Confusing Medium And Messaging

You’ve Got Better Things To Do, Al.

I’m very much in the camp of privacy protection being a default approach, and I believe the pipes and tubes providing access to the information age should be regulated for the benefit of the citizenry, but at which point did citizens and users stop being responsible for their own approach to being informed?

The web is wide and deep and I’ve not found it hard at all to locate information of wildly divergent points of view on any given subject.

If citizens choose to live in an echo chamber, whether that's provided by Facebook or Twitter, that’s hardly new, and should be no more governed than one’s choice of books to be read or plays to be seen. Further, if a citizen chooses to be commoditized in order to benefit in some way they value, I don’t consider that wise, but I definitely consider it a choice they should be allowed to make.

Will this allow shadow players to insert poisoned whispers into those chambers? Certainly! You can explain to the tobacco industry and George W's council for selling the Iraq war how that's new.

Don’t get me wrong, these companies are part of the principalities and powers, and I would encourage distrust as a foundation for dealing with any of them, but if the goal is to protect users from their own biases, I see this kind of finger pointing as a waste of time.

Progressive Disappointment

It’s been interesting listening to progressives these last several weeks as Obama-san announced his Afghan Surge while receiving the Nobel Peace Prize then swooped back to Europe a week later to ‘save’ the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, all while the Senate wrapped up its debate on health care to pass a reform bill which sent insurance company stocks through the roof. Most of the people on the far left had reservations about Obama-san from the beginning, knowing he was not an actual progressive, but a centrist with liberal leanings. Still, coming out of the nearly decade long John Wayne theme park ride that was Saint George, there was an inescapable hope in the social justice camp that change was really coming.

The encouraging bit has been watching the left re-gird itself and prepare to struggle as fiercely now in the face of Democratic flavored Corporatocracy as it did against the tarter Republican version.

The Best Justice Money Can Buy

“The Justice Department said a 1976 law on sovereign immunity protected the Saudis from liability and noted that “potentially significant foreign relations consequences” would arise if such suits were allowed to proceed.“ - Eric Lichtblau, Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists

Odd how we have this 1976 law which provides protection from legal action in the face of presentable if sometimes tenuous evidence, but there seems to have been no law against fabricating information in order to invade Iraq.

I also note the mention on yesterdays Democracy Now! that the Supreme Court has chosen not to hear Valerie Plame’s case against the Bush administration for illegally outing her as an undercover CIA agent.

I need to find out where the Texas Mafia gets those wonderful teflon suits.

Change We Can Put On A Pike

“You probably don’t know much about Sheila Bair, but she is looking out for you, and that is why the big guys on Wall Street and their allies in the Obama administration are out to get her.”- Robert Scheer, A Republican to Save Us

I thought early on that Bair should have been made Secretary of the Treasury, and bank shill Larry Sommers and his crew, including Timothy Geithner, should have been left out in the cold economic winter they worked so hard to help create.

Instead we have a consumer minded Republican fighting tooth and nail against a predominantly pro-bank Democratic administration, and the status quo, regardless of how underhanded and dehumanizing it is, will reassert itself.

What was it Obama wanted us to believe in again?

Roll Models

I can't really recommend this weeks screed by Eugene Robinson, Old Faithful of Nonsense, in part because his slurs against the state of Wyoming are personally offensive, but also because he adds little new information or insight into his subject, the post power presence of Grinning Dick in a world that would largely like to him to go away. The exception is this one bit concerning Cheney's expressed preference that the Republican party look more like Rush Limbaugh than Colin Powell: "Let’s see: Given a choice between a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state who has given to his nation a lifetime of exemplary public service or an entertainer who brags about how much money he makes from bombast and bluster, Cheney would go with the gasbag."

With A Little BBQ Sauce

It's a terrible thing to say, but I can't help it. It's like a quiet chirp from my inner being echoing and magnifying as it moves up through the empty caverns of a dark and sinister heart until it physically hums the whole of my being and comes out unbidden and uncontainable: "I want Cheney's head on a pike!"

As one who rebels against the use of violence, the statement is abhorrent. Even the way it sits on the screen like a bizarre owl pellet containing only the undigestible bits of political diatribe and dehumanizing caricature. But like that necessary regurgitation, it feels good to have it out.