According to The Raw Story article Parody ad shows Romney supporting Obama,

In response to Mitt Romney’s misleading ad released on President Barack Obama, the folks at BuzzFeed decided to have a little fun at making their own deceptive commercial.

Here is the parody.

There, take that Mitt Romney.

The Raw Story‘s article Senator plans first ever Internet-fueled filibuster describes Wyden’s fight against these bills.

…Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) will filibuster a bill — the Protect IP Act, which aims to fundamentally change the structure of the Internet — with a little help from his friends and admirers online.

Here is a brief video of Wyden made for promoting his campaign against these bills.

Here is the link to www.StopCensorship.org where you can sign the petition and become part of the filibuster.

One of the paragraphs in the article that caught my attention was the following:

Corporations could also use SOPA claims to force companies to stop processing donations to whistleblower sites like WikiLeaks that post documents protected by copyright or containing trade secrets. The bill would additionally require Internet service providers to “take technically feasible and reasonable measures” to block “rogue” sites from their customers, essentially creating a massive Internet blacklist.

The shutting down of payments to WikiLeaks was exactly the technique that was used to close down WikiLeaks entire operation. Without the disclosures that WikiLeaks made, many governments including the U.S. would be free to continue to tell the lies they have used to trick us into adopting policies that are bad for us. Some of what WikiLeaks has already disclosed is helping us to see the hysterical propaganda against Iran for what it really is. They show that the current head of the IAEA is a puppet of the U.S. government. He seems to be willing to promote the particular lies that the U.S. government wants to promote.

Read the article Seymour Hersh: Propaganda Used Ahead of Iraq War Is Now Being Reused over Iran’s Nuke Program, to see what I mean about the IAEA chief.

Democracy Now the article and interview Seymour Hersh: Propaganda Used Ahead of Iraq War Is Now Being Reused over Iran’s Nuke Program. The story was repeated by Truth Out.

In his latest article for The New Yorker blog, titled “Iran and the IAEA,” Hersh argues the recent report is a “political document,” not a scientific study. “They [JSOC] found nothing. Nothing. No evidence of any weaponization,” Hersh says. “In other words, no evidence of a facility to build the bomb. They have facilities to enrich, but not separate facilities to build the bomb. This is simply a fact.”

From the blog post on The New Yorker web site posting “Iran and the IAEA” mentioned above, I have Hersh’s words:

I’ve been reporting on Iran and the bomb for The New Yorker for the past decade, with a focus on the repeated inability of the best and the brightest of the Joint Special Operations Command to find definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons production program in Iran. The goal of the high-risk American covert operations was to find something physical—a “smoking calutron,” as a knowledgeable official once told me—to show the world that Iran was working on warheads at an undisclosed site, to make the evidence public, and then to attack and destroy the site.

Hersh also reports the information that never makes it to the news:

The report did note that its on-site camera inspection process of Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities—mandated under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory—“continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material.” In other words, all of the low enriched uranium now known to be produced inside Iran is accounted for; if highly enriched uranium is being used for the manufacture of a bomb, it would have to have another, unknown source.

It is just terrible how much propaganda the United States, Israel, and other countries are using to drum up an hysteria that has absolutely no cause that I can see.  Seymour Hersh has about 20 minutes in the interview we he just keeps laying on the evidence that President Obama and Israeli politicians are lying about almost everything they say about Iran.

Are we going to get into yet another war fomented by lying politicians, the press, and the wealthy?  Does Iran have oil? Enough said.

Three days after this post, there was a story, Big CIA Bust Reported in Iran, with possible links to this one.

The future post How China Has Benefited From America’s Hostility to Iran may also be relevant.

In the article Super Committee’s Loss Is Democrats’ Gain, Truth Out explains:

Keith and Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, analyze the potential outcome of the bipartisan congressional super committee’s failure to reach an agreement on how to reduce the deficit.

Can stupid questions lead to useful answers? I think we may have seen two examples where it is possible.

(See also Sen. Bernie Sanders: GOP lost in super committee failure.)

The article AFSCME Mock Gingrich’s Child Labor Scheme — With The Power Of Song explains the video below.

Newt Gingrich’s turned heads at the last GOP debate with a plan to repeal child labor laws, fire the nation’s janitors, and replace them with underprivileged children. Now AFSCME is giving his quote the musical treatment with a mashup web video featuring footage from the Annie.

The web video, which is actually pretty funny, is part of a petition drive highlighting Newt’s plan. Give it a look:

I found this interesting video in the article Sen. Bernie Sanders: GOP lost in ‘super committee’ failure.

Senator Sanders rescues this inane question (and accompanying headline) with his answer as to why the Republicans ‘lost’.

Imagine Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the Senate together.

Here is President Obama facing the people’s Mic.

Compare and contrast this with Newt Gingrich and The Peoples’ Mic.

To be fair, perhaps Ron Paul responded best.

The article Private sector loans, not Fannie or Freddie, triggered crisis tries to set the record straight. Here is a small sample of what is in the article:

Between 2004 and 2006, when subprime lending was exploding, Fannie and Freddie went from holding a high of 48 percent of the subprime loans that were sold into the secondary market to holding about 24 percent, according to data from Inside Mortgage Finance, a specialty publication. One reason is that Fannie and Freddie were subject to tougher standards than many of the unregulated players in the private sector who weakened lending standards, most of whom have gone bankrupt or are now in deep trouble.

During those same explosive three years, private investment banks — not Fannie and Freddie — dominated the mortgage loans that were packaged and sold into the secondary mortgage market. In 2005 and 2006, the private sector securitized almost two thirds of all U.S. mortgages, supplanting Fannie and Freddie, according to a number of specialty publications that track this data.

Those of us who believe in fact based reasoning need to shout this information from the rooftops over and over again.  Somehow we have to drown out the right wing media that want you to believe that the corporate world is as pure as the driven snow and the root of all evil is the government.

As the people’s mic showed Newt Gingrich (see Newt Gingrich and The Peoples’ Mic), they may have electric amplification, but we have numbers.

The New York Times article Heaven Is a Place Called Elizabeth Warren will be something that Elizabeth Warren fans can appreciate.

Yet the author makes the typical pundit’s mistake that shows she still doesn’t get it and is trying to set up Elizabeth Warren for failure.  Here are two example paragraphs that highlight the author’s failure.

And yet, on a deeper level, her popularity makes perfect sense. Embracing Warren as the next “one” is, in part, a way of getting over Obama; she provides an optimistic distraction from the fact that under our current president, too little has changed, for reasons having to do both with the limitations of the political system and the limitations of the man. She makes people forget that estimations of him were too overheated, trust in his powers too fervid. As the feminist philanthropist Barbara Lee told me of Warren, “This moment of disillusion is why people find her so compelling, because she brings forth the best in people and she brings back that excitement.”

…

But many of the people looking to Warren, as they did to Obama before her, are expecting material things — like readable credit-card pitches or safe bridges or jobs or a vote on a bill to create jobs — that are, at the moment, figments as imaginative as dragons and their slayers. And that’s dangerous, because when the person we decided was going to fix it all isn’t able to change much, it’s not just that we get blue but also that we give up. We mistake the errors of our own overblown estimations for broken promises. And instead of learning, reasonably, that one person can’t do everything, we persuade ourselves that no person can do anything.

Those of us who understand reality and can really listen to what Elizabeth Warren says, understand that one Senator is not going to change the world.  We also know that Elizabeth Warren understands that.  She makes the point that Obama made and seems to have forgotten, that getting her elected is not the end of the struggle, it is just the beginning.  It is not enough to have her in the Senate and Obama as President trying to pass certain policies.  It requires the continual agitation of the people on these matters to get us anywhere.

By paraphrasing Franklin Roosevelt’s comment to A. Philip Randolph that Randolph and his people needed to put pressure on Roosevelt  to make Roosevelt do the right thing, Obama seemed to show that he understood.  What Roosevelt understood that Obama seemed to miss was that Roosevelt used his office to keep the electorate stirred up and on his side.  He kept encouraging the people to speak out.  It was not just a one time comment to A. Philip Randolph.

When Warren describes how she managed to get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau legislation passed, she talks about how she reached out to labor and other constituencies to form a coalition that would help fight for the legislation.  She makes no claim that her voice alone is what did it.

If the media could only listen to what she really says and help her set the expectations of the voters as to what is really required to get things moving in the right direction again, then she might succeed.

On the other hand, if the media continue to play their favorite game of raising people up on pedestals just so they can knock them down, then they are perpetuating their role as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Another way of saying that electing one person the Senate is not final step we have to take, we need to remember that electing Elizabeth Warren is but a necessary first step.  We must elect more like her, and we must keep fighting.  Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, Elizabeth Warren, and more to come, and we might finally start to make progress.  Right now we are only beginning to make progress on beginning to make progress.

What this pundit misses about Obama disappointment is that many of us would not be disappointed that he couldn’t get things if only he had put some real effort before giving up. He did not explain to the public exactly what he wanted to do and then rally them to his side. This is his biggest failing and my biggest disappointment. He also kept trying to compromise with an adversary that plainly said that it had no interest in compromise. He negotiated with himself to water down what he would even try before even going out to meet the opposition. Early on, the President declared, “I am no patsy.” The evidence shows that a patsy is exactly what he is.

Whatever Elizabeth Warren’s failings may turn out to be, I don’t ever expect that I will be disappointed because she turned out to be a self-defeating patsy. If I turn out to be wrong, I won’t have buyer’s remorse. From everything I can observe of all the candidates for Senator from Massachusetts, she seems to be the be least likely to disappoint.

The story is cryptically named FL Democratic Congressman introduces pro-’Occupy’ amendment to Constitution.

 8 ‘‘SECTION 1. The rights protected by the Constitution

 9 of the United States are the rights of natural persons and

10 do not extend to for-profit corporations, limited liability

11 companies, or other private entities established for busi-

12 ness purposes or to promote business interests under the

13 laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state.

14 ‘‘SECTION 2. Such corporate and other private enti-

15 ties established under law are subject to regulation by the

16 people through the legislative process so long as such regu-

17 lations are consistent with the powers of Congress and the

18 States and do not limit the freedom of the press.

19 ‘‘SECTION 3. Such corporate and other private enti-

20 ties shall be prohibited from making contributions or ex-

21 penditures in any election of any candidate for public of-

22 fice or the vote upon any ballot measure submitted to the

23 people.

Does anybody see the loophole big enough to drive a truck through?

If a corporation that wants to spend money, it just has to open an unstaffed subsidiary that claims to be “The Press”. That subsidiary then cannot be hindered by this amendment from spending any money it wants to for whatever purposes it wants to as long as it can thinly veil it as an activity of “The Press”.

The constitutional amendment that Cenk Uygur wants to introduce is much simpler, but probably more flawed by larger ambiguity.

Corporations are not people. They have none of the Constitutional rights of human beings. Corporations are not allowed to give money to any politician, directly or indirectly. No politician can raise over $100 from any person or entity. All elections must be publicly financed.

It’s tough to write an amendment that lawyers won’t be able to turn into mince meat.