bodhi tree swaying

So, is this the work of a Ron Paul opponent, or a not very smart Ron Paul supporter?2/2/12 – 1

Loved this image.

When Krugman won his Nobel Prize for Economics, I commented that it was like discovering that your favorite, rather scholarly, uncle was secretly an undercover agent.

The deliberate inflicting of pain is now being accepted by government as a way of keeping the population in line.

The use of pepper spray in wartime, we should be constantly reminding ourselves, is an official war crime. It’s chemical warfare, and it’s torture.

If these policemen were soldiers, and the students were citizens of a foreign country, those in uniform would be facing prison sentences for what they’d done. Why do police forces have the right to perpetrate with impunity what are effectively war crimes against their own people? Why do we accept this so easily?

From the Atlantic:

James Fallows: Pepper-Spray Brutality at UC Davis

In case you haven’t yet seen the YouTube footage of what happened yesterday at UC Davis, here it is. The first minute has the main drama:

Let’s stipulate that there are legitimate questions of how to balance the rights of peaceful

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In every quarter since the recession officially ended in June 2009, the economy has grown. And yet ordinary Americans are still getting poorer, while the gap between the richest and the poorest still continues to grow. We need an economy that works for everyone, not just the rich.

The graph is from this article in the NYT.

The Occupy Wall Street campaign has been widely seen in the media as a coalition of flakes, unsure of why they’re actually there, without any clear message. And while there may be a grain of truth in that there is no one clear leader articulating demands, as Glenn Greenwald said,

Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power—in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions—is destroying financial security for everyone else?

I admire Glenn’s passion, and while he’s right, I think he’s articulating the wrong emotional message. He’s articulating disgust (“oozing,” “corruption,” “crony”). The problem with this is that disgust isn’t an attractive quality. It’s offputting. People aren’t generally inspired by disgust. And when they …

This appeared in my stream on Google+, having originally been posted by Armando Lioss.

I haven’t checked the figures, but given that the US accounts for almost 50% of global military spending, it looks about right.

Added later:
However, the military budget of the US has little directly to do with the country not having universal health care. The US in fact spends far more of its GDP on healthcare compared to other industrialized nations, although it gets far less for its money. If there is a common factor, it lies in the fact that government in the US is largely controlled by business interests who push military spending to absurd levels and who prevent the substantive healthcare reform that would allow all Americans to have access to healthcare.

From time to time one of my kids will grab the other kid’s food and eat it. They have an excuse. Their brains are not yet mature, and they don’t understand fairness, or only in a selfish way, being concerned to get their share, but often being unwilling to let others have theirs.

This graph shows, well, graphically, I suppose, what’s been happening in the US since the 1960s, in terms of income inequality.

The US has been baking more and more cookies, but 5% of the population has been grabbing most of them, leaving very few to be shared among the 95% of the population who are, for the most part, actively engaged every day in making the damn cookies.

Ross Douthat, the younger and hipper of the NYT’s right-wing columnists (the other being the rather gray and staid David Brooks) concludes a piece today praising the recent outbreak of bipartisanship with this extraordinary statement:

Real courage is required as well [as bipartisanship]. And this month’s outbreak of bipartisanship was conspicuously yellow-bellied. Republicans and Democrats came together to cut taxes, raise spending, and give free health care to the first responders on 9/11. They indulged, in other words, in the kind of easy, profligate “moderation” that’s done as much damage to the country over the years as the ideologies of either left or right.

Note how two different things here are lumped together as “yellow-bellied” (i.e. cowardly): the extension of the Bush tax cuts, and paying the health-care costs of heroic individuals who rushed in to the rubble of the World trade Center …

I came across this fascinating graph recently (in the Atlantic), and thought it worth sharing. The first column of figures shows how much the US federal debt grew, or shrank, as a share of gross domestic product during each administration. The second column of figures is the average annual rate of growth or reduction during that administration — for example, you can quickly see that under Truman, the debt burden fell by an average 4.7% for each year of that administration. Red is bad, green is good.

One thing that’s clear is that for most of the last 61 years, federal budgets were well run. The second thing that’s clear is that until recent times, federal budgets were well run under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The third thing that’s noticeable is that something has gone horribly wrong with the federal …

Ron Paul has taken a brave stance that will make him unpopular with many conservatives.

It is repeatedly said that 64% of the people, after listening to the political demagogues, don’t want the mosque to be built. What would we do if 75% of the people insist that no more Catholic churches be built in New York City? The point being is that majorities can become oppressors of minority rights as well as individual dictators. Statistics of support is irrelevant when it comes to the purpose of government in a free society—protecting liberty.

Via Think Progress

Ron Paul is a man I disagree with on many things, but he’s spot on here. This is where libertarianism and liberalism overlap.

Back in September, I posted a graph of job losses covering the final fourteen months of Bush’s presidency and the first seven of Obama’s.

I’d ironically titled the post See how Obama is destroying the US because someone had put a poll on Facebook asking the question, “Is Obama destroying our country?” The answer choices were thoughtfully provided as:

– Yes
– No
– Only a little

If you look at the comments for that post you’ll see I was criticized as “partisan,” “misreading the statistics,” and that I “do not understand what is going on.” I was also told that “Hard times are coming and you will not be prepared.”

Of course I don’t have any advanced skills in analyzing the economy, but it seemed obvious that the trend was in the right direction and that …

Here’s the article, which was published on Newsmax, and then pulled. I got the text from Google’s cache:

Obama Risks a Domestic Military ‘Intervention’

Tuesday, September 29, 2009 10:35 AM

By: John L. Perry

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:

# Officers swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to “obey the orders of the president of the United States.”

# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American

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Someone just posted a poll on FaceBook evaluating the Obama presidency. The question and answer choices were as follows:

Is Obama destroying our country?
- Yes
- No
- Only a little

The graph above compares Bush’s “economic miracle” — the miracle of destroying jobs at a rate unprecedented in modern times– with Obama’s performance. Note what happened in the months since Obama took office. Job losses have declined to a point where they’re not much worse than they were before the recession got fully under way. If current trends continue it’ll only be a couple of months before we see positive gains in the number of jobs.

Then we’ll be back to the start of what may be another long nightmare of prosperity, although the nightmare of peace is something we won’t see for some time, given that the Bush administration started two wars …

Peter Clothier has a neat idea for motivating people to push for a public health insurance option. Here is what he wrote:

Step 1: I handwrite a brief letter to my Senators. “Dear Senator …, I voted for you. I have placed my trust in you. I hereby respectfully request that you unequivocally INSIST on the inclusion of a public option or its equivalent in any health care bill that goes to President Obama. Yours truly, (signature.)”

(Find your senators’ addresses here)

Step 2: I place my letters in sealed, stamped envelopes, marked in bright, unmistakable letters on the outside: PO/PO (for Public Option/Post Office) in order to identify it as a part of this effort.

Step 3: IMPORTANT! On Tuesday, September 1 at precisely NOON o’clock, I drive, ride or walk to my nearest United States Post Office and silently place my letters in the outgoing mailbox. Suppose I were to

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Rachel Maddow’s piece is very sobering and shows how right-wing lobbying firms set on derailing health insurance reform are attempting to use thuggish behavior to intimidate legislators.

For some reason the Maddow video doesn’t display unless you visit the post — click on the title above if you can’t see it.

Stewart’s piece is lighter, but does a good job of showing how Fox News helps by endlessly recycling its own talking points (which themselves come from the Republican Party).

Glenn Greenwald is good at highlighting government hypocrisy, no matter where it originates:

Regarding Obama’s refusal to disclose the identity of health care executives meeting in the White House, TPM’s David Kurtz notes:  "It’s an especially painful continuation of Bush policies since candidate Obama promised to let CSPAN in to cover the creation of a health care bill and his campaign website still promises transparency in meetings between White House staff and outside interests." 

There are certain times when Obama betrays the spirit of his promises and other times when he betrays both the spirit and letter.  This seems quite clearly to be an example of the latter.

To me, this is one of the most astonishing developments in the ever-shifting rationale for why the US went to war in Iraq. Thomas Friedman tells us that we went there pretty much just to kick Muslim butt in order to deliver a message to that part of the world that we wouldn’t put up with terrorism from, you know, like people who live roughly in that part of the world. Wouldn’t really have mattered which Muslim butt we kicked. Could just as well have been Saudi Arabia, he tells us. Or Pakistan. Doesn’t really matter that none of those three countries had anything to do with 9/11 (although a lot of Saudi nationals were involved, of course). The important thing is that they happened to be Muslims.

It’s like New Zealand deciding to attack Austria because France bombed the Rainbow Warrior on their territory. Just to make an example of

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Gail Collins is often wickedly funny, and she’s in good form commenting on Sarah Palin’s quitting in order to spend more time with her family values:

• "Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter."
• "She recalled her visit with the troops in Kosovo, whose dedication and determination inspired her to … resign."
• "The timing of Palin’s announcement was extremely peculiar. Not only did she interrupt the plans of TV newscasters to spend the entire weekend pointing out that Michael Jackson is still dead, she delivered her big news just as the nation was settling into Fourth of July celebrations. You’d have thought she didn’t want us to notice."
• "It turns out that Palin believes that the only way her administration can ‘continue without interruption’ is for her to end it."
• "There is

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Glenn Greenwald keeps up the good fight, expecting journalists to pursue factual truth (and to call authorities on their BS) rather than merely pass on both "sides" of a debate as is both were mere opinions, even when one side is factually correct and the other is bogus.

This failure to takes sides with the truth, in an attempt to maintain a faux "objectivity" leads to the media passing on government (and opposition) propaganda, lending it the appearance of truth. This applies especially with the media’s refusal to call actions taken by Americans "torture," even when Americans have prosecuted others (as torturers) for committing those identical acts (such as waterboarding) and even as those same media describe as torture those same, or essentially identical, acts carried out by other nations.

In one of his many articles on this topic, Greenwald quotes this juicily hilarious extract from

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Didn’t get a chance to read much in the papers today — but I feel some sympathy for Mark Sanford, adulterous governor of South California. It must be a painful and humiliating thing to be caught in an adulterous relationship when you’ve built your career in part on condemning other people’s sexual ethics. But he shows no signs of resigning his office, although he insisted that Bill Clinton resign his office for a similar sexual transgression. Maureen Dowd provides a breakdown of Sanford’s hypocrisy.

Tonight I have a chapter meeting (a meeting with fellow members of the Western Buddhist Order) using an online service called Tokbox that provides free videoconferencing. Our chapter members are in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Montana, and Washington. We’ll be continuing our study of the Bodhicharyavatara.

This is four members of my chapter: Varasuri, myself, Varada, and Priyamitra. Sunada was away.

I’ve been …