Posted on Digg, re: Un-American: Have you listened to the right-wing media?

I never really call the conservatives, except when I'm being ironic. They are right-wing. *I* am conservative.

I believe in the Constitution, which mandates separation of Church and State. I believe that the government doesn't have the right to suspend the document.

I believe that corporations are creatures of the government, granted existence through our grace and exist for the betterment of the country collectively, and when they go off the rails, should be disbanded for breach of the contract by which they are tolerated.

I believe that corporations do not have superpowers that government do not have, and that government cannot use them to bypass laws on surveillance, for example.

I believe that for the most part, we pay the bills as we go. That means no tax cuts if the bills aren't paid. That means no borrowing to pretend there are no bills. A little deficit spending during bad times is utterly necessary, as capitalism is not perfect. But deficit spending during good times to pretend and pander that taxes don't need to be paid? No.

I believe that the Secret Service, the CIA, and all the little hunter-killer secret squads the right love so much should be brought back under government control.

I believe in a public good that overrides immediate private gain. I have a lot of good company in that belief.

I believe that destroying other countries for economic gain is a losing proposition that costs us skyscrapers in the short run and pariah hood and bankruptcy in the long run.

I believe that what a person does to his brain chemistry is his business, and that the consequences of that experimentation belong to him as well. I do not believe that the armed forces and police exist to force us to be the perfect humans that some want us to be - and that those "some" are some of the worst liars and hypocrites in that regard.

I believe that those who want to go to war against other countries for no damned reason but power/money should be forced to spend their own damned lives and their children's as well, or forfeit the right to vote for such invasions. You want the oil, go shoot them yourselves, or shut up.

That a start. That's conservative. The right are just... radicals. Disconnected, spoiled and false-to-fact.

Twitter is an original idea? Um, no.

Twitter users: you've rediscovered the AOL chatroom experience, circa 1993. Congrats. Yeah, it was and is fun.

But it ain't original.

Is Twitter the Vengeance of the Popular Kids' Lunch Table?

Seriously. The tech world has long been dominated by loner geeks: those who wouldn't be dating the cheerleader from the Popular Table in the school lunchroom.

I'm listening to Leo LaPorte's TWIT podcast, just downloaded fresh this morning. And Twitter, as they mention, has consumed the tech world. And Twitter is nothing but a popularity contest, and rewards and enriches the Kool Kids, with little regard to their actual abilities in tech. I could name names - Keeevvvvinn... Alexxxx....

TWIT has become a millionaires' club, full of 1) Young 2) Attractive people from wealthy/upper middle class backgrounds who behold endless vistas of opportunity before them. This is well and good, as such always are on top. But Twitter is supercharging the Kool Kids, while the tech duds who have always made this wonderful new world are becoming hangers-on, fans, recipients of restraining orders metaphorically who aren't invited to the tech table.

And yes, they were once the only occupants of that table. But like all other human endeavors, the business is being overwhelmed by celebrity and beauty and priviledge. Such is life.

Noticing here that the Apple stock didn't get trounced after the iPhone 3.0 announcement. Perhaps Apple's puzzling decision to stop announcing new products on a predictable semi-annual schedule and instead pop them out randomly with almost no notice to anyone has screwed up the stock-shorting geniuses' timing. About damned time.

The Wall Street Journal says that Netflix stock is overvalued, despite the fact they are taking over the video market and have future revenues of Apple-like levels stretching out before them.

Someone has decided it is time to short the stock and suck the profits out of its marrow. The Real Stock Market is about to fleece current shareholders of yet another excellent company. Get a cat food casserole recipe book, kids, your Uncle Wall Street's about to steal your future again.

Apple is about to release iPhone 3.0 in an hour. Gentleman, start shorting the stocks! Whee!

Cramer actual admits talking Apple stock prices up and then immediately selling short and talking the price down again. He said it was easy to do an very profitable as well.

I said some time back that Apple announcements always caused a major shortselling spree. I keep taking a bath on this, while the stockbrokers make bank.

Stewart is right. There are two stock markets, one for the 401K suckers, and the real one that only big boys play in.

Now it is possible, with lithium titanate or lithium iron phosphate batteries, to charge a car's battery pack in minutes. However, people are pointing out that it would take a 180 KW pipe to charge the car. Not available. Fail, say they.

Think a little. What you need is a sidewalk or garage capacitor/battery array that charges slowly and constantly off a 120 or 240 volt pipe from the grid or your solar array. When you want to charge the car, plug 'er into the sidewalk/garage battery/capacitor, and then blow all that power into the car in ten minutes.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper died today.

Comedy Central should form a news team, hell, a news network, around its Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert core group. Comedians of the "left" seem to be much more informed then the "middle" wing of the various mainstream news media.

Stewart understands that he needs the news networks to actually provide him some news to work with. But that seems less probable as the few outfits left coalesce into a few rightwing corporate news organizations.

The liberals need to move. We need more newsrooms, with clearsighted reporters and a lack of "balance".

What? - no one has noticed that Rush Limbaugh is running for president?

Fire Sale!

I hear the talking Democratic heads on Rachel Madow carefully pointing out that the Republicans should remember that so much depends on what they do right now - depression or recession, loss or win.

Damn. I must point out what they surely know but cannot say - but should.

If the economy tanks, if we enter a Greater Depression, those who hold wealth - and Republicans represent them - will be in a position unmatched in human history to buy up the planet's assets at depressed prices, as the deflation cycle finally ignites later this year. If we collapse, they will buy us. And in ten, twenty years, they will have used their newly-purchased positions as lairds of all to redirect civilization into something they enjoy, a true corporatocracy. And they will be wealthy beyond any conception most can summon today. We will see trillionaires. We will see gods. And they will live for over a century, as they will be able to purchase future bio-tech to keep them alive long after we wish they would simply die already.

This is not a game. Watch what the banks are doing with all that cash they demanded and received under Bush. They are not lending it out - they are buying rival banks at depressed prices. Watch that trend intensify, and watch other wealthy actors move to copy them.

Sure they want new tax cuts for capital gains and corporations. The more money to buy us out, the better. And we'd have given them the money to do it with.

http://tinyurl.com/gaimanbatman

So Obama frees the stem cell lines for research today.

A ban Bush put in place to save baby souls.

And remember this well: he took a week off to think about this subject before issuing the ban. Went on a retreat, listened to "spiritual leaders" about the subject. What didn't he do that very special week?

I'll give you a hint: he didn't read a report called "Bin Laden determined to strike within the United States", which was presented to him for action. He told the CIA rep, "Okay, you covered your ass." Literally said that. On the record.

He saved the garbage-bound embryonic souls, tho, and that was more important, if, of course, were you religiously insane.

If George Bush has left the White House already, who the hell is the President at the moment? Is he phoning it in?

Paper vs. electronic ballots

I can't stress enough: Franken could win this election because the voters, through their election process, could count the actual ballots, on actual solid really real pieces of paper.

If an electronic system was in place, no recount would be possible, as the ballots would be unexaminable and totals only available through the kindness of private companies. Franken would have lost, been robbed, had electronic voting machines been used, and Coleman would have won, as did so many Republicans have done in the past eight years, through the use of magical mystery machines.

It struck me, in the few minutes of one of the Obama/McCain debates last year, that Obama would be a Republican in the America I grew up in. I remarked that he was just another Republican, in my rude fashion, to my couchmates at the time.

So today, Firedog lake diarist DeanBaker reports that Obman is thinking of "restructuring" Social Security and Medicare to bring it in line with our national debt. In other words, he's long bought into the myth that Social Security and Medicare is bankrupt.

Recall that the Social Security trust fund was supercharged with increased taxes in the early Eighties for the sole purpose of being fully capable of handling the Baby Boomers in the 21st century. And that the fund was stolen - "borrowed" - in 1985 by Reagan and a compliant Congress to assuage the deficit and increasing national debt brought on by the supply-side tax cuts that have crippled us and the world.

The "restructuring, as DeanBaker reminds us, is a robbery of the trust fund's IOU's, a default on repayment on the loans made to the Greed is Gooders of the Eighties. Even tho it was long shown that the SS killers' arguments were based on incredibly manipulated data - see Krugman for details - Obama has bought into the rightist screed. We have another Republican, ladies and germs.

Here it is, a new Watchmen trailer, now with extra Rorschach!