Gingrich has declared war on Fox News, saying that he has been forced to rely on fair coverage from CNN, but that Fox News is "on Romney's side." So of course it's over for Gingrich. Even his top funder, casino billionaire Forgot Hisname, has been interviewed saying that he would love it if Gingrich won but that it's now obviously just not going to happen. Earlier he had said that he was only pumping the Gingrich campaign full of cash because he really didn't want Santorum to win, and now that Santorum has dropped out rather than face an embarrassing loss from his home state, Gingrich's main backer has no reason to stand behind him anymore. Indeed, his campaign is pretty sad already, it's really entirely a way to get Super Pac money so he can spend it pimping out his and his wife's books. Long live Gingrich, Gingrich RIP, see ya next time.

You might be saying, "but Santorum hasn't pledged his support of Romney yet, he could give his delegates to Gingrich," and that's really exactly what Santorum wants people to say. In Santorum's concession speech he said his fight wasn't over, and he still attended a campaign event with Pastor Superchristian Alsoforgothisname. He's not going to drop on his knees for Romney right away - it would make him look bad with his own supporters, especially after having just said that Romney is the worst republican to fight Obama and bemoaning how un-conservative Romney is. But Santorum also wants Romney to work for his support, which will be vital in the general, not just to clinch the primary. Gingrich will call out for Santorum's support and Santorum will entertain the idea, but Republicans don't like a ruiner and supporting Gingrich so close to the convention when Romney is so close to the finish line, would be a disaster.

Meanwhile, Romney has chilled his extreme pandering to the right and is trying to appear more centrist in preparation for the general. You'll see him talking about "Obama's war on women," pointing out that many women have lost their jobs since Obama took office (of course ignoring the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay act and his appointment of two female Supreme Court Justices), and he will speak louder about how the problem with national health care reform is that it takes away from the individual state's rights to pass their own health care reform laws (as opposed to the problem with national health care reform being that it amounts to socialism or "reparations").

Theism is crazy. I give up, I gotta say it. I just spent 4 hours reading through a comment thread http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/10/atheism-is-a-religion#commentform

Atheists are called out for being militant and "fundamentalist" so much when all they're doing is posing an argument. Then this person tries to marginalize and distract from the arguments by calling Atheism a religion, and she whines when people are fed up and take her to task about it on twitter - then she uses that backlash as proof that it's a religion!
Someone tweeted to her "Non-belief is a belief if OFF is a TV channel" the nerve! Meanwhile people get death threats for bringing up separation of church and state and the church tries to paint banning prayer in publicly funded institutions as a push to ban religion throughout the public sphere ("just as foretold in their spooooky book" *gasp* "don't forget to tithe and vote Republican!")

Look, I am the most militant atheist I know because when people ask me about my beliefs I tell them, but I also am not evangelistic - there's a reason you never see Atheists on street corners shouting for hours from a street corner in the rain. We're not concerned about a sky god watching us and judging whether or not we deserve to go to eternal torture or eternal bliss, we don't consider the people with which we disagree to be immoral, unclean, agents of evil. We are not a part of world-wide organizations built on "flocks" of people who are told what interpretation to take on an insane book, that they have to believe in on faith. When Atheists are really rude, it's either a lack of patience with circular logic, or just the fact that some people are rude. If Theists feel belittled it's because they believe in an ancient collection of oral traditions passed down for generations and redacted to suit Roman rule and including talking snakes and turning people into pillars of salt.

I don't believe in magic, or the tooth fairy, or Sherlock Holmes. I don't believe in God or any gods. Because I'm a big sci-fi nerd I might believe that there are civilizations so advanced that they would seem like gods to us, or that the entire universe is sufficiently complex and interconnected that it could be described to be a living thing, or that we are actually all in a very advanced simulation - but I think it's most likely that we happen to be lucky to be aware that we are alive and that's just about the most we're ever likely to know on the subject for sure.

But I don't want to sound like an agnostic theist here. I really, really think that there's no evidence to suggest the existence of any supernatural or metaphysical beings beyond our imagination.

There, I said it.

War with Iran is such a terrible idea for so many reasons that it simply won't happen. It makes for inflammatory campaign rhetoric used to excite the base, but intelligence and military leaders from every side considers war to be an impossible option.

"But Iran has said that Israel should be wiped out, we can't let them have the means to do it!"

Look, as it is now, Iran knows that it would be suicide. Intelligence assessments from the US and Israel describe Iran as a rational actor, and that they aren't working on a military nuclear program. They go on to say that attacking Iran would prove without a doubt that the only way for them to be safe from further attacks would be to get nukes, so a strike like Netanyahu has been crowing about would actually be a self fulfilling prophecy. But Iran suspects Israel to be a rational actor as well and everyone not in front of main stream media and behind a podium is saying that this should all die down once the elections in these countries are over.

News on this has been popping up a lot and if anyone wants sources on this position, I can provide them. What's less obvious is why exactly this is all happening, though I can easily speculate that oil is involved, as the threat of the straight of Hormuz being closed has incited speculation, pricing a 9 month shortage of supply into the current oil price and making a lot of money for Big Finance and the military industrial complex, of which all Netanyahu, the GOP, and the executive branch are all clients. All this talk of war also has the effect of continuing the rightward shift in US politics, as conservatives take insanely dangerous positions and Democrats compromise by taking only a moderately insane position, as Obama did when speaking at AIPAC and reminding everyone that he will do absolutely anything Netanyahu wants, including military action. Forget any anti-war liberal ideals, who cares that suggesting that we would preemptively invade a sovereign nation to prevent the development of a program that it actually has the legal right to pursue only strengthens the Iranian regime which relies on the threat of violence from without in order to maintain its violent grip within.

I really don't think we'll go to war, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be mad as hell about even the idea of getting into another such quagmire. The GOP taking this idea to the general election campaign will have to tell the American people how it would be a good idea to tackle a country many times more capable and populace than Iraq, especially when we can all see how well Iraq went.

Hanging out with a new friend, we were talking and he said something along the lines of "hands down, anything the government can do, corporations can do more efficiently," which of course is the code phrase that translates to "I am a Libertarian." He preferred to identify himself as an anarcho-capitalist. So, more than a few drinks in, we got into the issue.

I brought up specific situations where companies have taken over roles that our society typically left to government and described the result, that there are some areas where you can't have the only incentive be the bottom line when it comes to the public good. Privatized armies, privatized health care, privatized prisons, privatized fire protection - it all works most efficiently as profit making machines that will cut corners when it thinks it is able in order to make more money. The difference is that companies, especially the big ones, are a bunch of transnational fiefdoms that answer only to the profit margin. His response is that this is fine and only doesn't work because of government regulation - the guiding hand of the market would work more effectively than the government could, that if people didn't like the way a company worked, they would use the services of a different company. I responded that companies with enough money would do the cost benefit analysis and when it was cheaper to just own the media than fly right, they'll own the media. Told him about the Monsanto growth hormone piece being shut down because Fox didn't want to hurt an advertiser and subsequent whistle-blower lawsuit that failed because the higher court decided that it was not against the law to lie in the news, that it was protected as free speech.

The gist of the argument, essentially, is the question of who you want in charge. The government at least is accountable to people. Companies do not want accountability, they want total freedom from accountability, and it's their influence on the government that is behind movements for less accountability and more control. They pushed for retroactive immunity for wiretapping US citizens during the Bush Administration, corporate lobbyists pushed for a health care reform that keeps insurance companies around as middle-men, they pushed for the broad language in the new Defense Authorization Act that explicitly legalizes the extraordinary renditions we've already been doing, and they're pushing for SOPA and PIPA, which hands the fate of the internet to the media and Hollywood establishment.

Not that government isn't complicit, but it's corporate money that's corrupted government. This is the gist of the Occupy movement and an issue with the ground roots Tea Party movement - really, it's something everyone is concerned about. That's why Gingrich, seeing his numbers slip, and everyone els, wishing they HAD numbers, jumped on Romney for his work with Bain Capital and for being a millionaire in general. The Republican establishment, but especially the GOP funders, cried fowl and demanded the candidates turn down the populism; ostensibly because they were writing the DNC's campaign plan. The traditional Republican money-sources reminded the candidates that they did not want an examination of Big Money, the kinds of things Bain Capital did and the kinds of privilege Romney has. Capitalism in general wants to only be thought of as the thing that gets you a job.

It should be a primary issue, but it won't be, contrary to the warnings of Ailes, Beck, and Limbaugh. Romney will win the nomination, despite the best efforts of the Republican party, and Obama will walk the populist line to beat him, but Obama is just as much in the pockets of Big Business as any other candidate - just different businesses than Romney. Except Big Finance, so I'll bet Obama won't hit him so hard with the Bain Capital pension-fund & job-killing machine angle. Still, it's a conversation we need to have and the primary campaign is a good opportunity. What is the role of an economic system? What is the role of corporations? If companies get together to shut down an organization's source of donations because they don't like what they're saying, is that kind of censorship ok? What happens when companies, "too big to fail," do the things that we won't let governments do because we're rightfully afraid of them having too much power?

The much remarked upon 10,000 dollar bet that Romney offered to Perry is being talked about as yet another example of Romney not being able to avoid appearing out of touch with blue-collar, red-state, anti-elitist Americans.


Though Romney is the richest candidate, the only reason the other candidates haven't imported horses from France is because they're not big horse fans, not because they aren't also rich enough to spring for such luxuries or would shy from spending money so extravagantly.



There was of course the near-million dollar tab Gingrich ran up showering his current wife with diamonds, or the cruise to Greece he went on instead of campaigning in Iowa early on, which prompted the first generation of his campaign staff to abandon him over the belief that he was more concerned with self promotion than winning.

It doesn't matter who wins the primary, though. Despite the polls, I still can't believe it will be Newt, and in spite of the polls I feel like it must be Mitt - or maybe Ron Paul out of no where, but there's really not enough different about their positions to make a difference to the Obama campaign. All he'll have to do is honestly describe the GOP platform, that huge corporations and the super-rich deserve subsidies and favors, and poor people deserve dangerous water and lower wages.

Aside from the disenfranchisement backup plan that the GOP have been building for years, the worst thing that could happen to the Obama campaign is dissatisfaction among his base - and there is plenty of that. It could siphon votes away into the ether, or worse, embolden a protest candidate, a "spoiler" to split the vote a la Nader. Someone who speaks to progressive values, who condemns Obama for not closing illegal bases, for not standing in the way of retroactive immunity, for looking the other way when it comes to war crimes or crimes against humanity, for racheting up the use of mercenaries and illegal drone-strike assassinations, for supporting the attempted Honduran coup and regimes like Syria, and so on.

Ex-Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson, Former Democrat, Launches Third Party Presidential Bid Against Obama, GOP

Check out this video. Rocky Anderson could be that candidate. Hell, I think I'll vote for him.

I've been anxiously awaiting for the 2012 election for four years. I suppose a lot of people can say the same thing for slightly different reasons, but we're all very excited about the election. Not because it means anything really - it is simply a billion dollar spectacle that will bequeath onto the American electorate a much nicer sounding version of GWB instead of a crazier sounding version of Bill Kristol. But it will still be fun and exciting.

I'm reminded of a political cartoon depicting the last primaries: Republicans reluctantly choosing and lining-up behind McCain early on and then quietly waiting as the whole nation watched Clinton and Obama's fight, with Dem's crooning that they didn't know who to choose because they liked them both so much. The GOP primary is now the center stage, and no one really likes anyone. The candidate anointed by conventional wisdom, Romney, has never seen the top spot in polls - and really, the only candidates with a ghost of a chance in the general election have been ignored or derided by the right-wing press. The Tea Party movement has driven the party so far to the crazy fringe that no one who can win the primary can win the general.

With Herman Cain (as in all things, hilariously) out of the race, Gingrich, of all people, is claiming victory and willing to go to (omg) the Trump Debate because he figures he's so far ahead he doesn't need to worry about his credibility as much as Perry or Bachman. A Gingrich campaign against Obama, trying to get moderates to vote for him, is a frankly laughable idea. For the GOP, their only winning 2012 strategy will be - and already has been - voter suppression.
From legal, semi-legal, to illegal, they are doing everything they can, including jury-rigging, changing election law, making it more difficult for "get out the vote" (GOTV) campaigns, making it more difficult to register to vote, and confusing people about whether or not they are registered, where to go to cast their vote, whether they are eligible to vote, and old-school voter intimidation, and the ballot box by having armed guards wandering around, and at work, like with billionaire industrialists insinuating that voting for a Democrat will cost them their jobs. Conservative thinkers know that the biggest problem they face is with more people voting and the changing tide of demographics.

This, combined with voter apathy stemming both from a disillusionment with Obama and from a perception of Obama's inevitability, could give an upset victory to a GOP candidate. But this perfect storm is unlikely - the big money is on Obama, including Wall Street, Big Pharma, and the Military Industrial Complex.

So when the dust settles and the campaign debts are paid, we will have another four years of half-hearted support of good policy and quiet support of everything you can associate with previous presidencies, like expansion of executive power, indefinite detention, forever-war, the use of mercenaries, the use of depleted uranium, the support of mountain-top removal, the support of regimes that use torture and otherwise violate human rights, and the refusal to submit to binding environmental guidelines or any accountability of any kind.

Hooray for the DNC!

The challenge in 2012 will be in preparing a real liberal candidate to stand up to the inevitability of another Clinton White House, and convincing the public that such a candidate can beat the next GOP challenger. A real liberal candidate can emerge from grass-roots public policy battles, like a constitutional convention that strips corporations of personhood, a push to audit the Fed and hold white collar criminals to account for the financial crisis, and similar OWS causes.

I didn't want to go at first, but a friend was going, so my wife wanted to go, and I figured I should support the thing I've defended from people who only knew that they were being inconvenienced.

"I supported them at first...
...they don't have any end goal, any message,
they're just in the way,
they're making life harder for the 99% they claim to represent
If they spent time getting a job instead of asking for a handout they might deserve attention
and
they're just a wretched hive of scum and villainy."

I can't call myself the most informed person that exists, especially since I've been working and coming home to a bored/talkative mother-in-law and a social life. But I've been lucky to be prepared to handle these arguments. In bars, cars, kitchens, streets, and the internets, I'm proud to have answered the call when I heard it; at every turn, the issue was information. The above sentiments came from people who did not watch democracy now or surf alternative media but from people who got their news from fox or mainstream/local news. Mostly it came down to a confusion about the cause and the value of the method.



As for the cause, I hear assertions from the right that it's all about wanting a hand out. Of course, if your world view is all black and white, then when tens of thousands are moved to the point that they go into the street, then they are "Obama's fleabaggers," "parasites," "children," a mindless mob of the greedy poor. Yeah, and the Tea Party was just mercilessly and unfairly assaulted by the liberal media - the people with the racist signs don't define the movement, but the anarchists carrying the suspicious chunks of concrete define ours. The problem with believing the world is totally binary is that you tend to think if someone is on the wrong side of your opinion, then anything that looks bad for them must be true - confirmation bias.

The cause of the Occupy movement is similar to the Tea Party, actually, and at least can agree that money is damaging to democracy. When you boil everything down, I think, it's distrust with the money in politics that most defines the Occupy movement. Mega-Businesses invest in lobbyists and funnel money into political campaigns and then those politicians grant bailouts, poo-poo an audit of the FED, and rig regulations and tax law in favor of only the biggest companies. This is why the big protest is on Wall Street and not Washington: it's Wall Street that calls the shots.

So what do they want? Well, the "open protest" model means a lot of people can walk in and fight for their favorite causes, but you'll find that there's a unifying theme. There's the stinking symptoms of the problem, like extreme economic disparity and broiling unemployment despite record profits among the Orwellianly named "Job Creators." There's the constant causes of the left, like ending economic globalization plans that ship jobs oversees and strip communities of economic safety, or the constant wars that steal money that could be used to invest in our infrastructure, higher education, and food/energy security. And there's calls for solutions, like a constitutional convention to repeal Citizens United and proclaim that corporations are not people and that money is not free speech. Election reform. Regulating lobbyists. Bringing the tax code back to at least the Reagan era, removing loop holes and removing incentives to just get an address in the Caymans and legally avoiding taxes.
Doesn't sound vague or confused to me.



So these people all converged at highly visible spots in urban centers, and while making these demands they built their own societies to support their permanent protest. Food, shelter, clothes, books, teach-ins, panels, discussions, crafting, cleaning, and cooking, all volunteer, all inclusive, and all without a hierarchy, with general assemblies open to everyone and using 90% consensus to handle problems; internal, like safety and sanitation, and external, like long term plans with the city and the police. If society argues that it takes away our freedoms for our own good, it's communities like these that suggest that things are better when we have more freedom and leeway.

Of course, with the promise of shelter and free food, the tired, cold, and hungry weren't far behind. Word is that the police were even telling people to come to Occupy Portland for food. The influx of a segment of the population disproportionately afflicted with mental illness and addiction made for great stories for the main stream news. Local news channels were giddy to report on needles found nearby and depict a downtown blighted and unsafe - rarely mentioned was that these people were not materialised by the movement. It was already there, especially in the park known as a popular place for the homeless to sleep, but it just became centralised. In fact, there were doubtlessly people whose lives were saved by those camps; people who could try and get clean and redirect their energy toward something constructive, people who suddenly found themselves among people familiar with the infrastructure devoted to helping people with addiction, people who were far more safe sleeping in tents surrounded by liberals than sleeping outside the bread factory near 10th and oak.

So the news stories kept coming. The local-TV shows would stand on the edge and interview the random, naive, unintelligible, and high while mourning the nice lawn and describing the toll on the portapotties or the cost to the city to pay overtime for cops to stand around and wait for the crackdown. Fox filmed someone looking at a knife at a military surplus store and claimed protesters were stocking up on the sharpest knives they could find, or filming empty shelves and saying they were sold out of gas masks when actually, and there was even a big sign that said so, the gas masks were all behind the counter.

It helps that almost all US media is owned by just 6 companies.


Public opinion was decided. The people that pay for the news don't want people to organize and fight to make it harder to be the sole beneficiaries of democracy and capitalism. Even people who supported a lot of what it was for thought that it should end, that it had made its point. But this is a big deal, an evolution in American protest, an idea borrowed from the Arab Spring - peacefull marches are ignored by the media, so the people tried riots, like the WTO riot in Seattle, but both methods of protest have the problem of being over too soon. A place of permanent protest becomes a place where people can become politically active and engage in discussion far more readily than a march, rally, or riot, and while riots do get media attention, it hardly strays from the negative. The occupy movement, however, was able to outlive media blackout and even persist long enough so that people who heard the bad stories could see it for themselves on that one day a week they have free. Maybe that's why polling shows that the Occupy movement is more popular than the Tea Party.
The method was more effective at communicating its message the more visible it was, which is why Occupy Portland voted to try and hold onto their park, right next to city hall and shouting distance from the giant Wells Fargo building, instead of moving to other areas that would have been much easier for the city to ignore.

Especially hard to ignore because these were not professional protesters. Many had never done anything like this before, and the majority actually do have jobs.



I was there that night in Portland when they expected a crackdown at midnight or maybe 5am. I listened to a couple libertarians talk to an excited engineering student and got into the nitty gritty philosophical arguments behind economic theories. My favorite question will always be, what is a society for? What is an economy for? An impass was met when the point was made that America's period of greatest prosperity was after America's biggest investments in education and infrastructure in the post-war era, and that we've tried leaving it up to the free market to create the same conditions, but it can't. Giant banks might invest in a company that will come up with an innovative tooth brush, but there are some things that don't bring a quick profit, like sending people to college, investing in pure research, building high-speed rail, making the energy grid more efficient, or replacing aging water and waste pipes.



At the very, very least, there are a lot of people talking about this stuff than there ever has been, regardless of your opinions of the Occupy movement.

The fact that we are drawing down our presence in Iraq is hardly cause for celebration. The withdrawal, planned by then President Bush in cooperation with the wishes of the elected Iraqi government, is something Obama fought bitterly to postpone, and is hardly an end to the occupation considering the huge embassy we're leaving behind as a home base for thousands of State Department employees, as well as the over 5000 private military contractors outside any frame of accountability that will be roaming the country. And to make it even less exciting, the draw-down will come on the heels of an increasing presence in the Persian Gulf.

From CBS.com
According to the [NY]Times, the administration will seek to bolster ties with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman as a new "security architecture" for the region.

Maj. Gen. Karl R. Horst, Central Command's chief of staff, told the Times the plan was being described as "Back to the future" and "said the command was focusing on smaller but highly capable deployments and training partnerships with regional militaries."

Ostensibly it will be so that we can respond to 'security concerns' in Iraq - but the honest assessment is that we don't give a hoot about national sovereignty and the idea of succumbing to the wishes of the people of an occupied nation is unbearable. So we're gonna lurk around and make sure the world knows that we still own the middle east. We got all this money funneling to the Pentagon, so we gotta spend it. And along with floating around and flying the flag, we'll have more reasons to give money to Saudi Arabia - as part of that "security architecture," with the strings attached that the money must be used to buy weapons from us, weapons that we will see used against us in the near term in Afghanistan, which saw it's bloodiest day since the invasion yesterday, and in the long term, when our increased troop presence in Kuwait becomes the new best place to aim suicide attacks.

The Republicans will want to frame this as a surrender because the "the Democrats are soft on [The Enemy]!" narrative is the only way they can talk about foreign policy, but unfortunately this is not a real withdrawal. There will be never be a "peace dividend"

Cain is not a real presidential candidate. He does not have a real campaign and has not shown a serious interest in running one. Read it while it's free on the NYT page; the article, As Cain Promotes His Management Skills, Ex-Aides Tell of Campaign in Chaos is full of gems, painting a portrait of a candidate that will be painful for conservatives otherwise excited about his folksiness and background in the private sector that's far more concrete and successful than Mitten's. "He had not been in Iowa, the first caucus, since August," it's impossible to reach state-level campaign offices, and nearly as difficult to get something as basic as a bumper sticker in the early primary states - meanwhile he's doing a book tour in the southern states that are very late in the primary voting schedule. He's abandoned potential donors through simple lack of communication, and some staff have abandoned him because of what they see as a lack of management or aproachability - one leaked memo to Cain staff pertained to what was allowed when riding in the car with their candidate: "Do not speak to him unless you are spoken to."

All this comes on the heels of the New Hampshire Bachmann campaign staff quitting en mass, and some months after juicy stories about an "exodus" of top Gingrich campaign staffers frustrated from working for a candidate that does not appear interested in actually winning the nomination. And of course there's Palin, who spent all that time living high on the hog with a "not a campaign bus" wrapped in the constitution who, sadly, decided in the end not to run. Sometimes it seems the whole field, knows they won't win and are running anyway purely for self promotion.

Even poor Dr. Paul can't win - I suspect he's aware that winning the primary means he will be forced into a conversation about what it really means to pull government influence back to the late 1800s, an unpopular notion in general filled with unpopular specifics, like the end of medicare and the privatization of anything not bolted to the ground (well, actually, even those things too - who wants privatized fire and police depts, tolls on every road, and no public schools?).

Meanwhile, Romney has that "substance problem," where everyone already knows him as the guy who can't keep a position in the face of a group that doesn't like it. Despite being favored to win, he's hardly ever (if ever) been at the top of the polls, and I'd bet most of his numbers are more of an indicator on how much Republicans just don't like everyone else even less. I've heard it said that his problem is that he's trying to position himself as a moderate for when he comes up against Obama, a difficult dance when you have to win the nomination of a party hijacked by fundamentalist Christians with extremist views on social and economic policies that even Reagan called crazy.

The meaty part of the primary campaign season is starting soon, and it will be a big sad hilarious circus of doom and despair. Unless Huntsman fights his way to the top, the GOP has no chance, and if they don't pick Romney, Paul or Huntsman, they have no legitimacy as anything other than a wholly owned subsidiary of mega-corp money funneled through Rove and Koch-brothers PACs and Super PACs. And despite the article (and coming articles) about the ridiculous hollowness of the Cain campaign, I suspect he will win the nomination - indeed, Cain was a spokesman for the Koch bros. funded Americans for Prosperity after he was the pizza CEO he's always introduced as having been - "former Godfathers Pizza executive" just sounds more appealing than "former lacky for billionaire brothers and tea-party kingmakers." The Koch bros. bought the party, now they're trying to buy the game.