Fiddling while Rome burns

[unusualmusic_lj_archive]

Everyone from the prosecutor to the reporters agree that Obama had nothing to do with the Blagovich catastrophe. But all reporters Obama still needs to explain himself. And they are going to dedicate the entire rest of the year to calls that Obama explain himself with regard to a situation that he wasn't a part of.Because Blagovich and he lived in the same town. As Kevin Drum puts it:

All well and good, but it's a little odd that Baker leaves out the role of the press in all this. I'll let Bob Somerby do the heavy lifting here, but I've lost count of the number of op-eds and TV talking head segments over the past week that have started out with something like this: "There's no evidence that Barack Obama was involved in Rod Blagojevich's pay-to-play scheme — in fact just the opposite — but...." After the "but," we get a couple thousand words with some take or another on why this is casting a "lengthening shadow" over Obama even though there's precisely zero evidence that he had even a tangential involvement in the whole thing.

In the meantime, the auto bailout saga is going strong. The Poznan Climate talks just ended, you think that some good analysis about what the hell happened there might be done at some point? More stuff is coming to light about the government is listening in on Americans, to say nothing of indiscriminately collecting phone calls, phone nos. subject lines of emails

Two knowledgeable sources tell Newsweek that the clash erupted over a part of Bush's espionage program that had nothing to do with the wiretapping of individual suspects. Rather, Comey and others threatened to resign because of the vast and indiscriminate collection of communications data....The program's classified code name was "Stellar Wind," though when officials needed to refer to it on the phone, they called it "SW."

....The NSA's powerful computers became vast storehouses of "metadata." They collected the telephone numbers of callers and recipients in the United States, and the time and duration of the calls. They also collected and stored the subject lines of e-mails, the times they were sent, and the addresses of both senders and recipients. By one estimate, the amount of data the NSA could suck up in close to real time was equivalent to one quarter of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica per second. (The actual content of calls and e-mails was not being monitored as part of this aspect of the program, the sources say.) All this metadata was then sifted by the NSA, using complex algorithms to detect patterns and links that might indicate terrorist activity.

California is completely bankrupt, we are 21st in the world in terms of children that graduate from high school, our constitution has been torn to shreds, in fact a credible case can be made that the [The] Failed [United] State[s of America] is an actual reality. Our election system is fucked. The Bush Adminstration is fighting to keep poisoning LA air.
117 BILLION DOLLARS were completely wasted in the reconstruction of Iraq. Some guy jacked 50 BILLION DOLLARS from investors And that is just the beginning of the myriad very important stories that I have seen over the past couple of days. But no. Those aren't important.