1. 13 July 2008

    Citizenship Papers

    86 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.

  2. 07 May 2008

    Little Brother

    153 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.

  3. 18 January 2008

    263 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.

  4. 05 January 2008

    The Best Democracy Money can Buy

    Greg Palast

    276 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.

  5. 05 August 2007

    Dear Klobuchar

    429 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.

  6. 15 July 2007

    Deer Hunting with Jesus

    Joe Bageant

    450 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

  7. 28 September 2006

    740 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 Olsen740 days ago

  8. 740 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

  9. 27 August 2006

    772 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 Olsen772 days ago

  10. 24 August 2006

    775 days ago

    Congressional redistricting | How to rig an election

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

    via Kjell Olsen775 days ago

  11. 14 August 2006

    785 days ago

    Ironing the Flag

    On August 15, 2006 21:30 EST the United States will have been at war in Iraq longer than it was at war with Germany in World War II.

    via Kjell Olsen785 days ago

  12. 16 July 2006

    814 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 Olsen814 days ago

  13. 02 June 2006

    858 days ago

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

    America is massively broken:

    The inmates are running the asylum.

    via Kjell Olsen858 days ago

  14. 858 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 Olsen858 days ago

  15. 24 May 2006

    867 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 Olsen867 days ago

  16. 19 May 2006

    872 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 Olsen872 days ago

  17. 07 May 2006

    884 days ago

    Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. [...] Is there no other way the world may live?

    Dwight D. Eisenhower

  18. 04 April 2006

    917 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 Olsen917 days ago

  19. 26 February 2006

    954 days ago

    Bush's Mysterious "New Programs"

    Given Bush

    via Kjell Olsen954 days ago

  20. 07 February 2006

    973 days ago

    Let's talk about debt.

    Fiscal year 07: defense spending +7% (It’s already eating 55% of your tax dollars). National debt: +45% since monsieur bush weaseled his way into washington. My faith in our gov’t? minus way to fucking much.

    via Kjell Olsen973 days ago

  21. 05 February 2006

    975 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 Olsen975 days ago

  22. 31 January 2006

    Just great

    980 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.

  23. 15 January 2006

    996 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 Olsen996 days ago

  24. 07 January 2006

    1004 days ago

    Tuition-free MIT

    College tuition today is extortion. And not just at MIT. The U of M charges $8,000/semester, and that doesn’t cover your room and board or your books.

    my ideal world: a high school girl in Vietnam with a cable modem attending all the MIT classes that she wants. Philip Greenspun

    And why not?

    via Kjell Olsen1004 days ago

  25. 05 January 2006

    1006 days ago

    Americans, War Is the Answer

    I don

    via Kjell Olsen1006 days ago

  26. 23 December 2005

    1019 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

  27. 17 December 2005

    Bush on the Fourth Amendment

    1025 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

  28. 10 December 2005

    1032 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.

  29. 18 November 2005

    1054 days ago

    oligarchy

    Oligarchy (

    via Kjell Olsen1054 days ago

  30. 12 November 2005

    1060 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 Olsen1060 days ago

  31. 18 October 2005

    1085 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 Olsen1085 days ago

  32. 12 October 2005

    1091 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 Olsen1091 days ago

  33. 11 October 2005

    1092 days ago

    US Martial Law and Domestic Detention Camps

    We sure are walking a fine line my side of the atlantic these days.

    Details of these plans emerged during the 1987 Iran-Contra scandal. They included executive orders providing for suspension of the constitution, the imposition of martial law, internment camps, and the turning over of government to the president and FEMA.

    the truth is yes – you do have these stand by provisions, and the plans are here…whereby you could, in the name of stopping terrorism…evoke the military and arrest Americans and put them in detention camps. Henry Gonzales (D, Texas, House)

    via Kjell Olsen1092 days ago

  34. 1092 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 Olsen1092 days ago

  35. 30 September 2005

    1103 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 Olsen1103 days ago

  36. 26 September 2005

    1107 days ago

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

    Our government is completely and utterly retarded.

    Kjell Olsen1107 days ago

  37. 1107 days ago

    Greenspan: US has lost control of budget deficit
    via Kjell Olsen1107 days ago

  38. 11 April 2005

    RollingStone.com: The Crusaders: Politics

    1275 days ago

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

  39. 20 January 2005

    1356 days ago

    dangerousmeta! » On this inauguration day,

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

    via Kjell Olsen1356 days ago

  40. Also somewhat recently

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