Supreme Being Supremes

The town in upstate New York that gained notoriety a couple of years ago for the viral video of the bullied bus monitor has made the news again. The Supreme Court ruled today that the monthly town board meetings of Greece may now legally begin with a prayer from a "chaplain of the month."

Controversy and outrage ensue. While it's SOP to begin meetings in this country with a pledge of allegiance to the American flag as the symbol of "one nation under God," swearing allegiance to God without the jingoism has long been considered undemocratic in public settings.

What's the big deal? Prior to every corporate-tested school day, before every bloodthirsty sporting event, before every political meeting, we Americans lie, en masse, by proclaiming that there is liberty and justice for all in the One Indispensable Nation. And God is yet to be banned from the Pledge.

Plaintiffs argued before the Court that imposing upon an invisible Guy in the Sky to extra-nationally bless us is unconstitutional. According to the previous  decision rendered by the New York State Court of Appeals, the prayers of the Greece town meetings have tended heavily toward the Christian idea of God, thus violating the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. The Supreme Beings, in office for life, disagreed by their usual 5-4 margin and overturned the lower court ruling.

So, the deity barely squeaked through to gain parity with the Stars & Stripes. According to the decision, municipalities will not be allowed to directly proselytize one faith over another -- although the courts will not, of course, appoint any "prayer police" to make sure that such niceties are adhered to. The exception would be in a case where the audience was "coerced" into participating in prayers. Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSBlog has all the details here.

How about we just do away with pledges and prayers of all stripes and get on with the important municipal business of awarding no-bid cable franchises, purchasing military hardware for the police department, arguing over millimeters on property lines, and granting friendly variances to marauding developers? Ritual incantations of any sort have the effect of giving the absolving stamp of approval to some pretty shady stuff, as history has shown. Always beware of politicians claiming to have both God and Flag on their side.

From Adam Liptak of the New York Times:

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 decision, said “ceremonial prayer is but a recognition that, since this nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond that authority of government to alter or define.”

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the town’s practices could not be reconciled “with the First Amendment’s promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share of her government.”

They both actually do have a point. With the NSA taking the place of God as the all-knowing, all-seeing Eye in the Sky, many Americans are indeed insisting, like Kennedy, that their existence should be beyond government authority. And Kagan is absolutely correct about every citizen being promised, by the First Amendment, ownership of an equal share of government. Key word: promise. Because as recent studies show, we are now living in a de facto oligarchy. Democracy is dead. 

All the more ironic, seeing how the Town Without Pity is named after Greece, the original birthplace of democracy. That nation, like many a town and state here, is being sucked dry and plundered by the austerian global banking cartel. 

Liptak continues,

Town officials said that members of all faiths, and atheists, were welcome to give the opening prayer. In practice, the federal appeals court in New York said, almost all of the chaplains were Christian.

Two town residents sued, saying the prayers ran afoul of the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion.

Maybe some Buddhists, Muslims, Mormons, Hindus, Jews, Jains, Sikhs, Jehovah's Witnesses, Satanists, Scientologists, Wiccans, atheists and pagans can be prevailed upon to converge on the town, volunteer for the Chaplain of the Month Club, and thus ease some of the burden on the establishment Christians.  After all, the Town of Greece does have a history of championing the marginalized, the underdog, and the oppressed: town fathers originally named the place to show solidarity with Greece in its own 19th century struggle for liberation from the Ottoman Empire.

And if the diverse volunteers aren't forthcoming, officials can always schedule a referendum that would make a stint as Town Chaplain mandatory, like jury duty. They can draft people the Shirley Jackson way, through an annual lottery. (let he who is without sin cast the first stone.) Maybe some born-again Bus Bullies can do the drawing and transportation honors.

Plus, sordid history of bullying notwithstanding, the Town of Greece has been named the ninth (shades of Supreme Court!) safest place to live in the One Indispensable Nation. And all the schools have enlightened Greek names: Olympia, Apollo, Odyssey Academy, Arcadia and Athena.

 "Written laws are like spider's webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful." -- Anarcharsis, 6th century B.C.

"Life is short." --  Hippocrates, c. 460-357 B.C.

Obama Orders Unusual Review of Cruelty

Today in Sociopathic Irony:

Fresh from a victory designed to forever keep the grisly details of all his extrajudicial overseas drone executions from the American public, President Obama has deftly pivoted away from his own hypocrisy by calling for a review of capital punishment here in the One Indispensable Nation.

That is because in the Land of the Free, as opposed to those anti-free "tribal areas," executions are open to the public, albeit by invitation only. And sometimes they don't go as smoothly and as silently as planned. The "botched" execution of an Oklahoma inmate is a case in point. The convict didn't oblige the State by going gently into that good night. It was not a clean, surgical strike. The guy suffered mightily under state-sanctioned torture. Witnesses were subjected to his impolitic lingering.

Death has a funny way of doing that to us sometimes, even in America, where we squeamishly like to keep our dead and dying under sanitized wraps.

The New York Times' Peter Baker is on it:

President Obama declared this week’s botched execution in Oklahoma “deeply disturbing” and directed the attorney general on Friday to review how the death penalty is applied in the United States at a time when it has become increasingly debated.

Weighing in on a polarizing issue that he rarely discusses, Mr. Obama said the Oklahoma episode, in which a prisoner remained groaning in pain after sedatives were apparently not fully delivered, underscored concerns with capital punishment as it is carried out in America today. While reiterating his support for the death penalty in certain cases, Mr. Obama said Americans should “ask ourselves some difficult and profound questions” about its use.

Whenever Obama is forced to concern-troll an issue that he would not otherwise touch with a ten-foot pole -- such as those extra-legal executions and NSA spying --  he suggests that we think deep thoughts, ask questions, have a debate... and, oh yeah, conduct the obligatory whitewash review:

Within hours, the Justice Department outlined a relatively narrow review focused on how executions are carried out rather assessing the entire system. But given Mr. Obama’s broader comments, supporters and opponents wondered whether he might be foreshadowing an eventual shift in position by the time he leaves office, much as he dropped his opposition to same-sex marriage in 2012.

Wonder away, supporters and opponents. Comparing the president's championing of the right to marry (for political purposes) to his championing of the right to live (for humanitarian purposes) is like comparing apples to oranges. You simply do not "evolve" a conscience where none has previously been shown to exist. See: Presidential Kill List.

“In the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems — racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, you know, situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “And all these, I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied.”

 But this is America, where we do still have trials by jury. People theoretically are given due process before being condemned to death. And if you are affluent and white, you even get all due deference. See: the Affluenza Defense. Outside the exceptional boundaries of the One Indispensable Nation of dispensable people, there's something called a Disposition Matrix. This is the unwritten law, dreamed up by the Obama administration, that proclaims that all men in the prime of their lives are considered guilty unless proven innocent ex-post mortem. And Obama has certainly never raised any "significant questions" about the possible innocence of those people. He has never ordered DNA testing on the human bugsplat staining the "tribal regions."

For now, Mr. Obama said his position had not changed.

“The individual who was subject to the death penalty had committed heinous crimes, terrible crimes,” he said of the Oklahoma inmate. “And I’ve said in the past that there are certain circumstances in which a crime is so terrible that the application of the death penalty may be appropriate — mass killings, the killings of children.”

By all credible accounts, Barack Obama is responsible for the mass killings of thousands of people. And transparent humble-bragger that he is, he has only seen fit to admit to the drone strikes against the four Americans targeted in his killing spree. Could it possibly be that he doesn't consider the lives of foreign "militants" (including children and wedding parties) as valuable or as concerning as the lives of American citizens? Is his campaign of extra-legal executions being "unevenly applied"?

In a piece written for the New York Review of Books, David Cole notes that the Senate decision that excuses Obama from coming clean about his own filthy deeds comes on the 10th anniversary of that other public spectacle of cruel and unusual punishment: the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal:

To this day, the United States has not held accountable any senior official for torture inflicted during the “war on terror”—not at Abu Ghraib, not at Guantanamo, not at Bagram Air Force Base, and not in the CIA’s secret prisons, or “black sites.” President Obama has stuck to his commitment to look forward, not backward, and his administration has opposed all efforts to hold the perpetrators of these abuses to account. Indeed, the administration has classified even the memories of the survivors of torture in CIA black sites, now housed at Guantanamo, maintaining that they and their lawyers cannot under any circumstance even talk publically about their mistreatment.

Otherwise, the consumer-spectators of America might get the unpleasant idea that war crimes are being both covered up and continuing,  and that the people they elected to represent them are cold-blooded sadists and worse.

But, whatever. Let's have a debate. Let's conduct a study. Let's cover it up. Pick the red team, pick the blue team,  and let's all go to the polls and pretend we're still living in a humane, democratic society.

Meanwhile, you can probably scratch Occidental College (Obama's peri-alma mater) off the list of potential presidential library sites. A gigantic satiric sculpture of one of his killer drones is currently on display at that California campus:

From the press release for the exhibit:

The centerpiece of "We Will Show You Fear in a Handful of Dust" is a full-scale model of a MQ-1 predator drone, and the public is invited to participate in its completion. Participants will use traditional methods to apply architectural grade mud to the surface of an industrially manufactured drone skeleton. In the dichotomy between the drone's form and its surface, the sculpture is intended to open a discussion about technology and foreign policy while inviting multiple propositions about cultural legacies and possible resistances in the era of global surveillance and warfare.

(the sculpture was completed with the help of the public in March, and will remain on display in the center of the campus through this month)

With this project, Finishing School continues to explore its ability to make unwieldy political issues tangibly personal. For more than 10 years, the collective has employed various strategies to create environments in which a viewer/participant voluntarily enters into a relationship (usually an uncomfortable one) with an idea that has previously been regarded as an abstraction.  At first glance the projects can appear to be light-hearted, as the collective generally uses an element of humor to disarm its audiences.  Topics spotlighted by their work have ranged from corporate and government impacts on individual freedoms, to interpersonal hierarchies, and now to our relationship with the fastest-growing new technology wielded for civilian and military use.

Wow. No wonder Barack high-tailed it out of there and fled to the elite Ivy League. President Transparency will not be going to an Occidental reunion any time soon, I reckon.

May Day Mayday

The best part about May 1st is that the April 30th midnight deadline for more annoying-than-usual Democratic fund-raising has passed. Here's a typical example, titled "Crumbling Down" --

Karen:

The FEC deadline at midnight is a big deal.

If we don't meet our goal, we will fall behind. If we fall behind, we risk our work crumbling down because the Koch brothers' chosen candidates will walk into office.

We can't afford to let these guys to win. We have to fight back.

If you've saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:

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Together we can do this. We need you to step up.

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Thanks,

Progressives 2014

 As far as I know, the world did not crumble overnight, and the billionaire Koch Brothers did not succeed in swallowing poor multimillionaire Harry Reid whole because I failed to "step up." Nor did Debbie Wasserman-Schultz get turned into a pumpkin by the evil Tea Party Fairy. Unfortunately.

Also unfortunately, it seems that I have forever missed (until next month anyhow) the deadline to get my name forever implanted upon Obama's Wall... or, as it's alternately called,"The Permanent Record." I don't know about you, but when I was in school, getting your name put in the permanent record was a threat, not a promise. It was a punishment guaranteed to keep you in a low-wage job and in debt servitude for the rest of your misbegotten life. And if you went to Catholic school, condemnation to a very long stint in Purgatory.

Oh, wait.

So yesterday, doomsday, the Democrats pulled the cute stunt of putting the paltry $10.10 minimum wage bill on the senate floor, knowing full well it would fail by virtue of their failure to reform the filibuster.  It would fail.... but they would not. Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post got the whole thing pegged with the silly rhetorical question "Can President Obama and Senate Democrats Win by Losing on the Minimum Wage?"

They held conference calls and media events and rallies. They mobilized their biggest names, including President Obama, on a nationwide messaging push behind the minimum wage legislation.

And the result? The bill only got one Republican vote, falling well short of the 60-vote threshold needed to open debate.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it is.

Last month, Democrats did essentially the same thing for the Paycheck Fairness bill, which aimed to cut down on disparities in pay between men and women.

There was news conference after news conference on Capitol Hill, impassioned speeches from the Senate floor, and Democratic women lawmakers even started walking around wearing necklaces made of Payday candy bars.

(snip)

So why, a reasonable person might ask, are Democrats continually pushing bills that seem dead on arrival?

Because passing the bills isn't the point.

The point is to make the Republicans look like the sadistic psychopaths they are, and to raise money, money, money by dint of the "we suck less" credo. I can't even begin to count how many times Sean Eldridge, the billionaire Democratic neophyte running for a seat in my district, has emailed asking for $5 to "stand with him" on the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and marriage equality in solidarity against the evil GOP billionaire-fellaters.  Other than Elizabeth Warren, not one Democrat has asked me to send money to fight the banksters and reinstate Glass-Steagall. And even Elizabeth Warren isn't asking for donations to fight against American imperialism, endless war, and the Surveillance State.

And this being May Day, not one Democrat has asked me for help in defending workers' and union rights.

But, on this first day of the lovely month of May, I was mighty intrigued by an email from Lawrence Lessig, simply titled "Mayday."

I opened it with excitement, thinking it was announcing a general strike, or a march on Washington. This is what it said:

We all know this democracy is in distress. It's time to send an urgent signal that we can fix it.

Today we're launching a SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs. It's called the Citizens SuperPAC, and it's only going to succeed if you support it. The video below will explain the plan, and you can also head over to MayOne.US to learn more.

When I clicked on the link to Learn More, I was asked for money money money to get the Money Money Money out of politics. I was not asked to partake in a march, join a general strike, start a boycott, stage a sit-in, or write a speech or article. I was asked to write them a check or supply my credit card info, then Tweet all my friends, and spread the word on Facebook.

OMG!!! It'll have the oligarchs shaking in their Pradas. Meanwhile, my email address will spread far and wide throughout the fundraise-o-sphere, and somebody's office overhead will be protected for another 30 seconds.

Lessig means well, I'm sure. But the PTB must be so happy. Our mission, if we choose to accept it, is to be consumer-spectators in the One Indispensable Nation of dispensable people. We have been assigned our roles. Their Big Money is Big Speech. Our little money is but a faint whisper, giving us the illusion that we are citizens participating in our own democracy.

In 80 other countries, May Day is a public holiday. Stock markets are (gasp!) closed. Ironically, what's also known as  International Workers' Day commemorates the struggle that Chicago workers, unionists and reformers went through in 1886 to fight for an eight-hour work day. Violent protests broke out on May 1, 1886 as 35,000 workers rallied on the streets in Chicago to demand better working hours.

Yet in Miseducation Nation, schoolchildren are not getting the day off  (if they play hookey, they'll get their names on that dreaded permanent record!)  and they are probably not being taught about labor history in the classroom. According to the valuable teaching tool known as Washington Post's Kids Post, May Day is all about flowers, moms, baskets, beauty contests, dances, and maypoles. Children are finally and falsely told, as a kind of afterthought,  that only in "other countries" is May Day observed to honor workers' rights:

In the late 1800s, workers in different parts of the world were fighting for the right to work no more than eight hours a day. At the time, it was common for them to have to work 11 hours or more each day. They chose May 1 as a time to protest in favor of a shorter workday.

Despite the best corporate efforts to suppress the news, Chicago was actually holding an event to commemorate the May Day Haymarket slaughter. Other events are scattered throughout the nation. And if you can't get out, the World Socialist Website is holding on online rally this Sunday, May 4th. (Yeah, they do discreetly ask for an optional donation, but they also stress that money is not necessary to sign up.)

Update: I may have missed my chance to get my name on the Obama Wall, but no matter. Organizing for Action, his political post-campaign arm, sent me another email today, this time asking that I sign a petition in support of the minimum wage. The president's ungrammatical pitch (this failure is going on his permanent record!):

"What every American wants is a paycheck that lets them (sic) support their families, know a little (as opposed to much) economic security, pass down some hope and optimism (as opposed to property and money) to their kids. And that’s worth fighting for. (me)"

Am I in? You betcha. Who doesn't want to bequeath platitudes? And once I sign my name, I'm directed to the page where I get instructions on how to get the minimum wage -- by giving  OFA a lot of economic security, in amounts of $15, $35, $50, $100, $500, $1,000 and beyond. Coming soon to my inbox: a friendly guilt-inducing reminder from OFA that they're still waiting for me to step up and honor my pledge to the momentum. These follow-ups are always in the form of invoices telling me that I have remitted exactly $0 to the momentum so far. 

It must have been a momentary lapse. But if it goes on my permanent record, it really is of no moment.

Senate to Obama: Drone, Baby, Drone

Remember around this time last year when President Obama gave his big ballyhooed Drone Speech, promising more transparency to the citizen-consumers of America about who, when, where and why he obliterates and maims with his flying missiles?

How time does fly, just like a Predator. Five years of Obama drone strikes, at least 2,500 people in their graves. That's assuming they could find any body parts to inter.

 Meanwhile, buried deep in the cyberspace of Tuesday's online New York Times (so as not to inordinately clash with another, bigger front page bullshit story about Obama the Peaceful) is this piece by Mark Mazzetti:

The Senate has quietly stripped a provision from an intelligence bill that would have required President Obama to make public each year the number of people killed or injured in targeted killing operations in Pakistan and other countries where the United States uses lethal force.

The move highlights the continued resistance inside the government about making these operations, primarily carried out using armed drones, more accountable to public scrutiny. In a letter to the Senate earlier this month, James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, expressed concern that a public report would undermine the effectiveness of the operations.

Clapper, who still has his job despite his perjury before Congress on that whole massive phone eavesdropping debacle, is perfectly correct to say that confession to mass murder by a sitting president would probably put a damper on the killing spree. I mean, it's one thing for information on Obama's drone kills to be readily available from such activist groups as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Wikileaks and such whistle-blowers as Brandon Bryant. It's another thing for Obama to publicly sign a confession, or a rolling series of confessions, to massacres of wedding parties and women and children, and have the butchery actually covered on cable TV.

The article continues,

The provision, passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee last year as part of its authorization bill, required Mr. Obama to make public an annual report on “the total number of combatants killed or injured during the preceding year by the use of targeted lethal force outside the United States by remotely piloted aircraft.” The provision was the same for civilians killed or injured. But officials said that the provision encountered almost immediate resistance both from intelligence officials and Republican lawmakers, some who have fought against any changes to the way the targeted killing program has been managed.

No Republican lawmakers were named. But they are probably the same Republican lawmakers whose job description is going on TV every Sunday to bitch about Obama not using enough lethal force in Ukraine, Iran and Syria. If Obama were forced to openly brag about the people he does kill, it would make them look like liars and spoil the whole canard that Obama is a peacenick with a manhood problem. Just who do they think they're kidding? 

Mazzetti continues:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the Intelligence Committee and who originally offered the provision, agreed to take it out of the authorization bill to enable it to be passed unanimously.

Dianne, who made such a big impassioned Senate floor speech about being spied upon by the CIA over the torture report, and who recently wrote a strongly-worded letter/op-ed to Obama demanding he turn over said torture report post-haste, appears to have received the apology from on high she'd so strongly craved. She is back on the dark side. The light must have hurt her eyes. And that torture report is not forthcoming from the White House.... no doubt because it is extremely damning to all concerned, who still have their jobs, power, and perks.

In a speech last May, Mr. Obama pledged to make drone operations more transparent, and administration officials said that the White House would like to gradually shift drone operations away from the C.I.A. — partly to allow targeted killing operations to be discussed more freely.

But nearly a year later, there has been little movement on the proposals. Some powerful lawmakers, including Ms. Feinstein, have opposed moving drone strikes out of the C.I.A. and managed to blunt any momentum to enact the White House proposals.

It's the tired old Good Cop/Bad Cop kabuki. Obama wants to do the right thing, wants to be honest, wants to play Shuffle the Psychopath, but DiFi, and Hillary's pal John McCain, say no way. Because the Times wants you to believe these doddering fools have more power than God -- or more accurately, the authoritarian state breviary known as Disposition Matrix.

Mr. Clapper said in a letter that the executive branch was exploring ways to “provide the American people more information about the United States’ use of force outside areas of active hostilities.”

They're wracking their brains to come up with more propaganda, but not wracking them too hard. Because for the most part, the citizen-consumers of America don't give a shit about brown-skinned foreigners being rendered into bug-splat far, far, far away. And the executioners' branch knows it.

As Spencer Ackerman points out in The Guardian, the Senate very carefully and very specifically excused Obama from disclosing the names of the civilian victims he wrongfully kills in the drone strikes:

The bill authorizing intelligence operations in fiscal 2014 passed out of the Senate intelligence committee in November, and it originally required the president to issue an annual public report clarifying the total number of “combatants” and “noncombatant civilians” killed or injured by drone strikes in the previous year. It did not require the White House to disclose the total number of strikes worldwide.

And what Ackerman also writes about, and the Times does not, is that "another provision, which would require alternative intelligence analysis, as well as commensurate congressional notification should an intelligence agency consider legal action against a US citizen, has been moved to a classified annex of the bill."

In other words, if Obama decides to kill ("legal action") an American citizen, he won't have to tell us about it. He'll whisper it in DiFi's ear, though. Because she just loves being kept in the cozy classified annex.

The Groupthink Party

At the same time Wall Street bigwigs are signalling, via the Politico gossip rag, that they'd be equally OK with a President Hillary Clinton or a President Jeb Bush or a President Chris Christie, comes word that Hillary was guest of honor at Republican John McCain's annual neoliberal schmooze-fest for the ruling class. The press was barred, and so far there is no news about what was discussed. No secretly recorded goodies from a minimum-wage servant or waiter yet, anyway.  Her gig wasn't even publicly announced until two days before the event:

The McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University announced today (April 24) that former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will participate in a conversation with U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) at the McCain Institute's annual Sedona Forum on Saturday, April 26, 2014 in Sedona, Arizona.

"I am very pleased to have my friend Secretary Clinton join this year's Sedona Forum," said Senator McCain. "From her years of service as first lady, in the U.S. Senate and at the State Department, one would be hard-pressed to find a leader with Secretary Clinton's informed perspective on the many challenges facing America across the globe."

The guest list was a hodgepodge of Senate centrists, tax-avoiding CEOs, polluting oil company execs and neocon war hawks. (or, in the press release propaganda-speak,"thought leaders, philanthropists and decision-makers.")

Hmm. So when Elizabeth Warren told George Stephanopoulos yesterday that she thinks Hillary would be a "terrific candidate,"  maybe she meant that she hopes Hillary runs on the Republican ticket, right where she belongs.  As Hillary herself might say, "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

Or,as the late Gore Vidal did say, "Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic.  But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s.  'We have a single system,' he wrote, and 'in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."

Sushi Summit Bottoms Out

There's suddenly a reason to be cautiously optimistic: in the neoliberal death match euphemistically known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the little guy just won an important round against the steroid-fueled defending champions of Team Corporate Elite.

The small family farmers of Japan, who prefer to keep both their families and their farms intact, delivered a stunning blow last week to Big Ugly Ag. But Big Ugly Ag's promoter (Barack Obama of America), after canoodling over Sushi with P.M. Shinzo Abe of Japan, has vowed to come back for another round of fishy antics. Team Corporate Elite will refuel on even larger wads of cash, arm itself with even more fusillades of propaganda, and tone its tentacles in preparation for a whole lot of backroom arm-twisting of "constituencies" (anti-fast track congress critters in need of campaign cash and lobbyist largesse.)

Because Obama seems mighty irritated that regular people, like the small farmers of the world, are too comfortable. The capitalist monster is gnashing its terrible teeth, champing at the bit to transcend national interests for all-consuming global dominance. And Obama can't let his masters think he is a loser. As he insisted in an "I will not surrender" news conference with Abe:

"Now is the time for bold steps that are needed to reach a comprehensive agreement, and I continue to believe we can get this done. All of us have to move out of our comfort zones and not just expect that we're going to get access to somebody else's market without providing access to our own. And it means that we have to sometimes push our constituencies beyond their current comfort levels because ultimately it's going to deliver a greater good for all people."

According to Japanese news reports, Obama had complained to Abe over Sushi that while his domestic approval rating has sunk into the 40s, making selling the TPP at home difficult for him, the Japanese P.M. is much more popular. Obama seemed baffled that with an approval rating in the 60s, Abe would still bow to pressure from his own citizens over the TPP. The Japanese P.M., for his part, also complained that Obama was too humorless and business-like at what was meant to be a relaxing social event. He apparently acted like a pushy salesman instead of a visiting head of state:

Mr. Abe tried to deflect with a joke, saying "In Japan, Ambassador (Caroline) Kennedy is more popular than me." However, Mr. Obama kept pressing for concessions, citing the tariff rates for pork and beef.

Back at home, Obama and his negotiators are going to need true mega-doses of the standard corporate performance enhancers, given that their previous source of strength -- secrecy -- has been sucked dry by the actual intended victim-residents ("constituencies") of 11 different countries and their reps. Reps such as Wikileaks, and Public Citizen, and those small stalwart groups of politicians who still have their respective national interests at heart.

And even if Big Ugly Ag were to eventually prevail over the small farmers and foist its products upon the world, there are plenty more contenders waiting in the wings to take on such muscle-bound thugs as Big Bad Pharma and Poison Tobacco. Lori Wallach of Public Citizen puts it this way:

After years of missed deadlines, unbending opposition by other nations to many U.S. proposals and scores of deadlocked TPP issues, Congress’ refusal to grant President Obama trade authority, growing opposition in many nations, and now Obama and Abe not announcing a breakthrough, TPP should be ready for burial. Instead, like some movie monster that will not die, TPP is being animated by a broad coalition of powerful corporate interests and we are told talks will continue.

Even if the continuing bilateral negotiations resolve U.S.-Japan auto and agricultural trade issues, there are scores of other deep deadlocks in TPP negotiations. This includes deep disputes on medicine patent and government drug reimbursement rate policies that would affect healthcare costs; limits on financial regulation, food safety and Internet freedom; disciplines on state owned enterprises; the expansion of investor protections that subject domestic laws to attack by corporations in foreign tribunals; and environmental and labor standards. As well, 60 U.S. Senators and 230 U.S. Representatives have insisted that TPP include enforceable disciplines on currency manipulation, but other TPP countries oppose this and to date the issue had not been addressed.”

Of course, to hear the White House tell it, last week's blow to the solar plexus of his beloved corporate coup was only a temporary setback. (And given the power of his investors, he could very well be right.) According to The Hill, Obama merely "fell short" in his murketing abilities. Plus, it was a veritable whirlwind over there, and he got a bit buffeted in the ring. But according to administration flacks, Obama is still the champ -- because even though he never connected, he threw some pretty amazing "breakthrough" punches and created a "pathway" to the winners' circle:

"And so, when we say is there an agreement, the agreement comes on the very last day of the negotiation when you have a comprehensive package. That’s not where we are today,” a senior Obama administration official told reporters Friday on Air Force One.

 “Where we are is at that moment where we see how we’re going to achieve resolution potentially of these key market access issues that will help unlock other negotiations,” the official said. 

I nominate that last sentence for a Murketer of the Year award in the word salad category of best performance by an uncredited obfuscator in a supporting role.

And anyway, who needs a "senior Obama administration official" to toss out wilted propaganda when you have the glitzy Hollywood version so cleverly and originally known as West Wing Week? This is the email video modeled after Entertainment Tonight, sent out by the White House to disengaged citizen-consumers to keep us up-to-date on what we should think is important. The president, first lady and their palace guard are all portrayed as celebrities and filmed in only the most flattering lights and angles.

If West Wing Week was your only source of news, you wouldn't even know the reason for Obama's whirlwind trip to Asia. You're told that he flew to Japan to eat and say hello to some factory robots. Seriously. This is the blaring headline:

"POTUS Dreams of Sushi"

To an up-tempo light jazz score, pre-trip POTUS is shown in the first scene as Upper-Middle Class Everyman, cavorting on the White House tennis and basketball courts and reading "Where the Wild Things Are" to a group of children. The one realistic moment is when he forms his fist into a claw and uses his fishy dulcet tone to camouflage his inner free-market roar.

 

 

Then follow a whole series of Potuses and Flotuses planing and deplaning to the salutes of military men and the air-kissing and kowtowing by factotums. Once he arrives in Asia, Potus is instantly transformed into Potentate, with all the red-carpet and orchestral trimmings. He eats a $300 plate of Sushi, and gushes over robots. The Temp Emp of America then eats some more, this time with the Perm Emp of Japan. There's even a scene of them reviewing a medieval jousting tournament from the royal box. But not one word about the TPP. Not one single word.

The film ends with the non sequitur of Obama back home in the White House, jocularly posing for photos with comic Jim Carrey and making fun of his white shoes. I guess the president can only be humorous in his own comfort zone.

Watch the West Wing Week video here if you haven't eaten recently. 

And if you tried to look beyond White House propaganda for some real news on the president's Asia trip, you probably looked in vain. Because according to the dutiful Washington press corps, the president went to Asia to... eat! Here, for example, was the headline from ABC News:

"Mt. Fuji-Shaped Ice Cream Is 'Delicious', Obama Says"

Asked by ABC News how he found last night’s state dinner dessert, Obama said it was “delicious.”

"They had the green tea at the bottom that I’ve spoken about having since I was 6,” he said. “I was very pleased.”

He later passed the compliment to the emperor and empress in person as he bid them farewell at the Hotel Okura.

“Thank you for last night it was such a nice evening,” Obama told the couple.

Whiel (sic) waiting for his royal highnesses, Obama told the press that he is jetlagged on day three of his Asian tour. “I’m still on the waking up at 4 thing,” he said.

Whiel you're waking up from that vision, let me end the misery with just one more shallow non sequitur:

If you can't live by the promise of hashtag, what can you live by?

As the Times Turns

 (Updated below)

When is a New York Times retraction not a retraction?

When the Gray Lady gets caught with her bloomers down, but avoids any admission of wrongdoing, and hides her "correction" in a back page instead of right where it belongs. That, logically, would be on the front page where the original story and photo spread appeared, accompanied by a large type, bold print apology.

Those grainy photos of bearded "green men" that were peddled by the Obama administration to the newspaper as proof of Russian presence in East Ukraine, and dutifully and unquestioningly reprinted by the Times, have been exposed both as photos of different men and as old pictures actually taken on Russian, rather than Ukrainian, real estate. The whole thing had a decidedly Loch Ness monster feel to it right from the get-go, but at least it didn't take half a century for the fraud to be exposed. Thanks to the miracles of high resolution technology and hundreds of unlying 50/50 human eyeballs, the fakery failed within days.

Here are the opening weasel words in the "corrected" story:

A collection of photographs that Ukraine says shows the presence of Russian forces in the eastern part of the country, and which the United States cited as evidence of Russian involvement, has come under scrutiny.

The photographs were submitted by Ukraine last week to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, an organization in Vienna that has been monitoring the situation in Ukraine.

Some of the photographs were also provided by American officials to Secretary of State John Kerry so he could show them when he met in Geneva last Thursday with his counterparts from the European Union, Russia and Ukraine.

OK, so in the original story (see my previous post)  the photographs were enthusiastically "endorsed" by the Obama administration itself . But not 48 hours later, they're suddenly playing Hot Potato with their own discredited propaganda. Blame it all on "Ukraine." (which, let's face it, can now be defined as the right wing coup orchestrated by the U.S.) Ukraine says it was given (rather than eagerly grabbing) the photos by an "organization" which has been "monitoring" the situation. Poor John Kerry was simply passively "provided with" the evidence so he could have something cool to display for Show And Tell with his pro-West classmates.

For her part, State Department murketing pro Jen Psaki clumsily side-stepped the cesspit of disparities. You see, she insisted, that front page Times photo spread was only part of a "draft version" of a briefing packet. The most glaring example of the fakery -- a group shot of allegedly newly-arrived Russian militants in East Ukraine -- was actually taken in Georgia six years ago. The original photographer not only confirmed this inconvenient fact, he complained that the State Department had used his work without permission. Psaki excused the oversight and gave Kerry cover by claiming it was not among the photos handed to him.

The joint White House/Times ass-covering concludes:

Still, Ms. Psaki asserted that there was considerable classified and unclassified information that had led the United States and its Western allies to “make a connection between the Russians and the armed militants” in eastern Ukraine.

“We don’t have a shadow of a doubt about the connection,” she said.

Her cavalier, self-confident, so-what tone is indicative of the cavalier, self-confident, so-what tone of her bosses, and the cavalier, self-confident, so-what tone of the New York Times. They simply do not acknowledge the terrible consequences, in terms of human morbidity and mortality, of their irresponsible actions. As Polk-winning journalist Robert Parry puts it, 

In the old days of journalism, we used to apply the scrutiny before we published a story on the front page or on any other page, especially if it had implications toward war or peace, whether people would live or die. However, in this case – fitting with the anti-Russian bias that has pervaded the mainstream U.S. press corps – the scrutiny was set aside long enough for this powerful propaganda theme to be put in play and to sweep across the media landscape.

Not only has the Obama White House been exposed in an outright lie, but the Times just lost all the credibility it had clawed back since the phony stories it ran in partnership with the Bush White House. Alex Lantier of the World Socialist Website asks the following questions:

How was the decision to publish the fabricated photo report taken, and by whom?

· What was the Times’ role in the fraud? Did it doctor the photos, or did it uncritically publish photos doctored by as-yet-unnamed operatives in Kiev or in Washington?

· Do Times staff subject information they receive from the state to any critical review?

I suspect that Public Editor Margaret Sullivan will address these queries sooner rather than later. To her immense credit, she wrote an excellent piece this week that boldly questions the ethics of the Obama administration, both regarding the president's targeted assassinations and his attack on press freedoms in general. Unfortunately for the Times, arguably the most powerful and influential media outlet in the world, Obama seems to have found its Achilles heel. He has found the sweet spot where he can inject all the personal charm and state-sanctioned fraudulence at his disposal, and in the process poison the bloodstream of democracy itself. 

Update: Margaret Sullivan weighs in: 

It all feels rather familiar – the rushed publication of something exciting, often based on an executive branch leak.  And then, afterward, with a kind of “morning after” feeling, here comes a more sober, less prominently displayed followup story, to deal with objections while not clarifying much of anything.

The problems with the first article did not go unnoticed by readers and commenters. Ken Miller, a professor at Columbia University Medical School, called the photo story “egregious, being based entirely on alleged identifications of individuals in pairs of photographs where the faces were so fuzzy there was no way to see anything more than a vague and perhaps entirely coincidental resemblance (not to mention that the authenticity of the photographs themselves wasn’t established in any way).”

And the reporter Robert Parry (formerly of Newsweek and The Associated Press) on Consortiumnews.com sees a pattern in Times articles, often based on administration leaks, that “draw hard conclusions from very murky evidence while ignoring or brushing aside alternative explanations.”

Thursday morning, I asked the foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, to talk about what had happened.

Mr. Kahn rightly points out that The Times has made a major commitment to covering the Russia-Ukraine story over the past several months, using as many as 12 staff reporters, many of them on the ground. He calls the coverage “voluminous, competitive and excellent.”

He rejects the idea that The Times’s coverage has lacked skepticism and sees this instance as a result of a simple mistake: the State Department’s mislabeling. He also makes the point that, after hearing about objections to the photographs, “we spent the better part of a news cycle” trying to pin that down for the follow-up article.

“We were the ones who dug into that,” he said. In addition, he said, this article has to be seen within a larger reporting context: “This was not our first word on the subject, and it wasn’t intended to be our last.”

Mr. Kahn said he was well aware that many readers and commenters see a great deal of Times coverage through the jaundiced lens of its flawed reporting in the run-up to the Iraq war – as do both Mr. Miller and Mr. Parry, who are quoted above.

“We still have that in mind, too, and we are on guard,” Mr. Kahn said. But he said that was not a germane comparison in this case because he does not believe that the photographs were doctored or intentionally misrepresented for propaganda purposes. And he noted that the first article – published on a tight deadline, he said, because of competitive pressures – was not entirely dependent for its conclusions on the photographs, but also included other reporting that led to similar conclusions.

Here’s my take: The Times’s coverage of this crisis has had much to commend it, especially the quality of the on-the-ground reporting. But this article, with its reliance on an administration leak, was displayed too prominently and questioned too lightly. The Times’s influence demands that it be cautious, especially when deciding to publish what amounts to a government handout.

Got that, proles? Mistakes were made. But, deadline. But, we're Number One. So let's move on, oh ye jaundiced ones of little faith! 

Meanwhile, State Sec'y John Kerry apparently missed the Times' non-correction correction, because he's still doubling down on the discredited photographic "evidence." In an impassioned speech yesterday he shrilled,

Some of the individual special operations personnel, who were active on Russia’s behalf in Chechnya, Georgia, and Crimea have been photographed in Slovyansk, Donetsk, and Luhansk.  Some are even bragging about it by themselves on their Russian social media sites.  And we’ve seen weapons and gear on the separatists that matches those worn and used by Russian special forces.