Clarion Content: Politics & Policy

We have moved

2011-10-13T20:46:00.001-04:00

This blog is now an archival stub. New Clarion Content posts will be available on our main page here. For Politics posts, link directly here.

Gaming the system

2011-09-16T06:58:00.003-04:00

So how does one get a tax break in Jersey?

If you are one of those who think that America's tax system is designed to be gamed by the large at the expense of the small, here is one more example. This one is from the State of New Jersey, where over the objections of the slovenly Governor, Chris Christie, the production company that makes the Jersey Shore was awarded a $420,000 tax credit.

Ya know for doing their part to stimulate the economy and all.

It is not like Christie is a teaching firing disaster who is part of process that redirects monies from students and schools to Snooki and the Situation.

Read more here.

Good Samaritans

2011-09-14T07:08:00.001-04:00

For those of you losing faith in America and/or your neighbors...a group of Utah heroes, who had no intention of saving a man's life when the day started. When the moment of crisis arrived, they stood up and were counted.

Why him?

2011-09-04T21:02:00.005-04:00

Seen an interesting question posed in more than one place lately. Why is Jon Huntsman getting so much coverage for a candidate who receiving only one percent in the polls? It does not appear to mimic what has happened in the past for one percent, so-called fringe candidates, like Dennis Kuchinich, Ron Paul and Gary Johnson. Why would former New Mexico Governor Hunstman be getting so much publicity?

Hunstman's positions might overall be considered more mainstream than any of those three, or Rick Santorum or Herman Cain. It could be said that Huntsman's poll numbers are marginal, but not his policies. However, the Clarion Content would argue, wouldn't this make him less interesting, less appealing, less newsworthy as it were, not only is he not polling well, but he does not stand-out for unique and different solutions and ideas. (This media darling candidacy this reminds us of is Lamar Alexander.)

The Clarion Content has actually most frequently heard Jon Huntsman's name out of Democratic or Obama administration associated types. They have been out far and wide proclaiming that Huntsman is the candidate they least want to face. To us here, it sounds like the proverbial Briar Patch. President Obama and his men aren't the least bit scared of the tall, photogenic, Huntsman. Having nominated him to be Obama's ambassador to China, they must know the chinks in his armor, as it were. They are actually hoping that he somehow gains the nomination.

Is it their promotion of Huntsman that is getting him on the telly? This week he was on CNBC’s "The Kudlow Report," on Friday, and on Thursday, he was on Fox News’ "On The Record with Greta Van Susteren," before that on Wednesday, he was CNN’s "John King, USA." He capped it this weekend with Bob Schieffer on the prestigious, "Face the Nation," where he shared the screen with the leading insurgent candidate, Michelle Bachmann.

Political Joke

2011-09-02T09:00:00.002-04:00

From one of our Allentown, Pennsylvania readers...

A plane with four passengers on board is about to crash, but it has only three parachutes. The first passenger says "I'm Kobe Bryant, the best NBA
basketball player. The Lakers need me. I can't afford to die." So he
takes the first parachute and leaves the plane. (Nice high sense of his self-worth.)

The second passenger, Sarah Palin, says "I was the running mate of the
former Republican Party candidate for President of the United States. I am the most ambitious woman in the world. I am also a former Alaska Governor, a potential future President, and above all, the smartest woman in America." She grabs the second parachute and jumps out of the plane.

The third passenger, the Reverend Billy Graham, says to the fourth
passenger, who is a 10 year-old school boy, "I am old and I don't have many years left. As a Christian, I will sacrifice myself. You can have the last parachute, young man."

The boy says, "It's okay. There is still a parachute left for you, sir. America's smartest woman took my school backpack."

Earthquake rattles nuclear reactor

2011-08-24T07:10:00.001-04:00

North Anna Power Station

Among the scariest elements of yesterday's East Coast earthquake, which was felt from Durham, NC to Boston, Mass., was how closely it occurred to the North Anna Power Station, a nuclear reactor complex, located about 10 miles from the quake's epicenter. As yet, the facility's reactors show no signs of cracks in their concrete containment centers. The nuclear facility is located 92 miles southwest of downtown Washington, D.C. An estimated 1.9 million people live within 50 miles of the plant's nuclear reactors.

The quake knocked out the plant's off-site power source. One of the four back-up diesel generators powering the auxiliary safety systems died within hours of the quake. Sound like Japan anyone?

The North Anna Power Station is designed to withstand quakes of a maximum of 5.9 to 6.1 on the infamous Richter Scale. Yesterday's quake was a 5.9. The North Anna power plant is notorious already. It has accumulated one of the largest concentrations of radioactivity in the United States. The L.A. Times reports that Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a former assistant Energy secretary during the Clinton administration noted, the plant’s spent fuel pools contain four to five times more radioactive material than their original designs intended. The plant's reactors are thirty-one and thirty-three years old respectively.

Ahhh, nuclear power. What a country!

A bad wobble

2011-08-24T06:49:00.003-04:00

Is Bank of America, one of the two or three largest banks in the country, wobbling? By all accounts, we may have another too big to fail institution that needs bailing out by the federal government, lest it drag the banking system and the Western world down with it.

The bank is facing cash shortfalls of at least $50 billion related to mortgage lending disasters of recent years. The bank has petitioned regulators to give it until 2019 to straighten itself and its balance sheet out, so that it might come into compliance with new capital requirements rules. The bank is now said to be as much as $100 or $200 billion in the hole.

Bank of America's stock has fallen by 50% this year. Fresh sources of capital are drying up. The bank may have to be temporarily nationalized to survive. It took $50 billion in federal TARP loans to get Bank of America through the Lehman Brothers--AIG collapse. This looks worse.

A bad wobble indeed.

Stark reminder

2011-08-21T12:50:00.001-04:00

Kansas

Those of you who poo-poo the dangers of electing moral authoritarians to office would do well to read and remember this story. The State of North Carolina involuntarily, against their will and without their consent, sterilized more than 7,500 people, the last one as recently as 1974. This was done under the auspices of the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, one of many such state authorities across the country. The state sterilized the mentally handicapped and epileptics, along with those judged too promiscuous or hard to control.

So be careful before you say, nothing like that could ever happen in America.

Oil rig colonies

2011-08-17T18:23:00.003-04:00

Silicon Valley billionaire and PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create oil rig emulating, floating, libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

The idea is to create floating independent quasi-states beyond the reach of any one country's jurisdiction because they are in international waters. There is no information on how these colonies would cope with the growing movement toward international maritime law. This has been a hot button issue as the Empire has continued to have to combat marauding and piracy.

The prospective colonists hope to get around building codes, minimum wage laws and weapons restrictions according to Yahoo. No word on if they will be trying to circumvent tax codes, too, a racket perfected in island countries like Bermuda, the Caymans and Switzerland.¹

Stay tuned.

Read more here.

¹Also no word on how they would repel marauding bands of buccaneers should they appear over the horizon.

Start of a groundswell?

2011-08-07T01:22:00.001-04:00

Numbers cruncher extraordinaire, Nate Silver, made quite the statement on his blog, the 538, today, "Anti-incumbent sentiment is probably stronger now than at any point since polling began. We don’t know exactly how that is going to play out, and to some extent we are in uncharted territory."

We had not read anyone saying that this electoral season. We agree. What comes next?

Cops convicted

2011-08-06T16:31:00.006-04:00

Transformed

In a case out of the stuff of nightmare, five New Orleans cops were convicted in the killing of unarmed civilians in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One of the most amazing parts of the story is that the shooting spree, that left two unarmed victims dead and four others wounded (one of whom ultimate lost her arm), took place six days after city flooded. Six days! What does that say about the conditions in the area and the authorities? Law and order were clearly on the run, the cops were told that they were responding to a radio call of officers down and under fire at the Danziger Bridge.

Another detail that tells one just how far off of the civic rails things were at that moment in Louisiana, the 5-0 was rolling to the call in a Budget Rental truck. Literally. One of the officers was riding in the back of the box truck carrying his personal AK-47.¹ They jumped from the truck firing. According to reports, a family walking in search of food and supplies, the Bartholomews, ended up on the bridge that September day heading to a supermarket on the other side of the Industrial Canal that bifurcates the 9th Ward. The hail of New Orleans Police Department bullets killed seventeen year-old family friend James Brissette and wounded four other family members.²

Moments later, the cops open fire on two brothers, Lance and Ronald Madison, according to a Justice Department summary, one officer shot the mentally disabled Ronald Madison in the back as he ran away, another cop stomped and kicked him as he was lying on the ground before he died.

This is the small "c" conservative's nightmare, the state, who has its constituent citizens massively outgunned with its governmental arsenal, incidentally, paid for with tax dollars, turns its guns on the people in a climate of fear. This is the case for repealing the Patriot Act and eliminating the Department of Homeland Security. Guns in the hands of the state, while scary, is likely inevitable in a globalized society. Impunity to open fire on the citizenry, the presumption of guilt, is what must be fought at all costs.

In this federal courtroom, the officers ultimately lost when their fellow cops started to go state's evidence on them. As is so often the case, it was the cover-up that got them. Initially, it was not at all clear that the policemen were going to pay for this heinous incident. State of Louisiana murder and attempted murder charges were thrown out against the cops when the Criminal District Court ruled that the state had misused grand jury testimony. In a racially charged case and city, they were greeted by a cheering throng of supporters when they beat the rap.

The Clarion Content does not have enough information to make a definitive stand on one side or the other of this case on the basis of the facts. In a federal court, in front of juror of their peers these men were found guilty. We can only say that we are heartened that justice did not automatically pardon the powerful and armed against the dispossessed and unarmed. The presumption so often goes the other way.

¹Brady Bill anyone?

²After an initial cover-up, in later testimony it was revealed that the officers kept firing at the unarmed family as they cowered behind a bridge abutment. "The police just kept shooting and I just kept feeling myself being hit," testified Susan Bartholomew who lost her right arm.

How do they feel?

2011-08-03T12:00:00.002-04:00

How do the Democrats feel about the debt deal and President Obama? These quotes are from Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times...

Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already “neutered” the president, as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health care and Libya, leading from behind.

As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.”

Ouch!

Duck and Cover: 08.05.11

2011-08-02T11:05:00.002-04:00

Read Duck and Cover
at the Blue Pyramid.

Duck and Cover: 08.03.11

2011-08-02T11:04:00.002-04:00

Read Duck and Cover
at the Blue Pyramid.

Duck and Cover: 08.02.11

2011-08-02T11:01:00.002-04:00

Read Duck and Cover
at the Blue Pyramid.

Duck and Cover: 08.01.11

2011-08-02T11:00:00.002-04:00

Read Duck and Cover
at the Blue Pyramid.

Temporary end game: Debt

2011-08-01T13:23:00.006-04:00

What, me, worry?

The Clarion Content could not disagree more with the assertion of the New York Times editorial page this morning that President Obama should have used the 14th Amendment to make an end run around Congressional obstructionists and unilaterally raise the debt ceiling. It is a suggestion straight out of the Dick Cheney playbook. It advocates that when checked by a legitimate institutional disagreement, presidential power should be expanded so that the executive can still get his or her way. It is the methodology of Empire and dictatorship, the road to ruin.¹

We are glad President Obama did not pursue this course.

We do not think that he made a great deal on the compromise to raise the debt ceiling. We disagree with kicking the problem further on down the road, by appointing a bogus, super-committee to make the hard decisions Congress has been putting off for a generation.² President Obama already ignored the recommendations of his own deficit committee.

We are in no way impressed by President Obama's facetious claim that the Bush II tax cuts for the uber-rich will go away in 2013. Firstly, Obama would have to get re-elected, his prospects look pretty dismal right now. Secondly, he would have to keep his promise to let the tax cuts end, something he has not managed to do in his first term.

Bottomline on the debt deal, typical Washington, an ugly boiler room compromise that solves nothing and only delays the reckoning. It highlights the desperate need for a third party to break the political gridlock.

Obama was right about one thing change is coming, the only question left is the agent. If not Obama...this month has highlighted some of the more extreme alternatives.

¹President Obama has already showed his willingness to follow the Bush II-Cheney guide to concentrating power in the Executive Branch. Signing statements, extraordinary Presidential Czars, Afghan policy, etc.

²Nothing stops progress from happening like a committee.

NY Times kills Obama

2011-08-01T10:50:00.003-04:00

The New York Times killed President Obama for his compromise on raising the debt ceiling. While we do not view it in the apocalyptic terms of the NY Times editorialists, we do think it was a bad deal, typical Washington, a messy compromise that solves nothing and postpones addressing the real issues and root causes.

The NY Times sees it even more harshly than that, "

...the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status. ...It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.

In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t."

Debt notes

2011-07-29T23:11:00.001-04:00

The Washington Post, certainly no more of an unbiased source than most media outlets, published these notes on how the United States government debt was accumulated.

*Projected federal government surplus in 2001 $2 trillion.

*Projected federal government debt in 2011 $10 trillion.

*50% of this swing is caused by tax revenue decreases (tax cuts) of $6.3 trillion.

*Federal tax collection is at its lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years.

*The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have added $1.3 trillion in new debt.

*Obama's economic stimulus package added $719 billion in new debt.

*The TARP bailout program added only $16 billion in new debt.

*Overall King George the II and his follies added over $7 trillion to the government's debt.

*Obama has added $1.7 trillion to the government's debt.

They didn't note, but we read elsewhere, the debt ceiling was raised by Congress seven times during the eight year reign of Bush II.

Found him

2011-07-24T19:18:00.002-04:00

Got their man...

Life as a fugitive is always looking over your shoulder. Or so they tell ya. You know, dear readers, how the Clarion Content feels about the reverberation, between truth and fiction, reality and Art; constant high speed turbulent bi-directional flow.

Do they stop looking for you? Arthur G. Jones disappeared from Chicago in 1979 amidst allegations of gambling debts and ties to organized crime. His silver Buick was found at O’Hare International Airport, but Jones wasn't. Authorities suspected foul play. Even though there was no body ever found, Jones was declared legally dead in 1986, and his wife collected his Social Security benefits.

But the government doesn't quit. It functions like a Leviathan glacier, slowly inching across all the terrain, aka, all the data, within its purview, grinding down all, gulping down the unruly and unwary. And the interconnections between the computers at the nodes of information are getting better all the time. Mr. Jones was arrested Tuesday in Las Vegas and charged with four felonies including identity theft and fraud.

How? Started after the man who's Social Security number had been printed on Jones's fake Nevada driver's license in 1988 kept complaining and fighting the Social Security Administration over requests to pay taxes on money he swore hadn’t earned. So that guy, no shit, named Clifton Goodenough, has a story too.

The government kept coming after him for money, demanding he pay taxes on his earnings in Nevada. Wages which Jones was collecting working for a legal bookmaking operation under the name he put on that license back in 1988, Richard Sandelli. According to Fox News, Jones says he purchased a fake Illinois driver's license, birth certificate and Social Security card for $800 in Chicago in 1979, then moved to Florida, before eventually obtaining a Nevada driver's license.

Goodenough is telling the government man, 'I never earned any money in Nevada..." Social Security Administration is saying somebody is cashing a paycheck with that Social in Nevada.

Thirty-two years after he skipped town, cross-checking between the Social Security Administration's and Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles's computers caught up with Arthur G. Jones. The Leviathan glacier of government sweeps up a man... gulp.

No telling what the guilt, complicity, life story, twists and turns composite, the man, sum total, life laid out as narrative, looks like. The Clarion Content is not defending his innocence. Nor are we prima facie indicting the government for picking him up and charging him.

The vector, the arc, the tale and its place within the archetypal tales they will tell about our era, that is what interests us. Surely the story of Mr. Arthur Gerald Jones, is at least as strange as any we might make up.

Norway grapples: Mitt lille land

2011-07-24T11:11:00.002-04:00

Mitt lille land---My little country

Domestic terrorism is crime, do not give it legitimacy by politicizing it.

Two rights

2011-07-21T20:21:00.004-04:00

If two wrongs don't make a right, what to do two rights make? In a practical sense, try to imagine a world where President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner enact a compromise that both cuts entitlement spending and eliminates the Bush II tax cuts for the super rich. Heck, they could even eliminate the alternative minimum tax as part of the same compromise. At that point, all Obama would have to do would be ease off the crackdown against job seeking immigrants, and bring the troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, and it would be 1995 all over again economically.

A dream? More than likely, knowing Washington, D.C., it is a mirage. The devil is in the details. The Clarion Content favors cuts in entitlement benefits (especially for prescription drugs), gradually raising the minimum age for Social Security benefits, reinstating the estate tax on estates worth more than $5 million, higher marginal tax rates on the highest income brackets, lowering and simplifying corporate taxes, along with a libertarian immigration policy.

In backwards order, no one in Washington D.C. has the guts or the political capital to address immigration policy. Obama would have been far better served to start there rather than with health care policy. Bush II was going to produce a benevolent immigration policy towards Latinos before 9/11. His failure to do so afterward is one of the great tragedies of his administration.

Lowering and simplifying corporate taxes, lots of folks in D.C. claim to support this one, yet somehow it never happens. This is the second biggest factor, after structural adjustment, for the current unemployment malaise. Lowering corporate taxes incentivizes job creation.

Higher marginal taxes on the richest of Richie Rich's and bringing back the estate tax for the very wealthy. Somehow the upper crust and their lobbyists always manage to turn this into a populist issue. At first amazing, the narrative of American capitalism has now absorbed this myth so completely and seen it defended so assiduously that to tax the rich is to attack the very basis of freedom.

Social Security is the 3rd rail and entitlement benefits are the next-door neighbors. Is anyone in D.C., even President Obama, brave enough to touch the 3rd rail of American politics? Has anyone heard from Representative Paul Ryan since he mentioned cutting Social Security and other entitlement benefits?

We know that no politician who falls anywhere on the political spectrum between Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich has the guts to say that Bush II's wars of choice have been colossal wastes that have devoured American blood and treasure, but now are sunk costs. Osama is dead. No one can force Afghanistan to cohere without a totalitarian government.¹ Withdraw already.

But much like the "big" budget deal itself, that is probably just a dream that will disappear into the daily grind of realpolitik.

¹ In Iraq, America has fucked up so badly that the best play now may be to be to keep the troops there lest Iran station its tank divisions on the border of Saudi Arabia. So even though the Clarion has long advocated withdrawal from Iraq, and three, separate, new, nation-states, we may be beginning to lose faith in the viability of that option.

Durham City Hall construction

2011-07-17T23:40:00.002-04:00

Durham's City Hall is not exactly putting its best foot forward. Amid renovation, its sign hidden by shrubs, the site strewn with dumpsters and construction debris, it is not much to look at right now.

Photo courtesy of BWPW.

Pretty much Amazing

2011-07-16T23:00:00.003-04:00

We must admit, here at the Clarion Content, the idea of a Palin/Bachmann super ladies ticket has crossed our mind. Our only question is, who's on top?

So when we heard there was Sarah Palin documentary coming out in theaters, we were like, "Do tell!"

Here is the scoop.

The biopic, about former governor Palin, modestly titled, "The Undefeated," premiered this weekend in ten select U.S. cities. We were unable to determine the full list. It did include Dallas, Texas, Pella, Iowa and an unnamed town in the sprawl that is Orange County, California. While struggling to find the full list of cities, we did did uncover this enlightening side-by-side comparison in The Guardian of the UK.

Quoting a New York Post critic, "Its tone is an excruciating combination of bombast and whining, it's so outlandishly partisan that it makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln and its febrile rush of images – not excluding earthquakes, car wrecks, volcanic eruption and attacking Rottweilers – reminded me of the brainwash movie Alex is forced to sit through in "A Clockwork Orange." Except no one came along to refresh my pupils with eyedrops."

Quoting former governor Palin, "It will blow you away. It was awesome. It's all about American values.

To be fair, as the Post notes, Palin did not participate in the making of this film. She was its subject, but it was made by a fan not connected to her campaign.

Bush II's failures

2011-07-15T08:04:00.003-04:00

Bush and Rummy alone in the Oval Office

The litany of King George the II's failures is colossal. However, as the brilliant policy analysts over at George Friedman's Stratfor point out, any list of the impacts of Bush II's disastrous blunders would be incomplete without mentioning how his pointless, self-indulgent, avenge my father's failures, war in Iraq led America to ignore developments in Russia.

During the reign of King George the II, as American blood and treasure were being thrown overboard directly into the Persian Gulf, when Saddam was being replaced with civil war and instability, and the price of oil (read: unleaded gasoline) was shooting into the stratosphere, Russia took a turn for the worse. Bush the II, clown prince that he was, rather than being focused on global political stability or the global economy, wanted an easy triumph, thus, an offensive war against what was perceived to be the most topple-able of his ludicrous axis of evil.¹

What did that cost strategically in Russia and its sphere of influence?

Statfor says, "This gave Russia a window of opportunity with which to accelerate its crackdown inside (and later outside) Russia without fear of a Western response. During this time, the Kremlin ejected foreign firms, nationalized strategic economic assets, shut down nongovernmental organizations, purged anti-Kremlin journalists, banned many anti-Kremlin political parties and launched a second intense war in Chechnya."

This loss of focus on the big geostrategic picture cost reformers and potential democrats behind former Iron Curtain dearly. While King George the II was making Faustian bargains with the dictators of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, to support his was war of choice, Putin was able to claim he was doing the same with the vile dictator of Belarus and a range of puppets in the Ukraine, Georgia and Chechnya.² The loss of United States credibility made it tremendously difficult for America to have any leverage to resist Putin's Machiavellian scheming.

Ahhhh, King George the II... Will America ever recover from your reign? Sadly, it is debatable.

¹Grouping Iraq, Iran and North Korea demonstrated Bush II and his policymakers had the foreign policy vision of a five year-old on the playground. "We are the good guys. You are the bad guys. Now it's war..."

²The United States's resources and credibility to support political reformers in Ukraine and Georgia was badly hampered by war in Iraq. In Chechnya, Bush the II's lumping of all nominally Muslim freedom fighters under the label of terrorist, put America on the side of the dictator against the freedom of the people.

Bachmann confuses John Wayne's

2011-07-01T10:06:00.001-04:00

Perhaps you have already heard this story. Ultimately, we are not all that interested in its substance. It happens, candidates make verbal missteps and this one wasn't policy related. It was a doozy. Presidential candidate, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, got her John Wayne's confused the other day in Iowa.

While speaking in the hometown of notorious clown serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Waterloo, Iowa, Representative Bachmann was clearly thinking of the other John Wayne from Iowa. John Wayne, the movie star, who was born 140 miles southwest in Winterset, Iowa. Unless one of her staffers is a saboteur because speaking in Waterloo, Bachmann came out with, "What I want them to know is that, just like John Wayne is from Waterloo, Iowa, that's the kind of spirit that I have too."

Whoops, wrong John Wayne, wrong small Iowa town that starts with W.

It happens.

The reason we posted this note about it is, you have to see the unbelievable Bachmann photoshop attached to this article about the story in New York magazine. Terrifyingly superb.

Go to college

2011-06-27T11:03:00.004-04:00

An excellent article in the much maligned New York Times this weekend by David Leonhardt defends the case for going to college. He says the anti-college for the masses argument ends up being an elitist one, for me and not for thee. He notes the parallels between this debate and the debate about high school for the masses that occurred at the end of last century. The American cultural decision, high school en masse, has been widely validated, especially when compared to parts of Europe.

More education for all! How can we disagree. Leonhardt quotes a recent study by The Hamilton Project, showing that college tuition has delivered an inflation-adjusted annual return of more than 15%; for the stock market, the historical return is 7%, for real estate, it’s less than 1%.

Read his whole piece here.

Thanks to Lyneka for pointing us this way.

Challenge em

2011-06-23T07:08:00.001-04:00

Rick Crawford (R-AR) and Paul Ryan (R-WI)

The Republican's have yet to come up with a coherent answer to the argument that they prefer tax cuts for the wealthy over medicare cuts for the elderly. Obviously, any even semi-sophisticated analysis will note that tax cuts and medicare are not a zero-sum game. They do not trade-off with each other directly.

The Clarion Content, while willing to see taxes raised for the highest earners and the biggest estates, is just as earnestly interested in seeing the defense budget cut, along with the expenditures on foreign wars and futile nation building exercises.

The Republicans are going to have to develop some kind of narrative for when their electoral opponents accuse them of being willing to bargain off Granny's health care and retirement for their fat cat friends' tax cuts.

As yet, they have been unable to produce one. Read here a transcript of how a freshman Republican Representative from Arkansas, Rick Crawford, fails to handle this question in a town hall meeting with constituents. Representative Crawford starts out with the tack that, well, Medicare is broke anyway, but is unable to stick to this line of reasoning. John Q. Public points out, if Medicare is broke, it is hardly fair to give tax cuts to the richest of the rich in such a moment.

Time for a better answer, time to come up with it soon, or the Republicans will face Congressional trouncing in November of 2012, regardless of what happens at the top of the ticket.

Selling alcohol earlier

2011-06-20T18:35:00.007-04:00

Found this picture Google image searching for: "Buying Liquor at 5am."

Not sure how we feel about this one here at the Clarion Content. As libertarian leaning, get the government out my business, kind of people, we know in principle we ought likely be in favor, but practically having knocked back an alcoholic libation or two in our day, we wonder...

The North Carolina State Legislature is considering changing the law to allow liquor sales Monday through Friday to begin at 5am rather than 7am. Theoretically, why is that even the government's concern period? We certainly do not hold with the state's monopoly on hard liquor sales here in North Carolina. But in practice, from no limited experience, we can definitively tell you, dear readers, that very little good comes of alcohol that must urgently be purchased at 5am rather than 7am in the morning.

There are very few healthy, wholesome reasons why folks must have alcohol at 5am. Again, it is generally our contention that the State should stay far away from regulating the wholesome-ness or lack thereof in an individual's behavior that is not threatening to other citizen's lives and well-being. Ah, and therein lies the rub and not just in this case, not threatening to other citizen's lives and well-being.

Specifically, here, how high is the risk to other citizen's lives and well-being in allowing early morning alcohol purchases? The sun is never really up at 5am. This and more is what the State Legislature must weigh, in addition, the bill contains a slew of other provisions and changes to existing alcohol sales law. Read more here.

Presidential topics

2011-06-14T11:00:00.001-04:00

The second Republican Presidential Primary debate was held last night in New Hampshire. The reviews? It was very vanilla. Only Minnesota firebrand Michelle Bachmann stood out. The Washington Post offered this note, a keen insight to the topics that will decide the 2012 general election. Domestic issues dominated the debate; candidates spent 105 of a potential 120 minutes on domestic policy. The only foreign policy question that got extended treatment was the American military presence in Afghanistan.

Time for a study

2011-06-13T12:30:00.001-04:00

Something to consider

The New York Times ran an interesting article this weekend in the wake of the Congressman Anthony Weiner racy pictures scandal. (Weiner has been outed for sending naughty snaps via the interwebs.) The article observed that a casual look around the political landscape would say that female politicians have been embroiled in far fewer sexual scandals than their male counterparts.

We know, we know, the plural of anecdote is not data. But how about a study? The NY Times speculates, "Women have different reasons for running, are more reluctant to do so and, because there are so few of them in politics, are acutely aware of the scrutiny they draw -- all of which seems to lead to differences in the way they handle their jobs once elected."

Here at the Clarion Content we read it as another good sign for the millennium of women.

Dogs rolling with the SAS

2011-06-13T11:11:00.001-04:00

The British Special Air Service or SAS has been a model for special forces detachments of armies throughout the Western world. The SAS traces their history to World War II. The British government has largely veiled the SAS and refuses to comment on matters concerning their missions.

It was fascinating to read then, in the British tabloid, The Sun, that SAS soldiers have been rappelling into combat raids with German Shepherds strapped to their bodies. The dogs, renown for their police work, have proven incredibly useful in commando raids, including, apparently, the one that killed Osama bin-Laden. The dogs are equipped with infrared night visions cameras and are often used by troopers to scout ahead. Our furry four-legged friends typically wear body armor to protect against knives, gunfire and grenade shrapnel. Apparently some pooches have even been trained in the use of oxygen masks and have made parachute jumps, following in the giant footsteps of their forebears.

Read more here.

Postmodern globalism run amok

2011-06-03T08:06:00.001-04:00

The world market emphasizes the delights and upsides of being able to sell anything and everything from anywhere. This range is supposed to virtuous in and of itself. The presumption is that more choice is always better. Despite recent studies debunking that idea, it has proved a hard meme to dislodge.

While as our friends over at the MEP Report are fond of reminding us, the plural of anecdote is not data, sometimes the solid illustrative anecdote can serve as a beacon to shine a light on the reams of transactions taking place below the surface knowledge of the Empire's paperpushers.

To wit, the story of a seventeen year-old Chinese kid who decided to sell one of his kidneys over the internet to finance the purchase of new electronics gear; a laptop and iPad 2 amongst the haul. The Clarion Content has long hooted about the flourishing grey market for organs in China. The teen thought he had gotten away with it, having handled the transaction on his own without his parents knowledge. But his mother, not surprisingly, noticed the new computer equipment and then found her son's deep red scar. The BBC and a local Chinese TV report indicate the authorities are concerned.

California

2011-06-02T08:06:00.001-04:00

California is not gaining any new Congressional seats from the 2010 Census. This is the first time in the state's history that it has not gained enough population between censuses to garner additional representation in Congress. (Its population was up by 5 million folks or 14.6%.)

The state has yet to reverse the historic outflow of domestic migration. California lost approximately 72,000 residents to other states in 2009-2010. It is the fifth consecutive year of domestic migration outflow, something never previously seen in California's history.

It is something the Clarion Content believes must have a profound message for those who analyze the American psyche and American dreams.

Practice what you preach?

2011-06-02T08:00:00.002-04:00

Not so much for Chris Christie, the Governor of New Jersey; Governor Christie prefers do as I say, not as I do.

The governor, who has been slashing school budgets and social services in New Jersey, while wringing his hands about the state's budget crisis, apparently is ready to spare no expense when it comes to his personal indulgence.

The incident in question? Wednesday, Governor Christie decided to use a state police helicopter to attend his son's baseball game against St. Joseph Regional High School in Montvale, Bergen County, NJ. Surely the governor must have traveling from official business and wanted to see his family? What kind of scrooge would begrudge a person that?

Nope.

Governor Christie's last engagement on his official schedule before his son's baseball game was a private meeting Tuesday night at the governor's mansion with a group of Iowa donors who are trying to pursuade him to run for president.

Shady, Mr. Governor, shady.

What the heck?

2011-05-31T16:41:00.001-04:00

Regular unleaded gas for the car costs $4.00 a gallon!!! This is the single biggest factor for Obama's re-election prospects. Gas over $3.50/gallon, there is no way Obama wins again.

But, how about this for a crazy factoid? Jet fuel, the kind they fly commercial airliners on, averaged $3.03/gallon last month (May 2011).

Say what?

Jet fuel is cheaper than gasoline? Somebody needs to tell the oil cartel, they are f*cking us over...

Confidence declining

2011-05-31T15:57:00.004-04:00

From the America is going to H-E-double hockey sticks in a handbasket files, as seen in the USA Today: the percentage of middle-income American families that think it is possible to save for a secure retirement 37% in 2007, only 28% in 2011. Only 28% of American families think it is even possible to save for a secure retirement? The tiderbox is primed.

Thoughts on Peace

2011-05-17T11:11:00.000-04:00

"Peace is the deliberate adjustment of one's life to the will of God."---Unknown

"Each one has to find his peace from within."---Gandhi

"Let us forgive each other- only then will we live in peace."---Tolstoy

Avoiding the worst

2011-05-14T21:10:00.003-04:00

Yahoo Finance had an interesting article this week about some of the metropolitan areas that have suffered less in the Great Recession. The Clarion Content has read about the low unemployment in parts of the depopulated Great Plains, the Dakotas and Nebraska, but this is less about regional commonality and more demographic commonality.

Yahoo says that university centered towns and cities have been more recession proof. There are still 112 metro areas in the United States with 10% unemployment or greater. It is not the places with big universities. Among the cities Yahoo cites, Austin, Texas, Boulder, Colorado and Madison, Wisconsin---all have unemployment rates well below the national average. Of course, double winner, big university town, in a depopulated natural resource heavy state, Lincoln, Nebraska, checks in with a miniscule unemployment rate of 4.1%.

Another factor not noted by the Yahoo folks, but likely just as important as the universities in shielding these areas from recession, all saw significant population growth in the last ten years.

Austin, TX Population change 2000-10: 20.4%

Madison, WI Population change 2000-10: 11.6%

Boulder, CO Population change 2000-10: 5.8%

Lincoln, NE Population change 2000-10: 14.5%

If one buys into the Simon-Steinmann Economic Growth Model, that may simply be that. Simon would seem to be especially likely to be relevant in metro areas with big universities because his assumptions about population growth and economic growth moving in concert are underpinned/fueled by technological developments and advances.

Fixed, Part II

2011-05-12T07:46:00.000-04:00

Wait a minute! There were insiders who made billions off of gaming the system before the financial house of cards collapsed?

Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for Manhattan, is fighting systemic corruption.

The New York Times reports hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, who's Galleon Group hedge fund managed more than $7 billion in assets, was found guilty on yesterday of fourteen counts of fraud and conspiracy by a federal jury in Manhattan. Evidence showed that Mr. Rajaratnam allegedly used a corrupt network of tipsters to personally make over $63 million from insider trading trading in stocks. Apparently, that was merely the tip of the iceberg.

Rajaratnam and his firm paid out roughly $300 million in trading commissions annually to brokerage firms. As one of the prosecutors noted, "Cheating became part of his business model." Rajaratnam was taped saying, among many other incriminating statements, "I heard yesterday from somebody who’s on the board of Goldman Sachs that they are going to lose $2 per share," in advance of the bank’s earnings announcement.

Unfortunately, the uber-wealthy Rajaratnam's lawyers will appeal the verdict and will likely keep him out of jail long enough to flee the country. He will probably be sipping cocktails and proffering advice at Davos next year.

Fixed

2011-05-12T07:27:00.000-04:00

During the 2008 campaign, this guy vowed to "close the revolving door" and "clean up both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue" with "the most sweeping ethics reform in history." He must have just meant that as a rhetorical flourish, rather than an active policy making effort.

Need one more instance, one more reminder of just how fixed the game is Washington, D.C.?

One of the FCC (Federal Communication Commission) members, who mere weeks ago voted to approved the controversial merger of the Comcast cable monopoly and NBC television network, is leaving the FCC to become a senior vice president for the merged firm.

Can you say conflict of interest? Can you say bribery? Can you say, boy, the political environment sure has changed under President Obama?

Allegedly, yes, yes, no.

The media watchdog organization, Free Press, called the move, "just the latest, though perhaps most blatant, example of a so-called public servant cashing in at a company she is supposed to be regulating."

Bin-Laden Raid

2011-05-05T07:00:00.005-04:00

An interesting note in the Chicago Sun-Times points out that the U.S. Navy Seals conducting the raid on the house Osama bin-Laden was living in needed extra time on the ground. As you have probably read, one of their helicopters broke down and had to be destroyed. The Seals used this extra time to gather what may turn out to be valuable intelligence.

The interesting part of the story...despite the helicopters, the explosions, the firefight at a compound in a Pakistan city, all taking place supposedly down the street from the Pakistani equivalent of West Point, no Pakistani authorities, police, military or otherwise rushed to the scene.

Hmmmm. This registers as somewhat more than simply coincidental. Could the United States government be denying the complicity of the Pakistani government in the raid on bin-Laden to give its partners in the regime political cover?

Jive

2011-05-04T11:12:00.000-04:00

We have been hearing a bunch of jive from Washington, D.C. about how the recession is over. This in no way matches up with what we are observing on the ground. In fact, to our eyes the recession is deepening, consumer confidence is weakening further, soaring gas prices and food prices are trimming consumer spending, and there is no end in sight.

Of course, the fat cats in Washington, D.C. who not only never pay for gasoline, but have their own drivers that come out of the taxpayers nickel, can hardly tell. When they want to know how bad the recession is, they have a secretary/aide/staffer, bring them a report. If the lobbyists and campaign contributors aren't worried, why should the politicians care?

Youthful Patriots

2011-05-04T08:03:00.001-04:00

Spotted this on Texts from Last Night, ahhh, American youth culture.

"Went from writing my paper to watching obamas speech to crushing beers and singing springsteen in a crowd of 100 within 20 minutes. I love this country!" ---from New Hampshire.

More of the same

2011-05-03T14:09:00.000-04:00

We saw another signal that Osama bin Laden's apparent assassination is not going to change much of anything this morning. Both ABC's Good Morning America and NBC's Today show, neither of which we watch frequently, went directly from stories about bin Laden's death to commercials featuring the chairman of Exxon Mobil.

Aren't those two on the same side, trying to bleed America to death?

Patron saints of PC strike again

2011-05-02T16:48:00.005-04:00

The dark forces of political correctness have struck again, once more trumpeting morality over truth. As smarter political commentators than the Clarion Content have noted, these paragons of political correctness set the stage for King George the II and his lackey, the Dick, Cheney. Their willingness to put a moral code above the truth gave King George solid firmament to stand on as he blithely lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, like the PCers he knew what was best for the country, the facts be damned.

Unfortunately, those cardinals of political correctness still haven't learned their lesson. We read this week, in the Huffington Post, where they bludgeoned the President-elect of the American College of Surgeons into resigning, a man who invented the Greenfield Filter, a device that has saved countless lives as a means of preventing blood clots during surgery, a professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Michigan, who has written more than 360 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, 128 book chapters and two textbooks and served on the editorial board of fifteen scientific journals.

His crime? Citing a peer-reviewed scientific study that suggested semen had health and psychological benefits for women.

The sentence in question, "So there's a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there's a better gift for that day than chocolates."

His intention as he told the Detroit Free Press, "The editorial was a review of what I thought was some fascinating new findings related to semen, and the way in which nature is trying to promote a stronger bond between men and women. It impressed me. It seemed as though it was a gift from nature. And so that was the reason for my lighthearted comments..."

The response from the Inquisition on behalf of Political Correctness? You're fired.

What a country!

One more Shuttle snafu

2011-05-02T10:33:00.004-04:00

It was just the other day that the Clarion Content was lamenting the money pit that is NASA Space Shuttle program in all $200 billion has been poured down the drain. As if we needed one final demonstration, one more reminder of what it means to throw good money after bad, as gas creeps over $4 a gallon and more and more American children have to go hungry, NASA scrubbed the shuttle Endeavour's launch this weekend. Cost to scrub and reschedule $500,000 minimum for fuel alone!

They should have just cancelled. (the program twenty years ago...)

Reaction

2011-05-02T09:11:00.000-04:00

This is what we hope the reaction to Osama bin Laden's death is across all of America. Let us support peace.

Funny ha, ha

2011-05-02T08:04:00.000-04:00

Not what you want to hear

2011-04-28T07:20:00.001-04:00

Storms raged across the American South last night leaving death and destruction in their wake. (Notice how no one jokes about 2012 and Mayans any more? We have been through a lot of late.) Reports indicate 170 souls lost their lives last night across several states.

And in a phrase that may sound all too eerily familiar from Japan, the storms knocked out power to three nuclear reactors, all located in Alabama and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Fortunately, unlike Japan, there was no damage to back-up systems. Diesel generators kicked in, cooling systems were maintained and core temperatures never moved. But don't let any of these nuclear power apologists tell you, "It could never happen here."

Bullsh*t. We are one unforeseen natural disaster away from sharing Japan's circumstances. America must move away from, not toward, nuclear energy.

Is this a redux?

2011-04-27T10:10:00.003-04:00

New dog, old tricks?

We can't believe how many times in the last two years we have had to ask the same question?!? How different is Barry Obama from King George the II?

Despite the craven slobbering of the Obama apologist crowd, the facts are he represents more continuity with George Bush II than we ever expected. This today from The Hot Air Archives,

"Obama’s new Afghanistan ambassador is... Bush’s old Iraq ambassador... That would be Ryan Crocker, of course. Please don’t confuse him with David Petraeus, Obama’s top Afghanistan commander who used to be … Bush’s top Iraq commander. Or with Robert Gates, Obama’s Secretary of Defense who used to be … Bush’s Secretary of Defense.

Gates, of course, is stepping down in a few months. At this rate, I wonder if O will replace him with Rumsfeld."

Oh wait, no we forget, Obama's policy is more nuanced. He is using more remote control drones to shoot missiles into Pakistani villages...

As the author of the Hot Air piece notes, the only saving grace of this appointment would be if it is political cover for the President to back away from his dangerously foolish pledge to keep United States troops on the ground in Afghanistan until 2015. The Clarion Content has long held that there is no political center with which to form a congruent Western style State in Afghanistan. There is no more right or reason to prop up a Hamid Karzai than there is a Muammar Gaddafi or a Bashar al-Assad. (Barry and Hillary are backing only one of those other two, this month.)

The Shuttle Program

2011-04-26T23:00:00.003-04:00

Pioneer 11 approaches Saturn

The Clarion Content has not believed in the value of the manned space program since the Cold War ended. We support space exploration and experimentation. Un(hu)manned exploration is much, much, less expensive. There is still widespread world hunger, millions lack a daily source of clean water, not mention housing and disease, or America's desperate need for infrastructure investment. The Clarion Content cannot support the expenditure of the human crewed space program.

The final launch of the Shuttle program is upon us and with it some reflection on the massive waste. 133 Space Shuttle launches, which USA Today reports, NASA originally estimated $10.4 million per launch, ended up costing a hearty $1.5 billion per launch.

Want more? Those 133 shuttle missions conducted 2,300 experiments at a cost of $192 billion for the program. The cost per experiment? $83 million, 478 thousand and 260 dollars per experiment over the history of the shuttle program...

The most widely cited of those experiments according to Thomson Reuters' science information service, is a 1996 study of "anti-shock" shorts used to measure astronaut fitness. The circularity is self-evident. Human space missions yield little to nothing over uncrewed space missions other than the effects of space on humans.

USA Today quotes economist Henry Hertzfeld of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, "Economically, you can't make an argument for it."

What a tragic waste. Hopefully, this is the end of an era for such foolishness.

By contrast, the robotic space probes Pioneer 10 and 11 launched in 1972-73 yielded so much data that it has still hardly been tapped and continues to produce valuable experimental knowledge for a combined cost of $100 million!

What's going on...

2011-04-16T11:11:00.002-04:00

Regular readers of the Clarion Content know how bitter we are about the Obama Presidency. Perhaps our hopes were too high. His administration has underlined and put an exclamation point on the premise that there is no significant difference between Republicans and Democrats. Obama was the first major party candidate that the Clarion Content endorsed and oh, how we regret it.

He is cut from the same cloth as Slick Willie and King George the II.

CIA assassinations up under the Obama regime.

Guantanamo still open.

Non-combatants being tried in military courts without the protection of the Constitution.

Signing statements still being used to sidestep the Constitution.

Dictators being backed against freedom fighters wherever it is deemed politically expedient.

Oh, and that rhetoric about helping the little guy, who has been buffeted by King George the II's wars of choice and blase, "Let them eat cake" attitude? Sorry that's out the window.

Tax cuts for the rich extended.

Massive tax breaks for the biggest corporation continue.

And is independent, Vermont Senator, Bernie Sanders points out...

Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.

Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.

Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS.

Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009.

Boeing, which received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers, got a $124 million refund from the IRS last year.

Valero Energy, the 25th largest company in America with $68 billion in sales last year received a $157 million tax refund check from the IRS and, over the past three years, it received a $134 million tax break from the oil and gas manufacturing tax deduction.

Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department.

Citigroup last year made more than $4 billion in profits, but paid no federal income taxes. It received a $2.5 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury.

ConocoPhillips, the fifth largest oil company in the United States, made $16 billion in profits from 2007 through 2009, but received $451 million in tax breaks through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction.

Over the past five years, Carnival Cruise Lines made more than $11 billion in profits, but its federal income tax rate during those years was just 1.1 percent.

Duck and Cover is on-point as usual. It is awfully hard to feel optimistic. There are no saviors over the American horizon, rather a passel of psychotic Nero's are vying for Obama's throne and scepter.

While bearing in mind, the first moment of violence co-opts the Revolution, it is time for radically new approaches.

Asleep at the controls

2011-04-14T08:00:00.001-04:00

The FAA has reported six incidents this year where FAA air traffic controllers have fallen asleep on the job. Nice. The latest was this week, when a Nevada air traffic controller fell asleep while landing a plane with a medical emergency on board. The near catastrophe has prompted the government to put an extra staffer on midnight shifts at more than two dozen control towers across the country, according to CNN.

The pilot of the Nevada flight attempted to contact their air traffic control tower seven times with no response. After repeatedly circling the field, the pilot elected proceed and landed safely anyway. The Feds says that in the twenty-seven major control towers staffed with only one controller during the midnight shift, it will be mandatory to add a second controller.

Hope so.

Mall vacancies

2011-04-11T20:42:00.004-04:00

The Clarion Content warned more than a year ago of an impending secondary real estate bubble that could smack the American economy around, commercial real estate. We had read lots of analysis that said there were a ton of short term commercial real estate loans that were going to have to be refinanced, only with the new lower property valuations figured in. The slowing economy was also supposed to continue to hurt commercial occupancy rates.

This week we read that the less disastrous of these two dire predictions is indeed happening, this year malls and strip malls are supposed to see their highest vacancy rates in more than twenty years according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper reports, "Mall vacancies hit their highest level in at least 11 years in the first quarter." The expectation is that the worst is yet to come.

There is, as our sources suggested their would be, a glut of commercial real estate space. Reportedly, more than one billion square feet of retail space was built in the fifty-four largest American markets since the start of 2000. Many retailers that had been key mall and stripmall tenants, Borders, Blockbuster, Circuit City and Comp USA have nose-dived or gone out of business.

American cities already staggering under repeated economic body blows are losing lots of sales tax revenue as shoppers continue to migrate on-line. Big Box corporations are crushing mid-size competitors and specialty stores. The impact on the overall economy is very real. The base of pyramid that supports our massively indulgent and expensive lifestyles as Americans is having foundation issues. We must look at ourselves in the mirror carefully.

Egypt's presumed revolution

2011-04-11T20:18:00.004-04:00

As we warned in these pages last month, there was no revolution in Egypt. All the protestors in Tahir Square were able to accomplish was regime change. They got old Hosni Mubarak out and insured that his fat cat son would not succeed him as ruler. The state apparatus did not change. The military remained in charge. Events yesterday in Cario continued to underline this dramatic and disappointing reality.

According the Washington Post, "Angry anti-government demonstrators returned to Tahrir Square late Saturday, some declaring that they were ready to face martyrdom, less than a day after Egypt’s military rulers used force to break up a protesters’ camp in the place where their revolution began. Angry anti-government demonstrators returned to Tahrir Square late Saturday, some declaring that they were ready to face martyrdom, less than a day after Egypt’s military rulers used force to break up a protesters’ camp in the place where their revolution began."

On the ground in Egypt, it is evident that the regime is being run by the same ilk as it has been for more than fifty years, military statists. This is why demonstrators refuse to simply fade away.

Read the whole ugly story here in the Washington Post.

Of course, the regime is backtracking and putting a PR cover into play.

New spy plane?

2011-04-03T13:00:00.001-04:00

Amateur skywatchers have tracked down America's latest spy plane the X-37B. The plane which looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle is pictured above this column. It is unmanned and flown remotely. According to Wired, "The X-37B has generated intense interest, long before it ever left the ground. Boeing originally developed the twenty-nine foot ...craft... Then, the military took over in 2004, and the space plane went black. Its payloads were classified, its missions hush-hush."

Why it has such a cargo sized hold has been a matter of intense speculation. Space observers have tracked the plane following its second launch into orbit last week. Reportedly, "The X-37B is traveling in a slightly elliptical orbit more than 200 miles up, swooping from 43 degrees north latitude to 43 degrees south." According the expert Wired talked to, Brian Weeden, a former Air Force Space Command officer, now with the Secure World Foundation, the X-37B is orbiting around the fat middle of the planet, flying over the Middle East, Africa, and much of China, giving up global coverage, but getting more frequent passes. The orbit suggests that the space plane is spying.

Presidential Irony

2011-03-25T11:11:00.002-04:00

How bitter is the irony of Obama playing Nixon to Bush II's LBJ in the Middle East? In this scenario Bush's Dad is Kennedy, cautiously engaging in Iraq the same way Kennedy was only willing to dip America's toes into Vietnam. Bush I let the Shi'ites get massacred by Saddam because he was unwilling to commit to a drive on Baghdad. The follies of the son have shown this was the more prudent, if less moral, policy.

Here is Obama, following Bush II's LBJ, after a disastrous War with a massive cost of blood and treasure, he is married to staying the course. But why, Mr. President? For Nixon, the answer was ideological, but Obama is a pragmatist.

Iraq has yet to form a government and civil war is never more than a moment away. Afghanistan is mired in corruption and warlordism. In Pakistan, the United States is on the side of the anti-democrats. America is on the side of the dictators in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Bahrain, too, yet Colonel Quaddafi must go? Alas and alack.

Where is the administration's analysis for maintaining a massive, resented, military presence in Afghanistan? What about supporting an independent Kurdistan? A democratic Pakistan? Why support the status quo in Yemen and Bahrain?

Much like we would have voted for McGovern over Nixon, we should have gone Kucinich or Paul over Obama.

Blaming the victim

2011-03-17T08:27:00.004-04:00

The Clarion Content favors school uniforms, we believe uniforms help improve focus and eliminate potential classroom distractions. However, we do not support draconian school dress codes, which are quite different than uniforms. These dress codes, rather than eliminate confusion and issues, exponentially increase them by setting up battles where youth, inherently, naturally, push the limits creating conflicts with parents, teachers and administrators.

It was during the debate on imposing a statewide (as a sidenote surely this is an issue to be addressed on the local, not the state level) dress code in Florida schools that we heard one of the most egregious cases of blame the victim we have ever heard.

In attempting to illustrate the need for a dress code with the case of an eleven year-old Texas girl who was gang-raped by more than a dozen men, Florida State Representative Kathleen Passidomo said, "There was an article about an eleven year-old girl who was gang-raped in Texas by eighteen young men because she was dressed like a twenty-one year-old prostitute. And her parents let her attend school like that. And I think it’s incumbent upon us to create some areas where students can be safe in school and show up in proper attire so what happened in Texas doesn’t happen to our students."

Wow!?! An eleven year-old kid, gang-raped by eighteen men and it was her fault because of how she was dressed?!? She had it coming? She wanted it? Eleven year-olds cannot consent to sex in this country. Period. We hope Representative Passidomo's constituents are calling for the resignation of this anti-feminist hater.

Read more here.

The difference between Socialism and Capitalism

2011-03-13T22:47:00.003-04:00

We grabbed this brilliant bit from our friends over at the MEP Report. Always challenging, probing and inspiring. You should check them out here.

Earthquake moved Japan 8 feet!!!

2011-03-13T10:43:00.003-04:00

Reports from the U.S. Geological Survey indicate that the coast of Japan moved eight feet during the massive 8.9 earthquake off of its northeastern coast last week. The earthquake was the most powerful to hit the island archipelago in its recorded history. The quake was so big that it shifted the Earth on its axis. Reports from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy estimated the 8.9 magnitude quake shifted the planet on its axis by nearly 4 inches (10 centimeters).

Read more here at CNN.

Palin's 15 minutes up?

2011-03-10T19:18:00.004-05:00

A newly released Bloomberg poll shows strongly negative numbers for former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. 1001 adults were polled and 60% had an unfavorable opinion of Governor Palin, while only 28% had a favorable opinion. Interestingly, when compared to other politicians like Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie, more people had an opinion one way or the other about Palin than any other American politician, save for President Obama. Analysts say this means Palin will have a harder time moving the favorability ratings in her direction. More people have made up their mind on her, one way or the other, than any of the other potential 2012 candidates.

Deficit Hawk

2011-03-07T17:04:00.003-05:00

Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, a noted deficit hawk, gave Fortune magazine writer, Nin-Hai Tseng, an interview this week where he laid out some of the realities of the state of the state in Washington, D.C. Senator Coburn is often regarded as an eccentric, wild card---modern Washington parlance for a straight shooter who does not kowtow to lobbyists. The conservative Coburn has no patience for inefficiency in government, even in arenas traditionally sacrosanct to Republicans.

When asked about the Defense Department Coburn said, "I think there is at least $50 billion of waste in the US Department of Defense. But we don't really know because nothing in the Defense Department can be measured because they don't have audited financial statements. They're not even sure what they're buying and they're not even sure if they've paid for it. One of the things I've been working on for the last two years is to put financial controls in the Defense Department. They're highly effective at what they do but they're highly inefficient. There's a lot of money in that $600 billion budget that we could save just through good management practices."

The Senator also laid it on the line about the precarious state of America's finances, "I've studied a lot of international finance in the last year and a half and I've read the works of every major economist around the world and I've talked to U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and I've talked to U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. We're in deep weeds right now. If something collapses in the Middle East, and interest rates go up, we have the potential to go on a downward spiral that we cannot get out of. We're going to become Japan, too."

Obama and Libya

2011-03-07T11:11:00.001-05:00

One more reality check for all the Obama apologists shoveling the bullshit filled buckets labeled "Change". The Obama administration, over Congressional objections, had been pushing a $77 million deal to provide at least 50 refurbished armored troop carriers to Moammar Gadhafi's army. Congress had stalled the deal which would have benefited the massive multinational arms dealer, BAE.

This is different from what King George the II was up to how? Rhetorically? We are supposed to take solace in although the Obama administration is more of the same, he at least denies that he is on the side of the dictators and the huge companies that profit from their existence? Isn't that actually worse? At least, we, the People, knew where George Bush II stood. He made no bones about the fact that he was screwing the little guy into the ground to help the Kenneth Lays of the world. The Associated Press reports, "General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman were among companies listed as attending the 2008 and 2010 Libya Defense and Security Exhibition in Tripoli."

BAE is a British firm with a United States subsidiary, BAE Systems, Inc., listed in 2010 as the nation's 12th largest government contractor. It is headquartered in Rockville, Md. It is a classic case of the rotten junction of politics, money and the military industrial complex. The company's board is chaired by former Gen. Anthony Zinni, former Commander in Chief of U.S. Central Command; former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton, an Obama foreign policy mentor; and former Bush administration Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff.

Some change, Mr. President. Obama spouts a lot of rhetoric, then sells arms to Libya anyway, while green lighting tax relief for the very richest Americans. Nice work, Barry

Not Huckabee

2011-03-05T08:22:00.003-05:00

This week, no less of conservative leading light than Washington Post columnist George Will, dismissed former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee's chances of winning the Republican Presidential nomination. Will said the average American wouldn't trust Huckabee to run a lemonade stand let alone have his finger on the button.

Will thinks the nominee should be drawn from a more obscure list that includes Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.

It should be remembered that Will is, what would have been called back in the day, a Rockfeller Republican, not exactly a salt of the earth, Palinista.

What happened in Egypt...

2011-02-21T17:57:00.005-05:00

The Clarion Content is not a fan of seeing United States foreign policy conducted on a strictly pragmatic calculus. We do, however, support a pragmatic understanding of how events on the world stage play out. That is to say, sometimes foreign policy's motives have to be idealist, but interpretations of outcomes and results must be realist.

It is through this lens that we want to note that we strongly agree with George Friedman and Strafor's analysis of events in Egypt in recent weeks.

The week began with an old soldier running Egypt. It ended with different old soldiers running Egypt with even more formal power than Mubarak had. This has caused worldwide shock and awe...We do not want to be killjoys now, since everyone is so excited and happy. But we should point out that, in spite of the crowds, nothing much has really happened yet in Egypt. It doesn’t mean that it won’t, but it hasn’t yet.

An 82-year-old man has been thrown out of office, and his son will not be president. The constitution and parliament are gone and a military junta is in charge. The rest is speculation.

The great majority of the Western media is running around foolishly asserting that there has been a revolution. This wild overclaim only shows the distortion between their hype-skewed lens and events on the ground. The Wikipedia entry on these events, for example, is hyperbolically headed, "Egyptian Revolution of 2011."

Hooray for the Tea Party

2011-02-08T22:00:00.007-05:00

A ringing endorsement for the right of privacy was heard from an unexpected quarter today. Freshman Republican Congressman and emboldened veterans provided a shocking Tea Party tumult during a presumably routine vote to extend portions of the Patriot Act.

Specifically twenty-six Republicans bucked their leadership, eight of them freshman lawmakers, and voted against the extension of the Federal Government's abusive invasions of privacy. Today's vote would have: 1) extended the newly granted authority of the FBI to use roving wiretaps on surveillance targets, 2) allowed the government to continue gaining warrantless access to "any tangible items," such as library records, in the course of surveillance, and 3) allowed the government to continue surveillance of targets who are not connected to an identified terrorist group.

In the Clarion Content's view none of this authority should have ever been bestowed on the government to begin with, it was in clear violation of the Constitution and it was a dangerous breach of the Social Contract.

Unfortunately, this is all so much theater as the provisions will likely be extended next week. The Washington Post reports that Republican leadership will be able to jigger the rules and hold a new vote.

The bill to reauthorize key parts of the counter-terrorism surveillance law, which expire at the end of the month, required a super-majority to pass under special rules reserved for non-controversial measures... the final tally was 277 members in favor of extension, and 148 opposed. The Republicans who control the House made plans to bring the measure back for a quick vote later this month under normal rules, requiring only a simple majority for passage.

Not surprisingly the tone-deaf, clueless, Nancy Pelosi had nothing of substance to say about the bill's blatant attack on the rights of Americans or how little has been gained after ten years of stepped up surveillance. Instead, her office focused on mocking the Republicans, "Disarray."

Why think about what she and House Democrats might be able to accomplish with these upstart, rebellious Tea Party Republicans? You didn't think she was actually listening to the State of the Union last week, did you, dear readers?

It was left to the lonely voice in the wilderness, Ohio's Don Quixote, Dennis Kucinich, to remind his fellow members of Congress, "The Patriot Act represents the undermining of civil liberties."

Egypt and King George's olive branch

2011-01-28T14:54:00.007-05:00

Mubarak and Condi yuk it up...

Remember the heady days in the middle of the reign of King George II, when a moment of calm, a lull, an eye in the maelstrom of Iraq's civil war, allowed the mad king to dream of democratic contagion. It was argued for a moment that like so many of Kissinger's dominoes the dictatorships of the Middle East were going to morph into peaceful bucolic multi-party democracies. There was the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, that; that is going well. There was also the full-court press on Egyptian President Hosni Murbarak who made just enough of the right noises to pass the muster of Condi Rice. A sad sack herself, she will go down in history as a world-class dupe.

Sadly, the Obama Administration represents continuity within the American Empire rather than fundamental change, as things stand, Veep Joe Biden is now playing the Condi role. Unfortunately, the fire brigades brought in during the mad reign of King George the II, as they did in so many other places, threw fuel, rather than water, on the fire. Egypt has gone from smoldering to smoking. Faux moves toward democracy gave Murbarak what he thought was cover to attempt to squash and imprison leading voices of dissent and plurality. There were no real changes or democratic accommodations. Mubarak, and more importantly the people of Egypt, fully expect his son to succeed him under the status quo ante. America has ignored, to its detriment, any moderates within the powerful Muslim Brotherhood.

Today a full-fledged uprising grips Egypt. Stock market worldwide are tumbling in response. Gold and crude oil prices are soaring.

What a wonderful world.

Republican nominee

2011-01-25T12:00:00.001-05:00

Is another governor from Arkansas headed to the White House?

One of our older readers, a stalwart Republican since the AUH₂O campaign of Barry Goldwater, made a point of telling us this past weekend that he thinks the Republican Presidential nominee will be Mike Huckabee.

The case he made, in brief, goes something like this. Huckabee has campaigned once and learned the nuances of the primaries. He has tight ties with Republican base, especially the evangelicals. Our wise old Republican says that Sarah Palin is too volatile, too much of a lightning rod. He believes that much like the Dems rejected Hillary, her negatives were too high, the Republicans know that Palin is viewed as toxic by too many.

He discounts Mitt Romney as too liberal too win the nomination. The man who presaged Obamacare in Tax-achusetts is not winning the Republican nomination. Newt Gingrich is ruled out for having too much baggage. He is Gary Hart, there is no way the media isn't digging up dirt on old Newt that will rule him out. He may be the powerbroker who decides who will be king.

The rest of the legions of unknowns John Thune, Lindsey Graham et al. are not coming from out of nowhere. Though many of our liberal friends disagree, our old Republican hand says there is no way Jeb Bush gets drafted off of the bench for this run. The Bush name still has too many negative connotations.

Ironically, for all that, this stalwart Republican is not an unabashed Huckabee supporter. In fact, he would prefer to see one of the unknowns, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, become a household name as he emerges to the steal the nomination from more famous contenders, ala Obama. Perhaps the only thing ala Obama this diehard Republican has ever wished for.

The Republicans repealed Health Care...

2011-01-24T23:43:00.007-05:00

and fixed the economy.

Wait, what? You didn't hear?

Well- it is not because Eric Cantor and the young guns aren't putting out the press releases. Less than three weeks after taking control of the House of Representatives, Eric and the Egomaniacs sent out a press release this morning trumpeting,

"THERE ARE THE JOBS: Republicans Prevent Massive Tax Increase, Economy Begins to Improve: U.S. companies plan to hire more workers in the coming months amid growing optimism over the economy, a quarterly survey released Monday showed, providing further evidence that the jobs market is turning around. In the fourth-quarter poll of 84 companies by the National Association for Business Economics found 42% of companies interviewed, ranging from manufacturing to finance, expect to boost jobs in the six months ahead..."

No need to let the facts get in the way of your version of reality, Representative Cantor. No matter that Republicans did not actually control the House of Representatives when this survey took place, that much of the surveying was done before the November election or that even after the November election Republicans only control one of the three branches of government, the branch with the least direct impact on the economy, the Supreme Court. Pish-posh, facts. Blech. How dull. Facts don't play in the Real America.

In Real America, they just repealed the Health Care Law. Or was that Never-Never land, Representative Cantor? Even the always fair and balanced Fox News admitted, "Many House Republicans ran on repealing the health care law last fall. But after the vote, there was no GOP victory lap or celebratory press conference. The debate was muted. The outcome anti-climactic. And at the end of Wednesday, most just packed up and went home for the night." Their own salary, health insurance and pensions, safe and secure.

Toning down the rhetoric

2011-01-17T11:11:00.001-05:00

The single best way we have heard someone call for the toning down of the temperature of political rhetoric in America came from an unlikely source, Sports Illustrated pro football columnist Peter King. The Clarion Content is very wary of calls to temper or tamp down political rhetoric because of the concomitant chilling effects on all free speech.

King quoted John F. Kennedy, "Let us begin anew, remember on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate."

Kennedy was thinking arms control, but the spirit still resonates.

King is a talented writer with a big heart.

Twitter stands up

2011-01-15T13:58:00.004-05:00

It has recently come to light that Twitter stood up for the privacy of folks everywhere last month. The big brothers of the United States government got a court order demanding that Twitter turn over information about a number of people connected to WikiLeaks. The feds wanted IP and e-mail addresses. They got a court order demanding them.

Twitter took a stand for the little guy. According to Wired.com, Twitter successfully challenged the gag order in court, and then told the targets their data was being requested, giving them the time to try to fight the court order themselves.

Wired notes,

"Twitter and other companies, notably Google, have a policy of notifying a user before responding to a subpoena, or a similar request for records. That gives the user a fair chance to go to court and try and quash the subpoena. That’s a great policy. But it has one fatal flaw. If the records request comes with a gag order, the company can’t notify anyone. And it’s quite routine for law enforcement to staple a gag order to a records request.

That’s what makes Twitter’s move so important. It briefly carried the torch for its users during that crucial period when, because of the gag order, its users couldn’t carry it themselves. The company’s action in asking for the gag order to be overturned sets a new precedent that we can only hope that other companies begin to follow."

Buying a gun in Canada

2011-01-12T23:11:00.001-05:00

One of our favorite Tweeters, Kelly Oxford, put a lovely little post on her blog the other day about buying a gun in Canada. Or as she put it, "Do ...people realize that in Canada you also have the right to own a gun and ammo?"

Yep, it is true, but according to Ms. Oxford..."You can’t just decide you want to go the the local shop and pick one up like an Xbox game rental."

1. Pass a gun safety course (crazy people HATE tests! they hate a day long course! SCHOOL SUCKS!!!!)

2. Provide three references of character (crazy people are crazy! BILL IS CRAZY AND WANTS TO BUY A GUN!!! DON’T SIGN IT HAROLD!)

3. Provide information on your love life and financial affairs (have abuse charges against your lady/boy friends?? bankrupt? SORRY GUIDO!!)

***note: when husbands/wives get a license to buy a weapon, the spouse must sign a form indicating they feel safe with him/her buying a weapon.

Now mail this all in, get a license back in the mail (4-6 weeks later) and go and BUY YOUR GUNS AND ALL THE AMMO YOU NEED.

If you don’t like those rules, you are too stupid to own a weapon that can kill people when you move your finger.

Ahhh, Kelly Oxford. If you think that is great, you should read her thoughts about family.

Another Washington tragedy

2011-01-11T09:45:00.001-05:00

A candid photo of Ashley Turton...

More tragedy. The inside the Beltway community suffered a third blow this morning when Ashley Turton, the wife of a key Obama staffer and a prominent lobbyist herself, was found dead today inside her burning BMW SUV at her Washington, D.C. home. A police investigation is still underway.

The story has immediately triggered speculation, Turton's SUV was found halfway in-and-out of her garage when fire officials responded to 911 calls from neighbors at 4:50am. Metropolitan Police Lt. Nicholas Breul said, "This could be just a tragic freak accident. And that is why we're crossing our t's and dotting our i's, because it is a little freaky."

She was the mother of three young children and a lobbyist for Progress Energy, which is in the middle of a $13 billion merger. From North Carolina, Ashley Turton graduated North Carolina State and first worked on Capitol Hill for Congressman Mike McIntyre from North Carolina's 7th congressional district. Her husband, Dan Turton, has worked as liaison between the Obama administration and the House of Representatives.

Our condolences and prayers to her family and friends.

Check out the photos of the very odd circumstances here.

Political tragedy in Arizona

2011-01-08T14:30:00.004-05:00

Representative to the United States Congress Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot in the head during a public event in Tucson this morning. Tragic. We never want American politics to be conducted this way. This way lies madness.

Representative Giffords was holding an event outside a grocery store in Tucson, AZ when a man ran up and started shooting. The Pima County sheriff has told MSNBC that five other people were killed and six were wounded, including some members of her staff.

AOL reports, "Giffords has represented Arizona's 8th Congressional district since 2007 and is a member of the Blue Dog Coalition of conservative Democrats. She narrowly defeated tea party-backed Republican Jesse Kelly to win a third House term in November."

Domestic terrorism tends to be wildly underplayed and underreported by America's corporatist media. Bear this in mind as the story unfolds this week.

Different?

2010-12-28T08:00:00.001-05:00

The faces have changed, but the game remains the same

Despite what the defenders of the Obama administration want to tell you, dear readers, the chilling post 9.11 security climate is still in effect. It is more than that Homeland Security is checking nutsacks at airport terminals this holiday season. Our quarrel is not only with the balance between safety and privacy, but with the attitude and atmosphere of the state. The mentality of the state's security apparatus has not noticeably changed under the ostensibly liberal Obama.

What the Clarion Content's small "c" conservative editorial board believes this reflects is that President Obama and his policy team do not come at the world from a less regulation where ever possible framework. Obviously. From their point of view, more is more. This means that, although the current administration does not believe in the invading one's privacy for the same draconian reasons as Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, their p.c. based paternalism yields essentially the same result. Guantanamo is still open. Black prison sites are still likely maintained. Alliances with strong men across Central Asia, irrespective of national and individual citizen's sovereignty, continue. The state makes unwarranted, and frequently undisclosed, compromises of individual American citizen's civil liberties.

Ultimately there is a government mindset, led by the security apparatus, that believes proper enforcement and public safety trump individual rights and the protect and serve mantra of policing. We ran across another story today that underlined this message recently.

A fifty year-old airline pilot has come under fire from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, after posting a behind the scenes tour of security flaws at San Francisco International Airport on YouTube. The pilot, who taped the clips with his cell phone, has been flying for the airlines for more than a decade. He alerted Sacramento's KXTV when he posted the videos saying he wanted the information to be made public.

According ABC7 in San Francisco, the video posting resulted in federal air marshals and sheriff's deputies showing up, menacingly unannounced at the pilot's house. This appearance that the pilot, a deputized federal air marshal, also recorded, was made to personally and aggressively confiscate his federally issued handgun. Rather than handle this paperwork detail administratively in an office environment, security descended on the pilot in his own home, to make a show of force and displeasure.

His attorney, Don Werno, says he believes the TSA was sending a message that "you've angered us by telling the truth and by showing America that there are major security problems despite the fact that we've spent billions of dollars allegedly to improve airline safety."

Once again, enforcement attacks the whistleblower. Obviously, this sort of individual incident is far below the Presidential radar, unless it involves Henry Louis Gates Jr. or another member of the elite with access.

Change? Only who is sitting at the table has changed, the game remains the same.

Theories of secrecy

2010-12-24T19:50:00.001-05:00

There is a fascinating article in this month's Playboy Magazine by John Richardson about the alleged Russian spy Anna Chapman.

In said article, Richardson, who's father was a CIA agent, makes a complicated and insightful point about the nature of spying and the self-defeating conceit that it can create, paraphrasing, 'an obsession with secrecy can turn the glaringly obvious into a secret...'

The knowns hold none of the fascination of the mysteries of espionage and secrecy. When a really fetching theory is afoot from the intelligence community, the obvious can feel irrelevant, unimportant. This parallels the type of reasoning that surfaces in conspiracy theories. The totally mundane and simple explanation is discarded in part for its blandness, whereas the extremely intricate and complicated explanation is venerated for its sophisticated and Byzantine twists.

Obama's National Security advisor

2010-12-21T12:00:00.002-05:00

This guy, Thomas E. Donilon is replacing this guy, General James L. Jones, Jr.

One of the most influential people briefing President Obama is his incoming National Security Advisor, Thomas E. Donilon. Donilon is an old political hand, for fifty-five. He has been in politics since the Carter administration. As a twenty-something he led Carter's 1980 Democratic convention efforts to fend off a nomination challenge from the recently deceased Teddy Kennedy. (Incidentally, for all the fits and the false starts, that was the only time that Ted Kennedy ever ran for President.)

Donilon, a native Rhode Islander and former adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden, switched his brief sometime shortly after the Carter's defeat in the 1980 general election from political campaigning to foreign policy, parting directions with his former roomie, Terry McAuliffe. Warren Christopher, later Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, suggested Donilon read Dean Acheson's memoir Present at the Creation and consider another course.

The long and winding road has him succeeding General James L. Jones, Jr. of the Marines as President Obama's second National Security Advisor and the 24th in the positions long and unsavory history at the heart of anti-democratic politics in America.

The Washington Post has a fascinating in-depth profile of Tom Donilon, a must read for foreign policy wonks. The Post's Jason Horowitz reports, amongst many other delectable nuggets, that Donilon is the most Asian(India/China) focused of all of Obama's top-level advisors.

Read the whole article here.

Many thanks to long time Clarion Content fave, Information Dissemination for pointing the way.

Barry Obama, just another politician

2010-12-17T08:38:00.003-05:00

Once again, President Obama continues and extends the polices of King George II. This is not the change we were hoping for here at the Clarion Content when we endorsed Obama. What say those of you who mocked voting for Ralph Nader in 2000 now?

Wikileaks

2010-12-14T23:22:00.001-05:00

The best take we have heard on the Wikileaks disclosures so far came from the Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu who said, "You should hear what we say about you."

Sound familiar

2010-12-13T23:07:00.000-05:00

"Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy, and those who had anything united in common terror..."---Alexis de Tocqueville

Sound familiar and/or prescient?

European banking worries

2010-12-13T23:00:00.003-05:00

The Clarion Content has to admit we are woefully ill-informed about the banking crisis that is sweeping Europe. Oh sure, we get the fundamentals, European welfare states have borrowed unsustainably because folks retire too early and work too little to support the modern capitalist pyramid and all its goodies (eg. cradle to grave health care and cheap university education). What we do not understand is the particulars. Why is this all coming to a head now? And what does it mean for America and the global economy in this era of depression not yet averted.

We saw Greece implode. We are hearing more of the same about Ireland. From our perception it would seem Italy and Spain are in even more unsustainable models than the Irish, at least as ill-conceived as the Greeks. What is most troubling is the thought of contagion. Although the domino theory has not been shown to work with nationalist insurrections, they do not become pandemic, just the opposite might prove true with nationalist banking crises. The financiers are more interconnected transnationally than the revolutionaries. It goes to figure that elite institutions would be more likely to have international webs weaved than the proletariat.

That being said then, it is all the more urgent that this banking crisis be contained. Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics and Political Science at the UC, Berkeley argues just the opposite is happening,

"The Irish “rescue package” finalized over the weekend is a disaster...The Irish “program” solves exactly nothing – it simply kicks the can down the road. A public debt that will now top out at around 130 per cent of GDP has not been reduced by a single cent...Ireland will be transferring nearly 10 per cent of its national income as reparations to the bondholders, year after painful year. This is not politically sustainable, as anyone who remembers Germany’s own experience with World War I reparations should know. A populist backlash is inevitable...Nor is the situation economically sustainable. Ireland is told to reduce wages and costs...[this is] the phenomenon of “debt deflation” about which the Yale economist Irving Fisher wrote in a famous article at the nadir of the Great Depression.

One can interpret the intransigence of the [EU] in two ways. First, they understand neither economics nor politics. As Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, “They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing.”

Alternatively, policy makers in Germany – and in France and Britain – are scared to death over what Ireland restructuring its bank debt would do to their own banking systems. If so, the appropriate response is not to lend to Ireland – to pile yet more debt on the country’s existing debt – but to properly capitalize their own banking systems so that the latter can withstand the inevitable Irish restructuring.

But European officials are scared to death not just by their banks but by their publics, who don’t want to hear that public money is required for bank recapitalization. It’s safer, in their view, to kick the can down the road in the hope that something good will turn up – to rely on “the luck of the Irish.”

As John Maynard Keynes – who knew about matters like reparations – once said, leadership involves “ruthless truth telling..."

Well dang, if that doesn't just sound a little scary. Read the whole piece here.

Jackie Robinson

2010-12-11T17:11:00.004-05:00

How's about this one for a story we had never heard previously...

Social reformer and legendary baseball great, Jackie Robinson, who famously broke the color-line in what were, until then, the all-white Major Leagues, was once court-martialed for refusing to move to the back of an Army bus at Fort Hood, Texas. What!?! He was acquitted on all charges, but that was surely a story the Clarion Content had never heard about Robinson.

He had also been turned away when he tried to play for the Army base baseball team at Ft. Riley, Kansas. He was told to report instead to "the colored team," which, of course, did not exist, a Jim Crow joke.

Ugly, but a story that bears repeating, as it only happened sixty years or so ago.

Found on Foreign Policy.com.

Halliburton bribery

2010-12-07T13:05:00.004-05:00

In Nigeria, earlier this week, authorities detained ten Nigerian and expatriate Halliburton staff for questioning after raiding its Lagos office. The Houston based engineering firm KBR, a former Halliburton subsidiary, pleaded guilty last year to charges in U.S. court that it paid $180 million in bribes between 1994 and 2004 to Nigerian officials to secure $6 billion in contracts for the Bonny Island liquefied natural gas project in the Niger Delta.

No way!

The rich were illegally getting richer under the reign of King George the II?!?

Say it isn't so...

KBR and Halliburton reached a $579 million settlement with the United States, but Nigeria, France and Switzerland are conducting their own investigations. Albert "Jack" Stanley, the former KBR chief executive officer who worked under the Dick Cheney when he headed Halliburton, pleaded guilty in 2008 to charges stemming from a scheme to bribe Nigerian officials for work on the Bonny Island plant.

Elizabeth Edwards

2010-12-07T09:09:00.001-05:00

"...there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human. I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful."---Elizabeth Edwards

Buffett advice

2010-12-05T12:16:00.003-05:00

Warren Buffett last Sunday on "This Week" with Christiane Amanpour, "The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll all go out and spend more, and then it will trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on."

Bomb a nuclear weapons program?

2010-11-30T19:40:00.001-05:00

There is more than one way to bomb a nuclear weapons program, as the CIA and Mossad showed today, allegedly. Twin blasts in Iran killed a top nuclear scientist and maimed another today; unidentified motorcycle riders sped past their vehicles in different parts of the capital Tehran attaching bombs to the windows which detonated seconds later.

Right out of a movie.

Thanks to our friends at Rantburg for the heads up.

What small town rule might look like

2010-11-29T18:48:00.003-05:00

Old McAlester High School

Last week the town of McAlester, Oklahoma showed Americans what small town justice might look like, for good and for bad, if left entirely to its own devices. Protesters from Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas were in town demonstrating at the funeral of Army Sergeant Jason James McCluskey. Westboro church members are infamous for picketing military funerals across the country, spreading their message that "God hates America" because it tolerates homosexuality.

In McAlester, Oklahoma they were jeered and outshouted by a crowd of more than 1,000 people. More than two dozen cops formed a security cordon around the Westboro protesters. In the end they returned to their mini van to discover two of their tires had been slashed. To quote the Tulsa World, "To make matters worse, as their minivan slowly hobbled away on two flat tires, with a McAlester police car following behind, the protesters were unable to find anyone in town who would repair their vehicle, according to police."

Small town justice.

But it today's America, no such option exists. It has been globalized. The tentacles of Empire reach even to McAlester, Oklahoma. The Tulsa World continues..."The minivan finally pulled over several blocks away in a shopping center parking lot, where AAA was called. A flatbed service truck arrived and loaded up the minivan. Assistant Police Chief Darrell Miller said the minivan was taken to Walmart for repairs."

Bell Labs, an untold story

2010-11-29T18:17:00.003-05:00

Tim Wu, the developer of Net Neutrality theory, has written a fascinatingly little article for io9.com. He documents the interplay between Bell Labs, the government and the profit motive of a corporation. Bell Labs, for some fifty plus years, was one of the preeminent research institutions and facilities in the world. Its scientists garnered seven Noble Prizes. They invented the transistor and Unix. But it was not a public facility, nor a wholly state-owned entity, it was a private actor with its own particular motives.

Wu shows what that wrought, in this brilliant nugget- here.

No more hiding behind a wall

2010-11-29T11:11:00.000-05:00

The United States Army is deploying a revolutionary new weapon in the endless war in Central Asia. The Army's project manager for the program says it is a game changer. Naturally. It does sound to the Clarion Content like a particularly gruesome tool, as it designed to eliminate the target's ability to hide behind cover.

The weapon is called the XM-25 rifle. It is a programmable rifle that can be set so that its 25 millimeter ammunition rounds detonate either in front of or behind a target. It something like a meld between a rifle and a grenade launcher. Sounds interesting, right? In theory it works like this:

-- A patrol encounters an enemy combatant in a walled village who fires an AK-47 intermittently from behind cover, exposing himself only for a brief second to fire.

-- The patrol's leader calls for the XM25 gunman, who uses the weapon's laser range finder to calculate the distance to the target.

-- He then uses an incremental button located near the trigger to add 1 meter to the round's distance, since the enemy is hiding behind a wall.

-- The round is fired, and it explodes with a blast comparable to a hand grenade past the wall and above the enemy.

It has a range of 2,300 feet.

And somebody is making some green off of these bad boys. They reportedly cost $35,000 per rifle! According to Lt. Colonel Christopher Lehner, the Army is ordering 12,000 of them in the next year, ostensibly enough to have one per Infantry and Special Forces squad deployed in the theater of war.

The era of ducking behind a wall is ending.

Thanks to our friends at Rantburg for the heads up on this one.

Bush book prank

2010-11-19T12:29:00.004-05:00

There is a movement afoot and a Facebook page dedicated to causing a little fun-loving mischief now that King George the II's new book has come out. The plan is this: Move Bush's memoir to the Crime section of your local bookstore (the Fiction, Science Fiction, and Humor sections are also applicable), take a picture of your handiwork, and post it to the wall of the event page on Facebook.

We highly recommend joining in!

Sponsored by Waging Nonviolence.

Good Samaritan: How about that engineer!

2010-11-15T17:31:00.002-05:00

At the Clarion Content we sometimes take heat for being too negative. We are not naive enough to ever believe we could be fair and balanced, but we do think about and follow the positive, too. We take great joy in reading good stories. It is sometimes difficult because of the nature of the angle of the media, of which we might be forced to concede, we are a part. In our view, the role of the fourth estate is inherently critical, though not exclusively so. Being outside the gates of power, it is the press's obligation to shine a light on what is going behind the walls and the proverbial curtains, in the smoked filled rooms.

However, this time, today, it is "Ahoy, good news ahead!"

Check out this story we just ran across in the Seattle Times.

Duane Innes of Kent, Washington, who is a Boeing manager and engineer by training, had a brilliant and ingenious good samaritan moment. While driving to a Seattle Mariners baseball game this July, Innes saw a pickup truck ahead of him drift across several lanes of traffic, sideswipe a concrete barrier and continue forward on the inside shoulder at about 40 mph.

Innes, in a minivan, knew a busy intersection was just ahead. Balls and brains, all systems go, Innes told the Seattle Times, "Basic physics: If I could get in front of him and let him hit me, the delta difference in speed would just be a few miles an hour, and we could slow down together."

Without consulting the passengers in his minivan, "there was no time to take a vote," he pulled his minivan onto the shoulder at speed, got in front of Bill Pace's pickup, and allowed it to rear-end his vehicle, then brought both safely to a stop before the intersection. The eighty year-old driver, Pace, had a minor heart attack two days earlier. He had passed out at the wheel of his truck, due to what doctors later deemed to be poor circulation, with his foot on the gas.

Read the whole harrowing, but ultimately redeeming story here.

The long con

2010-11-12T10:00:00.005-05:00

Faces you can trust?

Although it does not get much publicity, there are still people out there running the long con. The long con is a confidence trick played out over time. The hustler gains the complete or nearly complete confidence of the mark, they use this power to defraud the mark of substantial amounts of dough over an extended period of time.

Today, we ran across one of the worst/best examples we had heard about in quite some while. Roger Davidson was scammed out of somewhere between $6 million and $20 million according to court filings. Computer geek, Vickram Bedi, thirty-six, and his Icelandic girlfriend Helga Invarsdottir, thirty-nine, were first visited by Davidson in an attempt to rid his laptop of a virus.

Upon learning of his wealth, the pair, initiated what the police called "an elaborate social engineering scheme," eg. the long con. They convinced Davidson that his computer virus was part of a larger plot in which he was being menaced by government intelligence agencies, foreign nationals and the shrouded in secrecy, Catholic organization, Opus Dei. How they got Davidson to buy into this conspiracy is unclear. Police allege that Davidson paid the couple $160,000 per month for 24-hour protection against the purported threats. This continued for a period of six years.

Police continue to investigate other ways the couple might have been defrauding Davidson of his money.

Missle Launch

2010-11-09T19:20:00.003-05:00

The media and the blogosphere are a flutter over a supposed submarine missile launch immediately off of the coast of California. Some spectacular footage was captured by a KCBS Los Angeles television crew, check it out here.

The United States Navy and Air Force both officially have no knowledge of the event. NORAD claims it did not pick up a missle launch. The Pentagon asserts it was not from a foreign source.

The comments on our old friend Rantburg's site range from the hilarious, like India test firing the nuclear missile submarine that Obama just sold them, "Kicking the tires and revving the engine? Would YOU take somebody's word that the missiles would fire?" to the skeptical, "a jet contrail viewed from a funny angle," to the conspiratorial, "a target missile for a new type anti-missile system. Probably something so classified it would make your toenails rot off...we don't know what NSA/CIA/super-secret-moose-n-squirrel-division is up to..."

Read them all here.

Duck and Cover, on point

2010-11-08T09:54:00.001-05:00

Our friends over at Duck and Cover have seen our future...

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Sound familiar

2010-11-08T09:07:00.000-05:00

As we think about the decline (and potential fall) of the American hegemon, we see some referential wisdom in the words of the Roman historian Sallust...

"Growing love of money, and the lust for power which followed it, engendered every kind of evil. Avarice destroyed honor, integrity and every other virtue, and instead taught men to be proud and cruel, to neglect religion, and to hold nothing too sacred to sell. Ambition tempted many to be false... At first these vices grew slowly and sometimes met with punishments; later on when the disease had spread like a plague, Rome changed: her government, once so just and admirable, became harsh and unendurable."

Rasmussen Reports polls widely wrong

2010-11-03T08:25:00.005-04:00

The Clarion Content, among many others, has questioned the accuracy and neutrality of polls from the Rasmussen Reports. They were founded by a former employee of the coronation, errr, campaign, of King George the II. They consistently phrase their polling questions with just a little twist to produce the desired result.

Their defense? They were right on the numbers in 2004 and 2006.

Last night, however, they were outed. According to our friend Nate Silver, over at the 538, "Rasmussen polls quite consistently turned out to overstate the standing of Republicans tonight. Of the roughly 100 polls released by Rasmussen or its subsidiary Pulse Opinion Research in the final 21 days of the campaign, roughly 70 to 75 percent overestimated the performance of Republican candidates, and on average they were biased against Democrats by 3 to 4 points."

Interestingly, it would be our argument that overstating your candidates odds at the polls actually hurts their chances. It would be analagous to the brass continuously telling American troops in Vietnam that the enemy was weak, under-armed, on the verge of starvation and primed for defeat. These lies and exaggerations actually harmed United States soldiers and Marines by leading them to regularly underestimate the enemy. We would argue that the Rasmussen Reports did something of the same for right-wing candidates last night.

Another Whistleblower punished

2010-10-29T09:05:00.004-04:00

It has long been the Clarion Content's contention that America hates the whistleblower. It is one of the tragedies inherent in capitalism. The whistleblower is viewed as a downer, a party-pooper, somebody who refuses to get with the program.

We have another poignant, sad, story of a whistleblower who would not do what the program wanted her to do, specifically the State University of New York at Binghamton's basketball program wanted her to do. Change player's grades to make them eligible to compete. The New York Times reports that Sally Dear, an adjunct lecturer at the university, said the fallout of the scandal had deeply wounder her and continued to affect her. She has stated publicly that she received so much pressure to change her grading policy for basketball players that it bordered on harassment.

As the scandal has enveloped the university how has it played out?

The university paid a $1.2 million settlement to former basketball coach Kevin Broadus to resign. Broadus will receive $819,115 from the Binghamton athletic department and $380,884 from the general fund of the State University of New York. The payment exceeds the value of Broadus’s remaining contract and requires him to withdraw the racial discrimination lawsuit he filed in March and to relinquish his right to any other claims against the university.

Professor Dear? No million dollar payments to her for calling the basketball program on its cheating. Instead, she said in a recent telephone interview with the NY Times that she has not been assigned to teach classes next semester. Punished.

During Coach Broadus's brief tenure six players were dismissed from the team, including one who was busted selling crack. One player was allowed in consecutive semester's to take sixteen and then twelve credits of Physical Education, when the maximum in the second semester should have been two credits. The scandal forced the university's Provost to step down.

How does Professor Dear feel about all of this mess? She told the NY Times, "This is why people don’t blow the whistle. I understand. In my heart and in my gut and every fiber of my being I understand why people don’t blow the whistle, why people are afraid to tell the truth. My life has been a living hell since all this took place."

Drill, Alaska? A reality check.

2010-10-27T09:33:00.005-04:00

The U.S. Geological Survey issued a reality check to those who think that United States can get by without foreign oil. Mind you, those who think U.S. oil resources are/were sufficient are in a special minority of dreamers, right there with those who still think the Earth is the center of the universe and the tooth fairy is real.

Despite the fact that these folks aren't the sort to be swayed by facts or numbers, it cannot help their cause that the U.S. Geological Survey revised the amount of untapped oil reserves that it estimates are in Alaska and its waters down by 90% this week.

The Survey group's new estimate is 896 million barrels of oil are in the reserve, approximately 90% less than a 2002 estimate of 10.6 billion barrels. The good news natural gas reserve estimates were revised upward from 8 trillion cubic feet of gas to 61 trillion cubic feet gas.

Side note, the United States desperately needs more liquefied natural gas terminals. Imagine an America willing to invest in its infrastructure. Too bad, it is a dream, not a reality.

Can the Tea Party get out the vote?

2010-10-26T10:01:00.004-04:00

The Los Angeles Times ran an article this morning asking that very question. In their view, the answer is unclear. They report that, "Up to now, the emphasis on the right has been on television ads, and conservative groups — including American Crossroads, founded in part by GOP strategist Karl Rove — have dominated...the push to get the nation's conservative voters to the polls is fractured and untested, with some "tea party" activists refusing to cooperate with more mainstream Republicans, in contrast to the unified and well-organized parallel effort by unions and Democrats, according to key players on both sides."

Is this for real? Or are they just trying to get their side hyped up?

It has long been the Clarion Content's contention that the media is missing the point when they say there has been a massive shift toward the Republicans this election cycle. We heartily disagree. There is simply much of the same simmering discontent that has been present for the last several election cycles. There is a massive undercurrent of unrest in American that spans the political spectrum. It has been seen through insurgent candidacies in both parties: from Howard Dean through Obama to Sarah Palin, the parameters have remained essentially the same even as the particulars have differed.

Will the Tea Party produce a big early fizz followed by a small pop, ala Howard Dean? Or will they have more of an Obama-scale effect?

The Clarion Content is now betting on big Republican gains in the House, enough to net a 20+ seat majority, while the Democrats hold on to the Senate by 2 to 4 seats.