Olbermann Tells Obama: Reject McChrystal's Resignation Offer (VIDEO)

Olbermann may have a grasp of the politics around this but he doesn't understand military culture or the importance of the chain of command. This isn't about Obama as President and politician. McChrystal showed a total lack of respect to Obama as Commander in Chief of the Armed Services. He was waving his nutsack in Obama's face with this interview. If Obama doesn't cut him down to size he risks losing the respect of the entire military, too many of whom already see him as weak and ineffectual because he's a Democrat with no military background. Obama needs to make an example of this dickwad and he needs to show that he understands the UCMJ.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

What's Next? Stocks? Pillory? Scarlet Letter?

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I've been saying for years that they'd start throwing us debtors' prisons again. That joke just got a whole lot less funny.

Deborah Poplawski still gets angry about her arrest in Minneapolis last year over an old $250 debt. During her night in jail, she worried about abandoning her 15-year-old dog, Nina, in her apartment.

. . .

It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.

Not every warrant results in an arrest, but in Minnesota many debtors spend up to 48 hours in cells with criminals. Consumer attorneys say such arrests are increasing in many states, including Arkansas, Arizona and Washington, driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt and a growing industry that buys bad debts and employs every means available to collect.

New York Officially Dead

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And here is the epitaph:

I am ending Lost City. Most of the City is lost after all—the good parts, anyway—so you could say the course of history has put me out of a job. Ironically, the kinds of news that fills up a jeremiad like this will, if too constant and voluminous, eventually puts the enterprise out of business. It's like writing a volcano report from Pompei; you know the communiques are going to end sometime.

I began the blog because I was incensed and alarmed at what the city was becoming. It was losing its grit, its fabric, its very character. It was losing its New York-ness, and gaining nothing but Subway franchises and luxury condos. Since none of my editors would let me write about it, I became my own editor. I was gratified to soon find that there were a lot of people out there who felt the way I did. And it wasn't too long before there were other bloggers who took on a similar mission, like Jeremiah Moss at Vanishing New York and EV Grieve at the blog of the same name. Taken together, we made for quite a few howls in the wilderness. And, tragically, we never ran out of things to report.

But, in the end, they were just howls, as ineffective at Lear's on the heath. I wrote thousands of words, and posted hundreds of pictures for four-and-a-half years—nearly 3,000 posts, all told. None of them made any difference. Not really. The press paid a little attention to our windmill-tilting, but City Hall never did. The City continued on its inexorable march to glossy mediocrity. Bloomberg, the billionaire, city planner Amanda Burden, the millionaire, and their cabal of equally wealthy real estate and Wall Street pals forged ahead and got the metropolis they wanted all along: homogenous, anodyne, whitewashed, suburban, toothless, chain-store-ridden, ordinary, exclusive and terribly, terribly expensive. A town for tourists and the upper 2%. He took a world-class capital of culture, individuality and independent endeavor and turned it into the smoothest, first-class, gated community Houston ever saw. Walk down Broadway on the Upper West Side, Sixth Avenue in Chelsea, Third Avenue in Yorkville—or look at the gaping hole of Altantic Yards—and you will see the administration's legacy.

My father, a nearly life-long New Yorker, warned me of its pending demise when I was just a kid. Why? The middle class increasingly forced out by ludicrous rent prices, small businesses forced out by ludicrous rent prices, everything good forced out by ludicrous rent prices... Well, let's face it, it's only gotten worse and more ludicrous. New York is a cautionary tale of what happens when an economy produces only rich and poor. And the darkness is spreading.

The Unemployed Need Not Apply

Sickening. Stomach-turningly sickening.

Still waiting for a response to the 300 resumés you sent out last month? Bad news: Some companies are ignoring all unemployed applicants.

. . .

A company's choice to ignore unemployed applicants and recycle the current workforce ignores the effect of the recession on millions of highly-qualified workers and could prolong the unemployment crisis, said Judy Conti, federal advocacy coordinator for the National Employment Law Project.

"In the current economy, where millions of people have lost their jobs through absolutely no fault of their own, I find it beyond unconscionable that any employer would not consider unemployed workers for current job openings," she said. "Not only are these employers short-sighted in their search for the best qualified workers, but they are clearly not good corporate citizens of the communities in which they work. Increasingly, politicians and policy makers are trying to blame the unemployed for their condition, and to see this shameful propaganda trickle down to hiring decisions is truly sad and despicable."

Yep. It's all the fault of the unemployed. Just ask Senator Judd Gregg.

Because you're out of the recession, you're starting to see growth and you're clearly going to dampen the capacity of that growth if you basically keep an economy that encourages people to, rather than go out and look for work, to stay on unemployment. Yes, it's important to do that up to a certain level, but at some point you've got to acknowledge that we're not Europe. (Senator Judd Gregg on CNBC)

. . .

Senator Gregg is not the only one who is putting the onus on the unemployed. The philosophy behind his statement is shared by many leading governmental officials. (And after all, the Obama administration wanted Gregg to head the Commerce Department. That thought he's a moderate?)

The philosophy they share is this: In the ideal free market, the price of labor determines the amount of employment, or so the theory goes. If the price of labor goes down, there will be more jobs. By cutting the amount and length of unemployment benefits, we effectively lower the price of labor overall, forcing more people to compete for scarce jobs. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has blamed high unemployment during the Great Depression on "sticky" labor markets -- sticky because resurgent unions and New Deal wage and hour laws prevented employers from cutting wages the way they wanted to during a time of falling prices. (Gregg might say that in those days we were way too much like Europe.)

In short, the way to create jobs is to get those lazy workers off the dole so that they can help lower wages across the economy. Only then will employers find it worth their while to hire more workers.

Yep. Kick the lazy bastards off the dole so they can not apply for jobs because they're unemployed. That should fix an economy that was ruined by unbridled greed.

Hopeless

If Richard Wolffe is to be believed, my intuition about Obama's less than proactive approach to the oil spill was accurate. There is no day to seize. There is NOTHING anyone can do.

Critics have bashed President Obama for being slow to seize the political initiative in combating the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast, now widely believed to be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. The White House has battled back, releasing a timeline of events showing that Obama was briefed—and deploying the Coast Guard—within 24 hours of the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

What has not been previously disclosed: The president was not only briefed on the real-time events of the spill, but also on just how bad it would be—and how hard it would be to plug the hole.

Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, told Obama at one of the earliest briefings in late April that the blowout would likely lead to an unprecedented environmental disaster, senior White House aides told The Daily Beast. Browner warned that capping a well at such depths had never been done before, and that they ought to expect an oil spill that would continue until a relief well was drilled in August, the aide said.

That early briefing on the scope of the spill—and enormous technical challenges involved in fixing it—might help explain the sense of fatalism that has infused Obama's team from the start.

On the Tyranny of the Mob

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By way of Andrew Sullivan, a succinct explanation of the failings of democracy run as majority rule. My favorite analogy: A group of friends wouldn't force the lone vegetarian to eat pepperoni on their pizza.

Why not majority rule? Three general reasons. Madison's reason was what he called tyranny. To a large extent, Madison's concern is pragmatic. He's aware that up to 1776, republics (and forget what someone told you; we're best off following the political theorist Robert Dahl and treating "democracy" and "republic" as interchangeable, really) were famous for being short-lived and unstable. Why? Because losers in a true majority-rules democracy, faced with a true majority, have no stake in the survival of the system and welcome a change. So one wants instead a system in which losers do not lose everything, and have a reasonable chance of winning in the future. To see the intuitive case for this, consider a situation in which you and a small group of friends need to choose an activity or a pizza topping or music to listen to. Perhaps, of the activities you all like, four of you prefer bowling, while two prefer miniature golf. Bowling, of course, "wins." And it wins the next time. After a while, however, odds are that you're all going to agree to let the miniature golf fans have a turn. That's not a violation of collective decision-making among equals; it's a consequence of it, in a situation in which it's easy to discuss fair outcomes. So even in a democracy, it's possible that the same group shouldn't always win.

We can also describe a situation in which the correct democratic solution should probably be that the minority wins: when an intense minority is opposed by an indifferent majority. I always use pizza toppings for this one. If one of your friends is a vegetarian, you're not going to insist on outvoting him and getting the pepperoni, and you're certainly not going to outvote the friend who is allergic to mushrooms. As her friend, you would realize that's just not right, even in milder versions in which, say, three of you have a very mild preference for anchovies, but the other two hate anchovies (imagine some decision rules that force such decisions; you can't cheat in this hypothetical and order a second pie, or whatever). And again, I'm going to strongly argue that two-beating-three in this situation isn't a violation of democracy, but a real, correct, democratic solution.

Days of Negronis and Roses

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I'm a little embarrassed by how un-put-downable I found this tale of alcoholism and codependency.

It was the spring of 2005 and I was living with the man that I, a bit stubbornly perhaps, had decided was the love of my life. The thing about choosing to live with a rapidly-approaching-bottom alcoholic is that there are just so many ways to distort reality and find seemingly logical explanations to make your slowly spiraling out of control life look and feel somewhat reasonable (just ask Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse!). This is true even though you aren’t the one who is drunk all the time.

So, anyway, when I wasn’t Googling “codependent” and “enabler,” I was busy coming up with increasingly bizarre ideas to set the train back on the tracks. Like when I tried to institute a thing called ‘Sober Sundays.' That’s right, Sober Sundays. It was exactly what it sounds like. And was, awesomely, a giant failure once I figured out that the Gatorade bottle the Boyfriend always had with him was, in fact, mostly vodka with perhaps a splash of Lemon-Lime. By the time May rolled around, I had given up trying for anything as simple as Sober Breakfasts.

I also decided around this time that I was no longer interested in drinking. Just trust me on the grossness of sleeping next to someone whose overnight sweat was probably 80 proof. (That said? The 2010 version of me looks back on this non-drinking era of mine and laaaaaaughs). We were at an impasse: I had stopped drinking and didn’t want to be around him when he was drunk, and he wanted to be drunk all the time.

And then Kimberly started showing up.

Patricia Clarkson at HRC Dinner

I have to say, this is one hell of a speech.

Joe Lieberman: Hypocrite Extraordinaire

Appearing at The Jaundiced Eye, the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, and My Left Wing.





Joe Lieberman then:

HAVING SPENT much of the past year mired in legislative trench warfare over Iraq, advocates in Congress seeking a mandatory withdrawal of troops are now refusing to pass funding for our forces deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

For Congress to fail to provide the funds needed by our soldiers in the field is inexcusable under any circumstances -- but it is especially disappointing right now, coming at the very moment when Gen. David Petraeus and his troops are achieving the kind of progress in Iraq that few would have dared imagine possible just a few months ago. [emphasis added]

A very petulant Joe Liberman now:

Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) lambasted transparency advocates at a press conference Tuesday, when they renewed their promise to bring Senate business to a halt until their bill blocking the release of detainee photographs becomes law.

"We're not going to do any more business in the Senate," Graham said, his face flushed red. "Nothing's going forward until we get this right."

The duo's bill, which would allow the Pentagon to exempt Bush-era photos from the Freedom of Information Act, was stripped from the conference version of the war supplemental Monday night. In anticipation of trouble, Lieberman and Graham had already inserted the bill into the tobacco-regulatory legislation currently on the floor of the Senate.

By turns sober and furious, the two senators vowed again Tuesday to vote against -- and, if possible, filibuster -- the troop-funding bill and all other legislation until they get their way. They equated the weapons supplied by the war supplemental spending bill with detainee photos that they said would serve as a recruiting tool for al-Qaida and a weapon against U.S. troops. [emphasis added]

So... who's playing politics with the troops?

The Trenchcoat Mafia & Other Tall Tales

Perhaps the most powerful lesson we could learn from the Columbine tragedy of 10 years ago, is how completely wrong the mass media can get a story. If you still think of Columbine as a cautionary tale on the dangers of violent video games or bullying and cliques, let it go. These are comforting fairy tales we tell ourselves to make sense of the senseless. It all seems so much more controllable, if we can identify the social mechanisms and change them. Don't get me wrong. I think anti-bullying programs in schools are a great idea, but nothing of the kind would have stopped Eric Harris, or his sidekick Dylan Klebold. Such is the conclusion of author Dave Cullen and of FBI investigators who scrutinized the evidence. Cullen's book, entitled simply Columbine, pubs this Wednesday.

Cullen concluded that the killers weren't part of the Trench Coat Mafia, that they weren't bullied by other students and that they didn't target popular jocks, African-Americans or any other group. A school shooting wasn't their initial intent, he said.

It turns out the reason for the Columbine massacre is as simple as it is troubling. Eric Harris was a psycopath. Dylan Klebold, the weaker personality, was a suicidally depressed kid who took on Eric Harris's ethos as his own. Together, they planned a spectacular event -- one that would have eclipsed the Oklahoma City bombing. Their bomb-making skills were inadequate and they failed to wipe out the entire school. But, their plan had little to do with personal grudges against individuals. They just wanted to kill as many people as they could.

The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting "the most deaths in U.S. history." Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn't just "fame" they were after—Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term—they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed the "worst school shooting in American history." They set their sights on eclipsing the world's greatest mass murderers, but the media never saw past the choice of venue. The school setting drove analysis in precisely the wrong direction.

In his original article for Slate, Cullen debunked the litany of Columbine myths propagated by the media:

1. Targeting jocks, blacks, and Christians: There were no targets. Harris and Klebold just wanted body count, and they didn't care who died. They expected their bombs to do most of the killing, murdering everyone in the cafeteria, irrespective of clique or social standing. When the bombs failed, they shot indiscriminately, firing into open crowds and under tables without bothering to see who their victims were. They taunted jocks briefly in the library, but they taunted virtually everyone else there, too.

2. The Trench Coat Mafia: A small group of Columbine students did dub themselves the Trenchcoat Mafia, and they did have a feud with a band of jocks in 1999. But it was never a formal gang or club, and most of the members graduated nearly a year before the massacre. Harris and Klebold were never closely affiliated with the group and did not appear in the 1998 yearbook picture identifying the members. The TCM had little to do with Harris and Klebold and nothing to do with the massacre. The killers wore long coats in order to hide their weapons.

3. The Hit List: Eric Harris did create an enemies list, with a wide and sometimes comical assortment of personalities—students who pissed him off, girls who refused his dates, Tiger Woods. There's no indication that these were ever intended as targets. No one on the list was killed.

4. Christian Martyr Cassie Bernall: One of the killers allegedly asked student Cassie Bernall if she believed in God, then killed her when she said yes. Bernall became a revered figure among evangelical Christians. In fact, one of the killers posed the question to another girl, Valeen Schnurr, after she had already been shot. They had a short exchange, he reloaded, got distracted, and she crawled away to safety.

5. Marilyn Manson: Klebold and Harris hated Marilyn Manson. On his Web site, Harris said he loved, "Good, fast, hard, strong, pounding TECHNO!! Such as KMFDM, PRODIGY, ORBITAL, RAMMSTEIN, and such."

6. Escape to New York: Harris' journal does contain a passage about hijacking a plane and crashing it into New York City, but that appears to have been an early fantasy. He settled on a more practical scheme long before he and Klebold actually staged their massacre. By the time of the attack, they fully expected to die at the high school. They refer to their death routinely and explicitly in their writings and in their videos.

7. Outcasts: Perhaps the most pervasive myth is that Harris and Klebold were rejected outcasts. They were not captains of the football team, but they were far more accepted than many of their schoolmates. They hung out with a tight circle of close friends and partied regularly on the weekend with a wider crowd.

Columbine is a cautionary tale. Just not for the reasons we were led to believe. It should serve as a reminder of how completely wrong the prevailing narrative can be, and how badly professional journalists can serve their audience, in their haste to tell us the story.

“Columbine” is an excellent work of media criticism, showing how legends become truths through continual citation; a sensitive guide to the patterns of public grief, foreshadowing many of the same reactions to Sept. 11 (lawsuits, arguments about the memorial, voyeuristic bus tours); and, at the end of the day, a fine example of old-fashioned journalism.