Outing

Well, I had hoped to put the HillBuzz insanity behind me, even though many of the hits I'm getting nowadays all go to this article. Basically, HillBuzz is a gay Republican blog masquerading as a PUMA blog -- a log cabin with a magenta paint job, as it were. They have been generating a whole lot of right-wing propaganda points -- and, it is said, donations -- by claiming to be the victims of a "co-ordinated attack" funded by George Soros.

This claim is bullshit, of course.

They also claim that Cannonfire is run by the fiercely anti-PUMA micro-bloggers. This is also bullshit. In fact, it's insane. Those anti-PUMA guys hate me -- always have, always will. I giveth not fuck one about them. I also giveth not fuck one for the HillBuzz hoaxters. A plague on both of their delusional houses.

I now know the identity of the person responsible for the article (and blog comments) that started this nonsense. Amusingly enough, almost no-one read those pieces until the Hillbuzzers decided to use them in their fundraising efforts.

The author is a guy who used to contribute to the comments here before I turned against Obama. The person in question is small potatoes -- as am I, in the great scheme of things. In his previous internet incarnations, he has always had a tendency to piss people off. Which is not always a bad thing, although sometimes it is.

The Evil Hand of Soros plays no role in any of this. But the HillBuzzers apparently find it pleasant (remunerative?) to pretend otherwise.

The name of the guy who started this brouhaha is John. I won't give John's last name, which I can't recall offhand anyways, but even if I could remember it I wouldn't reveal it. Basically, John looked up the WHOIS info on HillBuzz. It's public information. That allowed him to come up with a real-world name, which he published in one or two obscure places. John is the kind of guy who would enjoy doing something like that.

And that's it.

The HillBuzzers now claim that they underwent job discrimination and physical threats as a result of John's Big Reveal, even though very few people had read that Big Reveal. In fact, John seems to be the only one who ever cared.

I find these HillBuzz claims of persecution to be about as credible as L. Rob Hubbard's yarn about Xenu. Even so, those claims led to publicity by some big-name right-wingers, such as Michelle Malkin and Breitbart. (Is Breitbart a nasty piece of work or what?)

HillBuzz apparently thinks it/they/he (there seems to be one main guy behind that site) can mount a RICO suit against the imaginary Dreaded Soros Conspiracy. He apparently also has tried to harass the wife (!!) of one of the anti-PUMA bloggers.

Maybe HillBuzz is a total loon. Maybe (as this guy says) he is using his readership as a personal ATM.

This very silly incident has led to some fairly serious discussion of the ethics of outing. When, if ever, is it acceptable to reveal the real-world names of bloggers, most of whom operate under dumb pseudonyms? See Corrente here and Atrios here.

(I've actually been popping by Atrios' place recently, for the first time in ages. Even though he's still considered an A-list blogger, no-one ever seems to cite him or refer to him.)

The internet has changed the rules. In the old pre-net days, there was an understanding: Those doing research in various areas usually corresponded with others in those fields, even if the parties involved couldn't stand each other. Antagonists even traded newsclips and xeroxed articles, despite mutual antipathy. That's the way info-junkies had to operate in those primeval days.

As a result of all those mailings, every serious researcher knew the addresses and phone numbers of every other serious researcher, because the stationery letterhead had that info listed, and letters were always passed around sans permission (this was expected), and even if someone blacked out the address with a marker you could still hold it up to the light.

Ah, good times, good times. You wouldn't buh-LIEVE what was in my rolodex, back in the day.

But it was always understood that the personal info of your enemies must never be published, even in a small-circulation xeroxed newsletter with 73 subscribers, and even if the data was available in the phone book.

Then came the internet. As noted earlier, the rules changed. They changed because the internet revealed just how many crazy people are out there. I'm not talking cute crazy; I'm talking really really really crazy.

For example: Some of you may recall that a waitress in Texas made headlines when she refused to serve drinks to Dubya's underaged daughters. The Freepers published the real name, phone number and address of the said waitress, with the express intention of mounting a terror campaign against her. She had, after all, dared to inconvenience the Holy House of Bush. That made her fair game.

That sort of thing used to happen a lot, and the miscreants were almost always reactionary fanatics. As a result, most bloggers and blog commenters decided to adopt pseudonyms.

In my case, the name on the masthead also appears on my driver's license. However, I am fanatical about making sure that no-one receives any further information about me, although I've let slip that I am usually found skulking around southern California.

When this blog began, I would allow other people to have my phone number. Then some rather bizarre and disturbing calls started to come in. I changed the number (and carrier) and have stayed hidden ever since. This policy makes researching certain stories difficult, since interview subjects usually ask for a call-back number -- which a real reporter will be quick to provide.

It's a world of loons out there, and that's why so many other bloggers have adopted a similarly zealous privacy policy.

Back in 2006, Michelle Malkin published the private info of some anti-military protesters at UC Santa Cruz. She got that info from a letterhead, if I recall correctly. According to the old school rules (as noted above), it was understood that you never, ever publish information gleaned from a letterhead, even if you had obtained a piece of mail sent by an enemy. Malkin published anyways, obviously with the intention of fomenting harassment or worse against the protesters.

I retaliated by publishing Malkin's exact street address and phone number. She took her kid out of school and moved. I have never apologized and never will. Those who live by the sword, etc.

Not long before the Malkin episode, Ann Coulter had also published the personal information of actress/blogger Lydia Cornell. As a result of this despicable act, Lydia and her family underwent some very frightening harassment. I decided not to retaliate by publishing Coulter's phone number -- but I did publish this post, which clearly indicated that I had the information.

(That post contains this description of Coulter: "She dresses like someone who desperately longs for bombshell status, as though wrapping that hideous skeletal frame in black leather micro-minis will somehow make those prominent bones as jumpable as they are countable." One of the best damned sentences I ever dun writ. Incidentally, my ladyfriend kept Coulter's number on her cell phone as a gag. We never dialed it and never shared it.)

Ever since Malkin and Coulter received their public spankings, the right got the message. They stopped publishing personal info.

Then...then came the Obots.

Having received the beatific vision, the disciples of the Lightbringer decided that normal rules did not apply to them. That's why they published the real-world address of Joe the Plumber. (Remember Joe?)

In what way did this atrocious Obot behavior differ from Malkin's atrocious behavior? Ya got me.

I asked Lydia Cornell to protest in public the publication of Joe the Plumber's address. She did not.

Moral of the story: We all seem to have differing ideas as to when "outing" is justified. In Malkin's case, I decided to do it as a retaliatory measure. A lot of people disagreed with that decision, on the theory that two wrongs never make a right. But no-one can deny that, as a result, the right-wingers stopped doing that shit real fast.

And now....?

Time to go

Around the web, people keep writing that we must enact legislation to counteract the recent Supreme Court decision on campaign contributions. What's the point of a new law? The Supreme Court determines the constitutionality of laws. If you don't like the Court's decision -- and I sure as hell don't -- then you must agree on the need for either a new Constitution or a new court.

I'm not saying that we should chuck our current Constitution and start afresh. But we can renew it with an amendment which makes clear that corporations are not natural persons. Even the Supremes won't be able to eff with that.

As for a new court: This is one area where I still retain hope that Obama will do the correct thing, as opposed to the right(-wing) thing. Say what you will about Sotomayor: She ain't no Scalia.

Justice John Paul Stevens, perhaps the most liberal of the Supremes (despite being appointed by Gerry Ford!), is 89. He is, by all accounts, still quite alert and intellectually active. But Obama will probably be a one-termer, and Stevens cannot be expected to remain alert and active beyond the next Republican presidency, which will probably begin in January, 2013. The Gingrich administration (Huckabee administration? Palin?) will probably last until 2021 -- grisly thought, eh wot? -- at which point Justice Stevens will be 100 years old, presuming that he and the Republic have managed to survive. If he cares about liberal values, he must step down.

This year.

If he waits until 2011, Obama's nominee will have to be confirmed by a Republican Congress. At least, that's the way to bet. Those senators won't be in any mood to play Let's Make a Deal.

But even if Stevens is replaced by someone like unto Stevens, the Supreme Court is still weighted toward the right. In order to change the balance of power, one of the right-wing justices must retire as well.

The two oldest right-wingers are Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, both 73. Kennedy is considered a swing vote, although he usually swings right, or right-ish. He is, however, good on gay rights and (usually) good on abortion rights. Personally, I would prefer for Kennedy to stay.

As for Scalia -- oh, how I wish that someone could convince him to spend the rest of his days fishing. He's an ultra-conservative Catholic. Maybe one of our fine Marian visionaries (we have so many these days) can bring back a message from on high, telling Scalia that God wants him to quit his day job and become a professional bowler?

Clarence Thomas, some will be sorry to hear, is a spritely 61. He'll be regaling us with his puckish good humor for a long time to come.

Actually, the second-oldest Justice is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 76. I like her just fine. But maybe she should step down during this administration as well.

Would Obama dare to swing right in his next nomination? At this point, little would surprise me. But I still doubt that he would dare to piss off the Democratic base to that degree.

Then again, even I, cynic that I am, doubted that he would piss off the base to the degree that he has.

One virtue of enacting a new law: It allows us to stall for time. A case challenging that law would probably take years to reach the Supremes. I still say our best bet is to amend the Constitution. And, y'know, maybe try that "message from Mary" gambit. Couldn't hurt.

The difference

For all the ghastliness of our current Democratic party, I still cannot agree with those who say that there's no difference between the Dems and the GOPers. Case in point: Compare the tale of John Edwards aide Andrew Young with the tale of Bush IT guru Mike Connell (see also here and here). One story features high comedy in a fast-food drive-through; the other offers scattered bits of brain matter and flesh.

On the other hand, wasn't there a wiseguy in Vegas who ended up dead after his firm offered a mysterious donation to a certain state senator in Illinois...?

Amendment

The disastrous recent Supreme Court ruling that knocked down McCain-Feingold rests on the foundation of a single idea -- the idea that corporations are persons. This concept which has bedeviled this nation in many ways for many decades. As near as I can see, the only way to destroy that idea is via constitutional amendment.

There's a movement underway to rectify the situation. Start here and here.

I think this proposed new amendment will have surprising across-the-board populist appeal. Besides, won't it be fun to see the right-wingers try to come up with pseudo-populist arguments designed to convince you that corporations are persons? As you know, strained rationalization is my favorite form of humor.

The last line is priceless

You may have seen this elsewhere. And you've probably seen the hundred-and-one other variants of this clip. But...wow. Looks like Obama just lost the mustache vote.

What's wrong? Here's what's wrong...

Ian Welsh linked to these words by Paul Craig Roberts, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury to Ronald Reagan (!!). I can only do likewise...

My doctor has more people employed doing paperwork than he does delivering health care.

Legislation that cuts payments to private physicians and increases the payments to large corporate entities is intended to destroy private practice and to create in its place corporate bureaucracies in which doctors are wage slaves. The physician’s income is diverted to shareholders, CEO bonuses, and Wall Street. Health care is being replaced with health business.

It turns one’s stomach to watch libertarians and “free market economists” defend bureaucratized impersonal health care as “free market medicine.” There is no free market present. Corporate lobbies and campaign contributions use government power to create bureaucratized monopolies that destroy medicine for the practitioner and the patient. Wall Street pushes for greater shareholder earnings, which are achieved by denying care.

In other words, tax money is being diverted to the pockets of private businesses. This is par for the course in “capitalist” America.

In today’s America, Karl Marx’s criticisms of capitalism are understated. Wherever one looks, the scene is one of the government using taxpayers’ money to enrich private interests. Taxes are collected from people who can barely make it, and the revenues are transferred to multi-millionaires and billionaires. The federal government piles debt on the backs of heavily-burdened and dispossessed Americans in order that investment banksters can pay annual bonuses that exceed the lifetime earnings of most Americans.

Okay, the Marx reference was hyperbolic. Marx wrote about ten year-olds being forced to work in coal mines. We haven't reverted to that stage...yet.

Wall Street is romanticized by libertarians and “free market economists.” They believe, entirely on the basis of their ideology, that Wall Street finances venture capitalists who bring economic progress and higher living standards. Wall Street does no such thing, especially since financial deregulation turned Wall Street into a speculative hedge fund.

This...this, from the man called the "father of Reaganomics."

Here's today's idea on How To Fix Everything: Replace Larry Summers with Paul Craig Roberts, replace Timmy Geithner with Ha-Joon Chang (presuming the Constitution allows us to "outsource" that job to a foreigner) and replace Bernanke with Paul Krugman. If Ha-Joon Chang is impossible, consider DK over at The Confluence.

How to fix the economy. No, really. I'm serious.

Obama says that we are going to export our way back to economic health. Export what? We don't make anything.

My fear is that talk of an "export economy" is simply a way of justifying free trade policies. And those policies will keep us stuck as an import economy.

Our only real product is now the financial services industry, which creates nothing and sucks the life out of genuine industry:

It’s just one big game of passing the trash to a higher bidder in a fixed game of who can leverage themselves into the highest arbitrage profits by creating false momentum now.

You can also see the 2008 crash and the current return to business-as-usual for extraordinary profits of Financial Institutions vs. the rest of the industries in the U.S. economy. Lenin would love this. It shows a complete siphoning of money from everything else to banks.

What to do?

The best book I've read (okay, heard) recently is Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang. This work has not received the attention it deserves because it focuses on the developing world. American readers don't want to hear about third world issues right now, because we have problems of our own.

Yet to a great extent, we have returned to "developing country" status -- and that's why we must heed the lessons of this book. To be specific: We need to return to the policies that once made us great, policies now never discussed, policies which we've erased from the historical record. We need to protect our "infant industries" with tarrifs and large-scale investment.

Using irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of examples, Chang blasts holes in the “World Is Flat” orthodoxy of Thomas Friedman and other liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, today’s economic superpowers—from the U.S. to Britain to his native Korea—all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry. We have conveniently forgotten this fact, telling ourselves a fairy tale about the magic of free trade...

Between 1812 and the Second World War, the United States was the most protectionist country in the world. By contrast, Adam Smith advised America not to use protectionism to develop artificially a manufacturing base. This country would never have prospered if our leaders had followed Smith's advice.

You never see any examples of Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson or Jefferson quoting Adam Smith with admiration. Ever notice that? Ever wonder why?

(I've read Smith, as most conservatives have not. He seemed to think that America was and would forever remain an agricultural backwater. Well, that's what we're turning into again, thanks to modern-day Smith followers: A nation of farms and banks.)

Neoliberals (i.e., conservatives) often cite Smith without telling you that the Brits achieved dominance by not practicing what Smith preached. Only after they were perched at the top did they insist that others follow a strict neoliberal ideology. In essence, they pulled the ladder up after themselves.

So who pulled the ladder on us? That's the question which every parapolitical thinker ought to be asking.

And while you're chewing on that poser, read this piece by Chang:

Britain and the US may have been the most ardent - and most successful - users of tariffs, but most of today's rich countries deployed tariff protection for extended periods in order to promote their infant industries. Many of them also actively used government subsidies and public enterprises to promote new industries. Japan and many European countries have given numerous subsidies to strategic industries.

As chapter 9 of Chang's book demonstrates -- with much citation of example -- Japanese workers were once stereotyped as lazy, undisciplined and ineducable. (Which is pretty much the same stereotype now applied to Americans.) But the work ethic is not genetic. Our attitude toward work may have something to do with culture, but only to the extent that a culture changes when a nation advances.

The company which perhaps best exemplifies Chang's analysis is Toyota. This summary of Chang could change the way you look at the world:

Toyota has been touted by free traders as a clear example of why free trade works, mostly because of the widely cited example outlined in Thomas Freidman's book The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

But again, at a closer look, the reality is the opposite of what Friedman naively portrays in his book. In fact, Japan subsidized Toyota not only in its development but even after if failed terribly in the American markets in the late 1950's. In addition, early in Toyota's development, Japan kicked out foreign competitors like GM.

Thus, because the Japanese government financed Toyota at a loss (for roughly 20 years), built high tariff and other barriers to competitive imports, and initially subsidized exports, auto manufacturing was able to get a strong foothold and we now think of Japanese exports being synonymous with automobiles.

We have cynically abandoned Detroit. We grumbled that Americans just can't make cars any more. We decided that we would rather sneer and bitch than invest in ourselves. Screw it. Let the other countries take over the car market.

Because we are so quick to take that attitude, other countries are taking over every market.

Is that sort of cynicism actually accomplishing anything? Should America just give up on itself?

If you think otherwise, then the answer is both simple and hard. Simple, because we need merely recapitulate what worked for us before. Hard, because this course of action requires long-term thinking.

Instead of investing in the Wall Street vampires, we need to invest in our industries. We need to do so in the understanding that those investments may not pay off for decades. We may have to weather serious setbacks. (Remember how people used to laugh at Datsuns and Toyotas in the late 1960s?) Capitalism alone won't do the trick; our industries need help from a non-invisible hand. Most of all, we need to return to the non-free trade practices that made this country great.

If Obama cannot take those steps, then his talk of an export-driven recovery is pure hooey.

Concerto in F: Blogging the SOTU

Man, that was weird. While watching the CSPAN build-up to the State of the Union address, I got sick of listening to the talking heads, so I turned down the volume and replaced the audio with George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. You know the Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz thing? This was better. There were, like, a zillion and one eerie little audio-visual hook-up moments.

Obi and Michelle came slinking out of the White House while that jazzy opening clarinet solo played. Then, when the Big Theme hit, CSPAN cut to a wide shot of the Capitol. And on and on...

Anyways, the music is over, and pretty soon I'll have to listen to the guy actually talk. Hmm. Maybe I'll just fire up the Gershwin Concerto in F instead.

Come to think of it, this whole presidency has been a Concerto in F.

(Feel free to comment on the SOTU below, if so inclined. I'll be popping back with updates, giving my reactions.)

Update: I'm listening to both the Concerto and the SOTU simultaneously. So far, I like the Gershwin better. Michelle's skirt makes her look like she's in Panavision.

Update 2: Surrrre he hated the bank bailout. And when did he use the "popular/necessary" thing during the campaign? And why not tax stock trades, as other countries do? That would put a crimp in Goldman's gaming of the system...

Update 3: A new jobs bill? Great. But...the spending freeze...?

Update 4: Like hell the Senate will impose higher taxes on companies that outsource. But: A good idea.

Update 5: Here's where he gets all GOP on our asses. Nukes, offshore oil...

Update 6: No more Gershwin. What's next? I've chosen Act II of The Photographer by Philip Glass, which sort of sounds like every SOTU ever uttered.

Update 7: The best anti-poverty program is education? Tell that to the students who have racked up $70,000 in loans only to face a no-jobs job market.

Update 8: Okay, increasing Pell grants. That I like.

Update 9: Health care. Obama just did the "If you have a better idea, let me know" thing. Bill Clinton said damn near the exact same words when his attempt failed.

Update 10: Here's where he goes after Medicare and Social Security. Government by executive order -- I don't like the sound of that.

Update 11: They just laughed at him. And now I have a new soundtrack: An obscure piece by Franck called "What one hears on the mountain." It's really good. I don't think it has a commercial recording...

Update 12: Okay, I like what he said about the Supreme Court decision. But what the hell can he do about it? Passing a bill won't do the job, because the Court will just shoot down the bill. An amendment is needed. But that won't happen.

Update 13: Now I'm pissed. Obama just said that he will try to change the tone of our politics. He said that he didn't think it was right for people to utter falsehoods about opponents. Sorry, but I will never forget or forgive Obot behavior during the 2008 primaries.

Update 14: Here it comes -- military Keynesianism.

Update 15: Here comes the warm up to the big finish. I'm talking about the Cesar Franck tone poem. You really ought to hear this one. It's kind of long -- 22 minutes -- but then again, the SOTU is long too.

Woah...did he just jump into the gays-in-the-military thing? He just tossed red meat to his enemies. Still, it was brave.

Update 16: Good comment on TC:

Notice that he never links Clinton’s name to that surplus he touts, but he has no problem uttering “Reagan”

Update 17: Finishing up with a Kilar opus called Orawa, which is also really good. I don't know why I didn't think of doing this "background music" thing before. It's the only way to make an SOTU go down easy.

At any rate, I liked some stuff in this speech. Gotta admit it. But he really started to lose it during the development section of the Cesar Franck.

By the way, the name of that work in French is Ce Qu'on Entend Sur La Montagne, and it was inspired by a poem by Victor Hugo. Liszt wrote his own tone poem of that name, also based on the Hugo poem, but the Liszt version isn't nearly as good (IMO). Nevertheless, there are like a dozen recordings of the Liszt and no recordings of the Franck. At least, none known to me. I recorded it from a BBC live performance, fell in love with it, and it's been running through my headphones at least once a week ever since. The opening always makes me think that I'm visiting the Pyrenees...

Post-SOTU update: Obama's talking about $8 billion in high speed rail. Peanuts. I like this comment:

China spent $800 billion building a high speed rail system during the same time that Bush spent $800 billion invading Iraq. Now we need to play catch-up, but all Obama could find in the dusty corners of the cleaned-out vault was about 1% of that. Hey, at least it's a start.

The new Watergaters: Spooks and bucks (Updated)

Young political hitman James O'Keefe has been charged in his attempt to bug the office of Democratic Mary Landrieu. When I briefly mentioned this matter earlier, I told everyone to recall the message of Watergate I: Follow the money.

In a direct sense, O'Keefe gets paid by Big Asshole Andrew Brietbart, subject of an earlier post. Brad Friedman (who has received a death threat from the vile Brietbart) has done some investigating. O'Keefe receives a nice salary from Brietbart, even though Andy now claims that he is "out of the loop" on the wiretapping. Surrrre he is.

Brietbart repeated the don't-know-nuthin'-'bout-wiretapping mantra in an interview with Hugh Hewitt, although he admitted that he pays O'Keefe a "fair salary" for what he calls his "life rights."

Update: Brad Friedman makes an excellent point. Breitbart and the Republicans insisted that ACORN as a whole be held responsible for something done by individual employees. (Remember, O'Keefe is the guy who stung ACORN.) O'Keefe is a Brietbart employee: You can't receive a "salary" without being an employee. Therefore, by Brietbart's own logic, Brietbart is responsible. Brietbart may attempt to argue that he never paid his hireling to break the law, but ACORN can make the exact same claim. I'll be very amused to watch Andy try to worm his way out of this hypocrisy: Rationalization is my favorite form of humor.

In a sense, this current debacle was predictable. One thing I've learned about guys like Brietbart and O'Keefe: They have poor impulse control. That's why Brietbart is stupid enough to convey death threats via email. People with poor impulse control take unnecessary chances. They screw up.

(Will O'Keefe rat out his funders? Hard to say. He doesn't strike me as a calm, rational take-the-long-view kind of thinker. And yet -- who knows? I remember how Liddy went to jail for Nixon, even though Nixon held the fanatical Liddy in contempt. O'Keefe's "veritas" remark reminds me of Liddy in his nuttier moments.)

Okay, so where does Andy's money come from? As I asked earlier:

Anyone can maintain a blog -- hell, even I can do it. But making money at this game is a very different matter. It takes a large amount of capital to set up a high-profile website with paid staff and "name" writers and an advertising budget and all the rest. So where is Breitbart getting his dough?

If I recall correctly, Andy may be operating out of Brentwood, not far from his allegedly "progressive" mentor, Zsa-Zsa Huffington. A full-time blogger who can afford that kind of lifestyle? A blogger who can pay the salary of a team? Unheard of. Unless....

Unless there's a sugar daddy.

Blogging makes a perfect cover. The sugar daddy's funding of the site can come in the form of paid ads. Normally, ads on websites fetch less money than some readers seem to think, but nothing stops a "secret admirer" from over-paying by, say, a factor of ten or twenty. All perfectly legal. Andy's sites are big on Israelotry, so that's one potential source of revenue worthy of investigation.

Let's look at O'Keefe's compatriots in crime. To be specific, let's look at Stan Dai, also arrested for trying to bug Landrieu. Majikthise has done some superb research. Not long ago, Stannikins was a political science major at George Washington University, and an up-and-coming right-wing star.

He is editor-in-chief of The GW Patriot, an alternative conservative student newspaper, a Club 100 Activist of Young America’s Foundation, and an Undergraduate Fellow on Terrorism of the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies. He is co-founder of GW’s Students Defending Democracy, a volunteer on several political campaigns, and active in the GW College Republicans and GW Colonials for Life.

Not only that:

One Stan Dai was listed as the Assistant Director of the The Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (ICCAE) at Trinity (Washington) University. The ICCAE says it prepares young people for careers in intelligence.

(Original reporting, please credit Lindsay Beyerstein.)

Okay. I just did.

Stan Dai spoke about torture and terrorism last June at a "CIA day" organized by the Junior Statesmen Summer School at Georgetown. The program included a field trip to the CIA and lectures at Georgetown, according this event program I found online. As we know, Dai served as the assistant director of a program dedicated to steering young people into careers in intelligence.

By the way, Politico's David Mark was also a featured speaker at this event -- an event which, we might say, marked the nexus between "new" journalism and spook-world. Politico's Laura Rozen, without mentioning this potential conflict, has been doing some research into Dai.

In 2008, he was assistant director of an intelligence community "center for academic excellence" at Trinity Washington University.

"Stan Dai was a junior program administrator for one year in a grant-funded program at Trinity Washington University," Ann Pauley, media relations director at Trinity Washington University. "The program was called the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (ICCAE) and was one of several similar programs created with federal funding through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence following the September 11 attacks..."

We're also told that Dai never worked for the CIA. I'm sure that's true. He just ran an organization which recruited young people into the CIA. Well, that could happen to anyone. You'd be silly to draw the conclusion that Dai himself had something to do with the CIA.

Yesterday, I said that liberals have to establish an intellectual infrastructure in this country. The right-wingers have done just that, and the O'Keefe team was part of it. Two of the wiretappers belonged to something called the Leadership Institute, which

"prepares conservatives for success in politics, government and the news media." It's trained more than 79,000 students over the years, and employs 58 people. The group is led by longtime Republican player Morton Blackwell, who was elected to the RNC's executive committee in 2004.

And that's one reason why the mainstream media never treated single-payer as a permitted topic of discussion, even though the majority of the American citizenry want such a system. The sources of the Leadership Institute's funding remain somewhat mysterious. But we do know that Morton Blackwell trained Karl Rove:

In 1979, Rove trained at Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute. Its slogan: “For conservatives who want to win.” Blackwell helped co-found the influential Christian Right Moral Majority as well as the highly secretive and far-right Council for National Policy.

CNP membership is a conspiratorial who's who: Ollie North, John Singlaub, Pat Robertson, J. Peter Grace, and so on. (Erik Prince's mom is also on board.) The CNP receives a lot of its money from the Moonies, and also appears to have ties to the Scientologists. Along with Blackwell, CNP co-founders included some bona-fide kooks -- Illuminati-spotter Tim LaHaye and Glenn Beck's spirit guide, Cleon Skousen. (Skousen thought that Wall Streeters are commies.)

Just as Watergate allowed us a glimpse at things that were far more important than a third-rate burglary, the Landrieu incident allows us to peek in on a phenomenon which is much more important than the attempt to bug a senator. The far-right networks which achieved such astonishing success in the 1980s understand the need for new blood. The superstars of the Reagan era have aged; many are downright ancient. And so the gray-haired eminences are hiring 20-somethings to do some dirty work. If those jobs are done well, the 20-somethings will rise within the system.

Wiretappers O'Keefe and Robert Flanagan also work for another right-wing pressure group called the Pelican Institute, which wants to replace Medicaid with vouchers for private insurance. Again, the funding is mysterious. From the Times-Picayune:

Flanagan was paid on an hourly basis by the New Orleans-based Pelican Institute for Public Policy to assist with its blog, said Kevin Kane, the president of the libertarian group.

Let that sink in. Paid? On an hourly basis? To....blog?

Let's step back and take in the larger picture.

Someone is pouring a lot of money into blogworld.

I sure as hell ain't getting any. But others are. The money is pouring in through a network of mysterious "institutes," which have links to the most ultra-reactionary players within the American ruling class.

Throughout 2008, many of us thought that we could hear the Devil's bag of gold chink-a-chinking away in the background as Obotmania took over the A-list prog-blogs. (Frankly, I've cited one such site -- TPM -- above.) But the Devil has a march larger bag than we realized. Now that a sure-to-fail Democrat is presiding over this country's economic downfall, most of the lucre is a-heading right. The ludicrous "Obama-as-socialist" meme will be mainstream. Ann Coulter may make another stab at rehabilitating McCarthy. Hell, maybe Skousen will be taught in school.

Within two years -- maybe one -- the blogosphere will be a very different place. The Kossacks will be (already are) dispirited and deflated. Most of the energy and all of the money will be with the resurgent reactionaries. The Kook Right will become the new center.

Trust FOX

According to a recent poll, the most trusted name in news is FOX.

And people used to laugh at me when I told them that the American public is fundamentally conservative. Right-wing ideology is our default mode.

The only way to combat this brainwashing is for the left to do what the right does: Invest in "think tanks" and other institutions designed to promote an intellectual infrastructure friendly to liberal values.

Alternate universe

It's fascinating to see the alternate universe under continual construction at Democratic Underground. They now have a scenario similar in some ways to mine, except for them all roads lead to Rahm.

The triumph of the right

If Obama were to invite Paul Krugman to another dinner, Krugman might decline.

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view...

And perhaps the most important element of that world-view is this: The only jobs-creation program which our political culture now permits is a program involving weaponry. The economists who (rightly) castigate Obama's plan as a failed attempt at budget-balancing may be missing the point.

Obama may try to slash agricultural subsidies, and that attempt probably won't succeed, but he'll come out of it looking like a deficit hawk. In reality, the lion's share of the budget goes to the military, Social Security, Medicare and interest payments on the debt. Only military spending can create jobs. The ballyhooed spending freeze is nothing but political cover.

In short and in sum: Barack Obama is Ronald Reagan without the whimsy. The Reagan boom was ascribed -- rightly, I think -- to what was called "military Keynesianism." Today, only 40 percent of the citizenry wants to see increased military spending, yet increase it will -- because any other form of stimulus would face crippling right-wing opposition, and the right still controls the country.

All we need is a trigger. An incident. Watch it happen.

Looks like the psy-warriors are prepping us for a WMD attack in the U.S....

Health care reform: Bye bye!

Mr. Reid said that he and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, were working to map out a way to complete a health care overhaul in coming months. “There are a number of options being discussed,” Mr. Reid said, emphasizing “procedural aspects” of the issue.

They're passing it further down the line. In an election year, that means they are doing nothing. Looks like there's no hope of the Dems going down the filibuster-busting reconciliation route.

Of course, I did not like this reform package. But I did want to see a true filibuster take place.

Nipped! The young right-wing twerps who set-up ACORN were caught infiltrating Senator Mary Landrieu's office. They posed as telephone repairmen to set up wiretaps. Naturally, the conserva-bloggers are hailing these neo-Watergaters as heroes.

The Watergate advice remains sound: Follow the money. Who was paying these guys?

The Obama conundrum: Is there a "there" there?

From Alegre's corner:

In one regard, Obama '08 was always Bill Clinton '92, an empty vessel into which everyone could pour their hopes and dreams. But more importantly, underpinning Clinton's everything-to-everyone Man from Hope was a specific campaign platform that he challenged voters to hold him accountable for - something Obama avoided like the plague.

(Added note: Bill Clinton did talk specifics in '92. He talked and talked and talked.)

From Blue Lyon:

I really wish the media would quit calling Health Care Reform Obama’s “signature policy.” It never was, and that’s why it is the mess it is. In March 2009 I wrote:

A bit of a refresher: The March 2007 SEIU Health Care Forum was an event specifically designed to address health care and provide the presidential candidates with an opportunity to unveil their plans or at least talk about what direction they would go to provide health care for all Americans. Regardless of the quality of their plans, Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Gravel, Kucinich and Richardson, all came prepared to discuss the issue and lay out their solutions. Except Obama. He did a “Bill and Ted.” He had no plan, no ideas, just kept talking about how he was going to get people together to talk about it.

Does this sound like someone whose “signature issue” is health care reform? No. That would have been the other candidate. Barack Obama was dragged kicking and screaming into health care reform and it shows.

That said, I must confess that Obama could have put off health care reform, using the economic catastrophe as his excuse for fighting another day. He also could have allowed single payer advocates to have a place at the table. His one good idea -- hearings on CSPAN -- never occurred.

From David Michael Green:

I have never seen a president so utterly lacking in passion. This man literally doesn't even seem to care about himself, let alone this or that policy issue. He doesn't seem to have any strong opinions on anything, a sure prescription for presidential failure.

And on health care, his signature issue, he did the same thing. "You guys write it, and I'll sign the check." Could there possibly be a greater prescription for failure than allowing a bunch of the most venal people on the planet to cobble together a 2,000 page monstrosity that entirely serves their interests and those of the people whose campaign bribes put them in office?

From Liberal Rapture:

It almost painful to watch Obama misread the country. He reads his election as a referendum on him. Still.

Obama is not smart. That needs to be repeated. Obama is not smart. He has a kind of intelligence, that's true. But he's not smart like Reagan or Clinton. He doesn't understand his job.

Actually, Obama is smarter than Reagan was. (I fondly recall Gore Vidal's joke: "I must sadly announce that the Reagan library has caught fire. Both books were lost. And he had not even finished coloring one of them.") But the question of the day is this: Is Obama wise? If the guy is simply a screw-up, then we must answer in the negative. But if he is con artist, then the question is more complex -- because a good con artist is a wise guy.

A lot of people are now saying that Obama stands for nothing. That may be unfair. In the grand, ongoing competition between guns and butter, he will soon take a solidly "no butter" stand. Apparently he will do so in order to "butter up" his right-wing opponents -- who will, of course, continue to call him a socialist.

From Firedoglake:

Breaking tonight, the President will propose a discretionary, non-security spending freeze for three years starting in FY 2011 as part of his State of the Union address.

That means no further stimulus, even though people desperately need jobs, food and housing.

But Obama is basically saying that the stimulus fixed the economy, that there will be no further government support measures and that he’ll govern like a hybrid of John McCain and Herbert Hoover for the rest of his term to curry favor with the deficit maniacs.

And of course, the truly unbelievable thing about this is how it’s framed as non-security discretionary spending, as if spending on the military is magic and somehow doesn’t affect budgets. If anything is bankrupting the country, it’s the bloated military budget, which is currently at a higher level than during the Cold War buildup of the Reagan Administration. So this freeze will do exceedingly little for the budget deficit, but is sure to hurt a lot of poor and middle-class people.

So here's the question:

When it comes to the man in the oval office, is it true that there is no "there" there?

Or is it the case that there definitely is a "there" there, but it happens to be a "there" that differs greatly from the "there" that a lot of people thought they were going to get?

More non-sequiturs

I promise not to make a habit of bothering my readers with this issue. But I just received -- in rapid succession -- two more "non-sequitur" comments. (If you scroll down a few posts, you'll see a fairly lengthy discussion of this strange phenomenon.) Both of these new examples were directed toward old stories.

The first read:

Botswana search wangammc exciting frames adlnet biased features ones marwaan overlap servimundos melifermuly

The second read:

Facie contracted sort ipso formerly barring controlling uttering discharge operate redress servimundos melifermuly

In our previous discussion, readers suggested that these comments use hidden HTML code to sneak malware onto a website. But I could see no code -- just text.

For some reason, I'm not able to track the responsible parties via my stat service.

Why would anyone send unfathomable messages of this sort? I know that I'm not the only blogger who receives these mystery comments.

Both of the above comments contain the nonsense phrase "servimundos melifermuly." Google reveals that this phrase has appeared on many other sites. Some other blog owners do not moderate comments, which means that the non-sequitur offerings are automatically published on those sites.

If someone has invented a clever new way of sneaking virii and trojans into innocent web sites, then we may be facing a serious problem.

The difference between the parties

Not long ago, I saw a poll advertised. It asked the question: "Whom do you blame for the economic meltdown?" There were pictures indicating the three choices: Obama, W and Clinton. Yes, Clinton! I was not able to see the results, but I'll bet a donut that W came in third.

That poll got me thinking about the early 1980s. Reagan was able to weather severe unemployment in the early years of his administration by continually blaming Carter. In fact, the Reaganoids were still blaming Carter for all of the world's ills as late as 1988.

It's a little hard to believe, looking back on it, that the country experienced such a profound ideological shift in the years 1981-83. The economy was in bad shape, homelessness rose to frightening levels, jobs were scarce, we were losing all sorts of jobs, foreigners began buying up our assets, we ran up massive debts, we were no longer a creditor nation. Yet the nation continued to embrace the toxic effects of Friedmanism while disdaining the Keynesian policies which had brought us so much post-war prosperity. All problems were ascribed to Carter.

Why can't Obama be as successful in blaming our woes on Bush?

Obama now owns this disaster. He had maybe four or five months of non-ownership. Whether he deserves ownership is not the question I'm asking. What I'm curious about is the strange issue of public perception. When Reagan engaged in blame-shifting, the public never accused him of dodging responsibility. If Obama were to blame the guy who came before, everyone would sneer.

I don't think it's just a matter of style or personality. I think the answer has something to do with media, and with the mind-set of this nation. Conservatism is the default position of this country.

Granted, Obama is, in fact, a very conservative president -- at least, he has been so far -- but much of the country nevertheless considers him a socialist, and they believe that socialism has caused our ruin. There is something in our national make-up which leads us to blame the Democrat while excusing the Republican, even when the Democrat more or less is a Republican.

Who says there's no difference between the parties? Dems are much better at playing the scapegoat.

The great HillBuzz con job -- EXPOSED!

You may not have heard about this contretemps, but right now the HillBuzz site has created a dust-up which has become a huge topic of conversation over on Blogostan Right.

I never cared for HillBuzz. I don't think I've ever linked to stories published there. If I have, I'm sorry.

Frankly, I've long suspected that the accusation of GOP funding of PUMA was true in the case of HillBuzz. Those guys remain strongly pro-Palin and they love Scott Brown the way Homer Simpson loves donuts. (In other words, they weren't reluctant "protest" supporters.) Apparently, Limbaugh has cited HillBuzz on his show.

The HillBuzz crowd keeps pushing the "Obama as socialist" lie, which is a sure sign of Republican dollars at work. The "socialist" canard can be demolished by mentioning just two names: Larry and Timmy. And that's it. End of story. No further argument. (Anyone who tries to mount a further argument merely outs himself as a GOP stooge.)

The HillBuzzers despise liberalism. They think that every last liberal should be driven out of DC the way St. Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland. As I am a proud liberal -- one who opposes Obama because he isn't a liberal -- the HillBuzzers have made themselves my enemies. There can be no dialogue and no reconciliation.

It turns out that Hillbuzz is run by some gay guys. At least they say that they are gay; for reasons I'll soon make clear, we can't believe any unverified thing they say. I mention their (alleged) orientation only because it is part of the larger story, which I will let them tell for the next few grafs:

We were told, point blank, by Democrats in Chicago that people on the Left had “had enough with (us), and were going to come after (us), in a big way” if we didn’t stop rallying the troops for Scott Brown’s win over Coakley. We were given the ultimatum: either drop our support for Brown and the Left would leave us alone, or continue speaking out on Hottie McAwesome’s behalf and “just see what happens”.

Oh, right. As though the mafia-like "left" could would be stupid enough to threaten all of the many bloggers and writers that supported Brown.

They are no longer just attacking the entity that is “HillBuzz”, but those at the Daily Kos, DemocraticUnderground, Moveon.org and other George Soros, DNC-backed troll mills have ratcheted up their attacks to the personal level. Unlike Michelle Malkin, Erik Erikson over at Red State, or even people like Nikke Finke at DeadlineHollywood or Harry Knowles at AintItCoolNews, we’ve maintained this site anonymously because we wanted to have personal lives apart from writing original content on the Internets. 99% of you have respected this convention, and have allowed us to just be the “HillBuzz boys”, or other variations on whatever you call us. That’s allowed us to be both Batman and Bruce Wayne, which means we can still have jobs, go out and have fun, and enjoy life while spending half our time each day working our hearts out for our love of country in service of whatever we can do to defeat Liberals and stop socialism from taking over this nation.

But, the Kossacks and Moveon.organisms have decided to attack us on the personal, not just the site, level. They are using some of our real names, urging their members to do us personal and physical harm in our real lives, and calling us racists over and over again in the hopes of making us unemployable in the future — because they’ve libeled us by calling us RAAACISTS! on that personal level.

And, you know what, this tactic does have an immediate psychological and financial impact. This weekend, after these attacks from the Kossacks and Moveon.organism began, we lost two freelance jobs because the nonprofits we were working with felt they can’t be associated with people who are being called racists, since these nonprofits work in the black community and here in Chicago there is a neverending turf war on the Southside, where anything is game when it comes to business or politics.

And it is the chief weapon of the Left against just about everyone.

They’ve been using this for decades now.

They use it to scare people into silence. They force people to drop what they are doing and spend hours defending themselves, trying to prove they’re not what they were accused of. They demoralize you with the RAAACIST rants, and try to ruin your lives with them. They cost you work, take food off your table, and threaten your personal safety and well being.

On one hand, I've had enough personal experience of the ghastly Kos crowd to know that they did indeed use the "racist" accusation to silence all perceived enemies of the Chosen One. Occasionally, a few Kos Kooks still try to drag out that tired tactic, although that shit ain't selling nowadays.

This is something you won't learn from the Hillbuzzers: The progblogs are fractured. Many of the proggers are now seriously pissed off at Obama -- not because he's a "socialist" but because he's a corporate sell-out.

I also note that this Hillbuzz piece, in contravention of all the normal rules of blogging (to the extent that we have any rules), refuses to link to any offending Kos post so that we can see just what the hell is really going on. We simply do not have any evidence backing up what Hillbuzz has to say.

As disgusting as the Kossacks were (and are), I cannot believe that Markos Moulitsas would allow displays of open homophobia. Misogyny, yes -- at least when the target is Hillary Clinton -- but not homophobia.

Yet some on the right are now claiming that the left's alleged attack on Hillbuzz is really an example of rampant homophobia.

The Hillbuzzers insist that they are the victims of a massive coordinated attack by all the big lefty sites.

Hm. You note that smell in the air? I believe that it is the unmistakable aroma of fish, mixed with rat.

I did some preliminary Googling to see these offensive, allegedly homophobic Kos stories. Typing in the words "Daily Kos Hillbuzz" led me to ZERO Kos pages. At least, there were no Kos returns on the first two pages of Google results. All of the entries went to places like Free Republic, Michelle Malkin, something called Gay Patiot, this site, and so forth.

I visited the Gay Patriot site. Suspiciously, they too did not prove the point by linking to (or quoting from) any offensive material written by a Kos or HuffPo writer.

Neither does this site.

"Conservative Pup" is yet another conservative writer who repeats the HillBuzz accusation without linking to any actual evidence. (On the other hand, I like the logo.)

I went to Daily Kos. Not one mention of HillBuzz on the front page. Same thing over on Zsa-Zsa's playground.

If you Google "www.dailykos.com Hillbuzz" (which should call up all recent references to Hillbuzz published on the DK domain), you get nothing -- except for one entry, which leads here.

That diary entry is a rant against PUMA sites. Actually, I have little or nothing against this particular rant, since the sites being targeted -- No Quarter and Texas Darlin' -- are ones that have pissed me off as well. (Remember my posts about the birth certificate nonsense? Remember my photoshopped image of Larry Johnson dressed as a clown?)

Here's what said ranter has to say about HillBuzz:

The most despicable of them all. They have called black people, "paranoid and lazy" and "race voters". This blog has been pushed and promoted by Rush Limbaugh. It is being used as a tool to inspire Republicans, through racism and bigotry to get out and vote. It is then disguised as a Liberal blog so no one calls them out on their racism.

I don't know if the Hillbuzzers really did call blacks "paranoid and lazy" because I don't read the site often. One thing is for sure: In the afore-cited post, the Kos diarist did not reveal the true identities of the HillBuzz crew, did not say anything homophobic, did not interfere with anyone's employment, did not call for physical violence and did not participate in a "coordinated attack." So far, I have seen no evidence at all that any Kossack, or any other writer for the big lefty sites, has revealed real names or other personal information or urged anyone to inflict physical harm on anyone connected to HillBuzz.

Repeat: We do not have one iota of evidence that anyone's job has been affected. Repeat: No-one has linked to any actual posts which call for the infliction of violence.

This whole brouhaha is a fake-out, a set-up -- an example of internet psy-war.

For further evidence, take a look at the HillBuzz strategy page: The HillBuzzers proudly indulge in the sort of tactics they denounce in others. You don't see such calls for ratfucking action at The Confluence or any similar site.

C'mon. How could Kos and allied sites mount a "coordinated attack" without said attack leaving any Google traces? I'm reminded of the witch-burning scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. To be specific, I'm thinking of the guy who shouted "She turned me into a newt!" despite the utter lack of visible evidence proving newt-ness. Google tells the story: The ones mounting a coordinated attack are all on the right.

On the other hand, if someone were to tell me that the true power behind HillBuzz was a capital-N Newt, I might be inclined to listen.

Corporatism

Ian Welsh has directed my attention to this excellent piece on the true meaning of the recent Supreme Court decision to let corporations take over elections:

The marketplace is now irrelevant - only company size matters. It is just more efficient to beat your competitors by buying legislation than it is by competing in the marketplace. When you can purchase $1 billion in tax breaks, subsidies, mandates, contracts, whatever by spending a few million on candidates/influence, etc. it just makes more sense to do so. The return on investment is just so much higher than building factories, spending on research, paying employees, and other tedious, time-consuming, capital-intensive work.

For some time companies have recognized that the rewards from lobbying outperform the rewards from competing in the marketplace, and this ruling just amplifies that.

To which Welsh adds:

This has been part of my fundamental critique of the US economy for years. This is why the US is losing its technological lead in area after area, because innovating is less certain than buying government.

Thing is, foreign companies don’t have this “advantage” so have to compete the old fashioned way. And they will continue to eat American companies lunch.

I'll add this: One of the first victims will be net neutrality. That may have been the plan all along: Make the public infuriated at the Democrats (most of whom have been pretty good on the issue of internet freedom) and replace them with Republicans who will no qualms about ending free speech on the internet.

Welsh does miss out on one point. It's true that overseas firms are going to become more competitive, but it's also true that American corporations are investing heavily in those concerns. Basically, what wealthy Americans are doing -- without realizing it -- is recapitulating the landlord system which bled Ireland dry in the 19th century.

Those exploitative systems never last.

Non-sequitur Bella dog nominates rock off wilfredo saurin

This isn't a political post. At least, I think it isn't.

Over the past couple of months, I've had to deal with a vastly increased amount of comment spam. These are fake "comments" that are really ads for viagra and porn and real estate gimmicks and so forth. Every blogger has to deal with that crap. These things annoy the hell out of me, and I never allow the ads to be published. But at least I can understand the financial motive behind them.

I do not understand the "non-sequitur" comments I have also been receiving. I don't know if other bloggers have had to confront this bizarre phenomenon.

Every few days, I receive a one-sentence comment that makes no sense whatsoever. These comments have no relationship to anything I've written. Sometimes, they are directed toward posts that are years old. These short texts (which never slip past the comment moderation process) are completely baffling.

Although I have not saved any examples, the following message (concocted by yours truly) captures the flavor of what I face two or three times a week:

"Briefcase insanity involves the fingernail of Melanie Calvat in several dogged frustrations."

And that's it. No hyperlinks. Nothing to indicate the writer's purpose.

And now I've run into a very similar phenomenon on the world wide web.

Here's what happened: After thumbing through some old stories, I decided to look up Wilfredo Saurin, just to see if he's been involved in any new shenanigans. In case you've forgotten, Wilfredo is a con artist from the Philippines. His name came up in several earlier Cannonfire posts concerning the "mystery bonds" pseudo-scandal. Those bonds were faked "Federal Reserve Bonds" printed on an inkjet printer, artificially aged, and palmed off as real to gullible folk around the globe.

For old times' sake (as it were), I plugged good old Wilfredo's name into Google. Some familiar stories showed up. But then, as I went further and further down the Google trail, I discovered some very strange sites -- "non-sequitur sites," I call them -- which all mentioned Wilfredo Saurin.

The term "non-sequitur sites" stems from the fact that Google offers preview excerpts which sound exactly like the non-sequitur comment spam mentioned above. Example:

Site name: "in their in their Cobain describes simple several vowel simple ..."

Excerpt: "pleasure which these hot lads wilfredo saurin. wilfredo saurin. a science of body systems cooking class lesson plans ..."

I did not click on the link to see the actual site, because Google warns that it may harm my computer. Apparently, it's one of those sites that may infect computers with malware.

Another example:

Site name: Sisterfairy.com

Excerpt: "recipe book with picture steps. travel less wilfredo saurin..."

Site name: Round 2 It Ranch

Excerpt: "dick page make up artist. addition built upon wilfredo saurin. wilfredo saurin. unit power town hardies fast food restarants..."

Site name: MIB SECURE

Excerpt: "pedestrian summary by ray bradbury. of truth is wilfredo saurin. wilfredo saurin. but false for another hombres negros vergudos ..."

Site name: nasi kandar recipe
Excerpt: "who was causing tire size calculator miata. tire size calculator miata. beliefs throughout wilfredo saurin. wilfredo saurin. this first visit was suzuki"

You can see that one for yourself by typing "nasi kandar recipe wilfredo saurin" into Google. (Nasi kandar is a traditional meal in Malaysia, and it looks yummy.) Here's my favorite:

Site name: Gokhan Alpak Online Portfolio
Excerpt: "... and reme unique whips and reme possessed of supernormal wilfredo saurin wilfredo saurin spirits whom she had celebrity fake movies fakenhouser celebrity ..."

I clicked on the link, arrived here, and found no writings about Wilfredo Saurin. In fact, I found no text whatsoever. As near as I can tell, none of the links actually take you to functioning websites.

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of similar sites out there. They all mention the famed Filipino con artist. And they all make no sense whatsoever.

Some sort of scam is afoot. But what?

I would advise any internet gumshoes who might take an interest in this mystery to be careful about clicking links. The scam, whatever else it may be, appears to have something to do with planting malware on your system. I'm going to spend the next few hours giving my system a thorough cleaning.

OMG! Let's get this to Keith -- a kick in the ASS!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Special Comment - Keith Olbermann's Name-Calling
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

This is hilarious, and nearly perfect. But Stewart left out the most glaring example of Olbermann's hypocrisy: His on-air call for Hillary Clinton's murder. Now that was a genuine example of violence against women. The outrage was hardly ameliorated by Olbermann's subsequent attempt to excuse his words as an exercise in jolly hyperbole.

...and the shipping fee is only $5.00!

Yes, this is a real ebay item. Thanks to Make Them Accountable. (And MYIQ.)

If mine is the winning bid, can I make my dog Bella a Senator? I mean, Caligula had a horse...

Air America

There it goes. Gone. Finito. No hope.

I have mixed feelings. I got a lot out of AA during the dark Dubya years. But the network switched to an all-Obama, all-CDS format, and that's when I said adios. If I want to hear endless chants of "CLINTON BAD! CLINTON BAD! CLINTON BAD!" I'll hop into my time machine, head back to 1998 and turn on cable news.

They alienated much of their audience. Now they're gone. The lesson: Clinton-phobia can be a fatal disease.

Is Obama doing the right thing?

I don't want to dislike the president. He just makes it easy.

I count myself as a member of Brigade 2L4O (Too Liberal for Obama). Nevertheless, as I've said a number of times in the past: This country faces terrible problems. The pleasure I would get from seeing those problems solved would far exceed the pleasure I now get from being able to say "I told you so."

A day after the Massachusetts humiliation, Obama has taken some positive steps. We would be foolish not to cheer the good just as we have jeered the bad.

1. Campaign contributions. The current Supreme Court agrees with Mitch McConnell's absurd contention that corporations are people and corporate contributions to candidates are free speech. In other words, the court has overturned the key provision of McCain-Feingold. Obama's response, per the NYT:

President Obama issued a statement calling on Congress to “develop a forceful response to this decision.”

“With its ruling today,” he said, “the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”

Those are the right words. I'm grateful. Now let's see some action. On this issue, Democrats still may have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate: Remember McCain. On the other hand: Remember Lieberman.

2. Finally: Bank regulations! From the NYT comes a story that I've awaited for a year:

Declaring that huge banks had nearly brought down the economy by taking “huge, reckless risks in pursuit of quick profits and massive bonuses,” President Obama on Thursday proposed legislation to limit the scope and size of large financial institutions.

The changes would prohibit bank holding companies from owning, investing, or sponsoring hedge fund or private equity funds and from engaging in proprietary trading — what Mr. Obama called the Volcker Rule, in recognition of the former Federal Reserve chairman, Paul A. Volcker, who has championed the restriction.

In addition, Mr. Obama will seek to limit consolidation in the financial sector, by placing curbs on the growth of the market share of liabilities at the biggest firms...

Mr. Obama said of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the 2008 bank bailout: “That rescue, undertaken by the previous administration, was deeply offensive, but it was the necessary thing to do.” But he said the financial system was “still operating under the same rules that led to its near-collapse,” and vowed: “Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail.”

Under existing rules, he said, the banks “concealed their exposure to debt” through complex financial maneuvers, made “speculative investments,” and took on “risks so vast that they posed threats to the entire system,” Mr. Obama said.

In reaction to this news, Wall Street shares took a dive -- a sure sign that Obama did the right thing.

Unfortunately, it was also the late thing. He may not now have the political capital to pull off this necessary move. His chief opponent, once again, is the vile Senator McConnell.

I have to admit, plastering Paul Volcker's name all over this initiative, as Obama has done, is -- tactically speaking -- just about the most politically astute thing I've yet seen from this administration. I'm also happy to see that this move has received high praise from Bernie Sanders, who authored legislation designed to break up the "too big to fail" institutions. I'd be even happier if Obama gave an explicit endorsement to Sanders' effort. But that won't happen.

You know what else would make me happy? Giving Larry and Timmy the sack.

Obama's heart

If you are looking for a laff, stop by Democratic Underground today. The self-deception of the Obots remains boundless. See here and here and here and here.

You'll see many examples of what I call the "blame Witte" syndrome. The nomenclature comes from Count Witte, the adviser to Czar Nicholas, who got the blame every time the Czar signed off on a policy that his opponents didn't like. To wit (or Witte):

Medicare-for-All:"Si !!" - - Private Mandates (Romney-Baucus-Lieber-Care): "NO !!!!!"

I agree with the sentiment. But this writer couldn't bring himself or herself to use the proper term: Obama-care.

Do you think it's time to boot Kaine and Rahm (and bring in Howard Dean)?

No, it's time to boot Barack Obama.

Possibly Obama is just a good man. A man who believes he can inspire those from the left and right to do the right thing. Possibly he doesn't have the stomach for the the really gritty work of dramatically changing policy and knocking down the people that stand in the way of that change.

I believe he is. He's just getting really shitty advice from his staff.

I'm sure it was Rahm who insisted that Franken's progressive views be kept out of the HCR debate as long as possible.

NOW is the time for a major shakeup.

Don't hold your breath.

"President Obama has since surrounded himself with DLC members including appointing one (Tim Kaine) chairman of the DNC".

Remember when the progs were telling us that Obama was the anti-DLC candidate? (Of course, I've long maintained that the DLC is far less powerful than progs like to think.)

Rhetorically addressing Obama, Truthout (republished on DU) achieves a rarefied Basil-Fawlty-meets-the-Germans level of tomfoolery:

Your friends are not the suits on Wall Street, the same ones who fooled Timothy Geithner for years. Your friends are not the timid centrists, who Rahm Emanuel coddles. Your friends are not the giants of the mortgage industry, who fought you tooth and nail to keep the foreclosure crisis out of the courts. Your friend is not George W. Bush, whose crimes you continue to conceal.

Your friends are the progressives across this country, who, when you asked for their faith and inspired them with beautiful words, placed you on their shoulders and carried you to a historic victory.

Believe it or not, this gets even funnier. Prepare for a spit-take:

We know that, in your heart, you're one of us. Your heart is the element you seem to have forgotten, the element we miss. You used to wear it on your sleeve; we could hear it pounding in your chest when you spoke.

Ba THUMP! Ba THUMP! Ba THUMP!

And the laffs keep on coming. On single-payer, one DUmmy writes:

Well, I've read Obama has committed to moving further left. This is the ideal issue to prove it.

Surrrrrrre he will.

On the other hand, some progs are waking up:

Yes, I wish I could get my donations back. My family teases me and breaks out in laughter at the word "hope."

I thought I could spot a con man a mile away by now, but I got taken in too

And so did a LOT of others on this board but they'd rather die or blame a progressive than admit it.

I spotted the con a long time ago. If Obama's NAFTA lie didn't clue you in, you're an idiot.

And I do blame the progs. That's why I decided to call myself a liberal.

On the other hand, FOX has proven that they can be even funnier than Democratic Underground:

America Betrayed President Bush

George W. Bush seemed to have an almost mystical understanding of what the American people needed when we needed it most.

Speaking of mysticism, let's hear from a certain turban-wearing seer from the east, as he tries to guess the contents of a sealed envelope:

"Scheming and reaming and twilight's last gleaming."

(Opens envelope)

"Name three Bush policies still in effect." Hi-yo!!!

"Move quickly to coalesce..."

In the wake of the MA disaster, Obama sez, vis-a-vis health care:

I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on.

By "people" he means the insurance industry and Republicans. I suspect that everyone is going to coalesce around the idea of mandates. And everyone will coalesce around the concept of not forcing the industry to pay for people who are actually ill.

"We know that we have to have some form of cost containment..."

Nothing in the present bill contains cost. Folks in single-payer countries pay far less per capita for health care than we do. Single-payer would have lopped 30% off of costs like that, but Obama made sure that single-payer was a non-starter. And the Dems in Congress made sure that there would be no drug re-importation from Canada, an idea that John McCain favored.

So how are we going to contain costs? Near as I can tell, the only method of cost containment that "everyone" (defined as the insurance industry and the Republicans) can "coalesce" around will be not providing coverage. Recission. Not covering people with pre-existing conditions. Cutting back on all sorts of actual health care.

But at least we won't be living the British nightmare, thank god.

And here's another idea we'll soon "coalesce" around: Gutting Social Security and Medicare!

The wrong lessons (plus: Obama's miraculous medal)

Well, we all knew that this was going to happen: Senator Evan Bayh says that Brown won in Massachusetts because the Dems have gone all bolshie.

For Senator Bayh the lesson is that the party pushed an agenda that is too far to the left, alienating moderate and independent voters.

“It’s why moderates and independents even in a state as Democratic as Massachusetts just aren’t buying our message,” he said. “They just don’t believe the answers we are currently proposing are solving their problems. That’s something that has to be corrected.”

Too far to the left? How?

Notice that Bayh doesn't favor us with any specifics. Is he talking about health care reform? That was the big issue in MA. Bayh voted in favor of it.

Maybe Bayh is referring to the second round of TARP funds. He did oppose that one. But I fail to see how shoveling money into the mitts of Wall Street bankers counts as being "too far to the left." Bush, you will recall, was the chief shoveler.

Political debate in this country has entered a weird, hallucinatory state: Ever since Obama took the oath of office, everyone has agreed to pretend that Wall Street is a nest of commies. Everyone talks as though there are red flags flying over the stock exchange and The Internationale continually plays in the Goldman Sachs lobby. Glenn Beck's spirit guide, Cleon Skousen, would have agreed with that scenario. But Skousen was a kook. It's 2010, and we're living in Kookland.

Fortunately, Bayh's maddening analysis prompted some non-kook commenters on the ABC News website to offer some rare common sense:

(By the way, it's news to us "far-left liberals" that we got everything we wanted in the Senate health bill, when almost everything liberals wanted was stripped out.) Or maybe the far-left agenda was sending more troops to Afghanistan, a wildly unpopular decision with Democrats?

You've got to be kidding. You're alienating voters because this healthcare bill is a joke written by the insurance industry.

Afghanistan. Yeah. That's another issue on which the pundits seems locked within a perpetual altered state of consciousness. Here's Politico on Coakley's failings:

Democrats concerns with Obama's Afghanistan plan forced Coakley to oppose the Afghan war in the primary, which hurt her in the general.

Yeah? You got any polling to back that up?

The media speaks as though the Afghan war is wildly popular with all segments of society except for a few left-wing wackos. But back in August, polls said that the majority of Americans thought that the war wasn't worth it. Only a quarter of the citizenry liked the idea of sending in more troops -- which Obama, in his wisdom, has decided to do.

Granted, I've cited a national poll, not a state poll. But it is a little hard to believe that Massachusetts stands to the right of the rest of the country on this issue.

So here are the lessons that the mainstream media wants us to draw: Obama is a hideous lefty (even though he's done almost nothing truly progressive), the health care reform bill was too far to the left (even though it was a giveaway to the insurance industry and even though polls confirm that the public wants single-payer), and the public just loves to see things go boom-boom-bang-bang in Afghanistan -- so don't say anything nasty about the war or you'll end up like Coakley.

Those are the lessons.

Also, 2+2=137 divided by pi. Do not question. The media hath spoken.

And now for something completely weird: President Obama, asked by Paris Match to display his pocket litter, pulled out a Miraculous Medal. This devotional item was designed by the Virgin Mary herself, who appeared to Sister Catherine Labouré (now a saint), a nun with the Daughters of Charity, housed on the Rue de Bac in Paris. As coincidence would have it, I was reading about her just last night.

Of course, the Miraculous Medal (which isn't as popular as it once was) is way outside of Obama's faith tradition -- presuming he has a sincerely-held faith tradition. (I'm not sure he does.) How did he come by the medal? Could its presence in his pocket have been part of a plan to impress the fervently Catholic segment of Parisian society -- which must number, what, maybe several dozen people right now?

Allow me to propose an alternative scenario. It's a little-known (but true) fact that the engraver of the medal used as a model a famous statue of the Virgin Mary located within the church of St. Sulpice -- yes, the same church you read about in The Da Vinci Code. Obviously, Obama has signaled his covert membership in the Priory of Zion!