Month: December 2013

Last month, Stratfor e-mail hacker, Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Today, Occupy published Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated with Strafor by Carl Gibson and Steve Horn.  And it’s chilling.

Serbia’s Srdja Popovic is known by many as a leading architect of regime changes in Eastern Europe and elsewhere since the late-1990s, and as one of the co-founders of Otpor!, the U.S.-funded Serbian activist group which overthrew Slobodan Milošević in 2000.

Lesser known, an exclusive Occupy.com investigation reveals that Popovic and the Otpor! offshoot CANVAS (Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies) have also maintained close ties with a Goldman Sachs executive and the private intelligence firmStratfor (Strategic Forecasting, Inc.), as well as the U.S. government. Popovic’s wife also worked at Stratfor for a year.

These revelations come in the aftermath of thousands of new emails released by Wikileaks’ “Global Intelligence Files.” …

CANVAS Wikipedia entry.  Controversy:

Various organisations and individuals, including the governments of Belarus and Iran, as well as former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, have accused CANVAS of being a “revolution-exporter”. CANVAS denies this, emphasizing its role as educator and empowerer of peaceful methods.

Stratfor and Goldman Sachs bringing peaceful revolutions to the world.  Far more profitable version of Disaster Capitalism than using bombs and drones.

I’ve already written about the fact that the Founding Fathers were not in favor of the filibuster, so maybe Judd Gregg can just go read that. What’s more amazing than former Senator Judd Gregg’s interpretation of history is his assignment of blame for Senate dysfunction. He blames it on Harry Reid’s decision to “fill the tree.”

If you don’t know what that means, go here.

It was healthy for a nation with the size and complexity of ours to be assured that at one place in the process of governance, either a lone voice could make a point he or she deemed important, or an entire party representing the minority in the nation could make such a point.

This all ended recently when the Democratic membership of the Senate decided to exercise the single worst abuse of power in more than two hundred years of our constitutional democracy by changing the rules of the Senate so that 51 members of the Senate can now control the body in a unilateral and dictatorial manner.

The process had been building over the last few years. The Democratic Party’s leadership in the Senate had exploded the use of a procedure known as “filling the tree,” which, as a practical matter, cut off the historic rights of individual senators to offer whatever amendment they deemed appropriate to bills brought to the floor of the Senate and ended the power of the minority to offer amendments that would be seen as improving legislation.

“Filling the Tree” has the practical effect of turning the debate and amendment process of the Senate into a carbon copy of the House, where the minority has no rights except for those granted it by the majority.

Its excessive use by the majority leader in the Senate over the last few years was the result of the newer Democratic members not wanting to take the “tough” votes that were being brought forward by the minority.

Harry Reid wouldn’t fill the tree if the Republicans would agree to offer a reasonable amount of amendments that are germane to the underlying bill. But Republicans refuse to legislate in anything but troll-mode.

Ron Fournier has penned the mother of all concern troll pieces. Your first clue is that he quotes Ed Rendell. Ed Rendell never tires of trolling the president. Your second clue is that Fournier continues to treat the rocky rollout of healthcare.gov like it’s the equivalent of the Iran-Contra and Lewinsky scandals. I’m sorry, but a botched IT effort is in no way equivalent to a significant moral failing followed by a stream of unconscionable lies.

Ron Fournier doesn’t give a crap about the president. He doesn’t even like him. Why he would give Obama any advice at all is a mystery, and anyone who listens to Fournier is sub-mental.

If the president fires someone, it should be because they have lost his confidence, not because he needs someone to “empathize with his critics, [and] build significant relationships.”

What a load of crap.

That guy at the airport who will wheel your grandmother to her terminal is getting paid $5.25/hr plus tips. At least, that’s the case at the Philadelphia airport. I don’t know how much more, if any, the baggage handlers get at curbside. After taxes, that gives John Stewart about $600 a month, $400 of which he pays in rent for a basement apartment.

It’s past time that the underclass get organized and demand some changes.

I’ve noticed a controversy recently about the gender gap. For example, in the aftermath of the Virginia gubernatorial election last month, it was noted that Terry McAuliffe won on the strength of his support among women, but white women actually preferred Bob Cuccinelli. This led some women of color to complain that they weren’t getting the credit they deserved, or that white women were getting credit that they didn’t deserve. It’s an important point, but it doesn’t really reflect a proper understanding of the gender gap. It used to be that white women and white men voted very similarly, but in recent years white women have shown more inclination than white men to vote Democratic. That doesn’t mean that they prefer the Democrats overall, only that they demonstrate more support than white men. That’s the gap.

Another way of looking at it is that you can control for everything else, like race, religiosity, region, and income, and you’ll discover that women lean further to the left than men. Some of those subgroups will still show an overall rightward lean, but not as large a one as seen with their male counterparts in the correlating subgroups.

Even if you want to focus on the fact that white women still lean a little to the right, you have to take note of certain facts. For example, 59 of the 78 female members of the House are Democrats, and 20 of the 24 freshmen women are Democrats. Seventeen of the twenty female senators are Democrats, and all of them are white. The leader of the Democrats in the House is Nancy Pelosi, and several Democratic women have assumed leadership positions in the Senate.

Having said all that, I think political commentators often treat women of color as if they are black or brown first and only women second. Women prefer the Democrats by a healthy margin, and if they didn’t vote Mitt Romney probably would have won about 47 states. Other than the president, the two most popular politicians among Democrats are Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren.

People talk a lot about how demographic changes (primarily, the browning of America) are moving the country to the left and making it harder and harder for the GOP to cobble together an Electoral College majority, but the gender gap is equally important in explaining this trend. Simply put, while it’s true that the Republicans cannot afford to lose 78% of the Latino vote, they also cannot afford to lose as many white women as they’ve been losing. And they’re losing those votes for the same reason that they’re losing Latino votes. Their policies are hostile to women’s interests. Unless the Republicans make a split with the social conservatives on women’s rights and elements of public assistance, they will not be sending anyone to the Oval Office anytime soon.

While good comedians punch up and conservative comedians punch down, P.J. O’Rourke punches himself. While he is clever and occasionally quite funny, his lack of earnestness ultimately undermines him both as a comic and as a social commentator. He criticizes everyone, including himself, for being too self-centered. But he doesn’t offer any real alternatives. He’s a self-loathing Baby Boomer who is convinced that his generation destroyed this country through their narcissism and fascination with personal betterment at the expense of any higher calling. Yet, he doesn’t have a higher calling to offer. The only thing he really succeeds in is making me doubt, again, whether Hillary Clinton will really become our next president. Could we possibly elect a “senior” Baby Boomer like Clinton…a person born in the late 1940’s “on the bow wave of the baby boom’s voyage of exploration…keelhauled by the baby-boom experience and left a bit soggy and shaken”? Can we really go back to talking about whether someone failed to inhale the marijuana they were smoking? It seems like too much of a time warp. We have gay marriages to attend.

I keep that in mind when I hear rumblings of discontent on the left. Maybe Clinton could break the deadlock and reunite the country within a solid-left consensus. But I just have the feeling that progressives have learned to walk on their own and are going to be insisting on something more to their liking.

On the other hand, I don’t think the Boomers are quite done fucking with us, yet. Clinton will probably win this thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that Rosa Parks ended racism; I just have trouble understanding why seventy-nine percent of Republicans are willing to verbally express racial prejudice. Most Democrats demonstrate implicit racial prejudice, too, which is odd, because Rosa Parks ended racism.

I usually ignore Rush Limbaugh because he’s intentionally provocative, and I don’t feel like being a puppet on his string. But, sometimes, he says something so savory and satisfying that I can help gloating. His response to Pope Francis’s critique of unfettered capitalism is an example of this:

“I mentioned, last night — I was doing show prep last night — usual routine. And I ran across this — I don’t actually know what it’s called — the latest papal offering, statement from Pope Francis. Now, up until this — I’m not Catholic. Up until this, I have to tell you, I was admiring the man. I thought he was going a little overboard on the “common man” touch, and I thought there might have been a little bit of PR involved there. But nevertheless, I was willing to cut him some slack. I mean, if he wants to portray himself as still from the streets of where he came from and is not anything special, not aristocratic, if he wants to eschew the physical trappings of the Vatican — OK, cool, fine.

“But this that I came across last night — I mean, it totally befuddled me. If it weren’t for capitalism, I don’t know where the Catholic Church would be. Now, as I mentioned before, I’m not Catholic. I admire it profoundly, and I’ve been tempted a number of times to delve deeper into it. But the pope here has now gone beyond Catholicism here, and this is pure political. Now, I want to share with you some of this stuff.

“”Pope Francis attacked unfettered capitalism as ‘a new tyranny.’ He beseeched global leaders to fight poverty and growing inequality, in a document on Tuesday setting out a platform for his papacy and calling for a renewal of the Catholic Church. In it, Pope Francis went further than previous comments criticizing the global economic system, attacking the ‘idolatry of money.’ “

“I’ve gotta be very caref– I have been numerous times to the Vatican. It wouldn’t exist without tons of money. But, regardless, what this is — somebody has either written this for him or gotten to him. This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope. There’s no such — “unfettered capitalism”? That doesn’t exist anywhere.

I’m not Catholic, either, but I do admire the Church’s dedication to giving assistance to the needy. When the pope calls on the world’s leaders “to fight poverty and growing inequality,” he isn’t saying that government should get out of the way to make space for more Catholic or Christian charity. This wasn’t a call for more private sector solutions. It was a near-total rebuke to conservative economic ideology.

As ProgLegs points out, it’s quite a turnaround from El Rushbo’s recent assertion that Pope Francis is a conservative. Now, because he doesn’t approve of Reaganomics, the pope is a Marxist.

Pardon me while I enjoy this.