Needlenose

Seems like the ad deluge has already begun. I imagine that the Citizens United decision has flooded the election with unprecedented (and obscurely sourced) amounts of money, so the Reactionaries are going hog wild!  The main focus so far seems to be to get the 4 remaining seats in the Senate to accomplish…whatever the focus demographic wants.

Senator Cornyn provides this choice nugget:

It took just 4 years… 4 years for Democrats to unleash a wave of big government: ObamaCare, energy taxes, government takeovers, and nearly a doubling of our debt. They have left America on the brink and it’s going to take all of us working harder than ever to save this great nation.

This month marks the most critical FEC deadline. If we don’t raise $210,412 by June 30, we won’t have the resources to take back the Senate and put an end to the most liberal agenda in the history of the United States. We already made huge gains in 2010, taking back 7 Senate seats from Democratic control. The real test lies ahead, capturing the 4 seats standing between repealing the Obama agenda or failing every generation before us that lived up to their American duty.

The most liberal agenda in the history of the United States?  Presumably Mr. Cornyn slept through American History class, or assumes that his potential voters did, as I don’t think Obama’s agenda really stacks up against somebody like say FDR.  Or Johnson.  Hey even Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act, the EPA and Affirmative Action!  I was down in the Central Valley (a reactionary part of California) over the weekend and saw a recent McCain attack ad similar in message to Cornyns, but focusing on ObamaCare.

How realistic are their chances of snagging a majority?  Pretty likely, according to Paul Bedard.  Of course Bedard is a self-serving conservative.  Myles Spicer has a more optimistic outlook.  I say there is still quite a bit of road to hoe between now and the election, but undoubtedly paid-for speech could win the day for the Forces of Reaction. Wikipedia has a good write-up of the 2012 lineup.

Remember the awful Total Information Awareness project and the great hullabaloo  that killed it (or more likely drove it underground)?

Spy buddy sends me this guest post on a similar ‘mass surveillance’ system used to spy on folks abroad:

Mass Surveillance by the US Intelligence Agencies

Here is a greatly disturbing post (sounds like the stuff my schizophrenic cousin would say when he wasn’t on his meds) that summarizes a portion of Project PM Wiki. Smith describes a mass intelligence surveillance program with no government oversight that is funded by the US government and operated by federal agencies and US companies called Romas/COIN. According to Smith, Aaron Barr had a leadership role in the putting together the team of companies that bid on this contract. (Remember Barr? He resigned from his own firm after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients.)

Ms Smith describes a sophisticated mass surveillance campaign called Romas/COIN- soon to be replaced by a similar program known as Odyssey. For two years, the U.S. has been conducting mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world. What is interesting is that despite listening into phone calls, monitoring activities of individuals, and reading emails the Intelligence community was surprised by all the uprisings in the Arab world. Hmm, they really know how to use this stuff.

Most importantly Smith notes that this program was headed up by agencies, individuals and corporations who seem to have no government oversight-despite US taxpayer funding- while having carte blanche to monitoring the public.

I wrote a post (currently missing from the site until I can get the ‘lost years’ reloaded) suggesting that we need to track all the various environmental insults to the ocean (e.g. warming, acidification, non-point specific run-off, eutrophication, overfishing, etc.) and chart (and map) the cumulative impacts to determine just how bad things have gotten.  It looks like the scientists are catching up to Needlenose, as you’ll note in this depressing report from a workshop on ocean stresses and impacts.  Cliff notes summary for the lazy:

• Oceanic warming & acidification are accelerating hypoxia (which, as you may recall is being caused by agricultural and sewage runoff)
• Decline of the ocean is as bad, or worse than the ‘doomsayers’ have been predicting
• The cumulative effects are worse than previously understood
• The cumulative stressors are reducing the ability of ocean life to adapt to the ‘big changes’ of warming & acidification
• Ecosystem collapse is well underway, accelerating and spreading
• We are running out of time to take useful action

But enough of this dreary talk!  Let’s go back to our ordinarily scheduled programming to cover more on Weiner’s weiner!

I’ve done my best to remain blissfully unaware of what it is Rep. Anthony Weiner did to get himself in political trouble.  But I did note that as soon as the controversy, um, revealed itself, wise voices pointed out a simple way for Weiner to avoid having to leave office as a result — simply, refuse to resign.

Leading Democrats, though, don’t seem to want any part of that.  From TPMDC yesterday:

Democrats in Washington couldn’t have made it clearer that they want Weiner gone fast. Within minutes of his nationally televised confession on Monday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called for an ethics investigation and was seconded immediately by DCCC chair Steve Israel (D-NY).…  On the Senate side, Harry Reid more or less told Weiner to drop dead, acidly saying his advice to the lawmaker would be to “Call somebody else.” On the other side of the ledger, virtually no Democratic officials have moved to defend him.

Today, Pelosi upped the ante by specifically calling for Weiner’s resignation.

To some extent, the reactions by Reid and Pelosi are simply the institutional Democrats’ instinctive timidity at work — if they’d been alive during the American Revolution, they’d have responded to Benjamin Franklin’s famous declaration of “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately” by thinking, “Well, as long as we get them to hang someone else first, maybe we’ll get through this okay.”

As the New York Times notes, this knee-jerk reflex to surrender is amplified by Weiner’s longstanding endorsement of the opposite approach to politics:

The scandal swirling around [Weiner] has revealed a truth about his personality and his place in the Capitol: He does not care much about those he serves with, and they do not care too much about him.

In a body full of ambitious and egotistical people, Mr. Weiner, 46, stands out for his brash and sometimes even impulsive style. His aggressiveness has served him well, as he has emerged as one of the most visible politicians in New York City and one of his party’s most camera-ready combatants. Liberal cable television seems to love his style, as do many of his constituents.

This contrast, in turn, is why many progressives are trying to build counter-pressure for Weiner to stay in office:

While most of cable news has focused on Weiner death watch, MSNBC host Cenk Uygur has devoted his time to defending Weiner….

Democrats turning on Weiner is “part and parcel of the correct impression that the Democratic party is weak and the Republican party is strong,” Uygur said.

If you can forgive me a brief flight of fancy, I’d suggest to Reid and Pelosi that there’s a way for them to play both sides of this controversy successfully.  I’ve argued for years that Democrats have suffered from a poor division of labor — they don’t have designated bomb-throwers/”bad cops” to say rude (but true) things in the media, so that more moderate folks can play “good cop” and make the same points while seeming more agreeable.

If Weiner rejects the pressure to resign, Reid and Pelosi can justifiably turn to the world and say, “We tried, but we can’t force him to do what we want.” And from that moment, Weiner is a free man — free to speak impolite truths in whatever attention-getting manner and forum he chooses, enabling his less brave colleagues to accept media invitations to tut-tut his uncouth tone and choice of words… and then gently add, “But he does have a point about…”

Ahh, but who am I kidding?  The Democratic leadership is as incapable of this sort of clever kabuki as they are of standing up publicly for progressive principles.

(Updated and slightly revised from a post at Firedoglake.)

Record-breaking heat in Baltimore, Washington and Philly.  No apologies seem to be forthcoming from Faux News and Reactionary pundits who mocked Al Gore during last winter’s snowstorms.  Blinded by ideology?  Cherry picking the facts?  Or just stupid?  You decide.

…if it’s taken them so long to realize that weapons of mass destruction are readily available at gunshows across America.  Or maybe all the hoopla about ‘sleeper cells’ was total Bush bullshit, as I’ve suspected for years.  If there were any sleeper cells, and they had any brains, they’d do the next attack American style, driving Monster Trucks into Oil Refineries in Texas, with retrofitted fully automatics blazing.  At that point they may as well convert to Fundee Christianity and attack abortion clinics…then they’d have Palin and the rest of the Reactionaries rooting for them.

…the Iraqis apparently haven’t forgotten us.  Rocket attack kills 5 American soldiers on their compound.  American reactionaries are too busy gluing teabags to their hats and trading racist photoshops of Obama to put new ‘support our troops’ ribbons on their bumpers.

Please can we leave now?