Somewhere in America, a claque of merry pollsters stuck in preadolescent boy mode is getting paid to think up the most disgusting objects in the universe with which to compare Congress. Last time around, they made annoying dinnertime phone calls to unsuspecting people to find out whether they preferred a root canal or a Congress Critter. Guess who won? At least with a root canal, you get anesthetized.
It's getting harder and harder to come up with new lists of horribles, but the PeePeePee outfit really outdid itself this year. With an unbelievably high approval rating of 8 percent, Congress was unfavorably compared with toenail fungus, cockroaches, dog poop and hemorrhoids.
But there is faint hope for the critters. Americans still like Congress better than they like Honey Boo Boo and Charles Manson.
Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, Tom Friedman still thinks there's such a thing as mainstream Republicans. And that they really need to get their act together to reform their party, the same way Clinton reformed the Democrats and gave us mainstream Republicans. My response:
So-called mainstream Republicans have lost the right to call themselves mainstream. Their flow of ideas and policies for the common good dried up long ago. And John Boehner looks like he just needs to dry out.
A party only deserves to call itself mainstream when it has the capacity to either swamp, or cut off completely, those occasional renegade rivulets that branch off into crazy directions every now and again. The mighty GOP has spawned a cascade of toxic tea, and its so-called leaders have neither the will nor the way to dam (or damn) it.
And you can't call them conservatives, either, when they are so complicit in wanton destruction.
I'm happy that the president seems to be standing firm against what amounts to an internal coup d'état by a small group of reactionary usurpers. I'm unhappy that he still feels it necessary to hold out to the economic terrorists in our midst the carrot of deficit reduction and "entitlement reform" at a time where income disparity is at record levels and more and more people are sliding into poverty. I'm happy that he's giving more interviews and press conferences. I'm unhappy that he's ruled out invoking the 14th Amendment, minting a platinum coin, or even going so far as to call for the abolishment of the debt limit itself. After all, it doesn't actually exist.
The only limit we have to fear is the limited morality of the usurpers. So let's just go with the flow, and flush them out in 2014 (if they don't resign in disgrace first.)
Although a Grand Bargain of austerity for the masses and prosperity for the rentiers was the obvious endgame for both sides of the Money Party, I'm not as confident as I was even a couple of days ago that they will be able to accomplish their sleight of hand before default actually occurs. It is looking more and more like the imaginary ceiling will be breached after all, and that we're in for a whole heap of dog poop. Faced with the reality of a politically-manufactured Great Depression, I suppose the plan is that we'll feel abjectly grateful when the political donor class of the Charitable Industrial Complex provides a soup kitchen in every city to make up for the lack of jobs and the cutting of Social Security, food stamps and Medicare. This time around, there is nothing even close to a socialist left flank to protect us from incipient Hooverism.
Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida tried, though. And he got gaveled into silence when he cited the dog poop poll to illustrate how the "dignity of the House" has been called into question during the debate for a clean debt ceiling vote. Clip here.
The continuing immiseration of common people caused by a cabal of fringe right wingers and complicit deficit hawk Democrats and the fun poll questions answered by disgusted populace reminds me of the ending of an Anton Chekhov story called "Small Fry."
A depressed wage slave, stuck in his bleak surroundings while the rich people gambol about town, ponders the hopelessness of his life as his kerosene runs out and a lone cockroach scurries around on his desk:
Ah... running about here, you devil!" With the palm of his hand, he spitefully swatted the cockroach, which had had the misfortune of catching his eye. "What vileness!"
The cockroach fell on its back and desperately waved its legs... Nevyrazimov took it by one leg and threw it into the lamp. The lamp flared and crackled...
And Nevyrazimov felt better.
In an unsurprising move pretending to catch all the movers and shakers by complete surprise, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered all 350,000 furloughed civilian employees of the military back to work. This decision, according to the Washington Post, will "significantly" lessen the impact of Shutdown USA: The Movie.
When a shutdown's impact is "significantly lessened" simply because the workforce in one single department is now back on the job, it suddenly dawns on you just what the United States government is all about. (As if you really needed any more sudden realizations. But they keep slapping you in the face anyway.)
It certainly isn't about helping its own citizens apply for Social Security, or ensuring that teams of scientists are working at the CDC to track this year's flu outbreaks and other epidemics, or staffing WIC offices, so that poor women and children can get the proper nutrition and education. Those workers are all still at home. You see, they are not "essential" personnel tasked with maintaining American military bases or building predator drones and bombs for the lucrative defense industry.
Oh, eventually the non-essential workers will get paid. But only retroactively. Let them eat on credit.
And naturally and also unsurprisingly, the shutdown has certainly not stopped the hemorrhaging of $10 million an hour for the war in Afghanistan, now entering its 13th year.
Nor will it prevent Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) from holding a hearing today to demonize disabled Americans. Ronald Reagan had his welfare queens in their Cadillacs before Bill Clinton and the Newtster destroyed "welfare as we know it." Then the right wing pivoted to food stamp recipients dining on lobster tails. Not to be outdone, Coburn has his hordes of trailer trash malingerers buying electronics and meth with their $1100-a-month disability checks.
The ever right-leaning 60 Minutes, rather than showcasing the suffering of ordinary people sinking in the quagmire of gratuitous government austerity, devoted its very first segment last night to unquestioningly letting Coburn deliver his propaganda. The program highlighted a disability fraud ring operating out of Appalachia -- where, we are led to believe, an entire community has conspired to bilk the government out of its dwindling Social Security disability funds. (Even though Coburn says he has evidence, none of the culprits has been prosecuted thus far.)
Not once does 60 Minutes interview real people with real disabilities, struggling to get by on their paltry benefits. Reporter Steve Kroft never challenges Coburn on his specious claim that at least a quarter of all SSA cases are fraudulent, or on his even more ridiculous claim that the average disabled person stands to suck up $300,000 in lifetime benefits. It doesn't tell you the inconvenient truth that the vast majority of disability applications in this country are denied by the government.
CBS, of course, is not alone in demonizing people too sick or impaired to work. When NPR came out with its own hit piece on disability beneficiaries last spring, a group of former Social Security commissioners were incensed enough wrote an open letter refuting the claims:
Approximately 1 in 5 of our fellow Americans live with disabilities, but only those with the most significant disabilities qualify for disability benefits under Title II and Title XVI of the Social Security Act.
Title II Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (DI) benefits and Title XVI Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits provide critical support to millions of Americans with the most severe disabilities, as well as their dependents and survivors. Disabled beneficiaries often report multiple impairments, and many have such poor health that they are terminally ill: about 1 in 5 male DI beneficiaries and 1 in 7 female DI beneficiaries die within 5 years of receiving benefits. Despite their impairments, many beneficiaries attempt work using the work incentives under the Social Security Act, and some do work part-time. For example, research by Mathematica and SSA finds that about 17 percent of beneficiaries worked in 2007. However, their earnings are generally very low (two-thirds of those who worked in 2007 earned less than $5,000 for the whole year), and only a small share are able to earn enough to be self-sufficient and leave the DI and SSI programs each year. Without Social Security or SSI, the alternatives for many beneficiaries are simply unthinkable.
And as if to hammer home its subliminal message of Makers vs. Takers, honest folks vs grifters, workers vs. couch potatoes, the 60 Minutes segment immediately following Coburn last night was a hagiographic puff piece on the veterans of the Blackhawk Down debacle of the Clinton Administration. This second piece dovetailed nicely and coincidentally with the two weekend military strikes (Somalia and Libya) against terrorists, which went on as scheduled despite the Shutdown, as if to back up Sec. of State John Kerry's soothing remarks to the world that America the All-Powerful is still Number One.
Militarism and hegemony are essential. People, not so much. Especially those malingerers. The corporate media-political complex sends you this message:
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| Bad American |
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| Good American |
Do you see how the messages of the media and politicians always seem to mesh so very nicely? It's almost as though it was planned, or something.
Many a tear has to fall, but it's all in the game.*
Even though Weeper of the House John Boehner rails, "This isn't some damned game!"
It most certainly is, suavely counters Secretary of State of Affairs John Kerry. Think of this little tiff as a rare bad inning for the World Series champs.
The fact that one upstart, extremist right wing faction seemingly has the power to bring the greatest nation on Earth to its knees should not be cause for too much concern, he reassured the wavering global client/fan base of Team America. This shutdown kerfuffle is merely an example of how broad-minded and exceptional and strong we truly are. Since it is indeed all a game, it's patently unfair that the United States is getting such a bad rap and taking such an unfair hit to its good rep.
“Do not mistake this momentary episode in American politics as anything more than a moment of politics,” he said. “This is an example of the robustness of our democracy.”
I imagine that those nearly one million furloughed federal workers are breathing a huge collective sigh of relief right about now. When the bill collectors call, they can always say they are experiencing a momentary episode. The robustness of their endangered personal credit ratings must not be challenged.
The New York Times inadvertently broadcast the real truth: "Standing in for President Obama at an economic summit in Asia, (Kerry) warned on Saturday that the United States’ reputation was endangered because of the government shutdown, which sends the message that “we can’t get out (sic) own act together.”
Whereby he confirmed that the latest piece of bipartisan Disaster Capitalism is, of course, just an act. And that we the people are just the audience posing as unpaid bit players in the whole staged fiasco. Along with the furloughed workers, we will breathe a collective sigh of relief as the bickering parties in a fundamentally solid marriage finally come together to renew their vows.... their Grand Bargain for the Grandees. The Republicans won because they got all their hatred out in the open. The Democrats won because they made a good show of fighting for the peeps, even as they started their negotiations having already accepted austerian budget numbers.
The Democrats, as a few analysts point out, have essentially adopted flim-flam man Paul Ryan's budget. All this talk about Obama standing firm against the Republicans is bullshit. He already caved. John Boehner already got 98% of everything he wanted. Wall Street already got 1000% of everything it wanted.
It's all in the game.
Once in awhile he won't call, but it's all in the game. Soon he'll be there at your side with a sweet bouquet. Then he'll kiss your lips and caress your waiting fingertips. And your hearts will fly away.
The sweet bouquet, of course, is cutting Social Security through chained CPI, along with the possible raising of the Medicare eligibility age, no new taxes on the rich, further tweaks to Obamacare, and maybe even approval of the tar sands pipeline. Obama has left "entitlement reforms" on the table for a romantic candlelit dinner in the denouement of Crisis Theater, 2013. Kiss and Makeup Time is inevitable. John Kerry promised this to the fan base of the whole world. They're just waiting for either the staged GOP temper tantrum to bawl itself out, or for Obama to issue a time-out and invoke the 14th. Either way, he wants to bargain away the great social insurance programs of the 20th century.
"The robustness of the Market shall not be challenged" is what he dog-whistled. The world shall remain safe for plutocracy.
Unless, of course, more of us spectators make our voices heard. We stopped the bombing on Syria. We stopped the appointment of Larry Summers to the Federal Reserve. We can also stop the final shredding of the New Deal. We can crash their makeup scene, take all the pleasure out of their fervid makeout session.
We can, and must, get out of the box the media-industrial complex has constructed for us. This is not about Democrats vs. Republicans, and picking a side. This is about the .01% vs. the rest of us. It's about resetting the terms of the Class War.
* This pop staple was actually written by Calvin Coolidge's vice president, Charles Dawes... who was a banker before he entered politics. Plus ça change, etc.
** Update: here's a link to Maureen Dowd's cinematic column, comparing Jeffersonian "Utopia" to Ted Cruz-inspired Thunderdome. It got good reviews from the usual critics; it had me riveted right up to the point where she seemed to compare Julian Assange to a crazoid militia dude. I notice that all our usual media suspects, stung by recent criticism of their "both sides do it" journalism, are now on their best behavior and trying to be very careful not to lump the Dems and the Pugs together in the Shutdown debacle. Ergo, for some reason, Dowd drags out Assange as an example of extreme leftism. My comment:
Great cinematic treatment of 2084. But for many of us, the future is now.
You might even say it started with Jefferson himself, whose declaration that all men are created equal didn't extend to freeing his own slaves. His utopia was envisioned as a utopia for the ruling class.. Emancipation was always for another day. That "existential dread" has been a way of life for the underclass since the founders did the founding. Just ask the Native Americans.
The most recent outbreak of fear of our own government is due not only to the antics of the Tea Party. It stems from the overarching, paranoid antics of the national surveillance state, the evisceration of civil liberties, and capitalism gone wild. Julian Assange did us all a favor revealing such antics. So casting him as a villain in your dystopian film makes me suspect that the script came from the same official sources that brought us "Zero Dark 30."
And it's a movie we've seen before. Create a crisis, foment some fear, use it as a smokescreen to rob the poor and give to the rich. Even John Kerry as much as admitted that the current showdown meltdown is just a glitch in the well-oiled machine. He told a nervous crowd in Asia: "Do not mistake this momentary episode in American politics as anything more than a moment of politics, This is an example of the robustness of our democracy.”
Translation: Fear not, blood-sucking plutocrats. The fundamentals of the Market are strong. Keeping you well-fed is our highest priority.
Well, wonder of wonders. The New York Times finally got around to noticing that the majority of poor people will be barred from getting health insurance under Obamacare. The exclusion, of course, is due to those nasty, red, mainly southern states opting out of Medicaid expansion, which the Supreme Court obligingly allowed them to do at the same time it gave the thumbs-up to taxpayer subsidization of the private insurance predators. But still, the numbers are downright shocking, worse than I imagined:
A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help.....
The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’ aides.
“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion — many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. “It is their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to the entire health care system.”
So this begs the question: since Obamacare is shutting out poor people and minorities, why on earth are the Republicans so dead set against it? I thought their whole raison d'etre was the denial of health care to the poor and the darker-hued. Did they just shut down the government for no reason at all?
The Times article does not even touch upon the de facto exclusion of those opting for the high-deductible and co-pay "Bronze" junk packages that still leave "better-off" subscribers vulnerable to bankruptcy when they can't make their out-of-pocket costs. We won't know the full extent of the damage until cheap plan subscribers attempt to actually use their shiny new cards and then get those unexpected bills in the mail. Assuming, of course, that they can even log on to apply, which assumes they have an internet connection in the first place.
The Down and Out are getting a lot of unexpected The System Is Down messages on their screens. Do you suppose The System is trying to tell us something?
Meanwhile, with every day that goes by in the continuing contrived Shutdown Saga of the Crazy Pols vs. the Pragmatic Pols, the end-game is looking more and more obvious. The alcoholic in charge of the Crazy Caucus is now willing to play the sober president's longed-for Grand Bargain game of safety net cuts in exchange for giving up the Tea Party's fight against Obamacare. He might even sacrifice his Speakership in exchange for a lucrative spot on Fox or CNN. As I have repeated ad nauseum: heads they win, tails we lose.
Old people, widows and orphans, veterans and the disabled will "share the sacrifice" through the imposition of Chained CPI, giving up some meals and extras in order to placate Wall Street tycoons. The middle and working classes will be asked to give up just a little more so that their fellow citizens can morph into full-fledged health care "consumers."
And most people, who have already picked the blue team or the red team, will never know what hit them. One day we'll wake up to the glorious news that yet another crisis has been averted behind closed doors, in the wee hours. The Panda Cam will be turned back on! We'll be able to get forecasts from the National Weather Service! The Centers for Disease Control will be able to track down the source of the latest Salmonella outbreak from the unregulated factory farms! Kids with cancer will be admitted back into NIH trials.
And one day, so gradually that we won't even notice, our monthly Social Security checks will start shrinking. If we're among the 50 million and growing "food-insecure" people who need to sign up for SNAP subsidies because of unemployment or underemployment, those stipends will pay for maybe two weeks worth of food instead of three. We'll be helping the richest nation on earth, a nation that is nowhere near going broke, meet its "long-term fiscal challenges", as the president assured Wall Street yesterday.
Reports are contradictory on possible unilateral presidential action. According to Wall Street mouthpiece CNBC, Nancy Pelosi has said that Obama will ignore the Constitution and refuse to invoke the 14 Amendment so that the nation's bills can be paid. According to the New York Times, though, she is urging him to apply the 14th. Default or bust. Keep us confused, churn up the phony uncertainty and crisis atmosphere so that the market can make the necessary bets, in which heads they win and tails you lose.
According to the transcript of his CNBC interview, aptly headlined with the word Politic$, Obama craftily sidestepped those 30 million health care rejectees. "I am exasperated," he droned in his usual monotone, "with the idea that unless I say that 20 million people, 'you
can't have health insurance, they will not reopen the government.' That is
irresponsible."
And the beauty of it is, he seems to have quietly relinquished what had been the main sticking point for Republicans. He is no longer even insisting on a "balanced approach" of revenue from the rich in exchange for entitlement cuts. He is not insisting on the repeal of the Sequester either. As a matter of fact, he is offering decreased corporate tax rates to encourage low-wage manufacturing jobs coming back to our shores. I'll say it again. Heads they win, tails we lose.
So take your pick. Would you rather die quickly at the hands of a raving lunatic with an axe, or slowly by the scalpel of a cold-blooded psychopath who anesthetizes you first?
That's the name of a whole new literary genre bursting forth from the Style pages of the New York Times. One feature, called "Vows", takes the real love stories of real rich people and makes them available for the delectation of the ravening masses in the hinterland. One such entry celebrated the spiritual journey and sexual awakening of a woman after she serendipitously and fatally struck a child with her car.
In her most recent blog post, Public Editor Margaret Sullivan addressed the torrent of reader outrage over the piece. It was in supremely bad taste, complained the complainers, to mention the death of a child in the same column as a feel-good New Age Society wedding. Sullivan correctly noted it also seems to be in especially bad taste to celebrate the self-indulgence of the rich at the same time almost a million federal workers have been furloughed from their jobs.
But bad taste, tastefully presented, is the whole point of the "Vows" stories in particular and the Style section in general. I am convinced that these pieces are deliberately designed to piss off normal people as they purport to celebrate the shallow lives of the entitled rich. The only people apparently not in on the joke are the entitled rich, whose addiction to their own inclusion as stars of the never-ending atrocity exhibition prevents them from any real insight into their own selves. They're victims of their own toxic affinity fraud.
Lois Smith Brady, the writer of the latest target of hoi polloi wrath, actually produced a masterwork of satire with her calm evisceration of the "soul mates" of the Hamptons. She immediately lets us know what we're in for with the sharp thrust of her lead:
People describe Erika Halweil, a longtime yoga teacher in the Hamptons, as someone who has a lot of backbone in every way. She has great posture. She rarely gets upset over things like parking tickets or bad-hair days. (Naturally pretty, she probably doesn’t have many.) She is sometimes stern but never shy.
Erica's brother oxymoronically gushes about how at ease she is with her own exuberance. (The privileged rich can be relaxed and hyper at the same time, unlike the rest of us.) Growing up privileged, she and her family would forage for elderberries in Central Park when they weren't surf-casting on Long Island or watching old Laurel and Hardy movies.
The new bridegroom, one Corey De Rosa, was not quite so privileged, coming from an "Everybody Loves Raymond" type family. He only got rich catering to the rich as a Yoga instructor. He was a late bloomer, it seems, a party animal who had a hard time "transitioning" from decadence to that sweet spot of total relaxation, which for him is a special room painted all red and black that he calls his Womb.
But here's the paragraph that really got Times readers so ticked off:
On Aug. 17, 2008, Ms. Halweil was driving on Montauk Highway when a 5-year-old girl rode a red toy wagon down a steep driveway and shot out onto the road in front of Ms. Halweil’s car. When she recounts the accident (the child died and Ms. Halweil was not charged) you can really see her calm, philosophical and open demeanor. In an almost plaintive voice, she said: “It was clear sky, clear road. I saw a flash of red coming toward my car.” She swerved but still hit the wagon. “I got out of the car and this really beautiful little girl with pale skin and blue eyes was laying in the road. Her eyes were glazed over. I knew the spirit had left her body.”
She found salvation in Yoga and the love of her life, Womb Man. He fell head over heels because in the wake of the accident -- which the article touchingly calls a "bump in the road" -- he found her amazingly "beautiful and radiating." And ever so much "light and fun." Plus, she reminded him of Mommy.
Eventually, De Rosa and Halweil dumped their respective significant others and shacked up. When they finally made it legal -- only after Halweil gave birth to De Rosa's child with the aid of a concoction of Vodka, castor oil, baking soda and pineapple juice -- she dressed in a wedding gown she described as "pigeon-blood red."
Naturally, the happy couple humble-brags about how unpretentious they are. They are really "stripped down." And the sex is really, really good.
I had always made it a point to avoid the Style section like the plague. So thanks are due to Margaret Sullivan to alerting me to its rich satire. There are plenty of gems hidden amongst the fluff. Flannery O'Connor is alive and well in the Hamptons. And it is Absolutely Fabulous, sweetie-dahling.
Government shutdown is actually kind of a misnomer. That is because the leaders who actually run things have not been shut down, nor will they ever shut up. The Congress critters have not gone home. To the contrary, they're boozing it up* like it's 1929. The White House is open for business and schmoozing it up. Obama is reportedly feeling pretty chipper. Because as far as I know, Terror Tuesday has not been disrupted by Shutdown. As a matter of fact, economic terrorists Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon and a whole passel of their unprosecuted little bankster buddies will be dropping by tomorrow to give their factotum in the Oval Office instructions on how best to save the world for the Masters of the Universe.
One National Zoo will be closed down, but the one known as Congress will go right on roaring its terrible roar and gnashing its terrible teeth and grazing at the corporate lobby trough. The Panda Cam is going dark, and the pandering will continue in the dark.
The troops on the battlefield will continue drawing their paychecks thanks to a laudable and "rare" show of bipartisan unity, but the troops wounded in mind or body are out of luck. Money for their benefits will be gone by the end of the month.
The NSA and the Surveillance State will lumber on, unimpeded due to their budget being secret and infinite. Keith Alexander's Star Wars chair will not be yanked out from under him, and the ribbons and medals will not be yanked off his chest. But real crime? Real terrorism? Not being fought so much any more. Poor victims and witnesses are not being protected. And this has nothing much to do with Shutdown, but everything to do with Sequestration.... which goes on, and on.
Eight hundred thousand federal workers are being sent home, and millions more are being ordered to work without pay. But Obamacare is open for business in what is cutely known as a soft "anti-climatic" launch. Or, the opposite of a mass orgasm. Or, the letdown in the shutdown. Starting today, assuming that you still have enough money to pay your Internet bill, you are invited to log on and shop around for partial insurance from for-profit middlemen.
Let's just put it this way. The Great Shutdown of Thirteen will not inconvenience the elites and their essential services (war and wealth extraction) in any great way. The only people being made to suffer are the poor and the dwindling middle class. It's business as usual, only more noticeable. But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the people will finally revolt.
* The New York Times, in its infinite wisdom and political correctitude, axed a totally tasteless comment I wrote last night in response to Joe Nocera's Those Banana Republicans. It went something like this:
More like Banana Daiquiri Republicans, judging from the Tweets of enterprising Capitol Hill reporters gagging on the legislative fumes. (Although hemochromatotic Weeper John Boehner is said to favor Merlot.)
Although it is politically incorrect to say that "both sides do it", when it comes to boozing while legislating, both sides do it. Which is why Boehner and the lesser boozers will probably never be brought up on ethics charges or be treated to an intervention by their peers. So it is up to the media. Why the NYT silence on the problem of alcohol abuse in the chambers? Those enterprising reporters could maybe cop some strands of congress-critter hair or even capture a drop of flying demagogic spittle to forward to a lab for immediate chemical analysis.
With these sloppy drunks immiserating millions of already struggling people through sequestration and shut-down and furloughs and closings of essential services, the whole nation could probably use sponsorship in an Al-Anon chapter for the constituents of sick abusive pols. If Boehner and his Caucus of Creeps won't honorably resign from their leaky ship of state, we should just kick the bums out. Let them, inebriates in the service of inebriates that they are, lurch away into the political oblivion they so richly deserve.
Remember George W. Bush? He was an untreated alcoholic, a "dry drunk". And look where he got us.
And Ted Cruz is a whole 'nother story from a whole 'nother country. He is probably more into stimulants than depressants. Before he left Houston to begin his 20-plus hour marathon filibluster on the Senate floor, I think he must have made a detour to a certain laboratory in Albuquerque, because he came across as more of a meth-head than a drunk. Either that or he is congenitally hypomanic. Judging from his marathon glittery-eyed appearances on cable TV all week, I don't think he ever sleeps.
Meanwhile, Paul Krugman blogs that it probably wouldn't be rectitudinal to post on the Times website what he considers to be the best commentary so far on the whole Shutdown Mess:
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The good folks of the Surveillance State are terrified that we are not afraid enough of the bogeyman. They worry that we're not comfortable with our roles as domestic targets of our own government. So, instead of scaling back the surveillance, the spooks are simply ramping up both the fear and the guilt. They are striving mightily to wipe the Snowden egg off their faces even as they cravenly try to hide their faces.
Therefore, it's no big surprise that, having slunk and lurked on the dark side for so many decades, they are N.S.A. (Not So Adept) at filling this tall public relations order in order to justify their own continued, useless, bloated and lucrative existence.
But they're trying, they really are. Just in time to respond to the news of another blockbuster of an impending revelation that the Not-So-Adepts are in cahoots with the C.I.A. over an assassination program, the Obama administration has again commandeered the Paper of Record for use as its propaganda mouthpiece of record. In a masterpiece of the genre, the N.Y. Times has relied solely upon unnamed "present and former" officials to actually blame one of its rivals, McClatchey Newspapers, for an alleged August bombing plot leak that supposedly led to the "terrorists" clamming up and preventing the USA from monitoring them. The Times, of course, has proclaimed itself innocent of such enterprise journalism, patriotically and idiotically bowing to White House demands that it sit on the story to prevent the danger of official embarrassment.
The Times piece, homophonically and homogeneously written by a couple of reporters named Schmitt and Schmidt, is actually quite hilarious in places. For example, it takes seriously a complaint by Obama officials that the only chatter they've been able to pick up from Al Qaeda lately is terrorist gossip about the Snowden revelations! How dare they, when it is the duty of bad guys everywhere to broadcast their actual plans for mayhem. Idle chit-chat has no place in Spookville. As we all know, the Mid-east miscreants always, always stupidly allowed the American spooks to listen in, until Snowden and journalism happened along to spoil all the fun. Come on.
But the Times dutifully forges ahead anyway:
“The switches weren’t turned off, but there has been a real decrease in quality” of communications, said one United States official, who like others quoted spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence programs.
The drop in message traffic after the communication intercepts contrasts with what analysts describe as a far more muted impact on counterterrorism efforts from the disclosures by Mr. Snowden of the broad capabilities of N.S.A. surveillance programs. Instead of terrorists moving away from electronic communications after those disclosures, analysts have detected terrorists mainly talking about the information that Mr. Snowden has disclosed.
In other words, the "terrorists" are rubbing their faces in it. A lot like the American citizens who, suddenly made privy to state secrets, are now sending greetings to eavesdropping N.S.A. cubicle dwellers who might be feeling left out from the conversation, or who've run out of LoveInt targets to peep upon.
The data hoarders are also theorizing that since newspapers sometimes publish news, the terrorists have now discovered how read newspapers. The subliminal message, of course, is that information presents a clear and present danger. Ignorance is good. We must not know things, lest the Bogeyman tap into our knowledge:
“We have seen, in response to the Snowden leaks, Al Qaeda and affiliated groups seeking to change their tactics, looking to see what they can learn from what is in the press and seek to change how they communicate to avoid detection,” Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told a security conference in Aspen, Colo., in July.
And worst of all, the terrorists might stop using the Internet and communicate in person! And just when the Surveillance State had finally built its multi-billion dollar Data Resort out there in the Utah desert:
The government’s greatest fear concerning its counterterrorism operations is that over the next several months, the level of intercepted communications will continue to fall as terrorists most likely find new ways to communicate with one another, one senior American official said. It will likely take the government some time to break into that method and monitor communications.
One way the terrorists may try to communicate, the official said, is strictly through couriers, who would carry paper notes or computer flash drives. If that happens, the official said, terrorists will find it very difficult to communicate as couriers take significant time to move messages.
There's only one thing for it. Yank the cubicle-dwellers away from their computers and send them out on the trail of the paper-pushers. Commandeer the thousands of courier bikes from the streets of New York City and start an international counter-courierism campaign. The Tour du Yemen can be filmed from above by Reaper drones for our viewing pleasure. Where there's an insatiable will for the corporate suits of the Surveillance Industrial Complex to make a stash of loot, they will always find a way.
