Last Call

Nothing will happen after Aurora.  Nothing.  No laws will be passed, no regulations enforced, nothing.  And the next massacre will happen a few weeks or months from now, or hours if we're talking about the often forgotten urban centers of America where the victims are inner city minorities neck deep in gang violence.

Meanwhile our village betters keep telling us we can never have gun control.

Conservative columnist George Will said Sunday that the Aurora, Colo. shootings have little to do with the nation’s gun laws, describing it as the product of an isolated, deranged individual.

“That’s what the problem is – an individual’s twisted mind,” he said on ABC’s “This Week” roundtable. “There is a human itch in the modern age to commit sociology as soon as this happens and to piggy-back various political agendas on a tragedy. And I just think we ought to resist that. … There are deranged people in the world.”

We can never have gun control because Crazy People.

Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, also appearing on the roundtable, similarly argued that the tragedy didn’t have much to do with gun laws. She said the more relevant issue is mental health.

You know, mental health programs that Republicans say we have to cut if not eliminate entirely because we can't afford them, and we have to give tax cuts to corporations and the job creators and more money to the Pentagon for better, deadlier weapons to kill people with.

After all it's the stupid victims' fault for being shot and not packing heat to defend themselves with.

Former Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce wrote a missive Saturday highlighting the collective failure of the victims of the Aurora, Colo. massacre to stop the shooter who left 12 people dead and nearly 60 wounded in a movie theater.

The outspoken conservative — known for his ardent pro-gun and anti-illegal-immigration views — later sought to clarify that he was merely blaming gun control laws.

Early Saturday morning, the former Republican lawmaker took to Facebook to mourn the victims. He then wondered why none were “[b]rave” enough to stop the atrocity.

“Where were the men of flight 93???? Someone should have stopped this man,” he wrote. “…All that was needed is one Courages/Brave man prepared mentally or otherwise to stop this it could have been done.”

Only more guns can solve America's gun problem, just like only more tax cuts can solve America's tax revenue problems.

Today In Village Idiocy

Jay Rosen, journalism professor at NYU and media critic at large, has a term for that obnoxious Village tendency to compare two sides in an argument (liberals and conservatives especially) and lazily declare both sides to be equivalent in their partisan transgressions while the Villagers pretend to stay above the fray.  He calls it the View from Nowhere:

In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.” Second, it’s a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.

Rosen's been on to this tendency since the early Dubya years, nearly a decade now.  He's certainly nailed the process and the why:  It's used to suck all the legitimacy out of either side in a political argument and bestow it on the writer.

A perfect example of that is this Mark Fisher piece in the Washington Post equating Romney's tax returns to...you guessed it, President Obama's boirth certificate.  Fisher is careful to keep his View from Nowhere intact as he compares the two and throws up his hands, blaming both sides for the "lack of trust" in our politics.

When Obama’s birth certificate, passport records and medical files remain an issue for some voters through his presidency, it means that some people are still trying to resolve doubts about his exotic background — his role as a racial pioneer and his biography as the child of a father from Africa and a mother who took her son across the globe.

And when Romney’s tax records become a political albatross, that dispute is not so much about the merits of running a transparent campaign as about the discomfort some voters feel toward the candidate’s wealth and whether he understands the lives of those who have less.

Document battles — whether trumped-up election-season kerfuffles or genuine quests for important information — have been a mainstay of every national campaign since 2000. That should tell us that the hunger for proof stems from something much deeper than our search for the immaculate candidate. It’s part of our larger national neurosis, the corrosion of the sense that whatever our political leanings, we all share a common fact base. The fraying of that consensus has led increasingly to an entrenched popular skepticism, a stance toward politicians and institutions of all kinds that’s not just an arched-eyebrow “Show me,” but an obstinate and insistent “I don’t believe you.”

Not only do Americans increasingly segregate themselves in information silos arranged by political ideology, but even when we’re ensconced in the comforting echo chamber of Fox/Drudge World or MSNBC/NPR Land, we’re cynical about the very nature of facts.

Obama's birth certificate and Romney's tax returns are the same!  Both should be dismissed as things you shouldn't believe in.  The controversies surrounding them are just ginned up, because FOX and Drudge are the same as MSNBC and NPR.  Only the Village stands above it all.

And this is how our press will deal with the Romney tax returns issue now.  "It's the same as the Obama birth certificate thing, it's all nonsense, both sides do it.  We'll tell you what you really need to know about the candidates.  Stay tuned!"

Our press is trying to get you away from anything that would sink Romney and leave the campaign season meaningless.  They'd be out millions in political ad revenue if the race wasn't close, and more importantly nobody would ask them what they should be thinking about the candidates.

We're "cynical about the nature of facts" alright.  Especially with this press.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Bill Moyers gives us this staggeringly important interview with author Chris Hedges, who describes America of the Great Recession, an America completely subservient to corporate interests in both parties, those corporate interests bleeding out American cities and regions in the name of Almighty Profit.

Hedges calls these areas "Sacrifice Zones" in his new book.  He's absolutely right.

Hedges was particularly eloquent in describing the coal-mining areas of West Virginia, which “in terms of national resources is one of the richest areas of the United States [but] harbor the poorest pockets of community, the poorest communities in the United States. Because those resources are extracted, and that money is not funneled back into the communities.”

“Not only that,” he continued, “but they’re extracted in such a way that the communities themselves are destroyed. … They no longer want to dig down for the coal, and so they’re blowing the top 400 feet off of mountains poisoning the air, poisoning the soil, poisoning the water. … You are rendering the area moonscape. It becomes uninhabitable. … It’s all destroyed and it’s not coming back.”

Hedges went on to talk about Camden, New Jersey, which since the disappearance of manufacturing has become the poorest city in the United States and one of the most dangerous. “It’s a dead city,” he said. “There’s nothing left. There is no employment. Whole blocks are abandoned. The only thing functioning are open-air drug markets, of which there are about a hundred. And you’re talking third or fourth generation of people trapped in these internal colonies. They can’t get out.”

He spoke also about the Pine Ridge Reservation and migrant workers in Florida, saying, ” It’s greed over human life. … We, in that biblical term, we forgot our neighbor. And because we forgot our neighbor in Pine Ridge, because we forgot our neighbor in Camden, in Southern West Virginia, in the produce fields, these forces have now turned on us. They went first, and we’re next.”

“These corporations know only one word, and that’s more,” Hedges went on. “And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from the creating, essentially, a corporate oligarchic state.”

Watch the interview:



Devastating.  This is happening here, now.  And at every turn Republicans (and some Democrats) will make sure more and more Americans are sacrificed for corporate profit.  The GOP future of the United States is to simply keep jettisoning the weak and broken into the abyss until everything belongs to the one percent.

We're not too far off from that point now, a decade at most.

48 Hours Remembers Unsolved MO Murder

I remember when this happened, mostly because they made such a big deal about self-defense classes and how this woman was a green belt and was still beaten brutally.  And though it sounds hopelessly naive, that sort of stuff really never did happen around here.  Until then, at least.  48 Hours has investigated to bring new attention to the case.

"This is small town USA. A lot of stuff like this just doesn't happen," Walter said of the brutal murder.

Police documented the grisly scene using blood evidence to reconstruct Mischelle's final, terrifying moments.

"I believe she got out of the vehicle, and I think there was an argument," Walter explained. "She ended up over the guardrail and down the bottom of the slope. A very violent altercation took place. I believe she was beat at the bottom and knocked unconscious. There was a lot of blood…"

There was also blood under Mischelle's fingernails and marks on her right hand and wrist suggesting she had fought her assailants. 

"I think that she was fighting for her life. I think she was fighting more than one person," Walter said. "There was a blood trail going back up the hill. They carry her across the guardrail. They put her back in the car."

It wasn't until investigators searched her car and found three spent shell casings from a .380 caliber handgun that they realized Mischelle had been shot, too.

"I think after she got back in the car, I think that's when she regained conscious and somebody reached through the window…shot her point blank in the face; shot her in the back of the head. And then one more time in the back," Walter said, pausing. "I can't imagine what she went through that night."

She fought hard for her life, and lost.  It's unlikely anyone will ever come forward with information that will break the case open.  Her story is an important one for the area, though it's not enough to get a blip on coastal or major city news.  We were shocked and were forced to think about what we might do if faced with such a situation.

Besides the "Three Missing Women" case, this is probably the most famous unsolved case to haunt Missouri.

Stalkertastic

An obsessed lover built a hideout inside his ex-partner's house and used it to spy on her.

The 25-year-old man - who has name suppression - spent many hours in the hidden cavity, under a flight of stairs, and stocked it with clothes, bedding, food, candles, torches - and an arsenal of weapons.

He also cut holes in the plasterboard of the hideout and created trapdoors, giving him access to the whole house.

He was caught after he emerged from the hiding spot and lashed out with a spade when another man visited his former partner at the Lower Hutt home about 3am on April 1.

I cannot imagine what it would be like for a man to come bursting out of nowhere, wielding a weapon and speaking in Crazy.  I believe this may be the strangest booty call in the history of booty calls.

Not much is known about the man, except that his father surely contributed to his state.  In complete denial, his father calls it a "one-off" and suggests his son may have set this up over one night.   Trapdoors, bedding, weapons and all.  Somehow, in dear old Dad's mind, this means his son isn't as crazy as they believe.

But he's still crazy.  How do I know?  Sane people don't have a weapons cache in the room they use to spy on their ex.

Thank goodness this didn't end with someone getting killed.  They got to this one in time.

The Pain In Spain Continues, Part 2

The most recent Spanish austerity measures announced last week have now fomented major protests in the capital of Madrid as unemployed young Spaniards are descending on the the city in droves to rally against the Rajoy government.

Thousands of jobless Spaniards marched through Madrid Saturday in the latest angry demonstrations against economic crisis cuts, as fears rose for the country’s financial stability.

Young people thrown out of work by the recession converged on the capital, many of them having hiked hundreds of miles from around Spain, and walked through the city’s central avenues, waving banners and whistling.

“Hands up, this is a robbery!” they yelled, their regular refrain over recent days of protests. “Everyone get up and fight!”

It was the latest in a string of protests that have erupted since Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced 65 billion euros ($80 billion) in fresh austerity measures on July 11, including cuts to pay and unemployment benefits.

“I am very disappointed and angry,” said Alba Sanchez, 25, who had come by car from the northeastern region of Catalonia to join the demonstration.

“People cannot allow all these cuts by this government that hates us.”

The crowd marched peacefully to the sound of drums and trumpets and stopped at the Puerta del Sol square, the symbolic hub of numerous social protests, where demonstrators sat down and held a popular assembly.

On Thursday hundreds of thousands of demonstrators massed there after a mostly peaceful protest march that ended with police firing rubber bullets to disperse small groups of protestors.

Spain's population is only 46 million or so.  Protests involving hundreds of thousands would be the equivalent of a million plus here in the states.  Austerity there is failing, miserably.  The country's unemployment rate is almost 25% and things are only getting worse.

And when Spain goes down in flames, Europe will too.

Last Call

Republicans could pass jobs legislation.  Or stimulus legislation of any kind.  But they'd rather name useless arbitrary crap after Ronald Reagan.  You know, like America's coastal waters.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is floating legislation that would name most U.S. coastal waters after former President Ronald Reagan.

Issa reintroduced his bill Wednesday to rename the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which generally extends from three miles to 200 miles offshore, as the Ronald Wilson Reagan Exclusive Economic Zone.

The late Reagan, a Californian like Issa, established the EEZ with a 1983 presidential proclamation that declared the nation’s sovereign rights for exploring, exploiting and conserving offshore resources, including energy.

The irony is when coastal cities flood due to global climate change, the Reagan Exclusive Economic Zone will be in your house, killing your dudes.  It's a pretty good metaphor for what Reagan did to this country anyhow.

Space, The Final Frontier

Faith in an orderly universe that will function long after I'm gone:  restored.

Today In Useful Idiocy

Today's hit on the Obama campaign from our "morally superior" friends on the left who have nothing but scorn and hatred for President Obama trying to win comes from Columbia law professor Georges Ugeux at HuffPo (of course) in a breathless rant entitled "The Obama Campaign Is Unworthy Of A Democratic President".

Opening salvo:

As a Democrat and a staunch support of Barack Obama, I am completely disgusted by his campaign. Are we talking about the President of the United States? Are we talking about a principled man who has boosted our ideal for a fair and equitable America? Does this have anything to do with the American people?

Wait, what?

Everybody takes turns to bombard us with e-mails, phone calls to chip in for one reason or the other. Even those of us who asked to only receive selective information. 

He's mad because he gets Obama campaign emails asking for money?  Well hell, impeach the man.

The subjects for whom we are approached are generally a teaser to get to money. If we want to wish Happy Mother's day to the First Lady, a link to the payment process is attached.

The e-mail from the President "I will be outspent" is disgraceful. Is that how Barack Obama judges his campaign? Does he truly believe that he will lose his reelection on the fact that it might be outspent? "We can win a race which the other side spends more than we do. But not this much more".

Oh yes? Is that what we expect to hear from the President of the United States? Is this the way the democrats are judging themselves, using the weaponry of the Republicans to self-flagellate? Is our yardstick of value the money we collect and the money we spend?

Yes, you moron.  Because the Republicans and the media they are bribing with the billionaires who are buying our country are more than happy to convince Joe Six-Pack that the President is a secret Muslim socialist fascist who will round up white people in a second term.   I prefer to fight back rather than remain supine and let the Republicans run roughshod all over us, but I'm pretty sure as a Columbia law professor and CEO of your own consulting firm there Georges, you'll be okay under a Romney administration and GOP Congress.

In fact, I'm sure you'll have plenty of consulting advice you'll be glad to sell us.

The people you are using all have one characteristic in common: they are unable to imagine a Presidential campaign without narrow solidarity with the advertising industry and the media. Are they really brain-dead?

Why do we need to respond to the most disgusting Romney direct or indirect TV ads by other TV ads? Why don't we take the high road? And answer to those ads in a different way. Responsibly. And stop feeding Madison Avenue.

Because the votes of the brain-dead crappy FOX-fed zombies out there count exactly as much as ours, and high score wins.  Get it?

You can't be this stupid, man.  You're selling something just like the rest of the Useful Idiots, and that something is principled resistance to a GOP-controlled America.  You need that GOP-controlled part for that to work.

Odd how that works out, huh.  Yes, the Village is terrible, the media is terrible, and we have to do something about it.  That "something" cannot be "play to lose".

The Price Of Carelessness

A four-year-old child was left to die in the heat in a van.  In Dallas, which is hellish this time of year.

Dallas police said doctors at Baylor pronounced him dead at the hospital.

Family members have gathered at the hospital and identified the child as 4-year-old Benjamin Price.

Dallas police Lt. Scott Walton said the little boy was left in the van outside the day care after a field trip.

So yeah, again... utterly preventable.  A painful, horrible thing.  This is why daycares have head count and other procedures to double check and make sure kids aren't left behind.

** Note: other sources are saying three years old.

Big BOOOOOBS!

Now that I have your attention, this story really is about Big Boobs.

Microsoft has contributed thousands of lines of code to the Linux kernel, the open source software at the heart of the widely used Linux operating system. And now, the software giant has contributed some controversy too.

Sometime over the past few years, as Microsoft beefed up the Linux kernel with code related to its Hyper-V virtualization software, one unidentified developer needed a name for a piece of code used by the software, and for some unknown reason, he went with this: 0xB16B00B5.

That’s leetspeak for “Big Boobs.”

Microsoft issued an apology that seemed completely sincere, and will be removing the code in an upcoming patch.  It happens, no hard feelings against Bill's House for this one.  One developer nailed it on his blog, showing he gets the real problem, however.

Red Hat kernel developer Matthew Garrett is not impressed. “At the most basic level, it’s just straightforward childish humour,” he wrote on his blog. “But it’s also specifically male childish humour. Puerile sniggering at breasts contributes to the continuing impression that software development is a boys club where girls aren’t welcome.”

Thank you, sir.  Well said.

In bonus awesomeness, a link from the article lets you translate any phrase you choose into leetspeak, binary, ASCII, even Morse code.  Enjoy!

From Way, Way, Waaaaaay Downtown

Sports-crazy Australia has something of a Olympic-sized brouhaha brewing:  seems the men's basketball team flew to London in business class...and the women were stuck in coach.

Sports Minister Kate Lundy called for more equitable arrangements after learning that the Australian Opals, captained by global star Lauren Jackson, a WNBA three-time Most Valuable Player, flew premium economy.

“My view is that team travel should be equitable for our male and female athletes,” Lundy told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Basketball Australia said each national team was allowed some discretion over how their funding was spent — including on travel arrangements — but noted the inequality needed to change.

“The simple fact is when a policy results in gender inequality, it’s very clearly not the right policy going forward,” acting chief executive Scott Derwin said.

“I am putting in place a review of our Olympic travel policy with the goal of ensuring there is equity between travel arrangements for the men’s and women’s teams attending future Olympics.”

Kristina Keneally, who takes over from Derwin next month, welcomed the review as she hit out at the long-standing policy under which men are reportedly allowed to fly business class for flights longer than three hours.

“In this day and age, there’s just no excuse for men’s and women’s sporting teams to be treated differently when they both compete at the same world class level,” she said.

Glad somebody caught that little discrepancy.  It's bad enough flying coach when you're a big guy like me, but when you're over six foot, coach is a nightmare.  I can certainly see why your average basketball team would like nicer seats...but sticking the women in coach is one hell of a technical foul, Oz.

Glad the refs made the right call here.

By The Time I Get To Arizona (It'll Be All White With You)

The ACLU is going after the surviving "Papers, please!" provision of the state's draconian SB 1070 immigration law.  The Supreme Court upheld the provision on the grounds that there wasn't any legal reason to throw that particular law out on strictly face value.

Unless say, somebody (say, like the ACLU) could come along and prove the law was designed specifically for racial profiling as the main intent of the law.  The ACLU has gotten its hands on 10,000 or so emails from the legislation's authors through the Freedom of Information Act, and they've found some really awful discussions about the bill from lawmakers who apparently knew damn well that the law was designed to harass and intimidate Latinos.

Some low-lights of the ACLU's data dump:

• “Last week, Denver’s illegal aliens sang our national anthem in Spanish and bastardized the words of OUR country’s most sacred song.”
• “Battles commence as Mexican nationalists struggle to infuse their men into American government and strengthen control over their strongholds. One look at Los Angeles with its Mexican-American mayor shows you Vincente Fox’s general Varigossa commanding an American city.”
• “They create enclaves of separate groups that shall balkanize our nation into fractured nightmares of social unrest and poverty.”
• “Corruption is the mechanism by which Mexico operates. Its people spawn more corruption wherever they go because it is their only known way of life.”
• “Tough, nasty illegals and their advocates grow in such numbers that law and order will not subdue them. They run us out of our cities and states. They conquer our language and our schools. They render havoc and chaos in our schools.”
• “We are much like the Titanic as we inbreed millions of Mexico’s poor, the world’s poor and we watch our country sink.”

Oh it gets worse.  Racism and the perception that the law was racist was a hot, hot topic among the law's authors in one email entitled "What is racist?":

• “I’m racist because I don’t want to be taxed to pay for a prison population comprised of mainly Hispanics, Latinos, Mexicans or whatever else you wish to call them.”
• “I’m a racist because I believe the News Media has a duty to tell us the names and race of criminals.”
• “I’m a racist because I object to having to pay higher sales tax and property tax to build more schools for the illegitimate children of illegal aliens.”
• “I’m a racist because I dislike having to push one for English and/or listening to a message in Spanish.”
• “Factual is not racial. Realism is not racism. The new definition of racist is anyone winning an argument with a liberal, minority, pacifist, bible banger, or moron.”

They don't even view Arizona's Latinos as human, let alone entertain the concept that they might be taxpaying citizens who contribute to the state and country.   The Supremes all but screamed to the heavens that they needed a case involving SB 1070 violating people's civil rights.  They'll get it thanks to the ACLU.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Newly minted Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer has netted a pay package reportedly worth $71 million over five years, and could be worth $120 million.
• Former President George W. Bush will be skipping the GOP Convention in Tampa this year, he would rather "enjoy his time off the political stage."
• The International AIDS Conference will kick off in Washington DC this weekend, in a city with the worst HIV infection rate in the country.
• Aurora, Colorado shooting suspect James Holmes reportedly got around federal gun sales reporting requirements by not purchasing more than one gun in the same store in a five day period.
• Google has purchased Apple platform email company Sparrow and its eponymous email program, folding it into Google's Gmail team.

Last Call

The Boston Globe drops yet another expose' on Mitt Romney:  The Bain Capital Years as the paper reports Romney was not only firmly in charge of the company during the 1999-2002 period, but used the fact he was the man in charge as leverage to negotiate a severance package from the company.  Because, you know, he was still in charge.

Interviews with a half-dozen of Romney’s former partners and associates, as well as public records, show that he was not merely an absentee owner during this period. He signed dozens of company documents, including filings with regulators on a vast array of Bain’s investment entities. And he drove the complex negotiations over his own large severance package, a deal that was critical to the firm’s future without him, according to his former associates.

Indeed, by remaining CEO and sole shareholder, Romney held on to his leverage in the talks that resulted in his generous 10-year retirement package, according to former associates.

“The elephant in the room was not whether Mitt was involved in investment decisions but Mitt’s retention of control of the firm and therefore his ability to extract a huge economic benefit by delaying his giving up of that control,” said one former associate, who, like some other Romney associates, spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the company.

So yes, he was clearly in charge of the company at the time it made money for its sole shareholder off of sending tens of thousands of jobs to China, Malaysia and Singapore.  And yes, it was all about making Mitt Romney fat, fat loot.

Romney had a lot at stake because Bain had become hugely valuable under his leadership. Romney established Bain Capital in 1984, and in the 15 years that followed, the company had invested $260 million in its 10 largest deals (out of more than 100 during that period) and had reaped a nearly $3 billion return.

On one deal alone, involving an Italian phone directory company, Bain had invested $51 million and reaped more than $1 billion, with Romney’s personal profit being as much as $40 million, according to a former partner. Bain’s funds nearly doubled investors’ money annually during Romney’s tenure.

Romney had expected to remain at Bain Capital for years. He initially rejected the idea of running the Olympics, recounting in his memoir, “Turnaround,” that “after fifteen years of effort, Bain Capital had become extraordinarily lucrative. How could I walk away from the golden goose, especially now that it was laying even more golden eggs?” To do so, Romney wrote, meant “I would walk away from my leadership at Bain Capital at the height of its profitability.

 

Filthy lucre at the expense of US jobs.  That's how Romney made his money in the private sector.

 

Imagine what he'll do as President.