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What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process.  Remember all that?  Yet now, here's Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President - even Barack Obama - vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process. Also, during the Bush years, civil libertarians who tried to convince conservatives to oppose that administration's radical excesses would often ask things like this: would you be comfortable having Hillary Clinton wield the power to spy on your calls or imprison you with no judicial reivew or oversight?  So for you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this:  how would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?

Why can't President Obama stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Why can't he get the Israelis and Palestinians to stop squabbling and make peace? Why can't he get the Europeans to contribute more troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan? Why can't he forge a global treaty to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases? Why can't he . . . well, you get the point. Obama, it turns out, is not Superman.

"These are some of the things that keep American conservatives awake at night. Modern American conservatism is based on an almost endless series of grievances. Author Thomas Frank coined a term for it: the conservative "plenty-plaint" -- a long and ever-evolving list of personal and cultural gripes dressed up as an ideology. But there's also fear! And while it spans the breadth of the movement, this is the year of the Tea Party revolt, when the grassroots right, disgusted with the idea of semi-affordable health-care and tepid financial reforms is rebelling against even its own establishment. And the divide between the grassroots base and its leadership extends to the very fears that animate them. As we'll see, the conservative movement's business-attired hacks and the hard-Right tea Party types waving misspelled signs out in the streets have some very different causes for alarm. So, here are ten of the most interesting things that absolutely terrify Wingnuttia. First, a few terrors of the real hard-core Right. For the Tea Partier, the midterm GOP primary voter, it's not just the anxiety over social change that typifies more traditional conservatism. A broad chunk of the GOP base today is animated by wildly unrealistic terrors -- monsters stalking them as the sun sets, perhaps hovering just beyond their peripheral vision."

The major TV networks were not hoodwinked by a Pentagon propaganda scheme.  No government agency forced MSNBC to repeatedly feature the hawkish generals unopposed.

For months, the problem for Democrats was correctly identified as the "enthusiasm gap"--the idea that the progressive base of the party was not excited about voting. The exit polls from Tuesday's vote confirm that many Democratic-tending voters failed to show up. How, then, does one square this fact with the idea that Obama and Democrats were pushing policies that were considered too left-wing? If that were the case, then presumably more of those base voters would have voted to support that agenda. It is difficult to fathom how both things could be true.

"In a U.S. torn by dissent over health care, immigration and Barack Obama, rhetorical rage is the new norm. Just turn on Fox News and MSNBC. Partisan talkers like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity on the conservative-leaning FNC and Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz on their liberal counterpart MSNBC inflame their eager fans with colorful, merciless and sometimes misleading attacks on the opposition. A generation ago, no matter how divided their politics, Americans got their news from the same source-"the lame stream media," to quote Fox contributor Sarah Palin. Almost the entire country was watching back in 1968 when CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite declared the Vietnam War not winnable. Four years later, he was deemed the most trusted man in America."

While it may take months to stop the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it's not too soon to begin asking some questions about why it happened and what can be done to minimize the chance that something like this will happen again. Thanks to The Wall Street Journal's terrific reporting last week, there are two important things we already know

To know what the most important virtue of our age is we need to have at least a basic understanding of our age. Our era is becoming increasingly characterized by uncertainty. Fortunately or unfortunately, more than a cursory elucidation of our situation is beyond the scope of this essay. There are geopolitical, economic, technological and environmental trends worth mentioning. When the more philosophical portion of this  discourse arrives I will argue that the virtue of wisdom underlies the meaningfulness and efficacy of all other virtues, and this in broad strokes is primarily due to (1) the aforementioned instability in our surroundings ; (2) the relationship between the deontological and virtue; and (3) the nature of agency itself.  Whether uncertainty itself can provide an ethical foundation for us to elaborate on will be a separate question, and finally I speculate on where wisdom leads us in the context of a philosophy that is politically active and not doomed to irrelevance to and by the larger population.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 6, 2011) - For parents wanting to reduce the negative influence of TV on their children, the first step is normally to switch off the television set. But a new study suggests that might not be enough. It turns out indirect media exposure, i.e., having friends who watch a lot of TV, might be even more damaging to a teenager's body image.

'Deficits can be addressed by raising revenue, plugging tax loopholes, putting people to work, and developing the economy long-term in all the ways the President has discussed. But deficits are not what really matters to conservatives. Conservatives really want to change the basis of American life, 

ScienceDaily (Mar. 7, 2011) - Despite the fears of some, a new study suggests that use of the internet in general does not make people more likely to believe political rumors.

In the context of technology the only way out is through. Global society is dependent on artificially inflated energy resources-i.e. oil-that are directly leading us toward total collapse. Technology is being used to most efficiently maximize wealth of the largest corporate conglomerates at the expense of the social fabric and a living environment. The biosphere is in fact collapsing. The technology exists to solve our technical problems but the solutions do not seem like they will be effectively put to use. The power structures concentrating money off the status quo are too entrenched. Each human is called on to become more aware.

"You can't sustain a democracy in an oligarchic state. The writers on Athenian democracy understood that 2000 years ago," says Chris Hedges, whose new book The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress explores the problems of a crumbling empire, inside and out. Chris joins Laura in studio for a conversation about the death of Bin Laden and the continuing concern over terrorism, the end of empathy in the U.S., and what avenues are left for progressives to fight back.  "The elites are not going to help us," he warns, "We're going to have to help ourselves."

It's the catch-all term that's being used to describe this week's riots. But is this really anarchy? Not even close, says Chumbawumba's Boff Whalley, a self-professed anarchist

Why is Top Gear apparently exempt from the BBC's editorial guidelines and the duty not to fake the facts?

Rush Limbaugh has resorted to repeating discredited or misleading claims - that "the rich are not richer than they've ever been" and that the number of millionaires in the U.S. has decreased -- in order to dismiss President Obama's newly proposed jobs plan.

A Rumpus Lamentation on What We Lost Say you took the long view of September 11, 2001, the view from the heavens, the view of a compassionate celestial being. From up there, you'd see that approximately 150,000 earthlings died that day. Most of these deaths were caused by malnutrition and age-related illnesses, roughly 1500 were murders, hundreds more were due to civil wars. Also, 2,977 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. *** A lot of human beings died, that's my point. They all left behind mourners. Imagine the mother who watched her child die of hunger. Here's this tiny person, a daughter. She has a name, a face. She doesn't explode or fall from a skyscraper. She simply stops breathing. No cameras record her final moment, the lamentation of that mother. These images are not replayed on the television over and over and over. What would be the point of that? *** I recently went on a radio program to discuss the literature of 9/11. The host spent most of the hour chatting with people about their memories. They all talked about watching television. They were telling personal stories about watching television.

Charles and David Koch seem less confident these days. The brothers - who inherited money from their dad and grew it into America's largest collection of dirty industries - have decided they need to fight back. That's not surprising. Since Koch-sponsored secret meetings were revealed, secret planning with Supreme Court Justices was exposed, and secret funding of right wing groups became apparent, Americans have begun to wonder just how much influence these guys have purchased. Read more: http://technorati.com/politics/article/the-koch-brothers-are-getting-nervous/#ixzz1IXD3a4Zw