If You Subscribe to The Theory

That any support for the Obama Administration or Democrats of any kind can only be the result of hypocrisy, corruption, complicity, weak-mindedness, ignorance or incompetence, well good for you!

Marketplace of ideas and all that!

Also please reserve me two, front-row seats at your next public lecture wherein you explain to the 93% of African-Americans and 71% of Hispanics who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 that they are either frauds or childlike dolts who are not bright enough to understand where their best interests lie.

In Which I Anxiously Await

Lauren Green's interview with Steven Spielberg:

Mr. Spielberg, as a prominent member of the tribe that murdered Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, just where do you get off making a movie about the Holy Grail?

Story is here for the six people who haven't heard about it yet,

Thunder Buddies For Life

 Glenn Greenwald on Jeffrey Toobin then:

Greenwald told Business Insider late Tuesday night that he thinks some left-leaning members of the media — such as Time magazine's Joe Klein and The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin — have shifted stances on surveillance and civil liberties for "principle-free, hackish, and opportunistic" reasons.
...
"If they started a club called Liberal Pundits to Defend the National Security State, no auditorium in the country would be large enough to accommodate them.

"To call them principle-free, hackish, and opportunistic is to be overly generous."

Glenn Greenwald on Jeffrey Toobin now:

@JeffreyToobin Thanks - it's good to have passionate, clashing debate on the substance without lots of personal rancor.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 31, 2013

Disappoint By Numbers

Aaron Sorkin's latest creation is currently buried up to its axles in the mud of his own style book.

For this reason "The Newsroom" is not the show it could or should be.

If Mr. Sorkin would like to make "The Newsroom" into the show it could and should be he needs to hire a bunkhouse full of writers who are not Aaron Sorkin and given them their head.

Probably not going to happen:

Mr. "This Is NOT About Snowden"

So weird how most people who claim "I'd respect Snowden's acts if he hadn't fled" don't apply that to Bradley Manning
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 30, 2013

Strikes again.

Actual verdict details here:

The suspense at Tuesday’s five-minute-long court martial session was limited because Manning previously pled guilty to at least portions of 10 of the 22 counts he faced. Also restraining the drama was the absence of a military jury, which the defendant waived.

...

After warning spectators in the packed courtroom to avoid any outbursts, Lind recited a list of the charges, adding her “not guilty” or — more often — “guilty” to each. She also accepted and described changes in some of the charges that the defense offered with Manning’s guilty pleas.

The aiding-the-enemy charge could have resulted in a sentence of up to life in prison or even to the death penalty, but the military did not seek capital punishment in Manning’s case.

...

Manning did not dispute the fact that he sent WikiLeaks most of the material that led to the charges against him. However, his defense argued that some of the counts were legally flawed.

...

The Army intelligence analyst was arrested in May 2010 at a forward operating base in Iraq where he studied threats in a section of Baghdad. He’s been in custody since.

... 

All convictions and any sentence ultimately handed down in the case are subject to review of the military officer who convened the court martial, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan of the Army’s Military District of Washington. In addition, the case is likely to be reviewed by military appeals courts.

Lind ruled in January that Manning is entitled to a sentencing credit of nearly four months as a result of what she determined was unnecessarily harsh treatment the intelligence analysts received during his almost nine-month stay at a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va.

...

The case against Manning was prosecuted in the military justice system, which is separate from the civilian courts. But ivilian federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va. have been conducting a grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.

It’s unclear what how prosecutors might seek to build a case against Assange, who has asserted that WikiLeaks is a news organization that acts in ways similar to those in which more conventional journalists gather news. Many lawmakers have called for Assange to be prosecuted for espionage or treason.

However, following the outcry over the AP and Fox News investigations, President Barack Obama declared: “Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs.”

Comments are now closed for this post.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

Has been temporarily suspended at the request of my paymasters in the White House.

As longtime readers know, in the five years since I was laid off from my last full time job, my main source of income has been a regular "Loyalty Stipends" from the White House, which arrives every seven days via messenger shortly after my fax machine spits out a list of Administration talking points which I am supposed to subtly emphasize that week.

My directive this week?

Well, knowing that David Gregory's massive glass jaw is being held together with Post-It signature flags and ammonium nitrate, the Administration is fearful that one more of my devastating, award-ready dissertations on the kind of ludicrously slanted panel discussion Mr. Gregory staged today -- one more commentary on the umpteenth special pleading by Wall Street hacks to keep their industry unfettered by regulation that Mr. Gregory let sail past unrebutted... the umpteenth assertion that all the economy really needs is more corporate tax cuts, more fracking and Build the Dang Pipeline... the umpteenth recitation of the Centrist Creed that at least 50% of the gridlock in Washington is caused by Barack Obama being a "good Liberal Democrat" who just "needs to move more to the Center"... the umpteenth repetition by Harold Ford Junior that it's OK for him to knife Liberals in the back over and over again because "he's on [our] team" -- might just blow his career to flinders.

Or, as the White House fax put it, "One more post of this type risks dropping Mr. Gregory like a steer on the stun line" which is why the White House would "appreciate your laying off the poor bastard for awhile."

And since I have big plans to buy food sometime in the next few days, all I can say is:

Imagine If This

Is what Sunday Morning public interest teevee looked like?

Professional Left Podcast #190

"There is nothing in the dark that isn't there when the lights are on."

--  Rod Serling

Links:

• Harold Ford, Jr. does a blah blah blah on "bipartisan gridlock" without once blaming Republicans.
• Transcript of Obama comments on Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman verdict.
• Fox News leaves Obama economic speech coverage for commercial and "breaking news" on Royal baby name.
• Science Fiction University: IO9 commenters recommend SF books for beginners. 

Da' money goes here:

The Frame Story

Chapter 17:  Regression to the Meme, Ctd.

They teach you stuff in advanced writing classes at college.  Secret, weird, initiate-only stuff.  One of the things they teach you is what to look for when editing someone else's work.  Another thing they teach you is that there really aren't that many hard and fast Laws Of Good Writing. There are plenty of rules, but as Morpheus says in The Matrix, some of them can be bent. Others can be broken.

When editing the work of others it is important to know what effect they are trying to achieve.  If they flash a gun in the first act and we never see it again, they'd better have a damn good reason why.   If they write themselves into a "Lost"-ish corner of a thousand writhing loose ends and promises that All Will be Revealed, and then the little boy wakes up and it was all a dream, it is acceptable to fling poo at that writer in public forever.

And if they construct what is called a "frame story" --

A frame story (also frame tale, frame narrative, etc.) is a literary technique that sometimes serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, whereby an introductory or main narrative is presented, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories

...

When there is a single story, the frame story is used for other purposes – chiefly to position the reader's attitude toward the tale...

 -- it is perfectly within bounds to critique both the frame itself as well as what the frame contains.

The Book of Job is a frame story.  So is the Gospel of Mark

Frame begins:   Holy spirit descents from heaven (Mark 1:9-11)

At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

Then a buncha stuff happens.

Frame ends:   Holy spirit ascends to heaven (Mark 16:19)

After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God. 

One of the most famous frame stories in classical literature are the tales of pilgrims trying to outdo each other on their way the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.  Another terrific example -- "1001 Arabian Nights" -- is a series of individual fictive gem, all are fitted within the frame of Scheherazade trying to save her own life by spinning each of those tales out as a cliffhanger. Edgar Allan Poe used frame construction to serve a couple of important functions:

In Poe's writing, the outside frame of a frame story often has at least one of two purposes, that of manipulating the mood prior to the commencement of the main story, or that of posing the problem and resolution before giving way to what is known in detective fiction as the "reveal", during which the most intelligent character explains to the others how he solved the problem.

Having recently RSVPed in the affirmative to an invitation to an open, public debate over the merits of various aspects of NSA domestic surveillance and the apparent flaccidity of the FISA court, let us leap right into one of today's dialogue.

Here is how The Washington Post reports the issue at hand as follows:

...

As we’ve seen in other debates over the NSA’s surveillance, the roll call produced some interesting cross-cutting. Ninety-four Republicans sided in favor of the amendment, along with 111 Democrats. Missing, however, was transparency hawk (and darling of the Internet) Rep. Darrell Issa, who voted to uphold the NSA’s surveillance program.

Issa didn’t offer a public explanation for his vote, and efforts to reach his office received no responses Thursday morning.

Other committee leaders played a crucial role in rallying opposition to Amash. House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Judiciary Committee chair Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) spent much of Wednesday making calls to other members.

Amash faced stiff high-ranking opposition. The leadership of both parties, as well as the White House, vocally opposed weakening the NSA’s ability to conduct surveillance. But Amash still managed to mount a strong defense — which suggests that momentum is  building for critics of the NSA.

“The tide is turning,” read an update last night posted to DefundtheNSA.com, a Web site launched hours before the vote by Sina Khanifar, a digital activist. The site now has a list of the complete roll call, divided into two groups: those who voted for the amendment and those who voted against it. Beneath each lawmaker’s photo is a button urging constituents to tweet or call.

“They were very worried,” said Conyers of the Democratic leadership, which opposed the amendment along with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). “And the fact that they won this narrowly means they still are worried because this thing isn’t over yet.”

...

Mr. Charles Pierce describes the issue at hand this way:

Every member of the House leadership from both sides of the aisle voted against the amendment. This must be the "bipartisanship" that I hear so much about on The Sunday Showz. It's certainly reminiscent of the "bipartisanship" that ruled Washington in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when everybody was hiding under the same bed, and the laws got passed that made the NSA program possible in the first place. It seems to be the considered -- and well-nigh unanimous -- opinion of our political elites that democracy stops at the doors of the NSA. I don't recall a "national conversation" that decided anything like that.

Pretty clear how most people see this unusual development: on the subject of NSA surveillance party leaders and party rank-and-file members are at odds with each other. Those are the facts and they are disputed by no one. That is this story, and quite an important and consequential story it is.

But for some people, that is not enough.  Not nearly enough.

So keeping in mind your newly-minted English comp lesson, take a careful look at this frame that Mr. Greenwald drags into virtually every discussion and tries to bolt around virtually any set of  facts -- 

Frame begins:   First paragraph

One of the worst myths Democratic partisans love to tell themselves - and everyone else - is that the GOP refuses to support President Obama no matter what he does. Like its close cousin - the massively deceitful inside-DC grievance that the two parties refuse to cooperate on anything - it's hard to overstate how false this Democratic myth is. When it comes to foreign policy, war, assassinations, drones, surveillance, secrecy, and civil liberties, President Obama's most stalwart, enthusiastic defenders are often found among the most radical precincts of the Republican Party.

Then a buncha stuff happens.

Frame ends:   Last paragraph

The sooner the myth of "intractable partisan warfare" is dispelled, the better. The establishment leadership of the two parties collaborate on far more than they fight. That is a basic truth that needs to be understood. As John Boehner joined with Nancy Peolsi, as Eric Cantor whipped support for the Obama White House, as Michele Bachmann and Peter King stood with Steny Hoyer to attack NSA critics as Terrorist-Lovers, yesterday was a significant step toward accomplishing that.

-- and draw your own conclusions about what Mr. Greenwald wants this story to be.

The Danger Signal

Do Not Want

The Most Insufferable Man In The World

I don't always sext my junk to strangers, but when I do...

Hilariously Clueless Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

"The current GOP is a threat to this country’s economy, social order and cultural moderation. There is nothing even faintly conservative about their contempt for democratic institutions or their refusal to behave as anything but political vandals."

-- Andrew Sullivan, July 25, 2013

If by "current" Mr. Sullivan means "Conservatism as it has existed in America since before I was in long pants" then, sure, why not.

I note that Mr. Sullivan still hasn't learned to form his mouth to shape the word "Liberal" in any way that is not dripping with contempt.

Well, whether he ever finds the guts to apologize to his betters, the devil baby he helped sire is a full grown monster now, and it's coming for all of us.

Obviously the only viable solution is to squat in the highest branches of the tallest trees and bitch about how equally awful both sides are as, far below, Conservatism tramples the poor, the weak, the sick, the aged, the outcast and the dispossessed into penury and misery and early graves.

Two Men Say They're Jesus

One of Them Must Be Wrong

Conservatism's premier "advocate of Civilization defender of civilization,

teacher of the rules of civilization, arouser of those who form civilization, organizer of the pro-civilization activists, and leader ‘possibly’ of the civilizing forces”...

...has a rival.

Steve King Argues Western Civilization Is About Letting Steve King Be Racist

Of course, the Brietbart Collective takes a slightly different position:

EXCLUSIVE: WHITE HOUSE, GOP LEADERSHIP IGNORE FACTS TO ATTACK STEVE KING

Because insurgent outliers can never go wrong Very Loudly accusing the leadership they wish to shake down or depose of being in Sekrit Cahoots with the villains on the other side.

Either way, in the end,

there can be only one.

Open Public Debate 101

Here is what welcoming an open public debate looks like.  From Reuters:

House rejects bid to curb spy agency data collection

(Reuters) - A U.S. spy program that sweeps up vast amounts of electronic communications survived a legislative challenge in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, the first attempt to curb the data gathering since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed details of its scope.

The House of Representatives voted 217-205 to defeat an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that would have limited the National Security Agency's ability to collect electronic information, including phone call records.

Opposition to government surveillance has created an unlikely alliance of libertarian Republicans and some Democrats in Congress, The House vote split the parties, with 94 Republicans in favor and 134 against, while 111 Democrats supported the amendment and 83 opposed it.

...

Republican Representative Tom Cotton, who endorsed the NSA program, described the "metadata" being collected as essentially a five-column spreadsheet containing the number called, the number of the caller, the date, the time and the duration of call.

"This program has stopped dozens of terrorist attacks," Cotton said. "That means it has saved untold American lives. This amendment ... does not limit the program, it does not modify it, it does not constrain the program, it ends the program. It blows it up."

Cotton, a former Army captain who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said a comprehensive set of phone call records was needed in order for the program to work.

"If you want to search for a needle in a haystack, you have to have the haystack. This (amendment) takes a leaf-blower and blows away they entire haystack. You will not have this program if this amendment passes."

'SIMPLY WRONG'

But Amash, a conservative Republican, and other supporters of the amendment said the fundamental issue was whether the U.S. government had the right to collect and retain the personal communications data of American citizens.

"Government's gone too far in the name of security," said Representative Ted Poe, a Texas Republican. "Rein in government invasion, no more dragnet operations, get a specific warrant based on probable cause or stay out of our lives."

Representative Joe Barton, another Texas Republican, said the issue was not whether the NSA was sincere or careful in collecting data for use in anti-terrorism operations.

"It is (about) whether they have the right to collect the data in the first place on every phone call on every American every day," he said, noting that the law only allowed collection of relevant data. "In the NSA's interpretation of that, relevant is all data, all the time. That's simply wrong."

...

Of course, before you get all giggly and Stand With Joe over Representative Barton, he's also this guy:

But good on him for stating his case, plain and clear.

So that's what welcoming an open public debate looks like.

Here is what welcoming an open public debate does not look like (From Charles Pierce):

This is the argument that the White House is making to try and get Democrats not to support Amash's Hail Mary.

"In light of the recent unauthorized disclosures, the President has said that he welcomes a debate about how best to simultaneously safeguard both our national security and the privacy of our citizens...However, we oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community's counterterrorism tools. This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process."    

The hell you say.

A bill is being proposed and debated in a public session of the national legislature and that's not an "informed, open, or deliberative process." As opposed to what, a secret program, validated on the basis of secret evidence, by a secret court?  Hell, the Amash bill is the only informed, open and deliberative thing about this whole mess. If you're welcoming a debate, then welcome the debate. If you don't, then don't. But don't throw out laughable statements like this one. You sound like a bunch of East Germans.

And, once again, his mad international PR skillz aside, if Edward Snowden had not done what he did, the debate is not happening.

Here is what welcoming an open public debate also does not look like:

All we ever wanted was to get this into the open so that it could be debated.

Terrific!  Could not agree more!  Of course by definition in a "debate" you're going to have people who disagree with you on some things. Maybe a little and maybe more than a little.  Maybe over the boundaries of the argument. Maybe over the importance of this issue relative to other important issues.  Maybe over the scope of the plan you're proposing to meet the need you have identified.  Maybe they believe the disadvantages of your plan outweigh its advantages.  You understand that, right?

Hitler!!!

Heir to the Throne

Unto Ego and Naked Ambition a child was born this day.

And he was christened Carlos of the house Danger, first of his name, King of the Assholes and the First Meme, Lord of the Five Boroughs and pro-sexter of the realm.

No's Diving With Carlos Danger

 

Pretty much everyone you know probably agrees that economy sucks and the middle class is being dragged to the corpse cart whether they're dead or not.

But when it comes to what is to blame for this and what is to be done about it, if you listen carefully you'll hear

...what? 

From, those whose career incentive structure is geared to is offending no one and sucking up to everyone, you get one answer. From The Daily Beast:

Yet, neither party seems terribly disturbed by this trajectory, as the president and the Democrats hike payroll taxes on American workers and threaten to means-test government benefits to the detriment of the middle class. And we might also ask: Where’s the 21st-century equivalent of the Civilian Conservation Corps? Where’s the contemporary updating of the Tennessee Valley Authority? Where’s the American Democratic president who cares about the broad middle of the country? Sorry, but Solyndra just doesn’t cut it.

However, if you talk to America's millions of Crazy Uncle Liberties, you'll hear a list of Fox News talking points vomiting out of them --

IRS --Trayvon was a thug who had it coming -- Black are the real racists -- Benghaaazi! -- IRS -- 

-- on an endless loop.

And if you are in the contempt-inducing business of stating observed reality as it exists running around naked right before your eyes, you get still another answer.  From New York Magazine:

...Congress has to pass some kind of farm bill—failure to do so would, through a bizarre legislative quirk, cause the law to revert to where it stood in 1949, which would wreak all sorts of havoc at supermarkets. Congress will also have to pass bills to keep the government running, or else shut it down. And then it will have to lift the debt ceiling again. House Republicans have ignored constant pleas by Senate Democrats to sit down and negotiate their differing budgets. Instead, they plan to hold off any budget talks until late fall, when we will likely hit the debt ceiling, at which point, they believe, they can force Obama to accept their ransom demands.

Earlier this month, House Republicans issued those demands. They are staggeringly grandiose. If Obama wants to lift the debt ceiling for the rest of his term, they announced, all he has to do is … agree to sign on to Ryan’s plan to cut and privatize Medicare. If that’s too much for him, Republicans have generously offered the choice of letting Obama accept a package of deep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in return for a shorter debt-ceiling extension. Of course, if he chooses that route, he’ll have to come back again later and offer up further concessions.

The list is utterly deranged—Obama has sworn he won’t bargain over the debt ceiling again at all, and his entire administration would resign before he could agree to anything remotely like these demands. It’s not clear whether Republicans actually expect the president to succumb to their Bond-villain hostage scheme. But it is significant that Republicans are demanding even more from Obama than they demanded during previous debt-ceiling ransoms and will decry the inevitable failure to achieve it as yet another betrayal.

...

Somewhere in the background you will also hear the very white noise of a contingent who complain that all of this is irrelevant -- merely proof of a deep conspiracy to pretend there are other important stories in the world besides (pick two: Benghaaaazi, drones, IRS, Scenes from a Moscow Transit Area) ... stories which can only be properly reported when interleaved into paragraphs denouncing Barack Obama as a the most bloody-minded monster in American history.  Since this is flatly stated as axiomatic, no room is left at their table to discuss anything but what they deduce must be a vast and coordinated campaign to distract the public from the fact that (pick two: lazy, depraved, incompetent, tyrannical) comma (pick one: radical Communist, brutal fascist) Barack Obama cares nothing for this country but has instead suckered what's left of the Liberals movement into becoming brainwashed, morally-bankrupt tools in the service of his real masters, (pick two: Teh Gay, George Soros, international bankers, Abortion Incorporated, Satan, the Illuminati, the Muslim Brotherhood.)

Finally, there are those for whom runaway blonds, the drug habits of celebrities and this is what the "news" look like:

UPDATE: ‘I’m Deeply Flawed’: Anthony Weiner, AKA ‘Carlos Danger,’ Now Admits Still Sexting

by Noah Rothman | 12:55 pm, July 23rd, 2013

“Exclusive: Anthony Weiner is a sexual predator luring his victims,” blares the inflammatory headline at the gossip website, TheDirty.com. A new set of images from a chat session in which Weiner engaged in sexually explicit conversations with another woman from last summer threaten to derail Weiner’s campaign for mayor of New York City. In a statement responding to the allegations, Weiner admitted that the chat records were authentic. However, he said that he and his wife are now focused on moving forward with their lives.

“My source is solid,” the bombshell post at TheDirty.com begins. “She really thought Anthony Weiner and her were in love, they spoke on the phone daily multiple times a day for 6 months. Anthony Weiner played with her emotions and mind. Most calls were phone sex.”

“He promised her many things including a condo in Chicago (1235 S. Prairie Ave) where they were planning to meet up to have sex,” the post continues. “Anthony Weiner has a shoe fetish, particularly heels.”

The images taken from Facebook and the social network Formspring are blurred but are alleged to be Weiner going by the handle “Carlos Danger.”
...

Whether or not you or I like it, the collision between these tectonic plates is where our national narrative lives.  And the challenge to anyone who sincerely wants to get anything positive done in our mean, dumb, crippled democracy is finding a way to slog through that reality instead of gliding dirigibley above it all, pretending it does not exist.

The Great Leak Forward -- UPDATE

In his ongoing crusade to insure that Very Tight Focus is kept on the substance of NSA domestic surveillance and the flaccidity of the FISA court and not on distracting side issues, Mr. Glenn Greenwald -- the principal reporter and curator of this very important and consequential story -- has given yet another interview to yet another major news outlet.  

This time Mr. Greenwald was interviewed (Exclusively!) by Chinese state television. 

That interview focused almost entirely on:

• Edward Snowden's superhuman tranquility.

• The fact that America spies on Brazil.

• Apparent confirmation (or at least no denial) that among the thousands of classified documents Mr. Snowden stole (and copies of which are now in Mr. Greenwald's possession) are lists of the names and identities of undercover CIA agents.

• Apparent confirmation that Mr. Greenwald carries these thousands of highly classified documents on his person at all times, but that they are all perfectly safe because he has stashed the encryption keys where no one can find them.

• Mr. Greenwald's assurance that every story published is the product of rigorous assessment of that story's public interest value.

• Unnamed but "very prominent political figures and journalists" who have called for Mr. Greenwald's arrest.  Which sounds pretty ominous.  So ominous, in fact, that Mr. Greenwald tells Chinese state television (Exclusively!) that he would be "irrational in the extreme...to ignore those risks". Mr. Greenwald does not mention that, in America, "journalists" can't arrest anyone.  Mr. Greenwald also fails to mention his list of "very prominent" journalists who have done anything remotely like calling for his arrest boils down to Andrew Ross Sorkin (who later profusely apologized),  David Gregory (who is a buffoon who asked a stupid and incompetently-framed question) and a handful of bloggers. 
  
  
  Mr. Greenwald also fails to mention to the reporter from Chinese state television that the only leading* "very prominent" political figure who has called for Mr. Greenwald's arrest has been Peter King, who does not have any actual police power and has been, for as long as anyone can remember, one of D.C.'s most reliable go-to guys when you want an elected Republican nutjob to say something inflammatory on the record.  Of course, a story told this way -- "A couple of reporters and one well-known fringe lunatic Congressman made some asinine remarks" -- would not make nearly so interesting a tale of sinister American perfidy to spin on Chinese state television. Exclusively!

• This glimpse of how Mr. Greenwald believes realpolitik works in the real world -

"Governments can get away with doing only that which the populations of the world let them do.  We see examples of that all the time, where formidable and powerful power centers end up being restricted or even subverted and harmed and ended as a result of backlash from the population that first becomes aware of what they are doing to them then sufficiently angry about it and draws a line."

-- as explained by Mr. Greenwald utterly without irony to the reporter from Chinese state television.

• Mr. Greenwald's revelation that part of his agenda is to sufficiently embarrass the US government by exposing details of its spying on other governments that the public relations "cost" from "around the world" will too high for them to continue doing it.

Two items which were conspicuous by their absence from Mr. Greenwald's exclusive interview on Chinese state television?   

NSA domestic surveillance and the flaccidity of the FISA court.

*UPDATE:  Correction.  It has been widely reported that there are two other prominent politicians who appear to have said very stupid things about prosecuting Mr. Greenwald.

However, if you look at the actual transcript from the June 9, 2013 "This Week" exchange between George Stephanopoulos, Rep. Stone and Sen. Feinstein on which this widely-repeated assertion is based, it is very clear that neither Sen. Feinstein nor Rep. Stone ever called for Mr. Greenwald to be prosecuted.

And I will present such a case later on as chores, work and various errands and personal matters permit...

For Your Convenience -- UPDATE

The good people at MST3K have already compiled a comprehensive list of viable royal baby names...

UPDATE:  which also happens to double as a comprehensive list of sexting handles for NYC mayoral candidates.

Listen. Listen.

Listen.

Listen.

David Sirota Announces

Reminder: If you happen to have trolls/haters obsessed with you, it is typically a sign you are rocking the boat - and doing something right
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) July 22, 2013

That I am "doing something right".

So I've got that going for me.

"For a While I Was Here"

"And for a while I mattered."

That is what Harlan Ellison would like on his tombstone.

Before he has use for such, he would also like you to read his new book.  Because, as Jaime Lowe points out on Vulture.Com, "Harlan Ellison Isn’t Dead Yet":

In spite of his dire warnings, Ellison is alive and well and living in Los Angeles. This week he is releasing his first book-length work in almost a decade: 7 Against Chaos, a graphic novel from DC Comics. It is a vision of a future on the verge of apocalypse, but saved by a dream team of oddballs and freaks of nature that pick a fight with a monomaniacal lizard who rules an alternate universe. Ellison, never one to shy away from hyperbole, says of the book, “I hope it will leave a giant footprint on the arid plain of my life. This book is something — as I get closer to the edge of the abyss — I’m enormously proud of. It’s my Lawrence of Arabia, my Gone With the Wind.” He told me this recently on the phone, shortly after recording a guest spot on The Simpsons. (When he got the call requesting his cameo, Ellison’s response was: “Well, it’s about goddamn time.”) He did his spot in one take (his version of events), then joined the Simpsons’ writers and assorted crew for lunch. Producer and showrunner Al Jean had described it to me like this: “We had lunch with Harlan afterwards, where he was brilliant, hilarious and unprintable.”

There's a bunch of other stuff too, all available here in easy-to-read form.

What The Lizard People Are Up To

How many people would like to see me buy a new gun in Chicago and present it on TV to George #Zimmerman?
— Brad Thor (@BradThor) July 19, 2013

What'll fool you is how closely they approximate human appearance.
And then they open their mouths.

That being said, I need to give serious consideration to chucking the romance and adventure of the blogging life and in favor of writing a series of wingnut action novels under the name Zeke Thunderbolt.  The hours and the money look great, and my conscience won't be much troubled by taking a small dump in such an already vast and toxic swamp.

Words

Also: Honest disagreement doesn't = disparagement. One should be able to factually refute a point without being accused of "attacking"
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) July 20, 2013

Fail

Similarly, people w/similar principles should be able to disagree without assuming pure evilness or resorting to ugly ad hominem.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) July 20, 2013

I confess that if heard zombie "Colonel" Harland Sanders had leaped from the grave, taken over the "Meet the Press" studio at gunpoint and demanded that his "Chicken is Murder" manifesto be read on the air I would find that series on incidents more surreal than these tweets by Mr. Sirota.

Barely.

Professional Left Podcast #189

"A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in."

--  H. L. Mencken

Links:

• Lewis Black on Texas
• James Fallows, 2010, on memory holes
• Wonkette:  OMG, Obama will make Rachel Maddow Supreme Court Justice per Fox
• Jeremy Scahill on Colbert (at around the 15:45 mark)
• Worst columns of the week from Brooks, Friedman, Cohen, and Rubin!  
• driftglass on David Brooks
• Tucker Carlson sends a sixteen-year-old to a White House briefing.
• Gawker talks to young Blacks so Mike Barnicle doesn't have to.
• Time Magazine:   The Christian Witness of Trayvon's Mother.

Da' money goes here:

Near the Top of the Greenwaldian's Long List of Grievances

is their contention that the Beltway media and secretly-White-House-bankrolled progressive bloggers (Yay!) are colluding with the gummint to distract people from the real NSA story about surveillance and transparency by harping on things like personalities and motives.

Which sounds reasonable.

Now I'm not sure how much of what they see as a coordinated campaign of media distraction is genuine collusion as opposed to laziness and a hardwired reflex for shiny, personality-driven stories. Also, probably because I am an omnivorous news consumer, I haven't noticed any dearth of coverage of the substance of the Mr. Snowden's leaks in my own in-basket.  Also by preceding every leak with a "Transformers V: You!Will!Not!Fucking!Believe!Your!Eyes!"-level of hype  and then revealing stuff that is certainly consequential but often not exactly a "Bombshell That Will Stop Time And Freeze Your Soul!" while slowing paying each new leak out over a longer and longer period, you leave a lot of media slack time open for the ADHD children who run much of the news to talk about strippers and porn.

But as I said, it is a reasonable point.

Which like so many other reasonable points, the Outrage Caucus has frozen in carbonite and reduced to another rigid, binary test of ideological purity.  To even mention anything other the substance of Mr. Snowden's leaks is to reveal oneself indisputably as a fraud and hypocrite in the pocket of the Kenyan Usurper.  To push back at all on any element of the story or to wish-wish-wish that the principal reporter would keep his stampeding ego and petty grudges in check is to stand convicted as a kill-crazed fascist.

This is why we can't have nice things.

And so in order to insure that Very Tight Focus is kept on the substance of the important and consequential NSA leaks and not on distracting side issues like personalities, subjective hypotheticals and acrimonious speculations about the motives of other people, Mr. Glenn Greenwald -- the principal reporter and curator of this very important and consequential NSA surveillance story -- has once again taken matters into his own hands by giving yet another interview to yet another major magazine...

...with is practically groaning under the weight of personalities, subjective hypotheticals and acrimonious speculations about the motives of other people.

When asked about Hendrick Hertzberg comments in The New Yorker:

There’s an important distinction between people who are extremely privileged and who believe in and obey pieties and orthodoxies — people like Hertzberg, who aren’t dissenting from anything and who are basically defenders and supporters of political power, the royal court. The real measure of how free a society is isn’t how its good, obedient servants are treated; it’s how dissidents are treated...So yeah, good little New Yorker writers who love Obama . . . you know, he’s right. For him it is abstract and conjectural. But for people who are engaged in actual critical thinking...

Got that?

To disagree with Mr. Greenwald on any particular and to any degree means that you must be "extremely privileged",  a "good, obedient servant" of the "pieties and orthodoxies", a defender and supporter of "the royal court", a "good little" Obama-lover who is obviously incapable of engaging in "actual critical thinking".  But what elevates this from an everyday, run-of-the-mill Greenwaldian tantrum to the level of grand, comic opera is that just a little further down in the same article, Mr. Greenwald goes out of his way to assure us of the purity of his and Mr. Snowden's motives, because all they really want is a "democratic debate":

If you talk to Snowden, what he’ll say is, “Look, I’m not trying to destroy the surveillance state.” If he were, he could’ve done so many things: he could have sold the documents for millions of dollars to China or Iran; he could have passed them on covertly; he could have dumped them all on the Internet. What he’s trying to do is enable a democratic debate...

And I'm sure it's gonna be one helluva "debate"... just as soon as everyone who disagrees with Mr. Greenwald to the slightest degree is slandered and ejected from the room!

But I digress. 

We were talking about how very, very important it is to keep distracting side issues like personalities, subjective hypotheticals and acrimonious speculations about the motives of other people.  So let's get back to talking about what horrid bastards the Obama Administration are --

What the Obama Administration was going to do was pretty predictable. We knew they were going to accuse him of being a traitor, to depict him as fleeing to China, as having endangered the people to terrorists. They do the same thing in every single case.  

-- and the awfulness of those awful hordes of unnamed, unspecified "Democrats and progressives" -- 

But interestingly the most vicious and vehement attacks on my reporting have come from Democrats. Democrats and progressives are the ones who were my loudest cheerleaders when I was writing this stuff about the Bush Administration, and they’ve become the primary source of hostility and contempt now that I’m writing the same exact stuff about Obama.

-- because to repeat for the cognitively impaired, in Greenworld, although we are repeatedly told that the motive for all of this is -- 

So from the start, the question was, “How can the public’s attention be captured in a way that will engage a real debate?”

-- the non-brain-dead reader will have noticed by now that even the slightest, actual, debate style-pushback against anything that flows from the keyboard of Mr. Greenwald is instantly shredded and dismissed by the Outrage Caucus as a "vicious and vehement" attack by the obedient slaves of imperial power.

But again I digress.

So rather than dwelling on that, let us instead move on to another round of Mr. Greenwald's non-NSA-leak-related acrimonious speculations about the depraved motives of unnamed, unspecified "people" who have shocked and saddened him: 

I remember I would go around in 2007 and 2008 giving speeches about the Bush Administration, and people would sometimes say to me, “Don’t you realize that once Democrats get into office they’re going to do these same things, and all your allies who are now cheering for you are going to support those policies?” And I would say, “I don’t believe that’s true” — like their dignity would not allow them to spend eight years shrieking about the horrors of these policies, only to turn around and support them because a Democrat was doing it. I turned out to be totally wrong.

Then a little story about Mr. Greenwald's gumption:

I definitely knew it was going to take a lot of resolve, right? Because the government relies on this climate of fear. They want you to be scared. But this is what I’ve been working for ever since I started writing about politics and doing journalism. So I was pretty resolved that I wasn’t going to let fear impede what I did. I had to commit to doing it in a really aggressive and adversarial way.

Followed by a little story about Edward Snowden's heroism:

But the thing that really focused me was seeing how courageous Snowden was. I mean, here’s this twenty-nine-year-old kid who has made a conscious choice to subject himself to a substantial risk of being in prison for the rest of his life, and yet he never evinced even a molecule of remorse or regret or fear. He was completely convinced and tranquil about the rightness of his choice.

Followed by another hype of that-which-is-yet-to-come:

And I really believe that the most significant revelations are yet to come. I don’t want to keep previewing that — we’re going to take our time vetting it and reporting it and figuring it all out — but the stuff that has shocked me the most is the stuff we haven’t even written about. 

To be clear, I find none of this objectionable on its face.  But I take huge exception to it when it's coming out of the mouth of someone who is, at the same time, trying to silence anyone who disagrees with him to the slightest degree by insisting that anything which distracts people from the real NSA story about surveillance and transparency by harping on things like personalities and motives is monstrously evil. 

"Their Rigidity is Killing Them."

"It’s either holy purity, or you are anathema.”

Sound like anyone you know?

Actually, this is a quote from pissed-off Republican lobbyist and George W. Bush's former ambassador to Brussels, Tom Korologos who is one of many, cranky members of the Party of Personal Responsibility cited in a new column by Tom Edsall's entitled "Has the G.O.P. Gone Off the Deep End?"

For the uncharitable among us, the column is like tucking in to a ten-foot-long schadenfreude hoagie, trimmed with everyone from a former Tom DeLay aide to Bloody Bill Kristol, all weeping great big Burkean tears and bitching to beat the band about how the inmates have taken over the asylum.

Of course, what they're really furious about is that the monster they tinkered together to stomp Liberals to grue and carry them all to power -- a monster their betters has been warning them against building in increasingly panicked tones for years -- has now, in fact (as one long-forgotten wag once put it) and as predicted, kicked the lab door off its hinges and run amok.  The Party of Lincoln is now Rush Limbaugh's gimp-suited plaything and has stacked Congress with enough deeply paranoid, face-defiant, lockstepping meatsticks that, as Ed Rogers, (a top aide to both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush) notes, to kill "the art of governing in Washington":

The G.O.P. House has between 20 and 30 members who are ideological purists who think every issue and vote is black or white. Combine that with the members who fear a primary from the right, and you have maybe 60 votes that are hard to get. We have lost the art of governing in Washington. In the Congress no one is able to make and execute long-term plans.

If you have five minutes to kill, I suppose you could go read Mr. Edsall's article here.

Or, if you have a lot more time on your hands, you could just re-read every fucking thing Liberals have been screaming about for the last 30 years or so.   30 years during which even whispering the idea in print that the Right might not be right in the head was to invite political jihad from Conservatives and derision and ideological exile by the mainstream media.

After which, if you're still feeling perky, you could follow up by metaphorically slapping the smirk right off of the next lazy, Both Siderist idiot who uglies up your immediate vicinity.

And now a bit of film which apparently no Conservative has ever seen:

And a children's story which apparently no Conservative has ever read.

In Which I Continue To Wonder

If the grotty fringe Liberal blogosphere hasn't become to establishment publications what Xerox PARC was to Apple:

Fun With Andrew Sullivan

By Charles P. Pierce at 4:15pm

Mr. Sullivan is not pleased with Mr. Cohen's work.

He first got his column in 1976. At the WaPo, lifetime tenure trumps even unvarnished racism and even less varnished mediocrity. Can you imagine him being able to make it in the blogosphere on his own merits? Me neither.

Of course, if it were a couple of decades or so ago, and Cohen wrote pretty much the same thing, gussied it up with a lot of laughable pseudo-science about IQs, and changed his name to, oh, I dunno, say Charles Murray, he could have cashed a fat check from The New Republic.

Just sayin'.

Mr. Pierce is a very fine, very funny writer whose work I enjoy and link to regularly.

That being said, a decade after the Liberal blogosphere took raucous flight and made characters like Sunday morning gasbags and David Brooks and Tom Friedman and Peggy Noonan and Andrew Sullivan part of our regular target package, it is still weird to run across snarky magazine-based take-downs of the Sunday morning gasbags or David Brooks or Tom Friedman or Peggy Noonan or Andrew Sullivan and discover that there are legions out there to who are delighted that someone, somewhere has finally had the nerve to tackle these subjects.

Of course, unlike Xerox PARC, the grotty fringe Liberal blogosphere is not answerable to any hidebound New York home office goofs who have no frigging idea what make of what we are doing and stifle us at ever turn.  

Which is why I'm sure that if we just keep writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and...

The Monster We Wanted

The Monster We Got

On Guns

"Uh, Sis, what sort of gun should I carry?"

"Huh? Why the deuce do you want a gun?"

"Why, for what I might run into, of course. Wild animals and things. Deacon Matson practically said that we could expect dangerous animals."

"I doubt if he advised you to carry a gun. From his reputation, Dr. Matson is a practical man. See here, infant, on this tour you are the rabbit, trying to escape the fox. You aren't the fox."

"What do you mean?"

"Your only purpose is to stay alive. Not to be brave, not to fight, not to dominate the wilds -- but just stay breathing. One time in a hundred a gun might save your life; the other ninety-nine it will just tempt you into folly..."

-- Robert Heinlein, "Tunnel in the Sky"

And Here We

 Go...
 

Still Waiting, Ctd.

Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

"It’s sometimes hard for Westerners to understand the ferocity and passion behind sectarianism in the Middle East. I’m not an expert either – but the period of history I studied most exhaustively at Oxford was England and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The town I grew up in has memorial grave-stones for the Protestants burned alive on the Tudor-era high street, as cheering Catholics gathered around. As an Irish-Catholic in England, I was taught the brutal history of the Protestant-Catholic wars that played out over three centuries – and were still killing people in my lifetime.

"America never experienced this – which may explain in part the utopianism that led us into Iraq (and makes my own support of the fiasco even more indefensible in retrospect)..."

-- Andrew Sullivan, July 16, 2013

What can one say except that it’s obviously sometimes hard for gay Tory pundits to understand the ferocity and passion behind the idea of white male supremacy in America.

Many American towns have the grave-stones of Confederate and Union boys who slaughtered each other in their hundreds of thousands fighting for what each side firmly believed was the will of God:

...
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

How then was that not a holy war?

 In fact, since before Fort Sumter and the Cornerstone Speech -- 

...

This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. ...

Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another star in glory.” The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.

...

--  through Wallace 

and the Dixiecrats --

 

 -- and right on past Loving v. Virginia --

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix...

-- the problem of race in America has always been about white male supremacy.

And white supremacy in America has always been about Jefferson Davis' Almighty God locked in mortal combat with Reverend Martin Luther King's Almighty God.

And it continues to astonish me the number of times we on the Left are called upon to drum this basic fact of American history into the skulls of America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectuals. 

Maybe they'll listen to Sorkin: