Keynesianism Part I – It’s All About Spending

Posted on January 21, 2011 by stephenkmacksd
via youtube.com

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Revolt spreads against politics of despair

Posted on January 20, 2011 by stephenkmacksd

via cnn.com

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Depression May Tie Bullying to Substance Use in Girls | Psych Central News

Posted on January 20, 2011 by stephenkmacksd

via psychcentral.com

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New Military Commissions Undermine President’s Plan for Justice in Terrorism Cases | Human Rights First

Posted on January 20, 2011 by stephenkmacksd

Home » Press Release » New Military Commissions Undermine President’s Plan for Justice in Terrorism Cases

CONTACT: Brenda Bowser Soder, Human Rights First
C: 646-897-6372, W: 202-370-3323 | bowsersoderb@humanrightsfirst.org

New Military Commissions Undermine President’s Plan for Justice in Terrorism Cases

For Immediate Release: January 20, 2011

Washington, DC – In response to news reports that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will soon lift the current ban on bringing new charges in the nation’s flawed military commissions system, Human Rights First President and CEO Elisa Massimino issued the following statement: Continue reading →

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The bankruptcy of New Democrat ideology – Economics

Posted on January 20, 2011 by stephenkmacksd

via salon.com

I’ve decided to post this very revelatory piece on Matt Miller again, as reminder of the New Democrats and what they really stand for and advocate.

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Miranda and Obama :Secrets

Posted on January 20, 2011 by stephenkmacksd

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/01/19/obama_holder_doj_miranda&source=newsletter&utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Salon_Daily%20Newsletter%20%28Not%20Premium%29_7_30_110#

 

The argument from exceptionalism must be subject to ruthless questioning and relentless public scrutiny. It is the argument of tyrants,liars and political opportunists! The assertion that a republic can be predicated upon secrets: ‘secret laws’, ‘secret courts’, ‘secret evidence’, ‘secret presidence for evidence collection’, ‘secret interrogations’ all these are dubious at the least and destructive at the worst of a basic respect for constitutional governance. The ‘crisis’, the ‘exception’ is the rationalization made infamous by Carl Schmitt, the crown jurist of the Nazi’s: it has no place in a functioning, healthy republic.We find its root in Kierkegaard’s intellectual/moral monstrosity ‘the teleological suspension of the ethical’, an ex post facto rationalization of male/tribal power and imposition of will without consent. We have the “Bush Restoration’ in the Obama Administration. The manufactured paranoia of ‘the ticking time bomb’ is the ever present companion of our political discourse along with the ‘unseen enemy’, who lurks just out of our sight and more importantly out of the reach of duly constituted authority: however that can be defined.The facts of the malfeasance at the governing center in the American Political Melodrama make WikiLeaks or something like it a political necessity, if we are to survive as a republic.

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History and the historyless « The Immanent Frame

Posted on January 20, 2011 by stephenkmacksd

Buried in the middle of William James’s chapter on “The Sick Soul” in The Varieties of Religious Experience is the melancholy voice of one asylum patient. “There is no longer any past for me,” the inmate relates, “I can no longer find myself; I walk, but why?”   It is a strange moment of existential despair—one brought on by the loss of the past—in a chapter filled with despondency, not least James’s own. “There is no longer any past for me . . . I walk, but why.”   It is not at all strange that an absent past would prove disorienting, but it is peculiar in the midst of Varieties, in which history seems always to be getting lost in the search for the eternal: “The everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition,” James insists, remains unaltered “by differences of clime or creed.”  The mystical classics have “neither birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, . . . they do not grow old.”  Mysticism has no past, no genealogy, and yet it walks and knows why. Continue reading →

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Palestinians, America and the U.N.

Posted on January 20, 2011 by stephenkmacksd

Palestinians are well within their rights to bring the issue of Israeli settlements and their illegality before the United Nations Security Council. Our decision to do so follows both Israel’s refusal to cease all settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territory, and America’s failure to ensure Israel’s compliance with international law and existing agreements. The United States should support such a move, not block it. Continue reading →

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Bernard Avishai Dot Com: Bombing Iran: Goldberg Responds

Posted on January 20, 2011 by stephenkmacksd

via bernardavishai.blogspot.com

Thank you, Matt Duss

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Cockeyed Platonist on the Fallen State of Man

Posted on January 20, 2011 by stephenkmacksd
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/opinion/14brooks.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

I missed this column by Cockeyed Platonist (CP) when it was first published. 'The Tree Of Failure' is a title redolent with possibilities and CP exercises his good judgment and ethical restraint to telling effect.This is not simply a column but a sermon preached by a 'Social Conservative' on the 'Fallen State of Man', to use the vocabulary suitable to this piece. This is supposed be a commentary on the speech given by President Obama in Tucson after the shootings. But CP cannot resist the opportunity to engage in his favorite rhetorical exercise, of reducing historically located actualities into large, but manageable abstractions; the better to instruct his readers, to use the opportunity for pious sounding political moralizing: for the ethical posturing, that the thinkers on the Right cannot resist.The vocabulary is a compendium of the mainstays of sermonizing: Sabbath ( the seventh day of the week),redemption, renewal, with the additions of a sociological/political nature; social organism, communal improvement, social enterprise and civility,to add sociological relevance to his narrative, but clearly understood as intellectual garnish by his readers. Joe DI Maggagio then appears, as exemplary of a non-narcissist athlete, of the old school, and almost completes this collection. Reinhold Niebuhr has that signal honor of being the final example of American Uprightness, and is quoted, at length, on forgiveness. Mr. Niebuhr, a man who eventually founded,by time and cogitation, the school of political/moral thought of 'Christian Realism', an apologetically rationalized American Exceptionalism: the narrative richness and diversity of The American Political Melodrama is thereby secured, made empirically concrete.         

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