Matt Taibbi has two questions for Mitt Romney

Matt Taibbi has two questions for Mitt Romney:

I think the new strategy, rather than try to swim down into the deep waters of Romney's bogus plans, should be to stay on the surface and simply ask him simple questions. For instance, on his convoluted tax plan, just ask these two questions: 1) You've talked a lot about who's getting a tax break under your plan. But who's paying more? Where's the pain coming from? 2) If there is no pain, and the whole thing really is "revenue neutral," WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT? Now, cynically, we know what the "point" is. The point is to win an election by promising a 20% tax cut with one hand while promising that nobody will have to pay for it with the other. It's brilliant stuff – the ecstasy of pure bull.
I agree entirely. Why would one work so hard to get to the same place? Ergo, someone is going to pay, and in a world of regurgitated trickle-down economics, the likely answer is that the rich will get richer.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi has two questions for Mitt Romney

Two billion dollars per week for 11 years, but our leaders won’t level with us about Afghanistan

The War in Afghanistan. We've spent enormous blood and treasure on this adventure, yet it almost never shows up in most daily papers. The candidates for president almost never discuss it. In eleven years, no one has articulated why it is that we have invested so heavily in being there for eleven years. The official platitudes are based on horrific lies. No politician wants to discuss that our "ally" Pakistan is encouraging the Afghanistan insurgency. What should we say to the families of the soldiers who died there? Your loved ones died for what? "Freedom!" scream the politicians. No politician has discussed all of the things we could have done with that money had we truly invested in something permanent and valuable rather than something wasteful, tribal and destructive. No candidate has stated the obvious: We have been propping up a corrupt regime in Afghanistan. And the media cooperates with all of the above ignorance, making Afghanistan a bloodless, vague, distant thing that we don't know anything about, and we, as a nation, don't care that we know nothing about it. No one in power wants to admit that fighting wars is good insurance for re-election, or that it simply makes us feel like we're doing something meaningful and patriotic to fight a war, even an insane war.

Continue ReadingTwo billion dollars per week for 11 years, but our leaders won’t level with us about Afghanistan

On stealing massive numbers of votes

The November 2012 issue of Harper' Magazine includes an article title, "How to Rig an Election: The G.O.P. Aims to Paint the Country Red." Unfortunately, the article by Victoria Collier is not available online in its entirety. Here's a tiny excerpt of an extraordinary article that will leave you with a pit in your stomach and the phrase "faith based vote counting" resonating in your mind:

Blockbuster allegations are perhaps unsurprising given the group of Beltway insiders who helped to pass [the Help America Vote Act]. One central player was former Republican representative Bob Ney of Ohio, sentenced in 2006 to thirty months in prison for crimes connected with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff—whose firm was paid at least $275,000 by Diebold. HAVA's impact has been huge, accelerating a deterioration of our electoral system that most Americans have yet to recognize, let alone understand. We are literally losing our ballot—the key physical proof of our power as citizens.
Here's another haunting excerpt:
The statistically anomalous shifting of votes to the conservative right has become so pervasive in post-HAVA America that it now has a name of its own. Experts call it the "red shift."
This article should be required reading for all of those who want to simply assume that the will of the majority is being honored throughout the United States. Those who have investigated this issues over the past few elections have identified red flags everywhere they look when it comes to counting the vote. The Harper's article mentions a non-profit organization geared to making sure that every vote counts: Election Defense Fund. A peek at the EDF homepage provides this information:
According to the "father of exit polling," the late Warren Mitofsky, exit polls are intended solely for academic analysis of voting patterns and opinions (e.g., what did 25 to 34 year-old white males regard as the most important issue?) and not as any sort of check on the validity of the votecounts. Unless, of course, you are anywhere else on Earth (other than America), where exit polls are routinely employed, often with the sanction of the government of the United States, as just such a check mechanism, and have frequently led to official calls for electoral investigations and indeed electoral re-dos. In America, where votecounts in competitive and significant races consistently come out to the right of the exit polls (it is called the "red shift"), the media machine has waved off the exit polls, concluding, without so much as a quick peek under the hood of the vote-counting computers, that the exit polls must be "off" because they "oversample Democrats," conclusive evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. We're the Beacon Of Democracy, dammit--we don't need no stinkin’ exit polls! We're "one nation under God" so our elections must be honest!

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New cute bank trick

About two years ago, I took most of my money out of banks, putting it into a local credit union. I'm extremely happy with my credit union, which explains its procedures simply and doesn't hit you with dozens of tricks and traps. Well, maybe I should move my last account from Commerce Bank, a regional bank in the Midwest. Here's the latest trick/trap offered by Commerce. It offers online banking, but Commerce has decided that it will only let you SEE the past 6 months of your transactions online, unless you pay Commerce an extra fee of $6 or $10. Here's the notice that popped up on the Commerce website. You might be thinking what I'm thinking: They already HAVE all of the customer account data . It's not like it costs them anything more to display it ALL. But they would rather that you pay them something for nothing. After viewing the above page on my browser I took the above screen shot. I then tried to move forward by indicating that I would pay $0 for six months of displayed data. That's when I got the error prompt indicating that I still needed to make a "choice." Apparently, "Free" is not a valid choice. I had to log out and back in to circumvent this deceptive screen.

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How the Presidential Debates became almost useless.

At The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald refers to the work of historian George Farah:

He described how the two political parties in the 1990s joined forces to wrest control over the presidential debates away from the independent League of Women Voters, which had long resisted the parties' efforts to shield their presidential candidates from genuine surprise or challenge. Now run by the party-controlled Commission on Presidential Debates, these rituals are designed to do little more than " eliminate spontaneity" and "exclude all viable third-party voices". Citing a just-leaked 21-page "memorandum of understanding" secretly negotiated by the two campaigns to govern the rules of the debates, Farah recounted: "We have a private corporation that was created by the Republican and Democratic parties called the Commission on Presidential Debates. It seized control of the presidential debates precisely because the League was independent, precisely because this women's organization had the guts to stand up to the candidates that the major-party candidates had nominated. And instead of making public these contracts and resisting the major-party candidates' manipulations, the commission allows the candidates to negotiate these 21-page contracts that dictate all the fundamental terms of the debates."
What is the result of this behind the scenes usurpation? Greenwald explains:
Here then, within this one process of structuring the presidential debates, we have every active ingredient that typically defines, and degrades, US democracy. The two parties collude in secret. The have the same interests and goals. Everything is done to ensure that the political process is completely scripted and devoid of any spontaneity or reality. All views that reside outside the narrow confines of the two parties are rigidly excluded. Anyone who might challenge or subvert the two-party duopoly is rendered invisible.

Continue ReadingHow the Presidential Debates became almost useless.