06/17/2015 archive

Jun 17 2015

You can’t handle the truth.

One of the most basic, fundamental, problems of Neo-Liberalism is the secrecy of the elites.

There are two causes, only one of which is generally exposed (and that’s a rather generous characterization because they try to cover it up also) and it is- if we told you unwashed masses what we were actually doing you wouldn’t like it since we are so vastly superior in our intellect to you ignorant peons.

Frankly, that is quite insulting enough but it only masks the deeper reason.

We are incompetent morons who pretty much screw up everything we touch and only hold our priviledged positions because of nepotism and sychophancy.

Try and guess which motivation is in play here-

Eric Garner case’s secret evidence should be made public, attorneys argue

by Lauren Gambino, The Guardian

Tuesday 16 June 2015 15.42 EDT

Disclosure is opposed by the district attorney’s office, which argued that releasing the grand jury record would not lead to new answers, and would have a “chilling effect” on witnesses, who are promised anonymity, and even prosecutors, who might feel pressure from the public to deliver a certain result if secrecy was no longer sacrosanct.

“Perhaps less disclosure on that day would have been better,” said Anne Grady, an assistant district attorney for Richmond County, which encompasses Staten Island, where Garner lived and died.

At one point during the hearing, Justice Leonard Austin asked if the decision to release some information meant the cat was “already out of the bag”.

The assistant DA said she disagreed with that characterization. “Further disclosure will only raise more questions,” she said.

She added: “The intense public scrutiny should not result in disclosure but even more zealous protection.”

Jun 17 2015

Just When We Need Him, Stephen Is Back

Yesterday another Republican thew his hat onto the GOP Presidential candidate clown car, billionaire real estate magnate Donald Trump. In a rambling disconnected speech that was panned by both the right and left media pundits, he managed to insult China, Mexico and the intelligence of most voters. Trump made Jon Stewart’s night but what was really the topper was former Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert’s response to The Donald.

Sporting a Trump-style hairdo, Colbert was rolled to a podium in “a giant human trashcan” to announce he would still be hosting the “Late Show.” But mostly, he just rambled for more than six minutes, mimicking Trump’s own rambling speech.

“My mouth still has more to say,” he said as he babbled on about China, Mexico, lunch, bicycle racing, card tricks, hats and more.

“I agree with Donald that America is dead — buried in a coffin, in salted earth with our enemies pissing on it and laughing” Colbert said. “And Donald Trump is the only man who can — excuse me, I’m just moved — I’m physically moved by the knowledge that Donald Trump is the only man who can dig up the corpse of that nation and marry it.”

At one point, he literally foamed at the mouth.

Jun 17 2015

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Cracks appear in the climate change deniers’ defenses

In April 2009, as the political right was finding its voice in the tea party, South Carolina Republican Rep. Bob Inglis was making the case for a carbon tax. “I’m a conservative. I believe in accountability,” he said. “Global warming is not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of facts.” He added, “We don’t want to be a party of deniers.”

Most of his party disagreed. A year later, Inglis was trounced in a Republican primary, his staunchly conservative record proving insufficient to overcome this heretical deviation. On the surface, it may appear that little has changed in the intervening years. But cracks are appearing in the climate change deniers’ defenses. Today, the movement to seriously address global warming is gaining unlikely supporters, a potential preview of the tectonic shift to come.

Last month, six major oil and gas companies based in Europe, including BP and Royal Dutch Shell, wrote a letter officially endorsing an international price on carbon. “Climate change is a critical challenge for our world,” they declared. “The challenge is how to meet greater energy demand with less [carbon dioxide]. We stand ready to play our part.” In the short term, these companies stand to benefit from carbon pricing, which would shift demand away from coal. But even if their position is partially self-serving, it’s an important declaration, and one that deeply undercuts the climate change deniers’ arguments. Even oil companies, we can now say, believe climate change is real – and admit it’s something they are causing.

Ashley Gorski: New Docs Raise Questions About CIA Spying Here at Home

The current debate about government surveillance has largely overlooked the CIA, possibly because we know little about the agency’s activities within the United States. While the relevant legal authorities governing the CIA, including Executive Order 12333, set out the CIA’s mandate, they do so in broad terms. Beyond the generalities in EO 12333 and other laws, the public has had few opportunities to examine the rules governing the CIA’s activities.

But we know more today than we did a few weeks ago. In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, the CIA has released a slew of documents concerning CIA surveillance under EO 12333. (The Justice Department has also recently released a set of documents related to the executive order.)

The national debate in the 1970s about the proper limits of U.S. government spying on its own citizens was, to a large extent, about the CIA. In the wake of the Watergate scandal and news stories about other illegal CIA activity, President Gerald Ford and Congress launched investigations into the full range of CIA misdeeds – from domestic spying programs and infiltration of leftist organizations to experimentation on non-consenting human subjects and attempts to assassinate foreign leaders.

Zoë Carpenter: Meet the ‘Snake-Oil Salesman’ From Utah Who Wants to Transform the American West

To cash-strapped counties in the American West, Ken Ivory is offering what sounds like salvation. Underfunded schools, potholed roads, cuts to law enforcement-those can be reversed, the Republican state representative from Utah suggests in presentations to county commissioners, Tea Party groups, and Fox News viewers, if states force the federal government to turn over millions of acres of public land to local authorities.

Over the past several years Ivory has made himself the leading evangelist for the land-transfer movement, which is undergoing something of a resurrection in Western states. He’s also facing new accusations of fraud. In early June, the watchdog group Campaign for Accountability filed complaints in three states alleging that Ivory is scamming local governments out of thousands of taxpayer dollars every year by “making false statements” to convince them to support his nonprofit, “which exists primarily to pay him and his wife,” the complaint reads. What Ivory really has to offer, according to CFA’s Anne Weismann, is not salvation but “snake oil.”

Jessica Valenti: Jeb Bush can’t end the war on women with good domestic violence policies

Any Republican running for president in 2016 needs women voters to win, and the last few years of bone-headed statements and even more bone-headed policies – from “legitimate rape” to transvaginal ultrasounds, and from the wage gap to birth control coverage in insurance policies – haven’t made that easy. So perhaps it was inevitable that former Florida governor Jeb Bush would think that if he says “domestic violence” enough times, female voters will magically appear.

The difficulty for Bush is that other policies that he favors don’t protect women from domestic violence: they put victims at further risk. [..]

But while Bush passed the Family Protection Act while governor, which increased criminal consequences for abusers, increased funding for women’s shelters and his wife, Columba Bush, made working against domestic violence a big part of her tenure as Florida’s first lady, it’s going to take more to close the voting gender gap than focusing on just one women’s issue. Because one policy that affects women’s lives can’t be cleaved off from all the other, important policies that affect women just because they’re less ideologically convenient – especially when they’re interconnected.

Access to abortion, for example, makes it easier for women to leave their abusive partners.

Naomi Oreskes: The Hoax of Climate Denial: Why “Politically Motivated” Science Is Good Science

Recently, the Washington Post reported new data showing something most of us already sense: that increased polarization on Capitol Hill is due to the way the Republican Party has lurched to the right. The authors of the study use Senator John McCain to illustrate the point. McCain’s political odyssey is, in some dismaying sense, close to my own heart, since it highlights the Republican turn against science.

As unlikely as it might seem today, in the first half of the twentieth century the Republicans were the party that most strongly supported scientific work, as they recognized the diverse ways in which it could undergird economic activity and national security. The Democrats were more dubious, tending to see science as elitist and worrying that new federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health would concentrate resources in elite East Coast universities.

In recent decades, of course, the Republicans have lurched rightward on many topics and now regularly attack scientific findings that threaten their political platforms. In the 1980s, they generally questioned evidence of acid rain; in the 1990s, they went after ozone science; and in this century, they have launched fierce attacks not just on climate science, but in the most personal fashion imaginable on climate scientists.

Jun 17 2015

The Breakfast Club (Starry Starry Nights)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

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This Day in History

The Watergate scandal begins to unfold; The Battle of Bunker Hill during the American Revolution; O.J. Simpson arrested in the slayings of his ex-wife Nicole and Ronald Goldman; Singer Kate Smith dies.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

Buddha

Jun 17 2015

On This Day In History June 17

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

June 17 is the 168th day of the year (169th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 197 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1885, the Statue of Liberty, a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States, arrives in New York City’s harbor.

The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World, French: La Liberté éclairant le monde) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, designed by Frédéric Bartholdi and dedicated on October 28, 1886. The statue, a gift to the United States from the people of France, is of a robed female figure representing Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, who bears a torch and a tabula ansata (a tablet evoking the law) upon which is inscribed the date of the American Declaration of Independence. A broken chain lies at her feet. The statue has become an icon of freedom and of the United States.

Bartholdi was inspired by French law professor and politician Édouard René de Laboulaye, who commented in 1865 that any monument raised to American independence would properly be a joint project of the French and American peoples. Due to the troubled political situation in France, work on the statue did not commence until the early 1870s. In 1875, Laboulaye proposed that the French finance the statue and the Americans provide the pedestal and the site. Bartholdi completed both the head and the torch-bearing arm before the statue was fully designed, and these pieces were exhibited for publicity at international expositions. The arm was displayed in New York’s Madison Square Park from 1876 to 1882. Fundraising proved difficult, especially for the Americans, and by 1885 work on the pedestal was threatened due to lack of funds. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer of the World initiated a drive for donations to complete the project, and the campaign inspired over 120,000 contributors, most of whom gave less than a dollar. The statue was constructed in France, shipped overseas in crates, and assembled on the completed pedestal on what was then called Bedloe’s Island. The statue’s completion was marked by New York’s first ticker-tape parade and a dedication ceremony presided over by President Grover Cleveland.

The statue was administered by the United States Lighthouse Board until 1901 and then by the Department of War; since 1933 it has been maintained by the National Park Service. The statue was closed for renovation for much of 1938. In the early 1980s, it was found to have deteriorated to such an extent that a major restoration was required. While the statue was closed from 1984 to 1986, the torch and a large part of the internal structure were replaced. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, it was closed for reasons of safety and security; the pedestal reopened in 2004 and the statue in 2009, with limits on the number of visitors allowed to ascend to the crown. The statue is scheduled to close for up to a year beginning in late 2011 so that a secondary staircase can be installed. Public access to the balcony surrounding the torch has been barred for safety reasons since 1916.

Jun 17 2015

The Daily/Nightly Show (Digital Dating)

It seems strange in a way because I have ten fingers (or I did before that tragic snowblower accident) and computers count in binary or quaternary or octal or hexidecimal which means 6+10 which is the number of fingers I used to have (I mean 10, to count to 16 I had to take off my shoes.  Oh, frostbite.  Why do you think I needed the snowblower?).

Dazed and confused

Tonightly Lewis Black!  You know, I don’t even care who the rest of the panel is or what they’ll be talking about.

Continuity

Zebra

Wheat… lots of wheat… fields of wheat… a tremendous amount of wheat…

This week’s guests-

Aziz Ansari will be talking about his new book, Modern Romance: An Investigation, about how technology has changed our romantic relationships.

Ladies, if you’re not imagining a pimply Cheeto stained teenager blogging from Mom’s basement in their pajamas I’ve given you entirely the wrong impression and I deeply and sincerely apologize.

Why did I just send you an emoji of a pizza?  It’s very simple, there is no emoji for Combos which I think is a billion dollar idea right up there with Facebook.  No, really, think of it.  I could just sit here in the basement designing branded emojis for multi-mega nationals in my pajamas (umm… I would be the one in pajamas, not the elephant) brushing the crumbs off my orange stained keyboard.

But to save time and effort I think I’ll let you do it and sic my DCMA copyright troll lawyers on you after you make some money.

Judd Apatow’s web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.