Another example of how those in power respond to the rest of us, here's Marcy Kaptur and Simon Johnson on Moyers: MARCY KAPTUR: [Jamie Dimon, the head of J.P. Morgan Chase.]... I said, 'We can't do work outs.' And he looked at me, he said, 'Do you know that I talk to your Governor all the time?' He said, 'Our company employs 10,000 people in Ohio.'

MARCY KAPTUR: And I'm thinking, 'What is that? A threat?' And he said, 'I speak to the Mayor of Columbus.' I said, 'Why don't you come further north?' I said, 'Toledo, Cleveland, where the foreclosures are just skyrocketing.' He said, For two weeks, we tried to reach them. And finally, I was on a national news show. And I told this story. They called within ten minutes. And they said, 'Oh, we'll work with you. We'll try to do some workouts in your area.'

We planned the first one after working with them for weeks and weeks and weeks. Their people never showed up. And it was a Friday. Our people had taken off work. They'd driven from all these locations to come. We kept calling J.P. Morgan Chase saying, 'Where's your person? Where's your person?' And they finally sent somebody down from Detroit by 3:00 in the afternoon. But out people had been waiting all morning and a lot of people that's how they treat our people.

and: BILL MOYERS: A reality check. Not one CEO of a Wall Street bank was there to hear the President. What do you make of that?

SIMON JOHNSON: Arrogance. Because they have no fear for the government anymore. They have no respect for the President, which I find absolutely extraordinary and shocking. All right? And I think they have no not an ounce of gratitude to the American people, who saved them, their jobs, and the way they run the world.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html

When held with such contempt and disrespect what are you going to do?.....kicking the dog works in most dysfunctional relationships....unless the dog bites back.

In a post about messy comparisons between Viet Nam and Afghanistan at Digby's yesterday commenter johnsturgeon (@ 10:29) had a lengthy rebuttal to those who find the discussion a waste of time. http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/song-remains-same-by-digby-i-generally.html Worth the time to read his 29 points making a strong case that our "Best and Brightest" are willfully ignorant of failed military strategies or stupid. I'll go for ignorance believing that the generals, having over the years convinced Congress to shovel tons of money their way, need to try out those fancy weapons on the battlefield. Sturgeon's ending says much:

The overwhelming set of evidence about American behavior and choices in both sets of conflicts exhaustively detail a common set of mistakes, choices and local conditions/national contexts. To point to differences isn't just to split hairs, it's to split the hairs on the back of a red herring. Sure, it's a hairy red herring, but you get the point if I have to bean you with a mackerel.

But Yglesias' announcement that 'I'm really not sure there's anything to learn from Vietnam' is just beyond the pale. It's plainly obscene. Sure, from the rotted heart of an empire in decline, he can say what he likes. But that does not make it so.

Right now, somewhere in Afghanistan there are a few 9-year-old children in the crosshairs of a Predator drone, just as a few children once crouched in a ditch just outside of My Lai.

And Matt Yglesias sits down to blog. ul>

Sam at 2 Seas - With the money we spend on our defense industry protecting the "homeland" from commie-terrorist-socialism and the vast sums wasted on war making both public and private we could bankroll a lot of Third World states struggling to hold on to the little power they have. Pay them off I say, let's see how that works, after all we have the Greatest Political System evah with it's co-equal branches and look how cheaply they sell themselves to the Captains of Capitalism. If we had offered $10 Billion to Saddam to rat out bin Laden and go into exile I wonder if he wouldn't have taken us up on it.

POOLE, England — It has become commonplace to call Britain a “surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives.

Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood school, local officials here began a covert surveillance operation. They obtained her telephone billing records. And for more than three weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole education department secretly followed her, noting on a log the movements of the “female and three children” and the “target vehicle” (that would be Ms. Paton, her daughters and their car).

It turned out that Ms. Paton had broken no rules. Her daughter was admitted to the school.

One of the biggest criticisms of the law is that the targets of surveillance are usually unaware that they have been spied on.

Indeed, Ms. Paton learned what had happened only later, when officials summoned her to discuss her daughter’s school application. To her shock, they produced the covert surveillance report and the family’s telephone billing records.

“If they’d wanted any information, they could have come and asked.”

She would have explained that her case was complicated. The family was moving from their old house within the school district to a new one just outside it. But they met the residency requirements because they were still living at the old address when school applications closed.

Britons Weary of Surveillance in Minor Cases

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/world/europe/25surveillance.html?pagewanted=1&sq=uk%20surveillance&st=cse&scp=1

Britain's violent crime record is worse than any other country in the European union, it has been revealed.

Official crime figures show the UK also has a worse rate for all types of violence than the U.S. and even South Africa - widely considered one of the world's most dangerous countries.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-country-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html#ixzz0V42amsSg

but al qaeda will kill us all while we sleep.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-country-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html#ixzz0V42S0w2H

The Apocalypse and End Times Rapture is an accepted belief among many christian followers. Their god (the same god of Mohammed that's not named Jesus) is more powerful as "Western reason" would say with an itchy trigger finger poised to push the button. Blowing people and shit up is a video game to them. [George W. Bush, when asked by Bob Woodward "how is history likely to judge your Iraq war?" replied, "History, we don't know. We'll all be dead." (Woodward Shares War Secrets, CBS News, 60 Minutes, April 18, 2004).]