Autonomous Oblast

Gingrich is a very likely going to run for President in 2012, he is charismatic and to the Right of George W Bush; reading this article shows how dangerous he could be.

Gingrich: Remove Iranian regime
May 3, 2009br> WASHINGTON (JTA) — Newt Gingrich at the AIPAC policy conference called for ousting the regime in Iran and bombing its missile sites.

Gingrich, a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a likely presidential candidate in 2012, in his address faulted the last Bush administration and the current Obama administration for engaging with Iran as long as it is led by theocrats who threaten Israel.

“We need to recognize that there are some regimes we will never be able to cut a deal with because they are in fact evil,” he said Sunday, the opening day of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference, which drew nearly 7,000 delegates.

Gingrich likened negotiations with the current Iranian regime to negotiating with Adolf Hitler, and called for “enforcing the disruption of gasoline supplies until the Iranian economy broke, the ayatollahs were ousted and a new regime was in place without a single shot fired.” That earned thunderous applause.

The Georgia Republican also called for a military strike to destroy missiles in Iran and North Korea.

Via: John Cole & Retro*Politics

Rep. Peter Hoekstra writes in Pravda the WSJ op-ed pages:

Congress Knew About the Interrogations
It was not necessary to release details of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because members of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them since the program began in 2002. We believed it was something that had to be done in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to keep our nation safe. After many long and contentious debates, Congress repeatedly approved and funded this program on a bipartisan basis in both Republican and Democratic Congresses. by them.

• The principal is the one whose acts or omissions, accompanied by the relevant mens rea, are the most immediate cause of the actus reus (Latin for “guilty act”).
• If two or more people are directly responsible for the actus reus, they can be charged as joint principals (see common purpose). The test to distinguish a joint principal from an accessory is whether the defendant independently contributed to causing the actus reus rather than merely giving generalised and/or limited help and encouragement……. wikipedia

Commentary by Tim Jones @www.eff.org

Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration’s made two deeply troubling arguments.

First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue “would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.” As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence….

Article by New York Times writer Noah Feldman.

Feldman is a law professor at Harvard University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Listen to an interview with Feldman about this article here

Michael Silverblatt of BookWorm interviews Camille de Toledo author of Coming of Age at the End of History. This discussion touches many of the ideas and people that have long been of interest to me. The Spectacle , Guy Debord, Lip Stick Traces, TAZ, Zapatistas and much more.

In this election cycle it is good to step out side the media dialog and find grander ideas that can be used as fulcrums, to leverage philosophy on to the political stage.

Palin was (quite brilliantly) chosen by McCain because — like any successful commodity product in the postmodern marketplace — she embodies what Alex Shakar, in his novel The Savage Girl, calls a paradessence: a “paradoxical essence,” a conjunction of contradictory qualities. “Every product has this paradoxical essence. Two opposing desires that it can promise to satisfy simultaneously.” The paradessence is the “schismatic core, [the] broken soul, at the center of every product.” Thus coffee promises both “stimulation and relaxation”; ice cream connotes both “eroticism and innocence,” or (in more psychoanalytic terms) both “semen and mother’s milk.” The paradessence is not a dialectical contradiction; its opposing terms do not interact, conflict, or produce some higher synthesis. Rather, the paradessence affirms everything indiscriminately; it is a matter of “having everything both ways and every way and getting everything [one] wants” (from pp 60-61 and 179).

Palin is a paradessence, and hence a wildly popular commodity, because she combines the family-centeredness of the ideal suburban Mom with the ruthlessness of a corporate “warrior” in the dog-eat-dog neoliberal economy, or of a hard-core ideologue/foot soldier for the Far Right. She is sort of a perfect combination of June Cleaver and Ilse Koch.

From Steven Shavior : The Pinocchio Theory

Via Dean:
During this US election cycle we are hearing a lot from the pundits and candidates about “heartland voters,” and “white working class voters.”

Funny, Scary and insightful. This article from the BBC by Joe Bageant. Outside the major metropolitan areas these heartland voters are most likely a solid majority. Mr. Bageant’s bullet list seems right to me. [link]