EMMYdiocracy
Mediocracy is a situation which can occur in a democracy in which mediocre people prevail. The society is then subordinated to a quasi-egalitarian ideology in which words and ideas are redefined by mediocre people, to be convenient for mediocre people. Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a frequent critic of mediocracy in contemporary Western countries. || This where the tag cloud goes if the tag cloud loads:
live free or diebold
(via socialuprooting)
New legislation across the US could have a huge impact on the country’s 2012 presidential elections. Largely Republican politicians have passed a range of new voting laws that groups fear could disenfranchise as many as five million American voters this year.
Politicians claim that they are concerned about preventing voter fraud but minority communities see the civil rights gained in the 1960s as being under attack again in a subtler way.
The department of justice has already made strong rulings against laws that have been passed in South Carolina and Texas because they discriminate against minorities.
Fault Lines travels to Tennessee and Florida, two states that have passed strict laws, to explore the origins and consequences of the new legislation.
(via aljazeera)
Please click on each of the images above to see the clear contrast between Rocky’s policies, which are in the public interest, and the bought Democratic and Republican candidates, who act as if they are in retainer to Wall Street.
Help make Rocky the third choice and appear on the ballot on all 50 states. We have more than enough support to get Rocky to #1 on American’s Elect! Let’s show the Democrats and Republicans that the American people will no longer accept their corporatist and militaristic duopoly any longer. Yes, Obama is the lesser of two evils, but I believe that the American should vote for someone’s policies, not against a greater threat to their liberties and well-being.
Where will YOU draw the line?
- Will it be when Congress (including then-Senator Obama) caves into a multi-million dollar lobbying blitz and provides retroactive immunity for numerous felonies committed by powerful telecommunication companies?
- Will it be when the President of the U.S. says that we should just forget about war crimes committed by U.S. officials and not hold anyone to account?
- Will it be when the President receives more in Wall Street campaign contributions than anyone else in history, then surrounds himself with Wall Street cronies and fails to hold accountable those who committed financial fraud leading to the economic melt-down that has harmed millions of Americans?
- Will it be when the President adds U.S. citizens to assassination lists?
- Will it be when the President signs into law a bill that allows the President to designate people, including U.S. citizens, to be kidnapped, incarcerated, and detained for up to their entire lives without charges, legal representation, the right of habeas corpus, or trial – completely at odds with the Due Process Clause and the most basic principles underlying our system of government?
- Will it be when the President ignores the plight of many millions of people whose families are in dire need of jobs, homes, and essential health care?
We don’t have to put up this anymore, together, with all of our support, we can make a third choice appear on the ballots, and we have the means through social media to alert everyone to a better alternative.
Please add your support and reblog! Let’s make this go viral here on Tumblr.
(via socialuprooting)
Texas Gov. Rick Perry was operating under the influence of painkillers during Republican presidential debates earlier this election cycle, a new e-book by Mike Allen and Evan Thomas claims.
It “became an open secret that he was using painkillers in sufficient dosages to keep him standing through the two-hour debates,” according to “Inside the Circus,” which was released on Tuesday.
The Daily Caller first relayed the book’s report of an incident, presumably prompted by pain medication, in which the “manager of a rival campaign” supposedly witnessed Perry belting out the lyrics to “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” during a trip to the bathroom before an October debate.
“Wondering who was making all the noise, the campaign manager turned his head and saw, to his surprise, the governor of Texas,” the book states. “Perry came down the row of about twenty urinals and stood companionably close by.”
The authors continue: “Nonplussed, the campaign manager made a hasty exit; as the bathroom door closed, he could hear Perry still merrily singing away: “I-I-I’ve been working on the ra-a-i-i-l-road, all-l-l the live-long day.”Not to say “I told you so,” but I totally called this shit back in October.
just to pass the time of day
Tumblr, he’s talking about you! [x]
Wait, selling a president to the public through viral marketing, like how we sell snack chips and soda isn’t the same old game? New venue, new marketing technique, same old Madison avenue hacks
Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.
Will Democrats Strip Civil Liberties from Their 2012 Platform?
The 2008 document is at direct odds with how President Obama has governed. Changing it or leaving it the same would both be awkward.
When the Democratic Party holds its convention this September in Charlotte, North Carolina, President Obama’s speech is likely to garner the most press attention. But I’ll be most interested in how the delegates get themselves out of the pickle of their standard bearer’s making: What are they going to say about civil liberties and executive power in the party platform?
Four years ago, the last time the Democrats adopted a platform, their presidential candidate championed civil liberties, insisted that closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay would make us safer from terrorists, and righteously denounced the expansive Bush-Cheney understanding of executive power. Said the official 2008 platform contemporaneously adopted by Democratic delegates (links added):We will restore our constitutional traditions, and recover our nation’s founding commitment to liberty under law. We support constitutional protections and judicial oversight on any surveillance program involving Americans. We will review the current Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. We reject illegal wiretapping of American citizens, wherever they live. We reject the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime … We reject sweeping claims of “inherent” presidential power. We will revisit the Patriot Act and overturn unconstitutional executive decisions issued during the past eight years. We will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine duly enacted law. And we will ensure that law-abiding Americans of any origin, including Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans, do not become the scapegoats of national security fears.
Another section is also pertinent:We will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools to hunt down and take out terrorists without undermining our Constitution, our freedom, and our privacy … we will lead in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. We will not ship away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, or detain without trial or charge prisoners who can and should be brought to justice for their crimes, or maintain a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law. We will respect the time-honored principle of habeas corpus, the seven century-old right of individuals to challenge the terms of their own detention that was recently reaffirmed by our Supreme Court.
We will close the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, the location of so many of the worst constitutional abuses in recent years. With these necessary changes, the attention of the world will be directed where it belongs: on what terrorists have done to us, not on how we treat suspects.
If you click through to the links I’ve embedded above you’ll quickly get a sense of how thoroughly President Obama has betrayed the words and spirit of his candidacy and his party’s platform.
So what now?
As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein put it:What will the 2012 Democratic Party platform say about civil liberties? What will it say about the U.S. government’s lethal attacks on citizens overseas? About Gitmo and military tribunals? About drone wars? And, perhaps a more important question: Will Democratic activists push the party to keep and perhaps strengthen its platform — and if so, will the Obama campaign push back?It’s an uncomfortable choice: either betray your principles and accept the Bush-Cheney-Obama approach to the War on Terror, or else highlight in a minor way how your standard-bearer has betrayed the principles on which he ran and adopted so many of the policies he once criticized. Either way, the wording of the 2012 Democratic Party Platform won’t escape scrutiny.
I’ll be watching. And I hope Democrats who still care about these issues use the opportunity to make themselves heard.
Who runs America today? The rich and the multinational corporations. Who runs the White House? David Plouffe, whose job it is to make sure that ever word, every action of the president is calculated for electoral gain rather than the country’s needs. Who runs the Congress, on both sides of the aisle? The lobbyists, who win in every negotiation. And who loses? The American people, who have said repeatedly that they want a budget that sharply cuts the military, ends the wars, raises taxes on the rich, protects the poor and the middle class, and invests in America’s future not just in Obama’s speeches but in fact.
America needs a third-party movement to break the hammerlock of the financial elites. Until that happens, the political class and the media conglomerates will continue to spew lies, American militarism will continue to destabilize a growing swath of the world, and the country will continue its economic decline.
