progressive involvement

Back to business as usual

The banksters had to pay $25 billion because of their over-zealous foreclosures, but they're happy to pay it because, now that the suit is over, they can go back to seizing peoples' homes.

Why you can't trust ideologues

The Susan B. Komen Foundation has been in a week-long frenzy of attempted damage control, desperately trying to, as they say, save its "brand," and all because of an ideologue who got herself into a powerful position within the organization and decided to put the organization at risk in order to grind an ideological ax.

The Komen official most associated with the ending of grants for Planned Parenthood is Karen Handel, a former GOP politician in Georgia and the current vice president for public policy for Komen, last seen chortling about how Komen could end grants to PP and blame it on Congress.

Whether Komen can save itself is still up in the air, but right now it looks doubtful.  For one thing, they appear not to have entirely gotten the message.  They now say they will fulfill the grants they have made with Planned Parenthood, but it is not clear whether or not the Komen Foundation will give grants to Planned Parenthood in the future.

The Komen foundation had already made a number of questionable moves, such as partnering with just about anybody who would slap a pink ribbon on themselves, and that's not even to mention removing the words "breast" and "cancer" from the name of the organization because, one supposes, some focus group found them "negative".

Maybe the "race for the cure" could be replaced with a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood.

Arizona wants to buy its state capitol back

In 2009, Arizona sold its state capitol, and a number of other state buildings, to a private company for $735 million, of which the state has received $81 million so far.  

Arizona must have liked the symbolism of private enterprise owning its state government because the move made no economic sense at all.  Why sell your state capitol and then lease it back at exhorbitant rates?  

Or better, why not go all in and move out of the capitol entirely?  The Governor could move her office to the Congress Hotel, and the Legislature could meet in one of the ballrooms at the Hilton. 

Now, not three years later, Arizona's Governor and lawmakers have decided that maybe the state should own its own capitol building.  The same people who sold it in the first place now think better of the idea.

Image:  Wiki

Oh, the irony

Corporations are people, money is speech.  Believe those two idiotic things, enact them into law, and you make a travesty of democracy.  

The Romney campaign spent somebody's bag full of money and bombed Newt Gingrich with attack ads in Iowa.  This targeting was effective.  The military wishes it could bomb with equal precision.  Mitt's anonymous millions took Gingrich out.  Four million big ones and Gingrich went from odds-on favorite to limping into fourth place with 13%.

Not that I'm shedding a tear for Newt Gingrich, who thoroughly deserves all the calumny that he manages to stir up against himself, but why hasn't anyone asked any questions about this?  Why hasn't this been the main story out of Iowa the past two weeks?

The Citizens United decision, brought to you by our corporate-sponsored Supreme Court--Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy--means this:  Anybody can spend any amount of money to say absolutely anything they want and no one's fingerprints have to be on anything.  This is legal, believe it or not.  (Funny.  If I remember correctly, Newt supported that decision.)

While this is going on, the media acts as if these behind-the-scenes machinations don't really exist.  To put it another way, the media pretends that the whole system isn't bought.   This means that we're all being spoonfed a billionaire-bought media narrative that is largely concocted out of thin air.

 

Muslim incident on airplane

The Muslim's name is Jabir Hazziez Jr.  He stopped a man in severe emotional distress from getting into the cockpit of the plane.

Mr. Hazziez Jr. is a Kansas City firefighter, a reserve Jackson County deputy, and a member of the Naval Reserve.

The--ahem!--"dictatorship of relativism"

That's Pope Benedict's phrase, which means "we don't run things anymore, people think for themselves, and ain't it awful."  What he calls "dictatorship of relativism," others would call "freedom of thought."

Catholic Charities of Illinois has provided foster care and adoption services on behalf of the state of Illinois for many years.  The state then passed a civil unions law.  Catholic Charities sued the state of Illinois because they didn't want to serve LGBT couples.

Catholic Charities has now withdrawn the lawsuit, and said they will go out of the foster care and adoption business rather than treat gay and lesbian couples as couples.

They're claiming persecution of their religious beliefs.  They believe they shouldn't have to treat gays and lesbians the same as other people, and if you argue with this stance, or refuse to fund it, you're persecuting them.

“In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Ill., a civil and canon lawyer who helped drive the church’s losing battle to retain its state contracts for foster care and adoption services.

Bishop Paprocki is invoking the "dictatorship of relativism."  The question, however, is not toleration.  Of course you're being tolerated.  What you're not being is funded.  Why should the taxpayers of Illinois be expected to fund an organization that refuses to treat everyone equally?

Tim Kee, a teacher in Marion, Ill., who was turned away by Catholic Charities three years ago when he and his longtime partner, Rick Wade, tried to adopt a child, said: “We’re both Catholic, we love our church, but Catholic Charities closed the door to us. To add insult to injury, my tax dollars went to provide discrimination against me.”

The New York Times article also cited the work of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) in Illinois.  The LCMS position on homosexuality is similar to that of the Roman Catholic Church.  They, however, have chosen to follow the law in order to continue to provide adoption and foster care services for children.

 

If it was with Mussolini, you could kind of understand

A 99 year old Italian man is divorcing his wife of 77 years over an affair she had in the 1940's.

Something is wrong here

41% of young people have been arrested for something at least semi-serious by age 23?

Some, of course, will read this as a sign of the further Deterioration of Our Nation's Youth.  

Nonsense.  Adolescents aren't any crazier today than they ever were.  Alexander the Great slaughtered untold thousands for no particular reason.  No adolescent I've ever known did anything that cruel and stupid.

But what does it say that 40% of the country's young people have had run-ins with the law?

Those are police state numbers.

 

Christianity has "Good Friday," capitalism has "Black Friday"

The name "Black Friday" was first appended to the day after Thanksgiving in 1966 in Philadelphia, where citizens complained of the increased vehicle and pedestrian traffic as shoppers went forth to shop on the day after Thanksgiving.

Yesterday, 10,000 people were at Macy's in New York, at midnight, waiting for the doors to open.  Reports like these are typical:

"I thought I was going to get run over," Lindsay O'Rourke said after shopping at a Target store in Tulsa, Okla.

"It was insane," (said Michelle Mandel at Victoria's Secret in Davenport, IA).  "I had people climbing my merchandise and throwing product through the store. It was crazy."

You wonder who estimates these things, but whoever it is says that about 152 million people went shopping yesterday.  That's half the country.  By any definition, that is what is called "mass consumerism."

Obviously, there is no connection between celebration of Christmas, the incarnation of Christ, and the mass purchase of cheap products that few people actually want.  

It is a tremendous witness to the power of consumerism and capitalism, however, that people will mindlessly and willingly enter into a bizarro-world of crowds  and carnival barkers simply because advertising has convinced them that there is a "bargain" they must have. 

 

 

 

 

Wonder if literal brain-cell destruction is involved

Watching Fox News actually makes you know less than if you watched no news programming at all.