Onyx Lynx

• Dick Armey, another serial harasser and hypocrite.  
• Doc Gooden, talking to Jason Fry and Greg Prince (Faith and Fear in Flushing) about his memoir.  Which I will buy.

• Alexa O'Brien has a searchable database of the filings, rulings, and transcripts in the Bradley Manning case.  (Hat tip to Daisy.)  This, for example, is a transcript of the hearing held 6/26/13 (yesterday as of this writing), examining a witness; catch the disclaimer (p. 3).
• Low-tech spying, agents provocateurs, dirty tricks; your government at work.

  Sometimes, “intelligence” moves in the opposite direction -- from private corporations to public agencies. Among the collectors of such “intelligence” are entities that, like the various intelligence and law enforcement outfits, do not make distinctions between terrorists and nonviolent protesters. ConsiderTransCanada, the corporation that plans to build the 1,179 mile Keystone-XL tar sands pipeline across the U. S. and in the process realize its “vision to become the leading energy infrastructure company in North America.“ The anti-pipeline group Bold Nebraska filed a successful Freedom of Information Act request with the Nebraska State Patrol and so was able to putTransCanada’s briefing slideshow up online.
  
  So it can be documented in living color that the company lectured federal agents and local police to look into the use of “anti-terrorism statutes” against peaceful anti-Keystone activists.

  Todd Gitlin at TomDispatch, via AlterNet.
• The dangers of Big Anything by Richard Eskow, AlterNet.
• Terrance Heath, Republic of T, on When It Changed.  (Sorry; I couldn't help it.)
• Why "getting rid of Fannie and Freddie" is unrealistic (Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism).
• Driftglass, just because this paragraph cracked me up:

  But history runs in two directions, and so having already conquered the past and scrubbed it of any reference of the actual, ugly Conservatism that shaped so much of recent American history and gave David Brooks a career, today Mr. Brooks turned his attention to America's bright, multicultural future where, apparently, the entire Republican Party has wandered off into the woods and been eaten by bears.

• Saddle up that gnat; I'm putting any respect I might have for the governor of Texas on its back along with a gnat-size ham sandwich.  Which is, by the way, larger.

The Supes had other ideas.  Sorry.  Respect for the judiciary and all that.  But apparently the majority of justices spent the last couple of years not reading the papers (I don't expect them to read this blog.  That would be silly.  But major newspapers, even the Washington Post, have been concerned with the rollback of voting rights in the guise of so-called "voter fraud."  And remember, the "voter fraud" that has been turned up has been committed by Republicans and/or conservatives.  There are more lightning strikes hitting millionaire lottery winners than "voter fraud") or the case law.

Here is the actual decision.  Most of the really enraged writing got posted yesterday (I was inarticulate with fury, and then I went to a baseball game, which my team won despite the attempt to do the Wave counterclockwise), but Jesse Curtis had a nice essay yesterday, and a longer piece today, in which he states:

I'm actually more disturbed by the conservative reaction to the ruling than by the decision itself. I have not yet seen a single conservative criticize the decision. They are making it abundantly clear that they oppose proactive federal efforts to protect Americans' rights. Indeed, the predominant line of argument conservatives are taking implies that they envision the eventual repeal of all civil rights laws. They are treating yesterday's decision as almost self-evident progress. The idea seems to be that since we've made so much progress against racism, civil rights laws are now ugly distortions in our otherwise colorblind corpus of law. Removing protections is thus not a step back, but a ratification of the progress we've made.

As always, context is the terrifying enemy of racial conservatives. So let's introduce them to some context. In the United States of 2013, minorities are racially profiled with impunity, arrested for drug crimes out of all proportion to their use of drugs, receive harsher average sentences for identical crimes, attend unequally funded schools, frequently attend segregated schools that are, according to the Brown decision, inherently unequal, live in neighborhoods of much higher average poverty than almost any whites are exposed to, bear the brunt of environmental pollution, face pervasive discrimination in hiring even when their qualifications are identical, are discriminated against by realtors and banks, and, you get the idea. We're not going to have a debate about these things; if you do not accept them you are not ready to have an honest discussion. The point is, given this state of affairs, the urgent priority is to identify what more we can do to tear down this racist edifice. Worrying about repealing old civil rights laws, even if they were no longer needed, would be pretty low on our list of priorities.

Sorry; that was the smallest chunk I could take.

From the dissent (p.13, J. Ginsburg):

All told, between 1982 and 2006, DOJ objections blocked over 700 voting changes based on a determination that the changes were discriminatory. H. R. Rep. No. 109–478, at 21. Congress found that the majority of DOJ objections included findings of discriminatory intent, see 679 F. 3d, at 867, and that the changes blocked by preclearance were “calculated decisions to keep minority voters from fully participating in the political process.” H. R. Rep. 109–478, at 21. On top of that, over the same time period the DOJ and private plaintiffs succeeded in more than 100 actions to enforce the §5 preclearance requirements. 1 Evidence of Continued Need 186, 250.

Examples (recent examples, too) are given on pp.15-17 of the dissent, which is 37 pages long (the rest of the opinion is 31 pages).  I hear Justice Ginsburg actually yelled at Justice Scalia et al.  I don't blame her.  I've mislaid John Lewis' statement, but it was pretty scathing.

(In other news, DOMA is (partly) down and Prop 8 (California) is dead.  And I am happy about that.  John Scalzi's reaction.  Presumably the NOM people are making like Denethor after the beacon at Minas Tirith is lit.)

• Bobby (Blue) Bland, bluesman.  (Other stuff, too.)
• Richard Matheson, writer.
• Gary David Goldberg, writer and producer.
• Parke Godwin, writer.  (Wintermind seems to pop up at the weirdest times.)

(It wants to be a palindrome.  Later.)

The (former) Pan Am terminal at JFK is to be demolished.  (NYTimes article)

(Never flew Pan Am.  Might have landed there on a return flight once.  Kennedy is always under construction.)

Supreme Court decision, Salinas v. Texas, from Bloomberg Law, via Better Than Salt Money.

Yes, we're in trouble.

The Supreme Court changed the rules today. Miranda, as a functional object, no longer exists. Silence is no defense against self-incrimination; refusing to speak can be used against you as evidence of guilt. One must specifically invoke the 5th Amendment to get it’s protections. That’s my takeaway (with some support) from Salinas v Texas.

First thing to know, cops don’t have to remind you of your rights if they don’t arrest you. If they can deny that you were a suspect until you slipped up and gave them something suspicious, they can ask you anything they like. Under this new ruling your silence can be used against you. If you stop talking, that’s suspicious, and can be used by the prosecution to show a guilty mind. Moreover, the only way to get out of that is to say the magic words, “I am not talking to you because I have a 5th Amendment right to avoid saying anything which might be used to incriminate me”.[Emphasis added by me.]

That 's pecunium.  There's more.  You might want to make up cards with that sentence, in case you forget.

Franz Kafka is guffawing.  As are totalitarian (and authoritarian) regimes the world over.  Why does the government hate our freedom?

• Sad news:  Pam's House Blend is going away.  (via Driftglass)
  
  Now, I didn't go there much. For one thing, for many years, Safari and her net host's code were deeply antagonistic; I would go there and the browser would either freeze or crash. Not optimal, no.  On the other hand, when that stopped being a problem, there was an occasional gold nugget to be had.  And Pam's "voice" was unmistakeable.  Also, she put me onto a couple of resources for Journey.
• They're listening to your calls.  Via both Comrade Misfit and Anna van Z, who are in different ways scathing.
1. Comrade Misfit:

   Do you mind the government knowing what books you've been reading? Unless you live in a good-sized area, chances are that the neighborhood bookstores are all gone. Which means that you're buying books over the Internet or borrowing them from your library, all of which means that the government can find out what you read, what magazines you subscribe to. Maybe you like to catch up with your favorite shows using the cable company's "on demand" feature-- which means you told the cable company what you like to watch. Do you use an "affinity" card in the grocery store? Did you sign up for the rewards points at your local movie house?

2. Anna van Z:

   We got us a full-blown Stasi/Secret Police-state up in here!

ETA: Apparently CNet got it wrong and has walked back the assertions about random warrantless eavesdropping. Nevertheless, it's time for precautions.

It's not paranoia if someone is really out to get you.

60

(Apparently I forgot.)

• Via the sidebar at Making Light:  "You commit three felonies a day."  (I'm a bit behind, but I was late to church this morning, and yesterday, I aborted a survey which claimed to be a quiz, but somehow all the questions were on personal details.  Uh-huh.  So I guess I'll have to find a Floridian porn website for dolphins, which is probably crossing state lines for immoral porpoises.)
• Pecunium on:
• the dangers of metadata
• the threat posed to the populace

  This shit matters because the slope to which it leads is serious, and steep. The laws we have are what protect us from each other, and from the basest aspects of our darker natures. Few of us would refrain from doing what we have to do to protect ourselves, and fear of those things against which there is no protection is a powerful appeal to the base natures of our little lizard brain.

• From ProPublica, via AlterNet:  What we don't know about NSA surveillance.  The word "unclear" appears a number of times.

Do we love Big Brother yet?

• Via the sidebar at Making Light, "How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps," with follow-up "Inequality, MOOCs and The Predator Elite." I think I like this guy.
• From the first article:

  Within one generation, in five easy steps, not only have the scholars and intellectuals of the country been silenced and nearly wiped out, but the entire institution has been hijacked, and recreated as a machine through which future generations will ALL be impoverished, indebted and silenced. Now, low wage migrant professors teach repetitive courses they did not design to students who travel through on a kind of conveyor belt, only to be spit out, indebted and desperate into a jobless economy. The only people immediately benefitting inside this system are the administrative class – whores to the corporatized colonizers, earning money in this system in order to oversee this travesty. But the most important thing to keep in mind is this: The real winners, the only people truly benefitting from the big-picture meltdown of the American university are those people who, in the 1960s, saw those vibrant college campuses as a threat to their established power. They are the same people now working feverishly to dismantle other social structures, everything from Medicare and Social Security to the Post Office.

• From the second:

  The game plan seems clear – destroy the teaching profession, then blame those educators still struggling against all odds to teach, hold them responsible for the systemic failures. Then replace a system which focused on the social good of education with a for-profit model run like an edu-factory. There is a reason that billionaires like Bill Gates have bought into education – and its the same reason that Gates owns over a half million dollars worth of Monsanto stock. Factory farming and factory-ed have the same goal: profit. And not for you or me. Certainly not for our children. But for Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates and the other 1%-ers who have muscled their way into ownership of the “education industry”. And, I will say it until I’m blue in the face (and yes that’s another Braveheart reference): Education is NOT a for-profit endeavor, any more than medicine should be. It is a social good, and must be treated as such. Teachers are professionals and know more about the complexities of educating individuals than the “Instructional Designers” and curriculum technicians who are doing their best to take over.
  
  [...]
  
  We’re all screwed. And we’ll stay screwed if we keep struggling as individuals, or as separate classes of professionals. We’ve got to come together and rise up together – all workers, across all platforms and industries – and put our talents and our multiple intelligences to use for our own benefit. Stop giving our talents and abilities away to the Predator Elite, and start working together to figure out how to use our talents for each other. If all exploited journalists stopped writing; if all exploited artists stopped creating; if all exploited educators stopped teaching — what would these exploiters have?

• Dan Baum at Harper's, suggesting that the gun control debate isn't really about gun control.
• On Robert Fletcher, recently dead, who managed the fruit farms of Japanese neighbors after they were interned in World War II.  Three newspaper articles, excerpted by Arthur Silber.

No, not really.

• Well, we really can't pretend to be better than totalitarian/authoritarian regimes now, can we.  (And just because they claim not to be logging content doesn't mean they're not logging content. So s p e a k  s  l  o  w  l  y, your security apparatchiks are listening, and they don't get big words.)
• "Trained for Totalitarianism" takes you through the history of why there has not been a huge uproar and riots in the streets (you weren't really expecting the Tea Partiers to protest, now, were you?); this game goes way back:

  I don't think it is possible to overstate the significance of this early childhood training. Of equal significance is the fact that these issues are almost never discussed in the course of political analysis. Yet there is a profound sense in which authoritarianism (and even totalitarianism) feel right to many people -- "right" in the sense that it is very familiar, that it is the environment in which they were first made to function.

  Arthur Silber, the clearest voice we've got. Yes, the article is long. Your eyes and brain need the exercise.
• Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism presents Dave Dayen on student loans as medieval indenture and why heavy student debt is a bad idea.

  Fixing the student debt problem is not going to be easy. But student debt penury is having enough of a macroeconomic impact to be capturing the attention of policymakers and possible real economy allies, such as consumer goods companies. But the biggest wake-up call has already come in the form of declining enrollments for law schools and other programs which were once seen as sure-fire routes to a middle class or better lifestyle.

• An appreciation of Iain Banks at Vagabond Scholar (Mr. Banks has terminal cancer).  Because you deserve a short break from banality.
• South Carolina, what can one say?  (Daisy Deadhead says it.)
• Speaking of South Carolina...  (Zandar Versus The Stupid.)
• Monsanto doesn't want anyone to know food was genetically tampered with.
• Political cowardice.

  The way I see it, if you can’t look the people in the eye and listen to them then you don’t belong in public office.
  
  [...]
  
  When you don’t have a good argument for doing something, the last thing you want to do is be confronted by thousands of people asking why the hell your ass is blocking Medicaid expansion.
  
  Still, it was a shocking display of tuck tail and run.
  
  Anyhoo, the people will not be ignored.
  
  Cue Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones and his magical fantastical listening, but not to you, tour of 2013. Missourians have been following Speaker Jones all over the state in an attempt to get him to listen to them about Medicaid Expansion. By the time the tour reached Eureka, Speaker Jones was so moved that he closed an open meeting.

  [clucking noises]  If they can't face their constituents with their shiv-the-poor program, perhaps they should rethink the shiv-the-poor program.  Just saying.
• Melissa McEwan on the constant unrelenting pressure on women to have children, even when they clearly don't want to.  I have a rantlet suggesting that the abstinence-only crap is a way of trapping women into pregnancy, and that abstinence-only is prima facie misogyny, but it starts getting into mouth-frothing and spittle shortly after that.
• There is still racism.

I think that's enough for one day.

• Game of Thrones as critique of the patriarchy from the privileged side.

  This observation is what I find so profound about “Game of Thrones”. Yes, patriarchy hurts men by luring them into its bullshit narrative about putting “honor” over more important things like love and human decency. But it’s not like they’re lured with phantoms. For men, the reward of upholding these unfair systems is that they are given a place of prestige and told that their lives matter—and that the other half of the human race exists solely to uphold and serve them.

  Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at Raw Story.  Spoilers for that last episode (I'm not watching, so I don't know which one it is.  "Red Wedding?"  Anyway.)
• It's not really all marketing; better euphemisms don't cut it.  "Smiling faces tell lies," as the song goes.

  Unfortunately, there’s not a “nice” way to say that you oppose someone’s basic human rights. Maggie Gallagher is showing what a farce this kind of thinking is, trying to claim that one can somehow believe that heterosexuals are better than gay people without it actually being homophobic, even though that’s the definition of homophobia.

  It's as though the they haven't caught on that Dorian Gray's painting hasn't changed, but Dorian has. Republican organs are all two sizes too small, anyway.
• Speaking of fraud, Naked Capitalism's Bill Black explains why plutocrats, opportunistic crooks, and folks out to fleece you financially are a bad combination.

  At the heart of Greenspan’s failure lies an ethical void in the brand of economics that has dominated American universities and policy circles for the last several decades, a brand known as “free market fundamentalism” or the “neoclassical school.” (I call it “theoclassical economics” for its quasi-religious belief system.) Mainstream economists who follow this school assert a deeply flawed and controversial concept known as the “efficient market hypothesis,” which holds that financial markets magically regulate themselves (they automatically “self-correct”) and are thus immune to fraud. When an economist starts believing in that kind of fallacy, he is bound to become blind to reality. Let’s take a look at what blinded Greenspan:
  

  1. Greenspan knew that markets were “efficient” because the efficient market hypothesis is the foundational pillar underlying modern finance theory.
  2. Markets can’t be efficient if there is control fraud, so there must not be any.
  3. Wait, there are control frauds! Tens of thousands of them.
  4. Then control fraud must not really be harmful, or markets would not be efficient.
  5. Control fraud, therefore, must not be immoral. As crime boss Emilio Barzini put it in The Godfather, “It’s just business.”

  As delusional and immoral as this “logic” chain is, many elite economists believe it. This warped perspective has spawned policies so perverse that they turn the world of finance into the optimal environment for criminals. The upshot is that most of our elite financial leaders and professionals have thrown integrity out the window, and we end up with recurrent, intensifying financial crises, de facto immunity for our most elite criminals, and the rise of crony capitalism.

• Recto-cranial fusion.  (Speaking of making Jughead appear a Rhodes Scholar.)
• Jimmy Carter as reincarnated Eleanor Roosevelt.

  I was struck by the fact that there are a group of people whose job it is destroy aspects of America that help keep us healthy, fed, housed and connected. Why do they hate other Americans so much? Is it because they want the Social Security money to go to Wall Street or do they also want to see others suffer? Is it because they don’t see their own connection with others?

  Warning: References Noam Chomsky.  From Spocko's Brain.
  

Enough, already!

• Le sigh.
• Charles II is disappointed in John Kerry (with update on the Rios Montt case).
• A bunch from or via AlterNet:
• Has the "Left" abandoned cheap electricity?  'Cause I missed the memo.  
• The DEA has rehired a paid perjurer because there are still drugs.  

“The DEA rehired Mr. Chambers, is using him in investigations all over the country, is again paying him exorbitant amounts of money and refuses to provide discovery about what he’s up to,” Morgan wrote in a court petition, “If Chambers were nothing more than a run-of-the-mill criminal, that would be one thing. But both Chambers and his defenders in the DEA brag that he is a con man extraordinaire.”

• Georgia Senator makes case for women combat units:
  

  Well now! For a long time, conservatives have argued that it was women who were too hormonal and irrational for combat. But Chambliss has set them straight. It’s really young men who can’t be relied upon to control their emotions and urges under pressure.
  
  It's true that Chambliss doesn’t have first-hand experience of combat because he got a medical deferrment during Vietnam, so he wasn't exactly tearing it up on the battlefield. But still, it seems like he’s onto something here. Do we really want people who are prone to violent hormonal outbreaks doing a job that requires concentration and steady nerves?
  
  I think not. Female troops have already been unofficially serving in combat for decades, and they have distinguished themselves on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan as pilots and in military police units. One hundred-fifty-two have been killed, and nearly 900 wounded. Tanya Biank, author of Undaunted: The Real Story of America’s Servicewomen, explains that women soldiers have exceeded all expectations, despite particular challenges that men don’t face, such as wearing armor that was not designed for their bodies: "They have performed phenomenally. They have done more than just pull their own weight.”
  
  Perhaps they could perform even better without dealing with the hazard of young men who can’t control their irrational impulses.

• Paul Krassner.  'Nuff said.
• Noam Chomsky prognosticates and highlights hidden history, from TomDispatch, via AlterNet.
• You know, just like male desire.  (Salon, via AlterNet)
• Andrew Sullivan flunks American Political History again.  (Driftglass)
  

• Southern Beale at First Draft on Megyn Kelly:  "Blind Fox News Squirrel Finds Nut."

  Megyn Kelly is no feminist. She’s just another self-centered conservative narcissist who only speaks up when she feels personally insulted. She's no hero to women. She had no problem following Fox News' marching orders during Republicans' pre-election War On Women. And a part of me wonders if this whole Erick Erickson-Lou Dobbs-Megyn Kelly thing wasn't staged and scripted from the get-go in the first place.

• Charles II at Mercury Rising on trying to find disability fraud:

  And, of course, it’s all based on baloney: made-up statistics like the claim that 8% of children are on disability, conflation of SSI and SSDI, and so on. The recession and its aftermath have made more people poor enough–not to mention desperate enough– to become eligible for SSI benefits. In other words, there is no crisis, just a desperate longing of rich people for more and more and more and more.
  
  These are really awful people who are trying to take bread from the mouths of the very most helpless. They deserve to be shunned. The world should sit shiva for people like Kristof and Klein and O’Reilly and Lane who are morally dead.

  They'll never achieve satiety.

Rachel Maddow reports on a bit of pushback regarding the chair of the House Oversight Committee, who has been mentioned here before:

But the key takeaway here is the fact that Plouffe was willing to go there in the first place, as if to say to Issa, "You want a fight over honesty and ethics? That's a great idea." What's more, also keep in mind that if Democrats seriously pursue this as a line of criticism, Issa and his allies will be cautious in pushing back because they'd prefer not to have this conversation at all -- the last thing Republicans want now is a discussion about Issa's scandalous background and whether he's the best person available to lead investigations into others' suspected wrongdoing.

Seriously.

But the EPA watering down their own regs is not good news.

The PAG[Protective Action Guides]s are intended to guide the response to nuclear power reactor accidents (like Fukushima in Japan, Chernobyl in Ukraine and Three Mile Islandin the U.S.), "dirty bomb" explosions, radioactive releases from nuclear fuel and weapons facilities,and nuclear transportation accidents.

[...]

In addition, EPA admits that a nuclear power accident could far exceed the capacity of radioactive waste sites to manage waste generated from cleanups and therefore suggests allowing the waste to go to regular trashdumps, a fight the public has waged for decades in the US.

Article by Committee to Bridge the Gap at Reader Supported News.org.  Read the rest.

Jean Stapleton, actress.