I had not seen the video below:

until I saw it posted on The BlueMass Group article NYPD spokesman appears to be full of crap on pepper spray incident.

The larger the screen you view this from, the better able you are to see the specific things pointed out by the overlayed comments. You need to go to YouTube to see as large an image as you can.

Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC has more complete coverage and commentary on this story including the video clip above.

The article Palestine Vote Showcases the Decline of American Power does not make its best argument when it focuses on the decline of American power.

When it argues that so many other countries disagree with us, that also may not be its best argument.  After all, we have been in the position before of being lonely hold outs for a principled position and we were right to do so.

I think the best argument may be in the final paragraph:

But in large part, Washington’s current difficulties derive from adopting a position contrary to international law and to basic human decency. Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank looks suspiciously like Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait—both being land-grabs that violate the United Nations Charter, Article 2.4. The stateless Palestinians ultimately have no individual rights. No national courts uphold their property deeds or rights to resources such as water. At least if they are recognized by the vast majority of U.N. member states, the Palestinians may gain the standing to sue in national and international courts to stop the ongoing torts being committed against them by the Israeli settler-industrial complex. In standing against this attempt to right an epochal historical wrong to an entire people, Obama puts the United States on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of world opinion. Neither is likely to forgive him.

Being one of the last hold outs for an unprincipled position is not something I can or want to defend.

While I can imagine many Americans focusing on the need for the U.S. to withstand pressure and the need to stick to its guns no matter what, I see a flaw in that stance.  The stance only makes sense if you are right on the merits.  They forget that the main thing is to be on the correct side of the issue whether it is easy to do so or hard to do so.  The issue is not the difficulty of holding a position.  The issue should always be, first and foremost, whether or not our position is right.

Sometimes I am proud to be a Massachusetts native.

Here is an email I received from Elizabeth Warren.

On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart did an extended interview with Ron Paul.

Occasionally, Jon Stewart gets a word in edgewise to challenge Ron Paul. Ron Paul’s ideas would work so well if only people didn’t act the way they actually do. This is usually the knock on Socialism. In fact the problem applies to any extreme system that requires people to behave in an idealized way.

Sure I can insist on a libertarian system where my property rights are sacrosanct. What do I do if a person with a gun tries to take away my rights? Must I engage in a gunfight, or can I depend on the police department provided by the government that my fellow citizens and I set up in advance to handle this type of problem?

What if a major corporation with billions of dollars of resources tries to take away my property? What chance do I have to fight them off by myself?

If it takes this little thinking about fairly simple situations to see the flaws in Ron Paul’s ideal system, how well would it work when the issues get far more complicated?

As They get older, most people get over these notions of ideal people working in an ideal system. It took Alan Greenspan until well into his 80s or was it 90s before he finally saw the flaws in his similar ideas to Ron Paul’s. Give Paul another 20 years, and maybe he will come to his senses, too.

It is fun to discuss the ideal. I did it in my blog post, Imagine – Total Automation. After the ideal case reveals the upper limits on the possibilities, you need to get back to the real world to discuss what you might actually be able to implement.

Ron Paul does not seem to understand the place of the idealized system with respect to the real world.

And then again, some of his ideas are flat out wrong. Anything he says about the economy, especially the fed, is flat out wrong.

In the article The Real Job Killer: Missed Opportunity Paul Krugman writes:

Something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment. Indeed, in the absence of effective policy, that’s how recovery eventually happens: as the economist John Maynard Keynes put it in his “General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” a slump goes on until “the shortage of capital through use, decay and obsolescence” gets firms spending again to replace their plants and equipment.

At the end of my September 2, 2011 blog post Obama halts controversial EPA regulation I made the same point that Krugman is making in his article.

I heard a news report of an estimated cost of the regulations as $19 to $90 billion dollars.  The President was reported to have said that this was too big a burden at this time.  Does he think that the money was going to be used directly to plug up smoke stacks and be burned in the process?  That $19 to $90 billion would have been spent buying pollution control technology.  That would have meant job creation for the people producing and installing the technology.  The money might have had to come from industry’s cash reserves that are sitting idle.  This President apparently understands nothing about economics and how to stimulate an economy.  Why did I ever think he had the intelligence to understand this?

It is nice to have confirmation from a Nobel Prize winning economist about my understanding of how macro-economics works.  (I know, I have intimated before that the title ” Nobel Prize winning economist” is not always proof that you know what you are talking about with regard to economics.)

Talking Points Memo has the story Elizabeth Warren Endorsed By Russ Feingold.

“In all my years in the Senate, I always took positions that I believed in, even when my own party tried to stand in the way,” Feingold writes. “I know Elizabeth will be exactly the same kind of senator.”

Sometimes I would get upset with Feingold for opposing some of Obama’s initiatives.  I don’t know if his opposition did more good than harm.  Perhaps he understood Obama’s failings better than I did.

Thinking back to my days as a supervisor/manager, I remember that when you have a failing employee, you need to start discussing the problems with that employee as soon as possible.  If it should get to the point where you have to fire the employee, it should come as no surprise to the employee.  If you didn’t give the employee plenty of opportunities to correct the troublesome performance, then you have failed as a supervisor/manager.

Likewise, all of us who held our tongues when Obama failed us time and again were failing as the voters who elected him.  It shouldn’t have taken three years for us to deliver the message loud and clear that Obama was in danger of being fired.  Yes, it shouldn’t have taken Obama three years to appear to come to his senses.  We may both bear some blame for the delay that may cost him his job.

The Real News article 80 People Arrested at “Occupy Wall St.”  has the following video report:

Do you suppose that the police violence is prompted by real worries about this protest by the power brokers on Wall Street?