With the continuing obsessive coverage of the whole Gates arrest situation in Cambridge, it reminds me of a few things. The first is how totally worthless the “mainstream media” is in this country, that in the most deadly month yet in Iraq, with healthcare on the line, etc., all they care about is blowing up something that isn’t controversial into something gigantic. The media, as always, is more obsessed with playing news-maker than news-reporter.
Second, what President Obama said may have been poor word choice, but it was not incorrect. Arresting someone who had not broken the law—in their own home—because they seem to have not demonstrated the proper level of subservience and deference to cops who were mistaken is stupid. It is glaring stupid. It is a level of stupid derived from people so intoxicated with their own sense of self-righteousness and power-obsession.
Thirdly, anyone—black or white—who was being accused of a crime, in their own home, after having demonstrated that they were who they said they were, and who was being harassed by the police would be agitated. If I had just arrived back from a 15+ hour flight from China to not be able to get into my house, and then quickly found someone accusing me of being a criminal, I’d be a lot more than just agitated. I’d be seriously upset and argumentative.
Lastly, that whether people care to acknowledge it or not, people are treated differently based on their color of their skin, especially by the police. To not see that is to have ones head in the sand. This is most emphatically not a post-racial society. The election of an African-American man with a Islamic name is a demonstration of the total and complete abject failure of the Bush administration and Republicans, not the movement of a society past racial concerns.
Bonuses fell to $18.4 billion from $32.9 billion in 2007, the largest decline ever and the biggest percentage drop in more than 30 years, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said. The size of the bonus pool is the sixth-largest on record, he said.
So they must have done pretty well this year, right?
Losses from traditional broker-dealer operations of New York Stock Exchange member firms topped $35 billion in 2008, more than triple the record set a year earlier, Mr. DiNapoli said.
So, you lost $35 billion dollars, and have your hand in the tax-payer’s pockets, but yet you can find $18.4 billion to pay bonuses? My company turned a record year in revenue and profit and cut bonuses that were never that big to begin with.
They sure must employ a lot of people, right?
Meanwhile, Wall Street shed 19,200 jobs, or 10.2 percent, in New York City over the last 14 months, ending the year with 168,600 workers.
Let’s see, that comes out to an average bonus of $109,523.81. How did you do this year?
Now they’ll “defend” this orgyistic excess by promulgating the total fabrication that they have to do it to keep the talent. My question is: is this the same talent that lost $35 billion? Sounds like you should fire them, not give them rewards. I could have lost that kind of money for far less salary.
Wall Street is a microcosm of everything that is wrong with this country: a bastion of insular, self-serving egotists who do absolutely nothing useful for the country and enrich themselves while destroying the rest of society in the process.
Wall Street should be “up against the wall”. How they sleep… how they are allowed to sleep is beyond me.
Friedman frequently uses a rhetorical technique that goes something like this: “I was in Dubai with the general counsel of BP last year, watching 500 Balinese textile workers get on a train, when suddenly I said to myself, ‘We need better headlights for our tri-plane.’” And off he goes.You the reader end up spending so much time wondering what Dubai, BP and all those Balinese workers have to do with the rest of the story that you don’t notice that tri-planes don’t have headlights.And by the time you get all that sorted out, your well-lit tri-plane is flying from chapter to chapter delivering a million geo-green pizzas to a million Noahs on a million Arks. And you give up. There’s so much shit flying around the book’s atmosphere that you don’t notice the only action is Friedman talking to himself.
I’ve always wondered why people pay attention to his dreck, but then, I wonder that about Dr. Phil as well. Both are kindred-spirits.
Let me make no bones about it, Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at the Inauguration bothers me for two reasons. First, he’s an unmitigated homophobe, fear monger, war monger and all-around distasteful fellow who wraps his hatred in namby-pamby “feel good” language of fear. Second, why the hell are there so many preachers at the freaking Inauguration? Hello? Separation of Church and State. Go sit on your bible and spin.
WHICH IS TO SAY: I would shake his hand. If I met him, I’d try to find some common ground, or at least keep the dinner party civil until dessert. I think there are lots of ways for Obama to do the same in his presidency.
BUT AS SOMEONE CLEVER on Twitter pointed out, I still wouldn’t invite him to sing at my wedding.
Obama won’t be perfect, but I’m quite tired of him shoving a knife in the back of the LGBT community. First McClurkin, now this. Sounds like a lot of lip service about inclusion, and not a lot of actual action.
Hell, you could have invited Jim Wallis if you wanted that whole Christian thing. At least he manages to stay reasonably consistent and not advocate for more death and destruction.
Imagine, someone who understands science (and specifically physics) running the Department of Energy. Some have pointed out that he doesn’t have much (any?) experience in nuclear weaponry—the main focus of DOE—I would observe that most who do have that experience know nothing else in any depth because of the limitations DOE places on security clearances. I’m quite sure that someone who has managed to win the Nobel Prize for Physics can manage to grasp what needs to be grasped about that aspect of the work.
The future, however, is in solving our energy dependency, not in blowing more people up in spectacularly impractical ways.
During this financial crisis, Congress seems to have exactly two options that they refuse to deviate from:
Throw good money after bad
Encourage already gigantic companies to merge
The rationale that is used for both is “they’re too big to fail”, but I think we’ve seen with AIG that they’ll fail all-the-same, and the money is often little more than a longer fuse to allow the problem to grow even bigger. In the case of mergers, it seems that all they are doing is amplifying the situation. Too big to fail? Get bigger!
Idiots. Sometimes it’s necessary to let companies fail. That doesn’t mean that the government shouldn’t do something to cushion the impact on the economy and the downstream suppliers, etc., but simply going for “more of the same” is beyond stupid.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
The solution is to allow the idiots on Wall Street who lost trillions making nothing and the idiots in Detroit who lost trillions making something to fail. Go after the management for fraud and incompetence and then use tax money, where appropriate, to rebuild the auto industry into something world-class. Detroit can build world-class cars, but choses to make a cheap buck usually and is saddled with fall-out from a broken healthcare system and the myopic idiocy reinforced by Wall Street.
Wall Street, on the other hand, is largely populated with useless people who in any sane society would have been shoved on the B-Ark and blasted into outer space along with the management consultants. Instead, we ask them to fix the problem they created? See quote above.
In its continuing string of “f*ck you America” in the closing days, the Bush “administration” has decided that perchlorate is good for you:
Among the Bush administration’s final environmental legacies will be a decision to exempt perchlorate, a known neurotoxin found at unsafe levels in the drinking water of millions of Americans, from federal regulation.
The ruling, proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency in October, was supposed to be formalized on Monday. That deadline passed, but the agency expects to announce its decision by the year’s end, before president-elect Barack Obama takes office. It could take years to reverse.
Critics accuse the EPA of ignoring expert advice and basing their decision on an abstract model of perchlorate exposure, rather than existing human data.
Eh, what’s a little rocket fuel between friends? It’s not like that’s the only finger this criminals are giving the country on their way out:
The ruling is one of dozens planned for the final days of the Bush administration. Others include a relaxing of air pollution standards for aging power plants, and a reduction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s traditional role in evaluating the impact of federal projects on endangered species.
I mean, their stewardship of the financial markets, and our foreign policy has been such a resounding success, let’s just let them do their “thing” with the rest of the country.
This is about telling you that you mean nothing. That democracy is a nice word, but it should never threaten the entitlement of the most exclusive club in the world.
No matter what Joe Lieberman does, the people who are protecting him hate you much more than they hate him.
There’s much haranguing about whether Joe Lieberman (I-CT) should “keep” his position as chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. There shouldn’t be. He shouldn’t. This is not a minor policy disagreement. This is not a disagreement about whether Joe Lieberman toes the party line. It’s about the fact that he’s a turncoat in the strictest definition. This is not someone who said “nice things” about John McCain, but someone who campaigned for him, and spoke at the Republican convention. This is not someone who kept silent about Obama, this is someone who accused him of all sorts of laughable things—most of which if turned against Lieberman would quickly and roundly be condemned as anti-semitic insanity.
He not only doesn’t deserve a chairmanship. He doesn’t deserve a formal place at the table. Let him sit at the little kids table until he grows up. Unfortunately, Senate Democrats, in keeping with their tradition, are spineless weasels who will take a secret vote today, and likely give him everything he wants. They’ll try and pretend that he’s been rebuked, but a minor loss of power isn’t a rebuke, it’s a slap on the wrist. They’ll pretend they’re change, but they are just more of the same.
This is a petty man who went to support a party he has almost nothing policy wise in common with—except a love of war and death, apparently—because he was throwing a temper tantrum and wanted attention. This will come back to haunt many Senators in 2 years.
After watching what’s been going on the past few days since Barack Obama was elected the next President of the United States of America, I have a scenario that I think is going to play out, over and over and over and over.
Various knuckle-dragging idiots will puff up their chest, and using the miniscule amount of neural power they posses make wild and sweeping threats against the new President. This will assist them in dealing with their miniscule appendages.
The Secret Service will pay a little visit to said idiots and have more than a few questions about their statements.
Rush Limbaugh, and the rest of the chattering lunatic-class will accuse it of being “racially motivated” and that their freedom of hate speech is being abridged.
Let me cite from USC 18,871:
Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail or for a delivery from any post office or by any letter carrier any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States, the President-elect, the Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President of the United States, or the Vice President-elect, or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat against the President, President-elect, Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President, or Vice President-elect, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
Seriously, WTF is wrong with people? Just pull out that spare sheet and a pair of scissors and go join your friends in the KKK. At least they are reasonably honest about their unbridled fear and hatred.
If you haven’t heard—perhaps you’re still living in a cave somewhere—the 44th President of the United States will be Barack Hussein Obama. Let that idea roll around in your mind for a moment, that at this time, in this country, a half-white/half-black man with an Arabic name has just become leader of the free world. As he so often says, “only in America is this story possible”.
But Barack Obama is only the general who rides at the front of his troops. He can lead, and has passionately, but in the end, he has not won. We have, for without his troops a general is nothing but a man in a silly uniform. Without us, he wields no power. Without us, nothing else is possible.
And so we restore the true meaning of democracy: δῆμος (demos) for people and Κράτος (kratos) for strength and power. δῆμοΚράτος. Quite literally the power of the people. It was ours to capture, and it is ours to protect in the future.
Each of us has something to give to the campaign. For some, it is the time, sweat and frustration of walking door-to-door, calling on every American to participate in the democratic process. For others, too nervous to knock on the door, there’s a phone that needs calling, an envelope that needs stuffing or a door hanger just waiting to perch itself upon a waiting knob. Then there are others, such as myself, who are stuck with insane work obligations that keep me from taking the time off that I would rather, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make calls, and I have given more than ever before of my gold.
Standing in line to vote last week in communist Virginia, what I saw was unlike anything I’ve seen in 20 years of being politically active. The faces crossed worlds and generations, but the one thing that amazed me—during a over two hour wait to vote—was that people were happy. Sure, standing in line sucks, but this wasn’t an election based on a less-of-two-evils decision, but an election based on the power of choice. Everyone kept their temper, their humor, and while few discussed politics directly, the underlying theme was one of common cause and common purpose as a Nation. This is something I have never seen before in an election.
This is what America really is about. That the vote of a newly legal immigrant from Guatamala counts as much as that of a descendent of the Mayflower. That the small power of many can outweigh the vast power of a few. That hope, like wisdom, once unleashed can not be forced back in the bottle by anyone.
One of my favorite cyclists likes to say, “Leave everything on the road”, meaning that when he crosses the finish line, he will have burned every last ounce of energy in his body. If he falls short? No regrets because he gave it his all, every last bit of it.
We can’t have regrets on Election Night, thinking that some Democrats came up short because we failed to leave everything on the road. We can’t have a Jim Martin or a Bob Lord or a Darcy Burner or whoever come inches from victory, knowing that maybe we could’ve done just a little bit more to help them cross the finish line victorious. Even if all you can give is $5 to one candidate, or one afternoon phone banking, it still matters. There’s a lot of us, and a lot of little gestures adds up to a whole lot of action.
We are approaching a historic night, and one that can radically transform the direction of our country.
I’m not a US citizen, so I can’t vote in US elections (though I pay taxes like the best of them!), but my wife is. We have two signs in our front yard this week. One simply says “Obama”, the other “No on Prop 8”. I’d like to put up the equivalent of those signs in my blog.
If you’re eligible to vote in the US, do me and the rest of the world a favor and vote for Obama. If you’re voting in California, please help to reject Proposition 8, which is a blatant curtailing of freedom, equality and happiness for gay Californians. Defeating Prop 8 in California will pave the way for equal rights in other states and eventually all of the US. Don’t make me ashamed of living here!
PS. If you think you have no time to vote, think again.
Weird how the post title disagrees with the content, but I’m sure he’ll straighten that out.
Tim O’Reilly explains in great detail why he’s supporting Barack Obama, but I think the final paragraphs tell the entire story and sum up the massive differences:
The final argument for the presidency of Barack Obama is the enormous competence he has shown in running his campaign. He has demonstrated unprecedented ability to motivate people, to gather support for his vision and his programs, and to surround himself with people who can execute on that vision. For the past two years, he’s managed what you could easily think of as the fastest growing and best-funded startup in America, and as CEO of that startup, he’s come through with flying colors.
If Barack Obama were a company, I’d say he was ready for the IPO. And I for one intend to buy shares on November 4. I hope you will too.
Being a great capitalist and CEO means building great things and bringing huge numbers of people with you, not pocketing all the profits while you undermine the core of the organization.