National
The Daily Show – Tennessee no evil
“Aasif Mandvi worries that a few good apples at an Islamic center in Murfreesboro, TN could ruin it for the rest of the terrorists.” The Daily Show does a spectacular job of allowing the Murfreesboro TN mosque opponents reveal how unpatriotic they are.
The Daily Show – Homeland security, extremist makeover
Jon Stewart exposes the lunacy of the so called ‘ground zero mosque’ controversy and admits that once Charleton Heston, NRA president, was right and Jon was wrong and speculates that Fox News is a terrorist command center
Maddow – Veterans suicide rates climbing
Suicide rates for veterans returned home are sometimes exceeding the casualty rates in combat. War is hell!
Maddow – Inc.arceration – Private prisons benefit from AZ law
Is it possible the entire ‘ginned up’, whacked out Arizona immigration laws have been enacted to benefit ‘for profit’ private prison corporations? Yes. This is beyond insidious
Wells Fargo nailed for deliberately causing overdrafts and profiteering
Rush to the bank and reclaim your money. A judge has found Wells Fargo used unfair business practices in manipulating accounts and engaged in profiteering.
In a decision handed down late Tuesday, U.S. District Judge William Alsup accused Wells Fargo of “profiteering” by changing its policies to process checks, debit card transactions and bill payments from the highest dollar amount to the lowest, rather than in the order the transactions took place. That helped drain customer bank accounts faster and drive up overdraft fees, a policy Alsup referred to as “gouging and profiteering.”
Banks, especially those that pay their CEOs millions of dollars in salary and bonus each year, literally steal from their own customers. This is about time. Now move your money to local credit unions and let the big banks fall.
Maddow – Republicans starving cities
Lights, schools, emergency responders all falling by the wayside in the light of republican refusal to allow federal money to help states.
Electricity blackouts increase 124% and infrastructure crumbles
Economist Paul Krugman points out the dangerous after effects of trying to make government smaller
The lights are going out all over America — literally…a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.
And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back.
Another grave sign our infrastructure is in dire need of shoring up is the increase in blackouts in the US. CNN reports a 124% in non disaster related blackouts
During the past two decades, such blackouts have increased 124 percent — up from 41 blackouts between 1991 and 1995, to 92 between 2001 and 2005, according to research at the University of Minnesota.
In the most recently analyzed data available, utilities reported 36 such outages in 2006 alone.
“It’s hard to imagine how anyone could believe that — in the United States — we should learn to cope with blackouts,” said University of Minnesota Professor Massoud Amin, a leading expert on the U.S. electricity grid.
Without reliable energy everything comes to a standstill. Without energy we cannot even repair the existing infrastructure. Energy, human sweat included, is critical to a sustainable economy so relying on a system that is clearly breaking down, whatever the reason, is a flawed strategy.
This should make microgrids more and more attractive as both a way to avert blackouts but also to generate badly needed revenue for local economies.
Colbert – Threat standown – Monkey terrorism
Stephen smacks down the latest guffaw, faux pas, stupidly bad reporting at Fox News regarding trained monkey terrorists. (You can’t make this stuff up)
The Daily Show – 9/11 Responders Bill
Jon takes Congress to task for its inability to pass a bill to help the heroes of 9/11… not surprising considering how badly Congress treats our veterans as well.
Colbert – Alpha Dog of the Week – David H Brooks
David H Brooks, just another defense department scammer screwing over our troops and supplying faulty body armor.
The Daily Show – Born in the USA
Jon pokes fun at the frenzy surrounding immigration and the birth of Mexican sleeper cell terrorist babies.
Explain fusion voting to The World editorial staff
A recent editorial blunders over the topic of fusion voting while attempting to marginalize third parties. Fusion voting is used in many states and is employed to great success in New York. Fusion voting allows an independent party like Working Families to define or narrow down campaign issues that address matters of specific concern… like unions, or health care, or education.
A third party can than endorse a candidate that most closely aligns with their viewpoint. At election time, voters may check the Democrat box, for example, or the Working Families box for a candidate. This allows a candidate to know how many votes they received solely because of their position on the third party’s concerns and how hard to work in the legislature to retain those votes for future elections.
The World editorial misses the point regarding the Independent Party of Oregon and calls fusion voting a ‘quirk’ and assumes it is supposed to help win elections.
…the IPO is making headlines because of a legal quirk that lets a candidate represent more than one party. Among the candidates with dual labels this year is state Rep. Arnie Roblan, D-Coos Bay. (Should we say, ‘D/I-Coos Bay”?)
The big question is how much a dual label will help anyone win a general election. Probably not much. The IPO can’t exert real influence until it acts like a party, which means adopting shared principles and common goals. To do so, however, would alienate members who want to be truly independent.
That’s the underlying problem of all so-called ‘independent” parties. People can be independent, or they can participate in party politics. They can’t rationally do both.
What in the world does the Independent Party see in Arne Roblan? Or the Dems, for that matter?
Colbert – The Word – Ownership Society
“Stephen’s refreshing tax cut with lime will work its way through the system and trickle down like a racehorse” Explaining the trickle down theory and Bush’s tax cuts with Bud Light
Excellent summary of the importance of a free press to a healthy democracy
Michael Scherer does an excellent job of dissecting toture advocate Mark Thiessenattack on Wikileaks. Scherer looks back at history, namely the release of the Pentagon Papers that helped turn the war. The Pentagon Papers showed that more than one president deliberately mislead the country about the war in Vietnam and almost 70,000 US troops died as a result.
Supreme Court’s opinion in New York Times Co. v. United States, the so-called Pentagon Papers case from 1971.
Concurring in that case, Justice Potter Stewart observed, “In the absence of governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the area of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry — in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government.. . . . Without an informed and free press, there cannot be an enlightened people.”
The article also quotes from Justices Hugo Black and William Brennan
[W]e are asked to hold that, despite the First Amendment’s emphatic command, the Executive Branch, the Congress, and the Judiciary can make laws enjoining publication of current news and abridging freedom of the press in the name of “national security.” The Government does not even attempt to rely on any act of Congress. Instead, it makes the bold and dangerously far-reaching contention that the courts should take it upon themselves to “make” a law abridging freedom of the press in the name of equity, presidential power and national security, even when the representatives of the people in Congress have adhered to the command of the First Amendment and refused to make such a law. To find that the President has “inherent power” to halt the publication of news by resort to the courts would wipe out the First Amendment and destroy the fundamental liberty and security of the very people the Government hopes to make “secure.” No one can read the history of the adoption of the First Amendment without being convinced beyond any doubt that it was injunctions like those sought here that Madison and his collaborators intended to outlaw in this Nation for all time. The word “security” is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.
A government that lies to its people betrays everything a soldier hopes to be fighting for, everything. Long live Wikileaks and all independent media because without it we have no democracy at all.
Jessica---stumbled around and found your blog! I still haven't found the Coast News online, can you direct me? ...
Thank you, Linda, you did a much better job of explaining fusion voting or cross nomination than my humble effort. ...
I'm chair of the Independent Party. There is nothing unusual about candidates seeking and obtaining multiple party nominations. “Cross-nominations” ...
Well I'm certainly no expert, but it seems to me it's a little like giving Roblan a license to talk ...