It came down to two choices on what to give you. This, or a new video of GOP Presidential Candidate Thaddeus McCotter playing guitar to “Let It Rock” on Huckabee.
Not really much of a contest, really.
It’s called “The National Anthem” for obvious reason.
Sing along. It’s easy.
“Yes I know the rent is steep; But the whores and beer are really cheap!”
Notes, for those interested in what’s under the hood: The drums lift the rhythm from “The Wanderer.” Classic Fender Champ sound, recorded mostly live with a Fender amp and Option 5 Destination Overdrive. Axe — the ol’ ’79 Gibson SG and two harmonicas, one made in Japan, the other in Deutschland. Some Pennsy Dutch voice comedy from old vinyl.
General Electric Co. (GE), oncestill vilified in the U.S. for leadership in outsourcing jobs, is pulling more information-technology positions back in-house.
Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt has said GE will add more than 15,000 jobs in the three years through December. About 1,100 will be just outside Detroit in a center for information technology, a field emblematic of outsourcing. So far, GE has hired about 660 people in Michigan, a state that led the nation in jobless rates, making it a symbol of U.S. industrial decline.
Manufacturing expenses in the U.S. have narrowed in comparison to countries like China and India, helping GE add skilled jobs like the 125 planned at a flagship gas-turbine plant in Greenville, South Carolina, Immelt said in July.
About $17 billion of GE’s $150 billion in sales last year came from exports, a trend that fuels creation of such positions, Immelt said July 13. In the second quarter, about 59 percent of GE’s total sales came from overseas.
American innovation at its best. Web applications for small business.
T-shirt made in el Salvador or China or somewhere else, maybe Vietnam, just not here.
“Cairo (the Seal Team 6 dog) for Prez,” another in the Dick Destiny T-shirt fashion line called “Great and funny T-shirts no one will have the nerve to wear.”
Most seem to have noticed there’s been no dividend to the middle class. Bin Laden is offed and everything goes on as usual. The obvious wars continue. Secret operations escalate. The new secretary of defense and the head of the Pentagon go on television to complain that if the triggers on the terrible debt deal are ever allowed to activate, it will ruin them and threaten their ability to defend our freedoms from so many enemies.
All rubbish. They’re smart people and they know the only freedoms defended, not that everything is rotting out at home, are the freedoms to keep sending really big checks to the Lockheed Martins and Raytheons.
So where is the bin Laden dividend? Besides a week of celebration, the granting of access to the superdog on the trip — Cairo, and a story I declined to read in the New Yorker because it had been summarized so well everywhere else? Where did it go?
The White House is also counting on the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal big-screen version of the killing of Bin Laden to counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual. The Sony film by the Oscar-winning pair who made “The Hurt Locker??? will no doubt reflect the president’s cool, gutsy decision against shaky odds. Just as Obamaland was hoping, the movie is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, 2012 — perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.
The moviemakers are getting top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration.
It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president’s image to Hollywood when Boal got welcomed to the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon and showed up recently — to the surprise of some military officers — at a C.I.A. ceremony celebrating the hero Seals.
Just like W., Obama is going for that “Mission Accomplished??? glow (without the suggestive harness). At least in this president’s case, though, something has been accomplished.
Dowd can’t quite put her finger on what that “something” was.
It’ll be a great movie to watch, no doubt, after putting the price of the ticket, pop corn and soda on the credit card because your bank account is empty. We got the bad guy. They’ll be catchy and inspirational lines — lines no one actually said — at climactic moments. Some big deals in Hollywood will get to be even bigger deals in the winner-take-all great society. Yay.
Unsurprisingly, military excursions, flavor — special operations — at work in private war, well, everywhere:
This global presence – in about 60% of the world’s nations and far larger than previously acknowledged – provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world …
With real clout, it can win bureaucratic battles, purchase cutting-edge technology, and pursue fringe research like electronically beaming messages into people’s heads(like we really need to make the crazy people who read this even more crazy) or developing stealth-like cloaking technologies for ground troops. Since 2001, SOCOM’s prime contracts awarded to small businesses – those that generally produce specialty equipment and weapons – have jumped six-fold …
That aura now benefits from a well-honed public relations campaign which helps them project a superhuman image at home …
Superhuman.
An observation: When the place is declining into the unique status of third world status except for biggest, baddest military it doesn’t take much to impress the locals. It’s not like we’re overloaded with obvious talent. And those old Nick Fury & his Howling Commandos and Sgt. Rock comics always had appeal.
What’s also unsurprising is that these types of stories aren’t from the mainstream media in this country. This, a syndication to the Asia Times from TomDispatch.
Inexplicably, the old man speaks from the wires. It is true, crazy, or worthless? Heck if I know:
Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and perennial third-party presidential candidate, announced last month that he would work to find a Democrat to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012.
Nader now says that a primary challenge is a near certainty …
Much confusion follows. It emerges that Nader will not run again. That the challenger may be an “ex-governor” or “an intellectual” or “environmental” leader.
The upshot seems to be that the debt ceiling catastrophe and subsequent market drop have contributed to the certainty of a challenge.
I’m scratching my head on who would actually be better than the president? Who, exactly, in 2011 America is an “intellectual” or “environmental” leader that doesn’t make 90 percent of the population go, “Huh?”
What ex-governor? Ed Rendell? Hah-hah.
The speculation invites a laugh riot in the same way the current GOP hopefuls do. Let’s see if we can come up with our own John Huntsmans and Thad McCotters.
DD will believe serious budgets to the Pentagon after they arrive.
But for the last two days we’ve had a number of stories in which cuts to defense are already being bemoaned by “think tanks” and “defense analysts” who have never been our friends.
The last bit, taken from a Daily Beast thing syndicated to Yahoo, is a bit of a laugh riot, Unintentionally, of course:
“Do you want to share the world with the Chinese or with nuclear-armed Iran???? [says Thomas Donnelly from the American Enterprise Institute]. “The only thing worse than Americans running the world is someone else running the world.???
For Pentagon officials and many defense analysts, that is a dark scenario and far worse than any budget crisis.
Realistically, with American multi-national help, the Chinese are already “running” all dry goods stores in the United States. And I’ve laughed at the idea of a shooting war with them, for these reasons, previously.
Beware the green pantywaists. These guys would get slaughtered by the US military of 1945.
Since arms manufacturing is the only protected industry in the US and it’s spread out everywhere, it’s just not a Republican thing. Journalists on the beat know that. And what you haven’t seen in these articles are all the Democrats that will line up to sabotage any theoretical cuts to the defense budget when the time comes using the well-worn argument that they’re protecting wages and jobs in their districts.
A dose of horseshit from plutocrat Richard Clarke today, one of the fathers of cyberwar and cyberterror furor going back to the Clinton administration.
Clarke opines on the pages of a Boston newspaper. Very little of it is worth reading for value in 2011 America. Arguments about cyberwar are of no interest to the American middle class. National “defense” again it is without value.
What Clarke knows — he’s a smart guy — is that the serious attacks on the country have all been internal. And they have nothing to do with the bullshit meme of cyberwar.
The problems that plague the United States — economic failure on a breath-taking scale — have nothing to do with the issues he’s pursued for the last decade. It’s an astonishing thing to have been shown to be so wrong in the last three years.
The enemy was not the explosion of the wired world. And, in comparison to what has been done to the average well-being of Americans, theoretical cyberwars and Stuxnet viruses are trivial things.
In the US, most journalists on the cybersecurity/cyberwar beat act like insane people. They call up and always want to talk about what a cyberwar would look like and what can be done to forestall or mitigate it.
When I tell American reporters these things they act as if bitten by a poisonous snake coming out of the telephone line.
What? You question the authority of the Clarke’s and Mike McConnell’s of our great nation?
Nope, just asking for some grounding in the real world. Some perspective. Not the opinions from someone used to employing argument from totem pole authority over and over.
IMAGINE IF President Kennedy issued a nuclear war strategy in the 1960s that omitted the fact that we had nuclear weapons, B-52 bombers, and long-range missiles. What if his public strategy had just talked about fallout shelters and protecting the government? As absurd as that would have been, that is similar to what the Obama administration just did with regard to the nation’s cyber war strategy …
[Generals] have bemoaned the inability of the civilian departments and the private sector to defend critical US networks (like banking, electricity, and transportation) and have suggested the military may have to defend those networks.
During his confirmation hearings, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta voiced concern about the possibility of a “digital Pearl Harbor’’ that would cripple our electric power grid, banks, and transportation networks.
There it all is. The plutocrat obsession with attacks — always mentioning banking and electrical power — the former which gives away the concern that the paupers could come for their stuff. And so they need military grade protection.
You can ask people to mull over a simple thought experiment having to do with the US economy.
Yesterday, the news was very bad. The stock market tanked due to lack of faith in the stability and wisdom of the US government and economic health of the nation, so reliant upon it. The Chinese — who are often mentioned as those who could launch a cyberwar on the US — issued a dressing down on the matter.
As tightly intertwined as China is with the US, it absolutely must export to this country, of what possible value would be an attack from that country on our economy and financial system in cyberspace?
Assuming such a campaign could be mounted (and I doubt that it actually could), it would be a disaster for them. Yes, try to damage the purchasing power of your biggest customer even more.
That’s just rubbish thinking.
But that’s the Richard Clarke view. Clarke knows absolutely nothing of what matters to or affects average Americans.
“We can’t balance the budget on the backs of people who have borne the biggest brunt of this recession,” the president said, renewing his call for higher taxes on the wealthy. “Everyone is going to have to chip in. It’s only fair.”
The Census Bureau reported last fall that 43 million Americans, one in seven of us, were poor. But what is poverty in America?
The most recent government data show more than half of the families defined as poor by the Census Bureau now have a computer in the home. More than three of every four poor families have air conditioning, almost two-thirds have cable or satellite television, and 92 percent have microwaves.
How poor are America’s poor? The typical poor family has at least two color TVs, a VCR and a DVD player. A third have a widescreen, plasma or LCD TV. And the typical poor family with children has a video game system such as Xbox or PlayStation.
So with Heritage, you have the ready made Tea Party/GOP argument for eliminating food stamps because they’ve written that America’s poor are spoiled and with too much cheap consumer electronics in the apartment.
Of course, I didn’t see this while canvassing for the census. The poor people in Pasadena’s city center were definitely visibly poor.
“None of this means America’s poor live in the lap of luxury,” concedes the Heritage man near the end, apparently a little self-conscious over where he’s taken the reader. “The lifestyle of the typical poor family certainly isn’t opulent.”
Isn’t opulent. That seems safe to say. Where do they dig up these manglers of English and critical thinking?
The consequences for 2010, a very bad night for the Democratic Party, when the extremists were let in.
They always wanted to destroy government and are implacable. The Democrats can’t fight that animus given the willingness of the Tea Party/GOP to shoot the middle class dog if it doesn’t get its way. (However, they are somewhat culpable in their inability to explain this to Americans, again and again.)
The civilians are not without blame. It’s as if elections are viewed as a recalcitrant machine. Confronted with a lit green button that didn’t work, one which left them feeling bad because of the destroyed economy, most simply pushed (or push) the red self-destruct button right beside simply because it’s different than the one that’s operating poorly. That’s idiocy.
For every Robert Reich who is carping on the left, there are a dozen unhappy Republicans who think the GOP is acting recklessly. John Boehner’s speakership is in ashes. Michele Bachmann in now polling about evenly with Mitt Romney. The GOP is having a huge internal fight and is loathed and mistrusted by the entire international community. They have been exposed for the radicals that they are, and the people disagree overwhelmingly with their behavior and their approach …
The truth is, the 2010 midterms were a catastrophe. They had horrible consequences. This weekend was one of those consequences, and it couldn’t be avoided through “leadership.”
The rest of the world knows the US has unstable government and is in what sure looks like irreversible decline. Most people here now get that, too.
Finally, it was just too sad seeing the President thank people for using Twitter and getting on the telephones.
Infernally, the banner ad for made-in-China counterfeit Gibson guitars seems to be everywhere. Obviously, one big Net advertising firm in the US spins these out as part of a package deal going everywhere.
And I don’t know who it is. If you do, put it in the comments or please e-mail me.
