The Onion reports on a frustrated actor:
Calling the process of acting as though you are someone you are not a "pretty ridiculous thing to do," actor Ed Harris, 60, admitted to reporters Tuesday that he frequently feels silly pretending to be another person.
This is the formula for how big money corporations defang state Attorneys General. This story of corruption is presented in a highly detailed well-written piece at Huffpo concerning the firing of two up and coming Assistant Attorneys General who we're gunning for the bad guys on mortgage fraud cases. Once you connect the dots, you can see that these good-guy Assistants were canned because they were trying to do their jobs well.
Many cite the forced departure of Clarkson and Edwards as a vivid example of how mortgage companies and law firms successfully exploit connections to Florida's attorney general to soften legal probes, insulating themselves against the consequences of alleged law-breaking.
About a year ago, I was speaking to man whose son was serving in the U.S. military in Iraq. Without any provocation the man announced to me that we ought to simply drop a nuclear bomb on Iran and "take care of that problem once and for all." I was not surprised to hear such a blunt call for such widespread sterile violence. I'd heard talk like this before on AM talk radio, and I've heard it since. I'm well-aware that many of our conservative citizens and politicians are wired up in this Manichean/essentialist way, where all people residing in the Middle-East are suspect (or worse) and America is the greatest nation in the history of the entire galaxy, no matter that it refuses to take care of its own while burning $2 billion/week in Afghanistan. I've heard far too many people speak simplistically of burning millions of Iranians in a nuclear fire, all the while racking up such a proposed mass-murder with a shrug after labeling it "collateral damage." This is what it's now like in the horror-carnival that much of America has become. For those of us who are able to pull our minds out of tribal mode even a bit are witness to hordes of blindered fellow citizens who have been turned intensely incurious by a mass media obsessed with conflict pornography and urged on by psychopathic politicians. [More . . .]
At Huffpo, Lawrence Lessig has eloquently encouraged all of us to reach out to all others who seek to return control of the government to the People rather than the 1%. We should especially do this regarding people with whom we disagree on many other issues:
[W]hen Ron Paul criticizes the "Wall Street bailouts," and attacks government support for "special businesses" with special access, we should say, "that's right, Congressman Paul." Bailouts for the rich is not the American way. And when Rick Santelli launches a Tea Party movement, by attacking the government's subsidies "to the losers," we should ask in reply, what about the subsidies "to the winners" -- to the banks who engineered the dumbest form of socialism ever invented by man: socialized risk with privatized benefits. What, we should ask Mr. Santelli, about that subsidy? Or when Republican Senator Richard Shelby tells NBC's Meet the Press that the message in bank reform "should be, unambiguously, that nothing's too big to fail," we should say that's right, Senator, and it's about time our Congress recognized it. Or when Sarah Palin calls GE the "poster child of crony capitalism," we should say "Amen, Mamma Grisly": For whether or not we are all believers in "capitalism," we should all be opponents of "crony capitalism," the form of capitalism that is increasingly dominating Washington, and that was partly responsible for the catastrophe on Wall Street in 2008, and hence the catastrophes throughout America since.