You know that financed-by-Newt-Gingrich-buddies Ultimate Mitt Romney Hit Video I wrote about the other day? Seems it has a few problems, much in keeping with the character of the candidate it is designed to help.
Like, accuracy. The people in Gaffney, SC say say the plant closing featured in the video wasn’t a big deal. Similarly, Marianna, Fla workers cry foul over anti-Romney film.
When Mitt Romney Came To Town — Full, complete version
The amazing thing about this 28-minute-long Occupy Wall Street-style hit piece is who made it: Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC.
Barney Frank was widely quoted when he said, “I never thought I’d live such a good life that I would see Newt Gingrich be the nominee of the Republican party.” Turns out even if you lived only a sort of good life, Newt is just great as a spoiler.
Perhaps it is time to subject investment bankers and derivatives traders to routine random drug tests. It’s widely believed that many of them use cocaine (although meth use may be rising), and I read that drug use on Wall Street is a real problem, although of course it has also beem rampant for a long time. The health of the economy is too important to be left in the hands of potentially drug-addled brains.
After all if it’s necessary to drug test welfare applicants and unemployed people seeking job training (who have the same 2% positive rate as found on Wall St) and high school football players, it is all the more important to drug test the masters of finance given the enormous effect that their work has on others.
Or, perhaps, we should agree to only drug test people armed with weapons or holding security clearances?
Ron Paul is not fit to be President (see, e.g., this and this). But he does have qualities that make him interesting. One is that on issues he cares about — racism apparently not being one of them — he is more principled, more consistent (and more extreme) than we are used to seeing in a putative national candidate. (Reagan was certainly not consistent; he raised taxes significantly.) One of those issues is monetary policy: he hates the Fed; although I don’t go far down that road with him, Paul’s pushes for Fed transparency (with Alan Grayson) have been beneficial, and the results deeply revelatory. Another is his support for what we used to call isolationism, but Paul wishes to rebrand as loving our foreign friends.
Here’s his case for pulling back from empire:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMHBEAeNa-c
Something about the presentation made me think of Mike Gravel.
Kidding aside, Paul does have a serious point: US military adventurism doesn’t work out very well for us or our, um, beneficiaries. The US has at least 662 foreign military bases in well over 150 nations — not counting all the secret ones where no one has ever been tortured or subjected to rendition in places where they torture folks. The latest new foreign military base is in Australia, a state no doubt in danger of imminent invasion.
Bases create demand for infrastructure to protect them, which is then used to justify a larger number of carriers and other force projection tools. Those in turn need bases to supply them… Meanwhile, other countries feel occupied, or encircled. And the US spends far more on arms then any other country in the rest of the world. Indeed more than then the sum of the expenditures of the next 15 countries (2010 data.)
Ron Paul’s takedown of Newt Gingrich:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWKTOCP45zY
And don’t miss Ta-Nehisi Coates‘s takedown of Ron Paul (and it’s not for his economic policies).
There is something oddly affirming about this rap video ‘Film the Police’. (Warning: cruelty and bad words you probably don’t want your toddler learning.)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyT1buoyTnY
I am not usually a big fan of rap; although I’ve heard a few very striking and wonderful rap pieces, on the whole my liking for rap tends to be one notch above ‘take it or leave it’: I’ll take it if there’s nothing else on.
Why then do I say a rap video about police brutality is affirming? For one thing, I am cheered that this piece of resistance starts with a judicial trope. The counter-culture assuming the judicial robe is older than I am (and even I just barely recall here come da judge), but it is still cheerful to see it continued, or revived. There’s still some deep resonance about the idea that the rule of law might be something that can be appropriated and turned on the powers that be.
Even more affirming is the central assumption: publicizing state-sponsored violence can end it. And it might be true.
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