fascism

Norman Pollack in an article entitled “Democrats’ Complicity in Political Murder” morally “calls out” Obama and Democrats. Pollack writes: Read below the fold...

I wonder if Obama’s face will be carved into Mount Rushmore. Has the universe seriously become that cruelly surreal and Orwellian?

I think so.

A few days ago when I saw Obama’s likeness photoshopped onto Mount Rushmore on Al Sharpton’s show it made bitter bile burn my throat and choke me.

I then managed to scream and announce to a brother and nephew that if or when Obama ended up memorialized in such a way that would be the day I moved to another country.

“Where will you move to?” my nephew asked. Read below the fold...

So what wasn’t and isn’t seriously on the discussion table during the highly publicized presidential and vice-presidential debates this month which have averaged 70 or so million citizen viewers? Read below the fold...

Serious food for serious thought:

Luke Hiken Read below the fold...

The Law is the true embodiment
Of everything that's excellent.
It has no kind of fault or flaw,
And I, my Lords, embody the Law.

--The Lord Chancellor, Iolanthe, Gilbert and Sullivan

[Welcome, 4closureFraud readers! Welcome FDL readers! --lambert]

We can look at the foreclosure crisis as the pre-emininent law enforcement crisis of our time: Elite impunity for crimes committed and still being committed by lenders and servicers (“banksters”) on a massive scale. We can also look the foreclosure crsis as an issue of jurisprudence, where a revolutionary oligarchy seeks to change the nature of law itself.

Let’s start with “Code is law,” a terrific meme successfully propagated by Lawrence Lessig in the '90s. From The Industry Standard: Read below the fold...

The claim of Austrian school economists that "there is no macroeconomics" because the political-economic system at the macro level is explainable in terms of the aggregated attributes and activities of political-economic agents at the micro-level of that system is false, silly, and ignores the findings of many other sciences! That's because macro-level behavior includes structural and holistic properties of these systems that are not explainable by individual level phenomena or aggregations of them. Read below the fold...

Obama is playing a long (but not necessarily slow) game of global proxy profiteering-chess-for-oligarchs with China. The next opposing pawn to fall will be Iran.

This is what Peter Symonds has to say in wsws:

US preparations for a war against Iran are not directed at stopping the country’s alleged nuclear weapons program, but at furthering Washington’s hegemony over the strategic, energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. The US has not abandoned the aim that drove the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq: to exercise control over the oil and gas supplies of its European and Asian rivals.

Read below the fold...

‘Twas the week before extra-constitutional detention legalization and all through the House and Senate, hardly a rat-bastard, pimped-out-by-the-oligarchy, political or media creature was stirring, not even my own NY senators and rep!

I am away on vacation, despite remnants of the flu, lower back stress and a job that is thin-ice, one part-time day at a time precarious. I desperately needed a vacation since this bottom rung corporate job is as empathyless-ly and amorally run as our country. I am happy at long last to be around long-distance family. Nonetheless I am having fitful dreams along with bouts of insomnia about the deterioration of what used to be the American republic. Read below the fold...

This is one example of why I use the rhetoric I do:

Police locked down the Tucson congressional office of Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) on Thursday afternoon after staffers received a package containing a “confirmed” toxic substance, a Grijalva spokesman said.

Read below the fold...

I took a little flak last Friday for focusing on the sexism (which some didn't see) in Wesley Clark's fundraising letter about Sarah Palin, instead of focuing on how scary, scary, SCARY! she is and how what she said about targeting Democrats for death was wrong. Well, whatevah, because I write what I want to write. But some other things came up in discussion about right-wing populism, the TEA Parties and the nature of media distractions, and I thought they were worth more exploration. Read below the fold...

Jon Walker over at Fire Dog Lake makes a very effective argument about why learning the wrong lesson from the defeat of Martha Coakley in Tuesday's Massachusetts Senate race will lead to disaster. Read below the fold...

"We're not removing your right to protest. We're just removing your right to protest when it matters."

Guardian:

The Danish parliament today passed legislation which will give police sweeping powers of "pre-emptive" arrest and extend custodial sentences for acts of civil disobedience. The "deeply worrying" law comes ahead of the UN climate talks which start on 7 December and are expected to attract thousands of activists from next week.

Read below the fold...

CBS:

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.

The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us (One of the biggest independent news sites) Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.

Read below the fold...

Hoss makes a good point about this utterly devastating critique from Digby on yet another shitstain excuse for a piece of journalism, but I'd like to make a gooder point, if I may. I actually suffered to read Nooner's entire article, and what struck me was the completely self-absorbed tone and perspective she employed. Read below the fold...