The Washington Post has the article The populists capture the Democratic Party.

A quartet of senators and a dozen members of the House took the stage in a park across from the Capitol midday Wednesday to join hundreds of steelworkers, union faithful and environmentalists in denouncing President Obama’s bid for fast-track approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
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But Obama hasn’t really split the Democrats. They are almost unanimously opposed to him on trade. The upcoming battle over fast-tracking and the Trans-Pacific Partnership shows how dramatically the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has shifted.

To those in the Democratic Party who complain against my outspoken posts against Democratic policies and politicians who I think are wrong, I would like them to consider what activists in the party are accomplishing.  When the complainers ask what I expect to accomplish, I can now point to this.

No we aren’t going to turn the party around in an instant.  If we  can shift “dramatically the center of gravity in the Democratic Party” already, we have accomplished a lot.  We need to keep putting on the pressure.  If you want to follow the party leaders like sheep to maintain “unity”, then you can do so.  I’d prefer to get out in front rather than follow behind.

Fossil Free MIT has the article 04.09.15 – 500 Attend High-Profile MIT Divestment Debate.

In response to 3,000 nerds-turned-activists, MIT’s administration hosts an unprecedented public debate on whether MIT should divest from fossil fuels, just days before Harvard students and celebrities begin a week of civil disobedience to confront their administration’s stonewalling.

The article featured the video clip below.

If you follow the URL displayed at the end of the video, , you end up at the webcast of Should MIT Divest? A Debate on Fossil Fuel Investment. From the links I have just given you, you will find a wide array of other links to follow.

Rather than my just complaining about the Koch takeover of MIT, I now realize that there may be active steps I can take to see if I can undo the damage.

Thanks to Mary Afable for cluing me in.

Politicus USA has the article Bernie Sanders Rolls While Demonstrating How To Knock Down Faux Noise. [I have corrected some spelling errors in their headline. I noticed the same spelling error in the video]

What really stuck out was Sanders’s ability to shift O’Reilly and the interview anywhere he wanted it to go. It is rare that a guest on O’Reilly show is more aggressive than the host, but the senator from Vermont was aggressive without being combative. The segment never turned into a scream fest. In fact, Sanders handled Bill O’Reilly fairly easily by keeping the tone civil and not falling for the loaded questions that the Fox News host was […] trying to lead him with.

This is the closest I have seen anyone come to taming Bill O’Reilly. There may be others, but I only watch the show through occasional clips like this one.

I have been waiting for decades to find a progressive person who can handle the media this well. Frequently, Mario Cuomo could do it. Of course Bill Clinton could do it, but he was hardly progressive.

If Sanders can do this well against that O’Reilly blowhard, it gives me hope that Sanders could actually run, win, and lead this nation into a new era.

The BBC has an episode Hallelujah – How an obscure track on a Leonard Cohen album became a global anthem. Thanks to Laurie Cane for posting this on Facebook.  I have admired the song, but never understood it as well as it is explained in this radio broadcast.

Addicting Info has the article 35 Founding Father Quotes Conservative Christians Will Hate. Here are but two examples.

8. “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”

~Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802

or

10. “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, then that of blindfolded fear.”

~Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

When you here talk about the founding ancestors making this a Christian nation, you have these 35 quotes for rebuttal.

My caution in my most recent posts seems to be that you have to be skeptical of everything you read, especially here.  I cannot vouch for the authenticity of any of these quotes, but that should not matter.  When you are arguing with someone about whether or not this is a Christian nation, your opponent cares little about facts, anyway.

Just think that if I choose Thomas Jefferson’s words carefully, I could claim that he said,

I contemplate with reverence that act of the whole American people that their legislature should make an establishment of religion.

~Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

After all, if you believe just the first item that I have taken from the 35 quotes, Thomas Jefferson did say all the words above, and in the exact order I have used them.  I left out a few inconsequential words that don’t change his meaning in any way. 🙂

Thanks to Raj Vedam for posting this article on Facebook.

Naked Capitalism cross-posted the article How the Federal Reserve Is Destroying Your Economic Future by Lynn Stuart Parramore, Senior Editor at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and a contributing editor at Alternet.  The article is an interview of economist Gerald Epstein.

LP: What kind of Fed policies would help close the inequality gap in the U.S.?

GE: The Fed needs to adopt new tools, on its own and perhaps in cooperation with the other parts of the U.S. government, to improve the economy from the bottom up. This includes increasing facilities for debt forgiveness for under-water mortgages and excessive student loans; increased credit facilities for small businesses and cooperatives; helping to underwrite mechanisms for creating affordable housing in cities; and more restrictive enforcement of financial regulatory rules to help rein in excessive banker risk and pay.

But the Fed cannot reduce inequality on its own; far from it. This requires a concerted effort by the government, broadly speaking, to support a variety of efforts. These include things like raising the federal minimum wage, eliminating unfair restrictions on union organizing, increased fiscal spending on needed infrastructure with a condition that these jobs will be decent paying jobs. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and far from the question of the role of the Federal Reserve.

I also liked Epstein’s explanation of the difference between two different kinds of criticism of the FED.

LP: Many libertarians want to audit the Fed or just plain end it, while conservatives like Rick Perry label the Fed’s actions treasonous. On the other side of the political spectrum, members of the Occupy Movement and progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren challenge the Fed’s ties to Wall Street. How do people with such vastly different ideologies end up distrusting the Fed?

GE: On the surface, it may look like the right wing and progressive criticism of the Fed is similar, but there are key differences. Many of those on the right distrust the Fed and want to eliminate its power in the belief that the private economy, including the private banks, will be much more efficient, productive and even democratic if they are left to themselves: in other words, the criticism of the Fed really reflects a desire to cripple the government in the service of increasing the power and authority of the market.

The perspective of most progressive critics is quite different: they don’t want to destroy the power of the Fed to regulate the macroeconomy and finance. They want to regain control over it so that it better serves the interests of the whole population.

So the right wants to destroy the power of the Fed to increase the power of finance; and the progressives want to reorient the Fed so that it will stop protecting the interests of finance and protect the interests of the broader population instead.

Now you know why I think the criticism of the FED by the likes of Rand Paul and Ron Paul show their utter misunderstanding of the FED, but I also criticize the FED sometimes.

Salon has the article The Ivy League’s favorite war criminal: Why the atrocities of Henry Kissinger should be mandatory reading,  I have picked out just one of the accusations about Kissinger that were in the article.

1. Sabotaging U.S. Government Diplomacy

Five days before the 1968 election, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a bombing halt of North Vietnam to begin negotiating an end to the Vietnam War. Johnson needed to keep this decision a secret; any leak could jeopardize the peace he was seeking. Kissinger, who had been an adviser to the negotiators, called the Nixon campaign and said, “I’ve got some information. They’re breaking out the champagne in Paris.” In his own memoirs, Richard Nixon says that he had received advanced word of the negotiation “through a highly unusual channel.” Three days before the election, the South Vietnamese pulled out of the talks because a Nixon confidant named Anna Chennault informed them that they would get a better deal under a Republican administration. The number of Vietnamese and Americans killed because of Kissinger and Nixon’s sabotage of the Paris negotiations remain unaccounted.

All this time, I thought Reagan’s sabotage of Jimmy Carter on freeing the Iranian hostages was an unprecedented action thought up by Reagan;s henchmen.

When I wrote my previous post Hillary Clinton Calls Henry Kissinger a Friend, Praises His Commitment to Democracy, I knew that Kissinger was an immorally sleazy character, and I didn’t even know about the incidents in the current article.

Some of Hillary;s friends make my skin crawl.  Is this really who we  want as President?

As per the theme of the day, remember that you never know what to believe, including this article in Salon.  So, do we let everyone off the hook because you just don’t know what to believe?

Truthout has the story The “Possible Military Dimensions” Bomb That Could Blow Up the Iran Deal.

The Obama administration has been under heavy pressure from the Israelis and their supporters in Washington to insist that Iran confess to having carried out nuclear weapons research and development as a condition for sanctions relief.

That pressure is the result of several years of news media coverage that has treated allegations that Iran carried out research and development on nuclear weapons, published by the IAEA in 2011, as established fact. The media have constantly repeated the theme that Iran has been “stonewalling” the IAEA to cover up its past nuclear weapons experiments.

Absent from the media narrative is the fact that the allegations that the IAEA is demanding that Iran explain are all based on intelligence that is now known to have come from Israel and which the IAEA itself suspected of being fabricated, from 2005 to 2009.

Put this together with my previous post NBC’s Conduct in Engel Kidnapping Story is More Troubling than the Brian Williams Scandal, and you no longer have to wonder why I am skeptical about everything I read including the Truthout article.  I might as well be reading the Ripley’s Believe it or Not section of the paper as anything else.  At least Ripley warned you about its stories.

It is a very interresting trip to follow the links I followed to get to this story.  First thanks to Nancy Weinberg for putting this on her Facebook Wall.  I followed the link she gave to Glenn Greenwald’s First Look which had the story NBC’s Conduct in Engel Kidnapping Story is More Troubling than the Brian Williams Scandal.

That there was ample reason to doubt Engel’s belief about the identity of his captors is proven by how many people publicly called it into doubt. That NBC’s broadcasts reflected none of this doubt, and instead allowed a one-sided tale that we now know to be false to go unquestioned by the entire network is bad enough. That these executives seemed to have had ample reason to doubt the story themselves makes it far worse than just merely “bad”: it is the type of systematic journalistic deceit and propaganda that we have seen over and over, almost always on the side and in service of the U.S. government’s agenda of endless war.

The First Look story says that The New York Times broke this story. The link to The New York Times that I followed was NBC News Alters Account of Correspondent’s Kidnapping in Syria.

NBC’s own assessment during the kidnapping had focused on Mr. Qassab and Mr. Ajouj, according to a half-dozen people involved in the recovery effort. NBC had received GPS data from the team’s emergency beacon that showed it had been held early in the abduction at a chicken farm widely known by local residents and other rebels to be controlled by the Sunni criminal group.

As long as I had come this far, I decided  to go to NBC itself for the Engel post New Details on 2012 Kidnapping of NBC News Team in Syria.  This article was anti-climactic by comparison.

I don’t know what is most ironic.

1. NBC news executives acting more deceitfully than Brian Williams whom they have suspended for what he did.
2. The New York Times taking umbrage that a “respected” news medium would lie about a story to support the US government’s cause of the moment.
3. Richard Engel downplaying the role his bosses played in this farce.

I refer to a certain network as Faux Noise.  What should I start calling NBC?  Or The New York Times for that matter. I already say that The New York Times “prints all the news it sees fit to print”.

It just proves that one should always be skeptical of what one reads, even (or especially) about what one reads on this blog.  I don’t even believe myself anymore.

Mother Jones has the article The Second Amendment Doesn’t Say What You Think It Does.  The article is an interview with Michael Waldman the author if the book The Second Amendment: A Biography.  I liked the following example in discussing the legal “scholarship” that went into the Heller decision at the Supreme Court.

MW: They certainly supported a lot of it. The way it works in constitutional law is that legal scholarship plays a pretty big role. So there became a rather deafening roar of the pro-individual gun ownership model: They were publishing and reinforcing each other. Some of it was very useful, and I cite it in the book. And some of it, when you look at some of the claims, they are easily punctured. It reminded me of the people who write movie posters, in terms of pulling quotes out of context. Like this Thomas Jefferson quote—”One loves to possess arms.” It is in serious law review articles. It’s presented as proof of what the founders really meant. But what happened was Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to George Washington, saying, “Remember I sent you a bunch of those letters from when I was Secretary of State? Could you send them back to me? I think I’m going to get attacked for this position I made. I want to be able to defend myself: ‘One loves to possess arms,’ even though one hopes not to use them.” It’s a metaphor! But it’s in these law review articles. It’s funny! When you go to the NRA website, it’s still there. You can buy a T-shirt that has the quote!

I couldn’t find the T-Shirt mentioned in the article, but I did find this “scholarship”, CLEARING THE  SMOKE FROM THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT by ANTHONY J. DENNIS Copyright © 1995 Akron Law Review

Thanks to Summer Starbuck for posting this on Facebook.