;)
Sunday
Sep152013
The Commentariat -- Sept. 16, 2013
President Obama on the fifth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers:
Buh-Bye, Larry!
** Annie Lowrey & Michael Shear of the New York Times: "Lawrence H. Summers, one of President Obama’s closest economic confidantes and a former Treasury secretary, has withdrawn his name from consideration for the position of chairman of the Federal Reserve amid rising opposition from Mr. Obama's own Democratic allies on Capitol Hill. In a statement released by the White House on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Obama said he had accepted the decision by his friend even as he praised him for helping to rescue the country from economic disaster early in the president's term." Thanks to contributor MAG for the heads-up. Update. The Times has since expanded its story & added Binyamin Appelbaum to the byline. ...
... Zachary Goldfarb of the Washington Post has much more: "... amid an intensifying uproar of liberal Democrats and left-wing groups opposed to his nomination, Summers decided to withdraw his name on Sunday, telephoning the president to tell him his decision. When word of Summers's candidacy first circulated, liberals erupted, furious at what they said was his record of supporting deregulation in the Clinton administration. Obama took to defending him when questioned on Capitol Hill.... In order to buy time and cool tensions, the White House announced that no decision would be made until the fall. But that gave only space for Summers's opponents to strengthen the opposition to his candidacy, with four of the 12 Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee, which would confirm Summers, signaling opposition." Here's Summers' letter to the President. ...
... CW: According to a Reuters report, published Friday, the four Democratic Senators on the banking committee who opposed Summers were Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Jeff Merkeley (Oregon), Jon Tester (Montana), AND "Colleagues of [Elizabeth] Warren, a Democrat of Massachusetts, expect her to vote against Summers if he is nominated.... Sources said she has expressed concerns about Summers to her colleagues and had raised them with people in the White House. She has stayed silent out of respect for Obama." CW: Maybe Sen. Warren, out of respect for her former Harvard colleague, told Larry there was no way in hell she would vote for his nomination. ...
... Update. Ben White of Politico: "During their [phone] call, Summers told Obama he believed there was now too much political opposition to his nomination to move forward, a person familiar with the phone call said. Summers told Obama that his nomination now would create too much political uncertainty for the Fed and could thus be damaging to the economy. Obama accepted Summers' rationale and did not attempt to convince him to continue as a candidate for the Fed job, the person said." ...
... Charles Pierce: "Senator Professor Warren was one of the driving forces behind a genuine populist uprising of liberal Democratic senators ... and that uprising has kicked Larry Summers to the curb. She has quietly carved out a leadership role in the one area in which she is an acknowledged expert.... Quite simply, she is doing what she said she would do when she was running for the Senate. She has enough allies to get done a lot of what she wants to get done. Anything this president -- or his successor -- wants to do as far as national economic policy now has to go through her, and through the coalition to which she belongs." ...
... Here's Elizabeth Warren's "thwacking speech" (September 9) to the AFL-CIO to which Pierce refers:
... ** John Cassidy of the New Yorker: "In recent weeks, numerous stories appeared that quoted White House and Treasury Department insiders saying how much the President respected Summers ... and how much he valued his advice. But we already knew that. The key question was ... how much political capital [Obama] would be willing to invest in landing him at the Fed. If you looked at the issue in terms of cold political calculus, which is how Presidential aides look at most things, it was pretty clear which way the cost-benefit analysis would come out.... It's only reasonable to speculate that the White House political shop prevailed upon the President to give up on nominating Summers, that he reluctantly agreed, and that somebody told Big Larry the news and gave him the option of withdrawing gracefully before another name was announced." ...
... Scott Lemieux in Lawyers, Guns & Money: "Now one has to hope that Obama will do the right thing and nominate Yellen rather than spitefully picking a white guy worse than Summers (such as Donald Kohn.)" ...
... Kathleen Geier of Washington Monthly: "Members of the Fed are mostly drawn from the pool of distinguished economists, so given women's agonizingly slow progress within the econ, it may be a long time before another woman is as well-positioned as Yellen to break the Fed's glass ceiling." ...
... CW: I agree with Steve M. of NMMNB in his assessment of why Larry dropped out (and with contributor Kate M. who doesn't let us forget all the millions Larry will make "consulting" Wall Street firms), but I'm not sure President Obama will pass over Yellen for Alan Greenspan acolyte Donald Kohn, as Steve M. fears. As we found out this week, Obama is not afraid of "looking weak," & I don't want to think he would sink the economy just so his economic team could keep that "No Girls Allowed" sign on their club door. We'll see. ...
... Evan McMorris-Santoro: "... the end of Summers’ bid isn’t the end of progressive pressure on Obama. [Women's and] progressive leaders won't be happy until current Fed vice chair Janet Yellen has the Fed job."
NEW. Rick Gladstone & Nick Cumming-Bruce of the New York Times: "Rockets armed with the banned chemical nerve agent sarin were used in a mass killing near Damascus on Aug. 21, United Nations chemical weapons inspectors reported Monday in the first official confirmation by nonpartisan scientific experts that such munitions had been deployed in the Syria conflict.... The widely awaited report did not ascribe blame for the attack...." ...
... Reuters: "France, Britain and the US have agreed to seek a 'strong and robust' UN resolution that sets precise and binding deadlines on the removal of Syria's chemical weapons, the office of the French president, François Hollande, said, emerging from talks with John Kerry and William Hague in Paris." ...
... Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "According to a State Department official's account of the negotiations [between the U.S. & Russia] that began Thursday evening and ended Saturday afternoon with a framework accord to secure and eliminate Syria's chemical weapons, it was a deal that almost did not happen. In the end, the deal was written entirely by the U.S. side. The Russians agreed to it in an impromptu poolside conversation between Kerry, Lavrov and their deputies, who dragged over chairs to join them. Kerry made final edits to the draft on an iPad in his hotel room." ...
... Liz Sly of the Washington Post: "At the close of a week hailed in Moscow and Washington as a triumph of diplomacy over war, more than 1,000 people died in the fighting in Syria, the latest casualties in a conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people and can be expected to claim many more." ...
... Jason Easley of PoliticusUSA: "The notion that [Russian President Vladamir] Putin saved [President] Obama is political spin by his critics who are trying to tarnish his diplomatic victory in any way that they can. It is a display of how deeply Republicans hate this president that they are so willing to label Putin a hero, not even a year after their presidential nominee called Russia our biggest rival.... Making Russia shift from denying the existence of Syria's chemical weapons and Assad's responsibility for the attack in less than a week is a sign of presidential strength. To Republicans, diplomacy equals weakness. The right is trying to turn Obama's strength into a shortcoming, and sacrificing facts, the truth, and consistency while trying to score cheap political points." ...
... Anne Barnard of the New York Times: "Both sides in Syria's civil war see the deal to dismantle President Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons stockpiles as a major turning point. It left rebels deflated and government supporters jubilant. And both sides say it means the United States knows Mr. Assad is not going anywhere anytime soon.... Rebels and analysts critical of Mr. Assad's government say he has a well-established pattern of agreeing to diplomatic initiatives to buy time, only to go on escalating the fighting."
If we continue to set a precedent in which a president ... is in a situation in which each time the United States is called upon to pay its bills, the other party can simply sit there and say, 'Well, we're not going to ... pay the bills unless you give us ... what we want,' that changes the constitutional structure of this government entirely. -- Barack Obama, in an ABC News interview aired Sunday (see full interview in yesterday's Commentariat)
It has taken our President the Constitutional Scholar a full two years to figure that out. -- Constant Weader
Benghaaaazi! Karen DeYoung: "House Republicans will begin their promised fall assault on the Obama administration's conduct before, during and after the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, with the publication Monday of a report updating their investigation of the incident and a hearing Wednesday with testimony from a high-ranking State Department official. The report, prepared by majority staff for House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), focuses on what it calls 'shortcomings' in the Accountability Review Board investigation of the attack...."
Food Fight. David Rogers of Politico: "The farm bill is back....The final text of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's proposed cuts from nutrition spending is due out Monday. Floor votes could come this week in what remains a closely fought battle. Fox News has jumped in, distributing scores of videos to Capitol offices of last month's report featuring the surfer deadbeat [buying lobster with his monthly food stamps benefit]." ...
... Samantha Wyatt of Media Matters: "In reality, Greenslate [the surfer dude] bears no resemblance to the overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients, many of whom are elderly, children, or rely on the program for a short time while looking for work.... Fox's attempt to demonize food stamp recipients as a caricature of willful dependency ignores the fact that SNAP kept 4.7 million people out of poverty in 2011, many of whom are children or the elderly. Unlike Greenslate, the majority of these individuals relied on the program not because of laziness, but necessity."
Paul Krugman: "... while there is legitimate uncertainty about what the Fed should be doing, the costs of being too harsh vastly exceed the costs of being too lenient. To err is human; to err on the side of growth is wise." ...
... Emily Alpert of the Los Angeles Times: A "small but surging share of Americans ... identify themselves as 'lower class.' Last year, a record 8.4% of Americans put themselves in that category -- more than at any other time in the four decades that the question has been asked on the General Social Survey...."
Glenn Greenwald: NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander is an insane trekkie who, when he ran the Army Intelligence and Security Command, employed a Hollywood set designer to create (at taxpayer expense) an "Information Dominance Center" modeled after the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. CW: Greenwald's sourcing seems unimpeachable. Alexander strikes me as creepy, not someone you want to put in charge of anything.
Gubernatorial Race
Beth Reinhard of the National Journal assesses the Virginia race for governor: "Terrible candidates, awful campaign take Virginia from bellwether to sideshow." ...
... James Hohmann of Politico on why Ken Cuccinelli is losing to Terry McAuliffe. CW: The election is almost two months away. That gives Cuccinelli plenty of time to catch up. If Virginians care about policy, they'll vote for McAuliffe (though McAuliffe's performance before the Northern Virginia Technology Council, which Hohmann covers, doesn't speak well for McAuliffe in this area). If they care about ethics, they'll probably vote for Cuccinelli, the lesser of two evils.
Local News
Azi Paybarah of Capital New York: "Gov. Andrew Cuomo will hold an event with Bill de Blasio and Bill Thompson later this morning to help bring an end to the Democratic mayoral primary, according to multiple sources. De Blasio won Tuesday's primary with just over 40 percent of the vote, the threshold needed to avoid a run-off with the second-place finisher, pending a count of outstanding ballots." Via Joe Coscarelli of New York.
Photo below relevant to a comment I made in today's Comments:
News Ledes
Washington Post: "Police now believe two shooters, including one in fatigues, have killed four people and wounded eight others at the Washington, [D.C.,] Navy Yard on Monday, throwing the region into fear and chaos during the morning commute. At least one of the shooters is 'down,' police said mid-morning, but it was unclear whether that means the suspect has been arrested or shot. They said the other suspect remains at large, and police believe they have pinned down one between the third and fourth floors of one of the buildings on the installation in Southeast Washington." ...
... Here's the Post's liveblog of developments....
The Nation: Charlotte, North Carolina, police shot and killed "Jonathan Ferrell, a 24-year-old former football player at Florida A&M University [after he] crashed his car in Charlotte, North Carolina" & went to a nearby house for help. Officer Randall Kerrick has since been charged with "voluntary manslaughter." A CNN story is here.
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Reader Comments (26)
One of my favorite pieces of pop history is Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." The account is crammed with really smart people doing really smart things, a world I always enjoy visiting vicariously, but some of those smarties found context for their actions in a moral base that questioned and considered the consequences of what they were up to beyond their laboratories and test sites.
Needless to say, I liked better the smart folks whose view of the world and their place in it was wide enough to be a little conflicted much than those who did not. There were both more fully human and, though they lived in a place and moment when inaction was not an option, what they thought and said about the very real risks of what they were doing made those who followed them safer than we would have otherwise been.
I see Obama as one of those types. Smart, but not always certain the first answer is the right one or that today's right answer will not be tomorrow's wrong one.
Summers, I think, is more Teller than Oppenheimer, smart like Obama but without his imagination, which for a smarties like them both might be another way of saying, not possessing enough imagination to be less arrogant than he apparently is.
Don't know how Summers' withdrawal will turn out, but if Obama is not the man I hope he is, he might choose a third candidate, not Yellen, just to prove he can't be pushed around by his own party.
Maybe I'm bothered that the two men seem to be close at all. Because I don't care for Summers but like Obama, the President's apparent respect for Summers make me wonder a little about the President's judgment.
Or maybe we're just observing a domestic version of the Syrian-Putin Obama rope-a-dope, getting your way by bumbling into it.
We'll see.
Sad, isn't it, that it takes four progressive senators to stop a self-proclaimed populist president from acting like an asshole?
The Information Dominance Center inner sanctum is a TV set???
Take a look at the "dominator's" chair: doesn't it look like a kiddie safety seat in the back seat of a subaru?
The whole scene is as pathetic as Hitler's inner sanctum turned out to be, or what the Taliban's central headquarters in Afghanistan looked like.
Is there a connection between the belief that one has unfettered power and the withering of the creative imagination?
Like Ken, I'm really afraid the President will nominate someone other than Yellen out of spite.
When the operation to kill Osama bin Laden was taking place and all the big shots were watching in real time (I guess) and someone took the picture (Hillary hand over mouth) that was published all over the inter tubzz, I remember thinking, "Jeez, NCIS (the teevee show) has a better room to watch live events than the President of the United States." Guess General Alexander watches NCIS, too, and thought he deserved an equally impressive throne room to rule the world.
Talk about your $700 dollar hammers, where's Senator Proxmire when you need him?
@Ken: Interesting you should bring up Oppenheimer because when Kate wrote about "emotional intelligence" I immediately thought of him. I've always been fascinated by this man and Kei Bird's marvelous biography was pure pleasure. What this country did to Oppie (the Gray Board Hearings) in the end was sickening. And on the occasion of his meeting with Truman whose gross misunderstanding and ignorance of the implications of atomic weapons had prompted Oppenheimer to say something––"Mr. President, I feel like I have blood on my hands"––which of course rattled Truman to such an extent that he ordered his staff "never to let that son of a bitch in here again."
Oppenheimer strongly believed and emphasized continually that science needed the humanities to better understand its own character and consequences. He once said that no country could expect in any meaningful sense to win an atomic war."We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life."
Teller, by the way, was a prima donna and if what I've seen and read of Summers he has a bit of that himself.
As for Obama his heart is in the right place, it's just that he has had to learn how to lead among all the other things a president has to learn how to do on the job. I have the feeling by the time he gets it all together it will be time for his departure. Thank goodness in ordinary life we can keep working on getting better where the only end game is death.
Pepe: Have a little faith. We can always work on getting better, even after death. ;-)
NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander's Dominance Center on the architect's Web site must be getting heavy traffic, it's down. For me, at least. But, my first thought...what a hokey design! I can't imagine that a good architectural firm would want their name associated with something that looks so second-rate and out of the early 50's. (Remember the House of the Future from GE?).
My second take, Keith Alexander is rather benign looking—maybe a sort of a macho Mr. Peepers! But, then, it's this very sort of innocuous facade, which often lulls us into not suspecting the insidious (creepy) nature of the egoist inside.
Re: Architectural design, egos and assholes; or the fuckin' automatic door slapped me in the face again.
From the castle of "Frankenstein" (steen, steen!) to the death star of "SpaceBalls" to the whole freakin' town of Johnsons in "Blazing Saddles" Mel Brooks used design as a way of exposing the putzs he created for us in his movies. His villains have a terrible time with their surroundings, costumes and furnishings. The quill pen the governor uses to sign hanging warrants in "Blazing Saddles" is one example. Malfunctioning doors in "SpaceBalls is another.
Those of us with average means live in worlds created by others but influenced by our own tastes and needs. Hiring a interior designer or an architect to create one's own vision is a luxury few can afford. Those that can seldom have the artistic "eye" to carry out a innovative project so you end up with a derivative "mash-up" along the lines of a "classic Tuscany estate adorned with Greek columns and Edwardian brick work". As a woman landscaper said to me on one such project; Taj ma ugly.
Long way to get to my point; you can learn a lot about a person by their surroundings. Mr Alexander's tastes and sensibilities make me really question how he has the position. I'd rather have Scotty down in the engine room running things than a post-modern Kirk directing things from a Danish recliner.
Maybe Mel Brooks could crank out one more funny movie based on our post 9-11 insanities. Plenty of material.
Re: the Farm Bill/SNAP benefits
I would highly recommend the documentary "A Place At the Table" http://www.magpictures.com/aplaceatthetable/, which is currently streaming on Netflix, or can be purchased online. This film does an excellent job of documenting the real faces of food stamp recipients and the victims of our skewed food and labor policies: children. Hunger affects learning; obesity from eating cheap, processed foods leads to lifelong health problems. It's really shameful that the richest country on earth can't find the means to feed its children.
I live in a small, rural town in eastern Connecticut, and volunteer with our local food pantry. Every week, another woman and I drive to the regional food bank in New London to bring back meat, non-perishables, and produce. When I began volunteering about four years ago, each of us only needed to go about once a month. Now weekly trips are necessary, and frequently we go together to bring back two carloads of food. I also use monetary donations to purchase food that's not available at the food bank, and spent $1400 two weeks ago to replenish our bare cupboards. Our numbers hit a record in August. Contrary to the FOX claim, it's not lobster-eating beach bums or the Cadillac-driving welfare queens that are utilizing our pantry. It's people with jobs: grocery store clerks, Walmart cashiers, hospital workers, even people working in our school system. They're hungry and often ashamed.
Please watch the film, and ask others to do the same. We need to counter the Fox garbage that poisons the airwaves. And we need to go on the offense, pushing for a living wage, increased SNAP benefits, healthier school lunches, and increased availability of quality food. In other words, we need to put food pantries out of business.
@JJG: thanks for your comment. I have been thinking along those lines ever since I made my pejorative comment about Gen. Alexander's decorating tastes. After all, I myself copy other people's ideas when I decorate my house. I didn't invent my own style; when I redecorate, I look at pictures of what other people have done & decide what it is about a particular room that appeals to me. So maybe Gen. Beam-Me-Up was just doing the same thing & I should STFU. But I -- & those people who create the Taj Ma uglies -- at least put ourselves into the style of a room or house, even if we do sometimes end up with what you so humorously described as "a 'classic Tuscany estate adorned with Greek columns and Edwardian brick work.'"
I'm providing an example (see picture above, which I'll post momentarily). I bought a very old cast iron sink for my lake cottage, then had to build a sturdy stand to hold it up. Being cheap, I built it entirely of scraps from other projects; ergo, the beadboard uprights & baseboard on the facade (which I made removable so the plumber could easily get to the under-counter water heater. Instead of a plain ole front, I decided to make it curvy, but I didn't design my own curve -- I looked thru some old magazines to find one that was sufficiently extravagant & of no particular utility (it's likely I modified the original a bit). The result is as quirky as I am; it's an original -- but none of the elements is. I didn't invent beadboard or baseboard or the curvy bit.
Nowhere in my house, BTW, are any elements derivative of the Starship Enterprise.
Marie
Ken and PD,
Something else to consider when drawing the Oppenheimer/Teller comparison into the present: Oppenheimer might have been, as he famously said (supposedly) the bringer of death, but at least he appreciated that he had supervised a project that opened a huge Pandora's box.
Teller fervently wished for more and more boxes to pry open. He was a slimy little weasel who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to destroy Oppenheimer, far and away his intellectual and moral superior. His singular goal was to make himself famous and to create as many different ways of killing people as was possible. Hydrogen bombs on rockets, on railroad cars, in the ocean, big ones, little ones, bombs on the moon (he actually did propose detonating a hydrogen bomb on the moon just to see what happened), he was at least partially responsible for the nutso idea floated around by the Reagan geniuses of a "limited, winnable nuclear war".
Oppenheimer believed the Japan bombs were necessary but I doubt pictures of the smoking ruins gave him the hard on it gave Teller.
If Larry Summers is Teller, I'd be concerned that he is still out there, very connected, and can still cause a lot of mischief.
The recent detonation of economic structures helped along by Summers and his buddies originated in the deregulation bombs created by a the Lower Manhattan Project. And thanks to a cadre of smart senators (Elizabeth Warren for president!), we may have denied Summers the reward for sticking it up America's collective ass, at least the 99%ers.
Speaking of the atomic bomb, anyone who has read Richard Rhodes'
book on the bomb and Kai Bird's bio of Oppenheimer (both great books--and I've heard the new Ray Monk bio of J. Robert is excellent as well) might be interested in "Manhattan Project", a collection of articles, correspondence, memos, etc, written by many of those engaged in the making of the bomb. Edited by Cynthia Kelly. One of those eyewitness to history books. A good one. But read the others first.
@Marie; The sink was a great find; what you did with it shows ingenuity and humor combined. Since I wash the dishes in our house the french curves on the valance might be a little too feminine for me but who knows; maybe they would induce me into more scrubbing?
Atlantic monthly had an interesting piece on "Outsider artists" (ask PD for link). Those of us that personalize our spaces like you did are along the same lines. I'd rather a home like mine that is cobbled out of dozens of rich peoples remodels and roadside finds than a designer home. I have a O'Keefe &Merritt gas top stove from the forties side by a Dacor convection oven; both castoffs.
There's only so many shapes, it's how you stack'em.
Marie,
Nice design. But are you sure there are no NSA bugs under your sink checking your water usage and taking inventory of dangerous household chemicals? Bleach and ammonia make chlorine gas. Alexander may want to know if you're planning on chlorinating the neighborhood. Then again he may be coveting the Brasso while practicing his James Tiberius Kirk command posture sitting in The Big Chair.
"Viewscreen on!"
As we say about people like Keith Alexander, their taste is all in their mouth.
Marie--I see the coffee is on but what kind of pie are you planning
to serve us in those blue willow dishes? Hopefully, coconut cream.
I'm with Akhilleus, Marie. Those demurely draped curtains? that cover the opening below the distinctively handsome sink do draw the eye and prompt natural curiosity--even mine and I do not work or volunteer for the NSA-- about what lies beneath. I'd do anything to take a look.
Reminds me of the good old days when, according to "The Subversives," last year's account of Reagan's and J. Edgar's relationship, the FBI literally crawled under (as I remember) Jessica Mitford's house to listen in on her radical conversations.
On your next visit, you might want to check both under the sink and in your cottage crawlspace for the General before settling in. Just an idle thought.
The Command Chair, what a preposterous, egocentric piece pecker presentation. A reflection of the plutocratic world we are evolving into today. Power is not enough without a throne to emit that power from. At least until the feces hits the air circulation device.
If the good General Alexander would have chosen purple or lavender as his colors, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion.
The Sebastian Junger article, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-09-13/opinions/42025663_1_war-reporter-war-zone-junger, is a pretty good read about the use of military force.
Hey, it might not just be Alexander under the house. Doesn't Roger Ailes live upstate too? Hell, we might as well throw in Peter King, he's a New York GOP goon on the House "Intelligence" committee, plus he's running for president now. And he might invite Bachmann just to mollify the local teabaggers. It could get pretty crowded under there. In fact, they might sneak in and eat Forrest's cocoanut cream pie when you're out taking a walk to the lake. If they do, I'm putting in a request for blueberry pie for the next one.
With vanilla ice cream, please.
On a more serious note, more gun craziness just blocks from K St. where NRA lobbyists are counting their money and deciding just how much money the latest bodies are worth.
Details are scarce at this point but the idea floated by those lobbyists and their congressional lapdogs that we'd all be better off if everyone was armed all the time has been proven wrong once again. The idea, of course, is that as soon as some dastardly villain opened fire, the surrounding citizens, all armed, would open fire and perforate his ass.
I'm not an expert, but I'm guessing that a military base has a fair number of armed individuals. Not everyone, perhaps, but more than you might encounter in the local mall (depending on where that mall is, of course).
But the NRA theory that all it takes to stop bad guys are more guns appears, once again, to be the gigantic steaming pile of dung it sounds like.
Think those shooters can make it all the way to the NRA headquarters in Fairfax? I'm sure they'd get a warm welcome.
Good news. Sort of.
The shootings at the Washington Navy Yard are not the work of gun nuts or idiots (but I repeat myself) nor that of terrorists.
According to highly placed sources in Wingnut World, the rampage was planned by none other than President Obama hisself.
Alex Jones, respected member of the factual universe, and a guy who would never knowingly spread lies and cuckoo conspiracy theories, has revealed that a little fairy visited him and whispered in his ear that Obama has created this shooting as a diversion from Syria and as an aid to gun control.
Damn! I knew it had to be something like that. Nothing to worry about. Keep buying those guns.
@Akhilleus, sigh.
For more on Alex Jones: http://www.esquire.com/anxiety/alex-jones-interview-0913 ...and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words!
Alex Jones has had over 300 million hits on YouTube. Who are these people? Believers or just curious? If the believers outweigh
the curious, Jeebus, we be in deep #&i%.
You gotta wonder what sort of person Alex Jones is. What drives him. What wakes him up in the middle of the night. And why he hasn't found a more lucrative gig for milking the suckers.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/conspiracy-theorists-already-suspect-navy-yard-shooting-is-a-false-flag-20130916
Another shooting, another fucking crazy person/ persons hell bent on destruction. I feel hate intensely right now. What Martin Luther King advocated we all feel after the Birmingham church bombing–-to forgive and love those that did that deed–-I thought then, not for me, buster, not for me. I have not changed in that respect–-not one little bit!
@Akhilleus: You said, "Oppenheimer believed the Japan bombs were necessary but I doubt pictures of the smoking ruins gave him the hard on it gave Teller."
My understanding is that Oppie did not think that at all. If you recall this bomb was originally for Germany. Truman knew the Japanese were "looking for peace," and that the military use of atomic bombs on cities was an option rather than a necessity for ending the war in August, but this information did not get to Oppenheimer and after the war he came to believe he had been misled, and that this knowledge served as a constant reminder that it was henceforth his obligation to be skeptical of what he was told by government officials.
Re: hard dicks: During the Abu Grab business Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver (unfortunate last name in this context) recalled the mounting excitement among her male colleagues, including men from the CIA and the DIA, as different interrogation techniques were being bandied about. “You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas.”
And Marie: Such decorative skills in that lake cottage kitchen of yours–-quirky, indeed, but quite innovative.