to-the teeth bunch is getting more frustrated and angry by the hour. Do you think these post-Tucson bromides are going to cool them down? Do you think all the talk about "civility" is going shut Limbaugh, Savage, and Hannity up? How long before we have another Jared Lee Loughner with a Glock stride into an office building or crowd or church or school and blow people away right and left just for the sheer hell of it? For as sure as God made little green apples (as my Mom used to say), this is going to happen again. Count on it.

Related articles

• Beck claims 'I don't use [violent rhetoric] on or off the air': Oh really? (crooksandliars.com)
• Michael Russnow: Media Pundit Sarah Palin Says She's Not Responsible: Oh, Yeah? I Don't Think So (huffingtonpost.com)
• Eric Alterman: Think Again: The Hate We Tolerate (huffingtonpost.com)
• Tom Athans: Tucson: Is Talk Media Off the Hook? (huffingtonpost.com)
• David Brock Explains to Chris Matthews That Beck Has Been Responsible for Three Thwarted Assassination Attempts (crooksandliars.com)

Sixteen Really Dumb Things People Believe

They come all shapes and sizes. 

And we're talking a lot of people. Millions of people. And there are probably more than sixteen of these "truths" floating around out there, but these sixteen were conveniently aggregated in this Alternet piece. It's been one of my constant themes that Thomas Jefferson was completely correct when he premised the success of democracy on an educated electorate. Of course in his day, he was thinking of the mostly rich, well-born, and able who had the franchise, but that doesn't negate his point. Ignorant people can be led about  by their noses by the unscrupulous. They've got no tools to deal with lies, with misrepresentation of the facts, with contrived schemes to manipulate them. It's done all the time. And in our time it's being done on a colossal scale by the right, especially the talk-radio goons like Limbaugh and the Fox News stooges such as Beck, Hannity, and O'Reilly, hell, the whole Fox News collection of bimbos and brain-dead commentators. It is a constant source of amazement to me how people are just effortlessly gulled into believing the veriest nonsense.

I know you can't wait to know what these dumb things are. I feel pretty sure in saying none of them will surprise, but then again, one or two might. Without further ado, here we go. (links to all the following reports are in the source article)

1. Twenty percent of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim. 
2. Twenty-five percent deny Darwin's theory of evolution, and even more striking, less than 40 percent (39) actually believe it. The rest don't have an opinion.
3. Forty percent of people believe one of Sarah Palin's favorite lies, that "death panels" were included in the health care reform bill.
4. Just a few years ago, about half of all Americans believed Saddam Hussein was connected with the attacks on the World Trade Center. Not sure how many have made that nonsense part of their unchanging truth.
5. A majority of under-30 Americans cannot identify Iraq and Afghanistan on a map.
6. Forty percent of Americans think teachers should be able to lead prayers in school. Despite the fact that church/state separation is one of the chief foundations of the American system of government.
7. Many Americans believe in witchcraft, ESP, and other para-normal phenomena.
8. A decade ago, 20 percent of Americans believed the sun revolves around the Earth. (One in five!! It doesn't get much dumber than this. I don't think even Glen Beck believes this.)
9. Only about half of Americans know that Judaism is the oldest of the monotheistic religions. There are other crazy ideas about religion and church/state separation. See last fall's Pew survey on Americans' religious knowledge.
10. People believe Obama has raised their taxes. Nope. He's actually lowered them for the vast majority of us.
11. More Americans could name two of the seven dwarfs than could name two justices of the Supreme Court.
12. Along the same lines, more Americans can ID the Three Stooges than can name the three branches of government!
13. Polling data reveals that many Americans actually believe that Obama is a Muslim.
14. Fully half of the new congressmen don't believe in the reality of global warming. This phenomenon, which hardly lacks scientific data to support it, is in fact a bugaboo for the right, which sees it as a plot by the left and government to increase the size of government and interfere with the benign marketplace.
15. The efficacy of abstinence-only curriculum in schools to curb teen pregnancy, which has been a disaster.
16. Obama's trip to the Far East cost $200 million a day, one of the latest flat-out lies that people on the right believe.

I tell you, all of this just makes me depressed, knowing that I cannot do anything about it. The combined efforts of schools, media, and (presumably) those who actually know the facts, have had no impression whatever on this gross ignorance. We're already in a situation in which Jefferson did not believe democracy could survive. We've been in it for quite a while. Now, if you want to call what we live in a democracy, that's OK with me. But put me down as a person who doesn't believe it.

We Going to Be Frozen

Just another few thoughts on the elections. (You knew I would not be able to lay off them completely.)

• Republicans all of sudden think they've been given a mandate. They will not compromise. John Boehner, who sports a beautiful tan from all the corporate-sponsored junkets he takes to golf courses all over the world, says they are speaking for "the American people." It's a crock. People distrust the Republicans more than the Democrats.
• Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican leader, has said more than once now that the main goal for his party over the next two years is to make sure Obama is a one-term president. Does this sound like the GOP is ready to work with the administration? All that party has is anti-government rhetoric and one platform plank: cut taxes. It's their solution to everything.
• We are headed for two years of gridlock. Absolutely amazing considering the magnitude of the problems confronting this country. Just you watch: we're going to be frozen. None of the major problems of the country are going to be addressed: energy, the endless losing wars, the economy--do you really think the GOP is going to provide jobs?--environment, oil dependence.
• Corporations and rich people are delighted with this results of the election. Signals return to their unobstructed running of the government. (The Democrats were just annoying gnats anyway.)
• Healthcare bill will not be repealed--that was a joke from the beginning, and the GOP knows it--but the Republicans will get all kinds of political capital from the people who don't know any better. There may be some nibbling around the edges of it.
• Obama will further demonstrate how much of a weakling he is by giving in on the tax breaks for the fabulously wealthy. He will extend the Bush tax cuts, which were obscene to begin with and should have never passed--and don't forget, they would not have without an appreciable number of Democratic votes.
• The news media will pause for about 2 months before they start pumping up the 2012 presidential election. Just you watch. The only thing these people know how to do with politics is keep score. 
• Fox News will be even more unbearable now that the GOP has won big-time. I don't watch it ever unless it's on in doctor's office or I see snippets on The Daily Show. Can't take it. It's like watching the Giants' World Series celebration. I couldn't watch that either.
• Look for an emerging scramble for the Republican party nomination. They're salivating now that they think the country agrees with them. I'm lifting a prayer to the Lord right now that the party won't be able to shake their lunatic Tea Party fringe. Those mindless people are going to be big trouble for them. Think Sarah Palin. Think Rand Paul. Think Glenn Beck.

Related articles

• Byron Williams: The GOP now has skin in the Game (huffingtonpost.com)
• The Rise Of Rand Paul & How Tea Party-Backed Candidates Could Face Rocky Road On Capitol Hill (huffingtonpost.com)
• Compare and Contrast: How Democrats and Republicans React to Losses (firedoglake.com)
• GOP agenda: Make the Democrats yield (mcclatchydc.com)
• Mitch McConnell Has His Cojones in a Vise (crooksandliars.com)

We're Sinking

Below are a few salient paragraphs from a piece I read a couple of days ago. The author is David Michael Green, a political science professor at Hostra University. He is progressive Democrat and he is pissed off. I mean really angry about what he sees, and what many of us who share his political outlook also see, as the utter, craven cowardice of Obama and his administration to stand up to the assorted thugs, liars, and political opportunists populating the Republican party, Fox News, and right wing talk radio. And it will be because of this cowardice and the stupidity of clutching the ghost of bipartisanship long after the Republicans had basically taken a shit on his head several times that control of the government will be handed over to the real subverters of democracy: the servants of the plutocrats and corporations who will complete the take over of the country. I seriously thought--and it seems like a million years ago now--that Barack Obama was going to turn this country around. What a fool I was to trust in a politician. I'll never, ever do it again, for all the difference that will make.

It took me about 5-10 minutes to read the entire article, but if you don't have that much time to spare, the following will give you the flavor and main points.

As Robert Reich noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, the richest one percent of Americans have gone from taking in nine percent of the total national income right before the Reagan era began, to nearly one-fourth of it today. As Reich also reminds us, the last time this happened was in 1928. I would rush to say, "Hey, remember how that one turned out?", but it's pretty unnecessary to crack the history books for that reference, since we're now living it. As just about the stupidest society that ever was, we've decided to get together to explore the fun and exciting question, "What would happen if America had a devastating economic downturn once again, boys and girls?!?!"

There is one big difference between today and the 1930s, however. Once there was a political party in America - the one that did the New Deal and the Great Society - that stood up a bit for the middle class and the poor. But Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have led the Democrats down a different path. Now the party stands for a slightly weaker version of the GOP's plutocracy protection service. And, seemingly, for getting its face bitch-slapped bright red at every possible juncture. Both aspects of the New Democrats are a puzzle, but particularly the latter. What sort of psychology of the self-loathing explains how a Clinton or an Obama can be so passive, even when getting handed their heads by the most scurrilous of creeps on the political landscape, pieces of (allegedly) human garbage who could be destroyed with the slightest show of self-defense, let alone a wee assertion of political courage?

........................................................................ 

The worst, though, is what is to come. Obama and the Democrats will get slaughtered in November. This will happen not so much because of the socialist crimes they are alleged by the right to have committed - which are of course utter nonsense - but simply because of what they have not done, which is to solve the country's problems. Yet, because of the socialist, big-spending, freedom-crushing narrative that regressives have successfully fomented and that the administration has been completely inept about countering, and because the other post-election option of actually getting it right would appear to be (and would be vociferously made to appear to be, by Republicans) an act of spiteful spitting in the public's eye, the administration will have no option after the election but to tack yet further to the right in the ensuing two years.

That will be disastrous for Obama, for Democrats and for the country. (I could care less about the first two, who deserve it, and frankly I'm leaning that same way for number three on the list as well.) Like Clinton before him, Obama will try to placate voters and Republican monsters with their sponsoring oligarchy by moving to the right. Of course, there is absolutely nothing there except tax cuts for the wealthy (he is already proposing tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent). The Republicans have no other solutions for the economy (or anything else, for that matter), though these dam-busting boondoggles for the fiscally obese are, of course, no solution either. And, like Clinton before him, Obama will be relentlessly hounded by congressional investigations into every manner of bogus scandal that the fevered minds of the closeted perverts on the right can dream up to keep the administration reeling.

Unlike Clinton, however, there will be one big difference. I often said, back in the day, that the only thing that kept the American public from immolating Wild Bill, and the only thing that kept the Senate from convicting him in his impeachment trial, was that the economy was jumping at the time and Americans were therefore fat, dumb and happy. Today, however, they're merely fat and dumb, and even the fat part isn't a good thing in this case. The public could not possibly be more surly - apart that is, from how surly they'll be in a year or two. Obama has been as idiotic a president as could be created if you sat down with the intention of making one, and they will be happy to watch him get savaged him when they have a chance. By bringing timidity and compromise with criminals to bear against multiple severe crises, and by refusing to fight for anything, he has launched a vicious cycle that is sucking him inexorably down, and us with him: He fails to solve the problems, the public gets angry and frustrated, his party loses elections, the right accuses him of everything from being a socialist to a fascist, he says nothing in response, the public gets angrier and more frustrated, his party loses more elections, they are then even more unable to govern than before, the public is about to explode in anger and frustration, he moves to the right and thereby offers even less of a solution to these crises than the non-solutions already on display, and ... so on. And so on, again. Rinse and repeat.

Obama and the rest of the cowardly and corrupt members of his party have guaranteed their own destruction, that's for sure, but that is likely the least unkind thing that history will say about them. If we think about where this all goes next, it becomes clear what these shallow punks are trading away for their pathetic self-interest and unwillingness to fight against treasonous criminals. Democrats will be smashed in the next two elections, and the right will gain full control of the government and full responsibility for the state of the country. At that point, Republicans will have to put up or shut up. Since they will have no remotely viable way to solve the problems people face - since, indeed, their real mission is to make those problems worse, because that is necessary to further enrich their sponsors - they will reach for ever greater means of distraction to keep the public's attention elsewhere. All I can say is, "Watch out, third world countries everywhere".

Related articles by Zemanta

• New polls spell gloom for Obama's Democrats (alternet.org)
• Stephen Herrington: There's No Difference Between Democrats and Republicans (huffingtonpost.com)
• New Polls: Frustrated with Democrats on economy, voters look at GOP (dailykos.com)

Your Sister's a Muslim, Too--If Fox Says So

Pick your epithet--courtesy a bevy of liars

Newsweek comes to our house every week. I scan it; my wife reads it; my grandson reads it when he's over--we used to pass on copies to him, but I think he's got a subscription now to Time or something. (We're not passing copies along anymore, as far as I know.) Anyway, to the right there is the cover of the latest issue. Not too long ago, just last week, I had occasion to note the unbelievable fact that almost half--46%--of the Republican party believes that the president of the United States is a Muslim. One out of four people in this country don't believe that he was born a US citizen. A lion's share of the responsibility for spreading these lies belongs to Fox News and the hate-mongering radio: Limbaugh, Savage, and numerous other raving liars.

(Just as an aside, I don't think anyone could possibly imagined an engine of propaganda such as this network ever been allowed to put its stuff on the air. Say, 10 years or so ago. Have you ever watched Fox news for a few hours? It is absolutely unrelenting in its hostility to the White House and Obama. Whatever truth they present you have to find underneath mountains of lies, innuendo, half-truths, sneers, and self-righteous posturing – all, it goes without saying from the right of the political spectrum. Not the center, the right. And apparently, since this is the most popular news network in America, this bilge strikes a responsive chord with a large number of dreadfully naïve and uninformed people.)

This story, which offers a considerable number of direct examples, indicts the right wing media for propagating these half-truths and downright falsehoods about the president. Nor does it spare other people responsible, to wit:

The blame for this extends from Fox News and the Republican leadership, to the peculiar psychology of resentment in public opinion, to the ham-handed political response of the Obama White House. Whatever the cause, if smash-mouth tactics are validated by huge GOP gains in the midterm elections, then Big Lie politics may be with us for good.

What's really got me concerned is that the Big Lie has been in ascendancy ever since Fox News came on the air. This network is nothing but an organ of Rupert Murdoch pro-business, pro-military, far right conservatism. Its ludicrous motto – fair and balanced news – is actually, I think, a tongue-in-cheek in-joke for all of the fat cats, generals, defense contractors, and closet racists whose interests it serves. Fox news has never been fair and balanced since the day it started telecasting. But who would've thought that such transparent bullshit daily served up by this network would be the main determinant shaping the political life of this country? Amazing, isn't it?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Help Turn Off Fox (crooksandliars.com)
• Taibbi: For Their Use Of Racial Demonization, It's Time To Boycott Fox News (crooksandliars.com)
• When does Fox News' ugly Muslim bashing become the story? (smirkingchimp.com)

Unutterable

I've had occasion to sing the praises of James Kuntsler before, and I think I've told you that I never ever miss his blog which he posts once a week on Mondays. In one of the rain reasons I like this guy, aside from the fact that I agree what he says about peak oil and what that means about where the country is going, is that he writes in such a slashing style. Much in the same vein as Matt Taibbi, his stuff brims with picturesque, imaginative, and biting metaphors. His disdain for the dimwitted--well, more accurately, the uninformed, the complacent, the knee-jerk Right--is palpable and quite often funny.

So it was with some degree of anticipation that I read today what he has to say about Glenn Beck and his "Honor America" shindig on Saturday. Get a load of his opening:

     Here come the Corn Pone Nazis!

     Fox News entertainer, former drug addict, and professional weeper Glenn Beck took center stage at the Lincoln Memorial exactly forty-seven years to the day after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech for a rally dedicated to "restoring honor," which is tea party code for the otherwise unutterable idea: get that nigger out of the White House! (despite the attendance of a few African-American shills on the scene).

 I have read several pieces now by people trying to understand what kind of "philosophy" or "goals" or "unifying ideas" characterize the Tea Party. Nobody I've read seems to be able to, until now. As I said, Kuntsler as a way of cutting through the crap and fog and getting at the heart of the matter. I don't doubt for a single moment a substantial portion of the Tea Party movement's "program" can be boiled down to this unutterable idea. And unlike Doctor Laura, Kuntsler knows how to apply the n-word properly.Yes, blatant racism is indeed unutterable. But to think that people who subscribe to it – never kid yourself: racism in this country flourishes – are actually having a noticeable effect in the body politic is pretty disturbing.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Glenn Beck Has a Long History of Racial Mockery on the Radio -- His Civil Rights Talk Is Pure Fraud (alternet.org)
• Tea Party Rocks Primaries (rollingstone.com)