January 2010 archive

Just a little musical response to those who mistake malicious gossip for political analysis, judgment, and working towards serving the public good.

My mama didn’t raise me for a fool.

I rarely gossip publicly.  But as buhdy said in Happy Pony Joy Rainbows! and spies:

Wherein I simply cannot, in the face of THIS much stupidity, keep from lowering myself to personal attack. Mea culpa. Hopefully it will serve some higher purpose, But how can one NOT respond to this level of blatant hypocritical insanity, when one is one of the targets of it?

Ta, dahlings.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

   First off, I strongly encourage anyone who is reading this to go check out an article titled RedState trying to jam Coakley phone banks by dkos user pinback for more information on this story.

    So, as for the title of this article, my question is, should Erick Erickson of RedState.com go to jail the same way the last Republican hack who pulled this phone bank tampering scam did?

    Federal law prohibits making interstate calls “without disclosing the caller’s identity and with the intent to annoy . . . or harass any person at the called number.”

Rawstory.com Jan 10, 2006

    A hat tip to dkos user inland for the RawStory.com link.

More below the fold . . .  

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is an article that was originally posted on my blog a few days ago. I’m reposting it here as a self-introduction of sorts for those of you who I haven’t ran into over at Daily Kos, as well as an invitation to participate in what I hope will be an ongoing dialogue about the general need for political reform.

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Over the last few decades or so, America has gradually trended toward the kind of stagnation that has laid low great empires throughout history. This is reflected in the gradual erosion of the American middle class and the increasing stratification of wealth within our country over the last few decades, as our elected leaders have prioritized the interests of concentrated wealth and the handful of individuals who control it over the interests of the people. The stagnation in which we are currently mired is a function of the death grip on political power maintained by the Republican and Democratic parties, who have been allowed to game the political system to their advantage to an extent not seen in any other democracy. As I have stated elsewhere, I believe that if we are to steer this country away from disaster we must first clear the path for economic and social reform by achieving fundamental systemic changes to break the two-party duopoly and replace it with an open multiparty democracy. One of the first, and certainly one of the most important, elements in that systemic reform must be the liberalization of ballot access laws at the federal and state level.

The following MLK Weekend Essay is a reprint of an April 4, 2008 essay.

I’m thinking about times more than forty years ago when I sang, “We Shall Overcome.” I’m remembering how I felt when I sang it, holding hands, swaying, anticipation in the air. I loved the idea of walking hand in hand, black and white together, and at the same time there was always a tension, a tightness in my jaw and in the pit of my stomach, the presence of fear. The song’s purpose was to get ready to do what had to be done. I’m committed to nonviolence, I recall thinking, but there are those who are not. They shot James Meredith, and lynched Emmitt Till, and burned Greyhound buses, and unlike me, they don’t want me to be safe. Uncertainty about what will happen tightens my jaw, while my heart commits me to the cause.

Remembering these fears rekindles my old thoughts. I remember the policemen in the church parking lot writing down the license plate numbers as if it were the Appalachin Crime Convention. My mind flashes from people sitting in a restaurant who stop eating to stare and sneer, to the incomprehensible Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, to the repeated, threatening phone calls, to kids on a school bus yelling hate names through the windows, to the Klan and the police, and wondering how they were different. I think about the person who ran over my dog.

Zbigniew Brzezinski,

The Grand Chessboard:

“For America the chief gepolitical prize is Eurasia… America’s global primacy is directly dependant on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”

“About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in it’s enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”

“America’s withdrawal from the world or because of the sudden emergence of a successful rival – would produce massive international instability. It would prompt global anarchy.”

“The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role.”

The Real News Network’s Paul Jay interviews Zbigniew Brzezinski, former member of the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State from 1966 to 1968, chairman of the Humphrey Foreign Policy Task Force in the 1968 presidential campaign, director of the Trilateral Commission from 1973 to 1976, and principal foreign policy adviser to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential campaign.

From 1977 to 1981, Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. He was also a member of the President’s Chemical Warfare Commission (1985), the National Security Council-Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (1987-1988), and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1987-1989). In 1988, he was co-chairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force, and in 2004, he was co-chairman of a Council on Foreign Relations task force that issued the report Iran: Time for a New Approach.

Part 2 of this interview on the flip…

Bill Moyers Journal: Education and Peace in Central Asia

January 15, 2010

Author and humanitarian Greg Mortenson, whose best-selling books Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools argue that education is the best way to peace in Afghanistan and across the Islamic world.

BILL MOYERS: Beyond his domestic woes, certainly the issue that has preoccupied President Obama the most since he took office is Afghanistan. The war he inherited from George W. Bush is now its ninth year and seems no closer to resolution. Almost daily, it seems, there are more stories of fighting in far off mountains, of suicide bombers killing CIA operatives, of drones raining bombs down on villages and killing innocent people. THE NEW YORK TIMES reports this week that unlike the past, when Afghanistan’s brutal winters would slow the violence for awhile, “both sides seem determined to make a larger political point by continuing to fight through the snow season.”

Hard sometimes to remember that this whole thing began in pursuit of Osama Bin Laden and his accomplices in the attacks of 9/11….>>>>>

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Original article, by Andre Damon and subtitled As JP Morgan reports record compensation, via World Socialist Web Site:

The Wall Street Journal published an estimate Thursday that total pay at the largest Wall Street firms reached $145 billion last year. The Journal’s figure, based on preliminary figures, is more than any other year in history.