eWeek:

According to documents leaked earlier this week, the United States favors forcing international ISPs to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material and would require ISPs to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. In addition, the U.S. negotiators [on ACTA (International Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement)] are seeking international notice and take down agreements and mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM systems. The provisions are all favored by major U.S. content owners.

One of the default assumptions that most everyone in the health care insurance debate seems to share is that the Democrats will make things better, if not much better. That's the basis of the "progressive" incremental strategy, for example.

But in at least three very big policy areas -- surveillance, executive powers, and financial regulation -- the Democrats have not made things better, and at least in the case of surveillance, have demonstrably made things worse, by consolidating and normalizing Bush's policies.

... it's because they're trying to. That's why no investment in housing like HOLC, that's why health care deform is a sham and a scam, that's why the jobs situation remains pitiful, that's why "entitlement reform," and on and on and on. I mean, quality work like this is what the banksters get bonuses for.

Fact-esque:

The Obama Admin sent the message loud and clear and Corporate America got it: workers don't matter. Only the corporations get to be saved. They are the focus.

The result is pretty much what you'd expect: even though economists agree that putting money into the hands of people who will spend it is the only way to get out of the morass Bush and the Chicago School created, the corpo's are laying off more workers and cutting the paychecks of those who remain while loading them up with even more work and calling it "a rise in productivity".

Yay! Say, how's card-check coming?

Matt Taibbi:

This is what Barack Obama did to “earn” the Nobel Prize. He put the benevolent face back on things. He is a good-looking black law professor with an obvious bent for dialogue and discussion and inclusion. That he hasn’t actually reversed any of Bush’s more notorious policies — hasn’t closed Guantanamo Bay, hasn’t ended secret detentions, hasn’t amped down Iraq or Afghanistan — is another matter. What he has done is remove the stink of unilateralism from those policies.

They’re not crazy-ass, blatantly illegal, lunatic rampages anymore, but carefully-considered, collectively-run peacekeeping actions, prosecuted with meaningful input from our allies.

Via Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi explains Obama's Nobel Peace Prize by providing some very insightful commentary about who is - and isn't - eligible for Nobel Peace Prizes and why:

Go read Glenn.

Via the great Field Negro, this from Naomi Klein:

In the late 50s and early 60s, angry white mobs were reacting to life-changing victories won by the civil rights movement. Today's mobs, on the other hand, are reacting to the symbolic victory of an African American winning the presidency. Yet they are rising up at a time when non-elite blacks and Latinos are losing significant ground, with their homes and jobs slipping away from them at a much higher rate than from whites. So far, Obama has been unwilling to adopt policies specifically geared towards closing this ever-widening divide. The result may well leave minorities with the worst of all worlds: the pain of a full-scale racist backlash without the benefits of policies that alleviate daily hardships. Meanwhile, with Obama constantly painted by the radical right as a cross between Malcolm X and Karl Marx, most progressives feel it is their job to defend him – not to point out that, when it comes to tackling the economic crisis ravaging minority communities, the president is not doing nearly enough.

That's how the Overton Window works, kidz!*

Now, Klein being Klein, she ties together (a) the reparations movement, (b) the "crisis in African-American wealth, (c) the bailouts (in which Obama played such a prominent role), and (d) the transfer of wealth to banksters:

As the flap about Obama's all-points TV broadcast to schoolchildren didn't fascinate me much either way, I missed some of the details.

Apparently, evil conservatives didn't like the sound of children being told to "help the president."

No doubt, if schoolchildren were being directed to "help President Bush," we'd have all thought that was a grand idea.

[Do read the comments. --lambert]

[I have dear friends who will vehemently disagree with me about this. But so be it; I have to make a choice!]

Now that Edwards is out of the race I find myself, like VastLeft, surprised, even chagrined, to find myself endorsing Hillary. But there it is. I wish this could be something other than a rambling, impressionistic post, but heck: Maybe that's how we all make decisions anyhow.

My bottom line is this:

I feel that I know Hillary. For all her faults, I know her.

I want to entrust the very challenging future of our country to someone I know. Simple as that.

I don't feel that I know Obama, and the more I learn about him, the less I like.

Believe it or not, Harriet Miers, Inerrant Boy's latest attempt to drown another instiution, this time the Supreme Court, has never served as a judge.

So why'd Bush nominate her? Still trying to win approval from Babs?

"[BUSH] Harriet's greatest inspiration was her mother..."

Gag.

Pass the treacle!

UPDATE Let's ignore the winger frothing and stamping. And let's ignore the easy cheap shot that Miers, like Cheney (and Napoleon) crowned herself—in charge of the search, she determined she was the best. (No notion of conflict of interest with Republicans; it's lost to the Republican conscience, along with the duty of care.) No, what Bush did was put his consigliere on the Court that should, if there is any justice, try Him.

There's just no point in commenting on something as self-evident as the cold, calculating fascism in this:

"The White House on Friday threatened to veto a $440.2 billion defense spending bill in the Senate because it wasn't enough money for the Pentagon and also warned lawmakers not to add any amendments to regulate the treatment of detainees or set up a commission to probe abuse."

Not enough money for the most wasteful program of corporate welfare ever devised by man! And we'll have none of that "accountability" horseshit, while we're at it; that stuff's for impoverished shitkickers and ghetto denizens. This is an administration that has carved out previously unhoped-for Executive power, thanks to the likes of John Roberts and Alberto Gonzales, and there's no way the Little Man is going to start answering to the American people, let alone Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Constitution.

Why, if we started expecting Bush to look critically at the waste of the Defense Department, or demanded he be held accountable for the deterioration and ruination of Constitutional law, we might actually expect him to put some of those much publicized Christian principles into play and help the hurricane victims. And Christ knows, that way lies madness. As Paul Krugman noted this morning:

"Start with health care, where conservative senators, generally believed to be acting on behalf of the White House, have blocked bipartisan legislation that would provide all low-income victims of Katrina with health coverage under Medicaid.
In a letter urging Senate leaders to reject the bill, Mike Leavitt, the secretary of Health and Human Services, warned that it would create "a new Medicaid entitlement." He asserted that victims can be taken care of by Medicaid "waivers," which basically amount to giving refugees the health benefits, if any, that they would have been entitled to in their home states -- and no more.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, many needy victims won't qualify for aid. For example, Medicaid doesn't cover childless adults of working age. In fact, surveys show that many destitute survivors of Katrina are being denied Medicaid, and some are going without medicines they need."

We have neither the time nor the dogma to get behind ministering to the health needs of those of our citizens who have lost everything but the clothes on theire backs. It simply doesn't fit into the Conservatives' New World Order. And we're not going to house them, either, unless it's to sit them on the curb while we funnel plenty of money to our buddies, then shove them into some trailer that will dump over like a toy when the next hurricane comes along:

"These days, both conservatives and liberals agree that public housing projects are a bad idea, and that housing vouchers -- which help the poor pay rent -- are much better. In the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge earthquake, special housing vouchers issued to victims worked very well.
But the administration has chosen, instead, to focus its efforts on the creation of public housing in the form of trailer parks, which have been slow to take shape, will almost surely be more expensive than a voucher program and may create long-term refugee ghettoes."

Krugman comes to the conclusion that Bush is trapped between being politically unable to ignore the needs of the hurricane survivors, and yet wanting to forge ahead with his destruction of the social safety net:

"So here's the key to understanding post-Katrina policy: Mr. Bush can't avoid helping Katrina's victims, but he doesn't want to legitimize institutions that help the needy, like the housing voucher program. As a result, his administration refuses to use those institutions, even when they are the best way to provide victims with aid. More generally, the administration is trying to treat Katrina's victims as harshly as the political realities allow, so as not to create a precedent for other aid efforts.
As the misery of the hurricane's survivors goes on, remember this: to a large extent, they are miserable by design."

As are the poorest and the working poor among us, and as are the prisoners of war being held legitimately and illegitimately by our war machine.

Man, yet another female Bush enabler? Yes, Attywood yet again connects the dots: Harriet Miers is a front-runner, and, in the sordid tale of how Bush evaded his duties as a National Guardsman, and got away with it, she where the bodies are buried... Or the documents and the money, as the case may be.

Is there nothing that Bush and the Republican's don't degrade?

Oh no. He's getting me started again:

"We can all pitch in ... by being better conservers of energy," Bush said

Am I the only one who finds it creepy that Bush is turning to the Army as the only government institution that works in emergencies?

And am I the only one who wonders how broad Bush's defintion of "emergency" is going to end up being?

The shorter Digby:

Never, ever give Bush the benefit of the doubt.

But then, we already knew this.