I’ve just started reading through some of the summaries and stories on the recent Wikileaks release of over 250,000 diplomatic cables and I must say,  this stuff is awesome…for international politics geeks.

Most of the world might get interesting in a few tidbits here or there (like Ghaddafi’s Amazonian guard) or some juicy bits of partisan chatter, but for those of us who like to watch the politics and policies unfold on the grand scale, this is an amazing resource of insider information.

There is going to be fallout from this release for years, if not a permanent change in the ways some of this information is handled (if it has happened once, it will happen again). 

Then NYT has a great intro article here.   There’s also going to be parsing and pawing at what one news source or another pulls out of the quarter-million cables.

But in reality is just tons and tons and tons of background on and inside info of what gets done, how it gets done, a very little on why.  

Regardless, for someone like me, watching all this stuff from the outside and guessing here and there on what is going on the inside, having a full and open view of what is going on the onside is like Christmas in late November.

It’s going to be the same for our friends and enemies as well, as there are more than a few major world figures who get the “here’s my full, honest opinion” treatment, which is always dangerous (try it with your boss some time).

Saw this, had to share.  Please do it, literally, for the children.

The two truths to life (you’ve probably heard this before and will again) :

1) Death
2) Taxes

The two questions of life (you may not have heard these, but now you have):

1) What are you going to die for? (conversely and with the exact same real-world meaning: What are you going to live for?)
2) What should the tax rate be?

The two answers to the two questions of life (you’ve definitely heard these):

1) Freedom (allows one to decide what to die/live for)
2) Democracy (allows the many to decide how to tax the rich*)

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* I know some may find this biased, but there is a reason there are *two* truths to life, and not one.

So I constantly hear about how my President is a socialist and transforming the country into a socialist hellhole.

There is pretty constant stream of incontrovertible evidence for this.   See, for example, the record corporate profits posted this quarter.

U.S. companies hauled in profits at a record annual rate of $1.66 trillion dollars in the third quarter, according to a report by the Department of Commerce Tuesday containing a number of economic indicators.

Corporate America is making a strong comeback this year. The rate of growth is set to be one-third faster than the last two years, which hovered around $1.2 trillion.

But if record corporate profits aren’t enough evidence of our slide into socialism, how about the fact that billionaires now pay lower tax rates than their secretaries?

In an interview with NBC’s Tom Brokaw that aired last week, Buffett took his “I’m not paying enough in taxes, and neither are my fellow billionaires” campaign to a new level, highlighting his contention that he pays a lower tax rate than all of his office employees.

He told Brokaw: “I’ll bet a million dollars against any member of the Forbes 400 who challenges me that the average (federal tax rate including income and payroll taxes) for the Forbes 400 will be less than the average of their receptionists.” 

And so far not a single billionaire has come forward to get their free money, ’cause, of course, they are TAXED ENOUGH ALREADY (and lower than their underlings).

They are, however, totally full of shit in their defense of their ludicrously low tax rates.

Several argued that Buffett isn’t taking estate taxes into account.  Casino owner Phillip Ruffin (Tied at #220 with $2.1 billion) told Forbes, “He is forgetting about the 55% estate tax at death that goes along with making the money.  Maybe he is getting senile?”  While not interested in the million-dollar challenge, Ruffin did say he’d play Buffett in poker.

Actually Phillip, he’s not.  Not only is the estate tax currently at 0% (yes, Bush lowered it all the way to 0%) but no one ever pays estate taxes every year, only that one year when you inherit a few hundred billion from dead old dad (like the self-made Tea Party founders, the Koch Brothers).   So even that caveat is gone.

So we have a socialist country where the richest pay the lowest rate, a person with a million dollar sitting in the bank doing nothing makes more and pays less taxes per year than your average blue collar worker, and this money rolls over and over forever, creating a long-term monied class that doesn’t have to work and pays lower tax rates than the working class.  

Now I know that this is being called “socialism” (largely by the minions of the aforementioned Koch Brothers) when in fact it is nothing less than a simple return to the U.S. economy of the late 19th Century, where the Robber Barons ruled all, bought elections with huge amounts of anonymous corporate money, and then had their newly elected employees turn around and lower their tax rates even further (and cutting services to pay for it).

It’s not socialism folks, heck, it’s not even capitalism. 

This is just bullshit.

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NOTE: The funny part about this whole thing?  You know what it was that took the U.S from the Gilded Age to the part in history where we are the pre-eminment economy and super-power?   Hint:  It wasn’t tax cuts for the robber barons.

I’m generally not one to focus on doom and gloom.  As I tend to be a cynically sarcastic optimist (and, of course, the RPN), I can look at and appreciate the horridness of life, the idiocy of our actions, and still, occasionally, find that ray of hope and sunshine in the midst of the shit and suffering.

Let’s see if I can do it here.

First off, the demographic shift.  This was the underlying game-changer in the election.

I see old people

Old people vote.  And do so in a lot more numbers during the mid-terms.  Old people are scared about Mexicans, Muslims, and Socialists.  The media narrative pushed by many during the elections was about a national referendum on the Socialist Muslim President (who likes Mexicans) [this was The Big Lie].   You can guess how this ended up, well, you don’t have to guess, we all saw it.

After: 189 (D)- 239 (R)

Before: 256 (D) – 179 (R)

U.S. Senate

After: 51 (D) – 46 (R)

Before: 57 (D) –  41 (R)

Governor

After: 18 (D) – 29 (R)
Before: 26 (D) – 24 (R)

A massive deep-sea coral die-off was discovered this week about 7 miles (11 kilometers) southwest of the source of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, scientists announced Thursday.

Large communities of several types of bottom-dwelling coral were found covered with a dark substance at depths of about 4,600 feet (1,400 meters) near the damaged Deepwater Horizon wellhead, according to a scientific team on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ship Ronald H. Brown.

—

“The proximity of the site to the disaster, the depth of the site, the clear evidence of recent impact, and the uniqueness of the observations all suggest that the impact we have found is linked to the exposure of this community to either oil, dispersant, extremely depleted oxygen, or some combination of these or other water-borne effects resulting from the spill,” Fisher said in a statement.

…and then found some of the longer-term effects…

Last month, Dr. Wilma Subra, a chemist and Macarthur Fellow, conducted blood tests for volatile solvents on eight people who live and work along the coast.

“All eight individuals tested had Ethylbenzene and m,p- Xylene in their blood in excess of the NHANES 95th percentile,” according to Subra’s report. “Ethylbenzene, m,p-Xylene and Hexane are volatile organic chemicals that are present in the BP Crude Oil. The blood of all three females and five males had chemicals that are found in the BP Crude Oil.”

—

Chuck Barnes is director of the Alabama district of the Eastern Surfing Association, and is responsible for organising surfing competitions.

“In early September our local government gave the all-clear so surfers started going back into the water,” Barnes said. “But we immediately had several surfers get sick with headaches, upper respiratory problems, and other things and that’s when I decided we needed to test the water.”

…and I bring all this up in the context of the election to remind you that Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX), the guy who infamously apologized to BP on behalf of the people of the U.S., is now going to most likely head the House Energy and Commerce Committee, like he did before.

And to add to the crap flow some more, a full 50% of the incoming Congressional class doesn’t even believe in the science…Barton now has a lot of company.

ENVIRONMENT

– 50% deny the existence of manmade climate change
– 86% are opposed to any climate change legislation that increases government revenue

So on that side (the environment) we’re pretty much totally screwed.  We’ll go from a House that passed good legislation to deal with a major global issue (that died in the Senate) to a House that very well might hold hearings investigating “Al Gore’s global warming hoax”.

Add in some standard “Where’s mine? Screw yours!” hypocrisy and we’re almost there.

What one needs to further factor in is the huge shift in Governorships and state legislatures.   We just finished a census, so now it’s time to re-draw districts.  Hence the national referendum election will lead to more local craziness that continues to erode our national image, like the Arizona racial-profiling law, which many new Republican legislatures want to emulate (remember, fear of Mexicans is what many of them ran on, expec them to follow-through).

There was one interesting sidenote to the corporate sweep of the House that fell short in the Senate.   Rewind real quick if you will to the State of the Union address wherein President Obama warned that a recent Supreme Court decision rolling back corporate limits on campaign contributions would be bad for our democracy.  Justice Alito responded with a “not true”, and reality has responded with a “very, very freakin’ true.”

In 2008, 97% of contributions to campaigns could be tracked back to individuals.  In 2010, that number dropped to 32%.  In many races, huge, untraceable, outside money flooded the airwaves with attack ads.  In some cases this backfired, in most it didn’t. 

In cases with higher-profile nutjob candidates (i.e. all the Tea Party Senate races), all but one Sarah Palin-backed nutjob lost (O’Donnell, Angle, Miller, Whitman all losers, only Rand Paul !RAND PAUL! won, and, sad though it is to say, he’s actually an improvement over the guy he’s replacing, Jim Bunning).  

This seems to prove the case that in smaller races (most house races) you can run a nut with a bunch of money and do well, but in higher profile cases where the candidate is more widely and personally known, slinging anonymous mud at one’s opponent is less successful.

Mix in this huge influx in anonymous corporate money, the tide change in demographics (from young and hopeful to old and fearful (i.e. the “Tea Party”)), and an electorate that is still largely ignorant to what caused the current crisis and how, quite frankly, phenomenal the response from the current administation has been (for reals…read this glowing assessment from none other than Warren Buffet) and you have a recipe for bad things, man.

This is Buffet’s assessment of the team that just got their ass handed to them…

When the crisis struck, I felt you would understand the role you had to play. But you’ve never been known for speed, and in a meltdown minutes matter. I worried whether the barrage of shattering surprises would disorient you. You would have to improvise solutions on the run, stretch legal boundaries and avoid slowdowns, like Congressional hearings and studies. You would also need to get turf-conscious departments to work together in mounting your counterattack. The challenge was huge, and many people thought you were not up to it.

Well, Uncle Sam, you delivered. People will second-guess your specific decisions; you can always count on that. But just as there is a fog of war, there is a fog of panic — and, overall, your actions were remarkably effective.

I don’t know precisely how you orchestrated these. But I did have a pretty good seat as events unfolded, and I would like to commend a few of your troops. In the darkest of days, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair grasped the gravity of the situation and acted with courage and dispatch.

So we had a team doing good work in a bad situation largely replace with the team that set up the bad situation in the first place.  We now have the Party of 2% holding the other 98% hostage in order to get huge tax breaks for their 2%.   When the 2% run the country and the 98% are beholden to them…well…that just leads to bad things, man.

Bad things.

Which, BTW, is my final assessment on the 2010 election. 

We’ll see how the country does when the thing that has kept us alive in the midst of catastrophe [prompt and useful government intervention] is hamstrung by the very people it saved.

Politics is a curious game. 

You have to realize when someone is being both honest and disengenuous at the same time.

…and in this next episode of, what has Robot Pirate Ninja been reading lately.

I know you’re excited to get right to this one, to let’s just start straight up with the biggest mistake Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama made over the last two years.

Here’s the context…

Although it comes as no surprise, George Bush‘s straight admission that he personally authorised waterboarding – an act of torture and a crime under US and international law – marks a dismal moment for western democracies and the rule of law. When again will the US be able to direct others to meet their human rights standards? Certainly not before it takes steps to bring its own house in order.

Unlike the UK’s coalition government, which has announced a judicial inquiry on allegations of British involvement in torture, Barack Obama’s administration has apparently ended the practice – but has done nothing to investigate the circumstances in which it was used by the Bush administration.

Bush claims that the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah “saved lives”, including British ones. There is not a shred of evidence to support that claim, one that falls into the same category as the bogus intelligence relied on to justify war in Iraq.

Yes, we are all torturers now.  That middle paragraph quoted above highlight’s Obama/Pelosi/Reid’s major flaw in the political arena. 

They would do the good thing (in italics: ending the policy of torture)  but not do the really important thing (in bold: prosecuting the torturers to the fullest extent of the law). 

The first year of Obama’s administration should have been all about putting Cheney and Bush in prison.  He made the same mistake Ford did, and gave a pocket-pardon to a self-avowed torturer.  The fact that Bush claims to have done it for “our safety” does nothing to assuage my guilt.  How many need to be tortured to keep us safe? 

Once one is a torturer, the degree to which ones tortures is a footnote.  Kinda like being a murderer.  You don’t get kudos for only murdering a few people, when you could have murdered millions.  Same goes for torture.

Anyway, I will probably now refer to George W. Bush as “The Torturer” for a long time now. 

There’s another thing that has come up in The Torturer’s book-tour-victory-lap and it allows me to highlight one of the major problems facing 21st century America.  I highlighted one the other day (i.e. we generally have no idea how wealth is distributed in this country and this is a bad thing, at least we used to think so).  Another is that we have wildly diverging ideas on what caused the latest economic crisis.   From a review of The Torturere’s interview with The Gasbag.

Which gave Limbaugh a chance to slam Barack Obama, who, he suggested, has been demeaning the presidency. “The current occupant [of the White House] constantly runs around saying, ‘I inherited this mess from you!'” Limbaugh exclaimed.

I took a screenshot of this.   Note how the headlines from differing news organizations show the exact opposite information.

Ahh, but wait, it’s 2-1 for the lie.  Or is it….

The point of lies like this one (again based on a paraphrase of an out-0f-context quote) is to help demoralize the base.  This one is particularly effective at it.

Many, many, folks want Obama to return the U.S. to some sort of fiscal sanity.  This includes returning tax rates back to where they were when the U.S. had full employment and a balanced budget (back before Bush).   Personally, I’m all for letting all the Bush tax cuts expire.  I don’t mind paying a couple extra percentage points to get us back on the right track.  Obama, the candidate, wants to keep the lower end cuts and get rid of the high end ones (for those that don’t know, the high-end cuts amount to about $100,000 per person of richest 1%, the lower-end folks (the other 99%) would be seeing about $1,700 per person).

Now a lot of these folks want Obama to fight for this.   So this story comes out about him capitulating without a fight, without any concessions, and essentially just rolling over and playing dead. 

This pisses off his supporters, weakening public support.

But the simple fact is that these headlines (ostensibly from two different sources, but actually the same one) REPORT FACTUALLY INCORRECT INFORMATION.

They are lies.   It is annoying to have to keep pointing this out, but…just…the blatant bullshit of it…the complete lack of anything resembling journalistic integrity or ethics…jeez.  Over the top.

And so it goes.

UPDATE: This Reddit thread points out where this crap started, and I agree with it wholeheartedly.   That site is crap, as it anyone who repeats their b.s. without verification (which is what my screen-capture highlighted).

UPDATE2:  This is why I’m happy to let them expire, rather than run up a huge debt to reward those who have already been rewarded (and are already spending like, well, like they have all the money again)

Much of the growth is coming from the wealthiest consumers, says Josh Chernoff, leader of business consulting firm Bain and Co.’s North American retail practice. Households earning more than $100,000 a year make up just 21% of households but are driving almost 40% of overall consumer spending, he says. That’s up from 34% of consumer spending in 2006. Retailers who cater to the affluent — higher-end department stores, luxury retailers and warehouse club stores — are doing the best “and we think we’ll see that trend continue through the end of the year,” Chernoff says.

Here’s the difference between the two parties’ plans.   This graph should be everywhere in the next couple months.  Obama should hold a press conference standing next to it.

Here’s the news…

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Tests by federal health authorities have found listeria bacteria at a Texas food processing plant after state health officials linked four deaths to contaminated celery from the plant.

The Food and Drug Administration says results released Wednesday match testing by the Texas Department of State Health Services at the SanGar Produce & Processing Co. plant in San Antonio.

The tests found listeria bacteria in multiple locations in the plant.

I guess dying from food poisoning is 1000x less bad than dying from Terrorists, at least based on the reaction to the latest deaths caused by lax regulations and enforcement (or the “free market” as it is sometimes called).

BTW, that’s four more innocent Americans than Islamic terrorists killed this year.  Or Christian terrorists, for that matter.

If we don’t stop these vegetables now, it’s only a matter of time before Legume Law rules the nation.