ratboy's anvil 2

Tales from the new bread lines

In July of 1932, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Douglas MacArthur led armor, cavalry and infantry against hungry Americans--veterans of the Great War--ending the Bonus Army march on Washington, D.C., at bayonet point. Today his doll-like, pigeon-shit-patinaed sculpture stands in his eponymous L.A. park, a showpiece of the city long fallen into a hangout for the down-and-out, where at dawn each day the general again faces ranks of hungry Americans.

Waking Up in the 1930s

By Howie Stier

In the year 2010, America once again embraced the bread line. That distant, faded, iconic black-and-white image of the Great Depression has re-emerged across the nation, waiting to be updated fully into HD color. Just as we seldom see pictures of American war dead returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, we seldom see newscasts of the struggling, jobless masses lining up for handouts. But they are lining up, and the scene is not one we are inured to, that of the disheveled homeless, the permanent underclass being ladled turkey dinners by apron-clad celebrities at Skid Row kitchens at holiday time. Rather, neatly dressed, solidly middle class, once working folk fill these bread lines as they become reconciled to a stark new reality. At the same time, this generation of jobless and the underemployed has yet to embrace what is shaping up to be nothing but the 1930s redux, and their voices murmur inconsistent notes of doubt, disillusionment and hope.

They listen daily to banal statistics--consumer indices, home prices, housing starts, unemployment insurance claims--intoned by newscasters batting the cycle of adjectives for up and down, and they hope for no sound reason that these same talking heads that propelled them to invest in stocks and homes that would only appreciate will imminently announce a combination of factors that will dispel this economic morass. It's as if those contentious, post-ironic Shepard Fairey "Hope" stickers that remain plastered across the nation continue to radiate hypnotic beams convincing the viewer that prosperity is just around the corner. And so here are some voices of that doubt, disillusion and hope, culled from a region especially hurting: the megalopolis of Los Angeles.

Sylmar, Calif., as distant geographically from downtown L.A.'s Skid Row as you can get and remain within Los Angeles County, is visually too a sea change from Skid Row's piss-stained concrete pavement. Hard up against the Angeles National Forest, the rugged ridgeline of the San Gabriel Mountains spreads majestically from east to west along the horizon, and here on a recent summer afternoon a breeze fragrant with citrus cools a crowd of people who sit quietly beneath the shade of churchyard trees. But this is no church picnic. There is no Frisbee being tossed around, no music being played; no one has prepared his or her favorite potato salad to share. They are here to get a box full of donated food from the First Baptist Church food pantry, a situation with which many of them have only recently become familiarized, and an overwhelming sense of apprehension prevails among the crowd, some 200 strong, akin to that among displaced persons in the aftermath of a building fire. They know this is not the normal order of things and fear the future.

A horseman wearing a white straw Stetson trots past astride a palomino and waves lazily, his hat contrasting strongly with his skin, and a scene straight out of Steinbeck is complete. He is brown, a campesino like the wiry, muscled young men in work clothes speaking quietly in Spanish among themselves in the bread line. There are mothers, too, trying to keep their place while controlling kids, a thin man with a military posture in GI desert boots, and a few sullen and obese cholo types sporting shaved heads and the "M13" inked into forearms displaying allegiance to the Mexican Mafia street gang. There's also a clean-cut man with a pink face, the clean-shaven face of a banker.

Turns out he is a banker. A hedge-funder formerly with Bear Stearns, Matt, 39, lost his last job some two years ago. He is a soft-spoken man who used to buy and sell companies, and today he has no qualms with the bread line. "There's no stigma attached to this anymore," explains the Navy vet, who has simply given up on the idea of getting a job anytime soon. "I'm starting my own business. I take consulting work when I can, and I'm jettisoning my house." ("You can't be self-employed for this Obama mortgage refinancing, so I'm screwed," he adds.)

Its just sickening how intense the demagoguery has gotten and the harm it is causing completely innocent Muslim Americans. How can a reasonable American of any political stripe feel anything but anger and shame over the fact that such blatant displays of bigotry has gained the level of currency it has? It is these bigots who are anti-American and dangerous.

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Blackwater was not forthright in the ways it tried to get and got military and CIA contracts worth hundreds of millions? Gee...really? And here I thought the mercenary services company was headed up by a Christian. It is? Oh my....

Blackwater Won Contracts via Web of Companies

By James Risen and Mark Mazzetti

Blackwater Worldwide created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq, according to Congressional investigators and former Blackwater officials.

While it is not clear how many of those businesses won contracts, at least three had deals with the United States military or the Central Intelligence Agency, according to former government and company officials. Since 2001, the intelligence agency has awarded up to $600 million in classified contracts to Blackwater and its affiliates, according to a United States government official.

The Senate Armed Services Committee this week released a chart that identified 31 affiliates of Blackwater, now known as Xe Services. The network was disclosed as part of a committee's investigation into government contracting. The investigation revealed the lengths to which Blackwater went to continue winning contracts after Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007. That episode and other reports of abuses led to criminal and Congressional investigations, and cost the company its lucrative security contract with the State Department in Iraq.

The network of companies -- which include several businesses located in offshore tax havens -- allowed Blackwater to obscure its involvement in government work from contracting officials or the public, and to assure a low profile for any of its classified activities, said former Blackwater officials, who, like the government officials, spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that it was worth "looking into why Blackwater would need to create the dozens of other names" and said he had requested that the Justice Department investigate whether Blackwater officers misled the government when using subsidiaries to solicit contracts

...for their own good.

Its all about the structure of the economy. Americans have this fantasy that it is possible to base their economy on the premise that boundless individual wealth acquisition is all that matters. The fantasy is flawed in that the exact problem of capitalism is its "black hole" tendency where as capital is accrued, it sucks more and more capital toward it...a sort of "there can only be one" mechanism at the expense of the common good. Its a commonly accepted idea; after all, we all grew up learning to play Monopoly. The problem of course is that real life is not a board game and economy has real consequences.

The governor mechanisms that saves capitalism from this flaw of ever accelerating self-consumption ("the rich get rich, the poor get poorer") is redistribution or "sharing the wealth" where excessive individual wealth gets plowed back into the common weal by way of progressive taxation, higher average wages and/or social programs like the famed post-WWII GI Bill.

Henry Ford understood this moderating feedback idea perfectly which is why he offered his workers double the average pay rate of the day in order that his workers be able to afford to buy the very product they were producing. This of course drew howls of derision from other short-sighted employers who were more interested in beating up and killing union organizers they saw as thieves and disruptors of their God-given right to be wealthy beyond all measure.

What the extremely wealthy don't seem to get is that a healthy and comfortable middle class acts as the buffer to the necessity of achieving wealth redistribution by way of revolution.

Reality has a way of snapping people out of their fantasies. As more and more people lose their middle class status the "boundless individual wealth acquisition" premise will come to be seen for the toxic economic ruse that it is. If you think people are angry right now...you know where it goes...and don't forget about the ability of the internet to unleash the flash mob.

How to End the Great Recession

By Robert B. Reich

This promises to be the worst Labor Day in the memory of most Americans. Organized labor is down to about 7 percent of the private work force. Members of non-organized labor -- most of the rest of us -- are unemployed, underemployed or underwater. Friday's jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics will almost surely show fewer new jobs created in August than the 125,000 needed just to keep up with growth of the potential work force.

The national economy isn't escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working: near-zero short-term interest rates from the Fed, almost record-low borrowing costs in the bond market, a giant stimulus package and tax credits for small businesses that hire the long-term unemployed have all failed to do enough.

That's because the real problem has to do with the structure of the economy, not the business cycle. No booster rocket can work unless consumers are able, at some point, to keep the economy moving on their own. But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services they produce as workers; for some time now, their means haven't kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them.

This crisis began decades ago when a new wave of technology -- things like satellite communications, container ships, computers and eventually the Internet -- made it cheaper for American employers to use low-wage labor abroad or labor-replacing software here at home than to continue paying the typical worker a middle-class wage. Even though the American economy kept growing, hourly wages flattened. The median male worker earns less today, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago.

But for years American families kept spending as if their incomes were keeping pace with overall economic growth. And their spending fueled continued growth. How did families manage this trick? First, women streamed into the paid work force. By the late 1990s, more than 60 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home (in 1966, only 24 percent did).

Second, everyone put in more hours. What families didn't receive in wage increases they made up for in work increases. By the mid-2000s, the typical male worker was putting in roughly 100 hours more each year than two decades before, and the typical female worker about 200 hours more.

When American families couldn't squeeze any more income out of these two coping mechanisms, they embarked on a third: going ever deeper into debt. This seemed painless -- as long as home prices were soaring. From 2002 to 2007, American households extracted $2.3 trillion from their homes.

Eventually, of course, the debt bubble burst -- and with it, the last coping mechanism. Now we're left to deal with the underlying problem that we've avoided for decades. Even if nearly everyone was employed, the vast middle class still wouldn't have enough money to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

Where have all the economic gains gone? Mostly to the top. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation's total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

G0 Ed!

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Part 2

HuffPost editor Roy Sekoff appeared on MSNBC's "The Ed Show" Thursday night to weigh in on the "my demo is bigger than your demo" war of words between host Ed Schultz and Fox News host Glenn Beck.

Sekoff dismissed Beck's effectiveness at rallying people to his cause, noting that the Fox host has been less than successful when it comes to taking down Barack Obama, the stimulus, the health care bill or financial reform. But he cautioned that Beck's disaffected adherents shouldn't simply be ignored.

"I think we have to be careful not to denigrate the people who turned out to the Mall or to try to put down or to make it sound like there's less real, legitimate anger in the country. There's a lot of suffering, Ed, as you've documented in the show day after day," Sekoff said. "The danger for progressives is they can't leave a vacuum for a charlatan and a demagogue like Beck preaching a phony gospel of unity when he's really talking about hate."

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This populist chant could be just as easily aimed at main stream media people as it usually is at ineffective and corrupt politicians.

Our Enabling Media Is Worse Than Ever

By Stanley Kutler

Thomas Jefferson periodically expressed support for a free press as essential to an "enlightened citizenry," but when the reality of political life settled on him during his presidency and beyond, Jefferson had harsh words for it. The newspapers, he complained in 1803, "present only the caricatures of disaffected minds." In his "retirement" a decade later, Jefferson deplored the "putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them." The press' capacity for mischief was ravenous, Jefferson complained.

The media of the day, he said, were "like the clergy, [who] live by the zeal they can kindle and the schisms they can create."

Jefferson never met 21st century radio and television, with their volatile contributions to the media mix. Today, the media largely offers us the irresponsible, shoddy, pernicious zeal and schisms he so deplored and feared. Recently, Maureen Dowd channeled Jefferson's criticisms with her searing characterization of her colleagues as "spreading fear and disinformation that is amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment."

The mainstream media marches on, duly disseminating all the managed news fit to print or speak. Witness the reporting on the forthcoming November elections. "Forthcoming elections" have equal urgency, whether we are talking 2010 or 2012, and the electoral process provides fertile feeding grounds for the media. "Politics all the time," MSNBC trumpets in promotional spots, while arch-rival Fox merely politicizes everything. The marathon that was the 2008 election might have left us politics-exhausted, but did not.

Since 2008, the media have relentlessly pursued political happenings (and non-happenings), with reporters duly repeating partisan handouts as if they offered "news," reading tea leaves or ratcheting up the noise and placards of tea parties. We are bombarded with tales of unrest, anger and disaffection among the natives, anxious to march to polls to toss out the "rascal," that is, incumbents.

All this, we are to believe, is grass-roots democracy, with folks spontaneously gathering to air their grievances. It offers all the spontaneity of a pointillist painting.

A year after Barack Obama's election, a year of apparent grace for the president, media pundits turned attention to the 47 percent who did not support him. His victory left many angry and disaffected, and their hostility soon turned to a visceral hatred, quite often blatantly predicated on race. What else could be the meaning of all the signs and speeches proclaiming a determination "to save the Republic" and "to get our country back?" And along came "tea parties," a symbolic heralding of "revolution," not out of nowhere, but well-funded and choreographed by familiar political operatives and ideologues in search of a new vehicle.

Pros, not amateurs, lead this movement. They well know that hostility, disaffection and anger are red meat for the media, anxious to pursue "new" story lines, and an easy avenue to disseminate their anti-Obama line. Glenn Beck, of course, provides a divine afflatus. He would have us believe that he decided to hold a "political rally," but "God dropped a giant sandbag on my head" and told him he had to awaken America.

The political hysteria over hordes of illegals which prompted is shown to be just that by data demonstrating that illegal immigration is actually down by 67% over the last decade.

Now it appears that AZ governor Jan Brewer has ties to a lobbyist for a local prison that could monetarily benefit from the incarceration of those arrested under the draconian SB 1070 bill she signed into law recently. Her campaign has also removed all advertising from a local TV station in retaliation for its ongoing investigations into the lobbyist connections. As they say, follow the money.

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This Side of Democracy

By Stuart Whatley

Ignorance and poverty, and the lack of material means generally, prevent people from exercising their rights and from taking advantage of [opportunities]. But rather than counting these and similar obstacles as restricting a person's liberty, we count them as affecting the worth of liberty, that is, the usefulness to persons of their liberties. ~ John Rawls

As it is an election year amidst the Great Recession, talk of the American plutocracy is very much in vogue. But to label the situation as unique belies centuries of history. A politico-economic class structure has long been an operative distorting force in American government; and long has the value of civic expression and democratic agency for the many been seen as dwarfed by the clout and privilege of a wealthy few.

Every American has the right to speak out, to express views, and to serve as an advocate for all manner of issues and prospective leaders. But having rights doesn't necessarily mean they're valuable, or even useful at all. At times, many ordinary Americans feel as though they're just shooting blanks--electorally speaking of course--and with each new doubter in the process a vicious cycle ensues; the discouraged classes grow more cynical and abandon the civic process altogether, while select special interests exploit and occupy the space left behind. Campaign finance can be dry stuff, but it is ignored at one's peril, as it is the current election funding regime--and the perverse incentives it fosters--that undergirds much of the integrity of our entire political structure and the policies it propounds.

American democracy is in an era defined by political and economic strife, where the calls for reform are desperate and often shrill. This is of little surprise. The flaws in the system are obvious when one looks to the lukewarm reforms over the past year in health care and financial regulation, and the altogether abandoned cap and trade effort--all of which began with lofty promises, but ultimately pleased few when codified. It is a heady experience to think what would have come to pass had reforms already been in place two years ago to dilute the codependency between lawmakers and their benefactors. Millions of individual small donors helped usher Barack Obama into the White House. What if the same could be said for the 535 esteemed members of the United States Congress?

Of course, when the many are drowned out by a plutocratic few, the answer has always been to simply pile on more regulations, only to watch the courts inexorably shoot each down. Opponents of big government stand the line against opponents of big business, with each side exchanging the same stalemated arguments of corruption in government on the one hand and free speech on the other.

On Aug 11 of this year I made as post titled "Taqiyya" which included a slick youtube vid piece of anti-Muslim propaganda which raised the specter in part that Muslims could not be trusted to be honest in their dealings with un-believers because of a tenet in their faith called "taqiyya" which was portrayed as prophet sanctioned "right to lie and deceive the infidel".

A Muslim named Amad from Muslimmatters.org responded to the post with some comment insights and clarifications as well as a link to an article at Loonwatch.com which debunks that notion and puts a completely different contextual perspective regarding "taqiyya" on the semantic table.

It was enlightening to say the least to discover how my own ignorance of Muslim culture had led me to unwarranted fears about the meaning of taqiyya...me who prides himself on being completely unbigoted toward any group. I urge my readers to elevate their perspective on this matter by reading the original post and comments and then the article at loonwatch.

The excerpt below is from that article:

I was over at my parents the other day watching a movie with them and my sisters based on a true story about a young amateur golfer named Francis Ouimet during the early 20th century who managed against huge odds to win the 1913 US Open tournament while competing with major pros, including the famous Harry Vardon.
Hail the Underdog!

It proved to be an excellent movie that managed to make the tournament a nail biting roller coaster ride while simultaneously expressing a range of human frailties and ethical heroics. By the end my sister asks me if I was crying. I said I was teared up at the expression human goodness...when you get to witness good men or woman doing the right thing. That always gets to me. Its why I teared up when I knew that America had elected Obama. To wit:

I Feel Good: Elevation, Positive Thinking & The Persistence of Racism

By Jessie

Everyone, it seems, likes a story with a happy ending.  It may be a particularly American cultural phenomenon or part of human brain structure.  But the rather relentless focus on cheerful positive thinking is also getting in the way of confronting the persistence of racism in the U.S.

In the U.S., the prevailing narrative about race is that "racial dynamics have been transformed," first by the Civil Rights Movement and most recently - and finally - by the election of President Barack Obama.   We see this meme repeated again and again by mainstream news media, in popular movies (e.g., "Blind Side" and the entire genre of "white savior" films), and in personal conversation.   There is something in this narrative that speaks to both a human desire for "elevation" and the American quest to be "positive."

Roger Ebert, film and social critic, explains that he's never moved to tears by sad moments in movies, just during "moments about goodness."   Ebert describes the feeling this way:

"What I experience is the welling up of a few tears in my eyes, a certain tightness in my throat, and a feeling of uplift: Yes, there is a good person, doing a good thing. And when the movie is over, I don't want to talk with anyone. After such movies I notice that many audience members remain in a kind of reverie. Those who break the spell by feeling compelled to say something don't have an emotional clue."

This is the feeling that the movie "Blind Side" was supposed to evoke.   Ebert doesn't mention the Sandra Bullock movie, but touches on race when he goes on to compare that feeling to the way he - and lots of other people - felt in Grant Park the night President Obama was elected.

In an article at Slate.com by Emily Yoffe, "Obama in Your Heart," she describes a study about "the emotions of uplift" conducted by Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at UC-Berkeley, who had studied physical responses in test subjects who are deeply moved -- what psychologists call "elevation." Yoffe writes:

Elevation has always existed but has just moved out of the realm of philosophy and religion and been recognized as a distinct emotional state and a subject for psychological study. Psychology has long focused on what goes wrong, but in the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in "positive psychology"-what makes us feel good and why. University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, "Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental 'reset button,' wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration."

If the psuedo-science of gay reparative therapies wasn't so destructive to the individuals assaulted by it and and so damaging to the culture at large by way of preserving the historical ignorance, stereotypes and general distortions about homosexuality, the naive techniques it dreams up and uses and then consistently fails at would actually be funny in an absurd sort of way. Sadly though, the overall effect of such unlicensed therapies is a cruel horror story of unparalleled stupidities which needs to exposed and eliminated.

6 Ways Religious Frauds Try to Make Gays and Lesbians Straight

Thanks to the unscientific, unregulated underworld of ex-gay therapy, frauds and hacks of all stripes are getting away with any kind of therapy they can think up.

by Ted Cox

The "ex-gay" movement, which purports to save religious men and women from their unwanted same-sex attractions, will resort to any method to scam its unfortunate adherents.

Earlier this month, Truth Wins Out, an organization run by ex-gay-group watchdog Wayne Besen,* released an exclusive video of two men describing how ex-gay life coach Alan Downing had encouraged them in separate counseling sessions to stand before a mirror, undress and touch themselves.

A significantly older life coach, who also admits to being attracted to men, making 20-something men strip naked in his office? In the unscientific, unregulated underworld of ex-gay therapy, frauds and hacks of all stripes are getting away with any kind of "therapy" they can think up.

Make no mistake: every major, reputable professional psychological and medical association has stated that not only is there no evidence supporting the possibility of changing somebody's sexual orientation, but that such programs harm those involved; depression and suicide are all-too-common in the ex-gay world.

Follow the link below to see some of the strangest and most disturbing techniques ex-gay leaders use in their failed attempts to turn their victims -- who are tragically struggling to reconcile their faith with their sexuality -- straight.

Fortunately for me, my life of being extremely near sighted slowly came to an end as I passed through middle age as my eyes grew far sighted instead which resulted in nearly perfect distant vision to the point where I no longer need lenses at all except for reading. But during my days as lens wearer, I always had been aghast at what average glasses or contacts cost and suspected that the markups must be huge. Here's confirmation on that industry wide thievery and tips on how to avoid it and buy cheaply online.

Eyewear Industry Is Incredible Ripoff

What makes glasses so expensive? Oblong plastic lenses? Plastic and metal frames? We're getting screwed

by Anneli Rufus

Those of us who need prescription eyewear need prescription eyewear. Are you wearing yours to read this? Imagine if you weren't. Imagine life without your glasses for a year, a week, an hour. Yet many health insurance plans, especially for the unemployed or self-employed, don't cover them.

Mine doesn't.

Last year, I went shopping for no-line progressive bifocals in small oval metal frames. Name brands mean nothing to me. Price does. My high astigmatism and need for bifocals disqualify me from those buy-one-get-one-free deals, which almost always involve only single-vision specs.

In store after store, megachains and optical boutiques alike, small oval metal frames fitted with lenses matching my prescription started at $300. One popular shop quoted me $582 for the lenses alone.

I bought a pair of no-line progressive bifocals in small oval metal frames for $44 online. I'm wearing them right now.

Perhaps because prescription glasses are where medicine meets fashion, they're among the world's most overpriced merchandise. Imperfect eyesight isn't your fault: You can't make yourself nearsighted by eating too much fudge. Yet if your health plan excludes vision care, you've spent years at the mercy of a $64 billion industry characterized by 500-percent markups.

This has begun to change over the last few years. A knowledge-is-power, power-to-the-people, Web-driven DIY wave is rocking the optical industry's very foundations. Dozens of companies now sell prescription glasses online, frames and lenses included, for as little as $7.95.

It works like this: Google "cheap glasses" to find a frame you like at a price you like at a site you like. (Among the most popular are 39DollarGlasses, ZenniOptical -- where I bought mine -- and Goggles4U.) Use the virtual fitting mechanism to "try it on." Type in your prescription (obtained from an actual eye doctor), pupillary distance (aka PD, derived by measuring the space between your pupils with a ruler), address and payment information. Send.

And on a Fox station no less.

The guy in opposition to the ad is an idiot with the same old malarkey about pot being a gateway drug, and say stupid stuff like: "What's next medical cocaine, medical heroin....?" Duh, like yeah...those both already are used medically...what a knucklehead. Same old conflation between use and abuse.

Louis: the Movie

Classic Satchamo

and he's singing about High Society and sitting where again?

Intelligence vs rationality...not to mention the emotional IQ theory.

What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought

by Keith E. Stanovich

Clumsy speech, immense overconfidence, heavy reliance on intuition rather than factual evidence: many people associate these attributes with George W. Bush, and some believe, based on these traits, that the former president is a man of inferior intelligence. That is why so many people were stunned when, during the 2004 presidential campaign, Bush's IQ score was estimated to be 120--well above average and about the same as that of his opponent John Kerry. Psychologist Keith Stanovich of the University of Toronto, however, was not surprised at all by Bush's IQ. In his new book he explains why.

Stanovich is convinced that intelligence is different from the ability to make rational decisions and that the two traits do not always coexist. IQ tests measure only part of our cognitive qualities, he argues, and critical thinking is not included. As a result "some people can have very high IQs but be remarkably weak when it comes to the ability to think rationally," he writes. Yet our society is "fixated on assessing intelligence" and completely ignores rationality. Parents and teachers place great emphasis on trying to raise more intelligent children, but teaching kids to become rational human beings receives much less attention--even though critical thinking would be easy to teach, Stanovich says. This oversight is a serious problem because "societal consequences of irrational thinking are profound," Stanovich adds. For example, jurors have admitted to having made their decisions based on astrology, and Americans waste billions of dollars a year on quack medical remedies.

In What Intelligence Tests Miss, Stanovich shows that we have enough knowledge and the right tests to assess rationality as systematically as we determine IQ. So why aren't we doing it? He thinks the reason is a "historical accident." Because we had measures of intelligence first, IQ tests became ubiquitous early on and have pushed any interest in other cognitive abilities out of our minds ever since.

Stanovich makes a compelling argument that we need to put more emphasis on measuring and teaching critical thinking skills. His clear writing and his many interesting examples make the book accessible and engaging. What Intelligence Tests Miss illuminates the actions of everyone who affects our lives, from our family members to our co-workers to former president Bush.

and probably couldn't.

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If this guy is a terrorist, the terrorists are in deep trouble...or maybe we are if we don't find this guy really funny.

Canada's Next Top Terror Suspect

Accused terror suspect Khurram Syed Sher is featured in a surprising new viral video that is popping up on the Internet. The video shows Sher auditioning for the "Canadian Idol" TV show in 2008 by singing a rather tortured rendition of Avril Lavgine's "Complicated"--and tossing in a not-half-bad moonwalk.

The charges against Sher, announced Friday, are "conspiracy to knowingly facilitate a terrorist activity," according to a Canadian Broadcast Corp. report. --JCL

CNN:

Canadian terror plot suspect Khurram Syed Sher tried out for a spot on "Canadian Idol" in 2008, telling the judges he came to Canada from Pakistan in 2005 and performing Avril Lavigne's "Complicated" when the judges voted for that over a Hilary Duff song.

Sher, who is actually a native Canadian, sings in a Pakistani accent while performing a series of strained dance moves, one of which is reminiscent of ice skating form. Which make sense when at the end of the performance a judge asks Sher if he considered being a comedian rather than a singer.

"Not really, I like hockey," Sher replies.

Obama Must Assert Democratic Control Over Economic Forces

by Michael Sandel Political Philosopher, Harvard University

The agenda of postwar American liberalism was set out by FDR in 1944, when he called for an "economic bill of rights." True individual freedom required more than the political rights enumerated in the Constitution, he argued. Under modern conditions, it also required basic social and economic rights, including "the right to a useful and remunerative job...the right of every family to a decent home, the right to adequate medical care...the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment" and "the right to a good education."

From the Spring Democracy: A Journal of Ideas symposium, "What Happened?":

Obama can still redefine liberalism, but he must bring economic power to heel.

Imagine a president, or a presidential candidate, taking on Wall Street in blunt language such as this: "We have been dreading all along the time when the combined power of high finance would be greater than the power of the government. Have we come to a time when the president of the United States or any man who wishes to be the president must doff his cap in the presence of this high finance, and say, 'You are our inevitable master, but we will see how we can make the best of it'?"

Or this: "The supreme political task of our day is to drive the special interests out of our public life."

Or this: "Through new uses of corporations, banks, and securities," a privileged economic elite has "reached out for control over government itself," rendering political equality "meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group [has] concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor -- other people's lives."

Today, mainstream commentators and editorial writers would disparage such talk as irresponsible populist rhetoric. But American political leaders have not always been as deferential toward economic power as they are expected to be today. The statements quoted above were not made by far-out radicals, but by Woodrow Wilson (1912), Theodore Roosevelt (1910), and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1936).

It is striking to notice the difference between their liberalism and ours. For these icons of twentieth-century liberalism, the first question of politics was how to subject economic power to democratic control.

When Louis D. Brandeis spoke of "the curse of bigness," he meant that monopolies and big banks posed a danger to democracy. Today, we still worry about bigness, but not in the same way. When we say that Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and AIG are "too big to fail," we mean that their failure would wreak havoc with the economy, so the government must bail them out rather than let them go down. The problem with having banks that are too big to fail is that it violates the rules of the capitalist game. When times are good, they make outsized profits, but when things go badly, the taxpayer has to pick up the tab.

What the hell is the Republicans water supply that could possibly explain this level of ignorance?

Poll: Majority Of GOP Believes Obama Sympathizes With Islamic Fundamentalism, Wants Worldwide Islamic Law

by Sam Stein

A majority of Republicans believe that President Barack Obama "sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world," according to a survey released on Monday.

That figure, buried at the very end of a newly released Newsweek public opinion poll, reflects the extent to which a shocking bit of smear and misinformation has managed to become nearly commonplace within the GOP tent.

(Read the full poll results here.)

A full 14 percent of Republicans said that it was "definitely true" that Obama sympathized with the fundamentalists and wanted to impose Islamic law across the globe. An additional 38 percent said that it was probably true -- bringing the total percentage of believers to 52 percent. Only 33 percent of Republicans said that the "allegation" (as Newsweek put it) was "probably not true." Seven percent said it was "definitely not true." The rest (eight percent) either didn't know the answer or didn't read the question.

The Newsweek findings add more kindling to the already-heated debate raging around the persistent rumors that Obama is a closeted Muslim (he's not). In an illustration of just how deeply news outlets have been drawn to the topic, the magazine devoted seven of its 24 questions to Muslim-themed topics, producing, in the process, a number of telling and newsworthy numbers.

Fifty-nine percent of Republicans, for instance, said they believed the president favored "the interests of Muslims over other groups of Americans," while only 34 percent of said he had been "generally even handed" in his approach. In contrast, nine percent of Democrats said Obama favored "the interests of Muslims over other groups of Americans" while 82 percent of Democrats said he had been even-handed.

On a more uplifting front, 16 percent of all respondents said they had a very favorable view of Muslims while 45 percent said they had a "mostly favorable" view -- the highest and second highest totals recorded for those answers in the survey's history, respectively.