1. 05 September 2008

    Politics

    693 days ago

    The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such nations have no need of wars to save them.
    — William James

    Power and authority, as substitutes for performance and rational thought, are the specters that haunt the world today. They are the ghosts of awed and superstitious yesterdays. And politics is their familiar. Politics, throughout time, has been an institutionalized denial of man’s ability to survive through the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare. And politics, throughout time, has existed solely through the resources that it has been able to plunder from the creative and productive people whom it has, in the name of many causes and moralities, denied the exclusive employment of all their own powers for their own welfare.
    — Karl Hess

  2. 06 August 2008

    Cool programmers on Republicans:

    723 days ago

    Like most Republican plans, the idea is to sound reasonable while producing no results and selling off public assets for private profit. Republican voters aren’t bad people; they’re just really bad at spotting con men. That’s why their “family values” figureheads are always getting divorced or caught naked with underage boys.
    — Giles Bowkett

    Fundamentally, being Republican means being more outraged about someone lying to protect his privacy than lying to destroy another country.
    — Wil Shipley

    I’m sure I could find more, but I ran across both of these today and decided to post ‘em.

  3. 13 July 2008

    Citizenship Papers

    748 days ago

    Excellent set of essays, coming from agrarian and writer Wendell Berry. He espouses his philosophy and does a good job of demeaning everything about modern–day american politics and society, but in a good way. I took so many notes I don’t want to write any of them down, plus it’s summer. Instead I’ll mark this here down to re–read in the not distant future.

  4. 01 June 2008

    Interface

    789 days ago

    Neal Stephenson is awesome. His brand of special, pure, joyful absurdity shines through in this one as well as any of his others. It’s from back in 1994, a thriller dealing with a shadowy power structure and its exertion of power upon a presidential election. Brilliant, and yes you should read it. A few things that got me to tick the pages:

    “In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came up with all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. But no one will ever have as mch character as Lincoln and Lee. For much of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trust charisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to get laid and send us to Vietnam.”

    Ogle had broken a six-pack out of a junky old refrigerator behind the “Oval Office” and set up the cans on the presidential desk. Aaron had pulled up another chair and now both of them had their feet up on the desk and beers in their hands.

    “So what’s it about now?” Aaron said.

    “Scrutiny. We are in the age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media,” Ogle said. “The President is the ultimate public figure and must stand up under ultimate scrutiny; he is like a man stretched out on a rack in the public square in some medieval shithole of a town, undergoing the rigors of the inquisition. Like the medieval trial by ordeal, the Age of Scrutiny sneers at rational inquiry and debate, and presumes that mere oaths and protestations are deceptions and lies. The only way to discover the real truth is by the rite of the ordeal, which exposes the subject to such inhuman strain that any defect in his character will cause him to crack wide open, like a flawed diamond. It is a mystical procedure that skirts rationality, which is seen as the work of the Devil, instead drawing down a higher, ineffable power. Like the Roman haruspex who foretold the outcome of a battle, not by analyzing the strengths of the opposing forces but by groping through the steaming guts of a slaughtered, we seek to establish a candidate’s fitness for office by pinning him under the lights of a television studio and counting the number of times he blinks his eyes in a minute, deconstructing his use of eye contact, monitoring his gesticulations—whether his hands are open or closed, toward or away from the camera, spread open forthcomingly or clenched like grasping claws.

    “I paint a depressing picture here. Be we, you and I, are like the literate monks who nurtured the flickering flame of Greek rationality through the Dark Ages, remaining underground, knowing each other by secret signs and code words, meeting in cellars and thickets to exchange our dangerous and subversive ideas. We do not have the strength to change the minds of the illiterate multitude. But we do have the wit to exploit their foolishness, to familiarize ourselves with their stunted thought patterns, and to use that knowledge to manipulate them toward the goals that we all know are, quote, right and true, unquote.” 92-92

    Anyone who adhered, at least nominally, to any religion that was invented millennia ago by people who ran around in burlap and believed that the Earth was built on the back of a turtle—that is, any of the major religions—ran into little dilemmas like this on a regular basis. 141

    “Positions change. People don’t. Earl Strong may or may not always be a so–called conservative populist. But he will definitely always be a pencil–neck Hitler wannabe with a face from Wal–Mart, as you pegged him.” 237

    Now there’s a political insult.

  5. 07 May 2008

    Little Brother

    814 days ago

    New novel from Cory Doctorow (link). Definitely enjoyable, but there’s something about his novels that seems funny: it’s like reading blogs except it’s a long, coherent text. I do like this book, don’t get me wrong, but it bothers me how campy it is, sort of like a maelstrom of all the big ideas to have passed through the collective attention of blog-land. It’s just weird, makes me roll my eyes a lot. Might also have to do that this book is classed as young adult, but I don’t think so: put a 23 year old in place of a 17 year old as the main character and I don’t think that would change the book that much.

    I read it all through my web browser. I’ve taken to reading books on the laptop lately. It’s awkward to hold, and can be less comfortable than curling up with a book, but the sheer availability of books off the internet is very nice. You can crank up the text size (when reading lots I like the text at 20pts or so, which I hope doesn’t mean I’m going blind) and scroll through.

    You just leave the browser window open when not reading, at the proper spot. cmd-tab works great for finding where you just were if you lose your place, just pull two or three words out of your short term memory and in all likelihood they’ll take you back to the exact spot. Compare that with your page slipping away and having to slowly go through and try to find where your thumb ought to go.

    I’ve always felt I read slowly, but trying to read faster has never worked for me. I like to take my time really. I’ve had Rescue Time running for about a week now (more on the disturbing amount of time I spend on my computer if I ever get the guts to confront that topic), and it says I’ve spent 6 hours on craphound.com. My calculations are that the book (excluding pre– and post–ambles) is 110,062 words, so that by 6 by 60 (hours and minute) is 305 wpm.

    Wikipedia says this is on the high side of average, so I can’t be that slow, but also that people who train their speed–reading technique can get up to 800. But training my reading ability for speed seems questionable—reading is for fun, why mess with it and turn it into some kind of optimized algorithm? I wouldn’t want to turn it into something not fun for the ability to do lots more of it.

    I actually read all but the first few chapters of the book yesterday in a conscious effort at productive procrastination (I need to be doing schoolwork, semester ends next week and I’m not ahead by any means). But here I am writing this silly post and still not doing my stuff. Ouch.

  6. 25 March 2008

    Shock Doctrine

    Naomi Klein

    857 days ago

    Really a harrowing book from Naomi Klein. Follows the ideas of torture as they evolved scientifically, and melded with the economic theories of Milton Friedman to inspire a new way to run a country: that of corporatism. The first place these ideas took hold was in South America, when the CIA funded multiple coups d‘état and established military juntas supplied with Friedmanite economists (The and los Chicago Boys). This system was for some odd reason lauded by the West, and the systematic torture used to pacify those living in these countries was somehow seen as separate from the economic policies, when the economics were really the cause of the dissent that caused unheeded violence.

    The system spread to all over the world, until it was ensconced in the Western canon of developing all Third World countries, as the IMF and World Bank. Systems were put in place whereby any country needing emergency loans from the IMF could only get the money they needed to forestall complete and disastrous economic collapse by parcelling up all different aspects of their nation (water, electricity, industry) and selling it off to multinational corporations. Which led to the same things that happened in Latin America in the 70s.

    Now, under George W. Bush, this radical doctrine of privatization has taken hold on the US government. The war in Iraq has been fought by mercenaries and contractors just as much as by troops. FEMA doesn’t actually have any responsibility for dealing with disaster, it’s just an organization to arrange contractors around whatever happens to be the disaster du jour.

    This book really damns the Western economic systems that have taken power over the past 50 years. The financial system, multinational corporations, governments, Aid organizations (even NGOs) have all had their part to play in the dismantling of countless struggling nations, only to benefit a clique of super–rich governmental and corporate tycoons. An awfully depressing read, but thankfully it looks like things might be getting better: the US seems on the verge of economic collapse, developing nations almost universally now scorn the establishments of the IMF and World Bank. They’re looking back to where they were before this plague of shock doctrine and disaster capitalism overtook them: developmentalism as opposed to “barbarian capitalism.” Good luck to them, here are my notes.

    This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story—that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective bodhy politic as well as on countless individual bodies. 18

    Ewan Cameron ran a research program funded by the CIA at a canadian university in which he pioneered the idea of shock therapy—that by dramatically altering someone’s environment and submitting them to excessive shock of various forms, they could be brought to a state of mental infancy, from whence they could then be rebuilt into functioning citizens.

    Like pro–war hawks who call for the bombing of countries “back to the stone age,” Cameron saw shock therapy as a means to blast his patients back into their infancy, to regress them completely. 32

    The CIA, for its part, actively encouraged this narrative1, much preferring to be mocked as bumbling sci–fi buffoons than for having funded a torture laboratory at a respected university—and an effective one at that. 38

    1 When the program came to light in a class–action lawsuit by patients of Cameron against the CIA, the media sensationalized the fact that LSD was administered. They forgot to mention the rest of Cameron’s program.
    Jose Padilla:

    Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, he was accused of intending to build a “dirty bomb.” Instead of being charged and taken through the court system, Padilla was classified as an enemy combatant, which stripped him of all tights. Taken to a U.S. Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina, Padilla says he was infected with a drug that he believes was either LSD or PCP and subjected to intense sensory deprivation: he was kept in a tiny cell with the windows blacked out and forbidden to have a clock or a calendar. Whenever he left the cell he was shackled, his eyes were covered with blackout goggles and sound was blocked with heavy headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days and forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who, when they questioned him, blasted his starved senses with lights and pounding sounds.
    […] The Cameron–style regression techniques had completely succeeded in destroying the adult he once was, which is precisely what they were designed to do. “The extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged, both mentally and physically,” his lawyer told the court. “The government’s treatment of Mr. Padilla has robbed him of his personhood.” A psychiatrist who assessed him concluded that he “lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.” The Bush–appointed judge insisted that Padilla was fir to stand trial, however. The fact that he even had a public trial makes Padilla’s case extraordinary. Thousands of other prisoners being held in U.S.–run prisons—who, unlike Padilla, are not U.S. citizens—have been put through a similar torture regimen, with none of the accountability of a civillian trial. 44

    ———

    Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn 50

    ———

    Developmentalism was so staggeringly successful for a time that the Southern Cone of Latin America became a potent symbol for poor countries around the world: here was proof that with smart, practical policies, aggressively implemented, the class divide between the First and Third World could actually be closed. 55

    And that’s where the Chicago School came in. It quickly became clear that when Friedman, a brilliant mathematician and skilled debater, made those same arguments, they took on an entirely different quality. They might be dismissed as wrong–headed but they were imbued with an aura of scientific impartiality. The enormous benefit of having corporate views funneled through academic, or quasi–academic, institutions not only kept the Chicago School flush with donations, but, in short order, spawned the global network of right–wing think tanks that would churn out the counterrevolution’s foot soldiers world–wide. 56

    ———

    Suharto then send out his soldiers to hunt down the four to five thousand leftists on his “shooting lists,” as the CIA referred to them; the U.S. Embassy received regular reports on their progress. As the information came in, the CIA crossed names off their lists until they were satisfied that the Indonesian left had been annihilated. 67

    Corporatism, or “corporativism,” originally referred to Mussolini’s model of a police state run as an alliance of the three major power sources in society—government, businesses and trade unions—all collaborating to guarantee order in the name of nationalism. What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all–out war on the third power sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing the alliance’s share of the national wealth. 86

    All Argentines were in some way enlisted as witnesses to the erasure of their fellow citizens, yet most people claimed not to know what was going on. THere is a phrase Argentines use to describe the paradox of wide–eyed knowing and eyes–closed terror that was the dominant state of mind in those years: “We did no know what nobody could deny.” 91

    The Latin American operation was modeled on Hitler’s “Night and Fog.” In 1941, Hitler decreed that resistance fighters in Nazi–occupied countries would be brought to Germany to “vanish in the night and fog.” Several high–profile Nazis took refuge in Chile and Argentina, and there is some speculation that they may have trained the Southern Cone intelligence agencies in these tactics. 91

    ———

    Rodolfo Walsh, a gregarious renaissance man, a writer of crime fiction and award–winning short stories, Walsh was also a super sleuth able to crack military codes and spy on the spies. His greatest investigative triumph took place when he was working as a journalist in Cuba, where he managed to intercept and decode a CIA telex that blew the cover of the Bay of Pigs invasion. That information is what allowed Castro to prepare for and defend against the invasion. 94

    The letter [Walsh’s Open Letter to the Military Junta] begins with an account of the generals’ terror campaign, its use of “maximum torture, unending and metaphysical,” as well as the involvement of the CIA in training the Argentine police. After listing the methods and grave sites in excruciating detail, Walsh abruptly switches gears: “These events, which stir the conscience of the civilized world, are not, however, the greatest suffering inflicted on the Argentinean people, nor the worst violation for human rights which you have committed. It is in the economic policy of this government where one discovers not only the explanation for the crimes, but a greater atrocity which punishes millions of human beings through planned misery… You only have to walk around greater Buenos Aires for a few hours ro check the speed with which such a policy transforms the city into a ‘shantytown’ of ten million people.” 95

    The day after writing the letter, on a trip to Buenos Aries to distribute copies around to dissidents was ambushed by 10 soldiers at a supposed meeting to discuss a disappeared colleague.

    Walsh, whose motto was “It isn’t a crime to talk; getting arrested is the crime,” immediately pulled out his gun and began firing. He injured one of the soldiers and drew their fire; he was dead by the time the car arrived at the Navy School of Mechanics. Walsh’s body was burned and dumped in a river. 96

    The leaders of the government had explicitly called for Walsh to be captured alive.

    ———

    To the extent that killings by the state were acknowledged, they were justified by the juntas on the grounds that they were fighting a war against dangerous Marxist terrorists, funded and controlled by the KGB. If the juntas used “dirty” tactics, it was because their enemy was monstrous. Using language that sounds eerily familiar today, Admiral Massera called it a “war for freedom and against tyranny… a war against those who favor death and by those of us who favor life… We are fighting against nihilists, against agents of destruction whose only objective is destruction itself, although they disguise themselves with social crusades.” 96

    Pinochet had Orlando Letelier, a former and repentant chilean freidmanite, assassinated by a car bomb while living in Washington, DC. 99

    Yet in the Southern Cone, the first place where the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets escaped from the basement workshops of the University of Chicago and was applied in the real world, it did not bring democracy; it was predicated on the overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands ad the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people. 102

    ———

    “the only transcendental theology: solidarity” —Osvaldo Bayer 112

    ———

    In a way, what happened in the Southern Cone in the seventies is that it was treated as a murder scene when it was, in fact, the site of an extraordinarily violent armed robbery. “It was as if that blood, the blood of the disappeared, covered up the economic program,” Acuna told me. 125

    To protest in the name of morality against ‘excesses’ or ‘abuses’ is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no ‘abuses’ or ‘excesses’ here, simply an all pervasive system. Simone de Beauvoir, 126

    Foreign monopolies impose crops on us, they impose chemicals that pollute our earth, impose technology and ideology. All this through the oligarchy which owns the land and controls the politics. But we must remember—the oligarchy is also controlled, by the very same monopolies, the very same Ford Motors, Monsanto, Philip Morris. It’s the structure we have to change. This is what I have come to denounce. That’s all. Sergio Tomasella, 127

    ———

    The Falklands War, described by Jose Luis Borges: “a fight between two bald men over a comb.” 137

    This is where Friedman’s crisis theory became self–reinforcing. The more the global economy followed his prescriptions, with floating interest rates, deregulated prices and export–oriented economies, the more crisis–prone the system became, producing more and more of precisely the type of melt–downs he had identified as the only circumstances under which governments would take more of his radical advice. 159

    That meant that when Reagan and Thatcher came to power in the eighties, their highly ideological administrations were essentially able to harness the two institutions [The World Bank and the IMF] for their own ends, rapidly increasing their power and turning them into the primary vehicles for the advancement of the corporatist crusade. 163

    The principle was simple: countries in crisis desperately need emergency aid to stabilize their currencies. When privatization and free–trade policies are packaged together with a financial bailout, countries have little choice but to accept the whole package. The really clever part was that economists themselves knew that free–trade had nothing to do with ending a crisis, but that information was expertly “obfuscated.” […] “no significant case of trade reform in a developing country in the 1980s took place outside the context of a serious economic crisis.” 165

    In other words: “Want to save your country? Sell it off.”

    ———

    …not only did the ANC renege on Mandela’s original pledge of “the nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industry” but because of the debt [racked up by the pro–apartheid white government], it was doing the opposite—selling off national assets to make food in the debts of its oppressors. 212

    In the end, South Africa has ended up witha twisted case of reparations in reverse, with the white businesses that reaped enormous profits from black labor during the apartheid years paying not a cent in reparations, but the victims of apartheid continuing to send large paychecks to their former victimizers. And how do they raise money for this generosity? By stripping the states of its assets through privatization—a modern form of the very looting that the ANC had been so intent on avoiding when t agreed to negotiations, hoping to prevent a repeat of Mozambique. Unlike what happened in Mozambique, however, where civil servants broke machinery, stuffed their pockets, and then fled, in South Africa the dismantling of the state and the pillaging of its coffers continue today. 213

    After more than a decade since South Africa made its decisive turn toward Thatcherism, the results are scandalous:

    • Since 1994, the year the ANC took power, the number of people living on less than $1 a day has doubled, from 2 million to 4 million in 2006.
    • Between 1991 and 2002, the unemployment rate for black South Africans more than doubled, from 23 percent to 48 percent.
    • Of South Africa’s 35 million black citizens, only five thousand earn more than $60,000 a year. The number of whites in that income bracket is twenty times higher, and many earn far more than that amount.

    215

    Russia and Poland got the same shit deal South Africa did.

    Communism may have collapsed without the firing of a single shot, but Chicago–style capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of gunfire to defend itself: Yeltsin called in five thousand soldiers, dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, helicopters and elite shock troops armed with automatic machine guns—all to defend Russia’s new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy. 228

    But Russia wasn’t a repeat of Chile—it was Chile in reverse order: Pinochet staged a coup dissolved the institutions of democracy and then imposed shock therapy; Yeltsin imposed shock therapy in a democracy, then could defend it only by dissolving democracy and staging a coup. Both scenarios earned enthusiastic support from the west. 229

    The scandal wasn’t just that Russia’s public riches were auctioned off for a fraction of their worth—it was also that, in true corporatist style, they were purchased with public money. As the Moscow Times journalist Matt Bivens and Jonas Bernstein put it, “a few hand–picked men took over Russia’s state–developed oil fields for free, as part of a giant shell game in which one arm of government paid another arm.” […] In other words, the Russian people fronted the money for the looting of their own country. 233

    …quick and dirty deals were actively encouraged by Western powers at every stage as the fastest way to kick–start the economy. National salvation through the harnessing of greed was the closest thing Russia’s Chicago Boys and their advisers had to a plan for what they were going to do after they finished destroying Russia’s institutions. 241

    ———

    Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after over twelve years, and after 1000 days of official Fund work in the field, hawking your medecine to governments and to peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples… THe blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up, too; cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the entire world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name. Davison Budhoo, 261

    In his letter, Budhoo, who died in 2001, made it clear that his dispute was over more tnat the treatment of one country by a handful of officials. He characterized the IMF’s entire program of structural adjustment as a form of mass torture in which “‘screaming–in–pain’ governments and peoples [are] forced to bend on their knees before us, broken and terrified and disintegrating, and begging for a sliver of reasonableness and decency on our part. But we laugh cruelly in their face, and the torture goes on unabated.”

    After the letter was published, the government of Trinidad commissioned two independent studies to investigate the allegations and found that they were correct: the IMF had inflated and fabricated numbers, with tremendously damaging results to the country. 262

    In an extraordinary act of interference with a sovereign nation’s political process, the IMF refused to release the money until it had commitments from all four main candidates that they would stick to the new rules if they won. With the country effectively held at ransom, the IMG was triumphant: each candidate pledged his support in writing. 270

    (Before the IMF’s demands, two of the candidates had run openly anti–IMF campaigns.)

    ———

    When Rumsfeld joined the cabinet of George W. Bush in 2001, it was with a personal mission to reinvent warfare for the twenty–first century—turning it into something more psychological than physical, more spectacle than struggle, and far more profitable than it had ever been before. 284

    From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous traits make the War on Terror an unwinnable proposition. But from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash–in–the–pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture. 301

    What passes for debate is restricted to individual cases of war profiteering and corruption scandals, as well as the usual hand–wringing about the failure of government to adequately oversee private contractors—rarely about the much broader and deeper phenomenon of what it means to be engaged in a fully privatized war built to have no end. 306

    “Ch 15: A corporatist state—removing the revolving door, putting in an archway.”

    It’s hard to believe—but then again, that was pretty much Washington’s game plan for Iraq: shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all okay with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food. In Iraq, this cycle of culture erasing and culture replacing was not theoretical; it all unfolded in a matter of weeks. 339

    In other words, the U.S. government presence in Iraq during the first year of its economic experiment had been a mirage—there had been no government, just a funnel to get U.S. taxpayer and Iraqi oil dollars to foreign corporations, completely outside the law. In this way, Iraq represented the most extreme expression of the anti–state counterrevolution—a hollow state, where, as the courts finally established, there was no there, there.

    I don’t quite know what that last clause means either. But the court decision referenced was that in which Custer Battles—a contractor accused of blatant fraudulent activities in Iraq—appealed and won on the grounds that the CPA was in fact not a government at all, that Iraq was in fact outside of US law (under which the initial verdict was reached), as well as outside whatever Iraqi system of governance was being put into place.

    ———

    Put simply, if Iraqis were allowed to freely elect the next government, and f that government had real power, Washing would have to give up on two of the war’s main goals: access to Iraq for U.S. military bases and full access to Iraq for U.S. multinationals. […] Within his first six months in the job, he [Paul Bremer] had canceled a constituent assembly, nixed the idea of electing the drafters of the constitution, annulled and called off dozens of local and provincial elections and then vanquished the beast of national elections—hardly the actions of an idealistic democrat.. 364

    In the first three and a half years of occupation, and estimated 61,500 Iraqis were captured and imprisoned by U.S. forces, usually with methods designed to “maximize capture shock.” Roughly 19,000 remained in custody in the spring of 2007. Inside the prisons more shocks followed: buckets of freezing water; snarling, teeth–baring German shepherds; punching and kicking; and sometimes the shock of electrical current running from live wires. 366

    That is what happens with projects to build model societies in other people’s countries. The cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated. It is only when the people who live on the land refuse to abandon their past that the dream of the clean slate morphs into its doppelgänger, the scorched earth—only then that the dream of total creation morphs into a campaign of total destruction. 364

    It turns out that funding Iraqis to rebuild their own country is more efficient than hiring lumbering multinationals who don’t know the country or the language, surround themselves with $900–a–day mercenaries and spend as much as 55 percent of their contract budgets on overhead. 375

    In effect, the law called for Iraq’s publicly owned oil reserves, the country’s main source of revenues, to be exempted from democratic control and run instead by a powerful, wealthy oil dictatorship, which would exist alongside Iraq’s broken and ineffective government. 377

    The law passed. But not at first, when people were paying attention: it wasn’t rammed through until the insurgency and surge started to cause so much violence that Iraqis had better things to worry about then legislation.

    ———

    It was the weeping faces of these fishing families and other like them in Thailand and Indonesia that had triggered the historic outpouring of international generosity after the tsunami—it had been their relatives piled up in mosques, their wailing mothers trying to identify a drowned baby, their children swept to sea. Yet for communities like Arguam Bay, the “reconstruction” meant nothing less than the deliberate destruction of their culture and way of life and the theft of their land. As Kumary said, the entire reconstruction process would result in “victimizing the victims, exploiting the exploited.” 389

    “Governments have largely failed in their responsibility to provide land for permanent housing,” the report concluded. “They have stood by or been complicit as land has been grabbed and coastal communities pushed aside in favor of commercial interests.” 399

    Almost everyone I met commented on what one preist called “the NGO wild life”: high–end hotels, beachfront villas, and the ultimate lightning rod for popular rage, the brand–new white sport utility vehicles. All the aid organizations had them, monstrous things that were far too wide and powerful for the country’s narrow dirt roads. All day long they went roaring past the camps, forcing everyone to eat their dust, their logos billowing on flags in the breeze—Oxfam, World Vision, Save the CHildren—as if they were visitors from a far–off NGO World. In a country as hot as Sri Lanka, these cars, with their tinted windows and blasting air conditioners, were more than modes of transportation, they were rolling microclimates. 403

    ———

    Blackwater has a 600 acre, $40-$50 million dollar compound in North Carolina. 416

    When Katrina hit, FEMA had to hire a contractor to award contracts to contractors. Similarly, when it came time to update the Army manual on the rules for dealing with contractors, the army contracted out the hob to one of its major contractors, MPRI—it no longer had the know–how in–house. 417

    Under Bush, the state still has all the trappings of a government—the impressive buildings, presidential press briefings, policy battles—but it no more does the actual work of governing than the employees at Nike’s Beaverton campus stitch running shoes. 418

    No Conspiracies Required:

    The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous [than the current american conspiracies]. An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short–term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency, and real estate markets into crisis–creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dot–com collapse all demonstrate. Our common addiction to dirty, nonrenewable energy sources keeps other kinds of emergencies coming: natural disasters (up 430% since 1975) and wars waged for control over scarce resources (not just Iraq and Afghanistan but lower–intensity conflicts such as those that rage in Nigeria, Colombia and Sudan), which in turn create terrorist blowback (a 2007 study calculated that the number of terrorist attacks since the start of the Iraq war had increased sevenfold). 426

    ———

    The dirty secret of the neoliberal era is that these ideas [Developmentalism] were never defeated in a great battle of ideas, nor were they voted down in elections. They were shocked out of the way at key political junctures. When resistance was fierce, they were defeated with overt violence—rolled over by Pinochet’s, Yeltsin’s, and Deng Xiaoping’s tanks. At other times, they were simply betrayed through what John Williamson called “voodoo politics.” […] It is precisely because the dream of economic equality is so popular, and so difficult to defeat in a fair fight, that the shock doctrine was embraced in the first place. 451

    “barbarian capitalism” —Daniel Ortega 452

    In 2005, Latin America made up 80 percent of the IMF’s total lending portfolio; in 2007, the continent represented just 1 percent—a sea of change in only two years. 457

  7. 18 January 2008

    924 days ago

    So it’s like an actor. What does an actor do? He gives you a scene, and you read into it what the scene means to you. And that’s what he’s doing. It’s terrible, because what you read into it isn’t what’s going to happen, ‘cause he’s going to have the reality. The simplest one of all is we have a $50 to $70 trillion fiscal gap. There’s no money to do anything, never mind this imperialism, which is why there’s no money to do anything. Here. You recall that Hillary, Edwards, and Obama all said, when asked by Tim Russert, would you have the troops out of Iraq by the end of 2013? And all three of them equivocated, weren’t sure that they could do it. And then you heard just last night, oh, yeah; I’m going to start withdrawing them immediately. What are they talking about? Say one thing; say another thing. You know, withdrawing immediately, what does that mean? We’ll withdraw ten this month, and then I’m going to change my mind next month? It’s gross hypocrisy – is really what it is. It’s politics as usual, and that’s sad, because we’re at a turning point in ’08. If we continue with American imperialism, we’re done as a nation. Truly are.

    Mike Gravel

    All right america, we all know this is the guy we should elect as our next president. Now lets knock some sense into ourselves.

  8. 05 January 2008

    The Best Democracy Money can Buy

    Greg Palast

    937 days ago

    I really don’t understand that a book like this could have been a NY Times bestseller, as it’s pimped on the cover, and not have seriously fucked with the way america operated before its publishing. But as you will no doubt have observed, Bush won again in 2004 the same way he did in 2000, if not downright illegally then contra-legally. Enron and WorldCom may have been made familiar with federal prosecutions, but that doesn’t reassure me there aren’t other companies out fleecing me for all I’m worth right now. The environment and the people who depend upon it most are still being fleeced by multinational corporations courting obscene profits.

    —

    It must just be a profound coincidence that Kenya is, right now, dealing with what’s being looked upon as a civillian coup, a presidential election rigged by a “small group of hardline “leaders.” Considering certain elections in my great nation’s recent past, I see more similarities than differences. Of course it’s a good thing that 2000 and 2004 didn’t catalyze fighting in american streets. Of course what is happening in Kenya right now is beyond the terrible.

    But is it overly hopeful to think seeds of a strong new democracy might be sowing themselves? While praying for a quick and bloodless resolution to whatever conflict may be to come in Kenya, is it uncouth to think that 200 years hence the long-time peaceful, solidly democratic populace of Kenya will look back on 2008 as the year they fought and won their own revolutionary war1? Again, I really don’t know anything, I’m only taking a contrarian viewpoint: could this fighting be the ultimate in patriotism? As overwhelming as the Civil War was to the US, there’s no doubt that it meant something to its future.

    Surely now the world needs more peaceful and solid democracies. To hell with democracy, whatever form of government can engender a consistently peaceful and sustainable society gets my vote. I really can’t speak to whether the US fulfilled these goals in the past any better than we do today, but currently we’re far from being either at peace or sustainable. What are corruption, partisanship, greed, unnecessary war, and environmental destruction if not hallmarks of a violent and intolerable society. But hey, life really isn’t so bad. For me at least. I can’t speak for the Kenyans.

    —

    Interrupting me writing this I went to shovel the driveway at my mom’s work. So afterwards at a cafe across the street sitting with my mom, sister, brother, and a piece of chocolate cake (my payment), I noticed a dour looking guy sitting in the corner one table away reading this exact book, which I though was fun. So I mentioned it to my family, and I’m pretty sure he heard me (I don’t know why you’d go alone to a cafe to sit in the corner and read, how does anyone concentrate enough to work/study/read in that environment?).

    But as the conversation went on, it came to a business partner of my dad, a republican who at some point threw a fundraiser for Cheney and Bachman, inciting much titillation amongst the a DFL controlled Park Board with the privilege of giving the thumbs up or down to the project he and my Dad have been working on. Here political strife takes hold, the first guy being an idiot for holding such a fundraiser, the board being dickfaces for letting such trifles get in the way of a completely and totally unrelated decision2. I found myself accosting that most politicians, democrat and republican alike, should be shot3. This guy visibly squirmed. My little brother chimed in with the Jeffersonian The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. “It is it’s natural manure”:http://www.bartleby.com/73/1065.html.. Really we should only shoot a few politicians, just throw the rest to the curb and try to start over. But I like the way we think.

    —

    So quit the rambling. Here’s a book collecting essays and exposés that Palast, now an american-born investigative journalist has done over the years. “The most important investigative reporter of our time,” Palast has some good stuff. I know that America is messed up, and not just america, but the whole world. As I feebly understand it just boggles my mind. As a coping mechanism I like to radicalize myself, calming myself by thinking that it really can’t be this bad. Or looking at all the good things and rationalizing against them. (Would I give up the internet for world peace? I sure hope so, but the internet is so pretty!)

    Palast makes it debilitatingly clear how real these radical concerns are, and he’s not just some crazy guy spewing doomsday prophecy, but he’s gone into all the filing cabinets and come away with real evidence to back up what he’s saying. These aren’t just theories or warnings, this is what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. Uh-oh.

    The US media is still peeing on your leg and telling you it’s raining. 5

    I finally quit. It was dring my investigation of the Exxon Valdez crack-up. I was working for the Chugach natives of Alaska. Our team quickly discovered the oil spill was no accident: Before the tanker’s grounding, Exxon shuut off the ship’s radar to save money and a British Petroleum affiliate had faked the safety equipment reports. 7

    There’s a whole bunch more on the Valdez later in the book.

    Voter Fraud, Stealing Elections

    Every newspaper in America reported that Florida bars ex-criminals from voting. As soon as every newspaper agrees, you can bet ir probably isn’t true. Someone wants the papers to believe this. It did not take long to discover that what everyone said was true was actually false: some ex-cons could vote, thousands in fact. I knew it… and so did Governor Jeb Bush.

    A clerk in Jeb Bush’s office told Palast that: The courts tell us to do this [allow certain felons to vote as per state law] and we do that [not allow them to vote].

    On page 49, Roberts talks about an interview he set up with Clayton Roberts, director of The Florida Division of Elections (underling to Katherine Harris, Florida Secretary of State). He had a document marked ‘confidential,’ which, when revealed, caused Roberts to jump and run off to his office. Camera rolling. The video is said to be on the BBC website, but looks like it’s been shuffled and lost. Dammit internet.

    So a quick sum up of what Florida did: they hired a company, ChoicePoint of Atlanta (a database company), to sift through their records of felons vs. voters and provide Florida with a list of people that should be purged from the voter rolls. The confidential document mentioned above was a $2.3 million dollar contract between the two that specified these lists were to be verified by ChoicePoint, when both Mr. Roberts and Katherine Harris testified, under oath, that the verification was not actually up to ChoicePoint, but up to individual counties. Hmm. What actually happened was that paper was passed between the two parties informally saying something along the lines of: We want to bag as many black people as we can, because they’re almost guaranteed to vote democrat, and we don’t want that. Though not as directly.

    And Florida used more than the voter purge in their “no-count” bag of tricks. In February 2001, I found a doozy.

    This fact caught my attention: In a presidential race decided by 537 votes, Florida simply did not count 179,855 ballots. And whether your vote counted depended a lot on your color. In Leon, a primarily white county, only 1 in 500 ballots went uncounted, or “spoiled” as they say in the vote biz, that is, voided for one reason or another. In neighboring Gadsden, with a high population of black voters, 1 in 8 ballots was never counted. 62

    Palast includes here a chart of 4 Florida counties with 25+% black population, 12, 7, 9, and 7% ballots uncounted and 4 white counties, 1, 3, 1, and 2%.

    Her [Katherine Harris’s] office refuses to return their [unlawfully purged voters] civil rights. You can see her logic: What’s the use of stealing the 2000 race if you have to five it all back in 2002? Like a confessed bank robber who hides the loot and tells his victims, “It’s still mine suckers!” the stat is using every technical and legalistic trick in the book to keep illegally purged black registrations buried for good. 73

    Next is from a new chapter printed with the second edition of the book, published in 2003. Palast calculates that at those rates according to Edley’s numbers, that’s 77,000 votes taken from Gore in Florida alone. Bush won the state, and thusly the race, by 537 votes. We have a winner.

    Harvard law professor Chris Edley, a member of the Vivil Rights Commission, didn’t like the smell of all those spoiled ballots. He dug into the pile and reported this deep inside the commission’s official findings: 14.4 percent of Black votes – one in seven – was “invalidated” in the state of Florida, never counted. By contrast, only 1.6 percent of white voters’ ballots spoiled. 346

    To put it into cold – chilling – numbers, approximately 1,007,000 Black voters cast ballots in 2000 that no one counted. 347

    Black Box Voting

    (Not just Corporate) Corruption

    If Abdullah’s Bosnian operated “charity” was funding Chechnyan guerillas, it is only possible because the Clinton CIA gave the wink and nod to WAMY and other groups who were aiding Bosnian guerillas when they were fighting Serbia, a U.S.-approved enemy. “What we’re talking about,” says national security expert Joe Trento, “is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials.” And, he could add, for the presidential father. 103

    Where other US corporations throw a few million dollars into the political arena in the hopes of obtaining a few special favors, the Kochs have spent close to $100 million to change the entire tone of political discourse in America. 112

    Regarding the abuse of child workers, I tried but failed to reach Wal-Mart’s former lawyer, Hilary Rodham. We now call her senator Clinton, but Sam just called her “my little lady” when he appointed her to the Wal-Mart board of directors, a well-paid honor left off her official White House biography.

    Andrew Jackson ran for President on the platform of outlawing “Corporations”? 227

    Public ownership of the Trade Center is no anomaly. Capitalization of corporations owned by the US federal government exceeds $2.85 trillion. Add to that state and local operations, like water systems, and the total invested in public enterprise elipses the stock market, making the United States one of the most socialized nations left on this sad planet. If you’re not American, you wouldn’t know that. And if you are, you probably wouldn’t know that either. There;s a lot you probably don’t know about America that would surprise you. 231

    And yet in my home state of Minnesota, some fucker named Pawlenty won the election for governor by promising not to raise taxes. He didn’t. 5 years later, what happens?

    The jury verdict on the Exxon-Valdez spill was $5 billion in damages. This was all to be paid to victims and put out to clean the shit up.

    What you haven’t heard is that ExxonMobil hasn’t paid a dime of it. It’s been a decade since the trial. BP painted itself green and ExxonMovil decided to paint the White House with green: It’s the number-two lifetime donor to George W Bush’s career (after Enron) with a little splashed the Democrats’s way. The oil industry’s legal stalls, the “tort reform” campaigns and the generous investment in our democratic process has produced a Supreme Court and appeals pansls that look more like luncheon clubs of corporate consiglieri than panels of defenders of justice. In November 2001, following directives of the Supremes, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the jury verdict on grounds the punishment was too dear and severe for poor little ExxonMobil.

    And so to this day all of $50 million has been paid. That’s 2%. Debts are settled. 266

    Economics: Deregulation/Free Markets/WTO/World Bank

    To turn a quick buck, a slick line of academic hoodoo and some well-aimed campaign contributions will do the trick. Like Columbus bringing Indians back to the Old World for display, the power industry lobbyists brought Margaret Thatcher’s professors and their wheezing free market contraptions to California. In 1996, armed with the suspect calculations of well-compensated academics and inebriated with long draughts of utility political donations, the California legislature tossed out a regulatory system which, until then, had provided reasonably cheap, clean, reliable energy to the state.

    In 1999, my parents sent me their bill from San Diego. Instead of the 20 percent savings promised by the law, in the first year of full deregulation, their energy charges rose 379 percent over the previous year. But before te big bills hit San Diego, the new planetary power merchants, using a combination of money, muscle, and Americans’ penchant to follow the Hula Hoop state, suckered twenty-three other states into adopting deregulation laws. 129

    I’ll look for the link, but this is where a tape of a phone convo between Enron execs about sticking hot nails into old ladies eyes comes in. (No, I can’t remember the exact wording, but something to effect of gleefully screwing of the everyman in california.)

    The March 19 Memo4 suggests “I may well be politically more acceptable to countries to accept international obligations which give primacy to economic efficiency.” This is an unsubtle invitation to load the GATS with requirements that rulers know their democratic parliaments could not accept. This would be supremely dangerous if, one day, the United States elected a president name Bush who wanted to shred air pollution rules. How convenient for embattled chief executives: what elected congresses and parliaments dare not do, GATS would require.

    For example, as president – and previously as governor of Texas – George W Bush has fought to tear apart the one remaining effective control over corporate miscreants: the right of victims to sue corporations and executives that poison workers, kill consumers, and cook their books. As governor, Bush guided such so-called tort reform into Texas law in 1999, a favor to a business front group headed by Enron’s then-CEO Ken Lay. 171

    I wonder if someone could sue for damages caused by their being denied the ability to sue for damages under these laws?

    There are conspiracy ranks and paranoid anti-globalizers who imagine that the blueprints for WTO supranational control are designed in secret meetings between the planet’s corporate elite and government functionaries, with media leaders attending to adjust propaganda as ordered. They’re right. 173

    Palast cites the LOTIS Committee.

    TRIPS is the WTO‘s penal system for countries caught importing or exporting in contravention of marketing plans of corporations that own ideas.

    The story of TRIPS Africa, and Argentina begins with this unfun fact: 25.3 million people in Southern Africa are going to die of AIDS unless medicine arrives now. Luckily, Brazil, India, and most aggressively, Argentina can make the necessary drugs dirt cheap and ship them to the dying. Bus US, British, and Swiss pharmaceutical giants howled about the proposed cross-border shipments.

    During the Clinton administration, the US trade cops, led by then Vice President Al Gore and backed by Big Pharma, halted the life saving plan of selling cheap Argentine drugs to South Africans — Nelson Mandela’s pleas, Nobel Prize, and flowered shirts not withstanding. 185

    Emphasis mine, but WHO THE FUCK can think, while in their right mind, that this is OK? How can profits stand above the lives of 25 million people. Even despite the fact that they not only have black skin, but also live on the poorest continent in the world.

    Chávez moved to renationalize oil and rejected the sale of Venezuela’s water systems, while Argentina sold off everything including the kitchen-sink tap. Economist Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic Policy Research calculated that the loss of income from state businesses accounts for 100 percent of Argentina’s cavernous fiscal deficit. Argentina followed World Bank and WTO directions and sold off the banks and water companies owned by the state or Argentines to CitiBank, Enron, bank Santander, and Vivendi of the United States, Spain, and France. These swiftly vacuumed up Argentina’s hard currency reserves, setting the stage for the national bankruptcy at the first hint of speculator-driven currency panics. Imagine if Argentina had not sold off its oil companies on the cheap, or impoverished Ecuador had not dropped out of OPEC — they would today be wealthy, not wanting. 198

    The Keystone Kops-style plot against Chávez by Venezuela’s military-industrial complex served Big Oil’s interests. But that’s an old-style shoot-‘em-up coup, likely to fail. The coup d‘états of the twenty-first century will follow the Argentine model, in which the international banks seize the financial lifeblood of a nation, making the official presidential titleholder merely inconsequential except as a factotum of the corporate agenda. 199

    Amartya Sen is mentioned for being behind an economic scheme similar to that of Chávez in Venezuela, this in Kerala, India. My sister, excited to graduate with a global studies focus, has a huge crush on the guy for whatever reason. 204

    It is estimated that one in eight American adults has worked at McDonald’s. This acts as a kind of moral instruction for the working class, as jail time does for ghetto residents. It is one reason behind America’s low unemployment rate. As my old professor Milton friedman taught me, unemployment falls when workers give up hope of higher pay. 301

    —

    1 Probably, but then nobody reads this website anyway. My apologies to anyone that finds this speculation offensive. Of course war is terrible. I might wishfully be misconstruing tribal hate and primitive bloodlust for what I above clichéd “the seeds of democracy sowing themselves.” Although assuming there was any such hate or bloodlust would be so pointedly racist and completely unfair that I struggle to let myself write it. I have no idea what’s going on in Kenya (which I in fact can’t even type: I keep putting Kanya) beyond what I’ve read in a few newspaper articles. I just see an interesting parallel here.

    2 The project is actually about installing electricity generating turbines into old mill waterways under what is now downtown Minneapolis, something one would think these democrats would be all about. But from what I hear there’s a rich group of riverside condo and apartment owners and developers who want to see nothing of the sort, which can’t help.

    3 Republicans for being trite, petty, not to mention wrong, and democrats for being trite and petty, more of what they say makes sense to me.

    4 Concerning the General Agreement on Trade in Services, a WTO plank:

    considering the difficult matter of how to punish nations that violate “a balance between two potentially conflicting priorities: promoting trade expansion versus protection the regulatory rights of governments.”

    Or in other words, making sure nobody causes too many problems for the superrich who’ve placed themselves in positions with enough power to influence the formation of this treaty by outlawing the shit they peddle to us at a great profit to them and equal vitiation to everything but the bottom line.

  9. 05 August 2007

    Dear Klobuchar

    1090 days ago

    One of Minnesota’s senators voted for the hack surveillance bill. I was pissed.

    How dare you capitulate to Bush in his demands that the 1978 FISA laws be rewritten to legalize the current administrations illegal unrestricted spying programs. The 4th amendment? Have you ever fucking read the thing?

    There you go.

    There comes a time when giving in to the demolition of constitutional protections can no longer be considered a matter of being weak or unthinking. Rather it must be considered complicity. Enough Already

    By making the crimes of Bush legal at his own behest, under his threats – to refuse your summer recess, and to ‘hold you responsible for whatever terrorist attacks may take place in the future – you’ve done little better than incriminate yourself. I’m pretty sure that at his inauguration he swore to uphold the constitution of the united states of america, and you the same. I don’t see how you can sleep at night, much less how you can sit in the chambers of the senate and pretend to be doing your job.

    But hey, maybe it’s a good thing. Who knows how many catastrophic bridge collapses this administration will be able to prevent through their unadvised and unsupervised surveillance programs. Who knows how many structural engineers they’ll be able to send to Azkaban\d\d\d I mean Guantanamo.

    The Azkaban reference is a bit much, but I thought it was funny.

  10. 24 July 2007

    Candidates and their opportunities to respond to questions in last night's democratic debate

    1102 days ago

    Obama: 17
    Edwards: 12
    Clinton: 12
    Richardson: 10
    Biden: 9
    Dodd: 8
    Gravel: 7
    Kucinich: 7
    all candidates: 3
    Youtube/CNN democratic debate

    Wonder who the frontrunner is…

    (As computed by, I do like this haskell version of a similar program.)

  11. 15 July 2007

    Deer Hunting with Jesus

    Joe Bageant

    1111 days ago

    Wonderful bit of writing on the ignored population of America – poor whites. Living in small towns, working paycheck to paycheck, being born again and again into christianity, voting defacto republican, etc. They’re where Bush can draw enough of the electorate to have ever managed to b e our president, despite his utter incompetence. People for which it comes to pills or heating oil. I’ve met precious few of these.

    Bageant can take a look at these people with better perspective than most, having grown up in the small town spotlighted in the book, where he lives for a second time. But between he’s been places, moving west, getting college educated, moving through hippy circles, living on the Coeur d’Alene indian reservation, and in big librul towns. He can love and understand these people, while wanting to smack them for the idiocy they’ve been raised into.

    Bageant himself describes the book: “one part cultural anthropology and part splash of cold water into the face of those liberals wondering why their working-class brothers and sisters seem to have turned against them.”

    Backed by the faithful support of hardworking American Christians who seldom fully comprehend their leadership’s agenda, zealous evangelical leaders will have no less than the “inevitable victory God has promised his new chosen people,” according to the founding masters of the covert kingdom. Screw the Jews, they blew their chance. The 2008 elections, regardless of the outcome, will not change the fact that millions of americans are under the spell of an extraordinarily dangerous mass psychosis. Maybe the philosopher Nietzche was right “one is not ‘converted’ to Christianity — one must first be sick enough for it.” 190

    Over the past twenty-five years a boatload of America’s for-profit hospitals migrated to nonprofit status because it is more profitable. 231

    Liberal or Conservative, the average American spends about one-third of his or her waking life watching television. THe neurological effects are profound. For example, researcher Herbert Krugman famously demonstrated that television viewing makes the right brain hemisphere twice as active as the left, releasing a surge in the body’s natural opiates—endorphins, including beta-endorphins and enkephalin, all of which act on the same brain receptors as opiates. Other research shows suspension of critical-thinking skills. Meanwhile, we watch television pleasurably, believing we understand what we have watched, believing we are always in control of the experience and are not unduly influenced by it. 256

    Our culture is based on two things: television and petroleum. Whether you are Pootie [an actual person from Winchester] or the president, your world depends on an unbroken supply of both. So it is small wonder that we all watch a televised global war for oil as brain-wave entertainment. As a consequence, we revive the conditioning required to sustain out acceptance of the state brutality occurring at the edges of the empire in the quest for oil. How much of this convenient symbiosis linking corporate television, war as a corporate profit center, and corporate oil was consciously planned we can never know until we are redeemed from the blinding effects og the corporate sponsored hologram. 262

  12. 07 December 2006

    1331 days ago

    I had Birkenstocks in high school. I was that guy. And I was sure that those people on the other side of the political spectrum were trying to control my life. And then I went to Boulder and got rid of my Birkenstocks immediately, because everyone else had them and I realized that these people over here want to control my life too. I guess that defines my political philosophy. If anybody’s telling me what I should do, then you’ve got to really convince me that it’s worth doing.

    Matt Stone

    Here’s a good one. I’m not so much for anything as I am against most things. Something to think about. Is this reasonable? It brings to mind a cynical, pessimist, ‘hey kids! off my damn lawn!’ sort of attitude – an attitude that I embrace in a lot of ways – but one that at the same time I feel a little guilty embracing.

  13. 22 October 2006

    1378 days ago

    Doonesbury's War

    Piece on Garry Trudeau, the guy behind Doonesbury. I’m not entirely sure why I clicked onto it, or why I started reading it, or why I kept reading it; but it did a good job of pulling me in.

    It turns out he’s not afraid of publicity so much as he’s horrified at being perceived as the kind of person who wants publicity.

    I can empathize with that. I’ve never been one to attract attention to myself. But one of the things I wonder all the time is whether I’m just fake timid1. I mean I have a fricking public journal up on the internet for anyone to read2. I go out and play soccer on a field in front of fans, and although I hate to death the thought that people are watching me, I do sort of like it.

    So do I maybe try not to attract attention just because I’ve never been paid tremendous amounts of attention? Or do I tend to deflect whatever attention I do get, thereby discouraging it from coming? The chicken or the egg.

    There’s a difference between reputation and image, Trudeau explains. “These get confused in people’s minds,” he says, but one involves character, the other public relations.

    “I just refused to get entangled by issues of image maintenance that fame implied. I made a deliberate retreat from a publicly visible life.”

    It’s the stem cells. I hear their cries.

    1 Here meaning that I don’t want too much publicity/attention focused upon me.

    2 People can read it if they wish, but I haven’t ever told anyone about my site, it’s linked from a few other places. But I don’t at the moment have a link to it on facebook, where of my friends would likely find it.

    If you google for me it comes up, and if you see my station11.net email address (I mostly use my umn.edu addy for stuff relating to school) you might be inclined to see what site that is. But otherwise, the only reason someone would come here is because google led them, and there’s ostensible something I’ve put down in which they have interest.

    via Kjell Olsen1378 days ago

  14. 05 October 2006

    1394 days ago

    get your war on some more

    This guy is still going, and going good. 1, 2.

    via Kjell Olsen1394 days ago

  15. 28 September 2006

    1401 days ago

    Rushing Off a Cliff

    Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

    via Kjell Olsen1401 days ago

  16. 1401 days ago

    What has happened that the Senate is willing to turn America from a bastion of freedom into a caldron of suspicion ruled by a Government of unchecked power?

    Sen. Patrick Leahy

  17. 12 September 2006

    1417 days ago

    More Americans Have Now Died In Iraq Than Died On 9/11

    There isn’t much that I can say.

    via Kjell Olsen1417 days ago

  18. 05 September 2006

    1424 days ago

    Iraqis who Sweated out Hussein are Leaving under Bush

    At least 40,000 Iraqis have been killed in the past three years, with scores more murdered every day. Hospitals overflow with the wounded. Conditions are so bad, an estimated 1-million Iraqis have fled their homes for sanctuary in Jordan, Syria and Egypt. Iraqis, particularly middle-class families, who survived Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, are leaving en masse. Even Mr. Bush admits things are “terrible” in Baghdad.

    Don’t you just love the smell of democracy in the morning?

    via Kjell Olsen1424 days ago

  19. 27 August 2006

    1433 days ago

    The Founding Fathers weren't Christians

    The words “In God We Trust” were not consistently on all U.S. currency until 1956, during the McCarthy witch hunts.

    via Kjell Olsen1433 days ago

  20. 24 August 2006

    1436 days ago

    The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such nations have no need of wars to save them.

    William James

    I quoted this previously in my notes on The Metaphysical Club, the quote just gets me so good that I haven’t forgotten it since.

  21. 1436 days ago

    Congressional redistricting | How to rig an election

    Structuring voting districts so that your party the republicans can’t lose.

    via Kjell Olsen1436 days ago

  22. 25 July 2006

    1466 days ago

    What's so funny anyway?

    The post-modern ability the culture at large has adopted which has us giggling over abuses of power, sniggering at lies, whooping at war, and chortling at all the terrifying evidence of a country coming apart at the seems strikes me as irresponsible somehow.

    I’ve already bought my pitchfork and set alight my torch. (Actually, what I mean is that I bitch alot on this website. And really all I do is copy and paste stuff that parallels my feelings. What dissent.)

    Kjell Olsen1466 days ago

  23. 16 July 2006

    1475 days ago

    The Return of the Draft

    I’m scared as all hell at the draft being reinstated, no way am I going off anytime soon to fight. But I absolutely see the points made below, think about it.

    Without a draft, there’s really no antiwar movement, we’re willing to pay people to die for us. It doesn’t reflect very well on the character of our society. Charlie Moskos, professor of military sociology at Northwestern University

    It shouldn’t be just the poor and the working poor who find their way into harm’s way. If the kids and grandkids of the president and the Cabinet and the Pentagon were vulnerable to going to Iraq, we never would have gone—no question in my mind. The closer this thing comes home to Americans, the quicker we’ll be out of Iraq. Rep. Charlie Rangel, D, NY

    via Kjell Olsen1475 days ago

  24. 15 July 2006

    1476 days ago

    An anarchy is not the absence of government. It is the presence of a system which keeps the peace sufficiently well as to not allow any one entity to monopolize violence over entire regions (aka form a government).

    Anarchy

  25. 08 July 2006

    1483 days ago

    Hugo Chávez Interview | The Progressive

    Saudi Arabia gives us dollar for oil stability, we give them the 82nd airborne.

    We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade. We believe in fair trade and exchange, not competition but cooperation. Hugo Chávez

    via Kjell Olsen1483 days ago

  26. 06 July 2006

    1485 days ago

    Mission Statement - Campaign Wikia

    bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.

    via Kjell Olsen1485 days ago

  27. 03 July 2006

    American Assassination

    1488 days ago

    The strange death of senator Paul Wellstone

    The case is made that Wellstone was assassinated. At this point in time, there isn’t much that I would put above the bush administration, or whatever shady cabal is currently heading our country. The case is made, and convincing enough for me. It’s hard for me to believe this sort of thing, but I think that I’m well on the way.

    My willingness to take the assassination point of view does stem greatly from my bitter hate of the bush administration and my remorse over the death of Wellstone, so do watch out for the foam coming from my mouth.

    An administration that would lie to send hundreds of thousands of young American men and women into harm’s way is not an administration that would hesitate to kill a single senator. 38

    I sometimes feel like the authors fall back all to readily on the logical base they use to build up their arguments, that more emphasis is put upon the framework used to debunk than the actual debunking, but the motive alone of the Bush administration is enough to steer me right into the same conclusions. Further evidence gathered from eyewitnesses and inconsistencies in the established explanation only help firm things up in my head, and reduce my unwanted self image as that of a rabid nutcase conspiracy theorist.

    ...conspiracy theories have become a source of thrills for a bored subculture, one epitomized by its members’ reinterpretation of “accepted” history, deep cynicism about contemporary politics, and longing for some utopian future. 72

    The last two fit me quite well, I would hope that not the first. I surely shouldn’t be bored, I have more things on my hands right now than I really want.

    The further rigging of the NTSB’s ability to investigate plane crashes as criminal (the Attorney General can rule out terrorism as a possible cause in the NTSB’s investigation, further whatever the NTSB determines to be probable cause in a plane crash cannot be entered as evidence into a court of law. 132).

    This sort of thing just makes my head hurt.

  28. 1488 days ago

    I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

    Thomas Jefferson

  29. 30 June 2006

    1491 days ago

    Republicans: They sold the environment to Exxon, and sold the war to Halliburton. Now they want to sell the Internet to at&t.

    Lawrence Lessig

  30. 25 June 2006

    1496 days ago

    The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

    Joseph Stalin

  31. 16 June 2006

    1506 days ago

    Semper Why?

    The Marines who did the killing at Haditha will no doubt be scapegoated—like Lynnde England, of Abu Ghraib—for an unjustifiable and unwinnable war, created by venal politicians. If we’re to punish anyone for Haditha, we should start with President Bush and the congressmen, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who sent Roel Briones and Kilo Company on a murder-suicide mission in which there can be no justice.

    via Kjell Olsen1506 days ago

  32. 15 June 2006

    1506 days ago

    Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Monument

    I actually think this is the first thing bush has done that I can agree with. (How many months until the next election?)

    via Kjell Olsen1506 days ago

  33. 13 June 2006

    1509 days ago

    Holes in the ozone the size of Brazil
    Barges of trash in the chewable breeze
    Pools of industrial wasteland paté
    Sulfur dioxide dissolving the trees
    Pretty soon it will all end with a boom
    Why am I painting the living room?

    Why Am I Painting the Living Room?

    Best song ever.

  34. 02 June 2006

    1519 days ago

    So the US Presidential Election Was Stolen -- So What?

    America is massively broken:

    The inmates are running the asylum.

    via Kjell Olsen1519 days ago

  35. 1519 days ago

    Bill O'Reilly - Scumbag

    We all do indeed.

    When you are that wrong, when you are defending Nazi war criminals and pinning their crimes on Americans and you get caught doing so twice, you’re supposed to say I’m sorry, I was wrong, and then you’re supposed to shut up for a long time. Instead, FOX washed its transcript of O’Reilly’s remarks Tuesday. Its Web site claims O’Reilly said in Normandy, when, as you heard, in fact, he said in Malmedy.
    The rewriting of past reporting worthy of George Orwell has now carried over into such online transcription services as Burell’s and Factiva. Whatever did or did not happen later in supposed or actual retribution, the victims at Malmedy were Americans, gunned down while surrendering by Nazis in 1944 and again Tuesday night and Wednesday night by a false patriot who would rather be loud than right.

    via Kjell Olsen1519 days ago

  36. 24 May 2006

    1528 days ago

    Desperate for Supporters, DeLay Turns to Stephen Colbert

    America is in the hands of half retarded criminal pigs. What am I gonna do about it? Sit here and foam at the mouth?

    via Kjell Olsen1528 days ago

  37. 1528 days ago

    Fucking Nutbags

    I would like to quickly encourage any and all terrorists who may be out there to aim their bombs toward the desk of Bill O’Reilly. Fucking maniac. He says that american young’uns are being indoctrinated with tolerance, diversity, and secular values, and that it’s a bad thing. Who’s to blame? Our bomb throwing entertainers (John Stewart and the Dixie Chicks) and the pop media that fawns to them. Watch the video, I’m not even sensationalizing the shit he says. He actually used the term bomb throwing entertainers.

    via Kjell Olsen1528 days ago

  38. 23 May 2006

    1529 days ago

    Exxon-Backed Pundit Compares Gore To Nazi Propagandist

    That’s the problem. If I thought Al Gore’s movie was as you like to say, fair and balanced, I’d say, everyone should go see it. But why go see propaganda? You don’t go see Joseph Goebbels’ films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don’t go see Al Gore’s films to see the truth about global warming.

    We need a law passed condemning the phrase fair and balanced as outright farcical mania. Seriously america, go fuck yourself and maybe you’ll come back with a bit of sense.

    via Kjell Olsen1529 days ago

  39. 19 May 2006

    1533 days ago

    Ralph Nader: Conservatively Speaking

    Nader speaking with Pat Buchanan, towards disenchanted conservatives, june 21 of 2004.

    They’re almost all puppets. There are two sets: Congressional puppets and White House puppets. When the chief puppeteer comes to Washington, the puppets prance.

    Well, that is what representative government is for, to counteract the excesses of the monied interests, as Thomas Jefferson said. Because big business realizes that the main countervailing force against their excesses and abuses is government, their goal has been to take over the government, and they do this with money and politics.

    Let’s put it this way: it is impossible to exaggerate the dereliction of diligence in the Congress.

    The point is this: work should be taxed the least. Then you move to wealth, and then you move to things we do not like. And you will have more than enough to replace the taxes of under $100,000 income and to provide for universal health insurance and decent public transit and to repair the public-works infrastructure.

    via Kjell Olsen1533 days ago

  40. 16 May 2006

    1536 days ago

    The alternative of a decent society

    Invade Venezuela.

    Chávez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States. Like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on the English co-operative moment, and the moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the threat of an alternative way of developing a decent society: in other words, the threat of a good example in a continent where the majority of humanity has long suffered a Washington-designed peonage.

    via Kjell Olsen1536 days ago

  41. 1536 days ago

    Spinning the tires

    Sources within the gov’t leak to reporters that the gov’t is breaking the law. The gov’t is mad. The gov’t claims not to be breaking the law. The gov’t refuses to allow any investigation of said law-breaking. The gov’t breaks the same law in the same way to discover which of it’s members originally leaked that the gov’t was breaking the law.

    More sources leak to more reporters that the gov’t is more and more egregiously breaking the law, fostering more and more illegal activity, and thusly more egregious leaking of it’s illegal activities. Is anybody else’s head spinning yet? FBI Acknowledges: Journalists’ Phone Records are Fair Game

    via Kjell Olsen1536 days ago

  42. 13 May 2006

    1539 days ago

    War

    Men who have no respect for human life or for freedom or justice have taken over this beautiful country of ours. It will be up to the American people to take it back. Howard Zinn, before we went into Iraq

    Kjell Olsen1539 days ago

  43. 10 May 2006

    1542 days ago

    More Hot Air Over the Arctic

    Forget about Seals and Polar Bears. Even without taking the environment into account, drilling ANWR doesn’t make ONE OUNCE OF FUCKING SENSE. (à moins que vous êtes Halliburton, mais tant pis).

    via Kjell Olsen1542 days ago

  44. 07 May 2006

    The Power of Nightmares

    1545 days ago

    In a rightful binge of documentation, I went right from Why we Fight to The Power of Nightmares, written and directed by Adam Curtis and produced by the BBC.

    Curtis explains how radical islam and neoconservativism have both arisen from disenchantment with mid 20th century liberalism. The liberal idea of the great society had failed, leaving people the world around empty and vapid, but without comprehension of their meaninglessness. The two groups may be construed as enemies, but really live and die in each others arms.

    The conception of the west as a possibly a negative influence on islam society was conjectured by an egyptian studying for a time in small town 50s america. Islamists sought to overcome the western influence beginning to be exerted upon the middle east by the western powers. The Jahiliya, or reversion to pre-Mohammed ideals in the arab populace.

    Neocons wanted to found America anew upon the foundation of myth, namely that of freedom. Reservations about modern liberal society led Leo Strauss to philosophize that liberal politics led directly to nihilism, and for a nation to generate meaning in the world it needed to be bound by a greater good than that of the individual. Freedom, and it’s deliberate proliferation by America.

    When arab freedom fighters and american neocons colluded to expel the soviets from afghanistan, the religious fantasies of both islamists and neocons were fulfilled. The americans championed their freedom and the mujahideen their islam. The policies of american invasion continued, and the islamists embarked upon a terribly circular and deadly struggle to turn democratic middle eastern states to strictly islam governance.

    With the failure of islamists to construct islam nations by means of aggressively killing those nations populace and undermining whatever support they may have had to begin with, they decided to mount an attack on the greater destructive force – america.

    With terrorism focused on american embassies and culminating in 9/11, neocon politicians had stumbled upon a mightily persuasive societal myth1 – that of a coherent structure of terrorists, bent not only on the destruction of america, but also of freedom, the neocon idea of a greater good, the glue they needed to keep america from degeneration.

    But Curtis asserts that such a structure doesn’t exist in reality. It is only a powerful tool leveraged by politicians, affording them power beyond that which their constituencies would otherwise grant them. Al-Qaeda is no more than a name given to a fantasized organization imagined by the american government in 2001, in an effort to prosecute Bin Laden under laws written decades earlier to prosecute mafia crime.

    This inexistent notion of a coherent and stable terrorist rebellion against the powers of freedom and liberty have led america into a disillusioned and myopic state of affairs, trusting unprecedented powers to those who monger said nightmares to an overly sedated populace.

    In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda. Whilst the 20th century was dominated between a conflict between a free-market Right and a socialist Left, even though both of those outlooks had their limitations and their problems, at least they believed in something, whereas what we are seeing now is a society that believes in nothing. And a society that believes in nothing is particularly frightened by people who believe in anything, and, therefore, we label those people as fundamentalists or fanatics, and they have much greater purchase in terms of the fear that they instill in society than they truly deserve. But that

  45. 06 May 2006

    1547 days ago

    Bush likens 'war on terror' to WWIII.
    via Kjell Olsen1547 days ago

  46. 01 May 2006

    1551 days ago

    Loyalty Day, 2006

    WTF? I thought there we already had a May 1st holiday...

    via Kjell Olsen1551 days ago

  47. 1551 days ago

    Colbert Rips the President a New One

    The President was upset? Good. I hope the President was sleepless with rage. At least then he’d know how most of us have been spending every night for the last three years.

    I think the whole thing is a little overblown. Colbert didn’t even accuse the president of killing thousands. But better than nothing I guess.

    via Kjell Olsen1551 days ago

  48. 28 April 2006

    1554 days ago

    The Conyers Report: What Went Wrong in Ohio

    Bush stole the election(s), I wish I could say people are starting to realize it. The 1+ year old Conyers report (dated 05 January 2005), detailing all of the electoral transgressions that took place in Ohio last election.

    via Kjell Olsen1554 days ago

  49. 25 April 2006

    1557 days ago

    FEMA's Dirty Little Secret

    Mercenaries hired by FEMA to police settlements of Katrina victims won’t let interviews happen.

    AMY GOODMAN: We were going in the car, and he said, “Please interview me.”
    SECURITY GUARD: Yeah, he—he can’t. That

    via Kjell Olsen1557 days ago

  50. 24 April 2006

    Network Neutrality

    1558 days ago

    (A letter to my representatives in government)

    Network Neutrality: “in order to promote innovation, network service providers such as telephone and cable internet companies should not be permitted to dictate how those networks are used (i.e., not permitted to ban certain types of programs, to ban certain types of devices connecting to the network, or to favor carriage of traffic to certain web sites over others).” (from wikipedia)

    If the above was a bit much for you, and I’m indeed hoping that this isn’t being read by some intern, watch a quick introductory movie on the issue. Here’s a link which is likely to be much more coherent then my letter; and here’s a whole collection of material on the issue.

    The crux of things is that:

    • The internet is threatening a stranglehold held by telecommunications companies (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner) over electronic means of communication since the invention and adoption of electronic communication.
    • The internet is beyond amazing, I’m not sure what I’d do without it. Even if you could imagine life without the internet, why would you want it?
    • The internet is a ‘dumb network’ – nothing happens to a request sent out over it’s wires in between your computer and the computer it was sent to. All the work is done at the edges, at places where individuals are in control. Be that individual a person, an organization, or a government.
    • Telcos want to replace that direct individual to individual connection with one managed by themselves. They’d be taking the free market internet and turning it into an oligarchical system. They’d be able to decide who gets to see what, when, and for how much.

    Right now there are laws against this. There’s a bill surfacing in the House, sponsored by Rep. Joe Barton, which passed through committee a week or two ago, and is headed for a vote in the house.

    This centralization entirely contradicts the entire notion upon which the internet was founded and has flourished. In less then 20 years, the internet has left a bigger mark on our world than any other technology of recent invention. Allowed to continue to evolve and better itself, as it has done ever since it’s creation, only God knows what will come of it in the years ahead. Who could have foreseen just 10 years ago what it would be today?

    This is bad, bad, bad. The only reason the internet has evolved to the point it has is that it’s a decentralized system which allows equal access to everyone with a computer and connection. The web as we know it has emerged from nothing but a conglomeration of research universities and government organizations, into a massive engine for learning, communicating, and commerce. Above all the internet embodies equality and liberty, and who would entrust such important values to any corporation?

  51. 23 April 2006

    1559 days ago

    Bush Impeachment

    Somebody found a trick in the House rules that will let a state legislature introduce presidential impeachment proceedings. And Illinois is going for it.

    Should HJR0125 be passed by the Illinois General Assembly, the US House will be forced by House Rules to take up the issue of impeachment as a privileged bill, meaning it will take precedence over other House business.

    Sounds like fun. (California and Maine look to jump on the bandwagon.)

    via Kjell Olsen1559 days ago

  52. 1559 days ago

    Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in the affairs which properly concern them.

    Paul Valéry

  53. 18 April 2006

    1564 days ago

    The Hijacking of Reality

    Disneyland is as fun as Des Moines is dull, just as Michael Jordan is as rich as a Nike sweatshop worker is poor

    via Kjell Olsen1564 days ago

  54. 07 April 2006

    1575 days ago

    EFF: Class-Action Lawsuit Against AT&T

    AT&T indeed has been passing phone conversations through the NSA for the purpose of spying. Huh.

    the NSA uses powerful computers to “data-mine” the contents of these Internet and telephone communications for suspicious names, numbers, and words, and to analyze traffic data indicating who is calling and emailing whom in order to identify persons who may be “linked” to “suspicious activities,” suspected terrorists or other investigatory targets, whether directly or indirectly.

    via Kjell Olsen1575 days ago

  55. 06 April 2006

    1576 days ago

    Libby Claimed Bush Authorized Plamegate Leak

    Maybe fitzmas is just coming a year late.

    via Kjell Olsen1576 days ago

  56. 04 April 2006

    1578 days ago

    Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

    Diebold, located in North Canton, Ohio, does its primary business in ATM and ticket-vending machines. Critics of Diebold point out that virtually every other machine the company makes provides a paper trail to verify the machine

    via Kjell Olsen1578 days ago

  57. 02 April 2006

    1580 days ago

    How the GOP Became God's Own Party

    No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.

    via Kjell Olsen1580 days ago

  58. 01 April 2006

    Utopia

    Thomas More

    1581 days ago

    The book in which the term utopia was first turned, a look at what was wrong with 16th century english society and how the hidden society of Utopos was better.

    The book is a set of conversations between Raphael Hythloday (“peddler of nonsense”), a traveler who chanced upon the hidden society of Utopos and lived among it’s peoples for 5 years, and Thomas More, the author fictionalized within his own work.

    Utopos is a society in which everybody is equal, everybody is made equal by the abolition of private property. Everyone has what they need drawn from the collective labor of the Utopians, so how could they possibly want anything more?

    There are a few disturbing aspects to the society, thus the dubbing of the greek “u-topia” and “eu-topia” meaning no place and godly place. The thing about More’s Utopia is that there’s no way to get from here to there – ‘the institutions cannot be introduced unless they have already been introduced’ xv.

    But actually, my dear More (to tell you what I really think), it seems to me that wherever there is private property, where everything is measured in terms of money, it is hardly ever possible for the common good to be served with justice and prosperity, unless you think justice is served when all the best things go to the worst people or that happiness is possible with everything is shared among very few, who themselves are not entirely happy, while the rest are plunged into misery. Hythloday, 46

    For why should anyone be suspected of asking too much if he is certain the will never lack anything? Certainly fear of want makes all kinds of animals greedy and rapacious, but only mankind is made so by pride, which makes them consider their own glory enhanced if they excel others in displaying superfluous possessions; in the Utopian scheme of things there is no place for all for such a vice. 68

    Indeed they are amazed that any mortal can take delight in the dubious sparkle of a tiny gem or precious stone when he can look at a star or even at the sun, or how anyone could be so insane as to imagine that he is nobler because of fine-spun woolen thread, since that wool (however fine-spun) was once worn by a sheep, which was at the same time nothing more than a sheep. 78

    The utopian understanding of god:

    unknown, eternal, infinite, inexplicable, diffused throughout this whole universe not physically but by his power, in a manner that is beyond human comprehension. 116

    From my observation and experience of all the flourishing nations everywhere, what is taking place, so help me god, is nothing but a conspiracy of the rich, as it were, who look out for themselves under the pretext of serving the commonwealth. 132

  59. 24 March 2006

    1589 days ago

    Bronze Republican

    Here’s a cute joke.

    via Kjell Olsen1589 days ago

  60. 18 March 2006

    1595 days ago

    Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule

    H. L. Mencken

  61. 1595 days ago

    Only on Fox

    Fox news to the real world:

    “Upside” To Civil War?
    All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?

    via Kjell Olsen1595 days ago

  62. 15 March 2006

    How bad are the politics of the day?

    1598 days ago

    I’m not sure how, but I’ve ended up subscribed to the RNC mailing list under the name of my father. I get their emails, glance at the headlines, and throw them out mostly. (If you didn’t know already, I think anyone who follows bush should be immediately thrown out of the country having had their left ear cut off.) It’s nice to at least have an idea how ridiculous these people are.

    So I also managed to sign up (or get spammed by) for a few democratic newsletters. The two letters are included after me ranting in case you’d want to read them. Here I go.

    Ugh. So there are two political parties within these United States, the only way either party is willing to to acknowledge the existence of the other is with a quick and shallow denouncing.

    Dean raises some valid points, at least peppering his attack with facts. Mehlman doesn’t make one objective statement in his entire letter. It amounts to nothing more then DEMOCRATS WANT AMERICA DEAD, which I’m hoping isn’t true. Dean’s isn’t much better, coming to REBUBLICANS ARE LIARS.

    I’m going to overlook the fact that indeed, republicans are liars, for a minute here. As bad as the exchange between parties is, I don’t see why the democrats are so handily losing. I do hope that things turn around in the upcoming elections, I’m quite embarrassed they’ve deteriorated so far and so fast. I can’t heartily support either party – but there are more individual democrats out there I agree with than republicans.

    American politics are a complete joke. Shouldn’t the debate surrounding the activities and policies of our nation be more then shouting? Could the american people even handle anything more then almost incoherent babble and sniping between members of either party? Because the debate isn’t more then hollering across the aisle, and the american people don’t seem to be doing anything about it.

    I don’t know all that much about politics. I’ve taken the standard politics courses, but all my actual experience in worldly politics has come in the current era. The bush era. This can’t be how to govern a nation. I’m actually young enough to have not yet paid taxes; I can’t be sure I ever will, with politics as they are now. This isn’t worth my money, and I don’t want to have anything to do with it.

    The American government has held up quite well to this point. 200+ years of steady rule, very little national controversy. I can’t speak for the years before me, but I’d like to know if it’s always been this bad. Maybe I’m just completely unreasonable and should settle down. Self doubt works well to keep me humble. But my illusion is that things have fallen into a shithole lately. I’d be surprised if America could last this long in her current state.

    All I want to know, is do we have to stand for this? I live my life, fairly normally, and for the most part nothing the government does affects me beyond idea. Taxes will be paid, their being high or low may give or take a bit of money from me, but nothing more. I’ve never been to Iraq, nor do I have expedient plans to go there. So why should I be concerned over their being ravaged and terrorized by my government?

    For whatever reason I am concerned. I’m not doing much to change the course of politics, but I’m thinking a lot about it. I came across Death to Government by Karl Hess a week or two ago searching for “giving up government.” I think I’d be ready to throw everyone out of washington in the interest of reform.

    I can’t say with any certainty that I’ve ever admired a politician outside of Paul Wellstone. The libertarian idea, “how do you dismantle government from within government,” hits hard. It sucks that you have to first submit to the degenerating political system before you can do anything to change it.

    Or the hacker spirit:

    To protest, you have to take the present, and construct a new present with the tools provided, and put it in-front of the people. And you have to win, because the modern world, as Marx understood, is popular. You have to win by marketing. Matt Webb

    So that was a lot more ranting then I intended and it lacked any real end, but it gave me lots to think about. Don’t expect much from me, how about.

    The letters

    ‘Russ Fiengold is a traitor’

    That’s what Republicans want you to think.

    They are so scared of having a legitimate debate about Iraq or national security that they have only one reaction to news of their failures or calls for accountability.

    On Monday, Democratic Senator Russ Feingold introduced legislation to censure the President for breaking the law by creating a secret domestic spying program. Agree or disagree with his proposal, as a Senator—and as an American—he has the right to speak his mind and express his views without Republican Senators questioning his patriotism.

    But that’s exactly what happened. This week Republican Senator Wayne Allard of Colorado, in an interview with Fox News radio, said in response to Feingold’s action that he has “time and time again [sided] with the terrorists”.

    Send a message to Senator Allard: shame on him for questioning the patriotism of another Senator. Sign this petition and it will be delivered to Allard:

    http://www.democrats.org/stopattackingruss

    Agree or disagree with Russ Feingold’s censure resolution, it is completely out of bounds to suggest that anyone demanding accountability is siding with terrorists. It is simply un-American to question the patriotism and loyalty of a Senator who wants the Congress to live up to its responsibility.

    We’ve heard this cowardly nonsense from Republican leaders before. They attacked decorated Veteran and Democratic Rep. Jack Murtha for getting real on Iraq. They attacked Democratic Leader Harry Reid for shutting down the Senate to demand answers about manipulated pre-war intelligence.

    They have ended the careers of generals who questioned Bush Administration talking points, and they even attack their own when respectable Republicans speak out on the disaster this administration has created in Iraq and its failure to close the gaps in our security here at home.

    And time and again, the Republican controlled congress has consistently failed to conduct real oversight of the Administration, choosing instead to protect the Administration.

    But polls show that nearly 70% of Americans reject this president and the Republican Congress that has failed to hold him accountable. And together we will hold Republicans accountable at the ballot box this year.

    That’s why the Democratic Party is putting the infrastructure on the ground now to fight in all 50 states. People everywhere are saying “enough is enough”—and we will be ready to organize and fight everywhere with your help.

    Please contribute whatever you can to make it happen:

    http://www.democrats.org/accountability

    The sick behavior of desperate Republicans will only stop when we fight back, and 2006 is the time to do it.

    Thank you,

    Governor Howard Dean, M.D.

    Their Real Agenda

    This week, liberal Democrat Russ Feingold called on the Senate to censure the President for a program that is successfully stopping terrorists. After months of searching, Democrat leaders are finally beginning to find their agenda: take away the tools America needs to fight terror. In the last 24 hours, fringe groups like MoveOn.org and Democrat leaders from John Kerry to Harry Reid to Dick Durbin have rallied to Feingold’s side, praising his grandstanding as a “catalyst” for the investigation of the President.

    Weakening our national security is their agenda. Is it yours? Sign the petition to tell the Democrat leaders to stop undermining the War on Terror with cheap political stunts.

    We are a nation at war. Our President has no more basic responsibility than to protect the American people and fight terrorists who want to kill us. It’s one thing if a lone Senator wants our government to look the other way when an Al Qaeda terrorist contacts a sleeper cell inside the United States. It’s entirely another when Democrat minority leader Harry Reid commends Feingold’s censure move for “bringing [the terrorist surveillance program] to the attention of the American people.”

    Democrat leaders never miss an opportunity to put politics before our nation’s security. And now, they would rather censure the President for doing his job than actually fight the War on Terror. It’s what the MoveOn.org wing of their party wants, and now, it’s their agenda – from the top of the ticket on down.

    Make your voice heard. Tell Democrat leaders to stop playing politics with national security.

    Sincerely,

    Ken Mehlman,
    Chairman, Republican National Committee

  63. 1598 days ago

    In a single house there is no check, but the inadequate one, of the virtue & good sense of those who compose it.

    James Wilson

  64. 08 March 2006

    1605 days ago

    The Death of Politics, by Karl Hess

    The reactionary tendencies of both liberals and conservatives today show clearly in their willingness to cede, to the state or the community, power far beyond the protection of liberty against violence. For differing purposes, both see the state as an instrument not protecting man’s freedom but either instructing or restricting how that freedom is to be used.

    Will men continue to submit to rule by politics, which has always meant the power of some men over other men, or are we ready to go it alone socially, in communities of voluntarism, in a world more economic and cultural than political, just as so many now are prepared to go it alone metaphysically in a world more of reason than religion?

    To repeat: Conservatives yearn for a state, or “leadership,” with the power to restore order and to put things

    via Kjell Olsen1605 days ago

  65. 07 March 2006

    1606 days ago

    The truth about the Federal Reserve System - Google Video

    40 minutes on the dollar and the federal reserve.

    via Kjell Olsen1606 days ago

  66. 27 February 2006

    1614 days ago

    The Case for Impeachment

    Before reading the report, I wouldn’t have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don’t know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country’s good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world’s evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation’s wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal

    Kjell Olsen1614 days ago

  67. 26 February 2006

    1615 days ago

    Bush's Mysterious "New Programs"

    Given Bush

    via Kjell Olsen1615 days ago

  68. 23 February 2006

    1618 days ago

    I am Al Gore. I used to be the next President of the United States of America.
    laughter, applause
    I don’t think that’s funny.

    Al Gore

  69. 21 February 2006

    The Prince

    Machiavelli

    1620 days ago

    A Renaissance take on how to seize and maintain power over a principality. Taking a historical look at the book, nobody really knows whether Machiavelli is being serious or pandering to his friends in high places, he needed to get a job. He sets out a treelike structure, if this then that. Straightforward, but also ambiguous. It’s a short and simple book, on the first page Machiavelli notes he won’t be wasting any words on decoration.

    People should either be caressed or crushed. 9

    So too, in politics, for if you foresee problems while they are far off (which only a prudent man is able to do) they can easily be dealt with; but when, because you have failed to see them coming, you allow them to grow to the point that anyone can recognize them, then it is too late to do anything. 10

    Transfer of power, 33.

    a powerful and courageous prince will overcome all such difficulties by giving at one time hope to his subjects that the evil will not be for long, at another time fear of the cruelty of the enemy, then preserving himself adroitly from those subjects who seem to him to be too bold. 35

    In short, someone else’s armor either falls off, or it weighs you down, or it trips you up. 44

    A ruler then, should have no other concern, no other thought, should pat attention to nothing aside from war, military institutions, and the training of his soldiers. 45

    Since a ruler, then, needs to know how to make good use of beastly qualities, he should take as his models among the animals both the fox and the lion, for the lion does not know how to avoid traps, and the fox is easily overpowered by wolves. 54

    Therefore, many conclude a wise ruler will, when he has the opportunity, secretly foster opposition to his rule, so that when he has put down his opponents, he will be in a more powerful position. 65

    The choice of servants is of no little importance to a prince, and they are good or not according to the discrimination of the prince. And the first opinion which one forms of a prince, and of his understanding, is by observing the men he has around him; and when they are capable and faithful he may always be considered wise, because he has known how to recognize the capable and to keep them faithful. But when they are otherwise one cannot form a good opinion of him, for the prime error which he made was in choosing them. 70

    I do think, however, that it is better to be headstrong then cautious, for fortune is a lady. It is necessary, if you want to master her, to beat and strike her. And one sees she more often submits to those who act boldly then to those who proceed in a calculating fashion. Moreover, since she is a lady, she smiles on the young, for they are less cautious, more ruthless, and overcome her with their boldness. 77

  70. 12 February 2006

    1629 days ago

    Do Bush followers have a political ideology?

    Now, in order to be considered a “liberal,” only one thing is required

    via Kjell Olsen1629 days ago

  71. 09 February 2006

    1632 days ago

    Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the 22nd amendment to the Constitution.

    And I thought the fucker would be out of a job come 2008 no matter. The 22nd amendment?

    No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

    via Kjell Olsen1632 days ago

  72. 1632 days ago

    Mohammed Dance

    Sacrilege.

    via Kjell Olsen1632 days ago

  73. 07 February 2006

    1634 days ago

    I’d like to be able to explain to my wife how we can buy a brand new MacBook Pro while saving money, but either I’m not as smart as George W. Bush or she is much, much cleverer and less credulous than Republicans.

    PZ Meyers

  74. 05 February 2006

    1636 days ago

    Seeing Only Evil

    Sobering interview with an ex-cia expert on the middle east. We’re fucked.

    The irony is, we’re dumping billions and billions of dollars every time we go to the gas pump into a jihad against us in Iraq that’s killing American soldiers. I’ve read, “One kid is dying in Iraq so the father of the kid next door can drive his Hummer.” And what’s more, the money’s coming from Japan and China, and in a certain sense from the Middle East, and then it’s filtering back. Blackwater, SAIC, Custer Battle

    via Kjell Olsen1636 days ago

  75. 1636 days ago

    USINFO - U.S. Department of State

    Who needs fox when you can get all your news straight from the source? The official US propaganda misinformation department. If only there were less words and more nice pictures.

    via Kjell Olsen1636 days ago

  76. 01 February 2006

    1640 days ago

    Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports

    WASHINGTON – One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.

    I can just see the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal: WHAT DID THAT FRIGGING IDIOT SAY??? And oh, yeah, the white house has been destroying emails likely related to the Plame affair.

    via Kjell Olsen1640 days ago

  77. 1640 days ago

    Analysis: State of the Union

    When you read the small print, all the promises Bush has ever made have been empty.

    via Kjell Olsen1640 days ago

  78. 31 January 2006

    1641 days ago

    Sheehan arrested in House gallery

    So my idea about tshirts might not have been so naive after all. It was, in fact, seditious enough to get Cindy Sheehan arrested on her way in to watch Bush’s speech.

    I knew this whole free speech thing was too good to last.

    via Kjell Olsen1641 days ago

  79. Just great

    1641 days ago

    I watched the State of the Union address in it’s entirety once, the january before we invaded Iraq. Holy shit. What wasn’t a lie was a false promise. I was pretty pissed after the third time in one minute that everyone stood up and clapped for 20 seconds straight.

    Being a bit jaded, I’m not going to watch the state of the union tonight. I’m guessing all the best and most embarrassing bits will filter out through the blogosphere soon enough, and I’ll get my share of partisan liberal discourse.

    But pausing iTunes for a second, I heard Bush making tribute to Coretta Scott King, a woman who falls so far above Bush on the scale of worthiness it’s embarrassing that he would even use her name to further the act of spitting his vitriol.

    King should be well tributed. But by Bush? I’m the devil praising an angel, spewing mud in her face by just mentioning her.

    20 seconds later? 9/11. Danger. Death. Terrorism. Fear. Bin Laden. Hussein. Die. Bomb. Attack. Security. War. Applause. Back comes iTunes.

    But hey, at least we have racial equality.

  80. 30 January 2006

    1642 days ago

    Why "No Child Left Behind" Does Not Work for our Schools

    What is going on in today’s public classroom is this: the opportunity for teachers to open children’s minds and create lifelong thinking skills is being systematically and surgically removed by educational bureaucrats, politicians and administrators under the reform banner of “No Child Left Behind”.

    I was a sophomore when NCLB took effect, and my high school didn’t have anywhere to go but down. As an upperclassmen, I was past the basics courses in which 45 kids would get thrown into a room with one teacher (a lab science course!). I in fact managed 4 quite pleasant years. But anyone could tell that things were deteriorating fast.

    Children need more than basic skills. They need the chance to become motivated learners. They need the chance to be nurtured, to be loved. Education is not a business, a computer game, or a military operation. But to NCLB advocates, with their power-point presentations and their charts and spit-shined loafers and double-breasted suits, it is all this and more.

    Intangibles are all I’ve ever taken from school. I took calculus my junior year, passed the AP exam, and can’t remember which one is an integral and which a derivative. I’ve gone to public school all my life, and been quite impressed at the caliber of my teachers. Most of them had a quite significant impact on me.

    And not because they taught me what 2+2 equaled.

    via Kjell Olsen1642 days ago

  81. 1642 days ago

    Tell Your Senators to Oppose Alito Nomination to the Supreme Court

    It seems to not have yet been voted on, so go send a note to your senators to support the filibuster.

    Kjell Olsen1642 days ago

  82. 25 January 2006

    1648 days ago

    Saddam Hussein is a Tyrant and a Threat to Democracy and Deserves Removal from the Presidency for His Litany of Unjust and Barbaric Crimes

    Saddam Hussein’s intolerable use of weapons of mass destruction against enemies; unprecedented aggression against and occupation of a country which posed no threat to his own; routine kidnapping, torture, murder and secret prison system; wholesale slaughter of citizens from other countries; imprisonment of political rivals held for years without charges; and secret spying on his very own countrymen without court order or legislative approval, demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that this so-called “President” was a dangerous rogue, a tyrant, and a grave threat—of the highest order—to worldwide peace, stability and democracy.
    His immediate removal from unelected power was…and is…a completely justified imperative.

    via Kjell Olsen1648 days ago

  83. 24 January 2006

    1648 days ago

    Movement to impeach George W. Bush - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    C’mon, please?

    via Kjell Olsen1648 days ago

  84. 23 January 2006

    1649 days ago

    Democrats: Get Up and Walk Out

    I can’t decide wether this is just kneejerk or brilliant. All the democrats get up at the same point in time and walk out of Bush’s State of the Union address.

    If I were them, I’d print a set of disparaging t-shirts. They’d stand up and remove their suit-jackets at a given point, remain standing the duration of the address wearing the shirts. They wouldn’t once clap. They wouldn’t jeer. They wouldn’t smile. They’d sit for the first half hour, stand the rest, none of this up and down and clapping every two minutes. It would be best if they could scatter themselves, but I’m betting their seats are in a block. They could give the shirts out to audience members, to join in from the stands.

    I can even offer a bit of text for your opening statement. “Three years ago during this very speech,” your leading spokesperson can say from those steps, “Mr. Bush told us that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons – which is one million pounds – of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, 30,000 missiles to deliver the stuff, mobile biological weapons labs, al Qaeda connections, and uranium from Niger for use in a robust nuclear weapons program. He said all this three years ago, during this all-important annual address, and all of it was a lie. The American people deserve an explanation.”

    But all that really shows is how naive I am. tshirts?

    via Kjell Olsen1649 days ago

  85. 22 January 2006

    1650 days ago

    Daily Kos: National Sanctity of Human Life Day

    Although it may only applies to innocent fetuses in the sanctum sanctorum, what a touching sentiment.

    via Kjell Olsen1650 days ago

  86. 1650 days ago

    Why We Fight - A Film By Eugene Jarecki

    On the military industrial complex. When war gets this profitable, we’re going to see lots more of it. Opening in a week or two around the country.

    via Kjell Olsen1650 days ago

  87. 21 January 2006

    1651 days ago

    What they don't want you to know about the coming oil crisis

    Our society is in a state of collective denial that has no precedent in history, in terms of its scale and implications.

    It’s debatable how much oil is left, as to the fact that none of the OPEC countries keep accurate books. But the most optimistic speculators assume no more then 3 trillion barrels remain on earth.

    If 2 trillion barrels of oil or more indeed remain, the topping point lies far away in the 2030s. The “growing” and “cheap” parts of the oil-supply equation are feasible until then, at least in principle, and we have enough time to bring in the alternatives to oil. If only 1 trillion barrels remain, however, the topping point will arrive some time soon, and certainly before this decade is out. The “growing” and “cheap” parts of the oil-supply equation become impossible, and there probably isn’t even enough time to make a sustainable transition to alternatives.

    Half the world’s oil lies in its 100 largest fields, and all of these hold 2 billion barrels or more, and almost all of them were discovered more than a quarter of a century ago. Consider the recent record of discoveries of giant oil- and gas-fields of over 500 million barrels of oil or oil equivalent. Half a billion barrels – the definition of a “giant” field – sounds a lot. But since the world is eating up more than 80 million barrels of oil a day at the moment, it is in fact less than a week’s global supply. In 2000 there were 16 discoveries of 500 million barrels of oil equivalent or bigger. In 2001 there were nine. In 2002 there were just two. In 2003 there were none.

    But in 1985, they [OPEC nations] began to – how shall I put it? – massage the data. Kuwait was the first to give in to temptation. They found that their reserves had gone up overnight from 64 to 90 billion barrels. In 1988, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Iran and Iraq all played the same card. Abu Dhabi had been so needlessly conservative that their reserves went up from 31 to 92 billion barrels. They surely must have employed some incompetent geologists. How could they have overlooked 60 billion barrels? Finally, in 1990, Saudi Arabia decided it too had been conservative, hiking its total from 170 to 258 billion barrels.

    Is there any chance that the early topping point of oil production is somehow wrong, all just a bad dream? I am sorry to say that I think not. It is important to realise that the early toppers are not advocates or agitators by choice. They tend to have high residual affection for the industry they have spent their lives in.

    The peak of oil discovery was 1965. 41 years ago.

    And it’s not just that we’re running out of oil, we can no longer extract and process what oil there is into economically viable forms at the rate of demand.

    Slowly but surely the US military is being converted into a global oil-protection service Michael Klare

    Kjell Olsen1651 days ago

  88. 20 January 2006

    1652 days ago

    Death and Taxes

    Ultrahot graphical breakdown of how the government spends money collected in the for of taxes. In short? 399 Billion dollars on the military, 383 Billion on everything else.

    via Kjell Olsen1652 days ago

  89. 18 January 2006

    1654 days ago

    James Boyce: Filibust.

    Why is it when you remove yourself from Washington, when your eyes reopen to the world around you, only then can you see what is so clear to the rest of us?

    We can win the house, senate, and executive. But If we lose the judicial, it’s gone for 20+ years. So why isn’t anyone fighting?

    If not now, when?

    Kjell Olsen1654 days ago

  90. 17 January 2006

    1655 days ago

    I find that I perform best when I

    Barack Obama

  91. 16 January 2006

    1656 days ago

    AlterNet: Chomsky: 'There Is No War On Terror'

    Chomsky on the current state of things, in an interview with Geov Parrish.

    Same with global warming. They [the bushies] are not stupid. They know that they’re increasing the threat of a serious catastrophe. But that’s a generation or two away. Who cares? There’s basically two principles that define the Bush administration policies: stuff the pockets of your rich friends with dollars, and increase your control over the world. Almost everything follows from that. If you happen to blow up the world, well, you know, it’s somebody else’s business. Stuff happens, as Rumsfeld said.

    What’s your biggest regret over 40 years of political activism? What would you have done differently?
    I would have done more. Because the problems are so serious and overwhelming that it’s disgraceful not to do more about it.

    via Kjell Olsen1656 days ago

  92. 1656 days ago

    'We the People' Must Save Our Constitution

    Al Gore grows a pair. On how our government has failed us, and we have failed our government. Now we have some work to do.

    An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution – an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

    If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?
    The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch’s claims of these previously unrecognized powers: “If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution.”

    As a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the Executive Branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk. The stakes for America’s representative democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized.

    If this President’s attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks and balances will be lost. And the next President or some future President will be able, in the name of national security, to restrict our liberties in a way the framers never would have thought possible.

    The President’s judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure that the courts will not serve as an effective check on executive power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a longtime supporter of a powerful executive – a supporter of the so-called unitary executive, which is more properly called the unilateral executive. Whether you support his confirmation or not – and I do not – we must all agree that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of executive power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference to the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial deference to executive agency rulemaking.

    In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the “greatest deliberative body in the world,” meaningful debate is now a rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked: “Why is this chamber empty?”

    The political economy supported by these short but expensive television ads is as different from the vibrant politics of America’s first century as those politics were different from the feudalism which thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.

    Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”

    via Kjell Olsen1656 days ago

  93. 15 January 2006

    1657 days ago

    Just fire the Democrats, please. All of them.

    Second link in as many days poached from photodude:

    Heads need to roll. ROLL. People need to lose their jobs, en masse. After 2000, no one took responsibility. After 2004, no one took responsibility. And now it’s happening again. Our wonderful party leaders are sitting back and scratching their heads wondering why the country isn’t simply running into our arms while they sit back and do nothing to earn the country’s respect and loyalty. John Aravosis

    I agree completely. But just as the democrats need their heads to roll, republicans need to be slowly decapitated, drawn, quartered, and have their heads stuck on tall poles just inside the white house fence.

    via Kjell Olsen1657 days ago

  94. 14 January 2006

    1658 days ago

    The States Step In As Medicare Falters

    Can the bush administration do anything without completely fucking it up? This is embarrassing.

    “The first week was pure hell,” said Mike Souders, owner of Metropolis Drugs in southern Illinois. Computer systems crashed, phone lines were jammed, and there was no way for him to confirm that patients were covered.

    The old and infirm are walking into the same pharmacies they’ve always walked into the get the same medications they’ve always gotten and being charged exorbitantly for it, all because Bush’s medicare legislation has been a complete fuckup. Maine has spent $3.6 million in the past two weeks to cover 68,000 individual prescriptions. Try multiplying that by 50.

    Not only that, but when Bush passed the law in 2003, its stated cost was $534 billion over 10 years. All of the sudden it’s going to cost us $1.2 trillion.

    All of the worst predictions came true. Robert M. Hayes, president of the Medicare Rights Center

    Huh, sort of like with both that war somewhere over the rainbow and that Hurricane that hit the gulf coast. And then there was that whole Bin Laden determined to strike within the US thing.

    How on earth are these clowns criminals terrorists fuckwads (I don’t have enough of a vulgar term for them) still running our country?

    via Kjell Olsen1658 days ago

  95. 1658 days ago

    Chomsky on "Intellectual Property"

    Intellectual property rights are the equivalent of “kicking away the ladder.” Alexander Hamilton

    First you use state power and violence to develop, then you kick away those procedures so that other people can’t do it. Noam Chomsky

    via Kjell Olsen1658 days ago

  96. 13 January 2006

    1659 days ago

    Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Before 9/11

    I can’t quite figure out why peoples heads aren’t popping off at this whole Bush being our president thing.

    The NSA’s vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups.

    The lying sacks of shit. After the whole wiretapping without warrants thing broke, Cheney said that if they could have just done it before 9/11, they’d have stopped it. Oh? You actually were doing it before 9/11 and just didn’t think you wanted to tell us? I call constitutional crisis.

    via Kjell Olsen1659 days ago

  97. 1659 days ago

    Free Speech: Use It or Lose It

    Subversive signs over freeways.

    Kjell Olsen1659 days ago

  98. 11 January 2006

    My dear senators

    1661 days ago

    Dear Mr. Dayton/Mr. Coleman:

    I’m a sophomore in college at the University of Minnesota Morris and attended minneapolis public schools K-12. I worked for both the 2000 Dayton senate campaign and Wellstone’s 2002, and I called myself a democrat until I recently got fed up with the democrats spineless concession to Bush’s tyrannical reign.

    I don’t want to seem over-dramatic, but I’m really fed up with the actions of my government over the past five years, and deeply want for government to right itself and purge its radical corruption. We’re going the complete opposite direction that any democracy should be, and frankly, I’m a bit scared.

    I want to make absolutely sure that you will not vote to confirm Alito as a Supreme court justice. Why? Because Alito considers his ‘gospel’ to be that of the Unitary Executive Theory, otherwise known as “President or King (what’s the difference?).”

    I don’t think that our congress should be a puppet body, just as our judicial system shouldn’t be full of judges who praise the absolute power of the executive branch.

    Bush officials say that “there is no way to say how [alito] would rule” regarding unchecked presidential power. I’d say the fact that he helped pioneer the theory as an aide in the Reagan Justice Dept (a theory that goes against every principle our country was founded on and many of us hold dear), and exclaimed it in numerous speeches make for damn good testimony.

    Don’t let the worthless spectacle that has become of senate confirmation hearings inform you on Alito’s judicial philosophy. The fact that he lends any credence to the idea of unitary executive abolishes any article of faith you could have in him.

    I was embarrassed to see what our government is coming to yesterday, when Alito said “It

  99. 1662 days ago

    How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.

    Hitler

  100. 09 January 2006

    1663 days ago

    A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.

    Aristotle

  101. 1663 days ago

    Angry and Furious at the Collaborationist Democrats | The Huffington Post

    For me, Paul Wellstone was the last bastion of decency in congress. I don’t know why, or how, but the Bushies have managed to turn washington into something very, very wrong. It might just be rancor, but I can’t think of one good thing that’s been accomplished the last five years. And surely whatever little good has been done was also grossly countered by all the shit that’s happened.

    Politics in their current form need to get lost, completely and entirely. I’ve really lost all faith in our government.

    In truth, Pelosi, Rockefeller, and the New York Times collaborated with Bush for four years to ignore the Constitution. No one did anything on behalf of the millions of Americans being surveyed. At the end of the day, no one tried to stop it or even examine it. That says a great deal about our politicians’ commitment to democracy and the Constitution.

    Now I’m sure there are some perfectly decent democrats out there. I volunteered for the Mark Dayton campaign in 2000. He seemed a good guy. Sure, he’s rich as all hell (I think he spent 2 million on his campaign). But he hasn’t been able to get anything done in washington at all, and he’s frustrated and calling it quits after one term.

    via Kjell Olsen1663 days ago

  102. 07 January 2006

    1665 days ago

    It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

    Mark Twain

  103. 1665 days ago

    Scandal of force-fed prisoners

    Welcome to the gulag:

    New details have emerged of how the growing number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guant

    via Kjell Olsen1665 days ago

  104. 05 January 2006

    1667 days ago

    Americans, War Is the Answer

    I don

    via Kjell Olsen1667 days ago

  105. 04 January 2006

    1668 days ago

    US government warns it's running out of cash

    At that time, unless the debt limit is raised or the Treasury Department takes authorized extraordinary actions, we will be unable to continue to finance government operations. John Snow, US Treasury Secretary

    via Kjell Olsen1668 days ago

  106. 03 January 2006

    1669 days ago

    What I heard about Iraq in 2005

    The state of american politics today is profoundly embarrassing. The situation in Iraq and it’s handling by the bush administration triply so. Holy shit.

    I heard that this

    via Kjell Olsen1669 days ago

  107. 24 December 2005

    1679 days ago

    Information Awareness Office

    The government is running this office, with this in mind:

    The IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralized location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) Internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver’s licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data. In essence, the IAO

    via Kjell Olsen1679 days ago

  108. 23 December 2005

    1680 days ago

    What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge—the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations, to become guessers. If they didn’t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on.

    Please, don’t you do that. But let me warn you, if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you—and now I have to guess—about ten to one.

    Kurt Vonnegut, Your Guess Is as Good as Mine

  109. 22 December 2005

    1681 days ago

    Live Vote: Should Bush be impeached?

    85% say yes. It’s an internet poll, so I bet it’s a bit biased. But I think this thing is getting big. Critical mass?

    via Kjell Olsen1681 days ago

  110. 1681 days ago

    The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

    We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. we must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

    MLK, I Have A Dream

  111. 1682 days ago

    Hullabaloo

    The fact that they [conservatives] continue to win elections as being the tough guys perhaps says more about our puerile childishly silly and trivial culture than anything else. They lash out like frightened children and too many people see that as courage or resolve.

    via Kjell Olsen1682 days ago

  112. 21 December 2005

    1682 days ago

    Ex-Marine Says Public Version of Saddam Capture Fiction

    So have they told us anything that wasn’t a lie? This is really disturbing.

    via Kjell Olsen1682 days ago

  113. 1682 days ago

    Deserves Impeachment

    As political strategy and as public policy, the impeachment of Mr. Bush is an unappealing prospect. (Besides, if he could be thrown out somehow, who would want Dick Cheney to succeed him?) And yet, the actions and attitudes of this President raise the question of how else we can preserve the bedrock principles of a democratic republic.

    via Kjell Olsen1682 days ago

  114. Mark Dayton and Norm Coleman, hear me out

    1682 days ago

    A few hours after having written this: Looks like the drilling bit didn’t pass.

    I just wanted to let you know that I think it’s despicable that your fellow senator, Ted Stevens, has shown the disdain for congressional procedure and our troops fighting valiantly (in a pointless and unlawful war none the less) halfway across the world to hijack a defense appropriations bill with a provision to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The scumbags in congress today disgust me. Is it not completely inappropriate to force your personal agenda (as he has done) upon an entire nation while there are phenomenally more important issues at hand?

    First thing, ANWR will provide a windfall for the multinational oil corporations, but tear up a national treasure (the eighth wonder of the world?). I don’t care how small a percentage of the full reserve will be opened to actual surface penetration by drilling apparatus, the entire area will have forever lost it’s pure, unique air.

    Second, the actual volume of oil cached within ANWR is pitifully insufficient for it to be at all worth it. I’ll admit I’m on the environmental side of the issue, but at peak production (20 years from now), the subsidy provided to the american people by the surplus oil will be just 1 penny per gallon, and that’s the most it will ever do [1]. One penny per gallon. People will be saving 10 cents per tank, and who knows if they will even need or want it? You cannot tell me it’s worth such an enormous sacrifice (once it’s opened, cut through with highways to transport oil and pumps to extract it and all the necessary infrastructure, ANWR would hardly pass muster as a national park, and will never return to it’s former state) for such a trivial [2] benefit to America and it’s people.

    I’m a freshman in college at the University of Minnesota, Morris. My family was never rich, but well off. We had three cars at times during my life. That does not mean we struggled with gas costs. There are smarter and better ways to get around. For two years, fall/winter/spring, I biked the Midtown greenway to school every day. I attended 4 years at South High. 5 miles each way, I was fitter then ever and loved it. If it was too cold I could hop on the bryant avenue bus to lake street and be at school in no time, and I’ll admit to driving myself or catching rides occasionally. The metro transit system could use improvements, but it’s just as good as driving. Also cheaper, more social, and less stressful. Biking triply so.

    Please don’t cave into Bush and (Ted) Stevens hollow agenda to repay the multinational and ethically challenged corporations that financed their election campaigns. After the death of Paul Wellstone, who was the only elected official I’ve ever genuinely trusted and looked up to, I don’t see much good at all coming from any avenue of government. That isn’t how it’s supposed to work.

    Now with talks of Bush finally being held accountable for the crimes he’s committed since becoming president [3], I’m just starting to regain the naive confidence I held in government as a kid. Please don’t let me down: do what you know is right for your constituents (not big oil, but minnesotans) and shoot down this corrupt and anti-american drilling provision. If you’re not quite sure how to do it without holding up the Defense Appropriations bill (which, as much as I’m against the Iraq war, still must go through), see the third paragraph in the blog post at the bottom of my letter [4].

    Sincerely,
    Kjell Olsen

    1. http://www.alaskaaction.org/the-penny/
    2. http://www.answers.com/trivial
    3. his impeachment, his discredit, his dishonor and shame
    3. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/flavia-colgan/arctic-refuge-in-the-bala_b_12673.html

  115. 20 December 2005

    1683 days ago

    Censure motion introduced in House over Iraq, torture

    Formal congressional rebukes against Bush and Cheney have been put out by the House democrats over the handling of Iraq war intelligence, plamegate, and crime under international law.

    The Select Committee seeks to subpoena the President and other members of the administration in hopes of ascertaining if impeachable offenses have been committed.

    via Kjell Olsen1683 days ago

  116. 1683 days ago

    They Thought They Were Free

    Excerpted from The Germans, 1933-45 (pg. 166-73), by Milton Mayer.

    Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about

    via Kjell Olsen1683 days ago

  117. 1683 days ago

    Alaska Action for ANWR - The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

    The most money that drilling the Arctic Refuge would ever save American consumers is one penny per gallon, and that would be almost 20 years from now when oil production out of the Refuge would peak.

    via Kjell Olsen1683 days ago

  118. 19 December 2005

    1684 days ago

    At 87, Wallace still tells it like it is

    What Mike Wallace would ask Bush if he would consent to an interview:

    What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? In your background, Mr. President, you apparently were incurious. You didn’t want to travel. You knew very little about the military… The governor of Texas doesn’t have the kind of power that some governors have… Why do you think they nominated you? ... Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that the country is so fucked up?

    via Kjell Olsen1684 days ago

  119. 18 December 2005

    1685 days ago

    Fuck Christmas

    I love rants.

    At what point did a basic understanding of the separation of church and state become a fucking war on religion?

    via Kjell Olsen1685 days ago

  120. 1685 days ago

    Kristof challenges O'Reilly to visit Darfur with him

    So I have a challenge for you, Mr. O’Reilly: If you really want to defend traditional values, then come with me on a trip to Darfur. I’ll introduce you to mothers who have had their babies clubbed to death in front of them, to teenage girls who have been gang-raped and then mutilated—and to the government-armed thugs who do these things.

    via Kjell Olsen1685 days ago

  121. 17 December 2005

    Bush on the Fourth Amendment

    1686 days ago

    Bush has authorized the NSA to spy on citizens without their knowledge.

    I intend to do so for as long as our nation faces a continuing threat from al-Qaida and related groups. George Bush

    I’m no lawyer, but here’s our 4th amendment right. Try to tell me Bush is still operating within the bounds of the constitution he swore to uphold.

    The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. findlaw

    Say hello to King George.

    Both the Bush Administration

  122. 16 December 2005

    1687 days ago

    After December 15, Iraq will be at mercy of US corporations

    US invasion serves to privatize Iraqi industry with American corporations.

    via Kjell Olsen1687 days ago

  123. 1687 days ago

    Patriot provisions set to expire

    Senate showed Bush who’s boss today. 52-47 against renewal.

    via Kjell Olsen1687 days ago

  124. 15 December 2005

    1688 days ago

    The real Eugene McCarthy

    One thing about a pig, he thinks he’s warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one’s nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics. Eugene McCarthy

    via Kjell Olsen1688 days ago

  125. 12 December 2005

    Incarceration

    1691 days ago

    1 in 37 American adults are in prison. 1 in 3 black men will go to prison, along with 1 in 17 white men. Hispanics and Blacks make up 25% of the american population, yet 60% of the incarcerated.

    For every black man that goes to college, 3 will go to prison.

    In 1974 there were just under 500,000 inmates in the US. In 2001, that number passed 2,000,000. Between 1985 and 2000 federal funding for corrections increased 166%, compared with 24% for education.

    As of 2001, Bureau of Justice statistics show that 7 out of 10 released prisoners will be re-arrested within 3 years.

    Bush (our president!) claims to be a Christian, yet proved to be the most prolific murderer in all of Texas. What would Jesus have done?

    Are you fucking kidding me?

    (As always, wikipedia rocks)

  126. 1692 days ago

    Khaled El-Masri

    US captures German Citizen while vacationing, discovers he is innocent, holds him in Afghanistan for 2 months anyway, proceed to drop him in an Albanian forest.

    via Kjell Olsen1692 days ago

  127. 10 December 2005

    1693 days ago

    I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

    The presidential oath

    Bush having supposedly expressed his unhappiness with the constitution, here’s the oath he swore upon inauguration.

  128. 1693 days ago

    Ideas for Creating American Jobs That Are Better Than the 735,000 Jobs Promised If Drilling Is Allowed in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

    at McSweeney’s.

    via Kjell Olsen1693 days ago

  129. 09 December 2005

    1694 days ago

    Bush on the Constitution:

    Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It

    via Kjell Olsen1694 days ago

  130. 08 December 2005

    1695 days ago

    Alito's America

    Don’t let it happen.

    via Kjell Olsen1695 days ago

  131. 06 December 2005

    1697 days ago

    Professor beaten; attackers cite KU creationism class

    Fundies beat University of Kansas professor for trying to offer class debunking the myths of intelligent design and creationism.

    via Kjell Olsen1697 days ago

  132. 05 December 2005

    1698 days ago

    Hearts and Brains

    American Military looting organs from wounded Iraqis? I sure fucking hope not.

    via Kjell Olsen1698 days ago

  133. 1698 days ago

    The Bush Administration: Worse Than You Imagine Possible...

    You can’t imagine how completely and utterly despicable. $8.1 Trillion $8,118,319,301,298.54 (!!!).

    via Kjell Olsen1698 days ago

  134. 04 December 2005

    1699 days ago

    IS GEORGE BUSH THE WORST PRESIDENT -- EVER?

    NO doubt.

    via Kjell Olsen1699 days ago

  135. 02 December 2005

    1701 days ago

    Judgment at Nuremberg Part III

    Then, on March 16th, Bush and Blair gave Saddam Hussein 24 hours to disarm. And to leave Iraq.
    The next day the inspectors were withdrawn. Three days after that, the war began.
    Even if the question

    Kjell Olsen1701 days ago

  136. 01 December 2005

    1702 days ago

    Homecoming

    You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what a fucking mess we’re in. It’s been happening steadily for the past four years, and nobody said peep. The New York Times and all these people that abetted the lies and crap that went into making and selling this war now that they see the guy is a little weak, they’re kicking him with their toe to make sure he doesn’t bite back. It’s cowardly. This pitiful zombie movie, this fucking B movie, is the only thing anybody’s done about this issue that’s killed 2,000 Americans and untold numbers of Iraqis? It’s fucking sick. I hope this movie bothers a lot of people that disagree with it and that it makes them really pissed off, as pissed off as the rest of us are. Joe Dante

    Director of a zombie film in which servicemen killed in Iraq wiggle out of their graves and into voting booths so they can vote against bush, not happy with the state of american affairs.

    The movie is playing 10pm tomorrow night, on showtime.

    Somebody has to start making this kind of movie, this kind of statement. But everybody’s afraid – it’s uncommercial, people are going to be upset. Good, let them be upset. Why aren’t people upset? Every minute, somebody’s dying in this war, and for nothing. To establish a religious theocracy in Iraq? It doesn’t seem to me quite worth it. Joe Dante

    via Kjell Olsen1702 days ago

  137. 30 November 2005

    1703 days ago

    the Grave Threat of the Bush Administration

    The war, in other words, no longer serves the Republicans’ political interest and must be got rid of. So much for “staying the course.”

    The Bush administration’s hype about terrorism serves no purpose other than to build a police state that is far more dangerous to Americans than terrorists.

    via Kjell Olsen1703 days ago

  138. 27 November 2005

    1706 days ago

    Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt

    The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it’s a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? Frank Rich

    via Kjell Olsen1706 days ago

  139. 23 November 2005

    1711 days ago

    Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel

    What the President was told on September 21, was consistent with everything he has been told since-that the evidence was just not there. one former high-level official

    He was told that there was absolutely no connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. What?

    You can’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror. Bush, 9/25/2002

    Are these fuckers in jail yet?

    via Kjell Olsen1711 days ago

  140. 20 November 2005

    1713 days ago

    You Might Be a Patriot If....

    I would rather go down to my political grave with a clear conscience than ride in the chariot of victory as a Congressional stool pigeon, the slave, the servant, or the vassal of any man, whether he be the owner and manager of a legislative menagerie or the ruler of a great nation. George W. Norris

    Patriotism is supposed to be, at its best, selfless love of country and its people. Certainly what we’re witnessing now is not selfless. Patriotic acts are selfless acts. A patriot, therefore, doesn’t belong to a particular political party. He or she acts in a way that is selfless and demonstrative of a love of one’s country—not a love of one’s President.

    via Kjell Olsen1713 days ago

  141. 18 November 2005

    1715 days ago

    Tortured men look like 'Holocaust victims'

    Witnesses said many of the 169 men and youths were emaciated and looked like “Holocaust survivors”. Some had suffered beatings so severe that their skin had peeled off, and three men had been kept locked in a cupboard where they could not move. All the others were packed, blindfolded, into three rooms nine feet long and 11 feet wide. Kim Sengupta

    America – Holocausting terrorists.

    via Kjell Olsen1715 days ago

  142. 1715 days ago

    oligarchy

    Oligarchy (

    via Kjell Olsen1715 days ago

  143. 1715 days ago

    House passes sweeping budget-cut bill

    The broader budget bill would slice almost $50 billion from the deficit by the end of the decade by curbing rapidly growing benefit programs such as Medicaid, food stamps and student loan subsidies. Republicans said reining in such programs whose costs spiral upward each year automatically is the first step to restoring fiscal discipline.

    If I ever get into dollar problems, the first thing I’ll stop buying is food. And health care. Then learning. Goodbye america, you once were a great place.

    via Kjell Olsen1715 days ago

  144. 1715 days ago

    America is Broken

    What do you feel is more of a threat: terrorists or a government that tramples over and completely disregards the founding principles of our nation and enforces ineffective policies with mindless, out of control, oppressive bullies? Leonard Lin

    via Kjell Olsen1715 days ago

  145. 17 November 2005

    1716 days ago

    It's Fighting Words

    They call it flip-flopping, but how about owning up to your mistakes. How about changing course when you’ve been proven wrong? There is nothing honorable about defending a bad decision. The GOP point to how the senators and congressmen believed, as the administration did, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But that intelligence came from the executive branch and when the intelligence is wrong the executive branch is responsible for it. Stephen Elliott

    via Kjell Olsen1716 days ago

  146. 16 November 2005

    1717 days ago

    20 Amazing Facts about Voting in the USA

    80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.

    via Kjell Olsen1717 days ago

  147. 1717 days ago

    The biggest story of our lives

    And he most certainly was [Kerry, winning], at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.

    The silence of traditional media on this subject is enough to establish their newfound bankruptcy. The revolution will have to start here.

    via Kjell Olsen1717 days ago

  148. 1717 days ago

    Deafening silence over GAO e-voting report, new evidence of abuse. | MetaFilter

    When the term ‘liberal’ (subscribing to an ideology, or current of political thought, which strives to maximize individual liberty through rights under law) is commonly used as an insult, liberty in essence is fucked.
    Jefferson would say widespread corruption of the voting system amounts to grounds for revolution. Tree of liberty, tyrants, et cetera. When the voting system itself is circumvented, democracy no longer exists. mullingitover

    via Kjell Olsen1717 days ago

  149. 15 November 2005

    1718 days ago

    I Was Wrong, but So Were You - Parsing Bush's new mantra.

    Bush admits he might have been wrong, but is still lying to us.

    via Kjell Olsen1718 days ago

  150. 14 November 2005

    1719 days ago

    White House keeps dossiers on more than 10,000 'political enemies'

    White House insiders tell disturbing tales of invasion of privacy, abuse of government power and use of expanded authority under the USA Patriot Act to dig into the personal lives of anyone the administration deems an enemy of the state.

    via Kjell Olsen1719 days ago

  151. 12 November 2005

    1721 days ago

    Graham's amendment passed!

    The last time this country suspended habeas corpus was for the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II, a travesty that is now universally recognized as a blot on our nation

    via Kjell Olsen1721 days ago

  152. 11 November 2005

    1722 days ago

    ... And why it should never be one - Los Angeles Times

    What real CIA field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust

    via Kjell Olsen1722 days ago

  153. 1723 days ago

    DrugReporter: Bush and Blow

    The reason corporate America backed Bush Sr. is because “he’ll do whatever the big boys want. And so will his son.”

    When asked about censorship, Bush replied that there “ought to be limits to freedom” when it comes to criticizing him personally.

    You get close to, and turn up something bad on Karl Rove, that will get you killed right there. Mr. Fly, an unnamed source

    Bush is a lying disgusting criminal fuckwit scumbag.

    via Kjell Olsen1723 days ago

  154. 10 November 2005

    1723 days ago

    Bush Administration Breaks Record

    Bush Administration Borrows more from Foreign Nations than Previous 42 Presidents Combined

    You think this is a joke? It isn’t.

    via Kjell Olsen1723 days ago

  155. 1723 days ago

    Arctic drilling dropped from House bill - Environment - MSNBC.com

    Provisions for drilling are still in the Senate’s version of the bill, but yesterday the House dropped them from theirs! If the House passes the bill today it goes into committee to reconcile differences between the two versions, where hopefully it won’t get back in.

    via Kjell Olsen1723 days ago

  156. 08 November 2005

    1725 days ago

    US Politics - Creepy

    I read a lot of news, and it makes me wonder whether the faction currently governing America is heavily populated with greedy vicious lying thieving sanctimonious underhanded heartless venial creeps. That is what the evidence suggests. But like I said, you wouldn

    via Kjell Olsen1725 days ago

  157. 1725 days ago

    Kansas school board redefines science

    This is a sad day. We’re becoming a laughingstock of not only the nation, but of the world, and I hate that. Janet Waugh, Kansas City Democrat and member of the school board

    via Kjell Olsen1725 days ago

  158. Vote

    1725 days ago

    It was my first chance at the poll booth, and I took advantage of it. Not much to say. There was an education levy on the ballot, which was just a little 4×4 square of yellow paper.

    I just couldn’t not vote. I’m sure pissed enough about politics these days (you couldn’t tell?). And it’s not just your right as a citizen, it’s your responsibility. Not voting ought void your membership to the democracy or something.

  159. 07 November 2005

    1726 days ago

    Impeach Bush

    If there was ever a time in history to impeach a President of the United States, it would be now. Barbra Streisand

    Kjell Olsen1726 days ago

  160. 06 November 2005

    1727 days ago

    boondocks_comic

    Boondocks gets animated tonight on Adult Swim.

    via Kjell Olsen1727 days ago

  161. Politics of Ignorance

    1727 days ago

    The problem is that when you try to enlighten the masses, it

  162. 1728 days ago

    Kerry Suspects 2004 Vote Fraud

    I could have told you this a goddamn year ago. I just pray to god America won’t have to go through three more years of Bush – god knows what kind of shithole we could be by then.

    My Election 2004 posts.

    via Kjell Olsen1728 days ago

  163. 04 November 2005

    1729 days ago

    GOP blocks inquiry into Bush's handling of war / Pelosi, Dems lose appeal vote after out-of-order ruling

    Fuckers.

    I think it brings shame to this House to be engaged in a coverup when it comes to revealing what’s happening in Iraq. Nancy Pelosi

    via Kjell Olsen1729 days ago

  164. 1729 days ago

    Cut thumbs off graffiti 'punks'

    I’m saying maybe you put them on TV and cut off a thumb… Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman

    Kjell Olsen1729 days ago

  165. Senate votes to begin drilling Alaskan oil

    1729 days ago

    What the fuck is wrong with my country?

    The idea of drilling in ANWR has the wisdom of an overweight diabetic eating the last 8 chocolate cake pieces at the buffet, just to succumb to his insulin shock. No offense to people who suffer from diabetes. threehundredandsixty

  166. 02 November 2005

    1731 days ago

    Students start walkout to protest war, recruiting

    Spring 2003 I did this – there were all kinds of kids. We drove to the U, about five minutes away, where there were teach in’s leading up to a march to the capitol.

    At Minneapolis South, about 100 students walked out.

    I still have a little bit of high school pride. As an aside, the soccer team did a game better then we did last year, losing in the semifinals of the state tourney. I wasn’t there, but it sounds like just as gut wrenching a game as the one we lost last year:

    And it did, spinning over the head of Minneapolis South goalkeeper John Moening and into the top of the net with only one second remaining in the first overtime, lifting the Royals to the Class 2A boys’ soccer title game with a dramatic 2-1 victory Tuesday.

    Woodbury won with one second left in the first overtime, on a desperate crack from 30 yards out. Last year we went down with maybe 4 minutes, and just about scored twice in before the whistle, but we just couldn’t quite manage.

    via Kjell Olsen1731 days ago

  167. 1731 days ago

    Confronting The American Lifestyle

    Americans basically want peace and prosperity. But right now, our economy is driving the opposite. In order to secure the oil we need, we’re trapped in a major war in Iraq. The commuting, shopping and activities that comprise our day-to-day lives are draining our pocketbooks and keeping families apart. Again, it’s not Jane Q. Public’s fault, it’s not the market’s fault. It’s the government’s fault for laying out the rules so poorly.

    via Kjell Olsen1731 days ago

  168. 1731 days ago

    Alito's Ratings Similar to Miers', Lower Than Roberts'

    I wonder what the chances of holding bush from successfully nominating a second justice to scotus before his term ends? He sure has been picking assholes lately.

    via Kjell Olsen1731 days ago

  169. 29 October 2005

    1735 days ago

    Forgeries, Lies and Cover-ups The Scandal isn't the Leak, But the Illegal War

    The crime to name a covert CIA official pales in comparison with conspiring to lead the nation to war under false pretenses.

    via Kjell Olsen1735 days ago

  170. 28 October 2005

    1736 days ago

    TomPaine.com - What To Expect Next

    Looks like Fitzgerald’s investigation will be a bit more like Chanukah then christmas, with smaller presents coming for a number of days.

    In the Libby case, the allegations suggest he was merely one of many officials

    via Kjell Olsen1736 days ago

  171. 1736 days ago

    The White House under siege

    If Mr Rove goes, Mr Bush will have lost his sheepdog just as his flock is starting to jump the fences.

    Good riddance.

    Ordinary Republican voters feel no great horror about future deficits or the process by which decisions about national security are made. But they may grow more restless if evangelical preachers take against Mr Bush

    via Kjell Olsen1736 days ago

  172. 27 October 2005

    1737 days ago

    Exxon Mobil posts largest quarterly profit ever

    Oil companies earn windfall profit, thanks to bush.

    via Kjell Olsen1737 days ago

  173. 26 October 2005

    1738 days ago

    Fitzgerald Must Broaden Investigation

    We are no longer just talking about a Republican culture of corruption and cronyism. We now have reason to believe that high crimes may have been committed at the highest level, wrongdoing that may have led us to war and imperiled our national security. Congressman Jerry Nadler

    via Kjell Olsen1738 days ago

  174. 1739 days ago

    Plamegate: Worse than Watergate | The Huffington Post

    To borrow a phrase from that era, let me make myself perfectly clear: I’m not saying that Plamegate is the same as Watergate. I’m saying it’s worse. Much, much worse. No one died as a result of Watergate, but 2,000 American soldiers have now been killed and thousands more wounded to rid the world of an imminent threat that wasn’t.
    Could there be anything bigger?

    via Kjell Olsen1739 days ago

  175. 25 October 2005

    Wellstone

    1739 days ago

    I just watched Wellstone!, and you’d better go see it yourself. Wellstone died three years ago today.

    These days, with fucking baboons dominating american politics, I’d sure love to see a guy like Paul show his face.

  176. 22 October 2005

    1742 days ago

    Secret MoD poll: Iraqis support attacks on British troops

    The bush administration has fucked Iraq up so bad that 82% of Iraqi’s are opposed to the presence of coalition troops, and less then 1% believe that anything we’ve done has improved the security of Iraq. Additionally,

    71 per cent of people rarely get safe clean water, 47 per cent never have enough electricity, 70 per cent say their sewerage system rarely works and 40 per cent of southern Iraqis are unemployed.

    The real kick in the balls comes when we figure out that if we do leave, things will get ten times worse.

    via Kjell Olsen1742 days ago

  177. 1742 days ago

    Corrupt, Incompetent and 'Off Center'

    The republicans, that is.

    Hacker and Pierson shine a light on the methods employed by the governing right-wing clique to maintain and expand their power without paying the price for their unpopular policies and base-focused system of rewards. Examining the 2001 tax cuts, the Bush energy plan, the Medicare drug bill and the deregulation of almost every industry that has a lobbying team and campaign-contribution budget, they expose tactics like “tailored disinformation,” designed to confuse a poorly informed public; Mafia-like manipulation of the levers of power in the House, Senate and White House that not only defenestrates the Democratic opposition but cuts off their sources of financial support; and a network of “New Power Brokers,” like the aforementioned DeLay, Grover Norquist and countless think tanks, media moguls, funders and lobbyists who work together to game the system at a level that is either too complicated or too boring to attract intelligent scrutiny.

    via Kjell Olsen1742 days ago

  178. 1742 days ago

    DeLay: Zero percent chance of jail time - Rita Cosby Live & Direct - MSNBC.com

    Fuck you, Tom DeLay.

    DeLay: I understand what it’s about. It’s not about me, they can’t beat us at the ballot, they can’t beat us in the legislative bodies. All they’ve got left are the courts and these renegade prosecutors.
    ...
    COSBY: Do you believe he’s out to get you personally?
    DELAY: Oh, no doubt about it.

    There was only one paragraph between the two quotes – does DeLay have anything but shit to spew?

    On his mugshot:

    DELAY: Oh, you already are. They’re selling t-shirts, especially by enemies. They’re using it all over the place. They’re doctoring it up. Yes, they’re trying their best to make it look as bad as possible. It’s hard to do, though.

    via Kjell Olsen1742 days ago

  179. 21 October 2005

    1743 days ago

    Fitzgerald's Historic Opportunity

    Could fizmas really be coming?

    Fitzgerald did not earn his reputation as an Irish alligator by going after the little guy. Presumably, he is trying to find evidence that Karl Rove launched a covert operation to create the forged documents and then conspired to out Valerie Plame when he learned the fraud was being uncovered by Plame

    via Kjell Olsen1743 days ago

  180. 20 October 2005

    1744 days ago

    Why Are You So Angry

    Jon: Are you still doing the boycott of France?
    O’Reilly: Yes, we’re boycotting France. That’s, that’s why we can’t watch Colbert.
    Jon: [Incredulous stammering]
    Audience: [booing]
    O’Reilly: [to audience] Oh, stop, stop it, will ya? What, people from Marseilles? What? [impersonating a marseillaise] Whooo, Whooo, give me more wine [imaginary glugging of wine]. [serious now] I mean these are our enemies over there! What is the matter wi…
    Jon: France?!!
    O’Reilly: What is the matter with you!

    People actually watch O’Reilly’s show? This country must be stupider then I could have ever imagined.

    I’ll admit to enjoying the Daily Show, there was a time that I wouldn’t miss an episode. But I’ve never watched Fox News. And holy shit – this guy has the biggest show on fox news? A fucking childrens book? A following?!

    via Kjell Olsen1744 days ago

  181. 18 October 2005

    1746 days ago

    The Normalization of Treason, the Republicans' gift to America

    The Republican party’s gift to the American people, and the Bush administration’s legacy, will be the normalization of treason. They are trying to convince Americans that betraying our country during wartime for personal gain is no more serious than running a stop sign or going 60 in a 55 zone.

    I can’t believe the change in politics since bush got elected. In 2000 I was in eighth grade, and took a politics class. I volunteered for both Gore and Mark Dayton (running for the only open MN Senate seat, still serving).

    I remember staying up late watching the election coverage and going to bed completely and utterly stunned.

    I’ve always gone to public schools within Minneapolis, and I remember in that 8th grade class of twenty or thirty, just one girl pledged republican. In my high school the only known republicans ware that same girl, and the health teacher.

    I’ve never understood how bush managed to get elected. But holy shit, he is sure fucking things up. I still can’t understand how people can put up with all the stuff he has done and is doing. I’ve stopped capitalizing his name, not to mention losing any shred of respect I ever had for him.

    (Yet all I do about it is show up at a student democrats meeting and flame about it?)

    via Kjell Olsen1746 days ago

  182. 12 October 2005

    1752 days ago

    Bush approval dips below 40 percent - Politics - MSNBC.com

    39% approve, less then 30% believe the country is heading in the right direction.

    via Kjell Olsen1752 days ago

  183. 1752 days ago

    Chicago Tribune - Obituaries

    Man dies, invited mourners to

    please send acerbic letters to Republicans.

    In lieu of flowers!

    via Kjell Olsen1752 days ago

  184. 1752 days ago

    Cheney's Halliburton stock options rose 3,281% last year, senator finds

    Cheney banks 3,281% on shares of Halliburton stock. The value of HB skyrocketed because it was handed contracts to rebuild disaster areas caused by the bush Administration, of which Cheney is second in command (assuming bush actually does something). Cheney used to be the CEO.

    via Kjell Olsen1752 days ago

  185. 11 October 2005

    1753 days ago

    Better off without Him

    In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion

    via Kjell Olsen1753 days ago

  186. 09 October 2005

    1755 days ago

    Pombo Bill to Gut Endangered Species Act Clears First Hurdle

    Dick Pombo (R, CA) says the existing [endangered species] law is too cumbersome in the courts and too costly for landowners and developers. His new bill contains provisions calling for the onus of species protection to fall to voluntary efforts by property owners and local authorities around the country, purportedly freeing up the federal government from oversight and the courts from red tape.

    via Kjell Olsen1755 days ago

  187. 1755 days ago

    Rove's 4th Grand Jury Appearance to Focus on "Discrepancies in Testimony"

    Perjury.

    via Kjell Olsen1755 days ago

  188. 07 October 2005

    1757 days ago

    Bush's Class-War Budget

    It may sound shrill to describe President Bush as someone who takes food from the mouths of babes and gives the proceeds to his millionaire friends. Yet his latest budget proposal is top-down class warfare in action. And it offers the Democrats an opportunity, if they’re willing to take it.

    Here’s a comparison: the Bush budget proposal would cut domestic discretionary spending, adjusted for inflation, by 16 percent over the next five years. That would mean savage cuts in education, health care, veterans’ benefits and environmental protection. Yet these cuts would save only about $66 billion per year, about one-sixth of the budget deficit.
    On the other side, a rollback of Mr. Bush’s cuts in tax rates for high-income brackets, on capital gains and on dividend income would yield more than $120 billion per year in extra revenue—eliminating almost a third of the budget deficit—yet have hardly any effect on middle-income families. (Estimates from the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution show that such a rollback would cost families with incomes between $25,000 and $80,000 an average of $156.)
    Why, then, shouldn’t a rollback of high-end tax cuts be on the table?

    Because bush is just a stupid fuck?

    Kjell Olsen1757 days ago

  189. 1757 days ago

    Right-Wing House Twists Arms, Thwarts Democracy To Pass Oil Industy Windfall

    Shame, shame, shame. Chanted by senators in opposition to today’s Gasoline for America’s Security Act.

    But the bill is essentially a giveback to the oil industry

    via Kjell Olsen1757 days ago

  190. 1757 days ago

    AlterNet: EnviroHealth: Making a Mockery of Conservation

    The real target of the refinery bill is the Clean Air Act’s New Source Review (NSR). The NSR program requires owners of aging power plants and industrial facilities to modernize pollution controls whenever they expand their facilities and increase emissions. But the refinery bill doesn’t just exempt refineries from New Source Review requirements. It exempts ALL energy industry facilities—approximately 20,000 large industrial facilities and power plants across the country—not just on the Gulf Coast.

    And next up: drilling ANWR. Fuck.

    Kjell Olsen1757 days ago

  191. 06 October 2005

    1758 days ago

    BBC - Press Office - George Bush on Elusive Peace

    I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq

    via Kjell Olsen1758 days ago

  192. 1758 days ago

    Text of Gore Speech at Media Conference

    I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America’s fabled “marketplace of ideas” now functions.

    Gore alludes our age to that of the founding fathers – then it was the printing press, now it’s the internet. Before media stagnated due to the strong hand of the ruling elite, now it’s strangled by corporations. What could our situation lead to, if theirs led to such great things?

    But some extremely important elements of American Democracy have been pushed to the sidelines . And the most prominent casualty has been the “marketplace of ideas” that was so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders. It effectively no longer exists.

    I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. Thomas Jefferson

    Television brought on the “refeudalism of the public sphere” (??Jurgen Habermas??), reducing average citizens to the level of peasants and serfs, manipulated to serve interests not of their own. One way street.

    I don’t like the direction in which America is headed. Hate it, even. To the point that I’m becoming ashamed of being American.

    It seriously embarrasses me that my peers watch four and a half hours of TV a day. People don’t think! People hate reading! And I can’t ignore the educated demographic – but without encouraging the entire population to be privy to it more and more people just don’t care.

    Our democracy has been hallowed out. The opinions of the voters are, in effect, purchased, just as demand for new products is artificially created. Decades ago Walter Lippman wrote, “the manufacture of consent…was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy…but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique…under the impact of propaganda, it is no longer plausible to believe in the original dogma of democracy.”

    via Kjell Olsen1758 days ago

  193. 05 October 2005

    1759 days ago

    Can This Nomination Be Justified?

    Fucking shit no.

    In addition, the president has forfeited his right to be trusted as a custodian of the Constitution.

    I’d go as far as to say his right to be trusted at absolutely anything. An utterly complete failure.

    via Kjell Olsen1759 days ago

  194. 04 October 2005

    1760 days ago

    George Monbiot: The police abuse terror laws to penalise dissent

    No act has been passed over the past 20 years with the aim of preventing antisocial behaviour, disorderly conduct, trespass, harassment and terrorism that has not also been deployed to criminalise a peaceful public engagement in politics.

    via Kjell Olsen1760 days ago

  195. 03 October 2005

    1761 days ago

    JUST DELETED FROM DAVID FRUM'S BLOG

    She rose to her present position by her absolute devotion to George Bush. I mentioned last week that she told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met. To flatter on such a scale a person must either be an unscrupulous dissembler, which Miers most certainly is not, or a natural follower. And natural followers do not belong on the Supreme Court of the United States. David Frum

    Sounds to me like a conflict of interest.

    via Kjell Olsen1761 days ago

  196. 1761 days ago

    Ike Was Right About War Machine

    and video. Not a happy man.

    We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President and on leaving the White House in 1961, he said this:

    via Kjell Olsen1761 days ago

  197. 02 October 2005

    1762 days ago

    Crooks and Liars

    ...a source close to this told me this week, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions. George Stephanopoulos

    via Kjell Olsen1762 days ago

  198. 1762 days ago

    Perfection of Democracy

    As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart

    via Kjell Olsen1762 days ago

  199. 01 October 2005

    1763 days ago

    Audit Assails the White House for Public Relations Spending - New York Times

    Bush is now officially a criminal, when will he do his time?

    via Kjell Olsen1763 days ago

  200. 30 September 2005

    1764 days ago

    U.S. Needs to Go Goodwill Hunting

    America is less a beacon of hope than a dangerous force to be countered.

    via Kjell Olsen1764 days ago

  201. 28 September 2005

    1766 days ago

    Opiate of the masses

    But where do beliefs come into all this? Religion maybe, but won’t blind allegiance to any social club lead to the exact same thing? Is it just me, or do a significant amount of people eschew thinking completely?

    via Kjell Olsen1766 days ago

  202. 26 September 2005

    1768 days ago

    interdictor: Please Don't Tell Me That FEMA Pays $500 Per Hammer!

    Our government is completely and utterly retarded.

    Kjell Olsen1768 days ago

  203. 1768 days ago

    Greenspan: US has lost control of budget deficit
    via Kjell Olsen1768 days ago

  204. 18 September 2005

    1776 days ago

    A Letter to All Who Voted for George W. Bush from Michael Moore

    My Republican friends, does it bother you that we are the laughing stock of the world?

    Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can’t string a coherent sentence together. The middle class can’t pay the mortgage or the hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever.

    via Kjell Olsen1776 days ago

  205. 17 September 2005

    1777 days ago

    Hijacking Catastrophe

    Teriffic look at how neocons have taken their agenda to the highest level of american government.

    via Kjell Olsen1777 days ago

  206. 16 September 2005

    1778 days ago

    Google

    Type failure. Press I’m Feeling Lucky. Realize that the world becoming a better place. (If it were me, bush would come up with the term cocksucker).

    Google posted a nice response, acknowledging that google hasn’t done a thing – people just really don’t like george bush.

    via Kjell Olsen1778 days ago

  207. 15 September 2005

    1780 days ago

    Is the Orleans Levee Board doing its job?

    NOLA levee board spent money on a public fountain, two freeway overpasses (to easy access to a tourist casino) and other frivolous causes.

    via Kjell Olsen1780 days ago

  208. 12 September 2005

    1782 days ago

    Divers Find Explosive Residue On New Orleans Ruptured Levy

    Levees in nola were imploded, perhaps to save more valuable parts of the city? And by who? Debris were smuggled away from the scene by an unnamed army diver and tested in an army lab.

    If these allegations prove true, the ruptured levee which flooded New Orleans was a deliberate act of mass destruction perpetrated by someone with access to military-grade UNDERWATER high explosives.

    via Kjell Olsen1782 days ago

  209. 11 September 2005

    1783 days ago

    Taking Stock of the Forever War

    This, and the sheer number and breadth of terrorist attacks, suggest strongly that Al Qaeda has now become Al Qaedaism – that under the American and allied assault, what had been a relatively small, conspiratorial organization has mutated into a worldwide political movement, with thousands of followers eager to adopt its methods and advance its aims. Call it viral Al Qaeda, carried by strongly motivated next-generation followers who download from the Internet’s virtual training camp a perfectly adequate trade-craft in terror. 1

    Four years after we watched the towers fall, Americans have not succeeded in “ridding the world of evil.” We have managed to show ourselves, our friends and most of all our enemies the limits of American power. 2

    In a letter to bin Laden that was intercepted by American forces in January 2004, Zarqawi asked: “When the Americans disappear. . .what will become of our situation?” 9

    Now, day by day, the illusion is slipping away, and with it what authority the Americans had in Iraq. What is coming to take its place looks increasingly like a failed state. 10

    He [Bin Laden] had struck at the American will, and his strategy, which relied in effect on the persistent reluctance of American leaders to speak frankly to their people about the costs and burdens of war and to expend the political capital that such frank talk would require, had proved largely correct. 13

    In this new world, where what is necessary to go on the attack is not armies or training or even technology but desire and political will, we have ensured, by the way we have fought this forever war, that it is precisely these qualities our enemies have in large and growing supply. 14

    via Kjell Olsen1783 days ago

  210. 09 September 2005

    1785 days ago

    None Dare Call It Stolen (Harpers.org)

    This democracy can survive a plot to hijack an election. What it cannot survive is our indifference to, or unawareness of, the evidence that such a plot has succeeded.

    Preserving Democracy describes three phases of Republican chicanery: the run-up to the election, the election itself, and the post-election cover-up. The wrongs exposed are not mere dirty tricks (though Bush/Cheney also went in heavily for those) but specific violations of the U.S. and Ohio constitutions, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the National Voter Registration Act, and the Help America Vote Act. Although Conyers trod carefully when the report came out, insisting that the crimes did not affect the outcome of the race (a point he had to make, he told me,

    via Kjell Olsen1785 days ago

  211. 07 September 2005

    1787 days ago

    ongoing • The Grim High-Def Future

    So I guess that in the world of high-def, you just won’t be able to buy disks for your kids from overseas… wouldn’t want them to learn any of those nasty foreign languages, would you? There’s an explosion coming, and it ain’t gonna be pretty.

    You could always bypass media and download it. Who even buys media anymore? Anti-piracy is so draconian, couldn’t the industry try and work with the (presumably larger population of) good people instead of fucking everyone because of a few bad ones?

    via Kjell Olsen1787 days ago

  212. 06 September 2005

    1788 days ago

    Destroying the National Parks

    Bush is doing his best to fuck up America. His department of the interior is passing a draft of new legislation regulating our National parks, and it isn’t pretty.

    Mr. Hoffman’s rewrite would open up nearly every park in the nation to off-road vehicles, snowmobiles and Jet Skis. According to his revision, the use of such vehicles would become one of the parks’ purposes. To accommodate such activities, he redefines impairment to mean an irreversible impact. To prove that an activity is impairing the parks, under Mr. Hoffman’s rules, you would have to prove that it is doing so irreversibly – a very high standard of proof. This would have a genuinely erosive effect on the standards used to protect the national parks.

    Who the fuck voted for this piece of shit?

    via Kjell Olsen1788 days ago

  213. 03 September 2005

    1791 days ago

    The World Can't Wait! Drive out the Bush Regime. Mobilize for November 2, 2005!

    I’m sure tired of all this shit. Fliers.

    Kjell Olsen1791 days ago

  214. 02 September 2005

    1792 days ago

    The Pirate Bay - The worlds largest BitTorrent tracker

    Spectacular interview with Ray Nagin, Mayor of NOLA. You have to listen to this. (transcript)

    via Kjell Olsen1792 days ago

  215. 30 August 2005

    1795 days ago

    Attytood: When the levee breaks

    Although 2004 was the worst Hurricane season in the southeast US, Bush dramatically cut funding to local Hurricane protection authorities. Enter Katrina, and N.O. is 10 feet under and the water is still rising.

    via Kjell Olsen1795 days ago

  216. 26 August 2005

    1799 days ago

    Open Letter (Flying Spaghetti Monster)

    This is getting out of hand. Really. But it’s so spectacularly nerdy.

    via Kjell Olsen1799 days ago

  217. 16 August 2005

    1809 days ago

    The Future of Terrorism: What al-Qaida Really Wants - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

    Or: we all are fucked.

    This final stage is described as “definitive victory.” Hussein writes that in the terrorists’ eyes, because the rest of the world will be so beaten down by the “one-and-a-half billion Muslims,” the caliphate will undoubtedly succeed. This phase should be completed by 2020, although the war shouldn’t last longer than two years.

    Supposedly the terrorists goal is to consolidate the muslim world into it’s own Islamic caliphate. Think the USSR, but this time with radical islam instead of communism, and five times the population (USSR 293mil 1991, vs 1.5bil speculated in this article). And then fight the west.

    Kjell Olsen1809 days ago

  218. 22 July 2005

    1834 days ago

    American Civil Liberties Union : Defense Department Refuses to Turn Over Abuse Photographs; Asks to File Secret Brief Justifying Refusal

    In a letter filed at the eleventh hour, the Department of Defense claims that photographs and videos of abuse that the court had previously ordered redacted for future release “could result in harm to individuals” for reasons that will be set forth in a memorandum and three declarations that the government will file under seal with the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York.

    Scumbags. Is there much else in Washington these days? And I’m sure there is, it’s just not doing much to fight the scumbags, resulting in large demographics becoming utterly apolitical. As much as I want to care, and as I know I should care, why should I? These scumbags lie, they cheat, they ignore dissent, and they surely never rightly earned the thrones they sit on. And really, can anybody can dispute that?

    via Kjell Olsen1834 days ago

  219. 1834 days ago

    Paul Wellstone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    I felt that in the light of the last post I might as well showcase my number one political hero, Paul Wellstone. It might have been that I was at an impressionable age while he was a prominent figure in local politics (I tend to think it was because he was simply a spectacular person), but he is my number one cultural icon.

    He was just an honest and hard working guy, who spoke from his heart and worked for what he felt was right. The thing that makes him stand out against his peers is that he was a good man before he was a politician. In the throes of his final campaign he voted against the resolution for war with Iraq, after confessing to his wife just that morning that the vote would cause him to lose his senate race. Nobody in politics today is as earnest a man as he was, I don’t know if anyone will ever be.

    Here are a few Wellstone quotes, a quick primer on his life, and the Wellstone Action Foundation.

    via Kjell Olsen1834 days ago

  220. 1834 days ago

    Norm Coleman: Minister of Agitprop | Ari Berman

    I worked a few times for the Wellstone campaign before Wellstone was killed (just days before the election), and seeing Coleman sitting in his place still just floors me. Mostly because Wellstone was the best politician I ever knew, and in comparison Coleman is just scum. And it shows.

    via Kjell Olsen1834 days ago

  221. 08 July 2005

    1848 days ago

    CNN.com - First Stop, Iraq - Mar. 24, 2003

    Fuck Saddam. we’re taking him out. George Bush, spring 2002

    via Kjell Olsen1848 days ago

  222. 17 June 2005

    1869 days ago

    UPI Hears... - (United Press International)

    Fringe ideas like this always get me going. I can’t believe them, but if they were actually true they would end up being so spectacular that I can’t stop thinking about their repercussions.

    Reynolds commented from his Texas A&M office, “It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government’s collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings.”

    via Kjell Olsen1869 days ago

  223. 14 April 2005

    1933 days ago

    Transcript of interview with Tom DeLay - The Washington Times: Nation/Politics - April 14, 2005

    Tom DeLay is one scary bitch:

    Mr. DeLay: Not zealous. I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that’s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn’t stop them.

    I’m not quite up to speed on these ethics violations of his and the issues around that, but christ DeLay. You are the reason we have a separation of powers in this whole democracy thing, and I don’t think that you’ll be able to pull off putting congress in charge of the nation.

    via Kjell Olsen1933 days ago

  224. 11 April 2005

    RollingStone.com: The Crusaders: Politics

    1936 days ago

    I miss Social Studies. A quick look at what is wrong with lots of America right now. Just a rant.

  225. 07 April 2005

    1940 days ago

    RollingStone.com:The Long Emergency: Politics

    The United States passed its own oil peak—about 11 million barrels a day—in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.

    Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.
    It will change everything about how we live.

    No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

    We’re screwed, doomsday is coming, and this is an entirely plausible – if pessimistic – account.

    bq The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world’s richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq’s oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.

    So with china and india exploding in both population and consumerism/consumption, how do we expect to ration the worlds quickly evaporating pool of oil?

    We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. [...] In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that “the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.”

    Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.

    The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

    The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. [...] These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.

    The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the “level of service” (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.

    We shouldn’t fuck the nat’l rail systems:

    Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.

    Kjell Olsen1940 days ago

  226. 28 March 2005

    1950 days ago

    Jeremy Scahill: Sgrena Sets the Record Straight

    According to Klein, when Calipari was killed and Sgrena wounded, they were on a secured road that can only be accessed through the heavily-fortified Green Zone and is reserved exclusively for top foreign embassy and US officials. “It’s a completely separate road, actually a Saddam-era road, it would seem, that allowed his vehicles to pass directly from the airport to his palace,” says Klein. “And now that is the secured route between the U.S. military base at the airport and the U.S. controlled Green Zone and the U.S. embassy.”

    “It was simply a tank parked on the side of the road that opened fire on them. There was no process of trying to stop the car, she said, or any signals. From her perspective, it was just opening fire by a tank.”

    That could explain why the US military in Iraq has blocked the Italian government from inspecting the Italians’ vehicle, even though the car is the property of the Italian government which bought it from the rental agency after this incident. “I think they have something to hide if they won’t give the car over for inspection,” Sgrena told Klein. “It’s very strange. If there is nothing to hide, why not let Italian justice officials see the car?”

    What is all this? Are we really this clueless in Iraq right now? Christ, I hope that Sgrena si somehow mistaken, that she is exaggerating out of shock, because otherwise we just can’t know whats going to happen next in Iraq.

    via Kjell Olsen1950 days ago

  227. 26 March 2005

    1952 days ago

    The Daily Whim: Republican De-Evolution

    And all of this has shown the fractures within the Republican party (with more to come), fractures that have been held together by having a two term President and control of both houses of Congress for the first time in, I don’t know, forever. I think it was the goal that kept them together. Now, they’re a bit like the dog who’s chased cars his whole life, and now has finally caught one. What exactly are you going to do with it? And in 2008, with no “heir apparent” to Bush, I think we’ll see all these fractures erupt. Viciously.

    via Kjell Olsen1952 days ago

  228. 20 March 2005

    1958 days ago

    The Daily Whim: Get Your Own Personal Bill

    Is it just me, or has much of our congress, and even the rest of out federal government, en masse become raving lunatics? All this Terry Schiavo bull, Iraq war bull, Bush being re-elected bull, social security bull, and bush has only served two and a half months of his second term!

    I ask, are there any limits to their power, or their perversion of priorities? If they will strip state’s rights on a 48 hour whim, what right will they strip next when it becomes inconvenient, or a good point for political triangulation?

    “We should exhaust every avenue before we take a life of a human being,” House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said. “That’s the very least we can do for her.”
    Do you think Delay would do the same for you? If it was to his political benefit, he sure would. Since he’s in the frying pan on multiple ethics charges, it behooves him to fire up his core base on his behalf, and this is a primo opportunity. Likewise, Congress has been unable to do the Big Things (a budget, SS reform, etc.), so this makes great news-inducing busy work. It’s important to look like you’re doing something, even if it’s only subpoenaing multi-millionaires on steroids and the comatose.

    So I’m going to have my own special session. It’s time to update your Living Will, people, and include a new clause: “My wishes, as expressed here, supersede any and all new laws or bills Congress or any other body may pass trying to save me. And any Congressperson who attempts to do so will be haunted mercilessly when I finally do go. Starting with Tom Delay, on general principles.”

    Kjell Olsen1958 days ago

  229. 18 March 2005

    1960 days ago

    U.S. National Debt Clock

    This just about choked me: the only word that comes to mind in expressing this sort of thing is, well, fuck!

    The estimated population of the United States is 295,692,676
    so each citizen’s share of this debt is $26,300.01.
    The National Debt has continued to increase an average of
    $2.35 billion per day since September 30, 2004!
    Concerned? Then tell Congress and the White House!

    via Kjell Olsen1960 days ago

  230. 16 March 2005

    1962 days ago

    The New York Times > Washington > Senate Votes to Allow Arctic Drilling

    While this afternoon’s vote is not the final word on the issue, it nevertheless made drilling in the wilds of Alaska – an idea favored by the oil industry and fiercely opposed by environmental groups – far more likely than before.

    The closeness of this afternoon’s vote could be a prelude to bitter debate ahead. President Bush and many Republicans say drilling in the refuge would help make the United States less dependent on foreign sources of oil.

    Good – looks like the deal isn’t sealed, but how could we go about doing something like this to ourselves? And what is there that one can do to fight it?

    Maybe waltz on over to the senate and tell your representatives what you think – you are pissed, right?

    via Kjell Olsen1962 days ago

  231. 15 March 2005

    1963 days ago

    Profit at any cost | MetaFilter

    Stuff like this just ought to break everyones heart – but I guess it doesn’t, and looks ready to pass and become reality. Fuck.

    via Kjell Olsen1963 days ago

  232. 08 March 2005

    1970 days ago

    votefraud

    A florida programmer who claims to have coded prototype voting software with secret built in vote altering functions (give the party of your choice 51%) comes out about it. But who believes what they hear on the internet? I sure hope I could believe this…

    Did Bush win? Bush could not have won. Take Florida or Ohio. A switch of either would change the outcome. In reality Bush probably lost both.

    What can we do about it? Not only has another election been stolen but our democracy is now gone. The machines decide, not the voters. First and foremost, we must insist that the machine be replaced by machines that can be verified vote for vote. Integrity of the vote is paramount to democracy. The breakdown of trust in the system will rob this country of any legitimacy. We must force out of office any Republicans that have been benefited by this betrayal.

    via Kjell Olsen1970 days ago

  233. 06 March 2005

    1972 days ago

    AlterNet: Dearth of a Nation

    US is falling behind in technology markets:

    “We no longer have a lock on technology,” David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and the current president of the California Institute of Technology, wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times. “Europe is increasingly competitive, and Asia has the potential to blow us out of the water.”

    A good example is broadband. Most experts predict that when a critical mass of homes and businesses acquire high-speed internet connections, an explosion of economic growth will follow as whole new industries, such as video-conferencing and online video gaming, become possible. But these new industries are likely to flourish in whichever countries achieve near-universal broadband first, and at the current pace, that won’t be the United States.

    So subsidize it… Please?

    But overall the US is doing squat right now to position their (our) economy well in the future. Energy efficiency? We don’t even give a rats ass, and that could turn into trouble.

    Kjell Olsen1972 days ago

  234. 09 February 2005

    1997 days ago

    George W Bush and the 14 points of fascism - Project for the OLD American Century

    Proof this guy is a jackass – why did we elect him again? I getting worried for my tired country.

    via Kjell Olsen1997 days ago

  235. 20 January 2005

    2017 days ago

    dangerousmeta! » On this inauguration day,

    Excellent quotes, telling Bush off in the worlds of famous politicians and people.

    via Kjell Olsen2017 days ago

  236. Inaguration Day and Rotten old Politics

    2017 days ago

    I grew up spoiled, playing in my backyard with puppies, ponies, and a decent man acting president of the United States. What happened?

  237. 03 July 2004

    Reason

    Robert B. Reich

    2218 days ago

    A good solid political book, Reason actually gave me a little hope for the future of America. Reich shows how the Radical Conservatives diligently worked their agenda into the Nation’s premier tier and then savaged everyone, and plots his case to take the country back.

  238. Also somewhat recently

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