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Greetings. We begin tonight with the last communication from Jack Layton, party lead of the Canadian NDP, as he finally lost his battle with cancer at 61 years of age.
We go from there to an interesting set of statistical data from polls - as a group, the Tea Party are the least popular of twenty-four groups, ranking less favorable than Muslims, Atheists, and other routinely-disparaged groups. Furthermore, the data collected disproves the idea that the Tea Party are secular conservatives concerned about secular issues - the biggest indicator as to whether someone became a Tea Partier was whether they were a Social/Religious Issues Republican before there was a Tea Party. Which should make it much easier for people to understand why they're doing things that a supposedly secular movement would normally avoid.
Out in the world today, the rebellion in Libya, aided by NATO airstrikes and support, took control of most of the capitol, Tripoli. Revitalized hope of the Arab Spring continueing springs to life afterward, after the story in Libya had mostly died due to not a lot of protest over it and not a lot of apparent progress for one side or the other. The Spring is not universally favored, as Mr. Greenfield suggests that the ouster of Mubarak has destablized the one thing Israel had going for it in the Arab world, and now ISrael will have to defend themselves on all sides again. Mr. Thomas believes there's no way Libya will become a pluralistic democracy in the U.S. model, because they also think that The Bloodthirsty Religion has a reasonable legal code, and he also suggests that the new government in Libya be forced to pay reparations to NATO and the United States for getting assistance in overthrowing the dictator. Mr. Shapiro concurs in the belief that no Arab country can ever hope to be truly free so long as they have Islam.
Finally, the Japanese prime minister resigned his post over the handling of Fukushima Daiichi and economic malaise in the country.
In the United States, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake on the eastern part of the country shocked quite a few residents. And this is right before the I of the hurricane season is scheduled to make landfall and throw high winds at the same coast.
Defense contractors are proven to be following the HBGary profile unearthed earlier in the year, developing and using false social media profiles to manipulate opinions, trends, and the social media consciousness to their benefit. Elsewhere, conservative group insists that the Justice Department is working with a liberal group to increase the number of registrations of people eligible to vote but not necessarily able to travel to polling places, because they see voter fraud, I guess, or some sort of strange collusion.
The New York Police Department operates far outside its jurisdiction, with large amounts of assistance from the CIA, so they can spy on Muslim communities, believing them to be hotbeds of terrorist activity - all to a degree that would have civil liberties lawsuits flying in a torrent of paper cuts if the federal government acted in such a way. What happened to the days when everyone should be able to trust that the police would do their work professionally and without apparent prejudice? Are those part of the Time That Never Was that conservatives are always fond for? Because women's issues have serious lack of justice from the police as well.
Then again, when you have a ministry that claims female masturbation twice a week to erotica, or even romance novels, is the sign of a pornography addiction, one must wonder where the Anti-Sex League has actually put the goalposts.
A science teacher who called creationism "superstitious nonsense" was granted immunity by a United States appeals court, ruling that the law did not clearly spell out that teacher hostility to religious beliefs violated the First Amendment, and indicating that teachers have some amount of latitude in their speech and actions because they are supposed to get their students to think critically and use their faculties.
And on the things that show how much the economy is no longer about anyone who isn't filthy rich, articles pointing out that the economy, both in income and expenses, is driven entirely by the rich, who already make 2 of every 3 dollars and could probably stop the recession if they decided to spend rather than hoard, so much so that the middle class may not be savable, because they're not going to matter - it will be the rich and the rest. And considering the rich have been doing their best to ship all sorts of manufacturing, even of high technology, overseas so as to cut their costs, and then dulling their management, to the point of killing their worker base through the use of outdaded top-down command and control measures, there may not be anything left for a supposed middle class to use to return to primacy. Perhaps we will see John Galt's paradise, after all. (Although, there may yet be hope.) The Republican government isn't going ot help you - they want to sell off the portfolios of the government-sponsored enterprises to private investor funds - so all those foreclosed homes can be bought for a fraction of their worth and then sold to others for large profits. But you can't buy those houses, only the firms that are using the Republicans to accomplish this task.
And strangely, despite the fact that everyone could use a little redistribution, a lot of people who could really use it aren't all that favorable to it, because redistribution and government assistance might vault the few people under them into a position over them. People would rather have someone to look down on than to decide to help everyone.
In the sciences and technologies, a definition of addiction that finds the root causes in neurological imbalances, thus making it a primary illness, rather than a symptom of some other illness.
A modified and concentrated version of MDMA may be a useful cancer-killing drug.
Steve Jobs resigns his position as Apple CEO, a move apparently already well-known to the company and not expected to disrupt them in any way.
Enterprising hackers have developed a way to determine what key you press on your Android smartphone through the use of motion sensors in the phone. Because pressing the button makes the phone move, and the sensors are sensitive enough for the keylogger to guess which one it might be.
A Chinese documentary may have accidentally provided evidence that the Chinese government is conducting cyber-warfare using compromised IP addresses worldwide.
Finally, GameStop petulantly pulls a coupon from the retail version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution because the coupon included a free cloud-based version of the game from a competitor service.
In opinions, Mr. Cheney wanted another Land War - this one in Africa, as he pushed for the previous administrator to bomb Syria. Because the previous ones weren't enough, apparently.
Mr. Zuckerman attacks the President for being an ineffective leader and demanding that he find a way to fix all the problems with the country, including jobs, the tax code, and the perception that he lacks leadership. Mr. Zuckerman raises the spectre of "half of the people in this country don't pay taxes!", meaning "after they get their refunds, half of the people don't pay income taxes as a net value" - they still pay plenty of taxes, like payroll taxes, Social Security and Medicare taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, and other such things, and then have them refunded in one chunk. At least when Mr. Golub says the same thing, he complains about special interests and tax loopholes that make it possible for the rich to escape paying a lot of tax as well as those items that the working stiffs are able to take advantage of as well, before insisting that the correct pathway is to cut everyone's taxes, remove all regulations, make no investment at all in alternative energy when what we have currently is good enough for him, and force government workers and contractors to be paid what he believes is fair market value for their services, meaning "a little less than what the private sector thinks is an ideal payment and compensation package for them", assuming those workers would still have a job in his government that has trimmed "unnecessary" departments, like Education and Energy.
However, what should be the object lesson of this Presidency is that for work to be done, a President and his Congress must be able to work in concert. If either President or Congress are digging in their heels and being diametrically opposed to each other, then there's no work to be done. To blame the President when the Congress isn't giving him anything other than their Randian fantasies seems to be missing the point. The President could produce a hundred thousand proposals and if Congress didn't take up any of them, then exactly what sort of leadership is lacking? Apparently, however, to make mention of that elephant in the room is to draw the scorn of conservative commentators for not manning up and declaring that it's all his fault things are so bad, and to fix those problems, he will forthwith become a Tea Party Republican.
Mr. Brownfield lays all blame for economic woes at the feet of the President for not going along with the Ryan plan to prevent the government from being able to spend money and forcing the closure of its most relied-upon social programs, while criticizing the President for trying to support green job creation, because to him, it's a scam, and not at all because the floor of the economy dropped out and few companies seem willing to invest in green tech. Because it's easier to demagogue your opponent than admit to the complexity of matters (example: paragraph above, for both me and Mr. Zuckerman) Mr. Moore takes the opportunity to praise Saint Reagan and his plan of massive tax cuts as the reason the last recession became the boom times of the 80s, and decry the stimulus attempt as a failure (even though just about everyone agrees that the stimulus wasn't enough to be effective and deliver on its promises). Messrs. Christian and Robbins then raise the spectre of a value-added tax as a primary plank of the Obama tax reform platform, something that I'm guessing the President would be quite surprised to hear as his own policy.
Mr. Prelutsky believes Washington suffers from narcissism (but Democrats, and the President, suffer far more than others), the next president merely has to undo everything this one does and he and the country will be wildly successful, but that he should go farther and dismantle the federal government excepting for whatever Mr. Prelutsky believes is a Constitutional function of government, give the finger to every liberal group, and that isolationism is the best foreign policy.
Finally, Mr. Stossel argues that economics is the true path to morality, and if The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) is willing to put a price on a service, be it child labor, selling organs, or other things we would normally consider wrong, then we should embrace The Market and not any sort of social ideas about whether it is appropriate for children to work. And Mr. Williams insists that citizens shouldn't have to obey any law that places any restrictions on contracts that they will or want to enter into. Mr. Galt would certainly be very proud of today's conservative movement and their devotees.
We go from there to an interesting set of statistical data from polls - as a group, the Tea Party are the least popular of twenty-four groups, ranking less favorable than Muslims, Atheists, and other routinely-disparaged groups. Furthermore, the data collected disproves the idea that the Tea Party are secular conservatives concerned about secular issues - the biggest indicator as to whether someone became a Tea Partier was whether they were a Social/Religious Issues Republican before there was a Tea Party. Which should make it much easier for people to understand why they're doing things that a supposedly secular movement would normally avoid.
Out in the world today, the rebellion in Libya, aided by NATO airstrikes and support, took control of most of the capitol, Tripoli. Revitalized hope of the Arab Spring continueing springs to life afterward, after the story in Libya had mostly died due to not a lot of protest over it and not a lot of apparent progress for one side or the other. The Spring is not universally favored, as Mr. Greenfield suggests that the ouster of Mubarak has destablized the one thing Israel had going for it in the Arab world, and now ISrael will have to defend themselves on all sides again. Mr. Thomas believes there's no way Libya will become a pluralistic democracy in the U.S. model, because they also think that The Bloodthirsty Religion has a reasonable legal code, and he also suggests that the new government in Libya be forced to pay reparations to NATO and the United States for getting assistance in overthrowing the dictator. Mr. Shapiro concurs in the belief that no Arab country can ever hope to be truly free so long as they have Islam.
Finally, the Japanese prime minister resigned his post over the handling of Fukushima Daiichi and economic malaise in the country.
In the United States, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake on the eastern part of the country shocked quite a few residents. And this is right before the I of the hurricane season is scheduled to make landfall and throw high winds at the same coast.
Defense contractors are proven to be following the HBGary profile unearthed earlier in the year, developing and using false social media profiles to manipulate opinions, trends, and the social media consciousness to their benefit. Elsewhere, conservative group insists that the Justice Department is working with a liberal group to increase the number of registrations of people eligible to vote but not necessarily able to travel to polling places, because they see voter fraud, I guess, or some sort of strange collusion.
The New York Police Department operates far outside its jurisdiction, with large amounts of assistance from the CIA, so they can spy on Muslim communities, believing them to be hotbeds of terrorist activity - all to a degree that would have civil liberties lawsuits flying in a torrent of paper cuts if the federal government acted in such a way. What happened to the days when everyone should be able to trust that the police would do their work professionally and without apparent prejudice? Are those part of the Time That Never Was that conservatives are always fond for? Because women's issues have serious lack of justice from the police as well.
Then again, when you have a ministry that claims female masturbation twice a week to erotica, or even romance novels, is the sign of a pornography addiction, one must wonder where the Anti-Sex League has actually put the goalposts.
A science teacher who called creationism "superstitious nonsense" was granted immunity by a United States appeals court, ruling that the law did not clearly spell out that teacher hostility to religious beliefs violated the First Amendment, and indicating that teachers have some amount of latitude in their speech and actions because they are supposed to get their students to think critically and use their faculties.
And on the things that show how much the economy is no longer about anyone who isn't filthy rich, articles pointing out that the economy, both in income and expenses, is driven entirely by the rich, who already make 2 of every 3 dollars and could probably stop the recession if they decided to spend rather than hoard, so much so that the middle class may not be savable, because they're not going to matter - it will be the rich and the rest. And considering the rich have been doing their best to ship all sorts of manufacturing, even of high technology, overseas so as to cut their costs, and then dulling their management, to the point of killing their worker base through the use of outdaded top-down command and control measures, there may not be anything left for a supposed middle class to use to return to primacy. Perhaps we will see John Galt's paradise, after all. (Although, there may yet be hope.) The Republican government isn't going ot help you - they want to sell off the portfolios of the government-sponsored enterprises to private investor funds - so all those foreclosed homes can be bought for a fraction of their worth and then sold to others for large profits. But you can't buy those houses, only the firms that are using the Republicans to accomplish this task.
And strangely, despite the fact that everyone could use a little redistribution, a lot of people who could really use it aren't all that favorable to it, because redistribution and government assistance might vault the few people under them into a position over them. People would rather have someone to look down on than to decide to help everyone.
In the sciences and technologies, a definition of addiction that finds the root causes in neurological imbalances, thus making it a primary illness, rather than a symptom of some other illness.
A modified and concentrated version of MDMA may be a useful cancer-killing drug.
Steve Jobs resigns his position as Apple CEO, a move apparently already well-known to the company and not expected to disrupt them in any way.
Enterprising hackers have developed a way to determine what key you press on your Android smartphone through the use of motion sensors in the phone. Because pressing the button makes the phone move, and the sensors are sensitive enough for the keylogger to guess which one it might be.
A Chinese documentary may have accidentally provided evidence that the Chinese government is conducting cyber-warfare using compromised IP addresses worldwide.
Finally, GameStop petulantly pulls a coupon from the retail version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution because the coupon included a free cloud-based version of the game from a competitor service.
In opinions, Mr. Cheney wanted another Land War - this one in Africa, as he pushed for the previous administrator to bomb Syria. Because the previous ones weren't enough, apparently.
Mr. Zuckerman attacks the President for being an ineffective leader and demanding that he find a way to fix all the problems with the country, including jobs, the tax code, and the perception that he lacks leadership. Mr. Zuckerman raises the spectre of "half of the people in this country don't pay taxes!", meaning "after they get their refunds, half of the people don't pay income taxes as a net value" - they still pay plenty of taxes, like payroll taxes, Social Security and Medicare taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, and other such things, and then have them refunded in one chunk. At least when Mr. Golub says the same thing, he complains about special interests and tax loopholes that make it possible for the rich to escape paying a lot of tax as well as those items that the working stiffs are able to take advantage of as well, before insisting that the correct pathway is to cut everyone's taxes, remove all regulations, make no investment at all in alternative energy when what we have currently is good enough for him, and force government workers and contractors to be paid what he believes is fair market value for their services, meaning "a little less than what the private sector thinks is an ideal payment and compensation package for them", assuming those workers would still have a job in his government that has trimmed "unnecessary" departments, like Education and Energy.
However, what should be the object lesson of this Presidency is that for work to be done, a President and his Congress must be able to work in concert. If either President or Congress are digging in their heels and being diametrically opposed to each other, then there's no work to be done. To blame the President when the Congress isn't giving him anything other than their Randian fantasies seems to be missing the point. The President could produce a hundred thousand proposals and if Congress didn't take up any of them, then exactly what sort of leadership is lacking? Apparently, however, to make mention of that elephant in the room is to draw the scorn of conservative commentators for not manning up and declaring that it's all his fault things are so bad, and to fix those problems, he will forthwith become a Tea Party Republican.
Mr. Brownfield lays all blame for economic woes at the feet of the President for not going along with the Ryan plan to prevent the government from being able to spend money and forcing the closure of its most relied-upon social programs, while criticizing the President for trying to support green job creation, because to him, it's a scam, and not at all because the floor of the economy dropped out and few companies seem willing to invest in green tech. Because it's easier to demagogue your opponent than admit to the complexity of matters (example: paragraph above, for both me and Mr. Zuckerman) Mr. Moore takes the opportunity to praise Saint Reagan and his plan of massive tax cuts as the reason the last recession became the boom times of the 80s, and decry the stimulus attempt as a failure (even though just about everyone agrees that the stimulus wasn't enough to be effective and deliver on its promises). Messrs. Christian and Robbins then raise the spectre of a value-added tax as a primary plank of the Obama tax reform platform, something that I'm guessing the President would be quite surprised to hear as his own policy.
Mr. Prelutsky believes Washington suffers from narcissism (but Democrats, and the President, suffer far more than others), the next president merely has to undo everything this one does and he and the country will be wildly successful, but that he should go farther and dismantle the federal government excepting for whatever Mr. Prelutsky believes is a Constitutional function of government, give the finger to every liberal group, and that isolationism is the best foreign policy.
Finally, Mr. Stossel argues that economics is the true path to morality, and if The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) is willing to put a price on a service, be it child labor, selling organs, or other things we would normally consider wrong, then we should embrace The Market and not any sort of social ideas about whether it is appropriate for children to work. And Mr. Williams insists that citizens shouldn't have to obey any law that places any restrictions on contracts that they will or want to enter into. Mr. Galt would certainly be very proud of today's conservative movement and their devotees.
