- Liveblog: FCIC Report Release – “None of What Happened Was an Act of God”
- Phil Angelides has begun a press conference about the release of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report. You can watch the release here. You can find the report here…
- Whispering at Autocrats – By Tom Malinowski | Foreign Policy
- …while Tunisians didn't need American diplomats to tell them how bad their government was, the…candid appraisal of Ben Ali by U.S. diplomats showed Tunisians that the rottenness of the regime was obvious…to the whole world… [and] contradicted the prevailing view among Tunisians that Washington would back Ben Ali…
Most State Department professionals have long believed that explicit public criticism of repressive governments does little… that real progress toward ending human rights abuses…is more likely to come when such problems are raised behind closed doors…
…no amount of "high-level private candor" was going to convince Ben Ali of Tunisia that allowing free speech…was in his interest, because it plainly wasn't…
The people of Tunisia shouldn't have had to wait for Wikileaks to learn that the U.S. saw their country just as they did. It's time that the gulf between what American diplomats know and what they say got smaller.
- The Mythification of the Looting Elite
- [Firedoglake - emptywheel]
As more and more people talk about how inequality threatens our economic system and just in time for Davos, the January 22-28 edition of The Economist had a special report on “The Global Elite.” …it seems to be an attempt to mythify the looting going on so as to claim it serves some kind of useful societal function…
Of particular interest are some of the key myths propagated by this report. A central theme is that this new global elite got there not by taking from others, but by virtue of their superior intelligence.
…they got their wealth though their own actions, through work…
The focus here is on people like orthodontists who have built a practice rather than finance execs who have been getting rich off the public teat. And the report provides two reasons why the super rich are good for you…
And no need to worry about the rich accruing undue political power. You can’t buy political power, it says…
- NY Times considers creating an ‘EZ Pass lane for leakers’ – Yahoo! News
- The New York Times is considering options to create an in-house submission system that could make it easier for would-be leakers to provide large files to the paper.
- Cop’s Drug Policy Question to Obama #1 in YouTube Contest
- [Firedoglake - Michael Whitney]
This week Jon Walker at FDL noted that marijuana and drug questions were the top 5 overall; NORML’s blog reported that as of yesterday, the top 100 questions were all about marijuana and drug policy. Allen’s question, as a law enforcement professional, will be hard for Obama to ignore. That’s not to say he won’t do his damnedest to do so.
[Ooo, if you have not listened to / read Mr. Allen's question, do click through to read it. -L]
- The Congressional Progressive Caucus: A Time to Stand
- [Campaign for America's Future - Robert Borosage, strengthening grassroots resolve]
…convene today in their first ever strategy retreat. …With 83 members the CPC is the largest caucus in the Congress. In 2010, while Blue Dogs and New Dem conservative Democrats were getting decimated, progressives suffered relatively few losses – and the CPC emerged as a larger force in a smaller (193 person) but more liberal Democratic caucus…
The economy is now reverting to the unsustainable imbalances that helped drive it off the cliff – yet none of these made it into the president’s address…
This vacuum offers progressives a popular and compelling platform on which to stand. …the CPC could give voice to excluded alternatives that could be echoed and amplified by the progressive media and blogosphere…
What is required to give this legs? It won’t be action on the House floor…
- The Murder of Brisenia Flores
- [Balloon Juice - E.D. Kain]
Will Bunch has a truly heartbreaking, infuriating post up on the murder of nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father in Arizona in 2009. Brisenia’s mother survived by playing dead.
The killers were newly minted Tea Partiers and fledgling Minutemen… Shawna Forde, the mastermind of the operation, had apparently cooked up an idea to murder and rob drug dealers to fund her anti-immigrant activities. She and her accomplice, Jason Bush, broke into the Flores home on May 30, 2009…
These are scummy people, and they’d be scummy people without Glenn Beck or the Tea Party. But having a cause based on fear and hatred and bigotry just fuels these sorts of bigots. It gives them a moral edifice, however bizarre, to justify their actions.
- Chart: Obama Calls for 1 Million Electric Vehicles, but Is That Enough? – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic
- …two things from this chart: 1) We've got a long, long, long way to go in electrifying our transport; 2) Any notion that a one million EV goal is too ambitious doesn't take into account the enormity of the challenge. If you're an EV supporter, this seems like a bare minimum goal. If the time to deploy electric cars is really now, we need millions per year, not a million over four years.
- Video of the Day: Really Tiny Tortoises Set to ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’ – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic
- Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo might just understand the Internet. First, they lock up the domain name Zoo.org. Now, to promote their program to save endangered Egyptian (aka Kleinmann's) tortoises, they've put out a video that has that pungent viral smell. Mostly that's because the tortoises are so adorable, even "adorbs" as the kids say. They can be as small as the tip of your thumb.
- slacktivist: Fantasy role-playing games
- [Slacktivist - points to Ta-Nehisi Coates's excellent "The Unbearable Whiteness of Pro-Lifers and Pundits," and adds observations from his own experience.]
That bogus abortion/slavery analogy is one that I used to find compelling and reassuring. It was a frequently invoked analogy in the evangelical community. We found it inspiring, but not because we knew much of anything about the actual abolitionists, slave or free. And not because we knew anything much at all, for that matter, about abortion…
What was inspiring was being told that we were on the right side of the great moral struggle of our time…
Just assent to the proposition, cast your reliably partisan votes, attend the occasional photo-op vigil and learn to frown disapprovingly at the designated people. Do these things and you can regard yourself as being Harriet Tubman's equal in virtue, courage and commitment.
[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. Signal boosts are awesome! --L.]
The Of interest (Thu, Jan 27th, 10am) by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.