1831: Let Their Be Guns! in the movie theater, to shoot noisy people

1656: Stonewall 2.0, Rachel Maddow, and humanity

1202: Tennessean: elevated levels of thallium, lead in water at coal ash disaster

0924: Mono a Mono

0656: Another sign of the shifting winds

Makes sense…

Or, how about we can no longer be dumb as we wanna be…

unabashedly idiosyncratic collection[s], driven by the interests, passions and whims of our editors and writers.

The Toy Age is over.

We no longer get to have all the toys we want in our efforts to make ourselves happy.

Alexandra Penney and all the others who have lived in an economic lala land for the past 50 years — including nearly all of our political leaders — need to get over themselves.

As a nation we need to decide if we’re going to keep our eyes tightly closed and our hands over our ears while we make loud humming noises and wish for a return to 1995, or if we’re going to do what our grandparents and great grandparents did and get to work.

Robert Feinman, my co-blogger at The Writing On The Wal has this to say:

So the US is now faced with some unpleasant choices. It can plan for a smaller economy or it can just let it happen. Recent attempts to pump up the economy in the face of the current downturn seem to indicate that it is the latter course of action that will be undertaken. Present steps are aimed at restoring the “good old days” as quickly as possible. Even the scare of $140 oil hasn’t awakened political and social leaders to the need to restructure the economy.

What might the options look like?

There have been many cases where empires crumbled. In every case what followed was a rise in poverty for the bulk of the population, while the wealthy used their power to maintain their wealth. When you are the only ones with money it is cheap to buy loyalty from those without, and it doesn’t even cost much. The result is a rise of police power and repression of dissent.

This fracturing of society into the rulers and the ruled only makes economic conditions worse and accelerates the economic decline. Slaves don’t make good workers and have little incentive to improve society. In the worst cases you get civil wars and revolution.

So much for ignoring the problem, or, as we seem want to do, throwing money at the people who created the problem in the first place. What might creativity, inventiveness and the sacrifice that has made our nation great in the past look like? Continue Reading »

Alexandra Penney whines:

Hundreds of vitriolic comments blasted onto the site basically calling me a rich bitch. A few were sympathetic. I wasn’t surprised one way or the other because I’m scared shitless about just having to survive these days. But it suddenly seemed clear to me that we are all in this together. Aren’t we all afraid when we’ve lost our jobs, our savings, our homes, pensions-and our confidence?

I’m down to a tranquilizer and a half a day and only a few are left. I won’t be able to afford health insurance any longer. For God’s sake, hurry up, Obama!

Those fears are overwhelming me now. The fear of loss of independence, the loss of dignity, the loss of self, the loss of identity, even the seemingly small loss of not being able to pick up the check for a cappuccino when a friend is going through a rough patch.

You may think I was an out of touch elitist prancing around in starched white shirts, but pretty much everyone I talk to is scared of what’s going to happen to them in these really frightening times. Greed and insatiability have ripped off millions of Americans just like that M.F. (aka the motherfucker, Bernie Madoff) robbed every cent of my IRA, my entire life’s savings.

She’ll always have Walmart…

“The little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasophayrnx” indeed.

Julia Reed sees the light…

0859: RIP, Michael Connell, Internet-savvy political consultant for GOP

0724: Et tu Bruce?

Over at The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg is struggling to come up with 50 names of philo-semites. He started the list more than a month ago. So far he’s come up with 25.

I know, I promised fifty, but this is hard. The list might very well grow to fifty — keep your suggestions coming — but for now, here are twenty-five top philo-Semites.

1) Winston Churchill
2) W.H. Auden
3) Orde Wingate
4) Harry Truman
5) Maurice Blanchot

Given the restriction he’s placed on the list — the big one is no Righteous Gentiles, non-Jews who saved Jews during the Shoah — because, he writes,

That is a special category that represents something much greater than simple affinity for, and support of, Jews.

If you have suggestions for the list, drop Goldberg an email.

John Bogle, in Enough. The Measures of Money, Business, and Life, writes:

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.”

Via Tom Peters…

–

Johnny Sundstrom writes:

I remember one time many, many years ago when [my father] just looked at me for awhile and then said, “Indian people are all commonists.”

I looked back and then said, “Do you mean Communists?”

He said, “No, commonists. Communists is a foreign word. We believe in commonism.”

“OK,” I said, “what”s commonism?”

He smiled and said, “We all own the land, the air and the water and everything that comes from it. Nobody owns the land or the water or the air. That”s commonism.”

Via Sherry Chandler…

That’s the sound-bite image; a lonely widow living on Social Security eating cat food and taking only half the prescribed dosage of her heart pills so that she can afford to keep the thermostat at 60 degrees in her apartment.

That’s an image that we can feel indignant, and just a little smug, about because we’ve been responsible and worked hard and made wise investments.

Now it is morning in President George Walker Bush’s America:

“Did you know your medicines have expired?”

Mom answered. “Yes, but they’re not that old. Besides, we’re trying to save some money. Our drug deductibles are very high.”

This isn’t a poor family. They’re a typical middle-class one from Pleasant Hill, Calif., a nice suburb 25 minutes east of Oakland. But like a lot of other families, they’re under pressure and must decide whether healthcare takes precedence over paying the mortgage or buying food. Many families, having to care for both children and aging parents, likely have to decide whose healthcare needs — child or grandparent — are greater before spending their dollars at the doctor’s office.

The Pleasant Hill family isn’t among the 50 million uninsured to whom politicians keep referring. They represent everyone else — those employed and insured. But they’ve got a lot of skin in the game with high deductible plans that are affordable to their employers but tough on their own pocketbooks.

I’m certainly not the first person to mention President-elect Barack Hussein Obama together with the figure of Jesus-as-Messiah, but reading Dr. Rahul K. Parikh’s words this morning made me think that our President-in-waiting is about to step into the leper scene from Jesus Christ Superstar where the lepers are the economy, health care, the war in Iraq, international terrorism, the list doesn’t seem to have an end.

President-elect Obama has so far demonstrated a genius beyond expectations. Business even remotely as usual will not bring us gladly to this time in 2009.

0908: Me, Lebron, & bridges

1001: Why Rick Warren really is quite stupendously fucked

0954: RIP, Michael Connell, Internet-savvy political consultant for GOP

0847: 4 years

1447: The politics of Hope vs. Rick Warren”s genitalia

0834: Certified Sabbath Mode

0818: FORMER MUSIC CRITIC ASSESSES PD TREATMENT OF ROSENBERG

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Ed Hauser’s death was a tragedy that didn’t have to happen. It was a death that should not have happened. In many other countries it would not have happened.

The circumstances of his death may be the reason many more will die today and tomorrow.

Ed died because America doesn’t have the decency to protect its own citizens with the health care that’s basic in all other industrial societies.

As Mike Roberts wrote recently of Hauser in Cleveland Magazine, “The town could use a few more good men like Ed Hauser.

“Hauser is a pain – a persistent, nagging, unyielding pain. On the medical scale of one to 10, he would rate a 10. What makes him so painful is that he challenges the way the town and its dysfunctional government work.”

Hauser saved (for the time being anyway) Whiskey Island – named so because it housed an early distillery – from being gobbled up by the Cuyahoga-Cleveland County Port Authority. The island – which really isn’t an island – sits on Lake Erie immediately west of the Cuyahoga River. His unyielding work to keep the island from development earned him the title of “Mayor of Whiskey Island,” and the tag of honor, “Citizen Hauser.”

Hauser attended Port Authority meetings, demanded documents and even videotaped its meetings.

He was the burr that wouldn’t go away.

It cost him his health.

So the richest nation in the world couldn’t or wouldn’t save Ed Hauser.

Here we sit in Cleveland, Ohio, the home of the famed Cleveland Clinic but Ed Hauser waited too long to get medical help. He died waiting. I don’t blame specifically the Cleveland Clinic but it definitely is an institution, as they say when a crime is committed, “of interest.”

Our corporatized society likes to keep costs low. Ed was one of the casualties of that policy. Even when the auto companies are drowning in debt, they aren’t in the vanguard of demanding university health care, which would relieve them of huge costs.

Why? Ideology.

As Sen. George Voinovich pointedly said of President-elect Barack Obama, he’s a “socialist.” That’s an ideological position, one that fits corporate think.

The kind of thinking that denies many Americans even minimum health care.

How many Ed Hausers are there? We know there are tens of millions of them without proper health insurance, thus without proper health care.

The U. S. Census Bureau reported in 2007 that 47 million Americans were without health insurance, a figure rising each of the previous seven years. With the recession a year old that figure likely has rising considerably.

As the economy continues to deteriorate there will be tens of more millions soon.

Ed has received many deserved plaudits for his selfless work as a citizen activist. This is fine and proper.

There are other Ed Hausers out there who do similar work, maybe not as doggedly or as persistently as Ed has.

Cleveland also is the home of some of the large and well-funded foundations.

I think there ought to be at least some interest in funding activists who monitor government agencies. However, the great foundations don’t seem to gravitate to this kind of citizen action.

That costs people like Ed Hauser. It costs us, too, because there really is no citizen regulation of the very bad behavior of our business, political and civic life in Cleveland.

A Daily Dish reader writes:

I was an officer that ran interrogator teams in the Marine Corps from 2001-2004.

Reuel Marc Gerecht uses the biggest fallacy in all of the torture debate–the ticking time-bomb fallacy. He assumes that an ideologically driven terrorist like KSM or Abu Zubaydah would answer the questions truthfully even under torture when all he had to do was withstand for 4 days to let 9/11 happen. This is absurd.

They would withstand because they are so close to the “finish line.”

Even more likely though, assuming that KSM was captured on 7 September, would be to give us thousands of leads (which he did anyways when he was captured) with a little truth at the core and we would go ragged chasing them all down while the terrorists boarded the planes without a problem.

Bottom line, the ticking time-bomb scenario is just not a justification for torture of an ideologically motivated person who has immense incentive to withstand and disseminate false information. Finally, there are other methods that could “break” KSM in the above scenario like the shock of capture and some thoughtful, sophisticated tricks that are certainly not torture and in the Army manual.