This bugs me no end. I don’t care about the outcome of the Obamacare bill. Without it we’re screwed, but he made sure that with it we’re screwed as well. It’s a wash.

Justices Scalia and Thomas dined with the people litigating before them as they prepared to discuss the case. Not only is it improper, it’s flaunting. They are telling the world they don’t care about ethical conduct.

That demonstrates complete lack of integrity.

I think my mojo, my edge, my annoying self is returning. Don’t worry, fellow bloggers! I’m not going to go where not welcomed.

I set out this morning to write about this constant dialogue I am having with people about the importance and effect of voting. It’s a broad subject, but to sum it up, there is an old saying that if voting mattered, it would be illegal. Indeed, in Chile in the early 1970’s, voting was effective, so the US murdered the president and installed in power a man who then outlawed voting. The other example I used over at Intelligent Discontent* this morning was Father Jean Jacques Aristide, who came to power in Haiti in the early 1990’s by means of a popular movement that was then crushed by the Bush and Clinton regimes. Voting can indeed be effective, and in those two cases it forced power to come out in the open and use its only real sustaining device, violence.

What on earth makes people think that the leaders of the US, who so despise voting in other countries, respect it here? Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il and Fidel Castro also sustain(ed) their regimes using the façade of electoral referendum. Somewhere between the a real referendum in Chile in 1970 and the fake one in North Korea in 2009 lies the US voter. We do have a system in which voting can be effective, but we are trained to use it in the most ineffective manner possible, choosing among candidates offered to us by the oligarchy.

For that reason, in the United States in 2011, voting does not matter. Voting for munchkins in a world run by Wicked Witches is not much of a choice.

In retrospect it appears that the Obama campaign was constructed with the knowledge that there would be a backlash against Bush. He was groomed, and did not appear out of the streets of Chicago by accident. He’s highly intelligent, but I am wondering now if he even wrote those books that made him famous, his profiles in courage. Now elected, he has assiduously worked to make sure that every major advance made under Bush is either maintained or intensified.

In other words, in terms of regime Change in 2008, our votes were as important as a vote for Fidel Castro in Cuba.

Hope on that.
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*I just realized as I wrote these words that Polish Wolf, who wrote the post over at ID, committed the fallacy of the missing middle, which I just wrote about below. Blew right by me!

Here’s a nice turn of phrase I ran across: crippled epistemology. I like it because it so nicely encapsulates Randianism. People become embedded in tightly controlled feedback loops, and suffer from information starvation.

Randianism/libertarianism (they echo one another) yield negative results when implemented. That’s abundantly clear. The fallback response is that the implementation was imperfect, in other words, not enough. So some years back when electrical deregulation produced a catastrophe in California, we were told that deregulation was not done properly. That’s all. Also note that even though tax cuts* are said to produce jobs by putting money in the hands of “job creators” (a PR term if ever one was dreamed up), current unemployment is reaching depression era proportions.

These people firmly believe that once implemented, their proscribed philosophy will yield positive outcomes. Evidence does not sway them. That’s not only defined insanity, but also religious faith.
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*I suspect one reason why the wealthy (and their intellectual stooges) so vigorously oppose even a modest tax increase from 35% to 39.6% is the Clinton lesson, when a tax hike preceded a robust expansion. That is evidence that taxes have far less impact on economic growth than we’re led to believe. Ergo, no tax hike of any sort is allowed, as it might again defeat their flimsy philosophy.

Two uprisings have occurred in the last few years, the “Tea Party” and the “Occupy” movements. One was spontaneous, the other orchestrated. Guess which.

(Hint) One had strong financial backing by oil oligarchs, and a TV network that showed up whenever two or more gathered. The other, not. (Just a hint.)

I am in a motel room today watching football, bored to tears. Glenn Greenwald is putting out his usual outpouring of insight that, due to the depth of thought control in this country, few can grasp. (Who was it who sang “You better free your mind instead”? I did not know what that meant at the time either.)

The US is, surprise to me, pulling out of Iraq on the Bush timeline. It turns out that the Obama Administration did not want that to happen, but the Iraqis insisted that if American troops stayed in Iraq, they would be subject to prosecution in Iraqi courts for their crimes. This, as with all of the Arab Spring, is fallout from Wikileaks.

In other words, whoever leaked that cable [about a massacre of Iraqi civilians by American soldiers and the attempted coverup] cast light on a heinous American war crime and, by doing so, likely played some significant role in thwarting an agreement between the Obama and Maliki governments to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and thus helped end this stage of the Iraq war (h/t Trevor Timm). Moreover, whoever leaked these cables — as even virulent WikiLeaks critic Bill Keller repeatedly acknowledged — likely played some significant in helping spark the Arab Spring protests by documenting just how deeply corrupt those U.S.-supported kleptocrats were. And in general, whoever leaked those cables has done more to publicize the corrupt, illegal and deceitful acts of the world’s most powerful factions — and to educate the world about how they behave — than all “watchdog” media outlets combined (indeed, the amount of news reports on a wide array of topics featuring WikiLeaks cables as the primary source is staggering). In sum, whoever leaked those cables is responsible for one of the most consequential, beneficial and noble acts of this generation.

My nomination for Time Magazine man of the year: Prisoner Bradley Manning, whose newest crime is to force the US to be good to its word for once.