Salt City Sinner

Game of Drones posted on 10/18/2013 by the Salt City Sinner A few Fridays ago, Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager that the Taliban shot in the head for the crime of attending school, met with President Obama. President Obama, you may recall, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for the singular achievement of not being George W. Bush (or, according to the committee, some flimsy fairy-tale about Russia and START). Malala, who has become a powerful voice for women's education worldwide, just happened to have been passed over for a Peace Prize preceding her meeting with Obama. According to Gawker : While thanking the President for his support of education and assistance to Syrian refugees, Yousafzai pressed the President on the issue of drone strikes, a counterterrorism method he supports.  "I thanked President Obama for the United States' work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees," Yousafzai said in a statement ...

posted 8/17/2012 by the Salt City Sinner For the first time in the history of this blog I would like to reproduce, in its (almost) entirety, an essay. Thomas Frank, "Compromising Positions:" Let us review. Barack Obama, who was lifted to the presidency four years ago on a great wave of progressive fantasy, likes to say that hte national budget is like a family budget: that when times are tough, government has to tighten its belt. This is a Republican simile of very long standing, and the president is a Democrat. He is in fact the leader of the party that is supposed to believe in deficit spending during hard times. Yet Obama has enthusiastically adopted the belt-tightening trope, and all the terrible ideas that go with it.  Another thing the president likes to say - or liked to say, back in the days when his administration was new and "hope" hadn't started to stink yet was that "we should be looking forward and not backwards." More recently, h...

posted 8/10/1982 by the Salt City Sinner I am not the world's biggest Barack Obama supporter; let's just put it that way. While the Romney people would have an easier time squeezing farm-fresh goat's milk from a largish chunk of obsidian than winning my vote, I'm not at all pleased with some facets of Obama's tenure thus far. In particular, his cabinet full of Goldman Sachs alumni and his quite astonishingly murderous foreign policy puzzle and distress me. It was an unexpected opportunity, then, that this week I was given the opportunity to return to my ancestral spawning grounds to see Obama speak at a rally in Grand Junction, Colorado - the town where I was born (30 years ago today, as a matter of fact!). OH GOD WHERE AM I Grand Junction is a beautiful city located in the western slope region of Colorado, right near the Continental Divide. Colorado is a vital swing state during this year's election, and the energy boom and bust in western Colora...

"Idiot wind, blowin' every time you move your teeth You're an idiot, babe   It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe."   Bob Dylan, "Idiot Wind" Big Joe Kovacs likes to bang out the occasional column (and more than occasional New Age Christian Self Help Book ) at Big Joe Farah's WorldNetDaily , a publication of some repute that   I believe   I have   commented on   a time   or two  before. As with Glenn Beck, there will eventually come a point at which I have to take a few steps back from WND, which (and this is my coinage, thank you very much) is the most right-wing website on the entire Internet other than Stormfront. WND likes to keep the Christian Identity and white supremacy nestled beneath a decorative frosting of "legitimacy." What does Joe Kovacs do to keep things spicy? Oh, well, how abou- Wait, I ... what? This "journalist": Joe Kovacs is ready to shock you with the Bible, or with el...

In an astonishing act of -- let's call a rose a rose -- creeping totalitariaism, Congress has passed a law that erases the distinction between citizens of the United States and so-called "enemy combatants," a charming turn of phrase cooked up by the Bush Administration to sidetrack pesky things like the overwhelming preponderance of international law and various treaties that many US Presidents (including Reagan!) signed in good faith. While one could view this as an extended hangover from 9/11, or perceived "business as usual" on the part of a new administration trying to keep things flowing smoothly in the consensus department, this is a significant and ominous development in the liberties afforded to not only extralegal detainees, but UNITED STATES CITIZENS AS WELL. Jose Padilla is an American Citizen In accordance with what I've come to look at as standard operating procedure, this odious provision was quietly secreted away deep in the bo...

Quick update: as of this writing, the police are dismantling the #OccupyLA camp site at City Hall in Los Angeles. Image from CBS NPR's write-up   here  . The Raw Story has a live feed for who knows how long (probably not long)   here  . CNN's LA write-up (with additional information about the police taking down #OccupyPhiladelphia)   here  . The Socialist Worker has a very insightful, very sharp article today entitled " Co-opt-upy Wall Street? " which recounts an #OccupyWallSt event from November 17: New York City activists from OWS spent weeks planning the November 17 day of action alongside organizers from unions and community organizations, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). But when the Occupiers showed up for the day's culminating rally and march over the Brooklyn Bridge, they found a completely different event from the one they had planned.  Instead of a series of platforms for coordinated "people's mic...

In my previous post on this topic, I explained that a Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry had penned a column for the Nation magazine called " Black President, Double Standards: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama " in which she claimed that white progressives who had given Clinton a pass on his centrist tendencies were unwilling to extend the same courtesy to Obama due to racism. I found this pretty preposterous, and pointed out many variables other than race that could account for Obama's dwindling support (Obama has continued our endless, mindless "war on terror" on two fronts and expanded our military commitments to include the NATO action in Libya as well, Obama has failed on most of his major campaign promises to progressives including closing GITMO and the CIA's black sites, Clinton ran as a moderate while Obama ran as a liberal, &c. &c.). Gene Lyons, an old hand when it comes to anything Clinton, also expressed his outrage over Dr. Harris-Perr...

Quite a hubbub has been sweeping the liberal/progressive media outlets lately regarding a column by Melisa Harris-Perry entitled “ BlackPresident, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama .” Harris-Perry attempts to measure the electoral “roll-off” that can be ascribed to racism in the 2004 Senate race between then-State Senator Barack Obama and perennial wingnut candidate Alan Keyes, the 2008 general election, and the 1994 re-election of President Clinton. Her thesis, which is a bit murky, seems to be that by comparing the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, we can conclusively establish that the variable at play is racism on the part of white liberals (which is a political category that fits me pretty well, so I might as well kick someone).  Astonishingly, my first and most major objection to Harris-Perry's column ("wait, Clinton wasn't a liberal") is contained within the column itself, written by the author as though it suppor...