Just What IS the "Lesson" of Boston?

I am duly impressed by the speed with which law enforcement found and either killed or apprehended the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon explosions that killed three and maimed many.

But I'm not chanting "USA" and waving flags.  I'm afraid. Very afraid.

What transpired in Boston made me much more aware of how far the United States has moved toward becoming a totalitarian police state.  To a degree that is frightening, what happened to those Chechen brothers could happen to you.

You've been stripped of your privacy without realizing it.  Most of your protective blanket under the Bill of Rights is in tatters.  Surveillance technology of various kinds has made it possible for law enforcement to pinpoint you in a trice.  Quiet changes in procedure have taken away Miranda rights.  Government drones can find you and kill you --"legally."  You can be grabbed off the street -- possibly even out of your home -- tomorrow and held incognito without charge and without trial -- forever. Nobody is "just a nobody" any more. You're on camera, in a data base, tracked by cookies; you're a number, a code, a profile; what you eat, what you buy, where you travel and how . . . these are your cyber signatures.

It's well and good when this efficient police state nails genuine wrongdoers.  Perhaps (although I doubt it) such efficiency as was displayed in Boston will serve as a deterrant to similar attacks by others.  But I fear for the day when someone in some position of authority, however great or however minimal, decides to use the awesome power of this apparatus to do away with political enemies, to silence critics of government or policy, to quell minorities, to shield powerful corporate interests from punishment or even trial for their crimes. 

Those who wrote our Constitution and Bill of Rights knew well how quickly abuse of power can kill a democracy, and sought to build into those documents a foolproof system of checks and balances.  With PATRIOT Acts and Justice Department memos, with Presidential orders and TOP SECRET stamps, by Congressional cowardice and brainwashing of the public, most of those checks and balances have been disabled.  The common citizen is but a single step from enslavement by the ruling oligarchs.

I can understand the feelings of those in the Boston crowds who broke into applause, chants of "USA" and loud cheers when Suspect No. 2 was taken into custody last night.

But as someone who has already been on one powerful politician's enemies list, and who reported on things government didn't want made public, and whose job took him into other dark places in America, I felt a deep, deep chill when I realized how efficient the modern American surveillance state really is.

I think of Bradley Manning, whose conscience told him to enable his fellow citizens to know about things he knew about that, to him, weren't right.  He could well be put to death for an act of good conscience. His "trial" by his military captors no more resembles justice than American television resembles journalism. There is precious little left of the Bill of Rights to protect any American from his fate.

The very person who will probably prosecute the surviving suspect in Boston -- Carmen Ortiz -- is the same Department of Justice attorney who prosecuted the activist, Aaron Swartz, for writing about the corrupting influence of money in our government, political system and society, until he committed suicide.

The apparatus indeed is vast.

An Open Letter

• An Open Letter To:
• Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.)Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.),  John Boozman (R-Ark.),  Richard Burr (R-N.C.),  Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.),  Dan Coats (R-Ind.),  Tom Coburn (R-Okla.),  Thad Cochran (R-Miss.),  Bob Corker (R-Tenn.),  Jon Cornyn (R-Texas),  Mike Crapo (R-Idaho),  Ted Cruz (R-Texas),  Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), Deb Fischer (R-Neb.),  Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.),  Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa),  Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.),  John Hoeven (R-N.D.), James Inhofe (R-Okla.),  Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.),  Mike Johanns (R-Neb.),  Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Mike Lee (R-Utah),  Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) , Jim Risch (R-Idaho), Pat Roberts (R-Kan.),  Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Tim Scott (R-S.C.),  Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.),  Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), John Thune (R-S.D.), David Vitter (R-La.) and  Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). 

"Honorable" Senators:

On behalf of the people of the United States, and your constituents, I ask that you publicly justify your vote this week against the so-called gun control legislation.  Specifically, tell the families of the names that follow why the NRA and the arms manufacturing industry are worth so much more to you than the lives of  any or all of the people named.

Special request to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky:  Specifically addressing the families of those named below, please explain what was so utterly hilarious about the pictures of yourself and Sen Harry Reid, and their captions, as posted yesterday on your Facebook page.

Sincerely, in remembrance of:

Alex Sullivan, John Larimer, Jessica Ghawi, Micayla Medekm John Blunk, Alex Teves, Alexander "AJ" Boik, Gordon Cowden, Rebecca Wingo, Matt McQuinn, Veronica Moser-Sullivan and Jesse Childress. Slain by gunshot in a movie theater in Aurora, CO.

Cassie Bernall, Steven Curnow, Corey DePooter, Kelly Fleming, Matthew Kechter, Daniel Mauser, Daniel Rohrbough, Wlliam "Dave" Sanders, Rachel Scott, Isaiah Shoels, Lauren Townsend and Kyle Velasquez.  Slain by gunshot at Columbine high school.

          Brian Bluhm, Ryan Clark, Austin Cloyd, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, Kevin Granata, Matthew G. Gwaltney, Caitlin Hammaren, Jeremy Herbstritt, Rachael Elizabeth Hill, Emily Hilscher, Jarrett Lane, Matthew J. LaPorte, Henry Lee, Liviu Librescu, G. V. Loganathan, Partahi Lumbantoruan, Lauren McCain, Daniel O'Neil, Juan Ramon Ortiz, Minal Panchal, Daniel Perez Cueva, Erin Peterson, Mike Pohle, Julia Pryde, Mary Read, Reema Samaha, Waleed Shaalan, Leslie Sherqman, Maxine Turner and Nicole White.  Slain by gunshot at Virginia Tech.

         Charlotte Bacon, 6; Daniel Barden, 7; Olivia Engel, 6; Josephine Gay, 7; Ana Marquez-Greene, 6; Dylan Hockley, 5; Madeline Hsu, 6; Catherine Hubbard, 6; Chase Kowalski, 7; Jesse Lewis, 6; James Mattioli, 6; Grace McDonnell, 7; Emilie Parker, 6; Jack Pinto, 6; Noah Pozner, 6; Caroline Previdi, 6; Jessica Rekos, 6; Avielle Richman, 6; Benjamin Wheeler, 6; Allison Wyatt, 6;  Rachel D'Avino,  Anne Marie Murphy, Lauren Rousseau, Mary Sherlach, Victoia Soto and Dawn Hocksprung.  Slain by gunshot at Sandy Hook elementary school.

            

And the more than 3,400 American men, women and children slain by gunshot since the Sandy Hook massacre.

           

Another Biscuit for the Dogs of War

There he goes again.

Recent meetings in Kazakhstan (see previous blog) kept hopes alive for a diplomatic solution to the Iran nuclear question. But once again, right on schedule, comes George Jahn of the Associated Press Vienna bureau with a tainted morsel designed to stoke the appetites of the war dogs.

His dispatch begins:

VIENNA (AP) — Technicians upgrading Iran's main uranium enrichment facility have tripled their installations of high-tech machines that could be used in a nuclear weapons program to more than 600 in the last three months, diplomats said Wednesday.

They say the machines are not yet producing enriched uranium and some may be only partially installed. Still the move is the latest sign that 10 years of diplomatic efforts have failed to persuade Tehran to curb its uranium enrichment. Instead, Iran continues to increase its capacities.

The installations also suggest that Iran possesses both the technology to mass-produce centrifuges that can enrich much faster than its present machines and the ability to evade international sanctions meant to keep it from getting materials it needs to do so.

As usual, Jahn does not name sources, writes in code and weasle-words and makes unsupportable statements as truth.

Just after helpful negotiatons between the G5+1 group and Iran in April of 2012, and with hopes high for more progress in Moscow the following June, Jahn breathlessly reported he had been given a sketch by "diplomats" that "proved" Iran was advancing rapidly with  nuclear weapons development. It purported to show "an explosives containment chamber of the type needed for nuclear arms-related tests that U.N. inspectors suspect Tehran has conducted." I found a similar drawing on the site of a firm that sells bomb-containment devices to law enforcement. Responsible scientists denounced Jahn's drawing as a hoax.

Last November, with the G5+1 talks slated to resume in six weeks, Jahn dropped another Israeli propaganda bomb. The Associated Press he wrote, had obtained a graph alleged to be part of an Iranian computer simulation of a nuclear explosion. Experts promptly  pointed out that the graph of the relationship between energy and power shown in the AP story contained absurdly large errors that not even a junior high school physics student would make, let alone a nuclear scientist. Former senior IAEA inspector Robert Kelley, said “It’s clear the graph has nothing to do with a nuclear bomb.”

One of the sources for today's article by Jahn was an Israeli diplomat.  Another was said to be from a neutral country.  Jahn's article refers to only one lame attempt at verification of anything he was told, a telephone call to an International Atomic Agency official that was not returned.

The machines he's so excited about in his lede paragraph, which "could be" used in work in pursuit of a weapon, also "could be" used in peaceful nuclear research, especially for medical purposes. It was The United States "Atoms for Peace" program that gave Iran nuclear technology decades ago, and the Islamic republic became a Middle East leader in medical treatment facilities.  Now that the western embargo has tightened, Iran has been developing its own resources for nuclear research.  Neutral observers following the Iran situation have known for months that Iran intended to install up to 1,000 of the "high tech machines" Jahn mentions.  Why should it be news, then, that the number is now up to 600?

Because it will get the pot boiling all over again about Netanyahu's "red line"  and when the U.S. will be "forced" to join Israel in military action against Iran. The American Endless War Machine must be fueled, and Israel is itching to use a few of its own 300 too 400 nuclear weapons.

No Pulitzers for Iran "Coverage"

The only serious diplomatic effort to resolve "the Iran nuclear issue" resumed over the weekend and there hasn't been a word in the American media.  But that doesn't surprise me because it seemed clear before it began that the G5+1 session in Almaty, Kazakhstan, would be little more than an opportunity to "kick the can further down the road," as The Guardian put it -- keep the process alive until after the Iranian presidential election. 

The shame is that a Yank has to read the Guardian -- and other non-American news sources -- for a responsible report on the G5+1.  Ask a typical flag-waving, Limbaugh-loving American what the G5+1 is and he'll probably guess some kind of new, small computer. (G5+1 is journo-speak for the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, the group that is trying to broker an accord of some kind.)

The American media can't stand the sight of no blood; a calm, snail's pace negotiating session simply won't get their attention.  A computer-generated drawing purporting to show a new test chamber for superbombs, or a miscopied junior high school physics formula said to have "proved" Iran was trying to build nuclear weapons -- that's their cup of tea.  Anything to stir up war talk.

Even the New York Times, winner of another four Pulitzer Prizes today, can't seem to get it right consistently on Iran.  It's falling for  for the fishy-smelling kind of yellow-cake, aluminum tube stuff that led it to cheerlead the Iraq invasion. The collective sins of  our media already have built some things that don't exist into terrifying bogeymen.  "Iran's nuclear program" is the same kind of "threat" to U.S. national security that Iraq's "WMDs" were. There are still far-right Americans who believe in the latter; "we just haven't found 'em yet." The media drumbeat has endowed the former with a similar potential for horror that it doesn't possess.

For example, Robert Jervis, a professor of foreign policy at Columbia and a member of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, recently called "for the United States to resign itself to Iran's development of nuclear weapons and to focus on deterring the Islamic Republic from ever using them."  The entire section that follows in his essay is based upon the absolutely unproved assumption that Iran is, or is trying to, develop nuclear weapons.

Later in the piece, Jervis gives us this: "In practice, (we have) only two tools for dealing with Iran's advancing nuclear program: threats and promises, the melding of which the political scientist Alexander George labeled 'coercive diplomacy.' To succeed in halting Iran's progress toward a bomb, the United States will have to combine the two, not simply alternate between them."

Advancing nuclear program?  Progress toward a bomb? Under the desks, kids! 

Iran's "nuclear program" is not a lot different now from what it was after the U.S. gave the country nuclear capability and technology when our Good Buddy the Shah was running things, not always for the peace and comfort of the Irani masses. Its facilities -- including the bogeyman in the bunker at Fordow -- produce 20% enriched uranium This grade is fine for nuclear power generating plants like the one at Bushehr. But as for making a weapon, forget it.  In fact, the U.S. "Atoms for Peace" jump start led to Iran's developing  some of the finest medical research and treatment facilities in the Middle East.  Iran could only continue those things, after the U.S. embargo grew tighter and tighter, by using its own material, or what it could get past the embargo from places like Niger. Hence the two new uranium mines in Iran, which the U.S. duly "decried" during G5+1. Hence President Ahmadinejad's shopping trip to Niger after G5+1.

A Nigerian official said, "We are a sovereign state and will deal with who we want. Our uranium, our oil, we are going to sell them to who we want."

Meanwhile, there was diplomacy going on over the weekend, despite the silence of the New York Times, the talking heads and the rest of the U.S. media.  The EU powers offered unspecified relaxation of some portions of the embargo that is crippling Iran's economy, if the Islamic republic would stop 20% production, ship the existing stockpile out of the country and close down Fordow. That is, give away everything for a mess of pottage.

But it sounds like a negotiation.  At least it's not Shock and Awe. Until it is, the U.S. media will continue to ignore it or misrepresent it.

10 Years of "Unmitigated Disaster"

Tuesday was the tenth annivesary of the toppling of the statue of Sadam Hussein by U.S. Marines in Firdos Square in newly-conquered Baghdad, just 20 days after the start of America's longest war.

Like the "reasons" for invading Iraq in the first place, the statue-toppling was phony, a scripted event staged for propaganda purposes, a precursor of the even more phony "Mission Accomplished" debacle aboard an aircraft carrier less than a month later.

But on that infamous May day aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, the devastating cost, in dollars and blood, of American military madness was just beginning, and continues to this day. In dollars, the cost of the unfunded war passed three trillion in 2008 and still rises daily.  We have lost nearly 5,000 young lives there; 33,183 were wounded and more than 200,000 went home with PTSD.   We have slain 1.2 million human beings there -- men, women and children.

And what has all of this criminal activity bought?

Certainly not the peaceful civilian rule our lying government promised.  On the tenth anniversary of the U.S.missile and bombing rampage called "shock and awe," dissidents killed more than 50 people in 13 separate attacks around Baghdad.  More than 100 were injured. Sunni fighters tied to al-Qaeda continue terrorist attacks this year in an attempt to undermine Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shia-led government.

Remember what we called our carnage there? "Operation Iraqi Freedom."  How we love to mask our murder with cute euphemisms! Is it "freedom" to live amidst quotidian sectarian and political violence?  Or is it "unmitigated disaster," as one London academic put it? Iraq's U.S.-dictated constitution and puppet government were literally designed to sow sectarian and ethnic discord. Torture, sectarian death squads and billions of U.S. dollars have weakened the nation's social fabric and created a corrupt ruling class that gets richer by the day. The Shia faction controls the government, yet most of Iraq's Shia population remain the poorest of all the divided Iraqi population. Iraqi Kurdistan is a separate state in all but name. The U.S. and Turkey, a ruthless oppressor of the Kurdish people, pull the strings of the regional government, which is forging new  links to Israel.

Throughout Iraq, popular anger against corruption and human rights violations is growing. Peoples' lives, for the most part, are scarcely better than they were under the dictatorship of Sadam Hussein. Millions live without potable water, adequate sanitation, health care or decent housing.  Children are starving. Public infrastructure is non-existent in vast areas.  Cancer rates are soaring. 

An expatriate Iraqi living in the United States visited his homeland when the U.S. occupation "ended."  He writes:

• Millions of Iraqis have been killed, injured or displaced. One of the most developed countries in the region at the time of the invasion, Iraq now is among the worst in terms of infrastructure and public services. Baghdad ranks lowest in the quality of life of any city in the world, according to a recent global survey from the consultant group Mercer.
• Moreover, the Iraqi national identity has been replaced by ethnic and sectarian affiliations.
• I am half Sunni and half Shiite — or “Sushi,” as Iraqis jokingly call kids of mixed marriages. I was never asked my sect before 2003. I did not know who from my friends was a Sunni or a Shiite until then. But now, these sectarian divisions have become a core component of Iraq’s new identity, and they continue to threaten its territorial integrity and national unity.

A former New York prosecutor and dean of the Kennedy College of Law, Paul Savoy, writes that "there is universal agreement (among legal experts) that carelessness in the use of deadly force is criminal."

What we've done in Iraq wasn't mitigated by carelessness.  It  was deliberate.  There should be a new Nurenburg for those who planned and executed it.

The Lethal Toys of the Top Dogs

                                                     By MORT PERSKY

 What I was reading on the New York Times website Sunday night was a piece I assumed the Times intended as one of the most important news stories in its Monday paper, a story headlined "Domestic Drones on Patrol," telling us that skies over our own country may soon be thick with drones watching us, and perhaps doing other things to us, not all of them specified. Chris Anderson, who left magazine editing to start his drone-and-robotics business, flat-out says to the writer of this piece: "The sky's going to be dark with these things." 

Then I realized the Times was treating this not as a news story, but as a business feature in which what Anderson said was perhaps slightly more controversial than Delta's ordering a few passenger jets.

The problem is that we are given, and read, stories of mammoth, dangerous changes with the same low expectations of human morality and behavior that our leaders and media keep justifying. Result: this baleful news fails to awaken what the story demands: a cry of human pain rising to the heavens along with the intent to drive every drone airplane not only from use in this country but from the skies around this world.  

But instead of joining an outcry, I found myself about to add my two cents' worth to a calm, rational discussion by Times readers, almost a carbon copy of what we got a day earlier from Bill Keller, the former editor of the Times, who wrote his Sunday column on virtually the same subject.  Keller's piece appeared on page 7 of the Sunday Review section. The section cover was taken, after all, by a piece describing a new reason to doubt Affirmative Action -- it might hurt its beneficiaries' educations.

Page 7 was the place, and the two-word headline "Smart Drones" was all Times editors apparently thought their big piece about think-for-themselves drones deserved, even though Keller was discussing, with a minimal sense of discomfiture, drones which will decide on their own, no questions asked of the citizenry deploying them, who and what to blast off the ground all by themselves. And all present seemed to think they could certainly do this with no great objections from them. 

Drones appear to be scheduled to do it not only without citizen input, but with no human input whatever, the present low involvement of humans in dronery already apparently too high for both the Times and the U.S. government, which has been enjoying a long field day of taking actions with little, if any, citizen input and no more protest than local police can handle. 

And it's very much like the field day they plan to keep conferring on drones -- or toy planes, as I call them, not because they're toys but because of the child-like, let's-try-this-and-make-a-buck mental state of those who order them, manufacture them, use them, run them, and the top dogs who decide for the rest of us that it's OK to use them. 

What? Somebody out there thinks we should ask somebody else, somebody we don't already know is in full agreement with us, if there's anything wrong with what WE decided to do? Well, Barack and everybody else learned from George W. Bush that nothing of the kind is required. It is much more essential, they've decided, to carry out their own wishes on behalf of a government they think should divorce itself from the self-scrutiny once held to be the business of democracy.  

*         *         *

The U.S. Shootings Update

Today's daily shootings news is from North Carolina, Texas and California.

A student at Coastal Carolina University has died after a shooting near the campus in Conway, NC.

Anthony Darnell Liddell, 19,  of Bennettsville died after the shooting at University Place residence hall. Police are hunting the shooter who fired four or five shots about 7:30 p,m,. Tuesday.

A public school employee was  shot and wounded  near Tyler, TX, during a  training session aimed toward arming school district employees. A student and a gun safety instructor were working with a malfunctioning weapon when it misfired.  The bullet struck a school maintenance worker in the leg.

A statement from the schools superintendent said, "The accident will not affect the district’s decision, in light of the Sandy Hook massacre and other school shootings, to arm employees."

Yesterday, two police officers were shot to death in Santa Cruz, CA.  A resident describes Santa Cruz as "a peaceful community of artists and hippies and vegans." 

The alleged killer of Sergeant Loren (Butch) Baker  and his partner, Detective Elizabeth Butler,  had previous arrests for sexual assault and carrying a concealed weapon. The San Jose Mercury News reports that he had three guns registered to him, including a .40-caliber semi-automatic Sig Sauer.

More than 2,000 Americans have died by gunshot since Sandy Hook.

Our National Pastime: Latest Statistics

Today's daily U.S. shooting deaths took place in Las Vegas.

Occupants of a black Range Rover shot up a Masarati which crashed into a taxi that burst into flames.  The episode left three persons dead and at least three others injured.  It took place at 4:30 a.m. at an intersection on The Strip surrounded by some of the most famous casinos in town, including the Bellagio, Caesars Palace and Bally's.

Our daily dose of death by gunfire brought the total of Ameicans shot to death since Sandy Hook to well over 2,000.

Please be sure to write, wire or call Wayne LaPierre at the National Rifle Association to thank him for bringing us these daily entertainments.

"Guns don't kill.  People kill."

Thank Mr. LaPierre for fighting so hard to maintain his version of the Second Amendment, which gives everyone -- not just owners of black Range Rovers -- the "right" to bear arms.  After all, it's the brave patriots of his cockamamie organization who keep our nation safe from . . .er,  "bad guys."

You do feel safer, don't you?  Or have you already canceled your planned trip to Vegas? If you absolutely have to roll them dice, play high stakes poker or toss next week's grocery money onto a roulette table, you can buy body armor online. But don't think you can take shelter at your nearest courthouse, campus, shopping mall or church.  Some of the aforementioned 2.000 victims died at such places.

Our gun-toters are equal-opportunity killers.

This is The State of the Union

The union is still intact but the state of the nation is dismal.  Since Presidents are not required to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in their annual report to the citizens, here are some things Dr. Kidglove will not say tonight.

Our head of state violates his oath to uphold the Constitution daily. He has arrogated to himself the divine right of kings, the power of life and death over his subjects.  He has repealed, by executive whim, habeas corpus, the Posse Comitatus Act, and the First, Fourth, Sixth and Eighth amendments to the Constitution.

He deploys troops, tortures, orders attacks, invades, occupies and conducts secret raids and missions that violate treaties to which the United States is signatory, the Geneva Conventions, United Nations articles and United States laws. Many of the policies and actions of the United States meet the definition of war crimes.

The President has advocated policies and signed laws that have widened the gulf between the very  rich (about two per cent of Americans) and poor (about 20 per cent) and virtually destroyed the American middle class.

We have tolerated abuses of the Second Amendment to the point  that the nation has become one big armed camp.  Since "legal" weapons were used to slaughter 22 innocent children in Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Conn.,  gunshots have killed 1,900 more Americans, including two slain yesterday near the University of Maryland campus.

We have nurtured a culture of secondary citizenship for women.  Some states have claimed the right to invade women's reproductive organs by requiring vaginal ultrasound examinations before allowing certain health procedures to take place.  One state, New Mexico, is considering a law that would hold a woman guilty of felonious destruction of evidence for terminating  a pregnancy resulting from rape.  A judge in another state ruled the victim to be at fault when she was sexually abused by a police officer. 

The United States has refused to support worldwide efforts to slow the rate of climate change that is destroying ecosystems, changing habitat, warming the earth, melting polar ice and threatening the well-being of creatures great and small.

We are subsidizing the growth and profits of extraction industries whose products fill the atmosphere with destructive carbons, while refusing to encourage development of sources of sustainable energy. We export gas from fracking which destroys water sources even as the country suffers an epic continuing drought.

We have declared corporations to be "people" and given them unprecedented power over our government, while systematically repealing the constitutional rights guaranteed to individual citizens.  Yet our rate of economic growth is one-fifth of that of the Third World despite record corporate profits.

We have the poorest, yet most expensive, health care in the industrialized world. The quality of our educational system is plummeting even as our politicians demand further cuts in funding it because of a mythical "national debt problem."

The most celebrated of our academic experts on economics advocate strengthening the social safety net and increasing public spending to create jobs, while our elected officials pursue austerity policies that  cause troubled economies to fail even more egregiously.

We nurture an unrealistic, myth-driven national self image as a superpower operating on a high moral plane, while the rest of the world sees us as a rogue nation complicit in virtually every failed and oppressive policy in the global scheme of things. We think we are a democracy but we are a nation on the brink of becoming a  fascist oligarchy and police state.

And that is the real state of the union.

An Essential Guide for Oberservers of the Great American Political Theater

This infographic, created by OnlinePsychologyDegree.com, and published by permission, is presented as a public service for those who habitually watch Fox "News," sessions of Congress (especially confirmation hearings in the Senate), or any public utterances by American office-holders or aspirants to public office. http://www.onlinepsychologydegree.net/why-people-lie?

We Need a New Financial Responsibility Act

Dr.  Kidglove, who backpedals better than most NBA point guards, seems to have dropped the assault weapon ban from his post-massacre strategy on gun control.  Some self-designated experts on the issue say that's OK because the assault-weapon ban is a red herring anyway.  The important thing, they say, is to ban large-capacity magazines.

Whatever.

Perhaps bans and endless arguments over the original intent of the Second Amendment are all a waste of time.

How about this?

Require that all firearms in private hands -- yes, even genuine hunting weapons -- be licensed, but only after thorough background checks.  We license cars and motorcycles and doctors and fishermen and therapists and all kinds of stuff.  Why not lethal weapons?

And as a precondition for obtaining a license, require that each licensed weapon be insured: liability insurance, a minimum $5 million in compensation to families of victims killed by the insured weapon,  a range of, say,  $100,000 to $1 million in victims' compensation for anyone injured by the insured weapon.

Yes, Mr. NRA Macho Bigshot, you can keep your entire arsenal of military firepower; we'll give you, say, six months to license and buy insurance for each one.  Then go out and play Black Commando to your heart's content -- knowing that if your Navy Seal Sniper Automatic Rifle accidentally kills the farmer down the road, his widow will get $5 million from your insurance company.  (And, no doubt, your insurance will be cancelled, along with your licenses for the rest of your arsenal.)

Under our plan, after the six-month grace period, it would be a felony punishable by two years in jail and a lifetime ban from firearms licensing to carry, possess or use an unlicensed fiirearm of any kind, for any purpose.

As long as you obey the law, your precious "right" to bear arms remains inviolate. But you will be held accountable -- financially, at least -- for whatever damage your bloody guns cause, whether you're using them or someone else is.

Some gun nuts won't pay the costs of licenses and insurance, which should reduce the number of gun owners and the size of their arsenals.  Others will think twice about whether such an expensive phallic symbol really does much in the way of self-defense.  After all, weapons didn't save the self-styled Greatest American Sniper Ever, even at his second home on the shooting range.  And Machine-gun Mamas with such an investment in their guns will be motivated to keep them away from their teen-aged progeny with messed-up heads.

There would be attrition in gun ownership under this plan without the fuss of a constitutional fight over the Second Amendment.  Nobody's taking away your "right" to be Rambo.  They're simply requiring you to prove financial responsibility, just as you have to do to legally drive your pick-up truck.

The financial compensation for the wounded or the families of the slain would be simple justice. No amount of money can adequately  compensate the families of the murdered children of Sandy Hook,  but since money is the great engine of our corrupt society, let's try to make it work for the public good.

Maybe we could even persuade the health insurance companies to write these gun policies, and lower the premiums on regular health care for regular people.

Fat chance!

Profiles in Non-Courage

In the best traditions of Dr. Kidglove, the Senate Majority Wheedler, Harry Reid of Nevada, raised the white flag before the battle had even started.

Emerging from the back room where he knelt to kiss the boots of Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, Harry Halfheart announced another one of those Democratic "compromises" that give the Republicans more than they ever wanted.

This surrender was on so-called filibuster reform.  Reid had on the table two Democratic bills, one a milksop that would have made it only slightly more difficult for Republicans to bottle up legislation, the other a serious and fair effort to make possible genuine legislative debate in the Senate.  He had at his disposal a so-called nuclear option that would have enabled him to reform the filibuster rules with just a simple majority -- which the Democrats have.  He even threatened to use it.  This brought McConnell to the table -- with absolutely no cards in his hand.  Harry Half-Heart promptly threw his own full house on the table and declared, "I fold."

Another demonstration of how government works under a corporocratic oligarchy. An online essay today by Norman Soloman, author and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, warned progressives against letting Kidglove's second inaugural address "make us the dupes of our hopes." Solomon wrote, "it was notably disingenuous for Obama to proclaim in his second inaugural speech that 'enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war' -- minutes after completing a first term when his administration launched more than 20,000 airstrikes, strongly escalated the use of weaponized drones and did so much else to make war perpetual."

After running through a partial list of Kidglove's other betrayals of progressive ideals. he called upon progressivesto come together and organize militantly. He worte, "the kind of empowered access we need will come from mobilizing grassroots power."

Here are excerpts from the first few comments generated by Solomon's piece:

Pressure the president as much as you desire. . . letter, fax, email, make a phone call. The keystone XL pipeline will be built, drone warfare will continue around the world, the police state will continue unabated in the U.S.

These programs aren't being enacted because the President is being pressured by Republicans. (They) continue becausethe Democratic party accepts money from the weapons manufacturers, the prison- industrial complex and the energy companies. A banker will be the new treasury secretary because large financial interests in N.Y. want a banker to be the new treasury secretary. The Democrats  will not listen to public sentiment; they didn't listen to public sentiment on health care. Occupy Wall Street was publicly ridiculed by Democratic politicians -- before the encampments were decimated by Democratic politicians, before the message was co-opted into the 2012 campaign (so Obama could mimic the public's mood -- talking points for the president. He had every intention of promoting characters like the soon to be treasury secretary,  Jack Lew, no surprises here.

Engaging with (this Administration) is a waste of time. Support the development of the Green (or Socialist) parties in your neck of the woods. Work on initiative campaigns locally and nationally to remove money from politics and to expand ballot access to third parties and disenfranchised voters.
The Democrats will sell you down river every fucking time and they'll try to make you feel scared and guilty for being aware of their manipulative clap-trap.

                                         * * *
The Democratic party has  been, far more often than not, the driving force for destruction of progressive policies and goals over the past 20 years . . . I'm running out of words that do justice to the insanity of it. And losing interest in taking it seriously. It's like trying to figure out how to "turn around" the Tea Party.


Without a viable third party, we might as well move north into organic communes and live humble lives of good conscience apart from the maddening crowd--forget about politics. 
Politics have proven hopeless within the bounds of the duopoly as it stands and it has not the slightest interest in changing for the better. Money controls the entire system--including elections--and progressives will NEVER out-leverage that without commanding the ballot box via a progressive party. Without that, the Dems OWN us no matter how much it pisses us off--we'll never vote Republican. It's really just that simple.
Only a progressive third party can change this shit.

                                         * * *
We have two substantial progressive "third" parties, and several more very small ones. But we need them to work together, and we need progressives still in the Blue Party to leave and come to us. Between these three posts, we've got the problem and some real solutions in a nutshell.

Amen, brothers.  But, as Harry Half-Heart has just demonstrated once again, time and opportunity are running out.