What with the Senate fretting whether it dares step on health industry toes and maybe... kinda... vote on that body's watered-down, lickspittle healthcare "reform" package, it's odd so many studies are popping up advising us we don't need that ounce prenvention (or maybe even a pound of cure?) after all.
It's been almost a year since the Midas of Malicious Malarkey, Bernard Madoff, jumped from cushy insider/money man of New York to top scandal just about everywhere, and it seems the common fear in his downfall and its aftermath - that there are many more big-time Ponzi investment schemes out there 'bout to bust like overpriced Disney toys - hasn't panned out.
Yet...
There's power in cruelty. There's strength.
That fact is appreciated by every high-school jock shoving the put-upon, the grace-challenged into lockers, leaving their nerdy victims nursing painful scars much deeper than sheet-metal doors can ever tear. And as much by tony mavens snubbing the unfashionable and bad bosses humiliating underlings. Cruelty is locked in an elegantly infantile jig with status, since part of the privilege of exclusivity is providence to savage the common. And more than that: Cruel dismissal underlines stark differences of social and political elevation; it's not just about pleasures of sadism, although that's a huge part of the attraction. It's statement.
By spitting in your face, I prove to the world I'm a winner. Or, at least, not a loser. (It's probably more appropriate to keep this in negative dimension.)
There's something in human nature that can't exult unless someone else agonizes. There but for the grace of God... go I.
Kinda makes you wonder, "why now"?
US federal prosecutors said Thursday they were moving to seize four mosques and a 36-story New York skyscraper from a non-profit Muslim group suspected of having ties to the Iranian government.
The Alavi Foundation has been providing "numerous services" and illegally funneling funds to the Iranian government through money laundering, according to the office of US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara
Has Wall Street improved to the point where we can now afford our much-promised, long-delayed attack against Iran's "nukes"?
Dear Sen. Dodd,
Life isn't fair, you know. Another Democrat noted that: John Kennedy. You remember him - a President and administration more of promise than accomplishment, sanctified by his political martyrdom. But when we look back, we see he was on the hot seat from day one - Bay of Pigs, civil rights (King called his performance in that great struggle, during the mournful weekend of his assassination, "tardy"), the missile crisis, and on and on.
JFK's first year in office must have encompassed one of the shortest honeymoons on record, even more brief than that of President Obama and the "hope 'n change" Demos on the Hill.
Here's the problem, Chris - can I call you 'Chris'? - you and the rest of the party in Congress don't get no respect because you don't deserve any respect.
Honeymoon? You hypocritical gas-bags deserve some hot tar, feather overcoats and a short ride on a cold rail out of town.
Graywash.
I don't know if this term exists or not, but I'm coining it now, to signify the process of mixing tiny shreds of fact and huge dumploads of fiction in order to concoct an impression, a national delusion powerful enough to... build hugely expensive weapons systems... slap sanctions on countries that don't fit within the security blueprint we demand for ourselves and our little geopolitical pals.
...Or, launch a war on a country not making war on us.
B4 we nu it, we landed in a shorthand world.
Forget about Ritalin jarring us out of micro-second attention span. No drug can keep up with technology. Blackberries and texting have abbreviated and hacked our vocabulary to minimalist nightmare - LOL, MYOFB, FITB and SOOI join old favorites AWOL, NIMBY and FOB (or, Fat Old Broad, an archaic, telling bit of sexism from our latter-day, politically designated Stone Age of Sinatra and Chesterfields burnin' all night long.).
But today, especially for us aging Boomers facing retirements with scarce nuts and berries stored up, the most relevant may be an acronym I first heard on CNN Money's Revell on Retirement in January. Nothing better sums up our new reality of enforced solipcism: YOYO... or You're On Your Own.
Like the Pep Boys and brownbanded cockroaches, Larry Franklin evidently is in it for the long haul - even if it means blogging from the pokey.
You remember Franklin. He's the only defendant imprisoned in the abandoned "AIPAC spy scandal". A Defense Department functionary and part of Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans staff, he took the hit for passing on secret information about Iran to Israel via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, while co-defendants (and AIPAC honchos) Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman walked.
This week, in a Foreign Policy post, My Secret Plan to Overthrow the Mullahs, Franklin offers part apologia and part rabble-rousing from his lonely prison cell.
I voted for Barack Obama after long months of supporting his candidacy - sending him money online and prattling about him in every kitchen I could invade, to every friend or acquaintance I could buttonhole.
I became impressed with him in February 2007, when I watched him announce his campaign on a cold Saturday to a small crowd at the old statehouse in Springfield, Il - where Lincoln once worked, pundits never tired of telling us.
I liked what he said. It was 180-degrees from the reality we were living, four years downwind of the Iraq invasion, 19 months from the meltdown plunge, six years into the meanest, most infantile administration of physical and moral cowards with which, thankfully, we've ever been burdened in this country's history. If ever we wondered how the country would fare should ultimate authority fall into the hands of obnoxious, coddled frat boys, we discovered, too late, that fate would be a disaster generations mending.
For simply not being Geoge W. Bush, Barack Obama will always have my affection and gratitude, both as voter and American.
There was a lot for non-Jews to cheer about when J Street started taking heat from the big guns of what some American miscreants dare call "the Israel Lobby".
It means that non-existent lobby is taking the upstart opposition group seriously.
Up is down, night is day, and there is a limit to human venali-tay.
Lately, as I revel in the tepid, dreary pleasure of my drive to and from work in the urban garden that is downtown L.A. - anonymously monolithic and reeking of poverty's urine - I've become annoyed at all the far-Right talk radio cluttering up the airwaves. So much so, that I've started punching the 'scan' button to find something less recklessly heartless.
Edging in amid static, and fading easily, are a few "Radio Free Los Angeles" stations hammering a political line from the far, far other end of the spectrum. Between badly recorded garage punk triumphalism, disembodied voices shout denunciation of all fearsome evils wracking our nation and time - racism, class warfare, counter-revolutionary activity, dogfighting, dog eating, the persecution of Mumia, Palestine, etc. If you're over the age of, maybe, 25, it's all stuff you've heard before. A lot. But a new scare issue has popped up in time for Hallowe'en:
The H1N1 vaccine.
At the southeastern corner of Arizona, there is across the international border a small town called Naco, Sonora. As late as the first half of the 1970s, when I attended the university in Tucson, nasty scarring still marked adobe bricks in the south wall of an old hotel there. Some were likely bullet holes, some were divots the size of softballs, indications of shrapnel from pretty good-sized howitzer shells.
The foxes guarding our much-raided chickens have handed us a gamy egg in exchange for stealing the coop.
I guess I should be real impressed the Obama administration has drawn a line in the sand and told seven banks they couldn't pay their executives kings' ransoms out of the bailout kitty. It's an emotional issue, after all. Why should already-rich, overpaid crooks who got us in the meltdown jam profit with taxpayer money? As current affair, it's like episodic TV and freeway driving: There are good guys, bad guys, dumb folk and bang-up excitement. Maybe even a little blood and some broken glass.
Meanwhile, though, efforts to plug up the crumbling dike that is the derivatives market with safe-and-sane regulations are fading away slowly under cover of the bankers' salary smokescreen.
Interesting fallout from the newest spy case to affect if not actually involve our close, close, close Mideast ally: BradBlog notes this thoroughly unsurprising development seems to validate allegations made by a perennial neocon punching bag and FBI whistleblower:
This is, of course, the precise sort of thing which FBI linguist-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has been alleging concerning both Turkish and Israeli interests for some time. In her case, she has testified under oath to nearly-identical behavior by U.S. scientists, military personnel and academics at top-secret nuclear and military installations who are alleged to have done precisely what Stewart David Nozette has now been busted for...
One of the strangest schemes in our long, tired, sports-bar loudmouth of a foreign policy is the European Missile Shield, purportedly intended to protect the soft underbelly of the Mighty Continent against an Iranian missile attack.
Say... what?
And we can expect, perhaps, the next exceedingly bright idea down the 'pike an anti-gang task force for Martha's Vineyard?
Iran?
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