Ah, then James, in whose “interest”, or “interests”, does this new guard “act” to further?

Also, you appear far more sanguine in your conviction that the “established press” would respond appropriately to “news” that the public, in even a putative democracy is entitled to know … than, at sixty-six turns around ole Sol, than I … and I offer the “Downing Street Memo” and “sexed-up” as “evidence” that little effort was made to tie this “revelation” to the lies ( happily pimped by the media) that led this nation into “endless” (or the “Long”, as they now term it) war …

Where once the fourth estate might have stood up to power, like both Congress and the Court, the media now are compliant, complicit, and fully on board.

I raise these issues not as criticism, but only for perspective, as I thoroughly have enjoyed and been educated by your thoughtful and cogent replies, to the serious and informed questions placed before you this evening.

My sincere thanks and appreciation, James, to you and to Kevin, as well.

A most superb Book Salon.

DW

Obama: “… good to get away from Congress” …

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/obama-congress-joke_n_2916302.html

and …

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/obama-israel-visit_n_2915193.html

vows “eternal support” to Israel …

So then …more of the same …

Now, is anyone really surprised by any of this?

Is this scary …? All by itself … or will “” make it more or less so?

I guess “we” all just have to go on … making the same “mistakes”, over and over.

Wonder who, rather specifically, profits from these inevitable, and clearly, unavoidable mis—takes?

Ah, well …

DW

Hey ya, demi!

Great to “see” ya.

;~DW

Hmmm …

Would Ashley Judd vote “yes” for this?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/wall-street-deregulation-_n_2916795.html

Does it seem that very little has been learned by the astute political class, especially the Dems?

What did Irak teach them?

What did the financial meltdown teach them?

Why do I get the feeling that they will continue to vote for more of the same?

Ah, well …

DW

Which “” do you object to, Teddy?

Jon’s words or those words I “highlight”?

I quote Jon’s words as they give rise to the questions, and define the issues of concern.

I highlight other words for the emphasis of their overuse, essential meaninglessness, or patent absurdity, which neither bolding nor italicizing render, in my eyes, the appearance of those words in quite the same way as setting them in “” … seems to do.

However, I shall take your comment and msmolly’s to heart, as I quite respect both of you and fully appreciate any feed-back that either of you might be willing to offer.

DW

” … there is some concern that Judd’s more liberal positions would cause problems for down ballot Democrats … making some some Democrats nervous … prominent local Democrats and national Democrats, including the Clintons, are working hard to find an alternative …”

Is this what is known as astute political expediency?

Let us ponder, for a moment, the implications of what you report, Jon.

Clearly, the Democrats, including the Clintons, Hillary and hubby Bubby, would prefer someone, how shall we phrase this, “less liberal” to run against McConnell … would that be “right”?

Do you, as a political analyst agree with the Clintons? Do you agree that less liberal is “better” and wiser, strategically, at this time, if the Democrats wish to maintain power and continue on as they are … moving ever rightward?

Just the other day you suggested that Hillary Clinton’s support of marriage equality should be “celebrated” … should this “position”, these “efforts” of Hillary and hubby likewise be celebrated or simply endorsed as wise and well-considered political necessity?

Or, do you, as a political analyst, seek simply report the facts with no editorial comment?

Frankly, if that is the case, it is a bit like having a bird’s eye view of the Titanic AND the iceberg and noting that the deck chairs are being cleverly rearranged and that the band is playing patriotic and uplifting tunes …

Is it the proper “business” of the Clintons to “try to keep Ashley Judd from taking on McConnell”, as you put it? If so, then WHY? If not, then WHY not?

Or are such questions not a “proper” part of political analysis?

Do icebergs matter or is the desire of members of the political class to keep on doing the same damned things, regardless of the ultimate cost and consequence, to actual human beings, that is … the rest of us, all that may be reported, all that may be reasonably discussed, not in terms of the implications for the rest of us, but simply, on the most superficial and “neutral” of “levels” as expedient, and politically “astute” legacy party game-playing?

How may anything change if nothing the legacy parties do is challenged, if nothing is ever questioned more deeply and honestly?

If we have reason to consider that the ship of state is being deliberately hijacked, to the most venal and selfish of ends, then have we no responsibility to suggested alternative courses, different tacks, or are we constrained by a definition of “analysis” that merely reports the downward trajectory with no concern for “impact” on human beings, on civil society, on future possibility and actual consequence, but only with how “astutely” the political “wisdoms” may manipulate the “outcomes” that benefit only themselves and their “philosophies” of power and wealth, of deliberate exploitation and appeals, not to reason or humanity, but to unreasoning fear and cowed conformity?

Ah, well …

DW

“The bipartisanship fetish isn’t about making everyone a big happy family, its about protecting people from basic accountability.”

Certain people, certainly, Jon.

Now, you are an astute political observer, an established political analyst.

Might you be willing to speculate about how what you describe in your last sentence, the one I quoted, might be changed? Can such change come about if the legacy parties are not challenged, if they are permitted to be the only “choice” which the people may be allowed to vote for, to hear? Or, shall it require something different, different parties, different political “coverage”?

Consider that this “coverage” is by a media equally complicit in “sexing up” the “facts” to meet the demands of propaganda, of shouting down any who oppose perpetual warfare.

Are not the political elite much like the banking and Wall Street elite, that is “astute”, above the law, and too big to be held to any meaningful account?

If this is so, and it appears to honest observers that it is, how might we, the rest of us, bring about change if we forever seek only the least evil among the lying, self-serving political class to “represent” our “interests” … which that political class has not done for decades?

If the political class will not change, then who MUST change, who MUST dare to seek alternative possibilities?

Do you imagine that most political analysts have ANY interest in such change and might they be willing to help bring about that change?

Or will most political analysts continue to do what they have done these last many years?

I realize this might seem like a personal question, yet the answer, whatever it is, will affect the fortunes and lives of everyone not “inside” the current bubble of deceit and mutual “protection” which the money and power elites have erected around themselves, even as they savage civil society, make mock of the Rule of Law and bring disrepute upon this nation and “the people” in whose name the wars are all begun, prosecuted, and profited from …

There is, after all, a family who has a huge stake in what happens, and that happens to be the family of humankind, as well as all of life, of which humanity is but a part … we must consider that our tenure on Earth is not guaranteed and that “goodness” does NOT include greed, or the twisted desire to control everything and everybody … those things are pathologies, and destructive of life, of reason, and of truth.

What do you think, Jon?

Time for substantive change or just more “keep hope a jive”?

DW

So, a simple, reasonable, rational, humane, and realistic “sensibility” on the part of “Every Democratic politician that currently has a DECENT chance of running for president in 2016 … is something worth celebrating”?

Shouldn’t that level of sensibility, as well as a sense that the rule of law and the Constitution, all of it, matter and NEED to be supported, as well as a healthy skepticism regarding perpetual war, and a fundamental SYMPATHY and concern for the poor and downtrodden, coupled to a substantial grasp of the capacity of this abused planet to support human existence … be the VERY LEAST which we should expect from ANY and EVERY Democratic presidential candidate, Jon?

Are we so very desperate for lesser evils that we must needs celebrate candidates who, finally, embrace a sensibility not only long supported widespread at FDL but broadly held, for some time, BY a majority “the people”?

Forgive me for not sounding properly thrilled and elated. However, t’would seem you are easily moved to rejoicing … when, in fact neither the Democrats nor the Republicans running for president have begun to approach the understanding, conviction, and demonstrated personal courage of the woman who ran on the Green Party ticket for president, during the recent election, only five months ago? Have we not enough troubles brought on by the current President, a Democrat, including, as you mentioned earlier today, his willingness to slash Social Security, to occupy our thoughts and actions … right now? What is the true value and purpose of such celebration as you now suggest? The next presidential election is YEARS away, and frankly, there is a certain political expediency and calculation, as I perceive it, in the current pronouncements of would-be candidates … a calculation and expediency which are unseemly and damned close to meaningless, unless the ACTIONS of the potential candidates matches their convenient rhetoric … on MANY more issues than marriage equality, a important issue, certainly, but not the substance of coherent and broad vision, being, at best only a PART of the larger and very necessary whole.

Celebrate if you wish, yet please keep that celebration in some rational, reasonable, and realistic context … such “backing”, isolated from those other things I mention is pretty thin gruel … One is reminded of a character in a certain novel by Charles Dickens who asked for, ” … more, kind sir, if you please …”

Jon, we, all of us, need (and deserve) more, much more than a few words spoken in support of marriage equality … indeed, humanity cannot survive without it.

When the Democratic candidates for president speak and act more like FDR or the Greens, then and only then, is there any true reason for actual celebration …

That, of course is merely my opinion, yet I consider that I am not alone in such perspective …

DW

Thank you, Kevin.

My very favorite sentence in the ruling is this quote found on page 14: ‘”There comes a point where … Court(s) should not be ignorant as judges of what [they} know as men” and women’ …

I sincerely hope that Frankfurter’s words might resonate broadly through the high and mighty grasp and understanding of justices … everywhere … for there are clear patterns of deceit and destruction deliberately hidden behind assertions of secrecy and “security” which the Judicial “branch” is obligated, by moral principle, by Constitutional duty, and by democratic necessity … to recognize and “check”.

DW

As something to ponder, among the costs, one might find many of the comments to this article to be both disturbed and disturbing … were we, as a nation, not “exceptionalism” personified.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/15/us-drone-strikes-pakistan_n_2883014.html

Not only does our government, regardless of which legacy party is in “power”, pursue violence as fundamental policy, but, apparently, many “good” USians happily “believe” that the USA should do whatever it damn well pleases.

T’would seem that “Kill them all and let God sort them out …” well ought to be our “official” motto. If we can’t stamp it on our coins, then we should consider printing it on our paper money … just to remind us of our purpose: “This is not a democracy it is a business.”

Amerika uber alles!

The banality and ubiquity of such smug (if ignorant) complacency and hubris does not bode well for our collective human future …

Ah well …

DW

By zee way, Dan, it should, as zapkitty points out, be “Cost” … not “Costed”, there, in the headline …

;~DW

As always, Dan, thank you for reporting the truth of things.

I would add that Glen Ford, of Black Agenda Report, has well summed up our current reality with this article:

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/us-scorched-earth-policy-ten-years-after-iraq-invasion

The Exceptional Empire seems intent on going “out” not with a whimper, but the biggest bang possible … and it is all “done” in our name, yours and mine …

Endless destruction … relentless oppression … and sanctioned, open-ended greed.

And it will not stop until forced to do so.

Sweet reason will not avail until and unless the many, “the people” come to understand … and then find, somehow, the courage to say, “No more!”

Namaste

DW

Good morning, everyone.

Following on your comment regarding Irak, eCAHN … Glen Ford, at Black Agenda Report, has this to say:

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/us-scorched-earth-policy-ten-years-after-iraq-invasion

A dying empire, smitten with the lust for hegemony, for absolute control, and with a history of violence and repression (both at “homeland” and “abroad”), can be a very dangerous and destructive thing … in its death-throes …

My continuing appreciation, fatster, to you for your (from my perspective) “must read!” … “Roundups” … and your “Break Time” episodes have, more than once, made much difference for what remains of my equanimity and such mindfulness as I yet possess … celebrating, as they often do, these Break Times, the very best of human and humane perspective … in a world seemingly gone quite amuck.

DW

President Barack Obama’s legacy is assured, it will be one of astute innovation and daring enterprise …

For, even before completing his second term, this President has set up his post-presidential influence net-work and wealth-generation apparatus.

In that most popular of the terms ushered in by the dapper and jaunty Obama era, “looking forward”, it may well be imagined that “policy differences” will little impede the forward momentum of Obama’s powerful, and very multi-dimensional, organizational creation. Think of the “inside info”, the privileged “perspectives”?

Deucedly clever stuff, a really sublime, neoliberal, cream of the crop performance!

(Were I of a gambling nature, I’d speculate that about now ole Barack would award himself an “A” for overall achievement and laying the groundwork for “looking forward”, which is what all of “this” … has always been about.)

What might we expect next?

More circuses?

Cheap bread?

As you say, Dan, “America has come up with an innovative solution to its corruption problem – we legalized it.”

So, what’s next?

More of the same.

Appreciate your posts, DSWright, not just for the delicious and healthy mix of facts and useful insights, but for, most especially, the subtle satiric scents bubbling ever more exotically …to the surface.

DW

Your Madison and Jefferson comments about corporations, both here and on Attaturk’s post of this morning, are very much and thoroughly appreciated, JJ, and I hope that you might consider an extended “myFDL” post to provide members of FDL a more in-depth exposure to their thoughtful, realistic, and increasingly “realized” concerns.

DW

Odd, Teddy, I was just thinking how interesting that “this” should ketchup with Goldman Sachs, right after ole Lanny Breuer left the DoJ … In fact, one imagines that the Obama-Holder DoJ is negotiating, right now, with GS to come up with an “amicable” amount to “$ettle” this perceived wee “misunderstanding” Dan mentions.?

It is nothing personal, of course.

In the words of the Great White Snark, “This is not a democracy it is a business.”

Therefore, the “price” of doing business is always negotiable, and GS is always willing to pay, within what GS considers to be “reason”..

Heaven forfend that any individuals, any muckety-muck higher-ups at GS, should be held to personal account, this all being simply the invisible handiwork of that Invisible Hand of the Market and only the busyness of the bean-counters and ole Warren Buffet. If Buffet ain’t annoyed, then why should anyone lift their Heinz-end and give a fart?

Them what listen to GS advice, well, they wasn’t forced to sell, nobody held a gun to their heads … and, besides ain’t always the “buyers” who are told to beware?

The truly gullible are always hoi paloi who want, rather desperately, to “believe” that gummint are always the good guys and corporations are people too … that the rich must be doin’ something right, ‘cuz they’ve got all the money …

Now, Jane suggests a Special Counsel ought to be appointed to look into this recent “business” activity of GS. In a sane and rational world, where the Rule of Law actually operated, it would be realistic to imagine that the President of the United States would appoint such a Special Counsel. However, unless Barack Obama comes to personally consider that such “business” activity is “illegal”, and not merely unethical or destructive, it is unlikely that such an appointment might be made.

Who might we consider that the President would seek advice from regarding this matter? Whose voices will “our” President seek to “hear”? Who will whisper in his ear?

What would happen to the President’s “legacy” if he were to appoint such a Special Counsel to investigate? And how would he fair, financially, after his presidency were the Counsel to find wrong-doing or criminal intent?

Let us consider this episode as Obama himself might consider it, let us be pragmatic. Let us be astute.

Let us be politic.

And ketchup with the contrived “reality” of the moment.

If you were President would you stay in Dee Cee to witness tens of thousands opposed to the Keystone Pipeline, whose fate, to be built or not to be built, lies in your hands, stops its bucks at your desk … or would you go golfing with Tiger Woods?

What woods you do?

Please forgive the snark and vegetables contained in this comment, they are intended for edification of entertainment porpoises only … who, by the way, are still bitching, most unreasonably, about the “spill” in the Gulf, which, they have the unmitigated audacity to claim, is still leaking … and while a certain President is not “okay” with certain leakers, this one appears to be among those which do not even require “memos” to white-paper-over …

Such evidence as there is … suggests that there are no un$ettling blips on President Obama’s radar screen … business as u$ual seems quite well assured … as is said … “looking forward”.

DW

Reply to Tejanarusa @ 5

Perhaps, it is mind boggling for Obama, Tejanarusa.

However, Given Obama’s “positions” on many things, be it refusing to hold responsible those who engaged in torture, refusing to hold accountable those who engaged in criminal fraud, making even more use of drone assassinations than Bush, going after whistle blowers with a vengeance, NOT coming to honest grips with environmental issues, and so forth and so on, I find that on this “issue” of taxes, where Obama waffled on the “Bush Tax-Cuts” to the degree that they became the Obama Tax-Cuts, that he insists upon austerity, that it serves Obama’s “interest” to have people “believe” that Obama somehow, just does not “get it”.

Frankly, while I readily understand the import of the legal training which you received, I suspect that you, nonetheless, are able to realize when those with whom you would negotiate refuse to engage in rational compromise.

That suggests that it is not boggling of the mind which motivates Barack Obama … after all of these “wasted years”, but something else.

I do not think it stupidity or an inability to learn.

I think it, by this time, must be seen as remarkably clever, deliberate, and purposeful.

Many argue, as does Robert Kennedy Jr., that Obama is being argued away from his principles, from his true understanding … Kennedy, although arrested just the other day regarding the Keystone Pipeline, still “supports” Obama, as one would imagine that he would, as a loyal Democrat, yet that continuing support does not appear to serve Kennedy’s professed interest in stopping the pipeline and the environmental damage he reasonably claims would result …

After a certain point, after many years of very clear behavior, it must be painfully obvious that to continue to trust the judgment of anyone in the political class who has consistently produced policies destructive to the Rule of Law and to the well-being of the many, to the certain benefit of the monied elite, even in the “signature” health insurance “plan” of this president’s first term … it must become abundantly certain that such patterns are very unlikely to change, that continuing “belief” and “support” are either self-serving, for those who “play” in the political fields or evidence of far more patience than, so far as I am concerned, is deserved or beneficial to the dire needs and reality of the many.

Clearly, Tejanarusa, our mileage varies considerably, yet I thoroughly appreciate the tone and the measure, the inherent respect of others, and their viewpoints, that your comments invariably reflect.

DW