Ralph Nader: Obama is spineless

At Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman asked Ralph Nader for his thoughts on Obama's passing over of Elizabeth Warren regarding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

RALPH NADER: Well, our spineless president speaks again with a forked tongue. He talks about a tough agency, and he’s just thrown overboard the toughest federal cop on corporate crime, fraud and abuse against millions of Americans’ pensions and savings, and then tries to convince people that he’s really being tough against Wall Street. He’s basically a political coward. And the problem with that is not just detonating Elizabeth Warren’s career culmination of heading the agency that she conceived and built out of the Treasury Department in the last few months, but he’s signaling once again to the rogue Republicans in Congress that he has no backbone, that he’s going to cave. And that’s what he’s been doing. He threw Van Jones overboard, because Glenn Beck attacked—of all people—attacked Van Jones, his assistant in the White House. He doesn’t stand by his people, unless these people stand for Wall Street, like William Daley, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers. You’d think he’d give at least one post—one post—to the consumer constituency, the liberals and progressives, that brought him to the White House. But that is not the way he calculates it.

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More on the AT&T – T-Mobile Merger

Tim Karr of Free Press writes this:

Congress may be finally waking up to the obvious: that the massive merger of AT&T with T-Mobile just doesn't make sense. No amount of contributions from AT&T, or visits from AT&T lobbyists, will alter this simple truth. On Wednesday, the Senate's top antitrust official, Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, weighed the facts and wrote a letter urging Attorney General Eric Holder and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to reject AT&T's proposed takeover. Sen. Kohl wrote that "the acquisition, if permitted to proceed, would likely cause substantial harm to competition and consumers, would be contrary to antitrust law and not in the public interest, and therefore should be blocked by your agencies." Sen. Kohl's joined a growing chorus of opposition in Washington to the proposed merger. Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) also submitted a letter on Wednesday stating that they believed AT&T's takeover of T-Mobile "would be a troubling backward step in federal public policy -- a retrenchment from nearly two decades of promoting competition and open markets to acceptance of a duopoly in the wireless marketplace."

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Governor Perry and the “Save America” Zoo

Governor Rick Perry, who may or may not be running for president on the Republican ticket (any day now we may—or may not—get an announcement) has put out a call for a great big Texas style get-together prayer meeting.  He has a passel of preachers coming to harrangue about the problems of America. There’s only a couple of problems with the guest list and what it says about Perry. He has one preacher who said that Hitler was sent by god to force all the Jews back to Israel (part of the Grand Design). Another insists that not one more permit be issued for another mosque anywhere in the United States. We have another who claims that the reason Japan’s stock market crashed was because the Emperor had sex with the sun goddess. Still one more claims that demons are being released through the good works of people who are doing those good works for all the wrong reasons. [more . . .]

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Free Speech Above All

Johann Hari on Religious Censorship This video is an impassioned declaration on the importance of not allowing "sensitivities" and an unwillingness to offend become a force against free speech.  It is also, underneath, an argument for rejecting the pseuodthink of irrational defenses of absurdity.

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Denominations of the Tea Party

There appear to be three overlapping major factions of the current political movement called the Tea Party. I had thought there were really only two until recently. The two to which I allude are the Theocracy Movement, and the Libertarians. Sure, there is actually a registered Libertarian political party. But as of the last election cycle, unelectable Libertarians like Rand Paul were elected under the Republican banner due to Tea Party support. But today I found the article The Tea Party Stormfront that shows a real and dangerous overlap between the Tea Party and Stormfront, an umbrella for the KKK and other White Nation groups. This article shows how you can look up the data yourself, and how to find the instructions given by StormFront for their members to blend in with and lend their support to the Tea Party. With luck, this is the least fraction of the whole. It does seem to me that the Theocracy branch is really the bulk of this tail trying to wag to political dog. And making scary progress. Discussion?

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