Blackmoor Vituperative

Ten years ago, the idea of the US government spying on its citizens, intercepting their emails or killing them with drones was unthinkable. But now it’s business as usual, says John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent and torture whistleblower.

Kiriakou is now awaiting a summons to start a prison sentence. One of the first to confirm the existence of Washington’s waterboarding program, he was sentenced last week to two-and-a-half years in jail for revealing the name of an undercover agent. But even if he had another chance, he would have done the same thing again…

(from ‘US a police state, Obama consciously allows torture’ – CIA veteran John Kiriakou, RT.com)

I don’t interpret the election results the way anyone else does. When given the choice between two virtually identical candidates and three other very distinct candidates, 98% of the country voted for the two virtually identical candidates, and the votes for those two candidates got split almost exactly in half. To me, that says that a) 98% of the country approves of our current domestic and foreign policies, and b) that the two major parties are very good at choosing candidates that appeal to nearly everyone, to the extent that choosing between them may as well be a coin toss.

I find the chest-thumping of the winners and the hand-wringing of the losers surreal. Half of the country wanted a Pepsi, and a very tiny fraction less than that wanted Coke. This means that Coke is no longer relevant, can no longer be seriously considered as a soft drink, should be removed from grocery store shelves and relegated to local convenience stores, and so on? This means that people who want Pepsi are morally and dietetically inferior (or superior) to people who’d rather drink Coke? It’s the end of the world and/or the beginning of a new era because a very tiny fraction of the population prefers one brand of carbonated brown sugar-water over another brand of carbonated brown sugar-water?

It all just seems a wild overreaction to a very tiny difference in preference between two extremely similar things.

Here are two meme images I made in response to the outrage over the cost of PBS, and the outrage over that outrage.

Here is an interesting article from Matt Bai: How Much Has Citizens United Changed the Political Game? The gist of it is that Citizens United may not have exactly the impact that people tell you it has (or will have). Which, in retrospect, really shouldn’t surprise anyone.

And here is a … not so much a rebuttal, because he doesn’t respond to any of the original article’s points… it’s a reply, I guess, from Russ Feingold. I don’t find it persuasive. “A new form of corruption”? Hardly. Matt Bai makes it amply clear that this form of corruption has been around since at least the 1990s (and in my opinion, since long before that). But this Feingold fellow was the ONLY Senator to vote against the so-called PATRIOT act during the first vote on it, so I’ll give his arguments my attention based on that alone.