Shocked!
I am shocked to hear that the FBI has used the PATRIOT Act vastly more under Obama when looking in to things that have dick with terror.
Shocked, I tell you.
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Content
Wait a Second . . .
It’s okay to foist Obamacare and its many added costs on to the private sector, but not on to those who brought it about? Politico:
Dozens of lawmakers and aides are so afraid that their health insurance premiums will skyrocket next year thanks to Obamacare that they are thinking about retiring early or just quitting.
The fear: Government-subsidized premiums will disappear at the end of the year under a provision in the health care law that nudges aides and lawmakers onto the government health care exchanges, which could make their benefits exorbitantly expensive.Democratic and Republican leaders are taking the issue seriously, but first they need more specifics from the Office of Personnel Management on how the new rule should take effect — a decision that Capitol Hill sources expect by fall, at the latest. The administration has clammed up in advance of a ruling, sources on both sides of the aisle said.
If the issue isn’t resolved, and massive numbers of lawmakers and aides bolt, many on Capitol Hill fear it could lead to a brain drain just as Congress tackles a slew of weighty issues — like fights over the Tax Code and immigration reform.
The problem is far more acute in the House, where lawmakers and aides are generally younger and less wealthy. Sources said several aides have already given lawmakers notice that they’ll be leaving over concerns about Obamacare. Republican and Democratic lawmakers said the chatter about retiring now, to remain on the current health care plan, is constant.
Rep. John Larson, a Connecticut Democrat in leadership when the law passed, said he thinks the problem will be resolved.
“If not, I think we should begin an immediate amicus brief to say, ‘Listen this is simply not fair to these employees,’” Larson told POLITICO. “They are federal employees.”
Fuck you, John Larson. If it’s okay for the rest of America to burden the exorbitant cost rises for health insurance due solely to a bill that you fucking approved, you and your aides can do it too. Eat your own fucking dog food, asshole.
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The Way Things Are Supposed to Work
Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian concerning a functioning, democratic society:
The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what they do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals.
This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.
This is exactly right. I should know virtually everything that government is doing, and the government should know virtually nothing about what I am doing. It is my job to judge them. And I can’t do that if everything they do is shrouded in secrecy. The only way to return to the default is to radically diminish the scope and size of the federal government. The goliath is unaccountable, and that unaccountability is being used against us. It time for it to end.
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GMO Crops
GMO Crops: shown to make poor people not poor and not hungry.
Controlling for other factors, the adoption of GM cotton has significantly improved calorie consumption and dietary quality, resulting from increased family incomes. This technology has reduced food insecurity by 15–20% among cotton-producing households.
So GMO crops help people have more income and eat better, raising their overall quality of life significantly. Opposition is immoral.
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The Problem
The mass corruption and continuous shredding of our rights isn’t the perceived problem, but the leaks which expose them. If you’re so worried about leaks, perhaps you ought not engage in tactics that repulse those who have knowledge of said tactics that they feel it their moral obligation to leak it.
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When I Said It
Kristen Breitweiser at Huffington Post:
For years during the Bush administration, many groups fought against the Patriot Act and its illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens. They screamed about pre-emptive war based on lies. They questioned illegal “detainment” of “enemy combatants.” They were horrified by torture and extraordinary renditions. They fought for the sanctity and protection of whistleblowers. They spoke out against Cheney and Rumsfeld and their evil Executive Branch power-grab that threatened the very principles of democracy, our Constitution and our precious balance of powers.
And yet, where are these people now?
Where are their eyes, their ears, and their screaming voices?
Why aren’t their fists in the air and their passions emboldened?
Where is our collective conscience?
Because at this point, our Constitutional rights and privileges — our national security — are once again under attack.
We all need to pull ourselves out of our collective morass of self-absorption and myopic disconnect and start paying better attention — hell, ANY attention — to exactly what is going on in our country at large.
We need to start asking questions and demanding answers.
We need to rein in Obama’s power. And the power of the Executive Branch.
Because at this point, given the boundless parameters now put in place by our Nobel Peace Prize-winning-former-community-organizer-of-a-President, none of us can afford to be innocent, benign bystanders.
Of course when I said that government encroachment was a problem and that we have real cause to fear our government, I was called a loonie who ought put my tinfoil hat back on. Neocons brought us the total surveillance state; liberals ensured that it would stay forever. For that they can go fuck themselves.
Government is the problem, not who’s running it.
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Impeachment
Fast and Furious, Benghazi, IRS targeting of opposition political groups, spying on journalists in the AP and Fox News (and surely others), murder drones, killing American citizens without a semblance of due process, mass spying by attaining broad phone records of millions of Americans for years.
It seems to me that it’s about time time someone bring it up.
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Heroics Verboten
Punished. For protecting a fellow student from a knife-wielding bully. Wait, what? Yes, you read that right. A bully was in an altercation with a kid in middle school. A third student stepped in and assisted by pushing the bully out of the way. He was called in to the principal’s office and . . .
That’s when Leah O’Donnell, Briar’s mother, received a call from the vice-principal.
“They phoned me and said, ‘Briar was involved in an incident today,’” she said. “That he decided to ‘play hero’ and jump in.”
Ms. O’Donnell was politely informed the school did not “condone heroics,” she said. Instead, Briar should have found a teacher to handle the situation.
“I asked: ‘In the time it would have taken him to go get a teacher, could that kid’s throat have been slit?’ She said yes, but that’s beside the point. That we ‘don’t condone heroics in this school.’ ”
Instead of getting a pat on the back for his bravery, Briar was made to feel as if he had done something terribly wrong. The police were called, the teen filed a statement and his locker was searched.
A child was punished for helping another, perhaps saving him from grave injury, because they don’t condone his heroics not using the official, state sanctioned authority. They openly admit that it’s better to risk injury and use the official apparatus than to protect oneself. I hope these people are attacked one day, and suffer painfully as they await the police. We wouldn’t want them being a hero or anything.
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As If
It’s as if the words “Congress shall make no law” have some room for interpretation or something. The New Yorker:
In the long run, to rebalance the national-security state and to otherwise revitalize American democracy, the United States requires a Supreme Court willing to deepen protections for investigative reporters, as the majority in Branzburg would not. In response to criticism about the A.P. case, Obama has reintroduced federal legislation that would clarify journalists’ rights. Such a federal “shield law” might be constructive, but new legislation with overly broad national-security exceptions would be even worse than the status quo.
The Supreme Court’s ONLY responsibility in this matter is to say “look, government; this shit isn’t that hard. “Congress shall make no law” means Congress shall make no fucking law, goddammit.” And yes, carving out “special circumstances” which recognize “national security” in any shape is a really bad fucking idea.
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Glad to Know
I’m really fucking glad to know that the tax dollars that are stolen from my income are used to subsidize rich people driving fancy cars.
First, there’s the $7500 taxback bonus that every buyer gets and every taxpayer pays. Then there are generous state subsidies ($2500 in California, $4000 in Illinois—the bluer the state, the more the taxpayers get gouged), all paid to people forking out $63K (plus taxes) for the base version, to roughly $100K for the really quick one.
“But Tesla made a profit!” says people who advocate for using tax dollars on greendoggles. Oh really?
The latest round of Tesla wonderment came when it reported its first quarterly profit earlier this month. TSLA stock darned near doubled in a week. Musk then borrowed $150 million from Goldman Sachs (shocking!) and floated a cool billion in new stock and long-term debt. That’s how we—the taxpayers—were repaid.
[. . .]
Tesla didn’t generate a profit by selling sexy cars, but rather by selling sleazy emissions “credits,” mandated by the state of California’s electric vehicle requirements. The competition, like Honda, doesn’t have a mass market plug-in to meet the mandate and therefore must buy the credits from Tesla, the only company that does. The bill for last quarter was $68 million. Absent this shakedown of potential car buyers, Tesla would have lost $57 million, or $11,400 per car. As the company sold 5,000 cars in the quarter, though, $13,600 per car was paid by other manufacturers, who are going to pass at least some of that cost on to buyers of their products. Folks in the new car market are likely paying a bit more than simply the direct tax subsidy.
So Tesla didn’t make a profit from selling their automobiles, presumably what they’re in business to sell, but from laws that take advantage of people who buy other cars. Fucking great.
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President Placater
Glenn Greenwald on President Obama’s rhetorical style:
The hallmark of a skilled politician is the ability to speak to a group of people holding widely disparate views, and have all of them walk away believing they heard what they wanted to hear. Other than Bill Clinton, I’ve personally never seen a politician even in the same league as Barack Obama when it comes to that ability. His most consequential speeches are shaped by their simultaneous affirmation of conflicting values and even antithetical beliefs, allowing listeners with irreconcilable positions to conclude that Obama agrees with them.
The highly touted speech Obama delivered last week on US terrorism policy was a master class in that technique. If one longed to hear that the end of the “war on terror” is imminent, there are several good passages that will be quite satisfactory. If one wanted to hear that the war will continue indefinitely, perhaps even in expanded form, one could easily have found that. And if one wanted to know that the president who has spent almost five years killing people in multiple countries around the world feels personal “anguish” and moral conflict as he does it, because these issues are so very complicated, this speech will be like a gourmet meal.
But whatever else is true, what should be beyond dispute at this point is that Obama’s speeches have very little to do with Obama’s actions, except to the extent that they often signal what he intends not to do. How many times does Obama have to deliver a speech embracing a set of values and polices, only to watch as he then proceeds to do the opposite, before one ceases to view his public proclamations as predictive of his future choices? Speeches, especially presidential ones, can be significant unto themselves in shaping public perceptions and setting the terms of the debate, so Obama’s explicit discussion of the “ultimate” ending of the war on terror can be reasonably viewed as positive.
But it signals nothing about what he actually will do. I’m genuinely amazed that there are still smart people who treat these speeches as though they do. As Esquire’s Tom Junod put it after the speech: “if the Lethal Presidency reminds us of anything, it’s that we should be a long way from judging this president on his rhetoric or his portrayal of himself as a moral actor.” The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf added that Obama “has a long record of broken promises and misleading rhetoric on civil liberties, and it would be naive to assume that he’ll follow through on everything he said on Thursday.”
What Obama has specialized in from the beginning of his presidency is putting pretty packaging on ugly and discredited policies. The cosmopolitan, intellectualized flavor of his advocacy makes coastal elites and blue state progressives instinctively confident in the Goodness of whatever he’s selling, much as George W. Bush’s swaggering, evangelical cowboy routine did for red state conservatives. The CIA presciently recognized this as a valuable asset back in 2008 when they correctly predicted that Obama’s election would stem the tide of growing antiwar sentiment in western Europe by becoming the new, more attractive face of war, thereby converting hordes of his admirers from war opponents into war supporters. This dynamic has repeated itself over and over in other contexts, and has indeed been of great value to the guardians of the status quo in placating growing public discontent about their economic insecurity and increasingly unequal distribution of power and wealth. However bad things might be, we at least have a benevolent, kind-hearted and very thoughtful leader doing everything he can to fix it.
The clear purpose of Obama’s speech was to comfort progressives who are growing progressively more uncomfortable with his extreme secrecy, wars on press freedom, seemingly endless militarism and the like. For the most part, their discomfort is far more about the image being created of the politician they believed was unique and even transcendent than it is any substantive opposition to his policies. No progressive wants to believe that they placed such great trust and adoration in a political figure who is now being depicted as some sort of warped progeny of Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney. That creates internal discomfort and even shame. This speech was designed to allow progressives once again to see Barack Obama as they have always wanted to see him, his policies notwithstanding: as a deeply thoughtful, moral, complex leader who is doing his level best, despite often insurmountable obstacles, to bring about all those Good Things that progressives thought they would be getting when they empowered him.
I’m so glad that our president talks out of both sides of his mouth, and aims to make sure that our progressive political elite can rest safer knowing that he suffers with every kill he personally orders.
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Hard Working
This is a representative of the hard working, blue collared salt of the earth. The New York Post:
Union fat cat Mark Rosenthal spends more time sleeping at his desk than organizing labor, a series of damning photos reveals.
[. . .]
“He eats lunch when he arrives at work at 2 p.m. Then, like clockwork, he goes to sleep with a cup of soda on the table and the straw in it,” said Marvin Robbins, a union vice president.
“Then he wakes up, looks at his watch and says, ‘I have to get out before the traffic gets bad.’ He’s usually out by 4 p.m. after being at the office two hours.”
Rosenthal is a former Parks Department employee who rose to power campaigning to rid the union of corruption in the late 1990s.
[. . .]
Much of the 5-foot-7, 400-plus-pound Rosenthal’s food tabs are for catered union events and meals he writes off as “union business,” board members claim.
They say he significantly overorders at eateries like Dallas BBQ, the Stage Door Deli and Pine Restaurant in The Bronx, a hangout for local politicians, and takes the extra food back to his Bronxdale apartment.
“He’s always walking off with a doggie bag or extra boxes of food,” said another executive board member.
And here’s the kicker . . .
He said it’s normal for executives to take “power naps.”
He also blamed his meetings with the sandman on the effects of pain medication he takes for backaches he has suffered since he fell through a chair at a McDonald’s last year.
“The chair broke because I’m big,” Rosenthal said.
A local union head is an “executive?”
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Unintended Consequences
Gee. How could there be unintended consequences with such well thought-out law?
”There are some important and under-discussed ethical issues in depriving people of their rights,” he said. ”But somehow, when you are a patient, your rights to do as you please are suddenly suspended – even if you are not hurting other people.”
As a sufferer of schizophrenia, Coleman had been in and out of Liverpool Hospital’s mental health unit for six years. Previously, he and other patients were able to smoke, under supervision, in a small, open-air courtyard next to the ward.
But under amendments passed by NSW Parliament last year, psychiatric patients across NSW are now confronted with a ”tobacco replacement program”, which includes nicotine patches, educational classes and, in rare cases, leave passes off-site.
Having presented himself to Liverpool Hospital in February, Coleman, 25, had remained in the mental health unit as an involuntary patient until March 30, when he was found dead at the nearby railway station after asking if he could leave the grounds for a cigarette.
”The system in place has failed,” Coleman’s father, Mark, said. ”The anti-smoking laws, as they stand, are too rigid.
I just don’t understand how thing s could have gone wrong. Telling mentally ill people who have been hospitalized that not only must they deal with whatever affliction for which they have been institutionalized, but they must also quit smoking is a bad idea? Who knew?
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The President of Peace!
President Obama: Earning the fuck out of that Nobel Peace Prize. You know, because he’s promised us that he will kill fewer people than he has been. The New York Times:
As part of the shift in approach, the administration on Wednesday formally acknowledged for the first time that it had killed four American citizens in drone strikes outside the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, arguing that its actions were justified by the danger to the United States. Mr. Obama approved providing new information to Congress and the public about the rules governing his attacks on Al Qaeda and its allies.
A new classified policy guidance signed by Mr. Obama will sharply curtail the instances when unmanned aircraft can be used to attack in places that are not overt war zones, countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The rules will impose the same standard for strikes on foreign enemies now used only for American citizens deemed to be terrorists.
Lethal force will be used only against targets who pose “a continuing, imminent threat to Americans” and cannot feasibly be captured, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a letter to Congress, suggesting that threats to a partner like Afghanistan or Yemen alone would not be enough to justify being targeted.
So I guess killing American citizens who are abroad and with no access to America are imminent threats? We seem to be operating under different definitions of imminent. But here’s the kicker.
In his letter to Congressional leaders, Mr. Holder confirmed that the administration had deliberately killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who died in a drone strike in September 2011 in Yemen. Mr. Holder also wrote that United States forces had killed three other Americans who “were not specifically targeted.”
1 out of 4 ain’t bad.
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Money in Politics
Gee. I was under the impression that the left hated the mingling of money and politics. The Nation:
The Center for American Progress, Washington’s leading liberal think tank, has been a big backer of the Energy Department’s $25 billion loan guarantee program for renewable energy projects. CAP has specifically praised First Solar, a firm that received $3.73 billion under the program, and its Antelope Valley project in California.
Last year, when First Solar was taking a beating from congressional Republicans and in the press over job layoffs and alleged political cronyism, CAP’s Richard Caperton praised Antelope Valley in his testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, saying it headed up his list of “innovative projects” receiving loan guarantees. Earlier, Caperton and Steve Spinner— a top Obama fundraiser who left his job at the Energy Department monitoring the issuance of loan guarantees and became a CAP senior fellow—had written an article cross-posted on CAP’s website and its Think Progress blog, stating that Antelope Valley represented “the cutting edge of the clean energy economy.”
Though the think tank didn’t disclose it, First Solar belonged to CAP’s Business Alliance, a secret group of corporate donors, according to internal lists obtained by The Nation. Meanwhile, José Villarreal—a consultant at the power- house law and lobbying firm Akin Gump, who “provides strategic counseling on a range of legal and policy issues” for corporations—was on First Solar’s board until April 2012 while also sitting on the board of CAP, where he remains a member, according to the group’s latest tax filing.
CAP is a strong proponent of alternative energy, so there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of its advocacy. But the fact that CAP has received financial support from First Solar while touting its virtues to Washington policy-makers points to a conflict of interest that, critics argue, ought to be disclosed to the public. CAP’s promotion of the company’s interests has supplemented First Solar’s aggressive Washington lobbying efforts, on which it spent more than $800,000 during 2011 and 2012.
I guess cronyism is only bad when it’s groups and industries you don’t like being the beneficiaries. Whih makes them hypocrites.
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The Transformation
Witness the transformation from news to propaganda. Draw and STRIKE!:
Some real news came out of the release of the Inspector General’s report on the IRS abuse, and from the Congressional hearings this week. The Obama administration lied when it claimed it had no idea the IRS was targeting Conservative groups for delays & denials of their applications for tax-exempt status.
Everybody lied. The then-IRS Commissioner lied last year to Congress when he insisted no such targeting was going on, and Obama lied when he claimed he learned of the IRS scandal just last week by reading the newspapers.
But you wouldn’t really know that if you read the New York Times. You MIGHT if you dug way down deep into the story towards the end, if you can read a little between the lines.
Thankfully, as the following screenshots will show, you can learn for yourself how a breaking news story containing REAL new information gets ‘massaged’ by a media professional to ensure that readers come away with the ‘correct’ impression.
Anyone who claims that there is no such thing as media bias is a fucking idiot.
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Funny, That
Gee. A country that has adopted Castro-esque socialism turns in to a similar travesty as Castro’s Cuba. Who could have imagined that extraneous regulations, government graft, currency control, blindingly high taxation, and price fixing would create a socialist shithole? The American Interest:
Funny, all these years the Castro brothers blamed Cuba’s grinding poverty and economic failure on two big problems: the US embargo and a lack of energy reserves. Now here comes Venezuela, no embargo and some of the largest oil reserves in the world, and Castro policies are producing Castro results. It’s almost as if socialism tends to produce oppression and poverty in any country it controls— along with bureaucratic thuggishness, cronyism, and corruption.
Meanwhile, the WaPo story reports that, according to central bank data, one out of every five basic products isn’t available. The government is responding to this by attacking the media for causing a toilet paper shortage. But don’t worry, the shortage should go away soon; the last independent TV station in the country has recently been taken over by a group friendlier to the powers that be.
Funny, that.
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Reason 1,255,001
School administrators calling the cops and having students arrested for . . . a water balloon fight. Another student was assaulted by a police officer, and a parent arrested when he decided to question the principal about the necessity of having students arrested and beaten for throwing water balloons.
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The Future
If we can somehow discount the opinion of proglodytes on matters in which they use only emotion and completely discount science, basic economics, and reality, perhaps we can finally move our energy resources towards the future.
You wouldn’t know it from the press, but the nuclear industry is far and away the safest industry in America, with the fewest injuries, no deaths, the best safety record, and the least lost-work hours. Nuclear even has the best environmental record of all industries.
By any measure, nuclear outshines all other work places. But that never seems to be enough, and nuclear workers feel frustrated at the common misrepresentations and onerous requirements that keep being piled on them, post-Fukushima additions being the latest round.
Unfortunately, Fukushima has ended the modern debate for nuclear power despite not really being the disaster that activists really wanted it to be. CNN on a WHO report concerning the fallout from the meltdown:
As Fukushima Daiichi unraveled in global public view with fire, explosions and radioactive emissions for weeks, people living nearby were exposed to radiation and trauma.
The trauma was worse, the World Health Organization said in a report released Thursday on the health effects of the “Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.”
The lifetime risk of contracting certain types of cancer rose slightly for a small group of people because they were exposed to radiation from the nuclear disaster, the WHO said Thursday.
The notable exception was young emergency workers at the plant, who inhaled high doses of radioactive iodine, probably raising their risk of developing thyroid cancer. But since the thyroid is relatively resistant to cancer, the overall risk for these people remains low, the report said.
Otherwise, any increase in human disease after the partial meltdown triggered by the March 2011 tsunami is “likely to remain below detectable levels,” the WHO said in its report.
People exposed as children in towns close to the Daiichi power plant are slightly more likely to contract leukemia, breast or thyroid cancer in the course of their lives than the general population, the WHO said.
[. . .]
Those living in hardest-hit areas of Fukushima prefecture were exposed to radiation levels of 12 to 25 milliseverts (mSv) in the first year since the disaster, the WHO reported.
That’s equivalent to one or two CAT scans, according to the American College of Radiology. Even on the upper end of the scale, that barely raises the risk of dying from cancer, the college says.
According to United Nations nuclear experts, exposure to less than 1,000 mSv annually causes no meaningful increase in the risk of getting cancer.
The worst side effect of the Fukushima “disaster” (it would seem to me that a disaster would have more than 0 deaths) is that because radiation leaked in to the sea, people ought to avoid eating fish from the immediate area. Those who had some exposure didn’t even have enough exposure to raise the risk of dying of those who already had cancer. Which isn’t to say that one shouldn’t be concerned about potential contamination, but that we must remember that this is the worst “disaster” in the nuclear industry since Chernobyl and not a single person has died from the initial meltdown. No one has even gotten so much as sick from radiation exposure. Yet because of the fear that has been elicited in proglodytes and other environmental activists based on nothing but emotional appeals, the most efficient, cleanest, and historically safest form of energy we have has been virtually dismissed as a possibility, when the only thing to have been learned from Fukushima is that building anything on the shoreline in an earthquake zone with a propensity to tsunamis is probably a bad idea.
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