I do like Simon Johnson

His latest, on the essential site for all things marginally progressive but still mainstream acceptable economic: The Baseline Scenario

Dodd in a tough spot

He clearly wants to be *perceived* as doing the right thing, at least...while Ted Kaufman is relentless in showing things as they actually *are*.

(Meanwhile, the GOP remains a bunch of corrupt, unimaginative liars as usual, cf. mealy-mouthed dipshit, Mitch McConnell. How anybody could mistake these violent, idiot-mob-inciting old wrinkled crooks for populists remains a mystery "new" democrats have yet to solve, apparently.)

Finally

Someone from the political class begins to sound like Matt Taibbi, on record, on the Senate floor. The only reason people are not mad as hell about the ongoing Wall Street fraud is because they haven't bothered finding out. Read Matt Taibbi. The more people know the angrier they get. Let's hope the tide is genuinely turning, and the rule of law won't be beaten any further back. Where does the buck stop? Via.

Sometimes, she just stares at the wall...

...Hoping for the sun to glint off her tags.

It all started when we brought home that laser-guided parking system as a toy for the cats.

for sale

The block, not the dog.

Credit where credit is due

John Cassidy has written what may be the one and only puff piece aspiring to respectability on Timothy Giethner that will have ever been historically conceivable.

Appearing as it does sometime before the long-term relentless rise of the real misery index threatens to become unavoidable "news" (if it ever will), but also before the crackhead mentality on Wall Street culminates in another shitstorm of future carbon credit-default swaps or something-else-backed-and-bundled-securities.

The cursory lip wagging Cassidy gives to dissenting views are even more remarkable for being followed by nothing more substantive than the sort of self-certain, vaguely dismissive ideological boiler-plate, generalities and defensive wound licking in the supposed court of public opinion we have come to expect, all while vainly wallowing in the bureaucrats lament of feeling himself fundamentally removed from such concerns, such inevitable collateral, if not realpolitik itself, altogether. In short, Geithner betrays himself as a well-intentioned, self-satisfied ideological conservative at heart. Another moderate Republican, not so much unwilling as developmentally unable to acknowledge, examine and replace the speculative-fed fantasy extortion machine that veneers the grotesque rotting foundation of our financial industry and entire economy. No news there, certainly. At least he doesn't pretend to be something he is not. A real Democrat, for instance.

So the stress tests were actually brilliant and really saved the day despite being so "tough" (8.9% unemployment, anyone?), some won-over speculators now swoon. Huh. One sentence from one article by Matt Taibbi is mentioned in passing, described as unrefined, and no explanation about *how* Goldman actually proves its "capitalized" strength "greater than international competitors" even attempted.

The article does nothing to persuade that Giethner ever was or ever will be the right person to seize what remains the only real political opportunity in half a century (to honestly confront and
change any of the institutionalized injustice, Fed subsidies, F.I. roulette, or for that matter concomitant class war now having all but killed the New Deal)...an historic gift now mostly squandered.

Nationalization might have worked but would have been quite difficult. No shit.

So he "saved" the financial industry (from symptoms of withdrawal, and now it's back to shooting heroin, with our blessing). Big whup. Encouraging higher unemployment and lower quality of life having been essential to the "success" of the F.I. since Reagan's handlers won their war against the unions; what matters most is larger historic context. Other signs of stability and new "growth" are not convincing at best, misleading and dangerously deluded at worst.

I'm sure Giethner's sense of being misunderappreciated is sincere, however comically out of touch and frankly, pathetic, and his actions well-thought-out and well-intentioned. His ideological sense of what's possible or ethically necessary remains thoroughly depressing, and
quite possibly without a future.

a rare political post

Seth Ackerman rightly underwhelmed at Ezra Klein's sense of history:

The Democrats shot their historical wad on health care by re-introducing Bob Dole’s bill from 1994 and justifying it as a free-market solution. How is that a “huge progressive victory”?

Taibbi on the continued reign of credit default swaps: "Jesus..."

James K. Galbraith: In Defense of Deficits

Richard Parker: Athens, The First Domino?

Moreover, unlike Wall Street bankers, Papandreou isn't asking for a bailout (let alone a bonus for himself or senior ministers); what he wants is help stabilizing the market for Greece's bonds. And unlike Wall Street in the fall of 2008, Athens isn't being frozen out of the credit markets; in fact, it is still able to borrow....

But Wall Street speculators have swarmed in, playing Greece, as the Financial Times put it, "like a piñata." The country's tiny bond market–barely a billion euros a day were trading in Athens in January–makes an easy and tempting target for traders with big bats; by attacking Greek bonds, the traders get to play on an increasingly pan-European volatility in bond and currency rates, thereby leveraging a little nation's problems into gigantic trading-floor gains. And thanks to the Obama administration's repeated refusal to limit such activities–despite pleas from our European allies since 2008 to jointly regulate global financial markets–what the traders are doing is legal. In fact, massive immediate trading profits are the means by which banks like Goldman, Citi, JPMorgan, Barclays, UBS and Deutsche Bank are rebuilding their balance sheets without providing the lending the real economies of America and Europe need to begin their recovery....

Capitalism is Dead

"Long live the billionaire bailout society."

"just nerves burning out in a vacuum"

Still so relevant:

You see, there isn’t any such thing as just Art or just Experience. Art can be as abstract as you wish, but it must be meaningful. Experience can be “kicks,” it can be as ecstatic as you can make it — but ecstasy as an end in itself is nothing — it’s just nerves burning out in a vacuum.

Courtesy of an ongoing project to re-post all 700 of Kenneth Rexroth's columns from the 1960 San Francisco Examiner, 50 years later to the day, here.

Marco Roth, today:

...By comparison with most of the 19th-century novels, and even with most 20th-century modernist novels of the "stream of consciousness" school, the neuronovels [like Ian McEwans Enduring Love] have in them very little of society, of different classes, of individuals interacting, of development either alongside or against historical forces and expectations.[...]It now seems we've gone beyond the loss of society and religion to the loss of the self, an object whose intricacies can only be described by future science. It's not, of course, that morality, society, and selfhood no longer exist, but they are now the property of specialists writing in the idioms of their disciplines. So the new genre of the neuronovel, which looks on the face of it to expand the writ of literature, appears as another sign of the novel's diminishing purview.

Tell me again...

...Why the fuck I work so hard for a living (and without health care) in a world where these fake "profit"-posting professional bullshitters, reloaders and extortionists at Goldman Sachs get Croesus-sized tax-payer government hand-outs every illegal scam they pull, where 90% of the economy is complete bullshit that couldn't give a shit about the average working person let alone any honest investor, and where these juvenile fuckstick assholes are still actively encouraged and enabled by the old bullshitters now in political cabinets to continue running all of us right off the fucking cliff, again and again./?

Taibbi responds to some common criticisms of his newest article here.

Unmistakable signs of overpopulation

Still, that's a fair bit more generous than the people listing "used tissue" or "used toothbrush" and "wanted: Woodway Desmo S treadmill, plus working piano."

I exaggerate, but not much.

Adding insult to injury

From here:

Twelve French wine industry figures were convicted Wednesday of selling 18 million bottles (13.5 million liters) of falsely labeled wine to US wine powerhouse E&J Gallo at an inflated price. The wine was ultimately sold under E&J's ubiquitous "Red Bicyclette" Pinot Noir label.

The convicted were sentenced by a French judge, who gave them suspended jail sentences and fines ranging from 3,000 to 18,000 euros apiece. They had made seven million euros from their massive fraud [...] After a year-long judicial investigation, the defendants were accused of substituting wine made from less expensive local grape varieties for the Pinot Noir, which is popular on the American market.

In handing down the sentences, the French judge said, "the scale of the fraud caused severe damage for the wines of the Languedoc for which the United States is an important outlet."

However, a lawyer for two of the defendants argued that there was no harm, since "not a single American consumer complained."

Deficit Hysteria

A few links to correct for the mass of ignorance out there (for which both the ever-opportunist right wing and our current "moderate Republican" president bear increasing responsibility):

http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/obamabiden-deficit-hawks

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/deficit-fever-by-digby-suddenly-you_02.html

Most substantial of all, listen to James Galbraith talk to this obnoxious guy, whoever he is:

http://www.jimbotalk.net/programhighlights?date=20100201


Though granted, putting things in context is hardly an American pastime these days, still plagued as we are by Cheney's desperate and laughable narrative of "the age of terror."

Citing concerns over security...

Aid groups have yet to reach many areas of Washington, DC, where people remain freezing in their unheated homes or risk being victimized by savage, unruly mobs:

NPR seeks out DHorowitz in his infinite wisdom for Howard Zinn obituary

How fitting, really.

(via ATR) More that is well said on the subject, here.

Customer and online testimonials

If you are curious what other people say about my work, feel free to click the following links:

• http://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/11/timber-bookshelves-world-domination-etc/

• http://www.sharpsand.net/2008/04/13/548/

• http://www.designspongeonline.com/2009/06/sneak-peek-nick-dewar.html


• http://www.britishblogs.co.uk/similar-to/daphne-with-her-thighs-in-bark/

recently...

Our engagement rings are a light Nambaro (Cocobolo) wood harvested sustainably from Nicaragua with recycled sterling handmade by Marlon Obando Solano of Naturaleza Organic Jewelry (more about his excellent business here and here). Some cool photos here.

Prime Minister's Questions in America

This was brilliant, unprecedented in American politics and great TV...so when does he do the same thing for the Progressive Caucus, or netroots?

I fail to see how giving TV exposure to the genuine left, and the opportunity for the beginning of a response to what are surly some legitimate questions, could do anything but *help* Obama's cause. How else to prove his policies are indeed as centrist as he himself admits, after all?

Anyway if he's serious about inspiring the sort of little-d democracy we saw on the campaign trail (and not much since), there's one obvious way to start, by ceasing the complete censorship of voices from the left. Who knows, if given half the chance their ideas may even sound more eloquent, accurate, practical and courageous than Obama's.

I doubt it will happen, but it should. Until then we'll just keep giving all the ideological "middle ground" to the likes of professional fuckstick David Brooks.

Update: Well Robert Kuttner is less kind still:

Some of my friends think the Baltimore exercise was masterful. About the only thing I cared for was the juxtaposition of the words "Republican" and "Retreat." Obama did a fine job of defending his record and sounding high minded and presidential, but again the plea was for sweet reasonableness.

They sent us to Washington to work together, to get things done, and to solve the problems that they're grappling with every single day.

Obama ticked off area after area where he agreed with Republican policies. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan giving that to the Democrats? At one point, insisting that he was open to good ideas from any quarter, Obama declared:

I am not an ideologue. I'm not.

You're not? Then why bother? Ideology is not some arbitrary penchant for clinging to stale ideas. It is a principled set of beliefs about how the economy and society work, and should work.

To be a conservative Republican is to believe that markets work just fine, people mostly get what they deserve, and government typically screws things up. To be a liberal Democrat is to believe that market forces are often cruel and inefficient; that the powerful take advantage of the powerless; and that there are whole areas of economic life, from health care to regulation of finance, where affirmative government is the only way to deliver defensible outcomes for regular people.

That's an ideology, one that progressives are proud to embrace. So why does Obama think it virtuous to disclaim ideology in general? The problem afflicting America is not "ideology." It's the hegemony of rightwing ideology. And given presidential leadership, most working Americans -- most voters -- identify with the progressive view of how the world works, especially in an era where conservative ideology has produced financial collapse.

Obama's latest refinements on the politics of common ground make for a pretty pose, but they are too clever by half.

Now, if we are very sanguine, we can read efforts like these as prologue to a stiffening of Obama's spine. This is all a grand design -- he's playing chess, we're playing checkers. Along about March, he will pivot and finally deliver a tough speech declaring that he bent over backwards to accommodate the Republicans. But now, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

But I am increasingly skeptical that he will ever get there. It's just not who he is. So the obstructionism will likely continue, except in cases where Obama makes all the concessions.

Obama may think he is modeling a higher form of leadership. He isn't. If he wants to be loved by voters, it's time for some toughlove directed at Republicans.

UpdateII: Obama takes part of my advice, though the questions remain centrist and uncritical to a fault (at least those on camera) and Fox "news" doesn't even cover it (doing their patriotic best to keep Republicans forever in the dark). Etc. Obviously the damage O'Reilly & Co. continue to inflict on the intelligence of our national dialogue needs to be taken far more seriously (as opposed to simply scoffed at) and better combated.

Sign the petition demanding more regular question time here.

brief foray into dog psychology, cont.

This article (from a friend's facebook page, where all this blogging, er, started), "If Not Dominance...How do we Explain the Development of Social Behaviour?" adds significantly to the discussion below, I think.

Cesar Millan is a Hack?

I'm still educating myself about this debate (more here), the convictions and emotions surrounding which (not to mention cultural and gender predispositions) seem as strong as in any discussion of raising children.

But I will say the contrast between the two methods employed in these two particular videos is pretty striking (Update: An executive producer of the show weighs in (see comments to this post) as to why this may be. For the record I agree with her about common courtesy of at least taking these things in context.):

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1160909300600&oid=20444826822

Howard Zinn

Watching today's DemocracyNow show dedicated to Howard Zinn...I will always remember his "People's History" (recently televised) read like a novel in high school. He was a true intellectual and activist, constantly opening the future by relentlessly exposing and dignifying a more full and contentious truth than the romantic "Great Men" version of history could ever comprise...his latest short piece on Obama printed in The Nation arrived only yesterday:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100201/forum/6#zinn

http://www.progressive.org/zinn0509.html

http://www.progressive.org/mag/zinn1008.html

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/13/howard_zinn_i_wish_obama_would

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=2606

Update: NPR continues the despicable tradition of hostile and right-wing-framed obituaries for left-leaning intellectuals,uses David Horowitz of all people...what the fuck, Robert Siegel?

Siegel must still have a thing against Chomsky, and it's not healthy. Let NPR hear about it.

Haiti

Watching Amy Goodman walk through Léogâne last week, at that point the only reporter to step foot in an area deemed a "security risk" by the UN and so no aid whatsoever has arrived, although over 90% of the homes have been destroyed and people are still digging out their dead by hand...reminded me again how important it is to support organizations other than the mass bureaucracy of the Red Cross, organizations like Partners in Health who are there for the long term, with infrastructure already in place and extensive community outreach and organization. Christian Missions dropping pieces of bread from helicopters onto the rubble just doesn't cut it somehow.

oh yes

I still read Fafblog. Among other things. Etc, etc, etc.

Kennedy

"...was no radical. He hailed from the American elite — like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.

Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name."

....

Some wonderful capitalism we've got going on today.

...

• We told you so.

• http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=608&issue=125:

There is a significant problem for the left in relating to this anger, however, and the problem is Obama. Obama has presided over the continuation and extension of inequality, escalated the Afghanistan war, forced concessions in the car industry and given way to the private insurance companies over healthcare. The weight of the crisis is being felt particularly sharply by those—especially poor, working class and black voters—at the core of Obama’s electoral support and his support, though still real, is eroding as disappointment sinks in. The impressive movement that the Obama campaign mobilised to deliver the election a year ago has not been marshalled to fight for a public option in healthcare, to fight for jobs or for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) which would make it easier for workers to organise and join unions, and is opposed by much of US business, including Citigroup which was bailed out to the tune of $50 billion.

In the absence of a strong movement for reform from the left or pressure from a resistant working class, the louder voices are once more those of a minority of conservative politicians and radio presenters opposed to “big government”. The weakness of the Obama government in the face of deepening economic gloom is stoking that opposition, encapsulating as it does a degree of class anger among “ordinary” Americans which has no other obvious outlet.21

As a result, the Republicans made gains in the recent elections for state governor in Virginia—a state won by the Democrats for the first time since 1964 in the Obama election—and New Jersey. The results suggest, in addition to local factors, that those—mainly white—workers who came late to the Obama campaign have found little in the government’s priorities to alleviate their economic predicament.

The re-emergence of visible manifestations of conservative populism, however, are indicative of the weakness of the Republican Party as a political force; instead the likes of Sarah Palin and “shock-jock” Rush Limbaugh are increasingly vocal and are backing conservative candidates against those chosen by the party machine. The mobilisations of the right, such as those in opposition to healthcare reform, have been small but nonetheless illustrate the potential for anger over economic pain to be channelled by conservative forces if progressive forces sit on their hands.

Gary Younge makes this point about the healthcare protests: “The problem is not that the right were organised but that—with a few exceptions—the left has not been. At the very moment when he needed the ‘movement’ that got him elected most, it appears to have largely stopped moving”.22 It has stopped moving largely because Obama has refused to mobilise it and there is not sufficient confidence and pressure for independent action on a mass scale. It is not a surprise that the US president prefers not to revive a movement that may escape the control of the Democratic Party apparatus. But his equivocation risks alienating his own constituency and those who were pulled into his orbit by the tremendous power of his campaign for change, as well as reigniting cynicism of the “liberal” Democratic establishment that could well benefit the right.

The lesson from the Great Depression of the 1930s in the US is that reform and resistance to the effects of the crisis will ultimately depend on a significant movement from below pushing for them. At the moment that movement is absent. There are, however, other social and political processes taking place that suggest possibilities.

• Naomi Klein

The Bush administration's determination to mimic the hollow corporations it admired extended to its handling of the anger its actions inspired around the world. Rather than actually changing or even adjusting its policies, it launched a series of ill-fated campaigns to "rebrand America" for an increasingly hostile world. Watching these cringeful attempts, I was convinced that Price Floyd, former director of media relations at the State Department, had it right. After resigning in frustration, he said that the United States was facing mounting anger not because of the failure of its messaging but because of the failure of its policies. "I'd be in meetings with other public-affairs officials at State and the White House," Floyd told Slate magazine. "They'd say: 'We need to get our people out there on more media.' I'd say: 'It's not so much the packaging, it's the substance that's giving us trouble.'" A powerful, imperialist country is not like a hamburger or a running shoe. America didn't have a branding problem; it had a product problem.

I used to think that, but I may have been wrong. When Obama was sworn in as president, the American brand could scarcely have been more battered – Bush was to his country what New Coke was to Coca-Cola, what cyanide in the bottles had been to Tylenol. Yet Obama, in what was perhaps the most successful rebranding campaign of all time, managed to turn things around. Kevin Roberts, global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, set out to depict visually what the new president represented. In a full-page graphic commissioned by the stylish Paper Magazine, he showed the Statue of Liberty with her legs spread, giving birth to Barack Obama. America, reborn.

So, it seemed that the United States government could solve its reputation problems with branding – it's just that it needed a branding campaign and product spokesperson sufficiently hip, young and exciting to compete in today's tough market. The nation found that in Obama, a man who clearly has a natural feel for branding and who has surrounded himself with a team of top-flight marketers. His social networking guru, for instance, is Chris Hughes, one of the young founders of Facebook. His social secretary is Desirée Rogers, a glamorous Harvard MBA and former marketing executive. And David Axelrod, Obama's top adviser, was formerly a partner in ASK Public Strategies, a PR firm which, according to Business Week, "has quarterbacked campaigns" for everyone from Cable­vision to AT&T. Together, the team has marshalled every tool in the modem marketing arsenal to create and sustain the Obama brand: the perfectly calibrated logo (sunrise over stars and stripes); expert viral marketing (Obama ringtones); product placement (Obama ads in sports video games); a 30-minute infomercial (which could have been cheesy but was universally heralded as "authentic"); and the choice of strategic brand alliances (Oprah for maximum reach, the Kennedy family for gravitas, and no end of hip-hop stars for street cred).

The first time I saw the "Yes We Can" video, the one produced by Black Eyed Peas front man will.i.am, featuring celebrities speaking and singing over a Martin Luther Kingesque Obama speech, I thought: finally, a politician with ads as cool as Nike. The ad industry agreed. A few weeks before he won the presidential elections, Obama beat Nike, Apple, Coors and Zappos to win the Association of National Advertisers' top annual award – Marketer of the Year. It was certainly a shift. In the 1990s, brands upstaged politics completely. Now corporate brands were rushing to piggyback on Obama's caché (Pepsi's "Choose Change" campaign, Ikea's "Embrace Change '09" and Southwest Airlines' offer of "Yes You Can" tickets).

Indeed everything Obama and his family touches turns to branding gold. J Crew saw its stock price increase 200% in the first six months of Obama's presidency, thanks in part to Michelle's well known fondness for the brand. Obama's much-discussed attachment to his BlackBerry has been similarly good news for Research In Motion. The surest way to sell magazines and newspapers in these difficult times is to have an Obama on the cover, and you only need to call three ounces of vodka and some fruit juice an Obamapolitan or a Barackatini and you can get $15 for it, easy. In February 2009, Portfolio magazine put the size of "the Obama economy" – the tourism he generates and the swag he inspires - at $2.5bn. Not at all bad in an economic crisis. Rogers got into trouble with some of her colleagues when she spoke too frankly with The Wall Street Journal. "We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand," she said. "Our possibilities are endless."

The exploration of those possibilities did not end, or even slow, with the election victory. Bush had used his ranch in Crawford, Texas, as a backdrop to perform his best impersonation of the Marlboro man, forever clearing brush, having cookouts and wearing cowboy boots. Obama has gone much further, turning the White House into a kind of never-ending reality show starring the lovable Obama clan. This too can be traced to the mid-90s branding craze, when marketers grew tired of the limitations of traditional advertising and began creating three-dimensional "experiences" – branded temples where shoppers could crawl inside the personality of their favourite brands. The problem is not that Obama is using the same tricks and tools as the superbrands; anyone wanting to move the culture these days pretty much has to do that. The problem is that, as with so many other lifestyle brands before him, his actions do not come close to living up to the hopes he has raised.

Though it's too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison – while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of "clean coal" and refusing to tax emissions, the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Most importantly, he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will retire the ugly "war on terror" phrase – even as the conflicts guided by that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (the pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King, his "Yes We Can!" slogan from the migrant farmworkers – si se puede). These movements made unequivocal demands of existing power structures: for land distribution, higher wages, ambitious social programmes. Because of those high-cost demands, these movements had not only committed followers but serious enemies. Obama, in sharp contrast not just to social movements but to transformative presidents such as FDR, follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts (which, granted, constitute a not inconsequential demographic in the United States). Advertising Age had it right when it gushed that the Obama brand is "big enough to be anything to anyone yet had an intimate enough feel to inspire advocacy". And then their highest compliment: "Mr Obama somehow managed to be both Coke and Honest Tea, both the megabrand with the global awareness and distribution network and the dark-horse, upstart niche player."

Another way of putting it is that Obama played the anti-war, anti-Wall Street party crasher to his grassroots base, which imagined itself leading an insurgency against the two-party ­monopoly through dogged organisation and donations gathered from lemonade stands and loose change found in the crevices of the couch. Meanwhile, he took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate, swallowed the Democratic party establishment in one gulp after defeating Hillary Clinton, then pursued "bipartisanship" with crazed Republicans once in the White House. (read more)

• Taibbi:

Obama, as is his nature I think, tried to take the fork in the road all year, making nice to his base while actually delivering to his money people, not realizing the two were perpetually in conflict. His failure to make a clear choice, or rather to make the right choice, is what has doomed him everywhere politically.

It will be interesting to see what comes next, whether this is just for show or not.

Solar-Powered Clinics in Haiti: Partners in Health

This looks to be an exceptionally worthy cause to support, right now.

predictably odd

Half-baked contrarian Alexander Cockburn still in denial about global warming, pretends to be scientist in the pages of The Nation. There ought to be a name for this sort of stubborn irrationalist tick/dogmatist contrarianism festering in otherwise highly functioning (if profoundly vain) men, like Tom Cruise's or John Travolta's "scientology." And then Zizek could write a book about it (ZCWAB).

AgeofStupid.net

This film (download) should be showing everywhere. Smart reporting, too.

MoveYourMoney.Info

Move your money to local banks. Do it now. They're the only ones still loaning (to anyone besides each other), not on the take and not jacking up fees, after all. And their interest rates are often better. Go figure.

Credo Mobile

Just like I've been saying....(if you read that and decide to switch, kindly mention my name and phone number or special personal code, BVMGN, send me your address, and I'll split the $100 check they send me for referring someone, 50-50. I promise.)

Onward Christian Warriors (David Brooks, ass-licker)

Taibbi:

It’s because nebbishly little dorks like Brooks and Paul Wolfowitz and David Frum got their books dumped in high school that we end up dropping daisy cutters on Afghan sheep herds and shipping working class American kids halfway around the world to get their nuts blown off. That sounds like a simplistic explanation, but anyone who doesn’t have a keen ear for the pencil-pusher’s eternal quest for macho cred is going to have a hard time understanding Washington politics. Brooks’s columns have always been the easiest way to take the pulse of that particular dynamic, and it sure seems now that bureaucratic momentum for intervention and more intervention is re-inflating the chests of these Beltway generals.

Anyway, I almost can’t wait to see where this goes. Is the world ready for “Barack Obama, Christian Warrior?”

Praise the Lord whose dollar sign dupes his favored race!
Make the foreign trash respect your bullion brand of grace.
Trust in mock salvation, serve as tyrant's tools;
History will say of you: "That pack of God damn fools."

Still fighting for health care

Will the Progressive Block mean anything? Author of the essential text, "A Party is not a Movement," David Sirota pushes back against "establishment backlash, obsequiously triumphalist bullshit" and urges more and more progressive pressure:

In other words, if you are a Democrat, wherever you come down on the "pass the Lieberman-gutted bill" or "don't pass the Lieberman-gutted bill" divide, it should be clear the fight we're having right now over the Lieberman-gutted Senate bill is a fight worth having not just for this particular bill. It's a fight worth having for the overall cause of genuine health care reform. The progressive movement backing the president and/or the Democrats because of party affiliation, falling in line out of some obligation to unity, and even using our limited resources to praise this bill as "a good step forward" fails to appreciate how a movement is different than a party or a set of politicians. It fails to maximize what movements need to do to make sure parties and politicians deliver the most they can in the short-term and follow through in the long-term.

Social Democracy: Where we are today

Read all about it.

8/4 Walnut Bookmatch

Custom sizes from bar block to island top, choice of grain pattern and router detail available as always.

broken system

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Assholes.

Update (via demos):


Still enjoy sticking it to the Progressive Left while enabling Blue Dogs, Rahm Emanuel? You own every inch of this fuck up.

Copenhagen, cont.

350.org updates, here...

Update: And all the talk so far of holding global temperature rise to only 2C turns out to be politician-speak bullshit; they're still only talking about 3C:

With the talks entering the final 24 hours on a knife-edge, the emergence of the [leaked UN] document seriously undermines the statements by governments that they are aiming to limit emissions to a level ensuring no more than a 2C temperature rise over the next century, and indicates that the last day of negotiations will be extremely challenging.

A rise of 3C would mean up to 170 million more people suffering severe coastal floods and 550 million more at risk of hunger, according to the Stern economic review of climate change for the UK government – as well as leaving up to 50% of species facing extinction. Even a rise of 2C would lead to a sharp decline in tropical crop yields, [1/3 of all species facing extinction], more flooding and droughts....

The UN is admitting in private that the pledges made by world leaders would lead to a 3C rise in temperatures. The science shows that could lead to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, crippling water shortages across South America and Australia and the near-extinction of tropical coral reefs, and that's just the start of it."

Bill McKibben, founder of the campaign 350.org, said: "In one sense this is no secret – we've been saying it for months. But it is powerful to have the UN confirming its own insincerity."

will the coming return of the dustbowl be someday known as "the good years?"

"The dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out.... They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." -Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (image via)

The facts about what climate change will do to our planet, both the already inevitable, the very likely and the current trajectory toward extinction, in detail here (pdf):


A refreshingly honest and sobering article here, deserves to be required reading for all, particularly right now:

They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an "Oh, shit" moment--an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself.

[...]

Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues go a giant step beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose scientific reports are constrained because the world's governments must approve their contents. The IPCC says that rich industrial countries must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 (from 1990 levels) if the world is to have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. By contrast, the WBGU study says the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020--i.e., quit carbon entirely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035, and the world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050. The study adds that big polluters can delay their day of reckoning by "buying" emissions rights from developing countries, a step the study estimates would extend some countries' deadlines by a decade or so.

Needless to say, this timetable is light-years more demanding than what the world's major governments are talking about in the run-up to Copenhagen. The European Union has pledged 20 percent reductions by 2020, which it will increase to 30 percent if others--like the United States--do the same. Japan's new prime minister likewise has promised 25 percent reductions by 2020 if others do the same. Obama didn't mention a number, but the Waxman-Markey bill, which he supports, would deliver less than 5 percent reductions by 2020. Obama's silence--doubtless a function of the fact that Republicans are implacably opposed to serious emissions cuts--allowed Hu to claim the higher ground at the UN. Hu went further than any Chinese leader has before, pledging to curb greenhouse gas emissions growth by a "notable margin" by 2020. Obama dropped his own bombshell, however, urging that all G-20 governments phase out subsidies for fossil fuels. "The time we have to reverse this tide is running out," Obama declared. Alas, the WBGU study suggests that our time is in fact all but gone.

Obama, like other G-8 leaders, agreed in July to limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial level at which human civilization developed. Schellnhuber, addressing the Santa Fe conference, joked that the G-8 leaders had agreed to the 2C limit "probably because they don't know what it means." In fact, even the "brutal" timeline of the WBGU study, Schellnhuber cautioned, would not guarantee staying within the 2C target. It would merely give humanity a two-out-of-three chance of doing so--"worse odds than Russian roulette," he wryly noted. "But it is the best we can do." To have a three-out-of-four chance, countries would have to quit carbon even sooner. Likewise, we could decide to wait another decade or so to halt all greenhouse emissions, but this lowers the odds of hitting the 2C target to fifty-fifty. "And what kind of precautionary principle is that?" (read more)

Geither, Loan Shark; Obama's Sellout

I'm frankly surprised no one has commented on this more than physical resemblance. Matt Taibbi's latest depressing investigative piece on Obama's economic team is now available here:

"Do you care at all about economic regulation?" I ask. "There was sort of a big economic collapse last year. Do you have any ideas about how that whole deal should be fixed?"

"We got to slow down on spending," she says. "We can't afford it."

"But what do we do about the rules governing Wall Street . . ."

She walks away. She doesn't give a fuck. People like Pat aren't aware of it, but they're the best friends Obama has. They hate him, sure, but they don't hate him for any reasons that make sense. When it comes down to it, most of them hate the president for all the usual reasons they hate "liberals" — because he uses big words, doesn't believe in hell and doesn't flip out at the sight of gay people holding hands. Additionally, of course, he's black, and wasn't born in America, and is married to a woman who secretly hates our country.

These are the kinds of voters whom Obama's gang of Wall Street advisers is counting on: idiots. People whose votes depend not on whether the party in power delivers them jobs or protects them from economic villains, but on what cultural markers the candidate flashes on TV. Finance reform has become to Obama what Iraq War coffins were to Bush: something to be tucked safely out of sight.

Around the same time that finance reform was being watered down in Congress at the behest of his Treasury secretary, Obama was making a pit stop to raise money from Wall Street. On October 20th, the president went to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York and addressed some 200 financiers and business moguls, each of whom paid the maximum allowable contribution of $30,400 to the Democratic Party. But an organizer of the event, Daniel Fass, announced in advance that support for the president might be lighter than expected — bailed-out firms like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs were expected to contribute a meager $91,000 to the event — because bankers were tired of being lectured about their misdeeds.

"The investment community feels very put-upon," Fass explained. "They feel there is no reason why they shouldn't earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don't want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown."

Which makes sense. Shit, who could blame the investment community for the meltdown? What kind of assholes are we to put any of this on them?

This is the kind of person who is working for the Obama administration, which makes it unsurprising that we're getting no real reform of the finance industry. There's no other way to say it: Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America's racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads. Instead of reining in Wall Street, Obama has allowed himself to be seduced by it, leaving even his erstwhile campaign adviser, ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker, concerned about a "moral hazard" creeping over his administration.

"The obvious danger is that with the passage of time, risk-taking will be encouraged and efforts at prudential restraint will be resisted," Volcker told Congress in September, expressing concerns about all the regulatory loopholes in Frank's bill. "Ultimately, the possibility of further crises — even greater crises — will increase."

What's most troubling is that we don't know if Obama has changed, or if the influence of Wall Street is simply a fundamental and ineradicable element of our electoral system. What we do know is that Barack Obama pulled a bait-and-switch on us. If it were any other politician, we wouldn't be surprised. Maybe it's our fault, for thinking he was different.

taking holiday orders

In my spare time, business is still strong...




GreenRiverWoods.Etsy.Com

nice place...

Wish I lived there, looks fun (via Nick Dewar with many more at this site: The Selby).

Goodbye Middle Class

No thanks for all the years of hard work.

"exercise in sophistry"

Michael Brenner really says it best. And David Bromwich puts Obama in his place when dismissing Vietnam.

Climategate/SwiftHack

Tell it to Alexander Cockburn. Or many of the people around here.

most deliberately boring, despicably dishonest, triangulating Bush-lite speech ever

Obviously gamed to "win over" the Republicans in some way, but for what? Karl Rove and McCain are instantly supportive. And why not? They have nothing to lose by Obama's inevitable failure, and now Obama has rhetorically and symbolically legitimized the Bush paradigm, and the larger Project (For a New American Century). Yet as farce this time, his delivery and timing could not have been worse, politically. The only threat the Taliban poses is in making us look like a failed empire after 8 years of rendering them stronger–an effect this surge will almost certainly redouble.) Do they really think Pakistan will help capture Bin Laden? Depending on Pakistan seems an enormous gamble, assuming Obama's decided to reverse the neocon policy of letting Bin Laden get away (although admittedly killing one all-but-forgotten bogeyman might be spun as some kind of closure to allow America to finally start the mourning process). Meanwhile and more importantly, if anything is clear it is that the context of larger geopolitics remains unspeakable, not least of all because they cannot be "justified."

The applause from kid soldiers (many of them about to die for yet more master narrative propaganda-mantras, half-truths and outright lies) was glaringly tepid (though it helped wake up the third of them obviously dozing). Whatever political capital Obama gains by triangulating he loses instantly by having legitimized the idiocy of 30+ years of disastrous foreign policy and shifting the long-term frame of debate yet again further to the right. And after nearly a year of legitimizing 30 years of class warfare, with Goldman Sachs now running the country with still rising unemployment and no serious efforts to address climate change or health care in any manner even mildly uncomfortable to the habituated exponential greed of our largest monopolized corporations, we already know it won't be worth. Not to mention the glaring absence of anything resembling moderately serious or binding exit strategy: no end in sight.
.
But Digby is right. Progressives really have no right to feel betrayed.

Still what an awful speech and complete load of bullshit.

Update: Wednesday's Democracy Now show cuts through nearly all of it:

unintending self-parody only sad now

building with whole trees

Not exactly my style, but real pretty and interesting. Via Vitro Nasu who also has an amusing post on chairs.

"The Hamilton Project"

The truth about "New" Democrats these days, just so damn depressing (via).

Which is why those democrats beginning to buck the Bob Rubin/Wall Street/Obama administration circle need serious support, more now than ever. May the rift inside the party force Obama to enact some meaningful change despite his economic advisers and despite who he always was.

$1 Million per soldier to Afghanistan

... but no real money for health care, or new jobs at home...not exactly "change we can believe in."

A documentary of recorded conversations and personal memories, especially worth watching right now. Meanwhile Polk's open letter to Obama seems to have fallen on deaf ears:

the cost in casualties may not rise to the level of Vietnam or even Iraq, but the financial cost is unlikely to be less. My hunch is that the real cost to the US economy will be $3 trillion to $6 trillion, calculating overall, not just Congressional appropriations. So the Afghan campaign could derail your plans for America, as Vietnam derailed Johnson's Great Society.

And Krugman and Baker scoff at the NYTimes, but Obama still doesn't seem capable of listening beyond his Wall Street advisers.

Time for Geithner and Summers to be let go

Past time, of course. Still nice to see DeFazio and the Progressive Caucus showing signs of life!

November garden...

Big Think Interview With Rick Perlstein | Rick Perlstein | Big Think

Big Think Interview With Rick Perlstein | Rick Perlstein | Big Think

via Digby.

The Chamber of Commerce

....Strikes again. Truly, these people have no dignity. Or, mediocrity rules the day (what else is new).

Speak, Nabokov

From an excerpt of Ross Benjamin's forthcoming translation of Michael Maar's Speak, Nabokov (Verso), just published by n+1:

Laura is a far cry from the dark metaphysical cosmos into which Nabokov's great novels draw us. The sad truth is: dying is not fun. And to modify another of the master's maxims: Detail is almost always welcome. All the expansive elaborations on old age in Laura—involving flatulence, constipation, diarrhea, foot odor and prostate tumors—strike a downright grim, masochistic note. Nabokov, who once described his life as "fresh bread with country butter and Alpine honey," with Laura brings to mind Tolstoy's comparison of life to a tartine de merde, which one is obliged to eat slowly.

Ross relays, "The article includes a sneak peek at Nabokov's last, unfinished manuscript, The Original of Laura, on the eve of its controversial posthumous publication."

Speaking of climate legislation..."cap and trade" bullshit

The original video still available here:


Meanwhile...:

But there's no getting around the fact that as the science of climate change grows more dire, the global political system seems increasingly unable to deal with that reality.

Questionable gains

Confess that I remain torn on the benefits of this "victory." Still the fight goes on:


A fight for what, exactly one may well ask...

Heath Shuler Joins the Real Traitors

Last night former lousy quarterback, fiscally irresponsible corporate lacky and fundamentalist chairperson Heath Shuler loudly proclaimed to his constituents: "I do not want my job next year," as he voted to poison an already pissed upon bill in a pathetic feint at attempted compromise and then proceeded to vote to kill it regardless.

Heath Shuler is no Democrat. Hell, big PhRMA even thought he would prefer to use the talking points they created for Republicans, and he did! The man clearly has no mind of his own, whatsoever. Thanks to him women's rights have been set back several decades. As Digby aptly puts it, for these hypocritical ideologues/pseudo-Democrats mandatory childbirth is apparently the only risk Blue Dogs want insurance companies to be forced to take.

Unforgivable:

The real traitors tonight (Yes on Stupak, No on HCR)

We had a total of 64 Democrats that voted "Yes" to the Stupak amendment, which added an unnecessary and excessive anti-abortion provision to the House healthcare bill that was passed tonight. However, there were a total of 23 Democrats that voted Yes on the Stupak amendment, and then followed that up with a "No" vote on the final healthcare bill vote. These 23 Democrats intentionally voted for the Stupak amendment to actively impair the Democrats' healthcare bill, something far worse than a simple "No" vote on the bill.



Jason Altmire (PA-4) 202-225-2565
Bobby Bright (AL-2) 202-225-2901
John Barrow (GA-12) 202-225-2823
John Boccieri (OH-16) 202-225-3876
Dan Boren (OK-2) 202-225-2701
Ben Chandler (KY-6) 202-225-4706
Travis Childers (MS-1) 202-225-4306
Artur Davis (AL-7) 202-225-2665
Lincoln Davis (TN-4) 202-225-6831
Bart Gordon (TN-6) 202-225-4231
Parker Griffith (AL-5) 202-225-4801
Tim Holden (PA-17) 202-225-5546
Jim Marshall (GA-8) 202-225-6531
Jim Matheson (UT-2) 202-225-3011
Mike McIntyre (NC-7) 202-225-2731
Charlie Melancon (LA-3) 202-225-4031
Collin Peterson (MN-7) 202-225-2165
Mike Ross (AR-4) 202-225-3772
Heath Shuler (NC-11) 202-225-6401
Ike Skelton (MO-4) 202-225-2876
John Tanner (TN-8) 202-225-4714
Gene Taylor (MS-4) 202-225-5772
Harry Teague (NM-2) 202-225-2365

Shuler was happy to ride the Obama swell to what is now a relatively safe seat in the North Carolina legislature, with over a million dollars still in his pocket. Progressives donated and worked hard to get him elected, and for what? Some say his vote is still needed on upcoming climate change legislation. But of course he'll support that weak-assed cap and trade/future speculative market shit; he's a big business/banker's man. I say his true colors have been shown and progressives have every right to put their money and their rhetoric toward making him feel as much pain as possible. As an active Blue Dog recruiter, Shuler has made it more than clear he thinks he can afford not to listen.