Monsters

Wow.

Helping our Enemies

Justin Elliott on the military aid we have provided to Libya in recent years.

The most interesting factoid in this article is the following:

In fiscal 2009, the U.S. spent at least $536 million on training military personnel from 159 countries.

159 Countries?  What countries aren't we providing training to?

The Establishment Press, Part 5

This guy's a liberal?  Are you serious??!!

Abdication

This cracks me up.

From Steve Benen:

We see this fairly often, and it's puzzling every time. I can appreciate the unique role the President of the United States plays as a sole chief executive, but Congress is its own branch of government. Senators, especially a massive, bipartisan group of 64, have the power to sit down, negotiate, and craft a policy that would achieve the goal these members ostensibly want to reach. If a consensus could be reached, it'd be filibuster-proof. 

But instead of choosing to work on their desired outcome, they chose to write a letter, asking President Obama to endorse work on their desired outcome. 

Presumably, the next step will be calls for additional "leadership," from those who aren't interested in demonstrating any leadership.

As usual, this is all smoke and mirrors.  And people refusing to take responsibility for their actions.

And why the heck are Democratic senators signing this letter.  The only conceivable outcome of this is to make their own President look ineffective for not being able to achieve what they themselves are unable to achieve.

But never underestimate the ability of Democrats to shoot themselves in the foot.

More on the letter from Krugman, Ezra and Atrios.

Rewriting History

Bachmann.

I don't think this has anything to do with either ignorance or stupidity.  Personally, I think the righties actually want Americans to think that nothing good could ever have happened in a pinko state like Massachusetts.

Small Town Corruption

Atrios links to an article about why corruption is endemic to big cities and says:

I don't think there's any way to judge the winner of the corruption olympics, but I do reject the easy assumption that corruption in the "big cities" is necessarily and always worse than elsewhere. 

Speaking from experience, I would agree.  Indeed, in smaller jurisdictions, where communities are more  homogeneous from a religious and ethnic perspective, my experience is that people tend to base their decisions on trust, and trust is something that is very easily abused.

I rarely agreed with anything Ronald Reagan espoused, but in one thing he was absolutely correct:  Trust, but verify!

The Establishment Press, Part 4

Digby nails it.

Of course, the real reason for this is the change in the media ownership rules decades back.

Like big banks, big media is harmful to democracy.

Of Course It's an Act

Jonathan Bernstein on the "thick-skinned" Sarah Palin.

Of course its an act.  It plays to her paranoid base.  The main thing she has going with her base is that they feel sorry for her because she's so maligned.  If you took that sympathy away, there'd be nothing left.

There's Hope!

Here's Felix Salmon, trashing a so-called personal finance columnist for advocating purchasing a home for the least down payment possible.

This, in a nutshell, is everything that was wrong with the housing market before the crash — everything that we want to avoid going forward. Can’t Linda look around at the current devastated state of many people who bought with little or no money down, and see the dangers here? Evidently not. Instead, she seems to think it’s a bright idea to borrow more money than you need, to the point at which you’re pushing the envelope of what you can reasonably afford.

The best thing about this is that the personal finance columnist writes for the same news organization as Salmon: Reuters.  It's nice to see someone whose willing to stand up to his employer and say "Are you kidding me?!?"

Kudos.

Shocking!!

A new report from the London School of Economics concludes that the more military support the US provides to a country, the more likely it is that terrorist groups from that country will attack Americans.

Logically I had always thought that this would be true.  It is nice to see that it has now been demonstrated empirically.

ht/The Monkey Cage

The Establishment Press, Part 3

From Glenn Greenwald.

I remember growing up in the 1970s, hearing about the Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestia, that they were owned by and simply mouthpieces of the government and reported little but propaganda.  And our New York times and Washington Post were instead privately-owned news organizations that spoke truth to power, willing to publish such things as The Pentagon Papers and expose the corruption of the Nixon Administration.

My how times have changed.  Now I think of them as little more than privately owned Pravdas.

One side question that never seems to get addressed - what are the "national interests" of the United States, anyway?