That shall be the day

Ocean currents to the rescue.

Still waters run deep. But deep enough to power the world?

History will redeem Bush

How many days left?

Sarah Sarah!

Hey nonny nonny

Racist breathalyzer

Are their limits to defense of a client? [more]

Bailout criminal?

According to Naomi Klein's latest article in The Nation, "The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington's handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal." The article is called "In Praise of a Rocky Transition." ... "Criminal"? Explain.[more]

The face of the new politics

President-elect Barack Obama's 3 million campaign volunteers got re-enlistment notices this week.

Campaign manager David Plouffe, in a mass e-mail sent Wednesday to former workers, asked how much time they can spare for four missions integral to Obama's effort to transform his victory into a broader political movement.[more]

Stuff happens. Right?

Nobody fronts the results of an internal CIA inquiry that revealed the agency purposefully misled Congress and investigators during inquiries relating to the 2001 shooting of an airplane carrying American missionaries in Peru. One of the missionaries and her 7-month-old daughter were killed. While at the time the CIA insisted it was one mistake in an otherwise successful anti-narcotics program, the new report reveals that the agency repeatedly failed to make sure that sufficient care was taken to identify and warn the planes before calling on Peruvian fighter pilots to shoot down the target.

From Slate's Today's Papers

The wrecking crew

"I'm beginning to wonder if there's a single agency in the United States government that conservatives haven't left in worse shape than they found it." [more]

So that's the secret

Barack Obama "doesn't have that thing in him that needs to be loved," NPR political reporter Don Gonyea told an audience at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum. "He ran a remarkable and disciplined campaign. It was a wonder to behold."

The "conservative" dilemma

The right is divided into ideological conservatives and dispositional conservatives. The ideological conservatives hold to a faith linking small government and more tax-cutting to extreme social conservatism. They talk obsessively about returning to the glory days of Ronald Reagan and sometimes drop Sarah Palin’s name as a talisman. The dispositional conservatives want to check government’s influence on the economy but not eliminate it. They want solutions that are as unobtrusive as possible, but they do want solutions. The ideological conservatives will hold sway for a while, but the dispositional conservatives will triumph eventually. For the right, there is no alternative. [more]

Under the media radar

"It's been out for a while, but still cannot be mentioned enough. Project Censored, a media research and analysis group based at California's Sonoma State University has released the 25 most important stories that are completely ignored by the mainstream media."

A whodunit with strong movie potential

The oldest genetically identifiable nuclear family met a violent death, according to analysis of remains from 4,600-year-old burials in Germany. [more]

Make you mad? It does me.

Water is the new oil for global financial powerhouses and water is being commoditized and traded in global stock exchanges. [More]

Follow the money (if you can find it).

$2 Trillion Handed out by Paulson and Bernanke, But Who Got It, Nobody Knows. [More]

Let the games begin

It featured minimal graphics, no sound effects, and deeply flawed
gameplay. Yet one of the most important game titles of 2008 was played
by thousands and helped change the face of American politics. That game
was My.BarackObama.com. [more]

We'll wait and see.

Under Obama, a newly interactive government?

Test graphic.

Test graphic.

Secrets of talk radio

Read this and the appended comments. Then read the preceding item. Then think over the question of how Obama won?

Stale blood with stale views

The Sunday talk shows: marinade for a picked public opinion.

The real two Americas

Forget Red vs. Blue -- It's the Educated vs. People Easily Fooled by Propaganda

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted November 12, 2008.

Millions of Americans live in a non-reality-based belief system informed by childish clichés - they can barely differentiate between lies and truth.
Tools

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and cliches. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities. [more]

The Legacy

Lest we forget all of the things that Bush brought to the presidency.

We let it happen.

MIAMI (Reuters) - Former Guantanamo prisoners released after years of detention without charge went home to find themselves stigmatized and shunned, viewed either as terrorists or U.S. spies, according to a report released on Wednesday.

The report by human rights advocates urged U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to form an independent, nonpartisan commission with subpoena powers to investigate the treatment of U.S. detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

"We cannot sweep this dark chapter in our nation's history under the rug by simply closing the Guantanamo prison camp," said study co-author Eric Stover, director of the University of California at Berkeley's Human Rights Center. [more]

What does it take to just get over it?

Many conservative pundits and Republican officeholders on the national stage have reacted to the election of Barack Obama as a promising step forward in the history of race relations and democracy in the U.S. But gaining much less coverage from the national media are local reactions that are far less accepting and positive. [more]

The high price of 'security'

Since 9/11, more than three dozen federal air marshals have been charged with crimes, and hundreds more have been accused of misconduct, an investigation by ProPublica, a non-profit journalism organization, has found. Cases range from drunken driving and domestic violence to aiding a human-trafficking ring and trying to smuggle explosives from Afghanistan. [more]

68 Days and Counting

This past weekend was the anniversary of Cicero's famous speech to  the Roman Senate denouncing Catiline. It begins with the quotable:  When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How  long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an  end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does  now? [more]