"Obama Hasn't Accomplished A Damn Thing": Oh Yeah?

Proudly lifted from NEWS JUNKIE POST:

There are a few excellent resources where the victories of Change and Reform have been assembled on the internet, including the Democratic Change Update (reposted on News Junkie Post), the 244 Accomplishments of Obama, and the Things Obama Has Done page on Facebook.

While the mainstream media narrative has been dominated by right wing and Tea Party talking points, many of the fundamental changes in direction of this country have not received the attention they deserve. Now in one day, the very politicians who venomously opposed these reforms, the very people who want to take America back to the days of Bush are poised to retake the US House of Representatives. They are banking on the short attention span of voters, so share this list liberally!

Following are the "chapter headings" with categories further defined under each heading - by the bucket fulls.
And being good liberals, there are links to back up each and everyone of them.

Banking and Financial Reform
Civil Rights
Commerce, Trade and technology
Conservation
Economy
Education: College
Education: Health of Children
Employment: Jobs
Energy: Green
Energy: Old
Energy: Oil
Foreign Affairs and International Relations
Government Efficiency
Health and Wellness
Health Care Reform (See also Taxes)
Housing
Humanitarianism
Immigration
Infrastructure
Labor
Law and Justice
Medicaid/Medicare/Social Security
Military and National Security
Military Veterans and Families
National Disasters and Emergencies
National Service
Scientific and Medical Research
Space Exploration and Space Station
Taxes
Transparency and Accountability
Recovery, Progress and Change
Miscellaneous



IMPORTANT NOTICE: DEMOCRATS WHO DON'T VOTE ARE NO BETTER THAN YELLOW BLUE DOGS. IF THE CRAZIES WIN, THE ENTIRE COUNTRY LOSES. DINOS ARE TO DEMOCRATS WHAT THE TEA PARTY IS TO LOVE AND HONOR.*

VOTE FOR A DEMOCRAT NEAR YOU

IT IS YOUR PATRIOTIC DUTY

This is just my opinion and may not reflect the views of The Swash Zone. TnLib

On Moderation: KO, Jon Stewart and the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

I'm usually supportive of Jon Stewart and I like Colbert too, but I want to offer a few thoughts on their rally at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  And then there are those feisty tweets about the rally by none other than Keith Olbermann, to which I'll refer very briefly below.

The runup to the Restore Sanity event was predicated, I think, on the notion that if we could only get the extremists on both sides to pipe down, we could have a civil conversation about matters that are important to individuals and to the country as a whole. That's unavoidable as a justification of Stewart's brand of comedy -- he can't appear to support one political party or movement exclusively. He talks to people as if they were rational adults with the capacity to appreciate the silliness of political posturing and cheap rhetoric. While I don't for one minute credit the notion that an overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens are rational adults -- too many of them seem poised to vote for manifest imbeciles, ignoramuses, bigots, homophobes, and wild-eyed promoters of secession or worse to make that supposition believable -- if one doesn't posit something similar at least as an ideal or goal, we might as well admit that we can't hope to govern ourselves, that the grand experiment of the Founders was pointless. I don't suppose many of us would be pleased to make such an admission. Churchill's witticism about democracy being "the worst form of government except for all the others" still resonates with us.

One brief segment of Stewart's The Daily Show during the runup was instructive -- a series of vignettes in which six people chosen to go on a bus tour to the rally fail to transform themselves for the cameras into the sort of hacks and ogres whose ranting makes for good political fare. (Nice people may go to the theater just as Ian McKellen says, but they don't make for very good theater themselves.) Staged as it was, the series made Stewart's point: whatever the percentages, many people, at least, aren't ultrapolitical goons or raving fanatics; they're willing to treat their fellow citizens like equals and would prefer not to savage or dehumanize them. They have decent manners, want others to like them, and don't care for confrontation or violence. That characterization applies to the people in my own circle, and honestly, I haven't run into any full-on crazies lately (outside my television screen).

Still, if you don't mind a bit of contradictory meandering, another segment of the same show seems equally instructive: the one in which Stewart's editors put together an audio-video montage of all those supposed extreme-talkers on the left and right, neatly equalizing them. The trouble is, they are not anything like equal. That is where I must agree with the audacious KO, Keith Olbermann and his persnickety tweets about the logic underlying Stewart's rally: Olbermann and Company are not the equivalent of the motor-mouths coming at us from the extreme right. Outspoken liberals sometimes exaggerate and make much of little, but the right-wingers fabricate without conscience or remorse; liberals are in general eminently sane and humane, while the rightists are little more than squirming bags of appetite, irrationality, and, at times, even bloodlust. They betray no signs of consistent lucidity.

In this sense, the Great Middle Hypothesis is flawed because it posits that you can calculate a genuinely moderate position between two extant extremes raving at you through your TV box or laptop screen. If you follow this notion, you'll end up doing rhetorical battle with both hands tied behind your back. If you denounce or mock the patent absurdities of the other side, you'll be labeled an extremist, and of course (as KO reminds us) that other side will by no means "tone it down." It will just scream louder and play the bully with ever greater ferocity. Whenever the far right sounds reasonable, it's merely a tactic, sort of like a boxer's feint just before he clobbers you. Fundamentally, these people's worldview is cruel, paranoid, and illogical; for them, reason never is, nor can it be, anything more than a ruse. We forget that at our peril.

So while I like Jon Stewart and appreciate his wit, his persistent calls for middle-America-style "sanity" and moderation seem to me too easily transformed, tamed, or translated into our fabled liberal wishy-washiness in the face of an ill-intentioned opponent. Nice people are petrified of being labeled radicals, while rightists embrace such definitions. They have that over low-talking, reasonable libs. All of this is why I'm careful not to put too much intellectual stock in the rhetoric of civility and moderation, even though I don't want to dismiss it.

But I'm just a predatory dinosaur with huge, jagged teeth. What do I know about civility? What do you think?

HAPPY CEPHALAWEEN!

ANOTHER SWASH ZONE HALLOWEEN

Artist Ray Villafane began carving pumpkins on a lark for his art students in a small rural school district in Michigan. The hobby changed his life as he gained a following online and unlocked his genuine love of sculpting. Here are images of pumpkin carvings Villafane created over the years:

WHAT A TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE…

I was sent a link to an article (h/t to my brother Frank) that absolutely floored me. I shouldn’t be surprised as I have lately been ruminating over the corporate takeover of America. But this is so blatantly obvious it is shocking. For those of you who followed my previous articles on Arizona Draconia Part 1 and Part 2, I asked the rhetorical question, “What DID prompt the Draconian measures enacted by the Arizona governor and legislature?”

Laura Sullivan, investigative reporter for NPR has given me the answer and it is horrifying. Ms Sullivan has done a thorough job of tracking this story and doing all the background research HERE.

Glen Nichols, city manager of Benson, AZ gives an account of being visited last year by a couple of guys from the private prison industry.

‘Nichols said. "He's a great big huge guy and I equated him to a car salesman."
What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants.
"They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community," Nichols said, "the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate."’

To his credit, Nichols turned them down but that didn’t curb the enthusiasm of state legislators, including Sen. Russell Pearce (R-Mesa) who was instrumental in drafting Arizona’s immigration legislation.

All of this was orchestrated by a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) whose members include state legislators and powerful corporations like Reynolds American, Exxon and the NRA. This group is also responsible for bringing together Sen. Pearce and Corrections Corporation of America last December in a Washington, DC hotel.
While Sen. Pearce is in “deny, deny, deny” mode, there is mounting evidence that “Thirty of the 36 co-sponsors received donations over the next six months, from prison lobbyists or prison companies — Corrections Corporation of America, Management and Training Corporation and The Geo Group.”

Part 2 of Ms Sullivan’s article is an indepth follow up on ALEC and how it operates.

This is so reminiscent of actions taken by tyrannical regimes through the ages which always resulted in tragic consequences. It is scary and depressing.

Welcome to Corporate Amerika!

I thought it fitting to end this post by paraphrasing George Santayana, a Spanish born AMERICAN author:

“Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.”

ARMAGEDDON REDUX

(Note:  This is an encore post, not by request or popular demand,

but for the sheer hell of it. Tuesday is Election Day. Need I say more.)

Armageddon is getting a bad rap these days, and perhaps it is time to stop the gratuitous and shameless stereotyping of all things apocalyptic. First, I must correct a common misconception. All usages of the word ‘Armageddon’ assume there can only be one final cataclysmic event followed by no other; hence the word is capitalized and singular in every instance. If you don’t believe me, trying turning the word into a lower case plural without getting an error message in rude red MS Word underscore. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

In fact, there is much diversity in the Kingdom of Armageddon whose inhabitants come in all shapes and sizes, all denominations, all affiliations and persuasions. There are armageddons [sic] of the Earth by tremor and magma; armageddons [sic] of the sky that rain meteors and boiled frogs; and armageddons [sic] that emerge from the sea in the stealth of night and leave telltale hickeys.

There is the Armageddon of healthcare reform that will eat your baby and kill your grandmother; the Armageddon of imbedded microchips hidden under folds that beep in the night; the Manchurian Anti-Christ who will seize your guns and confiscate your property; and Armageddons of war, famine, Bird flue, Swine flu, fast foods and soda pop, anorexic Barbie dolls, and rock-n-roll. Finally, don’t forget the End Times of Apocalypstick Palin, Human Mouse Brain O’Donnell, the Swastika Cross Dressing Id-Iott, and ubiquitous Kochroaches everywhere!

Shall we fear the dreaded Armageddon? It lives among us in our towns and villages. It fills our church pews and voting booths. Perhaps we should accept Armageddon as merely one more force of nature that sends human lemmings over the cliff and restores the natural balance. Armageddon is plagiarism masquerading as hyperbole, and the night will sweat with terror as before we rubbed shoulders with delusional nincompoops hearing voices in their heads.

Bring on the dreaded Armageddon!  Why put off the inevitable!  Besides, you can always hedge your bets and invest in Plutonomy Stocks. *

* A hat tip to His Edginess.

John Shelby Spong

There have been times when I've sided with some of our 'founding fathers' in contempt for the religious practitioners who have conflated that poor, unsuccessful, would-be Jewish leader into a re-incarnation of Thor and the mouthpiece for their own miserable and ignorant minds. Ok, it's been more than many times and the Jesus I hear about most often is merely the blunt instrument in the hands of the angry and the ugly and the stupid.

Yes, I've read Dom Crossan and the Jesus Seminar people, but since he still implies that I'm the village idiot for not believing that the man he portrays as a man is more than a man, he only gets a partial pass from me. But then, on occasion, I bump into people like Bishop Shelby Spong who would restore that humanism, that tolerance that was amputated when Christianity was refashioned in the age of Constantine onwards, to its original place.

Of course I disagree profoundly about the nature of things, but about the nature of what we think and do and do to others, he restoreth something in me, even if it's not quite faith.

Sergeant Dino's Lonely Votes Club Band, or, the Case of the Simple Saurus v. the Professor

Economics Professor Casey B. Mulligan of the U of Chicago has published a blog entry in the 10/27/2010 NY TIMES entitled, "Assessing the Power of One at the Polls."  Now, I am only a simple dinosaur and not an economics professor, but I would suggest that one's analysis can be correct in terms of stats and probabilities, but still leave much to be said. The gist of the article is that while a sense of civic responsibility or even enjoyment may be valid reasons to get out and vote, candidates are talking foolishness when they insist that they can't win without your lonely little vote.

The professor is right, of course: your favorite candidates aren't likely to win or lose by a single vote. They're probably more likely to get hit by lightning on a sunny day or bitten by a shark in the community swimming pool. But here's the thing: when you join a political party or even register as an Independent, you're being asked to consider yourself not simply as an individual but instead as a member of a much larger unit. In this "group-think" context, motivation matters a great deal -- high motivation generates turnout, which is what determines the electoral fate of candidates. Voting is a collective endeavor in which masses of individuals, together, generate a large effect. The party that motivates its members to realize this Simple-Dino fact will probably win.

Perhaps everyone is unique in some ways, but we are not unique in the context I'm talking about here -- millions of our party's members may wake up on election morning tired, frazzled, dispirited, overworked and underpaid, influenced by the dire (or sunny) projections of various news outlets.  In other words, we'll feel much the same way for the same reasons. And millions of us will face the same decision -- "am I going to vote, or let the day pass?" (I'm leaving aside the early vote option, but there's no real difference -- you'll either do that, or let the chance slip by in slow motion.) How we decide as a group will generate an impact thousands, even millions, of times larger than that of any individual's choice. So if you care about whether or not your party (or the party you lean towards) ends up constituting the majority, make your decision in favor of taking part in the process, and don't worry about whether your one vote matters.

SHOCKING INCOME INEQUALITY REPORT DROWNED BY MEDIA NOISE

As our mainstream media continues to abuse us with nonsensical blow-by-blow accounts by blowhard headline-grabbing louts, this story received scant attention:

Scary New Wage Data

As millions of Americans lost jobs, homes, and life savings in the Great Recession of 2009, the highest-paid earners saw their average incomes rise more than five-fold in a single year. According to new data, the 74 highest income earners – the uppermost income bracket as measured by the Social Security Administration -- saw their average incomes skyrocket from $91.8 million in 2008 to a staggering $518.8 million in 2009:

These 74 people earned an average of $10 million -- per week. Meanwhile, half of all American wage earners, or about 75 million people, earned less than $505 per week.

An abrupt change in tax and economic policies started under the Reagan administration, conflated by Bush era tax cuts, made this possible. Three decades of Reaganomics have crippled the base of the income ladder while adding a burdensome weight at the top. The result is an unstable and unsustainable structure awaiting collapse.

Meanwhile the Republican Party and their tea party rabble are clamoring for more tax cuts and an indiscriminate dismantling of the social safety net for middle class Americans.  If our mainstream media had done a better job of informing the public, perhaps voters would be making more intelligent choices this November.  Fat chance!

Gays R Us

No, really, gays are us. No matter which stereotype one insists fits a group as disparate as mankind in general, it's impossible to separate it from one's own prejudices. If there's any appearance of unanimity, it may be that people tend to vote their own interests and support candidates that promise to advance those interests, but Gays are conservative, liberal, libertarian and any other blurry concepts we use to muddy the political waters. So when AP rattles our cage and asks us to worry that the dissatisfaction of gay Americans with the lack of progress the current administration has made with respect to protecting their equality will cause them not to vote at all or commit political seppuku by voting for Republicans, I have to wonder if they aren't trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy here or at least cashing in on the fear of jumping back out of the pan and into the fire.

"Some fear that gay voters angry over pace of gains might sit out election"

blares the headline. Some fear the Andromeda galaxy will smash into us any day now. That's a cheap ploy more worthy of Fox than AP, as is the use of quotes from a handful of individuals to stand in for the voice of a huge group that doesn't speak unanimously anyway -- but still, we all know there is frustration.

Will that frustration provoke people for whom DADT is a thorn in the side or who advocate the right to marry one of the same sex to choose candidates in the same main stream that opposed voting rights for women and minorities, the right to marry outside one's race, to get a room at The Breakers or a seat in the front of the bus? Perhaps one of those right wingers who blame every storm, every shift in tectonic plates on allowing gay people the right not to be stoned in the public square?

Gay people also care, I would presume, about the economic charade that collapsed the economy, the lawless and predatory markets, the wars and the erosion of rights that they were meant to justify. They care about government intrusion into our privacy, government control by corporate interests and all the other things we all, rightly or wrongly care about. They care about pulling the economy out of the nosedive the previous pilot put it into as much as any American. If they have an "agenda" as the bigots assert, it sure looks like it involves life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as much as anyone elses and the agenda of those selling the idea that they are different and dangerous certainly has to do with something completely different.