The NSA: Riddled with American Spies

According to Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency, set up to spy on people, has been spying on people. I can't tell you how shocked I was by this revelation. It wouldn't be quite so bad if  NSA were gathering intelligence about foreigners, the unwashed, so to speak, but they are also spying on well-scrubbed Americans, who have earned special status and should be exempt. What could be more obvious? 

As you know, to spy on Americans, authorities must first get permission from a FISA judge. That would be a safeguard except that FISA judges don't say no. All of this follows the Patriot Act rules, of course, which make intelligence gathering legal. I'm trying to think back--I do remember that when the Patriot Act was passed, some of us opposed it, on the grounds that it shredded the Constitution. The City Attorney agreed.  We asked our city council to live up to their oath, in which each of them had vowed to defend the Constitution against its domestic enemies. We handed them a petition signed by about a sixth of the eligible voters in our town. The council vote to defend the Constitution was 2-2-1. The council dunce who abstained said he did so because we hadn't gathered signatures from 51% of the voters. He wanted to be on the winning side.

A Collapse in Demand

I have a beard, the mark of an expert economist, so although I know nothing about economics, I sit here eager to explain how our economy got dry rot.  Here goes. After World War Two ended, a small group of rightwing economists began to argue that our markets were too constrained to be efficient. Only much freer markets would do--and, they agreed, this would end up concentrating wealth among the 1% and increasing the gap between the rich and the poor. They liked that. It would, they maintained, help mold a more flexible and cheaper work force. Now at first this bleak view of the economy gained little ground, but under Reagan and Thatcher, the theory got put into practice, and much of the center bought into it. In the end the result was a collapse in demand. That is, as the great bulk of the population grew poorer, they stopped buying things. The process was gradual, propped up for a decade by easy credit. The poor finally maxed out their credit cards. Today not enough people make enough money to buy enough goods and services to improve the economy. Wealth and power, as predicted by the theorists, have shifted in vivid ways to the 1%. Attempts by centrists and the left to change the situation have so far amounted to tinkering on the far edges of the problem. What we need is a big paradigm shift. 





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ObamaCare

One thing that makes polls almost useless is the way votes get lumped together. For example, ObamaCare gets a negative vote from the public of about 49%, with 16 of those percentage points coming from people who believe it to be too conservative. In other words, about 33% of the voters are opposed to the Affordable Health  Care act because it is too liberal. Big whoop.

I'm off on vacation for a week.

The Gay Agenda

Our local paper, unlike reputable newspapers, runs hate mail in its letters-to-the-editor section. I frequently see letters denouncing Blacks or Latinos or Jews or women or gay people. I don't believe that the doofus in charge is racist, but he or she likes to stir up controversy.  Many attacks on the gay agenda get printed. In today's paper a elderly man named Steve Carroll replied, "I feel cheated that after all these years, I still have not been issued my copy of the gay agenda." The problem is that the gay agenda must be readily available--many heterosexuals  apparently own copies and have   read them closely--but Steve Carroll, a gay man, has been left out, and without the agenda, he does not know what to do next. He noted that if someone would send him a copy, he would be willing to share it with his gay friends.

Jumping to Death

I give the Press Democrat credit for an interesting interview published on Sunday. Jeramie Taylor and Giovanni Amador interviewed Otter Villagomez, a lad who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge while on a field trip with his high school class about two years ago. "When we got to the beginning of the bridge, it was like, you know, that it would be cool to jump off the bridge," Villagomez explained.  The fall "felt like forever, even though it was like six or seven seconds. You jump and are just floating there for a second looking at the horizon. Halfway down you just start going faster." Villagomez was saved from drowning by an annoyed dude on a surfboard. The jumper had some broken bones and a punctured lung, but today he is among the 2% who have survived the big leap. He's also grown wiser, and his advice is, "Don't even try it." Here's the thing--we were all teenagers once, and if we survived we learned not to do moronic things or--if we learned nothing--we can run for congress in a red district.

Washington Insiders

Last week Washington's talking thinkers, who tend to speak in unison as fillers on 24-hour news stations  (a kind of Greek chorus), were certain that President Obama had fallen short of his goals because he'd relied on too many connected centrist insiders in his administration. Same old highly-connected people. That sounded right to me. This week the same thinkers are claiming that Obama has fallen short of his goals because he did not bring in enough experienced and connected centrist insiders to staff his administration, and, by God, they have me convinced. They must be right. The President has obviously brought into his administration too many but not enough centrist Washington insiders. Why hasn't he learned his lesson?

Warrantless DNA

If someone gets arrested, the police have the right to take his or her fingerprints. Also the Supreme Court has now ruled,  5-4,  that the police can swab the arrested person's cheek and register his or her DNA.  I'm not sure exactly what to think. I don't have much privacy. If you go on the Internet, what you write is open to being hacked and spread across the globe. That's the way it is, so I'm a little careful about what I send out. It's like when I go to Big John's to buy groceries. If I don't clamp one hand on my face, everyone in the store will know I eat Cheerios. I use one hand as a mask. I prefer to shop in private, and I can see fine by looking out between my fingers.

MSNBC Falters

Apparently viewing has dropped off at MSNBC. The question is why? The answer is up for grabs. My opinion, based on next to nothing, is that many progressive viewers do not care to watch repetitive programs focused on inside-the-beltway blather. For example, I have now seen the postal workers scandalous dancing about fifty times. I don't care about it. I didn't care about it the first time I saw it. It's a teabagger issue. What MSNBC is doing is letting people like Rep. Issa determine its topics. Then they have beltway analysts repeating each other's group-hug beltway ideas, which are often out of touch with the realities of Maine, Kansas, Georgia and Oregon. I'll put it this way. If I want to watch the Koch brothers' stooges rage on about nada, I can turn on False News. Or I can turn off the TV, which is what progressives may be doing.

Why We Are Here

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”
                                                                              --Kurt Vonnegut