Luckily for Barack Obama, news of improper shenanigans at the IRS stole attention from the week’s biggest story: that the President’s Justice Department had secretly seized call information from at least 20 phone lines belonging to Associated Press reporters, including personal cell phones and the main switchboard of the AP’s Washington bureau. While Obama thundered on about “inexcusable behavior” at the IRS, he said he would “make no apology” for his latest foray into Nixonian dirty tricks.
Most people are more concerned with money and power than privacy and freedom. Therefore the word “impeachment” was never uttered, not even by the most impolite members of the press.
America’s sense of outrage at the IRS fiasco is misplaced. The real scandal at the IRS is that they allow hundreds – thousands? – of 501 (c)4 non-profit organizations to receive tax-exempt status as “educational” organizations. What these groups really . . . → Read More: The War on Leakers
Originally posted April 28th, 2013
By Michael Konik
The commonly understood reason why terrorists wish to kill and maim Americans is because they hate our freedoms. That’s what’s behind all the civilian violence: they hate our freedoms. You can go ahead and enumerate all the freedoms the terrorists hate, but it doesn’t really matter which ones –freedom to assemble publicly with unmarried members of the opposite sex; freedom to participate in an electoral charade; freedom to watch nudity on television. The very concept of freedom is an affront to these heartless killers.
After the Boston Marathon bombs, there might be another reason worth considering, a reason that some unpatriotic thinkers have been suggesting since September 11, 2001.
Maybe terrorists don’t hate our freedoms. Maybe they hate our policies.
The surviving suspect in Boston indicated that his brother and he were outraged at U.S. involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Other captured evildoers have indicated . . . → Read More: Why Terrorists Hate America
Originally posted March 17th, 2013
By Michael Konik
Howard “Buck” McKeon represents California’s Twenty-fifth Congressional District, which is home to an Army fort, an Air Force base, a Navy weapons station, and a Marines mountain warfare training area. So if anyone is perfectly qualified to head the House Armed Services Committee it’s old Buck.
Thank God that conflict of interest concerns don’t disqualify the honorable McKeon from guiding where and how our military money is spent. Because without defense hawks like old Buck to keep an eye on our security, we might get lackadaisical and let our guard down, and the next thing you know a bunch of Al Qaeda will be waltzing into the Wal-Mart with nuclear bombs in their backpacks.
We’ve previously mentioned in this space that the peace-loving U.S. of A. spends more on defense than all of the other nations of the world combined. There’s a good reason for that: We’re . . . → Read More: In Defense of Defense
Originally posted March 3rd, 2013
By Michael Konik
Funny, isn’t it? The way things can get turned around completely backwards so that everything means the opposite? We don’t mean Orwellian doublespeak. We’re talking about common words that don’t seem to have a static definition.
Like, say, the word “villain.” Pfc. Bradley Manning was called a villain, among many other pernicious names, in the three years that he was held without bail while awaiting trial. He was also called dangerous. And a traitor. And anything else that springs to mind when a patriotic American feels incensed.
Manning, of course, is none of these things. He’s a hero. He’s a courageous, conscientious citizen who faces between 20-years and life-in-prison for providing classified documents to WikiLeaks. The Authorities are doing what they must do: crush with impunity any individual with the temerity to challenge the rules (as defined by the Authorities). Despite the unjust sentence and the barbaric . . . → Read More: Getting Good and Bad Mixed Up
Originally posted February 10th, 2013
By Michael Konik
The nerve of these people!
We are outraged. We are livid. This kind of barbarity cannot be permitted in civilized society.
Mahmoud Shaaban is an “ultraconservative” Islamic cleric in Egypt. “Hard-line,” “orthodox” – whatever. In the name of his great religion, he and his fellow cleric Wagdi Ghoneim have issued fatwas (edicts) calling for the deaths of Egypt’s opposition leaders. Shaaban said on a recently aired TV show that political opponents of the President should be punished. By death.
The reason? According to the Mullahs, Egypt’s opposition leaders, including former Atomic Energy Commission chief Mohamed ElBaradei, are seeking to “bring down” a publicly elected leader, the deeply religious Mohamed Morsi.
Ergo: these political opponents deserve to be eliminated with extreme prejudice.
Composing “kill lists” without judicial oversight — without any oversight — is an offense to human decency. Who do these Islamic clerics think they are, deciding . . . → Read More: Those Ridiculous Clerics!
Originally posted February 3rd, 2013
By Michael Konik
Guns are not the problem. People are not the problem. Young people are the problem.
They don’t listen. They play awful video game simulations of mass murder. They shoot six-year-olds.
And no amount of background checks or ammo-clip restrictions will change that. There’s only one way to solve the gun situation, one way to bring peace and civility back to our public areas while also not trampling on our inalienable American right to bear arms (as outlined with great clarity in the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America).
The maintenance of civil order in our fragile society rests on a rock solid foundation of family discipline. A child who disrespects his parents must be removed from society. Permanently. So that other children will see the importance of respecting their parents.
Originally posted December 11th, 2012
By Michael Konik
The acronym stands for “Russia Today,” but the coverage is anything but Soviet-centric. RT News is a progressive, muckraking, dogged media outlet, a model of what corporate-controlled American news organizations could be if they weren’t pre-occupied with business-as-usual. “RT Live,” which streams on the Net 24/7, is essential viewing for anyone curious what’s really going on while we’re all too distracted to notice. And their on-air talent tends to be scrumptious and smart, super cute sexy librarians who know how to smile.
Originally posted November 27th, 2012
By Michael Konik
The grave necessity of Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker’s book, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, was never clearer than the 2012 elections, in which citizens were presented with a “choice” between two competitie sub-brands of The Money Party monopoly. If you’re pro-war, pro-assassination, pro-bribery and pro-coal, you couldn’t go wrong with either guy. Which is why “Winner-Take-All” is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand how we allowed our democracy to be hijacked and what we can do to take it back.
Originally posted November 18th, 2012
By Michael Konik
So long as the American people are quite alright with their elected offices being available for rent, let’s have some fun.
We’re resigned to a world where money is speech, not property, a world where no one minds that half their Members of Congress are millionaires (as opposed to 1% of the population-at-large), where $372 was spent on promoting or attacking 11 California initiatives, much of it by secret donors who went to court to keep their identities shrouded. We get it.
Since the Supreme Court has taught us that corporations are people and since it has come to light that this particular group of people largely controls the Land of the Free, we think it best if all of us could stop pretending it’s otherwise. Let’s celebrate!
Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, had a cool idea. He thinks that . . . → Read More: The NASCAR President
Originally posted November 11th, 2012
By Michael Konik
In the days preceding the storm of the century, two candidates running for President of the United States strenuously assured voters that they would pump more crude, frack more natural gas, and burn more coal than the other guy. Whether or not an energy policy built on a fossil-fuel paradigm could or could not be sustained wasn’t discussed, at least by Messrs. Obama and Romney, who proudly reiterated their fealty to the oil and mining companies that sign the checks. Virtually every other candidate for President –the ones who weren’t members of the Democratic or Republican crime syndicates, such as Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party — characterized our looming environmental disaster as the biggest threat facing America, not terrorism or the national debt, as the Military-Industrial complex would like us to believe.
Luckily for Barack Obama, news of improper shenanigans at the IRS stole attention from the week’s biggest story: that the President’s Justice Department had secretly seized call information from at least 20 phone lines belonging to Associated Press reporters, including personal cell phones and the main switchboard of the AP’s Washington bureau. While Obama thundered on about “inexcusable behavior” at the IRS, he said he would “make no apology” for his latest foray into Nixonian…
News comes from Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, that a disastrous fire swept through a garment factory there, killing eight people. A factory fire in November killed more than 100.
The garment industry in Bangladesh is euphemistically called “loosely regulated,” so, regrettably, these things (fires and so forth) tend…
Were you aware that bottled water is “bad for the environment,” “bad for public water sources,” and “bad for your wallet”?
Neither were we! It’s pretty funny to think of something so obviously good – so amazing, when you think about it – as inherently evil, or something. Bottled water…
The commonly understood reason why terrorists wish to kill and maim Americans is because they hate our freedoms. That’s what’s behind all the civilian violence: they hate our freedoms. You can go ahead and enumerate all the freedoms the terrorists hate, but it doesn’t really matter which ones –freedom to…
The whole world is worried about North Korea. We’re not. We think locally. The area around which we can walk or ride our bike is our concern. We’re civic-minded that way.
Hollywood Boulevard is nearby. We walk on its sidewalks almost every day, often to access the subway, which serves…
Author James Goodale was chief counsel for the New York Times during the Nixon era. His new book, “Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles,” outlines our government’s pernicious (and ongoing) threat to media freedom. Some prescient authors get all the luck: Every morning it seems we’re greeted to [...]
