WorkingReporter - Ron Olsen on the web

For years the Transportation Security Administration, better known as the “TSA,” has, by appearances at least, been doing everything they possibly can to increase airline security by devising a system whereby their employees will be able to provide said same security without the necessity of doing any thinking whatsoever. Possibly because not everybody working for the TSA is qualified to ferret out international terrorists, who are, probably at this very moment, trying to think up new ways to smuggle weapons and (or) explosives on our planes.

And now some genius at the TSA (or perhaps a committee of big thinkers) has decided to let passengers once again carry knives on airliners.   When I first heard it I worried that I might have to go in to have my meds adjusted.  Or maybe I had been over exposed to X-Rays while being repeatedly body scanned at the airport.   Maybe the TSA had destroyed my brain.   But then I heard it again and read it in the paper and knew it was true.

They say they are letting the knives pass through the system so that their inspectors will be able to focus on looking for explosives.  I guess knives AND explosives are just way too much for them to handle, so something had to give.

At times like this I feel a need to take stock.  After years of being questioned, patted down, having our cell phones, laptops and carry-ons filled with underwear and other unmentionables examined inch by inch and thread by thread by strangers in uniforms while other strangers with no uniforms watched while waiting in long lines like cattle at a stockyard, after being viewed in the nude with our clothing still on and being basically demoralized and humiliated for the sake of security after religious zealots with box cutters - I repeat, box cutters - hijacked planes, the TSA is now going to go back to letting passengers take knives on commercial flights.   Knives.  You know, knives.  Probably one of the earliest weapons known to man, preceded only by the basic club.

Please understand.  I’ve been going through all this ramped up security along with everybody else, even though I have in the past been officially cleared by the Secret Service to cover presidential politics.  Even though my fingerprints and palm-prints are on file with the LAPD, the Los Angeles Co. Sheriff’s Department and the State of California.   I never complained about any of it because the world has changed and I can understand the need to make certain sacrifices for safety.  Particularly when underwear bombers and other assorted nutjobs are doing all they can to sneak box cutters, shoe bombs and God knows what on our flights.

And the TSA has decided to once again allow passengers weaponized with knives to fly?  Do they understand that when you get past the semantics that box cutters are just another type of knife?

I’ve got a better idea.  Archie Bunker, came up with it years ago.  Just pass out pistols to passengers when they get on the planes and then collect them again at the end of the flights.  It makes  as much sense as to again allow knives, even small ones, on airliners.

Just watched a most disturbing documentary piece put together by The Guardian. It points to the United States sponsoring secret police units in Iraq, for the purpose of obtaining information through the use of torture. According to the film, the operation eventually evolved into death squads.

The headlines indicate Prez Obama is once again “reaching out” to try and find a common ground with the GOP. How sad. This is beyond the President trying to build his image through the presentation of goodwill, or even an attempt to make the GOP look even more intransigent, which at this point, would be nearly impossible.   Obama, is starting to look like a weakling who isn’t sure what he should do so he keeps repeating the same failed process over and over. It’s as though he doesn’t realize he is in his second term.

He needs to grow a pair and lead.  Unless he is under orders not to.  And if that’s the case, you have to wonder who is giving the orders?  Scary thought.

At the rate he’s going, this President is going to give away slices of Medicare and Social Security, selling out pieces of the social safety net for generations to come and getting next to nothing in return.  If there ever was a time for this president to dig in his heels and get tough, this is that time.   With the mid-terms approaching, the Republicans have shown themselves more interested in wrecking the nation that sacrificing party ideology.  Obama, needs to use that.  He needs to go into the political combat mode he demonstrated on the campaign trail, showing the degree to which his point of view, putting the nation before politics, is in contrast to what’s left of the GOP which lives in fear of the extreme right.   Instead he is once again looking for a compromise.   I keep waiting for the real Obama to show up but wondering if we’ve seen all he’s got.

I’m no economist, I’m a journalist.  Someone who, for nearly 40 years, performed what he saw as a public service, observing, interpreting, and then reporting his observations as objectively as he could.   What I see now is troubling because it’s reminiscent of something that was happening in my very own neighborhood just prior to the economic meltdown of 08.

My wife and I both saw it on our walks through the neighborhood.   Big new houses were replacing the old “GI homes” built just after World War II.   They were over-sized for the lots they were on and were dubbed “McMansions” because they are all similar and so many were going up all at the same time.  They have been called “incongruous” for their neighborhoods, which is an apt description.  That, in and of itself, might not have been so strange, were it not for the fact that nearly all the cars parked in the McMansion’s driveways failed to match the status and price of the homes themselves.  People who drive Hondas and Toyotas, generally cannot afford a mansion, or even a McMansion, but there they were.  I tried to put it together in my head but it made no sense.  It was a question of disparity.

I remember wondering “how in the world can these people afford these houses?”  I wondered if maybe they knew something I didn’t.  Maybe I should run out and buy one myself before whatever was going on came to an end, before the bubble burst?  Some though, were saying it wasn’t going to happen, that this was the new normal and that the new and burgeoning economy would continue on.  Endless growth, funded by people buying more than they could afford?  It wasn’t logical.  But there it was.

I knew it must have been what we used to call a “bubble loan,” but I wondered how anybody could be so stupid as to get into a loan that would ultimately force them to either sell their property or be evicted by a bank.  How and why were they convinced they could make it work?   And why would a bank give a loan to someone who was almost sure to default?  All of it rattled around in my head as we strolled down our neighbor’s streets, noticing what was all too obvious.  People who could afford only an Accord or a Camry, were buying Mercedes/Lexus class properties.  Logically, it just did not work.  Later we learned that logic had nothing to do with it, at least not honest logic, pretzel logic maybe, and that sub-prime mortgages were the reason as the scheme eventually unraveled leaving American taxpayers to pick up the tab for Wall Street’s bags full of “derivatives” and other arguably criminal activities, the result of creative bookkeeping the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the first Europeans bought Manhattan for a bagfull of beads.

I got that same feeling today, when the DOW hit an all-time high.   While shouts of glory issue forth from the island we bought with beads, it is ironic that so many homeless are still out there.  The old guy sleeping on the steps at the supermarket.  The man in his 50’s pushing a shopping cart down the road.  The woman with three small children on the sidewalk begging for money or the other woman selling tamales outside the paint store in the local mini-mall.  All those homeless folks who were not there before the meltdown of 08.

There are also the unemployment numbers.  By one estimate, the nation has yet to make up some 3 million jobs that were lost during the economic meltdown.  Beyond that, you have to wonder just how valid any of these numbers are, with so many Americans having given up on even looking for a job.  You don’t think so?  Has your kid tried getting a job lately?   A recent report from CBS News notes that half of all college grads cannot find full-time employment.  But it goes beyond jobs.  It goes to small investors with no place to put their money.  No way to make a certain and safe return.  It goes to the top 1% controlling 40% of the nation’s wealth while they take home 24% of the nation’s income and own half the country’s stocks, bonds and mutual funds.  Think the system is rigged in their favor?  Could that be why the market is doing so well?  Oh sure, you can get in on it too, but do you think that’s safe?  Really?  Is that really where you want to put your retirement savings?   Do you have enough money to make a sizable return considering the risk?  Most of us would rather go for something like a CD, with a guaranteed return over four or five years.  Trouble is, there is almost no return on CD’s or traditional savings accounts or anything else with a heavy margin of safety.

I called my financial adviser the other day, after an investment once again showed almost no profit.  She assured me that the modest percentile my money is pulling in is the best we can do on such a low-risk investment.  “These guys are gonna wreck this country” I complained.  “Yes, they are,” she said, adding that she isn’t advising anybody to get into the market.  Not right now.  Not when it looks like we could be headed for another meltdown.

I’m no economist, but I’m getting that same old feeling again.  A feeling that things don’t add up as disparity again raises its vexing head.  Things like driving a Honda and owning a McMansion, or the fact that so much of the nation’s wealth continues to be extracted by those at the top to be hoarded or invested overseas while unemployment remains at 7.9%.  A feeling that bad times could be just around the corner.  Again.  Unless you happen to be a member or our new uber upper-class.  The new American version of Downton Abbey.  People who have insulated themselves economically with investments in companies overseas and cash tucked away in offshore banks while millions of average Americans try and cope with wages that have grown stagnant while prices continue to rise, or worse yet, no job at all and a huge college loan to pay off.

Our broken government remains mired in political muck.   Even the pundits have become so redundant that there’s no point in listening to much of what they have to say.  Their increasingly repetitive blather is no longer entertaining (which, after all, is their raison d’etre) leaving us in a state of “pedundancy,” a kind of ongoing leaderless daze, where nothing seems to matter.  It’s a sort of night of the living dead politicos, with a faction of Republicans who refuse any revenue increase in spite of the worst national imbalance in wealth since the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock.  Just 1% of the country holds half of the nation’s wealth, while our President, either cannot or will not exhibit the same persona in the White House that he showed us from the campaign trail.  It’s like there are two Obamas.   It it has nothing to do with making promises he can’t keep.   They pretty much all do that.  It has more to do with who he is at his core, a fighter or a high school debate captain.  The country needs the fighter we saw on the campaign trail, not the Obama who has attempted and repeatedly failed to be a king of compromise.  For God’s sake Mr. President, give it up.  They don’t give a damn for compromise.  And even if some of them do, the Tea Party is the tail wagging their collective dog.  Your only option is to get angry and go over their heads.

We need this president to finally get really po’d, and then take it to the people who will hopefully awaken from their long intellectual nap and give the Democrats a majority in both houses in 2014.  Or maybe (and this is what really scares me), maybe it doesn’t matter.  Maybe, it’s all by design.

Perhaps the “fiscal cliff,” or “sequestration,” or whatever you prefer to call it, is nothing but a giant governmental smoke cloud.  Something everybody can hide behind while they continue receiving their corporate revenue streams uninterrupted by anything so mundane as being forced to actually govern.   The same goes for the budget ceiling.  Another massive cloud of smoke, providing cover until arriving at yet another last-minute compromise.  In the meantime, the fact that we have the worst inequality of wealth in the industrialized world, the fact that we remain the only nation without a national healthcare plan, with our infrastructure crumbling while we give more of our annual budget to the military than the next 19 nations combined as many of the regulatory weaknesses that permitted the economic meltdown of 2008 remain unaddressed, all of this and more goes without resolution as our duly elected representatives in the federal government go golfing or pose for group photos or leave for yet another undeserved vacation mostly out of view of their constituents with the assistance of an all too cooperative mass media that knows only too well how to play the role of being journalists without actually doing any journalism.  They should all be utterly and totally ashamed of themselves.

The fact that they aren’t stands as a monument to the need for fresh faces in both the House and Senate.   The need for a majority that isn’t afraid of dealing with the fact that the Bush/Cheney machine took us into two of the lengthiest wars in our nation’s history while simultaneously providing massive tax cuts to the wealthiest of Americans.  And now those on the right, those who created our current economic crisis, are demanding to cure it through austerity, extracting even more wealth from the middle and sending it to the top?  Is it possible that Capitalism, as currently configured, simply will not work for the majority and that we the people don’t have the courage to even discuss the possibility?  Is it better to let a few take advantage of the many through the perpetuation of a broken system?

It continues to feel as though the fix is in, doesn’t it?   What with Wall Street and the corporations doing just fine as they continue protecting the interests of those at the top while child care, education, nutrition assistance, income security for the blind, disabled and aged and home heating assistance all face cuts as we tumble over the government-created  fiscal cliff.  Why should they care about a middle class that continues to be devastated by the price of groceries and gasoline or getting a college education?  While most of the nation struggles to put food on their tables, the wealthiest 1%, our neo-feudalist class, are surely more concerned with those issues concerning only them.  Issues like how they can take and keep more of the wealth from those who increasingly have less, and what has to be their biggest issue of all,  working out a way to squeeze themselves through the eye of a needle.

For the first time in some 600 years, a Roman Catholic Pope is abdicating his “throne.”  Good riddance.  I wish they’d all go away.  Dump the entire College of Cardinals, and start over with a clean (cleaner?) slate.  That’s what the Roman Church needs.  All those clergy who are even remotely connected to the international conspiracy to protect pedophiles that’s been going on for so many years should be removed from their duties.  All pertinent records should be turned over to the police so that those criminal clergy whose deeds have not exceeded the many statutes of limitation can be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.  These are the issues we should be discussing right now, not “ooos” and “ahhs” about who the next Pope might be as we wait like children to see if the smoke coming from the Sistine Chapel will be white or black.   It’s a lot of traditional nonsense.  The church is shot through with the cancer of pedophilia.   Apologizing for past criminal activity while pedophile priests and those who took part in the criminal conspiracy to provide cover for them is not enough.  Some of those same apologists, are among the cardinals who will vote to install the next “Holy Father.”  And people are still buying into this?

If you have doubts that the coverup went to the very top of the Vatican, be invited to watch the documentary “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God” on HBO.  Here’s the trailer-

Having nothing to do with the Vatican that I’m aware of (but they do have their own bank so who really knows?), is the unemployment rate in South Korea.  It’s currently running around 3%.  This is interesting to me, because our unemployment rate here in the United States is 7.9%, and yet, we the people of the United States, are paying with our taxes to support a military force of more than 28,000 Americans on South Korean soil to defend the South Koreans.  What absolute insanity.  They’re doing better than we are economically.  It’s time to withdraw our troops and let them defend themselves.   We can no longer afford to give away our military protection to nations that can easily support their own defense with their own money and their own blood.   The situation is by no means limited to South Korea.  We even have Marines on the ground in Australia, of all places.  If we’re going to keep this up let’s start charging for it and call it like it is.  The mercenary forces of the United States of America.  Our infrastructure is crumbling.  We can no longer afford to give away those resources we so badly need here on U.S. soil.  Charity, should begin at home.   Let the South Koreans, and others, pay for their own military needs.

Being used, is being used, whether it’s by the Roman Catholic Church covering up child molestation or the military industrial complex growing fat on unnecessary deployment of U.S. troops.  It’s time to say “enough.”  Don’t think you’re helpless.  Letters and emails to members of the Senate and House, do have an impact.  More than anything, these people yearn to keep their seats.  We must let them know that they will be sent home if they continue turning a blind eye to true representation.    Holding your silence, makes you a part of the problem.

So the British have put together a new law, giving their government the power to break up big banks that fail to separate out commercial (old fashioned banking) from investment banking (gambling with depositor’s money).  It appears to be similar to the protections offered here in the US by the old Glass Steagall Act.  Put in place to help prevent another Great Depression, Glass Steagall, did pretty much the same thing and it was working pretty well until two Republicans put together a bill to kill it - a bill that was signed by Bill Clinton, just prior to his exit from the White House.   When it came to killing Glass Steagall, “Slippery Bill,” was truly slippery.  Any remnants of Glass Steagall that the bankers might find truly troublesome on their march into an ocean of sub-prime insanity were in turn wiped away by the administration of the “great decider,” George W. Bush.  We all know what followed in 2008.

And now the British, in an effort to prevent another crash in the UK, are bringing the idea back.  Any reason we can’t as well?  Other than the fact that the Congress of the United States has been bought off by almost every big business enterprise you can think of, including banking and finance?  You remember them?  The guys who are too big to fail?  Other than that.  How do we get around those guys?  And until we do, aren’t we just kidding ourselves about the whole democracy thing as we wait for the next big crash?

All the brouhaha over President Obama sending out drones to kill Al Qaeda leaders is downright laughable.  Check that.  Laughable, is the wrong word.  There’s nothing funny about killing innocent women and children.  So it’s not funny.  Not funny at all.  It is though, perhaps, if not laughable, then ludicrous.  We’re the country after all, that invaded and then blew to pieces a sovereign nation after the administration of George W. Bush created a wave of fear based upon a threat that was largely fictional.  Next to a full-blown invasion force killing tens of thousands of innocents (by one estimate, as many  as 121,000 civilian deaths), the current use of our drones, although admittedly serious, doesn’t amount to much.   If there’s to be a critique, it  should include a hard look at Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Company, and the fictional threat they created that took us into Iraq.

Could it be we are nearing a tipping point in warfare, whereby our drones, cruise missiles, surgical strikes and stealth technology backed up by our existing nuclear deterrent, make traditional, conventional warfare unnecessary?   Could it be that Mr. Obama’s current use of drones with a surgical strike taking out Osama bin Laden, proves the degree to which it was unnecessary to conduct a conventional land war in Afghanistan to attack an international terrorist conspiracy, not to mention invading Iraq based upon a purely fictional threat?

First the New York  Post incorrectly identified the long-gun President Obama is firing in the recently released photo as a “rifle” instead of a shotgun.  Now the New Yorker is making the same mistake.  And you wonder why gun owners are suspicious with regard to the media’s ignorance when it comes to small arms and gun control?  Incorrectly identifying firearms only lends emotion to an already heated debate.  Back in my tv days I repeatedly had to tell the graphics department to change an image, as they thought any semi-automatic handgun would work as a representation for a shooting story, regardless of the type of weapon used in the shooting.  What the hell, a gun is a gun, right?   Of course it is, if you know nothing about guns.

If the White House is going to pull an obvious PR stunt to try and get gun owners on its side, then why release a photo that can be so easily questioned by anyone who has any knowledge of skeet shooting or shotgunning in general?   It only feeds the paranoia and extremism of those who argue for no gun control at all.

As I pointed out in a previous post, the gun Mr. Obama is shooting appears to be fitted with a “super-full choke” in the top barrel and is therefore not set up for skeet shooting.  In addition, if he were shooting skeet, he would in all likelihood be aiming his weapon to the left or the right, as the two targets cross over, flying in opposite directions.  There also appears to be a significant amount of smoke emanating from the end of the barrel and ports.  This wouldn’t be significant, were it not for the fact that modern shotgun shells are smokeless.  There is still going to be a small amount of smoke and gas when the gun is fired, but this appears to be excessive.  Almost like the photo was doctored for added affect.  This may or may not be the case, but to a skeet shooter the photograph is questionable, okay?

It’s possible that somebody told the President to fire the gun for no purpose other than getting a publicity photo.  If that’s what the photo shows, then the White House shouldn’t be pawning it off as a representation of Mr. Obama shooting skeet.

I recently attempted to take what I thought was a centrist position on the Obama photo and the push for more gun control in a couple of discussion threads on Facebook.  The problem, is that I’m a former trap and skeet shooter who is somewhat knowledgeable on the subject of small arms and ammunition.  Others, who apparently know little or nothing about the sport, couldn’t wait to jump all over me.  First, a former colleague (who I’m pretty sure has little or no experience with firearms), compared me to a birther.   Another, used the adjective “idiotic.”   Both comments came from journalists.

So much for a balanced point of view in the media.   Emotion has entered the building.  Reason has left the house.  I deleted both threads on my Facebook page.  Who needs it?

Extremism, is extremism, be it on the right or the left.  Those who argue for the elimination of small arms in America are no less unreasonable than those who argue for no gun control at all.  Both only fan the fires of emotional nonsense, making it all the more difficult to reach a compromise which will, in the end, provide an answer.  It may not satisfy both sides, in fact it’s sure not to, but hopefully it will make us all a little bit safer, both on the streets and in our schools.   Taking an extremist position only makes it more difficult and possibly even impossible for our policy makers to find the middle of the road.  So many have already taken a hard right or a sharp left, leaving themselves stuck in the ditch.

And for the record, I am not a “birther. “  I did, in fact, vote for Mr. Obama.  I also contributed to the campaign of Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, which I believe, makes me somewhat left of center.  Or perhaps, because I don’t like extremism in either direction, it might make me a true moderate, something few will understand as the media pays less attention to a moderate point of view.  Why would they?  It’s so much more exciting to go to extremes and scream at one another about “birthers” and “skeeters!”

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White House press secretary, Jay Carney, has now failed to confirm questions as to whether the President shoots skeet or trap, which appears to bolster speculation that if he doesn’t know the difference between the two then he may do neither, and that the photo was in fact nothing more than a publicity stunt (a lie?) designed to convince sport shooters that he’s one of their own.   If that’s what happened, then somebody in the President’s inner-circle had a bad idea.  Of course for those who think private gun ownership should be eliminated none of this will matter.  But those aren’t the people the photo was released to convince.  For sport shooters, White House backpedaling, making statements about the President never claiming to have experience as a hunter, only makes it worse.

After years of nonsense in the United States Senate, with a “super-majority” of 60 votes needed to get anything done, and the senators being allowed to stop the Senate’s business not by a real filibuster, but by simply threatening a filibuster, I had hopes that something positive was finally going to be done.  I had hopes that Majority Leader, Harry Reid, would lead his Democrats toward real filibuster reform, toward forcing those who wanted to stop the Senate from moving forward through the use of a filibuster, to actually keep talking until they were no longer able to go on.  That is to say, to actually filibuster, rather than simply calling it in.  Which is in truth, not a filibuster at all.  But it was not to be.  The Democrats wimped out.  Again.

According to Politico,  the grand bargain Reid made with the Republicans, “does little to end the practices that got the filibuster reform movement started in the first place.”  The Los Angeles Times, calls the changes “modest.”  Oh joy.

So Harry Reid reached an agreement with Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell (smiles all  around), to tweak current filibuster rules while leaving much of the process in place.  You’ll remember McConnell as the guy who said “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”   It helped establish the Republicans as “the party of no,” setting them on a course that would attempt to block everything President Obama wanted to do regardless of the damage that might be done to the nation.   While Reid and the Republicans failed to block a second term for Mr. Obama, they have succeeded in upholding the insanity of regulations controlling the Senate filibuster as the Democrats wimp out again.  Despite their majority, ending a filibuster will continue to require not a simple majority of 51, but a super-majority of 60 out of a possible 100 votes.

Why would they do it?   Could it be that Reid thinks he doesn’t have adequate support from his own party to get it done?  But why wouldn’t he have adequate support?  Could it be because the Senate, like the House, has been mostly bought off by lobbyists representing corporate and other big money interests who want their congressional lapdogs to be able to leverage issues despite their lesser numbers in the Senate?

It’s all about the politics of power.  It’s about members of the Senate and House throwing their support to big money contributors who fill their campaign coffers with millions upon millions of dollars, rather than the common folk who went to the polls to put them in office.

It’s about the death of majority rule in America.  A death that has led to:

-Inadequate filibuster reform in the Senate.

- A society being forced to consume GMO’s without knowing what we’re eating.

-Healthcare industry costs that continue to spiral out of control.

-A military presence in Afghanistan, longer than most Americans wanted us there.

-The death of due process for American citizens on American soil.

-A lack of regulation over the broadcast/cable/satellite industry which has made us (arguably) the most entertained and least well-informed nation on earth.

-A banking/finance industry that continues to be “too big to fail,” as those who participated in the criminal fraud that led to the economic crash of 2008 continue to escape prosecution as the Justice Department looks the other way.

-The greatest disparity between the wealthy and the poor in many years.  According to a report published by GlobalPost,  ” Among developed nations, only Chile and Mexico have higher income inequality than the U.S.”

I had also hoped for some sort of campaign finance reform.  Yeah, right.  Forget that.  Forget your elected representatives actually representing you in the Congress.  Not gonna happen.  Even with newcomers like Elizabeth Warren in the Senate.  She’s outnumbered and outgunned by those who have already been bought off.  The current course of obfuscation and inaction by McConnell, his Republican colleagues and others who care more for the money they need to ensure their political survival as opposed to the survival of a Republic built upon democratic principles,  is leading to the death of our democratic process.   This course of action will not be reversed so long as we continue to have the best government money can buy.

Lady Liberty is up to her neck in water and she’s sinking fast.  And Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid are smiling.

I was always turned off by  the concept of an alleged entertainment vehicle calling itself “Les Miserables,” or “The Miserable Ones.”  I was right.  After screening the film, I found the title to be spot on.  It describes precisely where this movie takes you,  regardless of what members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, might think.

After more than two hours of lead singers who cannot sing and un-melodic, repetitive numbers screamed at you while you are forced to watch far too many closeups of actors in agony, you will be drawn into the misery as well.  Which, I suppose, is fine for full-blown masochists and even those possessed of moderate self-loathing.   I am neither, nor do I care to be.   I am grateful I followed my instincts and did not pay to see this picture or the stage production, even though on stage, “Les Mis, might provide a completely different feel.  Since I haven’t seen it on stage, I don’t know.  I do know that a great many people and some critics are in denial about just how bad this movie actually is.  It’s just plain awful.  It happens sometimes.  The music is mediocre and therefore unmemorable, the actors are miscast and it’s way too long.  It is bloated and generally offensive.   This is what happens when a major studio buys into a project that doesn’t pan out.  At some point reality is overtaken by hype and much of the general public is swamped by denial.

Maybe Victor Hugo’s monster 1400 page book “Les Miserables” simply is not meant to be translated for the silver screen.  I’m reminded of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s attempt at adapting “Woman in White” from Victorian novel to contemporary musical theater.   That didn’t work either, but I went to see it while in London simply because it was Andrew Lloyd Webber, so how bad could it possibly be?

Go see “Hitchcock,” “Silver Linings,” “Argo,” or best of all, “Lincoln.”   Don’t bother with “Les Miserables.”  Unless you enjoy being miserable.   If you must have musical theater, rent a copy of  “West Side Story” or “My Fair Lady.”   You’ll be reminded of just how good the transformation of musical theater to motion picture can be, when the performers can sing and the music is actually……..there.

As President Obama signs a $633 billion budget to fund the Pentagon, while stripping away due process for American citizens permitting our military to imprison us indefinitely without access to an attorney or courtroom and our leaders seem determined to push us into war with Iran, we would do well to remember the following-

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”    - Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

Okay, this is outrageous.  President Obama just signed the “National Defense Authorization Act” for 2013.  As I understand it, this is supposed to authorize financing for the nation’s military to the tune of $633 billion.  However, last year and this, the bill has contained provisions which make it a rubber stamp for the old “Patriot Act,” permitting the government to hold non-citizens suspected of terrorism indefinitely without due process.  No lawyer, no court appearance necessary, they can just lock you up in Gitmo or a secret CIA lockup overseas.   During the campaign, Mr. Obama promised to make Gitmo, go away.  Instead, he has authorized it for another year and extended the law to permit the detention of American citizens indefinitely, without due process.  Again, for emphasis, this allows for the INDEFINITE MILITARY DETENTION OF AMERICAN CITIZENS. This is un-American and totally unacceptable.   The nation is losing its soul which is and always has been grounded in law.

Despite his campaign promises to the contrary, Mr. Obama, is allowing some of the worst  travesties of the Bush/Cheney years to continue.

No illegal search and seizure?  No due process?  No privacy for our phone calls or email?  What’s next?  Or perhaps I should say, what’s left?  And the really scary part is that millions are clueless.  Some, probably think this is all just fine.  Orwell, dear friends, is here.  This is the same kind of crap that led to Germany falling to pieces in the 1930’s and 40’s.  Scare the hell out of the populace and they’ll let you do almost anything, even invade a sovereign nation on nothing  more than a thread of speculation that one day they might decide to attack us.

And you thought the fiscal cliff was a problem?  Welcome to the new American police state.   The major media should be all over this.  Instead, their silence is deafening.  Possibly because they’re afraid of being viewed by the military establishment (homeland security?) as giving aid and comfort to a terrorist enemy by reporting the truth - that is to say, taking a position that doesn’t agree with the White House and Pentagon.  They could be snatched off the streets and thrown in some cell overseas, in Turkey maybe, and never heard from again.  While that’s a stretch, it takes no stretching at all to conclude that they’ve simply forgotten what real news is and how it should be covered.  Too many corporate lap dogs and too few real journalists who know how to use the First Amendment to hold our elected leaders feet to the fire.  Which is what they are supposed to do, or at least we thought that was our job, working for our viewers and readers and not the corporate bottom line, back in the day when we were still doing news.

Al Jazeera buying Current TV with the intent of turning it into “Al Jazeera, America” is great news.  For the most part, the Qatar-owned broadcaster already does a better job of journalism than the American networks.   That became painfully obvious to anyone watching their coverage during the Gulf War (s).  They already have 5 bureaus in the U.S. and plan on setting up 5 to 10 more following the acquisition of Current TV from Al Gore, which means job creation for U.S. journalists  and a greater diversity of opinion from a broadcast news outlet that appears to be striving for a fair and objective presentation as opposed to what we now have, business people who care more for business than journalism, seeking greater profitability through the presentation of entertainment or by blatantly slanting the news, turning it into disinformation.

The Arabs, riding into town possibly to to resuscitate American broadcast journalism?  How interesting is that?   One can only hope.