Should have been in the NSA, kid

Seems a young man at South Fayette High School in Pennsylvania who suffers from ADHD was sick and tired of being bullied and recorded on his iPad kids as they were bullying him.  Assistant Principal Aaron Skrbin (has there ever been an Assistant Principal anywhere who didn't make Niedermeyer from Animal House look like a bastion of righteousness?) reported that the bullying previously reported didn't measure up to his definition of bullying (sure to be a circle of hell reserved for him).  Principal Scott Milburn contacted police over what he considered to be a "wiretapping incident."  Lt. Robert Kurta interviewed the young man and told him to destroy the recording and charged him with disorderly conduct.  Judge Maureen McGraw-Desmet upheld the charge and the young man was fined $25 and had to pay court costs.

So...four adults had the opportunity to right a wrong, and all four chose to turn their heads, not do their fucking jobs, and blame the messenger rather than rectify the message.

The people of South Fayette, Pennsylvania must be so proud to have four leaders setting such a fine example for their kids--if, of course, they want their kids not to know how to lead a pack of starving dogs to fucking meat.

Too bad for the young man that he wasn't in the NSA--he could have just said the bullies were Al-Qaeda members and their asses would have been shipped off to Guantanamo.

Peace.
emaycee

It's the jobs, stupid

The editors at AlterNet got together and made a list of the ten failures of President Obama that make them angriest.  It is the usual litany of complaints you'd expect from those of us on the left--failure to prosecute big banks, the drone programs, NSA surveillance, the President's too easy and often capitulation to republicans, among others.

You know what the list doesn't contain?  The single failure that should make all Democrats angriest--the administrations inability to improve the jobs market.  Yes, I know a President in and of himself cannot create jobs, but he can sure push an agenda, and it's not as if President Obama didn't have the legacy of FDR and his public works as a guide.  It isn't as if we don't need a lot of work on the country's infrastructure.

Look, the items noted by the editors at AlterNet (truly one of my favorite sites) are all well and good, but we on the left all too often fail to note that those issues, while important, aren't usually so with a majority of Americans.  As we embark on the 2014 election cycle, you'd be hard pressed to come up with 10% of the American people who believe any of these failures to be among the most important issues of this year's elections.

The second greatest tragedy of Bill Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky (the first being the hurt he caused his family) was the good will of an excellent economy he wasted having to spend two years fighting the ridiculous republican impeachment fiasco.  To think of the good he could have done for the country with an electorate full of Americans with good jobs and economic optimism.

If the editors at AlterNet really want Americans to make surveillance on Americans or racism in the war on drugs a priority, they'd do well to focus on the economic well-being of working class Americans.

Otherwise, they're very likely to stay too damn busy just trying to survive to care.

Peace,
emaycee

Whither journalistic curiosity?

The NSA spying revelations really aren't my forte (not that anything else I write about is, but you know...) but I found it quite interesting that Mike Rogers (R-MI)--my very own Congressman--Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX) all were on Meet the Press and This Week with George Stephanopoulos this past weekend pushing the idea that Edward Snowden must have had help with the NSA leaks (most notably, from Russia) without producing a single shred of evidence to prove it so (in fairness to Feinstein, she at least admitted as much).

Both David Gregory and Stephanopoulos questioned the allegations--which to me seem of a bombshell type nature--but both seemed quite content to let the matter drop without pushing much harder than a dried leaf does against the wind.

What...the...fuck?  Really?  Three members of Congress make wild ass claims about foreign governments helping to leak our very own NSA information on national TV news shows and not one of these journalists jumps up and down like a fucking monkey screaming "Proof!  Proof! Proof!"

Thank God these fuckers weren't around during Watergate--Nixon probably would have been able to circumvent the Constitution and win a third term as President.

Peace,
emaycee

Whistle while you (don't) work

A short while ago I read a fairly uninteresting piece with a very interesting premise:  Is corporate America trying to distract us from our dismal economic situation with their support for social issues (specifically gay rights)?  The answer, not surprisingly, was yes.

I've been thinking about this premise over the past few days as any number of the Liberal websites I visit regularly have been overrun with pieces (a good one here) discussing what our role--mostly against any role--should be in Syria (the uproar on those same sites about the NSA revelations brought out the same thought).  Not so much that corporate America has orchestrated either of them, but that all the while Liberals are discussing Syria and the NSA, we're not discussing the piss poor state of our economy and American corporations can continue their survival of the richest campaign unabated.

For the record, mostly because of our abysmal record in the Middle East, I am against any kind of action in Syria.  But regardless of what Congress decides on the President's call to arms (and I'll give President Obama his deserved props for not acting unilaterally as has become the precedent), whether we drop bombs or not, when it's all over the ever increasing gap in income inequality will not have been whittled one iota, wage stagnation will have remained constant, one in six Americans will still live in poverty, one in five Americans will still have not had enough money to buy food, the number of poor Americans will continue to grow, and the middle class will continue to shrink.

And for the life of me, I don't know why the average American should give two shits about what Congress decides to do concerning the use of chemical weapons in a country thousands of miles away.

Peace,
emaycee

Not a pretty sight

Once again...I'm not trying to make light of the NSA spying program, but Digby reported yesterday that we've reached a point where "...it's always possible someone is watching you take a shit."

Quite frankly, I'd feel a lot more sorry for the poor bastard who has to watch my fat ass sitting on a toilet while I take a dump than I would for myself being watched as I do it.

Seriously.

Peace,
emaycee

Blind squirrels

Couple the revelation that the man behind the NSA spying leaks, Edward Snowden, donated money to Ron Paul's Presidential campaign with the statements by Rand Paul concerning the government overstepping its constitutional bounds and it seems to me like a bit of a conundrum.

Ron and Rand Paul are not political hacks doing their party's bidding like, say, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell.  These two men are certified kooks who believe an American utopia would be one where a person without health insurance with a serious medical condition should be quickly nailed into his or her coffin and placed six feet into the earth.

I've heard tell that even a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn, and this certainly may be a case where Liberals are going to march lockstep with the Pauls...but I can't be the only one who's a little bit nervous at the prospect, can I?

Peace,
emaycee

Where we're at

I'll be the first to admit that the ins and outs of spying on Americans is not my forte (not that much else I write about, other than living a middle class existence, really is) but with the amount of Liberal anguish this week over the NSA spying and PRISM revelations, I have a few observations.  Note that in no way am I defending what was done--just pointing out a few things that seemed kind of odd:

• There sure was a lot of  "Can you believe they did this?" that really should have been, "See? I told you so!"  Once the Patriot Act passed, and with each subsequent reauthorization, this kind of spying on Americans was not a matter of if, but of when.
• A lot of people sounded as goofy as Tea Party paranoids in going on about how much we should be worried about the government spying on us.  There's some serious ego out there--I mean, my guess is about 99% of Americans have absolutely nothing going on in their lives that the government gives two shits about.  I mean about 90% of internet content makes NCIS look like fucking Shakespeare, and judging from the inanity I've heard in people carrying on cellphone conversations as if the rest of humanity doesn't exist, the government would need enough No-Doz to fill Lake Superior just to stay awake.  Doesn't make the spying on the 1% who may have something going on in their lives that the government cares about right, just means a lot of people really lack perspective.
• The funniest one I read was this one (which even goofier, Digby actually bought into) by one James Fallows, who because he's watched 24 (among others), presumes to tell us that the rationale behind the spying, ferreting out terrorists, actually is false, because terrorists are such criminal masterminds that they won't fall into the government's trap.  Like the Shoe Bomber setting fire to his heel, the Underwear Bomber setting fire to his dong, and the Boston Marathon bombers who managed to get caught in all of three days.  This is not even mentioning that for all their planning, the 9/11 terrorists missed half their targets.  La Cosa Nostra  they ain't.  Can't even begin--even with his disclaimer--to understand the whole TV show rigamarole.  Man, I watched 24 religiously from its first episode to its last, but I never once believed it bore any more resemblance to reality than your average episode of The fucking Flintstones.
• The piece that scared me the most was this one on Think Progress (which after this The Nation piece on corporate sponsorship of their think tank, the Center for American Progress, may not be so surprising) in which corporate spying was basically played down and government spying was treated as if it were the Bubonic Plague.  Swear to God, it could have been written by Louis Gohmert.  I fear corporate spying exponentially more than than the government--American corporations are only interested in my overpaying for their services, and paying me as little as they can for mine.  At least the government gives a fuck if I live or die--it might be tremendously inept, but it does have my best interests at heart.
• I think sometimes we forget the responsibility that rests on the shoulders of the President.  I have three kids, and if I knew someone wanted to harm them, I'd do whatever it takes to keep them safe--and sleep like a fucking baby at night.  President Obama is responsible for the safety of over 300 million Americans.  I'm not saying that this makes any of this week's revelations about spying on Americans right, just that I can understand his wanting to leave no stone unturned.

In the end, I think what bothers me the most about all of this is that last week the Internation Human Rights Clinic of NYU Law School released a study that showed that 50 million Americans, 17 million of them children, did not have adequate food, and it didn't receive a tenth of the blog space, article space, or TV time as did the spying on Americans.  We're talking an essential necessity of living--eating.

I don't know if we Liberals have become numb to it, feel helpless in the face of it, or are just too interested in showing how intelligent we are, but frankly, it bothers me a whole hell of a lot more knowing that one in six Americans is going hungry than it does that the NSA knows we went to Taco Bell last night and then came home and watched reruns of The Big Bang Theory on TNT.

Peace,
emaycee