We all know that god personally told Michele Bachmann to run for president and made sure that she won the straw poll in Iowa last August. But god is somewhat promiscuous in his affections and also told Rick Perry and Rick Santorum that he wanted them to run too. Then god let his attention drift away from politics and wander to other matters, such as helping Tim Tebow get the Denver Broncos into the Super Bowl playoffs. As a result, the three candidates started tanking in the polls and Bachmann is now predicted to come in sixth in today’s Iowa caucuses.

But now that the playoff picture is set and god has done right by Tebow, Bachman is sure that god is paying attention to her campaign again and is ready to stun the masses, saying, “We’re going to see an astounding result on Tuesday night — miraculous.” How does she know this, you ask? Because “We’re believing in a miracle because we know, I know, the one who gives miracles.” Yes, god has her on his speed dial and is ready to roll.

So Michele is planning on a successful Hail Mary play today, since god seems to have directly assured her that Jesus will haul down the pass in the end zone. Then god can go back to his main interest and guide Tebow to a win over the Steelers on Saturday.

Glenn Greenwald eviscerates Hillary Clinton on the issue of internet freedom, pointing out that the things she condemns other governments of doing are the things that her own government is trying to do.

So let’s review Secretary Clinton’s list of grave threats to Internet freedom and see how it applies to her actions and those of the Obama administration. “Those around the world whose words are now censored . . . who are blocked from accessing entire categories of internet content” – check. Attempting to undermine the Internet’s ability to “enliven public debates, quench a thirst for knowledge” – check. “Ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled, and people constrained in their choices” – check. “Companies turning over sensitive information about political dissidents” and “a company shutting down the social networking accounts of activists in the midst of a political debate” — check. “Those who push these plans often do so in the name of security” – big check.

Internet freedom — preventing government and corporate control of the Internet — is indeed one of the most vital political fights of this generation, perhaps the most vital. There are many people in a position credibly to lead and support that fight. Hillary Clinton and the government in which she serves is most definitely not among them; more often than not, they are among the enemies of those freedoms.

It never fails to surprise me how brazenly our elected officials say one thing and do the opposite on matters of extreme importance. Surely it must be because they do not fear being questioned on such things by the establishment media that reserves its belligerence for the most trivial of issues.

Given that the Civil war was about slavery and the emancipation of African Americans, you would think that blacks would be keenly interested in that period of history, to understand the causes and effects of an event that had such momentous consequences for them. In an article titled Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?, Ta-Nehisi Coats says that the opposite is true and addresses the roots of this disengagement that results in “the near-total absence of African American visitors” from famous Civil War sites.

Our alienation was neither achieved in independence, nor stumbled upon by accident, but produced by American design. The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us was the result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other, one that avoided what professional historians now know to be true: that one group of Americans attempted to raise a country wholly premised on property in Negroes, and that another group of Americans, including many Negroes, stopped them. In the popular mind, that demonstrable truth has been evaded in favor of a more comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and individual gallantry. For that more ennobling narrative, as for so much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem.
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The fallen Confederacy’s chroniclers grasped this historiographic challenge and, immediately after the war, began erasing all evidence of the crime—that is to say, they began erasing black people—from the written record.
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For that particular community, for my community, the message has long been clear: the Civil War is a story for white people—acted out by white people, on white people’s terms—in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props. We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative. Having been tendered such a conditional invitation, we have elected—as most sane people would—to decline.

It is an interesting article.

Drones have become the weapon of choice that the Obama administration uses to kill people. Under his administration, their use has expanded far beyond what was done before.

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries… But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.

But while the administration tries to persuade us that all the people killed are ‘suspected terrorists’, the whole program is shrouded in secrecy and they refuse to divulge what standards are used to order the summary deaths of people in other countries. But while the publicized deaths of civilians or Pakistani troops are shrugged off as rare mistakes, there are reports that in a large number of cases, there are suspicions that they don’t even know whom they have killed. And of course, everything is shrouded in secrecy, so no one can question them.

What Obama has created is an unaccountable global assassination program that murders anyone that he decides deserves to die. But at the same time, it also murders people who are not targets, people who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, including US citizens. As the Washington Post report above states, “CIA and military strikes this fall killed three U.S. citizens, two of whom were suspected al-Qaeda operatives.” So two were merely ‘suspected’ of terrorism, which is the new standard that justifies summary execution. But what about that third person who wasn’t even suspected? As long as such people are poor and powerless, who cares if they die?

It seems like I have been unfairly maligning Republicans as being interested only in enriching the extremely wealthy. It turns out that they are perfectly willing to take away some of their privileges.

In addition, Senate Republican leaders would go after “millionaires and billionaires,” not by raising their taxes but by making them ineligible for unemployment compensation and food stamps and increasing their Medicare premiums.

Yes, that will show them. When Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein gets fired and applies for government aid to provide food for his family, won’t he be surprised when he is turned down?

A former federal prosecutor calls upon people, if they serve on a jury, to use nullification as a means to change marijuana laws. He uses the case of Julian P. Heicklen, which I have discussed before.

If you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty” — even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer.
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Jury nullification is not new; its proponents have included John Hancock and John Adams.

The doctrine is premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, not government officials, should have the final say as to whether a person should be punished. As Adams put it, it is each juror’s “duty” to vote based on his or her “own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.”

He points out that, “How one feels about jury nullification ultimately depends on how much confidence one has in the jury system. Based on my experience, I trust jurors a lot.”

I agree with him.

The Republican primary race is getting truly bizarre. Under normal circumstances, someone with Mitt Romney’s money, credentials, and establishment support should have by now been able to take a solid lead in the race, given the absence of any other major establishment challenger. And yet his levels of support have stayed at a mediocre 25% while successive opponents have been pecking at his heels, sometimes even overtaking him in the polls for short periods. It is clear that while the party establishment has gone one way, the party faithful is not happy with their choice.
[Read more…]

The infamous Haditha massacre that occurred on Nov. 19, 2005, have faded from people’s memories.

That morning, a military convoy of four vehicles was heading to an outpost in Haditha when one of the vehicles was hit by a roadside bomb.

Several Marines got out to attend to the wounded, including one who eventually died, while others looked for insurgents who might have set off the bomb. Within a few hours 24 Iraqis — including a 76-year-old man and children between the ages of 3 and 15 — were killed, many inside their homes.

As the reporter says, “Haditha became a defining moment of the war, helping cement an enduring Iraqi distrust of the United States and a resentment that not one Marine has been convicted.”

When reports of this got out, it was regarded as a horrifying atrocity and, as usual, was quietly buried. But two weeks ago, purely by chance, a reporter came across in a junkyard files of interviews of the people responsible for the massacre. What the interviews reveal is just how routine was the killing of civilians on this scale.

Chief Warrant Officer K. R. Norwood, who received reports from the field on the day of the killings and briefed commanders on them, testified that 20 dead civilians was not unusual.
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General Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar Province, said he did not feel compelled to go back and examine the events because they were part of a continuing pattern of civilian deaths.

“It happened all the time, not necessarily in MNF-West all the time, but throughout the whole country,” General Johnson testified, using a military abbreviation for allied forces in western Iraq.

One can only imagine the bitterness and hatred engendered in the relatives of those massacred in this way.

The oligarchy, so long accustomed to do their looting in peace, has been surprised by the sudden turn in the tide against their rapaciousness and the successful adoption of the Occupy movement’s “We are the 99%” slogan now being used against them. You would have thought that they would be smart enough to lay low and hope that the storm passes.

But no, some of them are whining about how their feelings are hurt and contemptuously dismissing their critics as being ‘imbeciles’ and that those who are so poor that they pay little or no taxes have no right to complain because they have ‘no skin in the game’.

Matt Taibbi points out that the reverse is true, that it is the oligarchy that has no skin in the game because are not rooted in any place and thus have no sense of obligation to a geographical community that ordinary people have.

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It’s called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you’d at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.

The oligarchy’s open display of the depth of their contempt for those not in their class is quite astonishing. I actually think this is a good thing and should be encouraged. The more this Marie Antoinette attitude is put on full public display, the more likely they are to get their comeuppance. As Taibbi ends his piece, “Unbelievable. Merry Christmas, bankers. And good luck getting that message out.”

At a recent campaign stop at a coffee house in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney spotted a man wearing a veteran’s cap. Since candidates love to pander to veterans, Romney glommed on to him but it was not quite what he expected. Listen to what the Vietnam veteran says after Romney leaves.

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