For the Record

U.S. run by corporations; administered by craven capitulators

The latest bit of evidence here.

More evidence here.

I think I'll just keep the list going for a while.  What fun!

Bank-friendly Dems threaten to block Financial Regulatory reform bill.

Death of public option causes health insurance stocks to climb 20-30% to a 52-year peak.

Obama sells out, and then sells out some more.

Follow the money.  And don't forget the iron law of institutions.

Wheee!

Read this; it's brilliant.

Barack Obama wins Nobel peace prize?

What for?

Some apt astonishment from Glenn Greenwald here and Matt Taibi here.

Benj and Leiter correctly point out that the award is aimed at messaging positive value to not being a Republican.  That's something, I guess.

Update:  speaking of other reasons for not handing Obama the Prize on a platter, how about the fact that he put the foxes in charge of the financial bailout and failed to implement any real reform, causing continuing misery and violence to millions of Americans, as their houses and hard-earned cash continue to go up in smoke and mirrors?  The U.S.: all scam, all the time.

The true measure of power

The true measure of power is how much you can get away with, which makes the gangsters running the U.S. effectively all-powerful.

Mary didn't raise no fool

Cenk Uygur argues by analogy that those 25% of U.S.ers expecting the second coming in 2007 are certifiably insane:

Imagine for a second if instead of Jesus, some psycho was waiting for a magical creature named Fred to come save him this year and suck him up into the sky. Now, who doesn't think that man needs serious counseling and perhaps medical supervision? Now, you change Fred into Jesus, and you have 25% of the country.

In the comment thread Freespeech has an induction-based argument that even believers shouldn't believe this:

Jeezus is way too smart to come back in 2007, think about it.

He would probably just go out to speak at some some peace rally. Then he would get arrested, be sent to GITMO with no trial (at least last time he got a freakin trial) where he would be subjected to water boarding and eventually have his balls stomped on.

Would you come back?  No.

Jezzus ain't stupid, Mary didn't raise no fool.

Like it says on those funky bracelets, what would Jesus do?

Jeezus would get the hell out of the USA and fast. This country just isn't tolerant enough for a dude like Jesus. Too bad we could use his help.

Pre-election weekend linky post

• A cheering reflection on the cultural underpinnings of the left blogosphere political movement. Especially cheering when read as a sort of "happy face" take on the value of bricolage in response to Thomas Frank's depressing doctrine of the context of cool. Also most excellently proceeding from the core Lennon-ist exhortation to "try something new".
• Vids: good natured people and one fucking psycho. (Though I note that Big Time manifests a bit of stung-ness in response to a huge dis from his long time bud Ken Adelman.)
• Ramsey Clark, former USAG and Saddam's lawyer, worries about "victor's justice".
• There's a good deal to read on the incredibly hilarious "101st fighting keyboarders fuckup" reported by the Times over the weekend; most cheering is that Bush considered it a pet project and even engaged in a bit of sympathetic interpretative prediction of the reaction of the sweet cherries that the 101st would pluck from his document treasure trove: "Bush extended his arms in exasperation and worried aloud that people who see the documents in 10 years will wonder why they weren't released sooner. "If I knew then what I know now," Bush said in the voice of a war skeptic, "I would have been more supportive of the war." " Note that this anecdote is from last March's Weekly Standard! [Backstory; more: apparently Laurie Mylroie and some other crazies, worried about the evaporating WMD justification for the Iraq invastion, enlisted PowerLine's moronic "Big Trunk" Mirengoff and others in pressuring a pair of congressmen to pressure Bush to pressure Bush's third CIA boss, Negroponte, to release 2 million pages of captured Iraqi docs on line. Or something like that. The goal was for an "army of Davids" -- in InstaIgnorance's asinine phrase -- to open-source translate them out of Arabic to provide the retrospective propaganda that would induce the war critics to shut up. Because we know how the right wing blogosphere is so knowledgeable about other cultures and so public spirited. For months, the IAEA was warning the Cheney Admin to take the docs down since they tell you in detail in Arabic how to build a nuke, info that the IAEA suppressed from the public until last March. Needless to say, they paid no attn until the NYT broke the story over the weekend. The national security party at work. I've been rotflmao all weekend!]
• A very cool formula to predict the outcome of a given congressional race without polls.
• The Clinton folk wargamed an Iraq takeover in 1999 and predicted that even with 400K troops, the likely outcome would be chaos. Rummy's New Model Army tried to do it with a third of that. Result? Chaos! (Incidentally, I've never seen a decent explanation of just why Rummy digs the light military so much. Maybe his thought is just as straightforward as this: with the same manpower a light military can fuck up a lot more places than a heavy military.)
   

Threatened by a potential

London Times (3 September 2006):

THREATENED by a potentially nuclear-armed Tehran, Israel is preparing for a possible war with both Iran and Syria, according to Israeli political and military sources.

Ed Wood, 'Plan 9 from Outer Space':

EROS
I? A fiend? I am a soldier of our planet! I? A fiend? We did not come here as enemies. We came only with friendly intentions. To talk. To ask your aid.

COL. EDWARDS
Our aid?

EROS
Yes. Your aid for the whole universe.  But your governments of Earth refused even to accept our existence.  Even though you've seen us, heard our messages, you still refused to accept us.

COL. EDWARDS
Why is it so important that you want to contact the governments of our Earth?

EROS
Because of death. Because all you of Earth are idiots!

JEFF
Now you just hold on, Buster.

EROS
No you hold on. First was your firecracker, a harmless explosive. Then your handgrenade. They began to kill your own people a few at a time. Then the bomb, then a larger bomb. Many people are killed at one time. Then your scientists stumbled upon the atom bomb. Split the atom. Then the hydrogen bomb, where you actually explode the air itself. Now you will make a bomb that brings the destruction of the entire universe, served by our sun. The only explosion left is the solaronite.

COL. EDWARDS
Why there's no such thing.

EROS
Perhaps to you.  But we've known it for centuries. Your scientists will stumble upon it as they have all the others. But the juvenile minds you possess will not comprehend its strength, until it's too late.

COL. EDWARDS
You're way above our heads.

EROS
The solaronite is a way to explode the actual particles of sunlight.

COL. EDWARDS
Why that's impossible.

EROS
Even now, your scientists are working on a way to harness the sun's rays. The rays of sunlight are minute particles. Is it so far from your imagination they cannot do as I have suggested?

COL. EDWARDS
Why a particle of sunlight can't even be seen or measured.

EROS
Can you see or measure an atom? Yet you can explode one. A ray of sunlight is made up of many atoms.

JEFF
So what if we do develop this solaronite bomb? We'd be even a stronger nation than now.

EROS
Stronger. You see? You see? Your stupid minds...stupid! Stupid!!

JEFF
That's all I'm taking from you!

[JEFF LEAPS AT EROS]

How many cops

does it take to "control" a 1000-person peace parade?  Looks like they're ready for May Day in Berlin.

Don't worry, the cone will protect you

In case you needed more evidence that all the brou-ha-ha about national security is so much bull:

Guards say Homeland Security HQ is insecure

WASHINGTON (AP) - The agency entrusted with protecting the U.S. homeland is having difficulty safeguarding its own headquarters, say private security guards at the complex.

The guards have taken their concerns to Congress, describing inadequate training, failed security tests and slow or confused reactions to bomb and biological threats.

For instance, when an envelope with suspicious powder was opened last fall at Homeland Security Department headquarters, guards said they watched in amazement as superiors carried it by the office of Secretary Michael Chertoff, took it outside and then shook it outside Chertoff's window without evacuating people nearby.

Maybe the "superiors" should be informed of the Center for Disease Control's rule #1 for handling a suspicious package or envelope:

Do not shake or empty the contents of any suspicious package or envelope.

Moving on...

The scare, caused by white powder that proved to be harmless, "stands as one glaring example'' of the agency's security problems, said Derrick Daniels, one of the first guards to respond to the incident.

"I had never previously been given training ... describing how to respond to a possible chemical attack,'' Daniels told The Associated Press. "I wouldn't feel safe nowhere on this compound as an officer.''

[...]

Former guard Bryan Adams recognized his inadequate training one day last August, when an employee reported a suspicious bag in the parking lot.

"I didn't have a clue about what to do,'' he said.

When in doubt, grab a cone.

Adams said he closed the vehicle checkpoint with a cone, walked over to the bag and called superiors.

Perfect place to make that call.

Nobody cordoned off the area. Eventually, someone called a federal bomb squad, which arrived more than an hour after the discovery.

"If the bag had, in fact, contained the explosive device that was anticipated, the bomb could have detonated several times over in the hour that the bag sat there,'' Adams said.

The bag, it turned out, contained gym clothes.

Beware the stench bomb!

Some guards who continue to work at Homeland, who would speak only on condition of anonymity because of fear of losing their jobs, said they knew of two instances in which individuals without identification got into the sensitive complex.

Another described how guards flunked a test by the Secret Service, which sent vehicles into the compound with dummy government identification tags hanging from inside mirrors. Guards cleared such vehicles through on two occasions, this guard said, and one officer even copied down the false information without realizing it was supposed to match information on the employee's government badge.

Doyle, the agency spokesman, said such tests are conducted routinely and "I can assure you that if people fail the test they are let go.'

They're sure to be replaced by someone more competent.