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Anyone outside the two parties' orthodoxies is deemed "crazy," but how sane are the two parties?. News and views from Glenn Greenwald

Crazy views about homeownership are helping the very bankers who screwed us in the first place.

"If I were to describe the first year of Barack Obama's presidency, it would be as that of a trimmer. He represented change - but not the radical kind the left wanted or the revolutionary kind the right still suspects. In the wake of the rigid, white-knuckled George W Bush and Dick Cheney, he appeared as a lithe and nimble, cat-like creature. Time after time he seems to have given way to opponents and to have bent too easily in the prevailing winds.\n\n[...]\n\nAll the way he seemed weak, reactive, vacillating, vague. He has given his supporters as little emotional satisfaction as he has given some of his allies (Britain included). In fact, he has driven his friends a little crazy and allowed his enemies to greet his open hand with contempt. He has bent to the prevailing winds and not picked battles when he was unsure he could win them. But in the end there isn't weakness here. There is a suppleness and pragmatism that is a kind of strength."

I recently read a commenter who accused the Obamoids of ineptitude by asking why Amazon can track millions of books while Obama can't track a batshite crazy Jihadist who got caught in-flammable delicto. Fair enough question, though the book metaphor sucks.

The New York Times this morning has a particularly lush installment of one of the American media's most favored, reliable, and self-affirming rituals -- it's time to mock and pity Those Crazy, Primitive, Irrational, Propagandized Muslims and their Wild Conspiracy Theories, which their reckless media and extremists maliciously disseminate in order to generate unfair and unfounded hostility toward the U.S.:

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis - a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences - it's increasingly obvious that what we're looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system. And no, I don't mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are. No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.

A Libertarian rebuttal to the post two links down on my profile, written a little more intelligently than most, from somebody who I find myself liking a little - but still showing some of the glib blindness that drove me away from that movement. Eg. responding to the report of the selling of tainted meat by saying that one could prevent the problem by cooking the meat until it's medium (ie. greyish red, instead of grey outright, and only mostly tasteless). "See", she seems to be saying, "even without governmental regulation, you have a choice", not quite getting that it isn't a reasonable choice. Selling meat that doesn't have to be cooked to death to be safe is absolutely possible; my grocery does it with regularity and I cook it rare with regularity, without problems following. So is it reasonable that people in places where the merchants or those they buy from are not as ethical should have to maybe choose between enjoying their meals, or surviving them, just so that somebody else be slimy without undue interference? With how ever much charm, the author of this piece answers that question with a resounding "yes", and shows why Libertarianism is, as I've said, not about the promotion of personal freedom so much as it is about the promotion of personal irresponsibility.

Some common sense on the subject of governmental regulation.

Michael Moore's comments today delivered and relayed at the "We Are One" rally at the State Capitol in Honolulu: Greetings! I want to thank you for turning out today to make your voices heard -- and they ARE heard, even across ocean and land. Today, hundreds of thousands of Americans are joining with you to honor Dr. King by standing up for working people all over America. It was what he was doing in Memphis when he was killed 43 years ago today, supporting sanitation workers on strike.   Today everywhere is Memphis, and it's not just sanitation workers being attacked. It's teachers and firefighters and social workers -- yes, all those greedy public workers who caused the Great Recession we are in! It was the greedy teachers who caused the crash on Wall Street! It was the greedy firefighters who sent millions of jobs overseas! It was the greedy social workers who insisted that GE pay no taxes and that CEOs should make 500 times what the average employee makes! No, my friends, it wasn't! It was the top 1% of the country who did this. THEY brought on the mortgage crisis. THEY made off with billions of dollars from our economy. THEY have systematically destroyed the middle class. And THEY have bought and sold the very people elected to represent us! America is not broke! It's just that the wealthy have absconded with the money! They've removed it from circulation and left us begging for school supplies and fire trucks and libraries. Even the Wall Street Journal admits that the uber-rich are currently just sitting on almost $2 trillion of cash. They're not creating jobs with it. They're not re-circulating it. They're just hanging on to it hoping to make more money off it by continuing their casino games in the stock market, the derivatives market, the credit default swaps market and any other crazy scheme they can invent. This has to stop. But it won't stop unless we make it stop. 400 wealthy Americansnow have more wealth than 150 million Americans COMBINED!  But what

Commentators seem shocked at Republican unreasonableness as a debt default looms, but it is the end result of a process that has lasted decades.

OBAMAGATE

It just gets crazier and crazier.