Palin: Christie’s Gingrich attack shows he ‘lacks discipline’. Unsnarkable.

Obama officials pushed to underestimate Gulf oil spill

“Amid the worst accidental release of crude oil in human history, the Obama administration sought to undermine its own scientists’ estimates of just how much oil was gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, a newly disclosed email reveals.” [Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility obtained the email through FOIA]

LINK.

Appeals Panel Rules Against ‘Enemy Combatant’ Jose Padilla

“A federal appeals panel has ruled against U.S. citizen Jose Padilla’s efforts to reinstate a lawsuit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Associated Press reports. Padilla has been in custody for nearly four years and labeled an “enemy combatant.”’

LINK.

Homelessness, created daily all over the globe by greed, followed by the homeless being harassed (even persecuted) daily by police. Endless vicious cycle.

Brazil police storm landless settlement near Sao Paulo

“Brazilian riot police have stormed an illegal settlement of landless workers in Sao Paulo state to reclaim the land for its private owners.

“The evictions follow a legal battle between the residents and administrators for the bankrupt property company that owned the land.’

LINK.

A followup to my comment here:

TEPCO is temporarily making available the raw footage from its endoscope scan of the #2 reactor.

Don’t read more into the vid than what is actually there: there are problems with water droplets getting on the lens, massive amounts of steam and optical artifacts from the extreme radiation.

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news/110311/index-e.html

What is obvious is what is not there anymore… the core or any indication of where all those tons of water pouring in are going.

But then, as I said, the <1% already knew about that…

ACTA, SOPA, PIPA–and Leahy is not giving up on PIPA, either.

Thanks for keeping us up-to-date on this, zapkitty.

I believe that would be not just eleven aircraft carriers but eleven carrier battle groups consisting of many many screening and support vessels. (A half dozen or more destroyers, usually at least one cruiser, plus oilers, supply ships, etc.)

Poor Sarah, desperately clawing for one last nanosecond of political relevance….

Sounds like Kirk suffered a fairly massive stroke. The media’s not really picking up on this but it is probably a career-ender. Best wishes indeed.

Au contraire, Padilla’s been in custody almost 10 years. For charges that have little to do with why he was originally detained.

Sounds as if the media is starting to caught on.

GOP Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois faces long difficult physical recovery from stroke

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/spokesperson-illinois-gop-sen-kirk-suffers-stroke-undergoes-surgery/2012/01/23/gIQAYbXFLQ_story.html

Interior can keep the fish. Put NOAA under DOT.

You’re quite correct on both points, bmull. I guess what was meant in the article was that he has served four of the 17 years, 4 months sentence in federal prison that was imposed on January 22, 2008.

The alternative to Davos. This should be interesting.

“Tens of thousands of anti-capitalist militants, including members of Spain’s “Indignant” movement and the US Occupy Wall Street, are due to attend the World Social Forum, which opens Tuesday in Brazil.

“The forum is an alliance of social movements opposed to the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of the world’s economic and political elites being held at the same time in the Swiss resort of Davos.”

LINK.

GreatApolgetic, cheerleading story on why Apple won’t make the iPhone in America…

Fixed

CIA Director David Petraeus issued a statement saying the agency supported the investigation and reminded employees of their obligation to keep classified information secret.

He most certainly has eyes on the White House.

More on the Padilla story.

ACLU National Security Project Litigation Director Ben Wizner:

“By dismissing this lawsuit, the appeals court handed the government a blank check to commit any abuse in the name of national security, even the brutal torture of a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.”

Whatever happened to the meme that all U.S. military equipment wore out in 2 hot wars and needs a complete replacement cycle.

I beg your pardon. There are SO many things that Sarah hasn’t quit at yet. She’s surely not quitting on quitting.

I have little doubt that the cat killer is also a liberal with a twisted sense of how to score political points.

Not that it couldn’t have been anticipated a decade ago, as soon as you saw how John Walker Lindh was treated.

My contempt for someone who is cruel to animals knows no bounds.

Thanks for giving us at FDL your most valued opinion on the motives.

Your contributions to this blog are invaluable./s

democracynow will prolly be there & cover it live. I think they did last year.

It took a while to stack the courts so these kinds of decisions could be consistently made. Now that they are suffiently stacked with the right people, the potential for overturnings are minimized. Atrocities can now proceed with impunity.

Right.

I was just remarking that the direction was apparent a long time ago. As with most forecasting matters, the timing is the tricky part.

On edit: And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how this will work with Occupies.

In the darkest hour, there is always a glimmer of hope. The persecution of Occupy by the feds and their local stormtroopers could galvanize the public in support of the movement. A backlash could occur.

Backlash is one possibility.

Galvanizing the movement is another one.

However, opposition to austerity in Greece, after gigantic demonstrations, has been put down altogether, as least insofar as I can find on the sites I normally visit.

Unless Tennessee has changed math as they are attempting to change history, 99 is still a bigger number than 1. The 1%’s hold on power is only based on the spreading and acceptance of myths. Once those myths are rejected, the walls of the fortress crumble.

“The thought of brutalizing any animal for the sake of making a political statement is beyond any standard of decency and the person or people responsible for this act should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law,”

Read Zinn, the parts about how effective PTB at maintaining their privileged positions against vast majorities.

Myths are not the only arrow in the PTB quiver. They have control of all the levers of power and all the money, and have had for all of history. It’s not as straightforward as you imply.

Agreed. It would also be nice if one day the brutalizing of humans was also held to that same standard.

Myths may not be the only arrow, but they are essential. They are what prevent the opposition from uniting.

Jared Bernstein finishes his article by assuming that the architects of products are the ones who profit by globalization. The NYT article says Apple makes $400,000 in profit per worker on its products. I know of no architect at Apple who is making $400,000, or even close to that.

Tim Cook, on the other hand, was compensated at $0.5 Billion last year.

Not so.

Here’s an unedited list of other techniques (from Zinn). Unedited in the sense that they are overlapping and in no particular order.

• Propaganda
• Control of media
• Mythmaking
• Patriotism/jingoism
• Resentment creation
• Blame the victim
• Fear
• Backlash
• Secrecy/classification
• Scapegoating
• Culturcide
• Genocide
• Surveillance
• Verbal intimidation
• Physical intimidation
• Racism
• Disenfranchisement
• Stalling
• Spying
• Physical violence or force, including murder
• Shaming
• Divide and conquer
• Religion
• Values
• Economic confiscation
• Intimidation
• Redirecting anger/rage from PTB toward other blameless classes
• Individualism
• Torture
• Invasion of the person
• Rules/laws, which exist only for the 98%ers
• Tokenism
• Infiltration
• Invisibilitation (think women)
• Destruction of communal spirit

“Creators” for the most part, belong to 99ers. Think of how few people of talent in highly visible businesses, like music, ever get top dollar.

That’s a comprehensive list, but a broad definiton of the myth concept would include about half of them. The definition of myth I have in mind: getting people to think they way the PTB wants them to think.

Hey D-Day: Slightly o/t, but that little kitteh in the photo is a dead-ringer for Maestro, one of my two. Great shot.

Gabrielle Giffords did not step down from Congress before finishing the Congress on Your Corner event that was the scene of the tragic shooting last year. She will also attend tomorrow’s State of the Union address.

Bold and classy. By my reckoning, there are about 534 members of the two legislative bodies who could stand to take lessons from her.

Go Gabby.

Is it just me, or do ALL of those feel familiar? :-(

Thanks!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html on Apple not making Iphones in the US – having taken manufacturing out of the US in 2004 – sort of points to why we have fewer jobs.

Apple has 30,000 office employees and its manufacturing employees number over 1 million – but all of those 1 million are via contractors in China these days. That is 1 million jobs that could be in the US if we didn’t reward China’s 25% tariff on US imports with a US tariff of 2.5% or less – or our rewarding internal non-tariff barriers in China with no such barriers in the US. Plus Apple has agreed to move much of its office employee/technical development to China in return for a few Apple stores and a contract with their cell phone providing telephone companies to sell the Iphone.

Seems enemy combatants are held until the war ends.

When the last terrorist dies.

I doubt he will ever get out.

But the SCOTUS says this is compatible with our Constitution.

Keystone XL should be shut down, but I fail to see the reasoning that says delay equals giving up the project.

To have shippers may walk away from their contracts with TransCanada, the shippers must go elsewhere – so where do they go? Who is competing with TransCanada with a different pipeline?

They have the tar sands oil being processed in the midwest now, causing an oversupply of product and thus lower prices. They want to drain the midwest of that oversupply. This does not change.

Canada is expanding tar sands oil production – so where does it go?

The goal should be to require a refinery to be built in the midwest or northeast or southeast with a pipeline to the new refinery so that we get something out of this. Protests against tar sands is not going to get them to stop production in Canada or stop folks from buying the product.

Perhaps we can get them to pipeline it to Quebec – ? – well NO – because the temp required in the line makes transport north of the border too expensive.

Bani Walid – the town flying the Gadhafi flag – is the home of the Warfalla tribe that was the muscle behind Gadhafi – becoming the most powerful tribe of the many tribes that make up the state – getting the reward of being the most armed and powerful tribe in Libya.

Hard to see how no one saw this coming. Still it is only a couple of hundred fighters – and will easily be crushed. But it is not easy to give up power – especially when you have weapons – and they are a large tribe that is the only population in many towns in that area.

SOPA, the international treaty version, is just one more attempt to take a right away via a treaty – as soon as possible we must get out of the WTO, and stop with the trade agreements that screw us and blow away our Constitution.