romney understands his magical thinking better than you do!

Romney quotes Cleon Skausen , boasts passionately about being a bishop and state leader in his church, the second coming in Jerusalem and Missouri, jes dayyum...., is it any wonder this cat couldn't run as himself?!?

when try'na impress a skeezer and reckless teabaggery go wrong...,

NYTimes | Mr. Humphries, who was identified on Wednesday by law enforcement colleagues, took the initial complaint from Jill Kelley, a Tampa woman active in local military circles and a personal friend, about anonymous e-mails that accused her of inappropriately flirtatious behavior toward Mr. Petraeus.

The subsequent cyberstalking investigation uncovered an extramarital affair between Mr. Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, his biographer, who agents determined had sent the anonymous e-mails. It also ensnared Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, after F.B.I. agents discovered what a law enforcement official said on Wednesday were sexually explicit e-mail exchanges between him and Ms. Kelley.

A spokesman for Ms. Kelley provided her version of events in two conference calls with reporters on Wednesday. Ms. Kelley’s concern when she took the e-mails to Mr. Humphries was that she feared the sender was “stalking” Mr. Petraeus and General Allen, said the spokesman, who asked not to be identified.

“She asks the agent, ‘What do you make of this?’ ” the spokesman said. “The agent said: ‘This is serious. They seem to know the comings and goings of a couple of generals.’ ”

General Allen himself had received a similar anonymous e-mail message, sent by someone identified as “kelleypatrol,” advising him to stay away from Ms. Kelley. The general forwarded it to Ms. Kelley, and they discussed a concern that someone was cyberstalking them.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said he had asked the Senate to postpone a confirmation hearing for General Allen’s next assignment while the department’s inspector general reviewed his e-mail correspondence with Ms. Kelley, which was discovered by F.B.I. agents investigating her initial complaint.

Pentagon officials said the review covered more than 10,000 pages of documents that included “inappropriate” messages. But associates of General Allen have said that the two exchanged about a dozen e-mails a week since meeting two years ago and that his messages were affectionate but platonic.

A law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, disputed that assertion on Wednesday, saying some messages were clearly sexual. Investigators were confident “the nature of the content warranted passing them on” to the inspector general, the official said.

if this is the very best the military has to offer, that splains some things...,

National Journal | They were said to be generals cut from the same cloth, David Petraeus and John Allen: whip-smart, adaptable, erudite and above reproach. Indeed Allen was Petraeus’s hand-picked successor in Afghanistan, having served as deputy commander at Centcom in Tampa, Fla., first under Petraeus, then under Marine Gen. James Mattis. Petraeus and Allen, the soldier and the Marine, represented, in other words, the very best that the U.S. military has to offer.

And yet, in less than a week, the careers of two very different men may be ruined as a result of alleged inappropriate behavior with women.

It was scandalous enough when Petraeus stepped down as CIA director after an FBI investigation uncovered his extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. The latest hairpin plot twist came early Tuesday when the Defense Department abruptly announced that the nomination of Allen, the outgoing commander in Afghanistan, to be commander of NATO forces was “on hold” pending an investigation by the FBI and the Pentagon inspector general related to his relationship with Jill Kelley – the woman who kicked off the FBI probe by reporting threatening emails she had received from Broadwell, and who has denied having any relationship with Petraeus beyond family friend.

A senior U.S. defense official told National Journal on Tuesday that investigators are now looking into “potentially inappropriate communications” between Allen and Kelley, 37, a doctor’s wife who worked at Centcom in Florida. According to The Washington Post, in the course of the Petraeus-Broadwell probe, the FBI uncovered between 20,000 and 30,000 documents — most of them e-mails —shared between Kelley and Allen.

In the end, Petraeus’ downfall marks the formal finish to a career that had in some ways passed its peak. The influence of his signature contribution to U.S. military doctrine—expensive counterinsurgency programs that take years to implement, with little to show in the way of results, as in Afghanistan —has been fading.

As for Allen, his tenure in Afghanistan is proving at least as troubled as Petraeus’, beset by “green-on-blue” attacks by Afghan soldiers and officials on allied troops, and a stubborn Taliban supported by Pakistani elements across the border.

During a visit to Afghanistan I made last May, he came across as sober and largely humorless in manner as he described in intellectual terms his strategic plans in Afghanistan. “There is this sense, and it’s a very Western sense I think, that there is a Napoleonic decisive battle that tends to end wars. In counterinsurgency, it’s much less about that than about creating an enduring capacity that grows and compounds on itself over time," Allen said. "And that’s what’s happened.”

He was far less of a glamorous or show-boating figure than Petraeus. Nevertheless, he’s now one of the leading men in a national soap opera.

the real lesson boys and girls, is, if you're sketchy, use Tor and PGP

slate | Using the dead-drop tactic can certainly reduce the chances that sweeping surveillance dragnets will gobble up your communications—but it is not exactly secure. The method was used by the planners of the Madrid train bombings in 2004, which killed 191 people, helping them to operate below the radar of Big Brother. However, law enforcement agencies over the years have grown accustomed to terrorists using the dead drop, and technologies have been developed to help counter it.

An interception tool developed by the networking company Zimbra, for instance, was specifically designed to help combat email dead drops. Zimbra’s “legal Intercept” technology allows law enforcement agencies to obtain “copies of email messages that are sent, received, or saved as drafts from targeted accounts.” An account that is under surveillance, with the help of Zimbra’s technology, will secretly forward all of its messages, including drafts, to a “shadow account” used by law enforcement. This may have been how the FBI was able to keep track of all correspondence being exchanged between Petraeus and Broadwell.

(It’s also worth noting that archived draft emails stored alongside sent and received messages on Google’s servers can actually be obtained by law enforcement with very little effort. Due to the outdated Electronic and Communications and Privacy Act, any content stored in the cloud can be obtained by the government without a warrant if it’s older than six months, as Wired reported last year.)

What this means is that if Petraeus and Broadwell had been savvy enough to use encryption and anonymity tools, their affair would probably never have been exposed. If they had taken advantage of PGP encryption, the FBI would have been able to decipher their randy interactions only after deploying Trojan-style spyware onto Broadwell’s computer. Further still, if the lovers had only ever logged into their pseudonymous Gmail accounts using anonymity tools like Tor, their real IP addresses would have been masked and their identities extremely difficult to uncover.

But then it is unlikely that they ever expected to come under FBI surveillance. Their crime was a moral one, not a felony, so there was no real reason to take extra precautions. In any other adulterous relationship a pseudonym and a dead drop would be more than enough to keep it clandestine, as my Slate colleague Farhad Manjoo noted in an email.

Broadwell slipped up when she sent the harassing emails—as that, as far as we know, is what ended up exposing her and Petraeus to surveillance. Whether the harassment was serious enough to merit email monitoring is still to be established, as Emily Bazelon writes on “XX Factor.” It goes without saying, however, that the real error here was ultimately made by Petraeus. If he had stayed faithful to his wife of 38 years in the first place, he’d still be in charge at the CIA—and I wouldn’t be writing about how he could have kept his adultery secret more effectively by using encryption.

fbi's surveillance state abuse is the real scandal...,

guardian | So not only did the FBI - again, all without any real evidence of a crime - trace the locations and identity of Broadwell and Petreaus, and read through Broadwell's emails (and possibly Petraeus'), but they also got their hands on and read through 20,000-30,000 pages of emails between Gen. Allen and Kelley.

This is a surveillance state run amok. It also highlights how any remnants of internet anonymity have been all but obliterated by the union between the state and technology companies.

But, as unwarranted and invasive as this all is, there is some sweet justice in having the stars of America's national security state destroyed by the very surveillance system which they implemented and over which they preside. As Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it this morning: "Who knew the key to stopping the Surveillance State was to just wait until it got so big that it ate itself?"

It is usually the case that abuses of state power become a source for concern and opposition only when they begin to subsume the elites who are responsible for those abuses. Recall how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman - one of the most outspoken defenders of the illegal Bush National Security Agency (NSA) warrantless eavesdropping program - suddenly began sounding like an irate, life-long ACLU privacy activist when it was revealed that the NSA had eavesdropped on her private communications with a suspected Israeli agent over alleged attempts to intervene on behalf of AIPAC officials accused of espionage. Overnight, one of the Surveillance State's chief assets, the former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, transformed into a vocal privacy proponent because now it was her activities, rather than those of powerless citizens, which were invaded.

With the private, intimate activities of America's most revered military and intelligence officials being smeared all over newspapers and televisions for no good reason, perhaps similar conversions are possible. Put another way, having the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.

The US operates a sprawling, unaccountable Surveillance State that - in violent breach of the core guarantees of the Fourth Amendment - monitors and records virtually everything even the most law-abiding citizens do. Just to get a flavor for how pervasive it is, recall that the Washington Post, in its 2010 three-part "Top Secret America" series, reported: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."

partisan teabaggery pulled the petraeus story off the rails

mockpaperscissors | Talking Points Memo pulls out the four most telling paragraphs from the NYTimes (paywall) story about the convoluted Patraeus affair story:

Ms. Kelley, a volunteer with wounded veterans and military families, brought her complaint to a rank-and-file agent she knew from a previous encounter with the F.B.I. office, the official also said. That agent, who had previously pursued a friendship with Ms. Kelley and had earlier sent her shirtless photographs of himself, was “just a conduit” for the complaint, he said. He had no training in cybercrime, was not part of the cyber squad handling the case and was never assigned to the investigation.

But the agent, who was not identified, continued to “nose around” about the case, and eventually his superiors “told him to stay the hell away from it, and he was not invited to briefings,” the official said. The Wall Street Journal first reported on Monday night that the agent had been barred from the case.

Later, the agent became convinced — incorrectly, the official said — that the case had stalled. Because of his “worldview,” as the official put it, he suspected a politically motivated cover-up to protect President Obama. The agent alerted Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who called the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, on Oct. 31 to tell him of the agent’s concerns.

The official said the agent’s self-described “whistle-blowing” was “a little embarrassing” but had no effect on the investigation.

So… the shirtless FBI Agent–who’s advances were spurned by the ingenue Jill Kelley went to the GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor to tip him that a scandal was brewing that could help the GOP, you know, because of his world view.

The little factoid that kept confusing me as this stupid story unfolded was why Cantor was briefed and the President wasn’t, and now we know: Teabagging. This sad and stupid story now officially has no legs. I hope that Mrs. Petraeus gets a good settlement and that miserable little rat-fucker General gets what he deserves.

in measured results, how successful have Petraeus' strategies been in Afghanistan and Iraq?

aljazeera | Defence Secretary Robert Gates referred to him as "the pre-eminent soldier-scholar-statesman of his generation".

But his critics say, the legacy of his career is not that stellar and deserves far more scrutiny than the US media and politicians are willing to give it. 

Earlier this year, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis released a whistleblower report on conditions in Afghanistan.

He said that Petraeus consistently gave glowing and inaccurate accounts of US military progress and that Petraeus built a so-called "cult of personality" around himself.

"A message had been learned by the leading politicians of our country, by the vast majority of our uniformed service members, and the population at large [that] David Petraeus is a real war hero - maybe even on the same plane as Patton, MacArthur, and Eisenhower .... But the most important lesson everyone learned [was to] never, ever question General Petraeus or you'll be made to look a fool!"

In his report, Davis was scathing in his assessment of US military commanders:

"Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognisable.

"This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan."

global system of cultural supremacy...,

more myth than man...,

globalresearch | The man behind the image was fake. He’s a shadow of how he and spin doctors portrayed him publicly.

Competence didn’t earn him four stars. Former peers accused him of brown-nosing his way to the top. It made him a brand as much as general. Talk about him being presidential material surfaced.

In 2007, Time magazine made him runner-up as Person of the Year. The designation is as meaningless and unworthy as Nobel Peace awards.

So is current and previous praise. John McCain once called him “one of (our) greatest generals.” His judgment leaves much to be desired.

He’s not the best and brightest on Capitol Hill. He once admitted to graduating near the bottom of his Naval Academy class.

White House and media spin praised Petraeus’ performance as Iraq commander and CENTCOM head. It was falsified hype. Performance contradicted facts. Iraq was more disaster than success. His Afghanistan surge failed. Syria on his CIA watch didn’t fare better.

Before he fell from grace, he was called aggressive in nature, an innovative thinker on counterinsurgency warfare, a talisman, a white knight, a do-or-die competitive legend, and a man able to turn defeat into victory.

In 2008, James Petras described him well in an article titled “General Petraeus: Zionism’s Military Poodle. From Surge to Purge to Dirge.”

He explained what spin doctors concealed. He quoted Petraeus’ former commander, Admiral William Fallon, calling him “a piece of brown-nosing chicken shit.” Petras added: “In theory and strategy, in pursuit of defeating the Iraqi resistance, General Petraeus was a disastrous failure, an outcome predictable form the very nature of his appointment and his flawed wartime reputation.”

The generalissimo is more myth than man. He shamelessly supported Israel “in northern Iraq and the Bush ‘Know Nothings’ in charge of Iraq and Iran policy planning.”

Petraeus had few competitors to head CENTCOM. It was because other candidates wouldn’t stoop as low as he did. He shamelessly flacked for Israel and supported Bush administration belligerence. Petras criticized his “slavish adherence to….confrontation with Iran. Blaming Iran for his failed military policies served a double purpose – it covered up his incompetence and it secured the support of” uberhawk Senator Joe Lieberman.

Doing so also served his unstated presidential ambitions. He climbed the ladder of success by being super-hawkish, brown-nosing the right superiors, lying to Congress, surviving the scorn of some peers, hiding his failures, hyping a fake Iranian threat, supporting Israel, unjustifiably claiming Iraq success, and boasting how he’d do it throughout the region.

In other words, he hoped to rise to the top by manufacturing successes and concealing failures. Manipulated media hype made a hero out of what Petras called “a disastrous failure” with a record to prove it.

a whole lotta family bidnis being concluded...,

NYTimes | Along with a steady diet of books on leadership and management, the reading list at military “charm schools” that groom officers for ascending to general or admiral includes an essay, “The Bathsheba Syndrome: The Ethical Failure of Successful Leaders,” that recalls the moral failure of the Old Testament’s King David, who ordered a soldier on a mission of certain death — solely for the chance to take his wife, Bathsheba.

The not-so-subtle message: Be careful out there, and act better. 

Despite the warnings, a worrisomely large number of senior officers have been investigated and even fired for poor judgment, malfeasance and sexual improprieties or sexual violence — and that is just in the last year.

Gen. William Ward of the Army, known as Kip, the first officer to open the new Africa Command, came under scrutiny for allegations of misusing tens of thousands of government dollars for travel and lodging.

Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair, a former deputy commander of the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan, is confronting the military equivalent of a grand jury to decide whether he should stand trial for adultery, sexual misconduct and forcible sodomy, stemming from relationships with five women. 

James H. Johnson III, a former commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, was expelled from the Army, fined and reduced in rank to lieutenant colonel from colonel after being convicted of bigamy and fraud stemming from an improper relationship with an Iraqi woman and business dealings with her family.

The Air Force is struggling to recover from a scandal at its basic training center at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, where six male instructors were charged with crimes including rape and adultery after female recruits told of sexual harassment and sexual assault. 

In the Navy, Rear Adm. Charles M. Gaouette was relieved of command of the Stennis aircraft carrier strike group — remarkably while the task force was deployed in the Middle East. Officials said that the move was ordered after “inappropriate leadership judgment.” No other details were given. 

While there is no evidence that David H. Petraeus had an extramarital affair while serving as one of the nation’s most celebrated generals, his resignation last week as director of the Central Intelligence Agency — a job President Obama said he could take only if he left the Army — was the latest sobering reminder of the kind of inappropriate behavior that has cast a shadow over the military’s highest ranks. 

The episodes have prompted concern that something may be broken, or at least fractured, across the military’s culture of leadership. Some wonder whether its top officers have forgotten the lessons of Bathsheba: The crown of command should not be worn with arrogance, and while rank has its privileges, remember that infallibility and entitlement are not among them.

the cult of david petraeus...,

wired | When it came out that CIA Director David Petraeus had an affair with his hagiographer, I got punked. “It seems so obvious in retrospect. How could you @attackerman?” tweeted @bitteranagram, complete with a link to a florid piece I wrote for this blog when Petraeus retired from the Army last year. (“The gold standard for wartime command” is one of the harsher judgments in the piece.) I was so blind to Petraeus, and my role in the mythmaking that surrounded his career, that I initially missed @bitteranagram’s joke.

But it’s a good burn. Like many in the press, nearly every national politician, and lots of members of Petraeus’ brain trust over the years, I played a role in the creation of the legend around David Petraeus. Yes, Paula Broadwell wrote the ultimate Petraeus hagiography, the now-unfortunately titled All In. But she was hardly alone (except maybe for the sleeping-with-Petraeus part). The biggest irony surrounding Petraeus’ unexpected downfall is that he became a casualty of the very publicity machine he cultivated to portray him as superhuman. I have some insight into how that machine worked.

The first time I met Petraeus, he was in what I thought of as a backwater: the Combined Armed Center at Fort Leavenworth. It’s one of the Army’s in-house academic institutions, and it’s in Kansas, far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2005, Petraeus ran the place, and accepted an interview request about his tenure training the Iraqi military, which didn’t go well. Petraeus didn’t speak for the record in that interview, but over the course of an hour, he impressed me greatly with his intelligence and his willingness to entertain a lot of questions that boiled down to isn’t Iraq an irredeemable shitshow. Back then, most generals would dismiss that line of inquiry out of hand, and that would be the end of the interview.

One of Petraeus’ aides underscored a line that several other members of the Petraeus brain trust would reiterate for years: “He’s an academic at heart,” as Pete Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as Petraeus’ executive officer during the Iraq surge, puts it. There was a purpose to that line: It implied Petraeus wasn’t particularly ambitious, suggesting he was content at Fort Leavenworth and wasn’t angling for a bigger job. I bought into it, especially after I found Petraeus to be the rare general who didn’t mind responding to the occasional follow-up request.

So when Petraeus got command of the Iraq war in 2007, I blogged that it was all a tragic shame that President Bush would use Petraeus, “the wisest general in the U.S. Army,” as a “human shield” for the irredeemability of the war. And whatever anyone thought about the war, they should “believe the hype” about Petraeus.

fbi deemed petraeus affair part of criminal probe

Watch More News Videos at ABC | 2012 Presidential Election | Entertainment & Celebrity News

abcnews | Fury is an inadequate description for the former-CIA director's wife, Holly Petraeus' reaction after she learned that her husband had an affair with Broadwell, a former spokesman for David Petraeus told ABC News.

"Well, as you can imagine, she's not exactly pleased right now," retired U.S. Army Col. Steve Boylan said. "In a conversation with David Petraeus this weekend, he said that, 'Furious would be an understatement.' And I think anyone that's been put in that situation would probably agree. He deeply hurt the family."

As for Petraeus, the retired Army general who resigned as CIA director last week after admitting the extramarital relationship, he, "first of all, deeply regrets and knows how much pain this has caused his family," Boylan added.

"He had a huge job and he felt he was doing great work and that is all gone now."

Petraeus knows "this was poor judgment on his part. It was a colossal mistake. ... He's acknowledged that," Boylan said.

One result is that Petraeus could possibly face military prosecution for adultery if officials turn up any evidence to counter his apparent claims that the affair began after he left the military.

But Boylan says the affair between Petraeus and his biographer, Paula Broadwell, both of whom are married, began several months after his retirement from the Army in August 2011 and ended four months ago.

Broadwell, 40, had extraordinary access to the 60-year-old general during six trips she took to Afghanistan as his official biographer, a plum assignment for a novice writer.

"For him to allow the very first biography to be written about him, to be written by someone who had never written a book before, seemed very odd to me," former Petraeus aide Peter Mansoor told ABC News.

The timeline of the relationship, according to Petraeus, would mean that he was carrying on the affair for the majority of his tenure at the CIA, where he began as director Sept. 6, 2011. If he carried on the affair while serving in the Army, however, Petraeus could face charges, according to Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which reprimands conduct "of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces."

Whether the military would pursue such action, whatever evidence it accumulates, is unclear.

is it the end of the road yet for the alliance of corporate oligarchs with poorly-educated southern suburban white trash religious fanatics?

kunstler | The Birchers retailed all kinds of ideological nonsense that made them the butt of ridicule during the Camelot days of John F. Kennedy and the heady Civil Rights years of his successor Lyndon B. Johnson. (Bob Dylan wrote a song about them in 1962: "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues.") Everything perceived to be a threat in a changing society was sold by the Birchers as a communist plot - water fluoridation, de-segregation, even, by a kind of tortured logic, the US strategy in the Vietnam War. Since a Democratic president and congress passed the civil rights legislation of 1964-5, the traditionally Democratic "solid South" revolted almost overnight and eventually turned solidly Republican. (It was also good for business.)

Something else was going on in Dixieland from the late 1950s on. The region boomed economically, partly from luring northern industry down with cheap labor, and partly because so many large military bases were located there - hence the hyperbolic, militant patriotism of a region that had lately staged a violent insurrection against the national government. The region also went through an explosion of air-conditioned suburban sprawl because the southern states were geographically huge and the climate was unbearable half the year. The sprawl industry itself generated vast fortunes and widespread prosperity in a part of the country that had been a depressed agricultural backwater since the Civil War. 

Consequently, a population of poor, ignorant crackers crawled out of the mud and dust to find themselves wealthy car dealers and strip-mall magnates in barely one turn of a generation. The transition being so abrupt, their cracker culture of xenophobia, "primitive" religion, and romance with violence came through intact. They were the perfect client group for a political party that styled itself "conservative," as in maintaining the old timey ways. Toward the end of the 20th century, as the old northern states' economies withered, and Yankee culture lost both footing and meaning, and poor white folks all over America looked with envy on the glitz of country music and Nascar, and gravitated toward the Dixieland culture of belligerent, aggressive suburbanization, religiosity, and militarism. This cartoon of the old timey ways swept the "flyover" precincts of the nation. Along in the baggage compartment was all the old John Birch Society cargo of quasi-supernatural ideology that appealed so deeply to people perplexed by the mystifying operations of reality. That perplexity was supposedly resolved in a Bush II White House aide famously stating, "We make our own reality." The results of the 2012 election now conclusively demonstrate the shortcomings of that world-view.

And so the news last week was that a different version of America outvoted the John Birch Dixiecrat coalition by roughly two million ballots. Meaning, of course, that there are still a lot of dangerous morons out there, but also that the times they are yet a'changin' again. Fist tap Dale.

mitt romney is the president of white male america...,

NYTimes | IT makes sense that Mitt Romney and his advisers are still gobsmacked by the fact that they’re not commandeering the West Wing. (Though, as “The Daily Show” correspondent John Oliver jested, the White House might have been one of the smaller houses Romney ever lived in.)

Team Romney has every reason to be shellshocked. Its candidate, after all, resoundingly won the election of the country he was wooing.

Mitt Romney is the president of white male America.

Maybe the group can retreat to a man cave in a Whiter House, with mahogany paneling, brown leather Chesterfields, a moose head over the fireplace, an elevator for the presidential limo, and one of those men’s club signs on the phone that reads: “Telephone Tips: ‘Just Left,’ 25 cents; ‘On His Way,’ 50 cents; ‘Not here,’ $1; ‘Who?’ $5.”

In its delusional death spiral, the white male patriarchy was so hard core, so redolent of country clubs and Cadillacs, it made little effort not to alienate women. The election had the largest gender gap in the history of the Gallup poll, with Obama winning the vote of single women by 36 percentage points.

As W.’s former aide Karen Hughes put it in Politico on Friday, “If another Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue.”

Some Republicans conceded they were “a ‘Mad Men’ party in a ‘Modern Family’ world” (although “Mad Men” seems too louche for a candidate who doesn’t drink or smoke and who apparently dated only one woman). They also acknowledged that Romney’s strategists ran a 20th-century campaign against David Plouffe’s 21st-century one.

But the truth is, Romney was an unpalatable candidate. And shocking as it may seem, his strategists weren’t blowing smoke when they said they were going to win; they were just clueless.

Until now, Republicans and Fox News have excelled at conjuring alternate realities. But this time, they made the mistake of believing their fake world actually existed. As Fox’s Megyn Kelly said to Karl Rove on election night, when he argued against calling Ohio for Obama: “Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better?”

Romney and Tea Party loonies dismissed half the country as chattel and moochers who did not belong in their “traditional” America. But the more they insulted the president with birther cracks, the more they tried to force chastity belts on women, and the more they made Hispanics, blacks and gays feel like the help, the more these groups burned to prove that, knitted together, they could give the dead-enders of white male domination the boot.

The election about the economy also sounded the death knell for the Republican culture wars.

Romney was still running in an illusory country where husbands told wives how to vote, and the wives who worked had better get home in time to cook dinner. But in the real country, many wives were urging husbands not to vote for a Brylcreemed boss out of a ’50s boardroom whose party was helping to revive a 50-year-old debate over contraception.

where america's racist tweets come from...,

theatlantic | The day after Barack Obama won a second term as president of the United States, the blog Jezebel published a slideshow. The gallery displayed a collection of screen-capped tweets.

There were, both shockingly and unsurprisingly, many more where that came from. And many of those tweets were geocoded: Embedded in them were data about where in the U.S. they were sent from.

Floating Sheep, a group of geography academics, took advantage of that fact to turn hatred -- and, just as often, stupidity -- into information. The team searched Twitter for racism-revealing terms that appeared in the context of tweets that mentioned "Obama," "re-elected," or "won." That search resulted in (a shockingly high and surprisingly low) 395 tweets. The team then sorted the tweets according to the state they were sent from, comparing the racist tweets to the total number of geocoded tweets coming from that state during the same time period (November 1 - 7). To normalize states across population levels, the team then used a location quotient-inspired measure -- an economic derivation used to analyze norms across geographical locations -- to compare a state's racist tweets to the national average of racist tweets.

So, per the team's model, a score of 1.0 indicates that the state's proportion of racist tweets to non-racist tweets is the same as the overall national proportion. A score above 1.0 indicates that the proportion of racist tweets to non-racist tweets is higher than the national proportion.

Here's the LQ formula the team used:

Their findings?

Alabama and Mississippi have the highest LQ measures: They have scores of 8.1 and 7.4, respectively. And the states surrounding these two core states -- Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee -- also have very high LQ scores and form a fairly distinctive cluster in the southeast. Fist tap Dale.

the republican brain

skepticblog | Hearing the speakers at the GOP convention spout their ideas this week, I’m again reminded that an entire American political party is proudly and openly espousing views that are demonstrably contrary to reality, from claiming that rape does not cause pregnancy, to claiming that global climate change is a hoax, to even weirder idea, like the bizarre notion that the President of the United States is a Kenyan Muslim. For years, I’ve puzzled over why people can believe such weird things as creationism or other kinds of pseudoscience and science denials. In my 2007 book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, I devoted an entire chapter to asking why creationists can so confidently believe patently false ideas, and refuse to look at any evidence placed in front of them. I’ve compared it to Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass, where Alice steps through the mirror and finds that the objects and the landscape look vaguely familiar—but all the rules of logic are reversed or turned inside out. How can people continue to believe things that are clearly wrong, and refuse to change their ideas or look at evidence?

It turns out that human brains are constructed very differently than what we would like to believe. As described by  Chris Mooney (2012) in The Republican Brain: The Science of Why they Deny Science—and Reality, our brains are not logical computers or non-emotional Vulcans like Dr. Spock, but organs in emotional animals who navigate the factual world to fit our beliefs and biases. Mooney explains this by starting with an anecdote about the Marquis de Condorcet, an important figure in the French Enlightenment (he helped develop both integral calculus and also wrote many important works on politics and philosophy). Condorcet believed in the Enlightenment ideal that humans would always be rational and guided by reason, and persuaded if logic and evidence were considered—and lost his life in 1794 during the irrational, emotional, highly political Reign of Terror. Even though Enlightenment philosophy and political science long argued that humans are rational animals, modern psychology and neurobiology  have shown this is not the case. Humans filter the world to see what fits their emotional and cultural biases, and easily neglect evidence and information that does not fit  (confirmation bias). Even more to the point, we are prone to what psychologists now call motivated reasoning—confirmation bias, reduction of cognitive dissonance, shifting the goalposts, ad hoc rationalization to salvage falsified beliefs, plus other mental tricks cause us to constantly filter the world. Our minds do not behave by objectively weighing all the evidence and listening to reason, but instead acts as if we were lawyers seeking evidence to bolster our pre-existing beliefs. Instead of the Enlightenment ideal that humans would change their minds when the facts go against them, motivated reasoning explains why humans are adept at bending or ignoring facts to fit the world as we want to see it.

obviously I'm not the only one who sees this...,

wikipedia | Neofeudalism is made possible by the commodification of policing, and signifies the end of shared citizenship, says Ian Loader:

The commodification of policing ... also has to do with the ways in which private policing and security can assist in the creation of commercial or residential spaces in which an exclusive, particularistic order comes to be defined and enforced. The warm, sanitised, consumer-friendly realm offered by shopping malls represents an important instance of the former. In contradistinction to the unpredictable, democratic ‘messiness’ of urban streets, malls make systematic use of private patrols and camera surveillance to create what Coleman and Sim call a moral order of consumption; something which entails the exclusion (on grounds of property, rather than criminal, law) of those ‘flawed consumers’ who are unwilling or unable to be seduced by the market. In respect of the latter, walled, gated, privately policed enclaves — currently most evident in Southern California and elsewhere in the United States, though also apparent (in embryonic forms) in parts of Britain — serve as a means of physical protection, and a vehicle for protecting the value of economic capital; both of which are predicated on the essential ‘unliveability’ of civil society beyond the walls. As such, the commodification of policing and security operates to cement (sometimes literally) and exacerbate social and spatial inequalities generated elsewhere; serving to project, anticipate and bring forth a tribalised, 'neo-feudal’ world of private orders in which social cohesion and common citizenship have collapsed.

cartel de sinaloa

wikipedia | The Sinaloa Cartel (Spanish: Cártel de Sinaloa or CDS)^[5] is a drug-trafficking and organized crime syndicate based in the city of Culiacán, Sinaloa,^[6] with operations in the Mexican states of Baja California, Durango, Sonora and Chihuahua.^[7][8] The cartel is also known as the Guzmán-Loera Organization and the Pacific Cartel, the latter due to the coast of Mexico from which it originated. The cartel has also been called the Federation and the Blood Alliance.^{[7][9][10][11]} The 'Federation' was partially splintered when the Beltrán-Leyva brothers broke apart from the Sinaloa Cartel.^[12]

The United States Intelligence Community considers the Sinaloa Cartel "the most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world"^[13] and in 2011, the Los Angeles Times called it as "Mexico's most powerful organized crime group."^[14]

The Sinaloa Cartel is associated with the label "Golden Triangle", which refers to the states of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua. The region is a major producer of Mexican opium and marijuana.^[12] According to the U.S. Attorney General, the Sinaloa Cartel is responsible for importing into the United States and distributing nearly 200 tons of cocaine and large amounts of heroin between 1990 and 2008.^[15]

los zetas

wikipedia | Los Zetas is a powerful and violent criminal syndicate in Mexico, and is considered by the U.S. government to be the "most technologically advanced, sophisticated, and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico."^[7][8] The origins of Los Zetas date back to 1999, when commandos of the Mexican Army's elite forces deserted their ranks and decided to work as the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel, a powerful drug trafficking organization.^[9] In February 2010, Los Zetas broke away from their former employer and formed their own criminal organization.^[10][11]

 

Los Zetas are well armed and equipped, and unlike other traditional criminal organizations in Mexico, drug trafficking makes up at least 50% of their revenue, while a large portion of the income comes from other activities directed against both rival drug cartels and civilians;^[9] their brutal tactics, which include beheadings, torture and indiscriminate slaughter, show that they often prefer brutality over bribery.^[9] Los Zetas are also Mexico's largest drug cartel in terms of geographical presence, overtaking its bitter rival, the Sinaloa Cartel.^[12] Besides drug trafficking, Los Zetas operate through protection rackets, assassinations, extortion, kidnappings, and other criminal activities.^[13] The organization is based in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, directly across the border from Laredo, Texas.^[14][15]

po thang...,