Reduced as we are to a choice between smarmy and loathsome,it is disturbing to realize that part of the reason for Romney's stiffness and discordant address is that he is not the facile and suave pretender that is our Prez.

Finally a wind blows through the Balkans, and it will blow the austerians all the way back to Berlin.

In the first vote (other than Iceland's resounding rejection of debt peonage) since the shit really hit the fan in Greece, I think it impossible to imagine this people will stand for more.

Learning in astonishment that Romney plans to run as the man who can save the tattered economic lives of "ordinary americans", we can anticipate that only the full tilt boogie return of Obama Agonistes can overcome the voters' susceptibility (already well shown) to repeated high priced agitprop. 

After announcing themselves pleased beyond all human power to describe by the outcome of the Clinton Welfare Massacre, the three amigos declared their intention to show how empowering it could be to live the life of a timed-out single mother of four.

So much heat as attended the substance of the Ryan Budget that some may have failed to note that his budget resolution carries a reconciliation motion.

The same filibuster defense that was ultimately successfully used to obviate the Repugnants' intractable resistance to any policy with Prez's name on it, including one with Heritage Foundation Grandparents (viz, individual health insurance mandate...)

The left has fought tooth and nail as the proliferation of surveillance devices, both privately and publicly installed, continues apace.

I believe that this is an error.

One, we'll never roll back the surveillance devices because they give to their controllers the irresisstable superpowers of being in more than one place at once, and being invisible.

Two, we should welcome, not oppose universal surveillance.

As we shuffle along the slough of despond, occasionally raising our tired eyes to the cryptic countenance of Anthony Kennedy, who has been rendered by the vagaries of retirement and  poor health into the emperor of the universe, may we not look, once more, to the imagination of FDR for a remedy.

Once before an embattled president sought to rally the people to their own salvation, once before "nine old men" placed their flabby bodies athwart the road to progress, once before the salutary interventions of the democratic branches of our government were rendered useless and impotent by hidebound ideologues and partisan shills.

Then FDR took the court to the edge of the abyss, and showed them what lay at the bottom, if they persisted in their most pernicious error

Bobby Rush, Minister of Defense,

brings it to the House floor.

Huey, Eldridge, George, Mark, Fred....look down and be proud.

The rules of engagement for the  New York City Police Department have changed.

I'm not quite sure when, but it was, I think, shortly after David Dinkins was replaced as Mayor by Rudy G.

It used to be that every cop carried what was called a "throwdown".  An untraceable gun, the purpose of which was to be thrown down (hence, the name) if the cop discovered that he or she had shot and killed an unarmed civilian.

This is what ethnic cleansing looks like:

An as-yet confidential report submitted by the European consuls in Jerusalem and Ramallah raises urgent concerns over the “forced expulsion” of Palestinians ...from Area C of the West Bank... the report mentions the fertile and strategic Jordan Valley (where the Palestinian population has declined from 250,000 to 50,000 since the start of the Occupation)...

The recent encounter of a vacationing civil servant and a mugger offering deadly force has caused me to revisit a question that had piqued me obliquely when one of his shiftmates, while on his way to work, rear-ended another c

If you paid any attention to Xi Jinping, the president-designate (interesting that they even have such a position, rather like scholarly associations) of China, you might have been struck by the efficiency with which the Chinese political system finds and promotes individuals of talent.

Consider, after all, that Xi Jinping was not the product of a democratically premised electoral politics.  He was selected by cadres who themselves were selected from ever wider pools of aspirants.

Watching in stark amaze as the issue of contraception coverage (contraception!) proves fraught enough with controversy that it troubles, still in the 21st century, the councils of the great and mighty, I am moved to reconsider some of my prior analysis of the great health care reform fiasco.

We are being priveleged to witness, once again, the down-in-flames destruction of a creepy New York Police Commissioner. (ed note: the last non-creepy one wasTeddy Roosevelt...)

We are left with only a few hours within which to exercise unrestrained speculation as to "the (tax) horror which dare not speak its name".

Level of income, of course, has been bruited as cause for embarassment.

Obvious high roller lifestyle deductions will cause the odd blush.

But, quaere:

Might the annual act of self-denial represented by parting with many millions of dollars be regarded as so extreme as to make you potentially seen to be a cult-addled and superstition-ridden nutjob?

Newt Gingrich, like Tide and Coke is new and  improved.

We learn, inter alia, from this evening's debate that he has raised his performance as a health care policy analyst.

Viz:

When jacked up by Santorum over his decade of support for an individual mandate to buy insurance, Newt credited (and tacitly solicited credit for) the onset of new wisdom.

 We are a country that cheerfully permits over one million of its children to experience in any year the terror, the existential fear, the insecurity, the permanent scars that must of necessity flow from forced eviction from their homes.