The Glue That Holds the Crap Together

President Obama yesterday appointed National Intelligence Director James Clapper to head* a secret task force to figure out how James Clapper and the Spy State can lie more effectively to the American people. In spook-speak, it is called being the "least untruthful". In real-speak, it is called polishing off the dog shit being hurled at the public and calling it a kiss from a warm puppy.

In a sign that the president not only holds us in utter contempt, but that he is now gleefully rubbing our noses in it, he wasted no time pivoting away from promising an "independent review" at Friday's press conference into cynically subcontracting the whole shebang to Booz Allen & Friends. Appointing James Clapper to investigate his own agency is like appointing Lloyd Blankfein to investigate Goldman Sachs, and then inviting him over to the White House for lunch to discuss how to starve retirees via Chained CPI. Oh wait... that actually did happen. Lying to Congress with impunity has its privileges.

But anyway, Obama made the newest announcement in true Orwellian gobbledygook:

Technological advances have brought with them both great opportunities and significant risks for our Intelligence Community. I believe it is important to take stock of how these technological advances alter the environment in which we conduct our intelligence mission. The Review Group will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust.

Translation: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

Obama is leaving it up to Clapper to appoint members of the secret panel, which will secretly report to Clapper who will then secretly report to Obama, just in time for Christmas, at which time the government shut-down and all the other theatrical fiscal disaster Glass Debt Ceiling machinations perpetrated by the Duopoly will be in full swing, making the 315 million terror suspects, otherwise known as the American public, forget all about Edward Snowden and human rights.

As Marcy Wheeler points out, neither Obama nor any Congressional oversight committees will be allowed to question the Secret Panel of Invisible Sworn Whisperers. They will submit their report directly to Clapper, who no doubt will submit the least untruthful version of what they allegedly oversaw.

In one of his classic rants, the late George Carlin noted "there is just enough bullshit to hold things together in this country." But judging from yesterday's joke of a Task Force announcement, the off-brand Obamian adhesive has reached a state of dilution that renders it about as effective as water --  the kind of dirty, exploding-in-your-face water that you can only get from a toxic fracked well.

*Update, 8/14: Stung by criticism that he is appointing the fox to guard the henhouse, the Obama administration has used more weasel words with which to backpedal Clapper's assignment to investigate his own abusive agency. He is now only "coordinating" the task force, not heading it. This probably involves leading with his ass instead of with his shiny bald pate, as well as facilitating, mentoring, nudging in the right direction and hovering in the room at all times as the very embodiment of impending doom to ensure that the assignees don't leave the room with sensitive documents. H/T AnneEnigma. More here.

Two Small Steps for Man Amidst the Giant Leap Backward

In an unsurprising ruling, a federal court judge has just ordered an end to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's campaign of racially profiling black and brown men on the streets of his fair city. From the New York Times:

In a decision issued on Monday, the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, ruled that police officers have for years been systematically stopping innocent people in the street without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. Officers often frisked these people, usually young minority men, for weapons or searched their pockets for contraband, like drugs, before letting them go, according to the 195-page decision.

These stop-and-frisk episodes, which soared in number over the last decade as crime continued to decline, demonstrated a widespread disregard for the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, according to the ruling. It also found violations with the 14th Amendment.

To fix the constitutional violations, Judge Scheindlin of Federal District Court in Manhattan said she intended to designate an outside lawyer, Peter L. Zimroth, to monitor the Police Department’s compliance with the Constitution.

You might remember that it was Attorney General Eric Holder who filed a DOJ brief calling for the federal monitor. In a kinda sorta related development, Holder also just announced that the government would be backing off harsh sentences for minor drug convictions, such as those illegally obtained as a result of the NYPD street pat-downs. No word yet about whether the thousands and thousands of young people currently rotting in jail on weed convictions would be set free, however.

 No word either about the hit prison series Orange is the New Black being another catalyst that changed Holder's mind on drugs. This wildly popular Netflix saga, set in a low security federal prison, actually humanizes inmates, most of whom are young, minority and serving years for the crime of using/selling/buying drugs while poor.

 But more likely, Holder was listening to the Most Trusted Doctor in News, Sanjay Gupta, come out in favor of legalizing marijuana. Gupta only recently discovered that nobody has ever died from a cannabis overdose. He has been "terribly misled" all these years, he now insists. Gupta, you may remember, was Barack Obama's first choice to be Surgeon General.

And most likely of all, Eric Holder is desperately trying to deflect attention from yet another newly-revealed Obama Administration lie, perpetrated to cover up the Giant Leap Backward for ordinary people: the DOJ's monstrously inflated count of its prosecutions of the culprits of the financial meltdown and fraudclosure scam. As Jonathan Weil of Bloomberg (yeah, ironically enough, owned by that Bloomberg) notes:

In an updated press release Friday, which corrected its initial release of last October, the Justice Department said a review of the cases found that the inflated figures included defendants who had been sentenced or convicted in fiscal year 2012 -- not just people who had been criminally charged, as originally reported. Its original, lofty tally also included cases in which the victims weren't distressed homeowners.

"As a result, the announcement overstated the number of defendants that should have been included as part of the Distressed Homeowner Initiative, as well as the corresponding estimated loss amount and number of victims," the Justice Department said.

When Holder first trotted out these figures last October, he bragged during a press conference about the results of the government's "Distressed Homeowner Initiative," which he called “a groundbreaking, yearlong mortgage-fraud enforcement effort” and “the first ever to focus exclusively on crimes targeting homeowners.” Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan joined him at the press conference. 

What a charade. No wonder the government found it so difficult to bring a meaningful number of accounting-fraud cases against bank executives after the financial crisis. Its own books were cooked.

Weil suggested that Holder owes the American people an apology. And since black and brown people were disproportionately victimized both in the subprime mortgage and foreclosure frauds perpetrated by the unpunished bankster class, perhaps the attorney general still retains a vestigial -- albeit ass-covering -- moral compass within his corporate brain. Perhaps his ballyhooed announcement of less draconian sentences for drug offenders is to atone for his own negligence in protecting poor people from financial predators. Perhaps even he is realizing that when they turn to drugs for relief, punishing them a second or third time is being unduly harsh.

Shut Up, He Explained



"Lucy, I don't like that tone. You're thinking again." (graphic by Kat Garcia)


President Obama attempted one last desperate time yesterday to pull another fast one on the American people. But his combination of wheedling, bullying, cynical mendacity, fear-mongering, and 50s sitcom-style drollery all failed. They failed dismally, completely and irrevocably.
  
He used all the propaganda tools in his oratorical toolbox, trying to sell people on the rationale for the massive surveillance apparatus targeting every man, woman and child not only in the United States, but throughout the entire world. That grating, down-home folksiness combined with stentorous jingoism was reminiscent of George Bush and all the ghosts of fascist regimes past. He chose the safety of an opulently appointed room at the White House and the protective filter of a reverential Washington press corps to deliver his message. It was the usual craven Friday afternoon news dump excreted through the mouth of the big man himself. And what was dumped was this:

We spy on you, but please don't call it spying. See, we just collect all your stuff. And anyway, the problem is not with our gross violations of your basic human rights. The problem is that you people haven't gotten with the program and learned to trust us. Father Knows Best. The beatings will continue until morale improves. We will not change our ways. But we will change your minds. Our continued hold on power depends upon the continued success of our public relations scam. Your comfort and your continued ignorance are our primary concerns. So just snuggle down under your soft totalitarian covers and let us get on with it. And when I say we need to "tighten the bolts" on surveillance oversight, what I really mean is that we'll continue tightening the screws against all of you insignificant little ants. 

To its credit, the New York Times has published a strong editorial effectively condemning the president for his empty promises to merely "tweak" the N.S.A. spying program while unconscionably defending its continued existence:

Fundamentally, Mr. Obama does not seem to understand that the nation needs to hear more than soothing words about the government’s spying enterprise. He suggested that if ordinary people trusted the government not to abuse their privacy, they wouldn’t mind the vast collection of phone and e-mail data.

Bizarrely, he compared the need for transparency to showing his wife that he had done the dishes, rather than just telling her he had done so. Out-of-control surveillance is a bit more serious than kitchen chores. It is the existence of these programs that is the problem, not whether they are modestly transparent. As long as the N.S.A. believes it has the right to collect records of every phone call — and the administration released a white paper Friday that explained, unconvincingly, why it is perfectly legal — then none of the promises to stay within the law will mean a thing.

Good. The Gray Lady finally realizes that Barack Obama holds the citizens of this country in utter contempt by trivializing their concerns. His ability to fool some of the people all of the time is rapidly eroding. The reader comments expressed near-universal outrage. Here's mine:

That kitchen analogy not only fell flat, it reeked of the desperation of a demagogue who feels his control slipping away. The president essentially compared the Surveillance State to a henpecked husband (himself.) And we, the victims of government overreach, are the hysterical overbearing Lucy Ricardos with our silly concerns and demands for proof of his divine benevolence.

We won't be invited to the show or get a seat at the table, but he'll put up a webpage, maybe have another Google+ Hangout, invite a bunch of Villagers to meet behind closed doors, order a few more drone strikes, croon out a few more love songs, and proclaim that all is well in Happy Land, all the while reminding God to bless America.

This must be what Hannah Arendt meant by the banality of evil.

 

Cogito Ergo Sum of All Fears

For all you cynics out there who think Barack Obama was lying to Jay Leno the other night when he said he doesn't spy on Americans,  the government megaphone known as the New York Times wants everybody to just calm the hell down.

Obama was parsing, is all, counting on the possibility that most people glued to The Tonight Show were too stupid to read between his philosopher-king lines. The fact that the government is collecting all your information cannot be equated with snooping. Here, according to Charlie Savage in a controlled leak disguised as an exposé, is what they are really doing to you:

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.

 While it has long been known that the agency conducts extensive computer searches of data it vacuums up overseas, that it is systematically searching — without warrants — through the contents of Americans’ communications that cross the border reveals more about the scale of its secret operations.

You see, it is only collecting those emails containing top-secret keywords dreamed up by top-secret bureaucrats that might relate to people under surveillance who live across nonexistent cyberspace borders. Therefore, if I email my friend in New Zealand (who in turn emails someone else, who unbeknownst to us, is under surveillance because her Uncle Joe's email was once flagged for talking about the Boston Marathon bombing) I will probably end up getting noticed by Big Brother. And if I made the mistake of yacking about the new pressure cooker I just bought and the latest fictional terror plot, I am in triple trouble. Oops -- since I just speculated about it here, I am very likely on The List already. I wrote to a foreigner who writes to lots of other people. I mentioned a household WMD. I mentioned the NSA. I have a name. I exist. I communicate. Je pense, donc je suis. I use the Internet, therefore I am suspect. There can be no doubt.

Naturally, the "senior government official" who spilled his guts to Charlie Savage will not be prosecuted for leaking, because this was one of those "official leaks" designed to downplay the egregious nature of the revelations before Glenn Greenwald reports on them. Because, according to the official leaker, there are safeguards in place to ensure that once a corporate Booz Allen snoop does read my stuff based on a keyword alert, he will immediately recognize the mistake, immediately report the gaffe to a "superior" whose sole function apparently is sitting around waiting to throw the billions of inadvertently-collected emails in the Bonfire of Ill-Gotten Communications. This front-page Times scoop's purpose was to reassure me that Big Brother means me no harm. It was also meant to give Barack Obama cover for his Big Leno Lie.

There can be no doubt.

The Times, of course, is not alone in giving cover to Obama, who also hilariously insisted to Leno that Edward Snowden could have gone through proper whistleblowing channels instead of seeking political asylum elsewhere. As the FAIR blog points out today, corporate media hacks are hacking in droves, defending domestic spying, fear-mongering over Al Qaeda, and Cold War-mongering over Russia.

And as NBC's Lester Holt reported last night,

 "While the cold war has been over for more than 20 years, the growing chill of late between Washington and Moscow became downright frosty today as President Obama called off his planned meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin, a response to Russia's grant of asylum to accused American spy Edward Snowden..."

To be fair, the report was later "tweaked" as Holt once again downgraded Snowden to leaker status.

And conversely, civil rights icon John Lewis has now hastily retracted his glowing comparison of Snowden to Gandhi and Thoreau. He's done a complete 180, pivoting from praising Snowden for his courage to now condemning the actions that have "damaged American  international relations and compromised our national security.  He leaked classified information and may have jeopardized human lives."

Ouch. It appears that Lewis may have inadvertently been putting a damper on Obama's co-optation of the upcoming 50th anniversary of MLK's March on Washington. So -- down goes the praise, straight into Obama's bonfire of the vanities. The keywords are..... Damage Control. 
  
Do you see where the propaganda brigade is taking this whole discussion? Snowden is now spying for Russia because he exists in Russia through no fault or plan of his own. The American media-industrial complex is even concern-trolling the historic Russian anti-gay agenda as an excuse to boycott the Winter Olympics. Before Snowden, they didn't care. This is all about American chest-thumping and last-gasp hegemony. All of a sudden, our Predator President is the victim instead of the bully. All of a sudden, those Yemenis are inexplicably chattering about revenge in response to our surgically precise and anonymous drone murders.

It was very telling that the president self-protectively spilled his angst-ridden guts to a comedian on TV, rather than, say, at an actual press conference where he might have run the risk of being asked a tough question by at least one renegade reporter.

But anyhow, it is gratifying to know that our politicians enjoy their gold-plated, no-deductible, no co-pay health insurance in order to pay for all the bodily harm and psychic assaults inflicted upon their sensitive selves by Vlad the Impaler and Snowden the Merciless. The casualty list is becoming quite extensive. Charles Schumer has been poked right in his beady little eyes at least a dozen times in the last week alone. Reports of penetrating back wounds among members of Congress have reached epidemic proportions. Paul Ryan has suffered the double indignity of being both knifed in the back and slapped in the face. Poor baby. Somebody get him a Medicare voucher, quick, before Babushka Putin gives our exceptional American freedoms another black eye.

Today In Kafka

One of the great traumas of early parenthood is the very first time you hear adorable little Susie or Johnny uttering the F word. Since the standard ritual of the washing-out of the mouth with soap is now considered child abuse in some locales (and for good reason -- have you read the ingredients on a bar of Irish Spring lately?) the most that Mom and Dad can do is a time-out, loss of privileges, and of course taking a good hard look at our own potty mouths.

But how would you feel if your child was under official court order to never, ever utter one particular F word again for the rest of their lives, under pain of having the family homestead taken away and the bank account seized?

 This has actually happened to a Pennsylvania couple who settled a lawsuit against a gas drilling company that polluted their drinking water supply through that most dreaded F word of all: Fracking. Under the terms of the settlement, even the two small children in the family were issued a gag order by the presiding judge, forbidding them to utter the word Fracking for the rest of their lives:

The sweeping gag order was imposed under a $750,000 settlement between the Hallowich family and Range Resources Ltd, a leading oil and gas driller. It provoked outrage on Monday among environmental campaigners and free speech advocates.

The settlement, reached in 2011 but unsealed only last week, barred the Hallowichs' son and daughter, who were then aged 10 and seven, from ever discussing fracking or the Marcellus Shale, a leading producer in America's shale gas boom.

The Hallowich family had earlier accused oil and gas companies of destroying their 10-acre farm in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania and putting their children's health in danger. Their property was adjacent to major industrial operations: four gas wells, gas compressor stations, and a waste water pond, which the Hallowich family said contaminated their water supply and caused burning eyes, sore throats and headaches.

The Hallowiches constantly worry what will happen if the two kids slip up one day and yack about fracking on the playground in a town where fracking has become a way of life and livelihood for many families. No longer can the children partake in discussions about whose water is the smelliest, or who can triple-dog-dare who to be first to test out the latest playground water fountain to see what solid, liquid, gas or flame comes spewing out.

 "They're going to be among other children that are children of people within this industry and they're going to be around it every day of their life, that if they in turn say one of the illegal words when they're outside of our guardianship we're going to have difficulty controlling that," said Mr. Hallowich.

My knee-jerk advice to the Hallowiches might have been to get the F out of town and out of Pennsylvania, where the gas lobby owns the government regulators. That hefty court award should last them awhile if they're thrifty, even if they have to abandon their polluted land and can't find new jobs. One possibility is the next state over (New York), where fracking is still banned, thanks to a strong environmental lobby. The kids could scream Fracking Fracking Fracking!!!! at the top of their lungs and blend right in with the activist crowd. To be really safe, I'd recommend Woodstock, whose town council last year actually voted to make fracking a felony.

But there's a huge catch. If the Hallowiches have cell phones or iPads, they won't be free no matter where they go. The technology now exists for police, courts, governments and probably corporations to remotely monitor the voices and movements of all of us, via the ridiculously easy secret installation of spying software on our electronic devices. They can hear us and they can see us, and that goes for our kids, too. The only solution is to get off the grid entirely. And that would be hard, given that technology has proven both addictive and necessary to our very existence. For example, without the Internet, we'd never be able to find out where they're fracking and how they're snooping.

Meanwhile, Steve Horn of DeSmogBlog has obtained documents proving that the Obama Administration is not only helping to shield fracking polluters from oversight and consequences, but that it actually censored a report establishing a clear link between fracking and the pollution of ground water in Pennsylvania. The EPA lied when it reported that the methane caused by fracking was "naturally occurring" in water and perfectly safe to drink. Two whistleblowers have now accused former EPA Chief Lisa Jackson of being the instigator of the cover-up. She was apparently acting on orders from the boss man himself, who feared that his re-election chances in that important swing state would be damaged by bad publicity. He has, after all, been a longtime booster of the gas industry and its donors. (Jackson, ironically and conveniently enough, now works for Apple, manufacturer of the iPad.)

 I assume that the Justice Department has gone into full panic mode, trying to catch the EPA truth-tellers and indict them for giving aid and comfort to the populace. Because when it comes to leakers, this administration is schizophrenic. It punishes those who help their fellow citizens, and rewards those who poison us -- be it by leaking toxins into our air and water, or by the enactment of toxic policies that have sucked the wealth of an entire nation into the voracious maw of the predatory financial class. 

 

Terrornado Week

Let's just assume for a moment that the American government's answer to Sharknado has nothing to with deflecting attention from the fact that our government is spying on us, and everything to do with some actual nefarious "chatter" among the folks who hate us for our freedoms.

Let's assume that there are, indeed, plans afoot to blow some Mid-East embassies to smithereens.

If that is the case, then we must acknowledge that the so-called terrorist folks have every right to be irate. Any plot they might be hatching would be in the realm of counter-terrorism. Take your pick of atrocities:

Drone strikes are increasing, Obama's impassioned public promise to taper them down notwithstanding. People are still being obliterated. In the days immediately preceding the Terror Alert, the State Department blithely proclaimed: "In no way would we ever deprive ourselves of a tool to fight a threat if it arises.”

So, Obama will continue to bomb the residents in "tribal regions", where marginalized populations risk death for simply failing to pledge allegiance to any of the nations under American control and for occasionally allowing "militants" to camp out in their neighborhoods because hospitality is an integral part of their culture. (See: Yemen, Waziristan, Somalia). It is therefore very easy to envision the relatives of the "collateral damage"  chattering up a storm in between bouts of crushing grief for their crushed children.

In the days immediately preceding the Terror Alert, the Center for Investigative Journalism reported  that the CIA was actually targeting rescue personnel ("double-tapping") in the aftermath of drone fatalities as recently as two years ago. This is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. The people who hate us for our freedoms are very much aware of the fact that past and current administrations are never prosecuted for war crimes. I imagine that the deliberate killing of medical personnel by Predator drone caused quite a bit of renewed chatter in the tribal regions.

The continued operation of Guantanamo Bay. It's still there. Inmates are still being force-fed, in violation of both their civil rights and religious beliefs during this holy season of Ramadan. It's a violation of internationally recognized medical ethics. It's torture. Outraged chatter has been busting out all over.

Revelations that Benghazi was the site of a secret CIA operation keep coming. The Susan Rice "talking points" scandal might have been a double contrivance -- both in the lies she told about possible motivations, and in the wrong reasons for Republican outrage and ensuing investigation. If Benghazi was an illegal black site prison, as David Petraeus's mistress once alleged, look for the GOP to shut up about it forthwith. When it comes to endless war, they will protect President Obama. Impeachment will be off the table. Domestic chatter will cease as partisan mouths clamp shut in solidarity.

There have been a series of apparently coordinated prison breaks, including from the infamous Abu Ghraib in Iraq, scene of inmate torture by the American military. I imagine those newly-freed inmates are chattering up a storm, especially if they were locked up for political reasons, at the behest of the American security apparatus.

So, although I'm leaning toward the theory that the surveillance state bureaucrats announced a new terror plot simply because they're terrified that their lucrative operations are about to be defunded by Congress, there may be some truth in it. If there's a plot, it was provoked by our own government. And very possibly aided and abetted and even orchestrated by our own government in order to keep us compliant and quiet. In other words, they are operating on the conventional wisdom that any terror attack represents an ensuing cash cow for the security state. A little human collateral damage in the name of disaster capitalism has never stood in their way before. Their cynicism has always been beyond breathtaking.

 Just look at how President Obama himself cynically spent his weekend. He played golf and partied hearty with a "This Is Your Life" cast of characters from the last 52 years of his storied existence. He was not "huddled" in the Situation Room with his national security team.

The fact that CNN pre-empted its regular programming to dust off the terror graphics and 9/11 doomsday music to broadcast a marathon special report consisting of vague threats is another huge hint that the alleged threat is a wholly fictionalized, Homeland Security theater production. Did you notice how all their paid defense industry and ex-CIA consultants magically appeared in the studio, all at once, to parrot identical government talking points? It reeked of pre-arrangement. Wolf Blitzer is still around to cry Wolf.

Meanwhile, Congress  unconcernedly flew home in their unsequestered jets to raise money and hide from their constituents, getting richly rewarded for fake gridlock. They're also falling all over themselves to preen before the TV cameras, moaning about how many ways Russia and Putin and Snowden are physically inconveniencing them. Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) has been poked right in his beady little eyes! Paul Ryan (R-Gerontophobia) complains of being both slapped in the face and stabbed in the back. It's a good thing these gold-plated government leeches won't have to shop on the ObamaCare exchanges to get taxpayer care for their myriad wounds and maladies. The co-pays for the treatment of Putin poisoning alone would bankrupt them otherwise.

If these people were truly in panic mode, they'd be hunkered down in undisclosed locations. But they're right out there in the open, jaws flapping, freely chattering and scarifying and looking rather clownish while doing so.  So, as far as I can tell, the only thing we have to fear is fear-mongering itself.

But Since Terror Sells, They'll Never Shut Up

Lies & Whispers

Edward Snowden may be free, but we, his grateful compatriots, remain forever in chains. Thanks to the double-shredding of both Rousseau's Social Contract and the Magna Carta, American feudalism continues apace. What an irony that Russia, that bastion of repression, is now sheltering an American from the freedoms he could enjoy if he ever set foot in the Homeland again. It's just too bad that Putin's public relations coup is spoiled by his recent criminalization of gay pride. Hypocrisy, it seems, is an equal opportunity international personality trait wherever you look. 

Is it me, or has the pace of the disintegration of this country been ratcheted up a notch? Even if we aren't hurtling toward destruction at Mach speed, there's enough regression in the air to unequivocally prove that we are at least sliding backward. Even former President Jimmy Carter recently acknowledged that we no longer live in a functioning democracy.

Take the latest Washington soap opera, in which the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve has now been elevated (or sunk) to the level of palace intrigue, circa 1787. Obama -- he who so righteously scoffed at Mitt Romney's "binders full of women" remarks, even as his hypersecurity forces were literally binding a couple of Green Party female political opponents to metal folding chairs lest they interrupt his bullshit -- is now openly embracing perhaps the worst caricature of misogyny and greed ever dreamed up by a Dickensian brain. That, of course, would be Larry Summers. Larry, one of the chief architects of the 2008 collapse, has been rightly lambasted throughout the blogosphere after word leaked out (official, cowardly, and unprosecuted) that Obama wants to appoint him to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve over the much more qualified and populist-leaning Janet Yellen. Barry became so incensed at the blowback to his wishes that he quickly morphed from simply whispering his desires to "full-throatedly" endorsing his pal behind closed doors to some Congressional Democrats, while lambasting the "liberal media". So much for that much-vaunted transparency and phony populism. I think the best we can hope for is translucency, filtered through a fog of propaganda, lies and doubletalk.

In his pro-Janet Yellen column today, Paul Krugman managed to skewer the White House whisperers without even once mentioning Obama by name: a true achievement by any journalistic measure. According to Krugman, there are two factions at work: the subtle VSP ("New Democrat"/ Wall Street/Gravitas) whisperers, and the more blatant and unhinged GOP misogynist whisperers who are equating a possible Yellen appointment with the feminization of the dollar... whatever that might be:

The point is that while the gravitas types like to think of themselves as serious men (and I do mean men) who are willing to do what needs to be done, recent history suggests that they’re actually men who are eager to prove their seriousness by doing what doesn’t need to be done, at the public’s expense.

Also, there was a time not along ago when almost everyone in the gravitas crowd, if asked who possessed that mystical quality in its purest form, would surely have answered “Alan Greenspan.” How well did that turn out?

So is Janet Yellen the only possible candidate to be the next leader of the Fed? Of course not. But the case for someone else should be made on the merits — and, so far, that hasn’t been what’s happening.

Since Krugman did not mention He Who Must Not Be Named by name, I did the honors in my Times comment: 

Sexism has been festering in the White House ever since Barack Obama took office.

His problem with women, combined with his groveling to rich and powerful Wall Streeters like Summers, is well-documented. As told in Ron Suskind's appropriately titled "Confidence Men," chief White House economist Christina Romer was quickly forced out. Elizabeth Warren, along with her consumer protection bureau, was duly marginalized by Timothy Geithner. Janet Yellen already belongs to a very special sisterhood.

According to Ezra Klein, the White House remains paranoid about the possibility of another economic collapse. Should that occur, the Fed Chair would become the go-to savior. The alpha males deferring to a woman? The very thought must be making the testosterone drain right out of their bodies. They're reduced to anonymously whispering their angst to obliging media stenographers.

Still, the president had no problem loudly touting infrastructure investment in Florida, where a tiny percentage of the privatized profits could magically trickle down from contractors to "that waitress wanting to buy an iPod." (I wish I were kidding. He really did say that.)

Then, it was on to an Amazon "fulfillment center" where struggling Americans with "grit and resilience" can order protein powder from middle-class careerists earning a whole 12 bucks an hour.

Reaganomics, sexism, and obscene wealth disparity posing as prosperity. A trifecta for the One Percent, and a triple-whammy for the rest of us.

Another commenter (male) took issue with my view of Obama as  sexist, saying it could not possibly be so because he likes and respects the women closest to him:

Obama fought for and got Susan Rice and Samantha Power. His closest adviser has always been Valerie Jarrett. His first Secretary of State was Hillary. He is close and respectful to a very strong wife. His is entirely wrapped around the fingers of his girls.

I just do not see sexism in him. Nor do I see him permitting it around him.

Now his economic policy does not at all please me, and the bums he has chosen to listen to are all men. But I don't think that is sexism. That is something else.

My response:

 Obama's is the "benevolent" brand of sexism. Of course it's not even close the misogyny-as-policy openly embraced by Republicans. But it's there, and it rankles. Examples:

"As the father of two daughters" he ordered his female HHS secretary to ban the Plan B contraceptive for teenage girls, who he predicted would be bopping into drugstores buying up birth control like it was gum. Sexist much?

He made public remarks about Kamala Harris being the best looking attorney general in the country. Many women found this demeaning, as "well-intentioned" as it may have been.

We should begin comparing what John Kerry is doing as Sec of State to what Hillary did. Obama seems to be giving him much freer rein in the Middle East peace talks. We'll see how this develops. Hillary, you may remember, was deemed "likeable enough" by Obama during the primary debates. Benevolently dismissive and criticized as sexist by many women.

According to the female White House staffers interviewed by Ron Suskind for his book, the hostile workplace atmosphere was such that in the private sector, it would have amounted to grounds for a sexual harassment suit. A lot of this had to do with Larry Summers. Larry Summers is definitely a misogynist. So if the president loves Larry, what does that make him?

I guess you have to be a woman to "get" this. A few isolated gaffes are one thing. But then a pattern emerges. Combined with the economic policy, it just adds to the toxicity. And the annoyance.

To which more hilarity ensued, including the usual redundant cut-and-paste jobs from the dregs of the Obama Truth Squad: accusations of "hatchet job" and  "Obama can never do right by Ms. Karen!". Good to know there are still a few die-hards left out there.

Meanwhile, if 1787 all over again is getting you down (nostalgia just ain't what it used to be) then fast forward to 1984 this weekend for an anti-surveillance celebration in a city near you. Big Brother has seen enough, and we've had enough. Marchons.