Because Obama has a stellar track record of protecting our rights, yeah.

This is why CREDO is my phone company. I’m not optimistic about the DCCC *caring*, of course, but I’m glad my money goes to people who give a shit about me.

Occupying a building is a considerable undertaking. This is a nonviolent protest, and its numbers are still fairly small. NYPD is letting OWS stay in the park for now because it can’t find a viable reason to kick them out, and so far are using only minimal violence. Attempts to take over a building with numbers like theirs would end in unsuccessful bloodshed. There are more than six people, sure, but it would take six thousand or more to get past cops in riot gear. Police presence in that part of Manhattan is heavy.

I was there last night and there were definitely people in the building recording and taking pictures, from windows on the first and third floor. There were two choppers hovering the entire time but I don’t know whether they were police or media.

machiavelli would probably send walker his cv. dude clearly needs some competent assistance, since he’s unable to manage on his own.

are they getting jane’s car back? do they have transport home?

adorno et. al., in The Authoritarian Personality, came essentially to the same conclusion, through psychological surveys, back in 1950. some of their frameworks were freudian, and so are a bit shaky these days, and there have been legitimate criticisms of the methodology, but more recent research (a lot of it coming out of germany) is confirming what they found. unfortunately, most establishment psych types (particularly in the US) think the entire idea is discredited, in large part because of a lack of “balance” and the suggestion, deemed prejudiced and “unfair”, that right-wing authoritarian concepts should be pathologized with no corresponding left-wing pathology found. and there’s also probably more than a sprinkling of anti-semitism in there.

the problem with using the word “fascist” here, as i see it, is that the primary motivating goal in a regime traditionally defined as fascist is the idea of forging a new nationalistic collective identity. it’s fair, i think, to object to the use of “fascist” here on those grounds, since that doesn’t seem to be the US’s goal, but your opinion that manning would have been “disappeared” in a true fascist regime, and that accordingly obama can’t be called fascist, isn’t necessarily true. under fascist rule in italy, for example, under mussolini’s regime, many many of those who worked against the regime were imprisoned rather than killed or disappeared, and their identities and locations were publicly known. in some cases, they even continued writing and working while imprisoned, as gramsci did. political prisoners are common under fascist regimes.

secret political murders aren’t fascism, and they are not a defining element of fascism. they’re state terrorism. acts of terrorism by the state against its own people are commonly an element of fascist regimes, but the two ideas are not interchangeable.

perhaps it would be helpful for you to explain your objection, instead of just repeatedly asserting the wrongness of others on the thread.

you’re not any better off with individual policies, kumari. they’re almost always more expensive, and they’re considerably more selective. i have student insurance. my husband is self-employed. a policy for him costs more now than coverage for both of us cost when i had it through my employer, and it covers much less. because of pre-existing conditions, i can’t get individual policy coverage at all, and if i could, my premium would be three times higher than his — not because of pre-existing conditions, but because i’m a woman. gender discrimination in premiums doesn’t happen in the employer-based system (at least, it didn’t happen to us) but it sure does in the private market.