Glenn Greenwald writes:

The costs should be clear to any rational person.

Those costs come from vesting in the President what is literally the most extremist power a political ruler can seize, the true hallmark of authortarianism: namely, the power to order even his own citizens executed without a whiff of due process or accountability and in total secrecy — far from any battlefield. One would have to view the threat of Terrorism as some sort of truly existential menace on par with, say, the Civil War — which was the standard neocon myth to justify whatever Bush/Cheney did — in order to view the risks of vesting this secret, unaccountable assassination power in one political official as worthwhile.

When Al Gore delivered his major speech on the Washington Mall in 2006 denouncing the unrestrained Bush/Cheney assault on core American values, he asked: “If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can’t he do?” That’s exactly my question here for the far more extreme power claimed by Obama: if you believe the President should have the power to order people, including U.S. citizens, executed with no due process and not even any checks or transparency, what power do you believe he shouldn’t have?

Great question.

Now is way past the time to dial back the Imperial Presidency…

Charged with doubling the state budget between 1860 and 1873, South Carolina Republicans pointed out that much of the increase arose from support of the lunatic asylum, orphan house, state penitentiary and public schools, none of which existed before. — Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 1863-1877, “Southern Republicans In Power,” p. 365

From PoliticusUSA:

[Republican persidential candidate Willard Mitt] Romney did not meet with any of the convention rank and file after his speech, and only met with the African-Americans that he planted in the crowd.

This isn’t the first time that Mitt Romney has had to bring his own supporters with him. On numerous occasions during the Republican primary the Romney campaign bused in Mormon college students to fill out the candidate’s crowds.

It is hard to believe that same crowd who booed Romney for 15 seconds would give him a standing ovation at the end of his speech. Mitt Romney is thoroughly incapable of telling the truth, but it is amazing how brazen the Romney people are. They actually tried to trick America into thinking that African-Americans will support Romney by stashing plants in the audience.

Via Lisa Kudrow on this morning’s Watch This…

0711: The difference between a cult and a religion

From Quietness by Rumi:

Take an ax to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.

Via Shamash on Facebook…

I fear that the Pee Dee will pull one of its silly editorial tricks come November.

Here’s what I sense. Hope it’s wrong but…

The PD boldly will endorse Sen. Sherrod Brown for the U.S. Senate. A Democrat over Republican. Josh Mandel, Brown’s opponent, has been shooting himself in the foot. The Pee Dee has been taking note of these self-inflicted wounds.

So it’s an easy choice for the PD to go with Brown.

That leaves the decision for President of the United States.

Well, having shown itself as willing to nominate a Democrat, I figure the editorial board (which is a misnomer for “the boss” Terry Egger) will nominate Mitt the Romney for President. Making Republicans (and Kevin O’Brien) happy.

I really think that something has to be done about this. Not after but before the nominations for President.

I believe the Plain Dealer management should know there are people here so angry at the thought of another editorial betrayal that like decision – like the silly ones of the past – will deserve retribution. After all, this is Democratic county.

The paper did endorse Obama in 2008. It has endorsed Romney in the 2012 GOP primary. It drew criticism for that from one blogger who Continue Reading »

From Daily KOS:

All rhetoric has been weaponized in the phony virtual political war between Left and Right for the benefit of the political industry, words have no meaning because there is no universal moral force behind them. Everything is part of an industry, democracy has been commercialized, people have been reduced to consumers by the corporate oligarchy and in a deeper analysis of that, they are literally slaves.

It is not a notion or an abstract idea. No one thinks of himself or herself as a slave, not Right, Left, Independent or Center. It is unthinkable, but it is so. I think that merits a little more attention than a maybe progressive candidate. Unthinkable is what got us here.

Reframing everything is needed because that is what is needed to save democracy, evolution, and meaning and to discredit conservatism, the establishment and the corporate oligarchy. I say discredit because trying to destroy these things will only be a Pyrrhic victory. They will destroy you in the process. I have to control my anger at them and realize that anger is not my deepest feeling and those calling for anger are wrong or have a self serving agenda.

Step One: stop thinking like a consumer…

And if you want to spend some time going hmmm? check out the rest of the diaries…

Matt Taibbi points us to what he describes as an important article by The New York Times’ and outstanding financial reporter Gretchen Morgenson where she writes:

One of the most revealing exchanges in the Barclays documents came when a bank official tried to describe why Barclays’s improper postings were not as problematic as those of other banks. “We’re clean but we’re dirty-clean, rather than clean-clean,” an executive said in a phone conversation. Talk about defining deviancy down.

“Dirty clean” versus “clean clean” pretty much sums up Wall Street’s view of cheating. If everybody does it, nobody should be held accountable if caught. Alas, many United States regulators and prosecutors seem to have bought into this argument.

Taibbi jumps on Morgenson’s point:

This viewpoint has been particularly in evidence since 2008. Time and again, American regulators have appeared to be paralyzed by corruption in cases when most or all of the banks have been caught raiding the same cookie jar. From fraudulent sales of mortgage-backed securities, to Enronesque accounting, to Jefferson-County-style predatory swap deals, to municipal bond bid-rigging, the strategy of American regulators has been to accept “Well, everybody was doing it” as a mitigating factor when negotiating settlements, where that should have made them want to crack the whip even harder.

Why? Because “everybody is doing it” corruption is way more dangerous than corruption involving one or two rogue firms going off-reservation. Regulators who spot that kind of industry-wide problem, to say nothing of cartel-style anticompetitive corruption, should be in a panic: They should always impose serious, across-the-board punishments, and it goes without saying that senior executives responsible have to be removed.

I saw we grant early release to oh say, 100 felons doing time for pot possession and give their cells to 100 banking executives. I’m sure a reasonably competent assistant district attorney in New York City can put together the list.

How do you deal with your plethora of books?

Right now on my desk I have the following:

Across That Bridge by John Lewis;
Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel;
Black Over White by Thomas Holt;
Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle;
Business Model You by Tim Clark;
Complete Idiot’s Guide to Calculus by Michael Kelley
Complete Idiot’s Guide to Physics by Johnnie Dennis;
Derelict Paradise by Daniel Kerr;
Fear And Loathing On the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson;
Good Citizens by Thich Nhat Hanh;
Ignorance by Stuart Firestein;
Liar’s Bible by Lawrence Block;
Moby Dick by Herman Melville;
PACE by Al Sears;
Reconstruction by Eric Foner;
Script & Scribble by Kitty Burns-Florey;
Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China by Guy Delisle
Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog by Kitty Burns-Florey; and
Teachers Have It Easy by Dan Moulthrop.

I’m like a heroin addict. I keep swearing off allowing books to pile up this way, and I do well for a few weeks or even a month or two and then, before I can blink, the pile is back. How do I end my Renton cycle?

Bill Zimmerman concludes:

A new movement is being born. Jobless young troublemakers being thrown away by society understand that the extreme disparities in wealth and power that are the cause of their problems will not disappear on their own. Behind these young people will be millions of dissatisfied workers pursuing the American dream denied. That is why the coming era of citizen activism is likely to dwarf what my generation accomplished in the 1960s. We altered the country, culturally, socially, sexually and spiritually. The next wave of activism will change it economically.

Jeremy Rifkin warned in his 1994 book, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era, that the greatest threat to global society was masses of young, unemployed men.

LIBOR should actually be called LIE MORE…

0500: MONETARY HISTORY CALENDAR July 9 – 15

The results showed that a narrow, concrete, here-and-now focus works against self-control, whereas a broad, abstract, long-term focus supports it. That’s one reason why religious people score relatively high in measures of self-control and why non-religious people like [journalist and explorer Henry Morton] Stanley can benefit by other kinds of transcendent thoughts and enduring ideals. Stanley always combined his ambitions for personal glory with a desire to be “good” as he’d imagined his dying mother telling him. p. 165

From Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

There is quite a gulf between:

I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.

and:

…all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free…

Editor Matthew Breen explains…

Hyperbole only lowers expectations.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

…[A]s I’ve repeatedly documented, and as Friedersdorf notes, these claims are unproven and inherently unreliable for numerous reasons, including the warped Obama re-definition of “militant” to include “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants . . . . unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” There is abundant evidence that the number of civilian deaths are vastly higher than official claims…

The euphenisms — and bodies — just keep getting piled higher and higher…

Who is Middle Class? Our Middle class isn’t the Upper Class, those richer than we, or the Lower Class, those with little or nothing. For us, Class is a fair muddle.

In George Orwell’s inter-war world, livelihood and education put the coal miner firmly in a class lower than the store clerk, yet the miner might bring home a few pounds more each year than the clerk. Here, autoworkers and doctors, firefighters and engineers, bookkeepers and lawyers, all believe themselves – pace disparate wages, employment and education – to be Middle Class, because they can afford the trappings of The Middle Class. Most recently in 2008, however, we learned again that those embellishments disappear in an instant, sucked down the financial toilet, when Wall Street and banking greed flush the economy.

The Occupy Movement disregards multiple classes in favor of just two categories: the 99 percent and the One Percent. The latter consists of anyone who could lapse into a coma for 10 years knowing first, that their health insurance was sufficient for their care, and second, that their wealth would not diminish, but grow while they lay unconscious. The former would be doomed.

Now is a moment for our nation, perhaps for the world, to replace the fiction of a classless society and the upward mobility inherent in Capitalism with economic realism. Yes, the rare individuals do rise from childhood poverty to command vast corporate empires, but so too did peasants become a monarchs. Possible yes, but probable? Not bloody likely.

Our struggle is not between left and right, conservative and progressive, but top and bottom. We the people are the 99 percent.

You may also join this coversation at the Civic Commons…

The above is part of my 272 project…

And this is why…

Yes, the process of Going Up From Egypt can be this simple…