Tripoli: Rebels Stand Ready to Welcome Advance
Rebels Advance, Surround Tripoli, as Qaddafi Totters
By Juan Cole / Informed Comment
The long slow slog of the Libyan struggle to throw off the rule of Muammar Qaddafi, accelerated this weekend, possibly decisively, with rebel forces making major advances. Tripoli was said to be ready to embrace the rebel youth when they came into the capital.
Free Libya forces made substantial advances over the weekend, coming up from Zintan to take much of Zawiya on the coast, with the help of the majority in the city that opposes dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Zawiya was the site of among the first and biggest anti-Qaddafi demonstrations, and was brutally repressed with tank and artillery fire on unarmed noncombatants by Qaddafi brigades. Since March it has been under secret police rule, but that was thrown off jointly by locals and by their allies from the Western Mountain region to the south.
Read more: Rebels Advance, Surround Tripoli, as Qaddafi Totters | Informed Comment.
Weekly Reading List From Common Dreams
You can’t go wrong with any of these:
- Tim DeChristopher: I Do Not Want Mercy, I Want You To Join Me
- Jeff Cohen: Obama is NOT “Caving” to Corporate Interests
- Paul Buchheit: The Question Conservatives Can’t Answer
- Paul Krugman: ‘Centrism’: The Cult That Is Destroying America
- Christopher Brauchli: The Tax Burden of the Very Rich
- Robert Reich: Why Washington is About to Make the Jobs Crisis Worse
- Robert Scheer: Debt Madness Was Always About Killing Social Security
- Holly Sklar: CEOs to Workers: More for Me, Less for You
- Glenn Greenwald: On Not Freaking Out With Fear: An Un-American Response to Oslo
- Tom Tresser: None Dare Call it Privatization
Republican Science: “Make Pi 3 and Round Planck’s Constant To 7 × 10-34 m2 kg / s”
Ian Squires has a nice piece of satire up and running at Huffington Post, titled “Conservative Pie: Republicans Introduce Legislation Redefining Pi as Exactly 3.”
Satire can be problematic when posted on the web, due, I suppose, to the rising gullibility level of the reading public or the willingness by many to latch on to the faintest wisps of conspiracy wafting on the breeze.
Writers on the web often label their work as “satire” or “humor” or “just kidding,” and when they do I usually find their stuff to be lame and generally ineffective. Good satire and humor draws you in, sets the hook and yanks you into the boat laughing. Advance written warnings and disclaimers serve only to scare the fish away.
Squire caught his limit this morning.
Some of the best satirical comedy of our time is being generated unintentionally by republican politicians and their tea party brethren and… sisteren.
Part of the beauty of his piece is that the right has worked so hard presenting nincompoop propositions for public consumption that as absurd as the idea of legislating the value of π may be, when told that it emanates from a republican source it takes on a certain verisimilitude.
If the scientific community is largely in agreement that anthropogenic climate change is at work and a real threat to our future, the view of the right, driven by those who find such an idea financially inconvenient, is to kill the concept with legislation, defunding, false advertising and positively Galilean smear campaigns.
If Boyle’s law, or Planck’s constant or the Pythagorean theorem is going to cost the Koch brothers some dough then it’s time to spread some money to introduce legislation against such subversive and expensive ideas.
If you need Fred Flintstone riding a brachiosaurus to square your belief in a six thousand year old universe with the fossil record, just make the claim and build a megamillion dollar museum. Present it as fact, the republican hoi polloi will pay admission.
A large part of the republican base will believe nearly anything, if it is presented as “common sense,” anti intellectual and based on conservative values.
It matters not that your moon rockets are now landing in Louisville, that was probably part of god’s plan anyway.
Corporate Personhood versus Democracy
[Editor’s note: The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United was the worst decision by the court since those of Dred Scott v. Sandford and Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the latter of which established the ridiculous idea of corporate person-hood in US law. The origins of corporate person-hood are explored in the excellent essay linked below from William Myers. Bob Higgins]
The Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood versus Democracy
By William Meyers
What Corporate Personhood Is
Corporate Personhood is a legal fiction. The choice of the word “person” arises from the way the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was worded and from earlier legal usage of the word person. A corporation is an artificial entity, created by the granting of a charter by a government that grants such charters. Corporation in this essay will be confined to businesses run for profit that have been granted corporate charters by the States of the United States. The Federal Government of the United States usually does not grant corporate charters to businesses (exceptions include the Post Office and Amtrak).
Corporations are artificial entities owned by stockholders, who may be humans or other corporations. They are required by law to have officers and a board of directors (in small corporations these may all be the same people). In effect the corporation is a collective of individuals with a special legal status and privileges not given to ordinary unincorporated businesses or groups of individuals.
Obviously a corporation is itself no more a person (though it is owned and staffed by persons) than a locomotive or a mob. So why, in the USA, is a corporation considered to be a person under law?
Corporate personhood is the idea (legal fiction, currently with force of law) that corporations have inalienable rights (sometimes called constitutional rights) just like real, natural, human persons.
That this idea has the force of law both resulted from the power and wealth of the class of people who owned corporations, and resulted in their even greater power and wealth. Corporate constitutional rights effectively invert the relationship between the government and the corporations. Recognized as persons, corporations lose much of their status as subjects of the government. Although artificial creations of their owners and the governments, as legal persons they have a degree of immunity to government supervision. Endowed with the court-recognized right to influence both elections and the law-making process, corporations now dominate not just the U. S. economy, but the government itself.
Read more The Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood versus Democracy by William Meyers.
Could A Small Nuclear War Reverse Global Warming?

Could A Small Nuclear War Reverse Global Warming?
From HuffingtonPost
“Nuclear war is a bad thing.
Right?
Scientists from NASA and a number of other institutions have recently been modeling the effects of a war involving a hundred Hiroshima-level bombs, or 0.03 percent of the world’s current nuclear arsenal, according to National Geographic. The research suggests five million metric tons of black carbon would be swept up into the lowest portion of the atmosphere.
The result, according to NASA climate models, could actually be global cooling.”
Lovely, all we need is a “small nuclear war” every two or three years and we can keep global warming at bay forever.
There would be no need to get off of fossil fuels, just burn oil and gas until they run out, then burn coal until there’s a layer of soot a fathom deep.
Another benefit I suppose, would be the job growth created by the need to bury corpses, my god, undertaking would be a major growth industry.
It’s warming to know that there are concerned people, smart people, doing all this contingency planning, thinking creatively, out side the bun and all.
Officials said that “The military will be in overall command of the limited nuclear wars but the devices will be deployed and detonated by drunken civilian contractors for purposes of deniability, the bar will be cash only because, you know, we have to get this deficit under control.”
How was this study paid for? A grant from the oil industry and the defense department.
Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Don’t Forget Bahrain
While all eyes follow the news cycle from Tunis to Cairo to Benghazi the world and the US should not forget Bahrain.
While just a causeway removed from US ally Saudi Arabia and host to the US 5th Fleet, the blood of the people of Bahrain runs the same color and their thirst for freedom and dignity is equally strong.
As the Boston Globe points out in an editorial this morning the violence used against unarmed and peaceful protests is just as reprehensible when committed by our allies as by our foes.
Read more: No free pass for Bahrain – The Boston Globe.
America the Beautiful, Landfill of Lunacy

Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry fires a six shooter filled with blanks. Photo: Rodger Mallison / AP
In Texas where everything is supposedly bigger, including belly laughs, members of the state lege are tripping over themselves to gain passage of a bill that would allow college students the right to carry firearms on campus, to classes, and I guess, to mixers, rallies, keggers and raves.
The reasoning behind this forward looking pile of sausage is a bit hazy but it fits in well with the Texas board of Ed’s decision to get Tom Jefferson out of our textbooks in order to include more riveting tales of the adventures of John Calvin, a notable historical figure I suppose, but one who happened to die a couple of centuries before our republic was born.
Ahh Texans, gotta love ’em even if you gotta cage ’em.
“On Wisconsin,” Sarah Palin Calls for Sacrifice From Working People
Sarah Palin, is calling for sacrifice on the part of the working people of Wisconsin.
That was my first laugh this morning, a derisive laugh but many days start that way for news junkies. So much of what I read and see over morning coffee drives a growing cynicism and an anger that smolders beneath the surface and slowly grows.
The issues driving the crowds of people in Cairo and Tunis, in Benghazi and Bahrain are the same as those smoldering and now threatening to rise in flames in Wisconsin.
The widening gulf between those who hold all the wealth in our various societies, those who manipulate the strings of power and the mass of people who produce that wealth with their sweat and labor, has widened to a point that has become intolerable even among the normally complaisant. (more…)
Can Giuliani Beat Obama For GOP Nomination?
In a recent poll, respondents report that if the republican front runners are suddenly raptured off the planet, Rudy Giuliani would be the only one left on the list who looks good in a little black dress and would become the favorite to win the nomination.
Rudy would be the favorite…that is, unless Barack Obama continues his inexorable creep to the right.
The President’s SOTU speech last night sounded as if he and his wordsmiths had just returned from a long sojourn in some fairyland where full employment and economic justice prevail.
What he offered in his address was more of the same hollow panaceas, noble sounding bromides, continued wars, more tax cuts for business and spending cuts for the rest of us.
His stomach for kowtowing to republicans and the economic power elite may have been the model for the new Starbucks size.
Given another two years of moving toward and through the center, I expect that Obama may win the CPAC straw poll and be elected as a Republican in 2012.
Republicans: “They Weren’t Taino, They Were Indians”
With health care ‘repealed,’ GOP turns to climate change is the title of an article By Renee Schoof at McClatchy yesterday, in which She reports:
“Now that the House of Representatives has voted to repeal the health care law, Republicans say they’re likely to move soon to another target — a rewrite of the Clean Air Act so that it can’t be used to fight climate change.”
This falls on the heels of their now stalled attempt to rescind the last congress’ progress on health care, and return to the old Republican, Tea Party and compassionate conservative favored “Bring out your dead” system. (more…)
Mafia Arrest List Switched With White House Guest List
The two hundred plus guests at the White House for free chow and entertainment the other night included the heads of Boeing, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase or as they’re known around here, “the usual suspects.”
The fat cats lined up for a lavish spread, an open bar and a gala evening provided by the American taxpayer who was neither invited, welcome, nor I believe, much considered in the conversation. It was decent of us though to foot the bill for this formal introduction of the crème de la crime of our fading culture to our new landlord.
The theme for the evening was “quintessentially American,” with a menu that featured farm-fresh vegetables, poached Maine lobster, dry-aged rib-eye with buttermilk crisp onions, topped off by old-fashioned apple pie with ice cream. The entertainment, in the White House East Room, was the most quintessential of American music — a parade of jazz greats, including Herbie Hancock. Business Leaders Make Cut at State Dinner With Hu Huffington Post
That may be quintessentially American on Pennsylvania Avenue but down home we’re eating the quintessential bean soup.
Meanwhile the FBI, the NYPD and other assorted crime fighters were putting the final touches on a round up of more than a hundred Mafia members and criminal associates of New York’s five families and we’re not talking Astors and Vanderbilts we’re talking Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese, Bonanno and Colombo, guys with names like Vinny Carwash, Baby Fat Larry and Tony Bagels. (more…)
A Day Of Guns, A Day In America
Once again a country that experiences more violent gun deaths than any other country on Earth has been shocked by a maliciously motivated madman with a gun. The talk all week from the various electronic chatterboxes has been guns, their control, their abuse, the somehow sacred right to possess them…guns.
In a darkly funny piece written in the bleak light of the Arizona murders Elayne Boosler relates her experience with writing and speaking her views about guns, gun control and the NRA and includes a couple dozen responses to her essays and twitter posts on the subject.
Her columns and tweets were in favor of controlling guns, they were measured, reasonable and since she is a comedian with a flair for writing humor they were funny, and like the best humor, there was an element of tragedy or darkness woven into their fabric. (more…)
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