US Media Double Standard--on Uprisings In Syria And Uprisings In...the US
By Russ Baker on Feb 11, 2013
Why is torching a police kiosk an admirable thing in Syria but cause for consternation in the United States? Why is protest again corrupt central power in one country a good thing-and something to be dismissed in another? WhoWhatWhy asks....WhyWhyWhy

Thee "Blood" Items You Probably Have In Your House Right Now
By Our Roving Correspondent on Feb 9, 2013
A few things to unsettle you. Hey! No need to thank us. (Oh, and a few things you can do to settle right back.)

Radioactive Eye Glasses...Silverware...Zippers...Hip Joints...Anyone?
By Karen Charman on Feb 7, 2013
Every ten years or so, the nuclear establishment trots out a proposal to offload some of its so-called low-level waste-radioactive metals, concrete, soil, plastics, and other materials-onto the public. In the past, this idea was met with outrage and was stopped. But as the nation's nuclear garbage pile continues to grow, the pressure to release some of it into commerce-and thus our daily lives-mounts.

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Rep. Peter King (R-NY) seems to think that Republicans in the House of Representatives were given a “mandate” by voters allowing them to prevent tax cuts for the rich from expiring, despite exit polls showing voters overwhelmingly support tax hikes. “[T]he fact is, in Congress, the American people have returned a Republican House of Representatives. So we also have, if you want to call it, a mandate.”

Except that’s not quite true, Mr King, and you know it. The American people didn’t vote for a Republican House, the Republicans didn’t actually win the House, and therefore there is no mandate. 53,952,240 votes were cast for a Democratic House candidate compared to 53,402,643 cast for a Republican; in other words, over half a million more Americans voted for Democratic House candidates than for Republican candidates. Republicans received less than half of the vote for members of the House of Representatives, and even lost seats in the House this election. Yet Republicans still took 55 percent of the seats in the House. In effect, they had to steal the House. Here’s how:

In 2010, Republicans won a substantial majority of state governments. Once they were in power, they then deliberately redrew congressional district lines in order to manipulate the 2012 House election for a Republican victory. It’s called gerrymandering, a very old, very nasty technique that has long been successful in affecting the outcome of elections, for both sides. And it’s getting worse now that computer modelling can precisely calculate districts to maximize political advantages. Citizens, advocates and political parties have filed 194 lawsuits challenging congressional or state district maps in 41 states. Lawsuits are still pending in eight states.

Gerrymandering is the process of manipulating geographic borders to create a political advantage for a particular party, obstructing the ability of voters who oppose a state’s ruling party to influence future elections. It works on the principle of “wasted voting” – a numbers game where opposition voters are shifted, or “packed” into districts where their party would win anyway even without their vote, then “cracking” any remaining opposition voters by moving them into districts where they are a significant minority, rendering their vote futile. Voters, of course, aren’t physically moved, just the lines on a map where they officially live, which end up bizarrely twisted and distorted out of any natural proportions. And it’s technically legal.

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This is one of the most frustrating things for me as a Democrat: The problems of poverty have simply disappeared from the national political discussion. It's not as if we don't have poor people anymore, right? Obviously, the topic doesn't test well in focus groups, or we'd hear about it. But what does this say about the party's historic claim to protect the poor and needy? Not too much, I'm afraid. Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, writes:

Underneath the statistics, hidden behind the desolation of the poor in the poorest big city in the United States, lies one of most intractable political dilemmas of our era: Can the Democratic party, the party of the left, address issues of poverty and want in today’s political environment? For example, can they talk about hunger?

Hunger has grown sharply since the financial collapse of 2008, although it is felt acutely by a relatively small percentage of the population. In 2007, 12.2 percent of Americans experienced what the Department of Agriculture describes as “low food security,” including 4 percent who fell into the category of very low food security. By 2011, the percentage of those coping with low food security rose to 16.4 percent, and those experiencing very low food security went up to 5.5 percent.

The U.S.D.A. defines “low food security” as a lack of access “at all times to enough nutritious food for an active, healthy life.” It defines “very low food security” as individuals going without or with very little food “at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food.”

Looked at through the calculus of contemporary partisan politics, the U.S.D.A. data demonstrates that in 2011 low food security was a problem for just under one in eight whites — a matter of concern but for many white voters, a virtually invisible issue. Very low food security affects the lives of only one in 24 whites.For African Americans, low food security is a problem affecting one in four, and one in ten experience very low food security. The percentage of Hispanics who experience low food security is higher than the percentage of blacks, although the percentage of Hispanics suffering very low food security is slightly lower.

[...] The issue of hunger sheds light on the broader politics of poverty.

Democrats have concluded that getting enough votes on Nov. 6 precludes taking policy positions that alienate middle-class whites. In practice this means that on the campaign trail there is an absence of explicit references to the poor — and we didn’t hear much about them at the Democratic National Convention either.

Republicans, in turn, see taking a decisive majority of white votes as their best chance of winning the presidency. The 2012 electorate is likely to be 72% white, according to a number of analyses. In this scenario, Republicans need to get at least 62 percent of the white vote to win, and Democrats need to get 38 percent or more of the white vote.

Elijah Anderson, a sociologist at Yale and the author of several highly praised books about race and urban America, including “The Cosmopolitan Canopy,” organized the symposium. When I asked him about the Democrats’ problems in addressing poverty, Anderson wrote back in an email:

Apparently, the Republicans have backed the Democrats, and President Obama in particular, into the proverbial racial corner. It is a supreme irony that Obama, the nation’s first African-American President, finds himself unable to advocate for truly disadvantaged blacks, or even to speak out forthrightly on racial issues. To do so is to risk alienating white conservative voters, who are more than ready to scream, “we told you so,” that Obama is for “the blacks.” But it is not just the potential white voters, but the political pundits who quickly draw attention to such actions, slanting their stories to stir up racial resentment. Strikingly, blacks most often understand President Obama’s problems politically, and continue to vote for him, understanding the game full well, that Obama is doing the “best he can” in what is clearly a “deeply racist society.” It’s a conundrum.

The issue of race helps to explain another development in academia as well as in the public debate: the near abandonment of the once powerful tradition of exposing the exploitation of the poor.

CrooksandLiars.com was honored this week in the 54th annual Southern California Journalism Awards:

Managing Editor Tina Dupuy won first prize for her featured online political commentary, “Confessions of a Child Janitor.” The judges comments, "Heart-felt first-person account of what it means to be working poor in America, inspired by some of Newt Gingrich’s campaign utterances. Rather than it being the working poor who are federally subsidized, Dupuy argues, it is their underpaying employers who are getting a free ride on the taxpayers. It’s 'wealthy janitors,' she says, who are Gingrich’s true 'invented people.'"

Also honored with second prize in the same category, was political writer Jon Perr for “You Know Mitt Romney is Out of Touch.”

The family of the late journalist Daniel Pearl was given the "Daniel Pearl Award" for "courage and integrity in journalism."

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the legendary Washington Post duo of Watergate fame, received the "President's Award," on the 40th anniversary of Watergate. Woodward, who is in the final stages of new book, appeared by remote camera from Washington, D.C. while Bernstein gave a live, inspirational speech to future investigative reporters.

Winners were chosen by press clubs across the nation from a record 750 entries in one of the oldest and largest journalism competitions—not just in Southern California, but the nation as well.

The awards banquet, held at the Millennium Biltmore's Crystal Ballroom in downtown Los Angeles featured celebrity award presenters like Martin Sheen, Ernie Hudson, Ron Pearlman and Pauley Perrette.

We're all proud, and thrilled that Tina and Jon's work was recognized with these honors, and wish them continued success in the future.

Hi there. It's me again, writing about the billionaires. I know we all know the billionaires are out there throwing zillions of dollars at this election because they can. We all know how they buy politicians, but the real problem is how they buy policy and public opinion. These two articles highlight how they use their billions to influence via philanthropy, at our expense, and they're both must-reads.

First, via Zaid Jailani at Republic Report, a report on how billionaire money is pushing for millions to be redirected from state funds to private schools in North Carolina:

In addition to PEFNC (which is largely funded by the founders of Wal-Mart), another group called NC Citizens for Freedom in Education (NCCFE) has been formed to do political accountability work to directly target politicians who opposed to the privatization scheme. Facing South notes that “ all of NCCFE’s funding in the current election cycle so far – $52,900 – came from the American Federation for Children [AFC], a national organization that promotes privatization of public schools and has played a key role in the creation of neovoucher programs in other states.”

AFC is mostly funded by the DeVos family, who are the heirs to the Amway fortune. This family not only has funded school privatization efforts in North Carolina, but it has formed countless “school choice” groups all over the country, pouring millions of dollars of their fortune into the cause of school vouchers.

While the DeVos family and Wal-Mart heirs may be funding groups with friendly-sounding names to push their agenda, the public should know that the effect of this heavily-financed rush to privatization could eventually be the destruction of America’s public education system. They should also be aware that numerous for-profit businesses stand to reap millions or billions from this shift, and are behind much of the lobbying efforts to make this happen.

Here's something else they should know: Because organizations like Parents For Education Freedom in NC (PEFNC) are classified as tax-exempt organizations under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, all contributions to them are tax-deductible. As a tradeoff for that tax-exemption, lobbying activities of that organization are limited to a small percentage of revenue. But in the case of PEFNC, they deny any lobbying at all. Their stated purpose is to "educate the public concerning educational opportunities in North Carolina", but here's what their revenues paid for, according to their 2010 990 (PDF):

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Part of being a Democrat is acting like you’re losing even when you’re winning. Part of being a Republican is acting like you’re winning even when you’re losing. The phrase “silent majority,” that brilliant bit of Nixonian rhetoric, is a way to augment Republican numbers and voices. “Nearly all people agree with me and they’re not only in my imagination … you just can’t hear them.”

Senator Jim DeMint (SC-R) has an odd obsession with ill-fitting metaphors. He famously proclaimed his only reason to kill the Affordable Care Act was to annihilate the president politically. "If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him,” said the tea-touting Senator. DeMint has a pre-existing condition; he thinks an enemy’s high casualty mêlée is comparable to the inability to pass a sensible, relatively mild, reform bill. Well, at least when he’s talking about Democrats. As the kick-off speaker at this year’s CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) DeMint used a somewhat softer analogy: football. Specifically these two teams DeMint sees have different goals. “We don’t have shared goals with the Democrats…Compromise works well in this world when you have shared goals."

In football the teams are never expected to go in the same direction with the best interests of the fans in mind. Also in football, no team threatens to shut down the country as a strategy to win the game.

But maybe DeMint is correct: It’s really tough to compromise with a group that’s solitary goal is destroying you. Apparently taking the same oath to uphold the same Constitution, in the same country, drawing the same paycheck, in the same office building, in the same city and being of the same religion, sharing the same language and being mostly (85 percent) male, white and wealthy isn’t enough common ground for Republicans to even entertain working with those alien Democrats. It’s even tougher to compromise with a group who you could totally agree with but they retroactively become against their own ideas once you propose them. Like say, the individual mandate every GOP candidate was for before he was against it. (Yes, except Ron Paul, keep your emails.)

Enter the “severely conservative.” This was the description Mitt Romney bestowed upon himself at this year’s CPAC. “I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” said the oft-frontrunner. “Severe” is a word normally associated with pain or really bad weather. With today’s GOP, not only do Republicans refuse to have the same goals – they deny all similarities to their enemy. “The President is not like us.” This is severely conservative.

In the same speech Romney promised to repeal ObamaCare even though it’s nearly identical to the plan Romney signed into law in Massachusetts, dubbed RomneyCare.

Let’s put it this way: If Romney “repealed and replaced” the “job-killing ObamaCare” with RomneyCare, no one would notice. If there were a taste test and you covered the labels – no one could tell the difference. You’d have a 50/50 chance of guessing which reform you were actually enjoying.

But to be a true severe conservative demands suspending disbelief. What must you be willing to accept? The economy buckling while a Republican was in the White House never happened. Bush never bailed out the banks or the auto industry. Deficits suddenly matter. Clint Eastwood is a hippie. And if the country continues to struggle it’ll be great for the GOP.

It reminds me of King Pyrrhus’ quote which sums up the term Pyrrhic victory: "If we are victorious in one more battle, we shall be utterly ruined."

And well, these severe conservatives are acting like they’re winning.

That should tell us something.

One of the richest men in the country, ranking in the 0.006 percent of Americans, likes to accuse the President of creating an “entitlement society.” Mitt Romney, the heir apparent, next in line GOP nominee … is against entitlement.

When I hear “entitlement society” I think, “country club.” But When Mitt uses that phrase he doesn’t mean rich guys like him, given all the advantages of wealth, who are now enjoying its comforts – he means the rest of us. Yes, Mitt is against an “entitlement society” because that involves too many people and not just him and his ilk. It’s not the “entitlement” he contests – it’s the entire “society” part.

At the Monday Florida debate last week Mitt noted that under Gingrich’s tax plan Mitt would pay no taxes at all. Gingrich responded with, “Well, if that -- and if you created enough jobs doing that -- it was Alan Greenspan who first said the best rate, if you want to create jobs for capital gains, is zero.”

So rich people whose money makes their money (it’s literally capital gaining) are so fortunate they get to hire other people to pay taxes for them? Rich people with their alleged mythical power to create jobs even get to outsource their tax obligations to poor saps working for a living?

This is the prosperity gospel as a Super PAC-funded marketing blitz. Money is next to godliness and poverty is the fault of the poor for not being better people.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the Romans job-killing communists.

“Contrary to the President's constant disparagement of people in business,” former George W. Bush budget director Gov. Mitch Daniels said in his State of the Union response last week, “It's one of the noblest of human pursuits.” This is one of those phrases you (usually) will only hear in business school (funnier if it was one of those rip-off for-profit colleges). Business is one of the noblest of human pursuits? Noble as in aristocratic? That phrase, “noble pursuits,” is usually applied to an avocation not paying much but rewarding in other ways: teachers; firefighters; nurses; foster parents; soldiers; community leaders; social workers; mentors; rescue workers; care givers; farmers. Or to anyone who’s honest, shows up every day and works hard. That’s a noble pursuit.

Are the wealthy really so sensitive they need Mitch Daniels to make them feel better about themselves in a spiritual sense? What they’re doing not only pays off with privilege and cash – it also has to be venerable from a moral perspective? How much reward does one group need? They own everything and they also need to be thanked?!

The rich are not just over-paid – they’re over valued. And generous welfare recipients.

As Senator Tom Coburn points out in his damning Nov. 2011 report, “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous,” we are a wealthfare state. It reads, “This reverse Robin Hood style of wealth redistribution is an intentional effort to get all Americans bought into a system where everyone appears to benefit.” In other words: We subsidize the rich by telling the poor to pay their fair share.

It’s been a strange three years under the Obama administration. First the GOP was against empathy. Yes, the party had to vehemently opposed seeing the plight of your fellow human beings because Obama was for it. Now their new hot button word? Fairness. Obama used the word fairness in his third State of the Union. And now the GOP has decided to be against fairness and celebrate inequality as being the thing that makes America great.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the three wise men were shareholders.

The prosperity gospel is not America. It’s not democratic. It’s not even Christian. It’s greed warped into being a virtue by the greedy.

The rich aren’t better, they’re just richer.

As many of you know I've been covering the Occupy Movement since Day 1. I've been to eight Occupy camps in two countries: One raid. One near-arrest. One march on the U.S. Consulate. A couple of barricaded streets. I was at the largest GA the movement has had thus far (Cal Berkeley) and at the first ever national one (in DC). I'm on various text message alert lists with all the news...many of it at 2am. In short: I've been following this movement closely. And for a handful of publications.

Today I wrote a piece for Alternet about how the movement is on the brink of being marginalized:

The Occupy Movement, “the 99 percent,” has, ironically, been hijacked by a small minority within its ranks. I speak of a small percentage of Occupiers who are okay with property destruction. As we saw in Oakland over the weekend: They’re okay with breaking windows, trashing city buildings and throwing bottles at the police. In short: They are not nonviolent. They are willing to commit petty criminal acts masked as a political statement.

These are Black Bloc tactics and they're historically ineffective at spurring change. The now Gingrich-vilified Saul Alinsky in 1970 said the Weather Underground (the terrorist wing of the anti-war movement) should be on the Establishment’s payroll. “Because they are strengthening the Establishment,” said the “professional radical” Alinsky. Nothing kneecapped the call for the war to end quicker than buildings being bombed in solidarity with pacifist sentiments.

Here’s the key point: Occupy is not an armed conflict – it’s a PR war. Nonviolent struggle is a PR war. Gandhi had embedded journalists on his Salt March. He wasn’t a saint. That was a consciously cultivated media image. He used the press and its power to gain sympathy for his cause. What he didn’t do is say he was nonviolent “unless the cops are d*cks,” a sentiment voiced at Occupy. Nonviolent struggle has nothing to do with how the cops react. In actual nonviolent movements they welcome police overreaction because it helps the cause they’re fighting for.

The whole piece is here.

Newt Gingrich, while thanking the Koch family for hosting a political fundraiser in 2007 adds "I think anytime you can visit a starter home like this..." Received by rounds of laughter from guests, Gingrich continues on to make a joke about the "core" differences between liberals and conservatives while using the no doubt palatial estate of the Koch family in an analogy about public housing.

Personally, I think Casey Anthony could beat him in a personality contest.

Here's the thing about an "entitlement society" the GOP candidates like to rail against: They don't like the fact that too many people would benefit from it. They're 1 percent suck ups.

Tom Clancy’s fiction has never really been my cup of tea, and his rightwing ideology even less so. Clancy, a gun-toting NRA member who famously blamed 9/11 on left wing politicians, has made a vast fortune writing military thrillers. But like a lot of rightwing military fans, Clancy never served in the military, enrolling at Loyola College at the height of the Vietnam War to earn a bachelor’s in English Literature before becoming an insurance broker. His wife of nearly thirty years divorced him after she discovered his affair with Katherine Huang, an assistant district attorney in New York he’d met on-line. He then married Alexandra Llewellyn, twenty years his junior and a cousin to Colin Powell who introduced them while Clancy was still married to his first wife while having an affair with his mistress. Charming.

His personal ethics are reflected in his fiction, not only by its literary content but by the questionable professional practices of its author. His novels gleefully espouse torture such as waterboarding and inducing heart attacks, where every liberal character is an idiot and a buffoon snorting cocaine, scarfing tofu, and determined to raise taxes on the wealthy (the b-stards!), and all the conservative characters are heroic patriots with impeccable principles. Then again, Clancy can’t actually be considered a real writer anymore, since he’s far too busy milking his various cash cows to ever sit down at a keyboard. It might be because since 2002 and the release of Red Rabbit the quality of his novels has greatly deteriorated. “If you haven’t read the new Jack Ryan novel yet, do yourself a favour. Don’t,” read one particularly acrid critic. The following year, his book, The Teeth of the Tiger (where the so-called “good-guys” are an FBI agent who murders a suspect in cold blood, and his cousin, Jack Ryan Junior, a lacklustre foul-mouthed frat-boy with the intellectual acuity of roadkill) was likewise savaged in reviews; the Washington Post calling it a “bloated, boring, silly novel” with “inane dialogue, gossamer characterizations, endless repetition and bumper-sticker politics.”

Ouch. On the other hand, Putnam paid him a cool $50 million for the two new books, which I’m sure did much to assuage any bruising to the ego.

Even so, Clancy didn’t come out with another Jack Ryan novel until 2010, which he didn’t even write – instead, it was written by Grant Blackwood, with his two follow-up novels, Against All Enemies and Locked On written by Peter Telep and Mark Greaney, respectively. That the true authors’ names appear on the cover in squintingly teeny-tiny print dwarfed under Tom Clancy’s name in huge typeface is actually quite remarkable, since Clancy didn’t even previously acknowledge his novels were being ghostwritten by other people past a brief mention in the acknowledgments to their “invaluable contribution to the manuscript.” Raymond Benson and David Michaels wrote the first two books in his Splinter Cell franchise, for which Clancy received millions from his publishers. No idea how much Benson and Michaels got for their work-for-hire hackery. The only thing Tom Clancy has to write these days to ensure a bestseller is two words: his name.

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