This is just how things work now. Elites never pay a price for their misbehavior. They can start wars for no good reason. They can torture people. They can hold them in indefinite detention. They can blow off the statutes against spying without warrants. They can flout the campaign finances laws. They can probably cause a traffic jam for a week straight, on purpose.
The Federal Elections Commission believes Republican strategist Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, his pro-Republican fundraising organization, probably violated campaign finance rules.
The 2012 report, first reported by the Sunlight Foundation on Tuesday and released on Friday, recommends the FEC conduct a deep investigation of Rove’s organization. But the report was just a recommendation and the FEC did not act on it. The panel in charge of opening an investigation was tied 3 to 3 in a vote as to whether it should pursue an inquiry.
Specifically, the FEC report said that Crossroads GPS had violated campaign finance regulations going back to 2010 because it did not register as a political group.
The General Counsel says that Crossroads violated the law, but the Republicans on the FEC simply refuse to do anything about it.
Karl Rove has more lives than a cat.
In the court of public opinion, Christie got a giant f**k-you last night. And gave me something really good to add my crappy “A Guy’s Guy Poll” diary.
Marie2
Christie….A guy’s guy??
Aren’t we being a wee bit prejudiced?
replacing one prejudice with another (gender) isn’t a step forward
Then again
“I’m not prejudiced …I despise every one equally” 😉
Hey, how about the slap on the wrist that the beanie baby billionaire got for stealing $25,000,000 from the unemployed and indigent? But then he had a bad childhood (Boo Hoo) and gives a lot to charity (right wing foundations maybe?).
He’s an greedy thief who should be jailed for twenty years minimum.
He’s an greedy thief who should be jailed for twenty years minimum.
Turn him into a poor black kid and get him to steal a candy bar, and you’ve got your wish.
Homo sapiens should be reclassified as Homo selfdestructus.
Sadly we are the only known species to knowingly and wantonly engineer its own extinction.
This is actually nature’s fault.
How did we get the tendency to give greater weight to anecdotes?
Why do are we cautious about new things/people/ideas?
We evolved in a way that was advantageous for survival 25,000 years ago but today is self destructive.
Thanks for the comment.
However… probably the major between us and the rest of the Animal kingdom is our advanced ability for abstract reasoning.
The way evolution works is that it favors those traits that help the species survive. Take for example the appendix, science has shown that it has/had a number of functions. As some of those functions have decreased in importance to survival, so too the prominence (size) has been shown to be decreasing. NB it still has some minor functions.
Next one needs to consider what ‘Culture’ actually is in context of its function in the survival.
Objectively it is a set of practices, beliefs and concepts of right and wrongs (morality) that have aided the group to survive.
e.g. the Moriori ( they were a group of Polynesian who became trapped on the Chatham Islands ( very small) 800 miles from anywhere in the lower Pacific, about 7-800 year ago.
Unlike their parent end sibling groups NZ Maori and Easter Island’s Rapanui (both bigger islands) who remained war like and cannibals, the Moriori were peaceful. Neither did they rape their environment…their population was self sustaining and stable. Their culture evolved to maintain this … however part of their culture evolved around infanticide and gods who had strict laws. Without either they would have died out. Both the other cultures were in deep trouble by the time whitey arrived.
the point is their culture evolved a morality that while unacceptable to us enabled their survival and the others almost didn’t
As it happened the Brits told the Maori where the Moriori were and that they spoke a similar language so the Maori got in their war canoes the Moriori welcomed them and were enslaved and eaten.
The clear conclusions are (IMO) culture ( beliefs and morality)is relative/ relevant to the circumstances of the people.
The Maori survived because it had the relatively greater resources to exploit( NB they forced the profligate extinction of the unique mega flora… giant birds) but got into big trouble when drought struck (internecine tribal warfare) as did the Rapanui.
We in the West are like the Maori on steroids because we are even more profligate in our consumption and internecine tribal warfare all of which is based on the fictional “magic pudding” (Children’s book by Lindsay about a never ending pudding) scenario (always new areas/ people resources to exploit).
NB the laws of physics about closed environments … e.g. the earth is a closed environment all the water, oil etc. we have or likely to is here today .
Clearly what has made the West ‘great’ (sic?) is that falsehood. The meta point I was making is that we alone can choose the rules, morality that sustains our existence. Similar the Moriori the bestial tendencies can be practised out of dominance/ use and like the appendix or ‘junk DNA'( sic) no longer have as much influence as it seems to today. That is logic base on provable facts. BTW there are other examples too.
Comments anyone?
I generally agree with you but I think asteroid mining is a distinct possibility within 50 years and that will effectively mean a “magic pudding” in terms of resources (not energy). Even at 10 billion it would take an enormous amount of time to mine out the asteroid belt of resources for example. That said, even with effectively unlimited resources “endless growth” is a fallacy precisely because of its unintended consequences.
Re: My comment about behavioral evolution, adhering to our abstract reasoning requires a constant struggle to ignore the heuristics that have shaped the beginnings of various cultures and that are self defeating to day. That’s why we fail at changing the self destructive tendencies so regularly.
I once postulated an alternate history where Rove was ill at a key time delaying his meeting with Shrub and as a result, Bush did not run for president.
Where’s that giant flux capacitor when we need it?