Dr. Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist from the University of Southern California who has studied the neurological basis of consciousness for years, tells Big Think that being conscious is a “special quality of mind” that permits us to know both that we exist and that the things around us exist. He differentiates this from the way the mind is able to portray reality to itself merely by encoding sensory information. Rather, consciousness implies subjectivity—a sense of having a self that observes one’s own organism as separate from the world around that organism.

“Many species, many creatures on earth that are very likely to have a mind, but are very unlikely to have a consciousness in the sense that you and I have,” says Damasio. “That is a self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of witness to what is going on in our organisms. That kind of process is very interesting because I believe that it is made out of the same cloth of mind, but it is an add-on, it was something that was specialized to create what we call the self.”

It seems to me there is something missing from this all-too-brief summary of Damasio’s account. To have a self (and thus to be robustly conscious) is not just to be a “witness to what is going on in our organism” or to recognize that one’s own organism is separate from the world.

To be conscious is to have the felt sense that something matters—has significance or import. A sophisticated computer might know that it exists, that things around it exists, and that there is a difference between it and the world. But I doubt that such a machine would have a felt concern for something because it is not a biological organism with needs embedded in feeling states. Self-awareness is not merely a “witness” but an active sorter of what to attend to and what to ignore in light of what matters. It is hard to imagine a consciousness without this sorting ability.

Last weekend Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin staged a “rally” in Washington, DC. From reports, it isn’t obvious what the rally was about.

Here is clip full of interviews with people in attendance. After watching the clip I am even less sure what the rally was about.

I challenge anyone to find a shred of reasoning here. Political thinkers often say that democracy requires an educated public.

How about a public has maintains some connection with reality?

  Here’s what those in attendance had to say.

But there is reason to think neither strategy will work.

Over the past 30 years, consumers have been spending more by going into debt assuming that increased value of assets such as homes will keep them solvent. But that created artificially high prices, especially in real estate and real estate-backed securities, that collapsed when the financial crisis hit. Thus, there has been a massive loss of wealth since the beginning of the recession which makes it harder for people and businesses to borrow money and makes it harder to service the debt they have already incurred. Until the level of debt held by individuals is brought into line with current income levels, spending will be sluggish no matter what the government does. According to  some economists, it may take 10 years to work of the excess debt in the economy.

So what to do about the recession? William Galston has the right idea:

A different era … How long will it take our policy makers and political parties to absorb the implications of that stark, undeniable phrase? When they do, they will realize that we have only two strategic options: Either we accept years of sluggish growth and high unemployment, or we shift to a new model that mobilizes the record level of private capital now sitting on the sidelines for public investments that will boost economic activity and employment in the short term, and economic productivity and growth in the long term, while generating rates of return sufficient to interest investors.

This is why we need a national infrastructure bank as the linchpin of a public investment strategy driven by economic analysis rather than congressional politics. Rather than bridges to nowhere, we need a bridge to the future. It’s time for hide-bound appropriators to get out of the way.

Our nation’s infrastructure is old and deteriorating. Now is the time to mobilize capital to rebuild it and put people back to work as well.

But what Galston fails to mention is that conservatives are likely to see a government supported infrastructure bank as more “socialism” since the idea is coming from Democrats.

Why would they be more welcoming toward this idea that any of the others Democrats have floated?

The problem is not a lack of ideas; the problem is Republican intransigence fed by public ignorance.

And as a propaganda technique it is working very well for Republicans.

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alder:

Our maddening times demand that the truth be forthrightly stated at the outset, and not just that the president has nothing in common with the führer beyond the possession of a dog. The outlandish stories about Barack Hussein Obama are simply false: he wasn’t born outside the United States (the tabloid “proof” has been debunked as a crude forgery); he has never been a Muslim (he was raised by an atheist and became a practicing Christian in his 20s); his policies are not “socialist” (he explicitly rejected advice to nationalize the banks and wants the government out of General Motors and Chrysler as quickly as possible); he is not a “warmonger” (he promised in 2008 to withdraw from Iraq and escalate in Afghanistan and has done so); he is neither a coddler of terrorists (he has already ordered the killing of more “high value” Qaeda targets in 18 months than his predecessor did in eight years), nor a coddler of Wall Street (his financial-reform package, while watered down, was the most vigorous since the New Deal), nor an enemy of American business (he and the Chamber of Commerce favor tax credits for small business that were stymied by the GOP to deprive him of a victory). And that’s just the short list of lies.

Polls measure just how effective it is:

In 2008, 13 percent of Americans were under the misimpression that he was a Muslim. Now the figure is 24 percent. One explanation may be that Obama’s connection to his Chicago church was fresher in the public mind then. But the deeper problem is a growing number of people who think the president is not just disappointing or wrongheaded but dangerous. More than half of Republicans surveyed (52 percent) think it’s “definitely true” or “probably true” that Obama “sympathizes with the goals of fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.” This says more about the mindset of the GOP than about Obama. It reflects not just the usual personal and partisan animus of the age (George W. Bush was subjected to exceptionally nasty attacks from the left) but a flight from facts—a startling disconnect between a quarter of the country and what some of Bush’s aides once disparagingly called “the reality-based community.”

Part of the difference between the use of the Big Lie by today’s conservatives and ordinary partisan bickering is that the Big Lie is being promoted by mainstream political figures:

Meanwhile, the right-wing and left-wing backbenchers who once sharply attacked each other in Congress, then walked off the floor arm-in-arm as colleagues, now barely speak. And the congressional leadership is getting into the venom game. When the racist Gerald L.K. Smith charged in 1937 that FDR was a secret Jew (he later called Dwight Eisenhower a “Swedish Jew”), no one could have imagined that the Senate minority leader would be asked about it, much less tacitly endorse the claim. But there was Mitch McConnell last week saying that “I take the president at his word” when he says he’s not a Muslim. That’s what’s known in politics as a “dog whistle”—a coded message to followers. Many conservatives don’t accept Obama’s “word” on anything. McConnell was thus giving them permission to consider the president’s faith an open question, even as he said it wasn’t in dispute.

Why would a “responsible” politician like McConnell engage in Big Lie propaganda? As usual in Republican politics, just follow the money. Via Frank Rich in the NY Times:

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are. […]

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

And we should be under no illusions about these benign public-spirited businessmen trying to make our country a better place to live.

When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).

So when can we expect the Democrats to fight back against the Big Lie? Frank Rich is not holding his breath.

When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

Obama is too busy burnishing his bi-partisan credentials trying to win the votes of people who think he eats babies for breakfast.

What is bothersome about Burne’s review is his utterly misleading use of 20th Century philosophy of mind to make his case.

His review is subtitled: “A debate on Cartesian dualism has led to radically differing approaches to the treatment of depression”. The introduction of the article suggests that opposition to Descartes’ claim that the mind (or soul) is a non-physical substance led to the assumption that brain functions are nothing but chemical reactions that can be controlled through drug intervention—an approach that is now proving to be ineffective.

Sixty years ago, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle published his famous attack on Cartesian dualism, The Concept of Mind, which claimed to find a logical flaw in the popular notion that mental life has a parallel but separate existence from the physical body. Among other effects it provided sophisticated support for the psychological behaviourists, then in the ascendant, who asserted that since we could not objectively observe mental activity it was not really a fit subject for scientific investigation.

Nowhere was the notion of banning mental states taken up more enthusiastically than by the emerging discipline of neuropsychiatry. If consciousness and all its manifestations were “merely” the firing of neurons and the release of chemicals in the brain, what need was there to focus on mental states? Once the physical brain was right, the rest would follow.

It was an approach that has spawned a vast pharmaceutical industry to treat any pathological psychological state – anxiety, shyness, depression, psychosis – with a variety of pills.

The clear implication of the article is that we should return to a dualistic conception of the mind that treats the mind as independent of physical states.

But this is just silly. Ryle rightly criticized the Cartesian picture of the mind as assuming a “ghost in the machine”—a weird supernatural entity that somehow issues in experience and rationality. Ryle’s criticism of Descartes was surely apt.

However, Ryle’s solution to uncovering the nature of the mind, behaviorism, was rejected by cognitive science decades ago and few researchers think that we can understand the mind by ignoring mental activity. I doubt that behaviorism had much impact on the development of pharmaceutical interventions.

Furthermore, the fact that we haven’t yet discovered the complex brain functions that cause psychosis or depression does not entail that the mind must be non-physical. The failure of drug interventions simply shows that the brain is more complex than many researchers had thought and mental illness is unlikely to be cured by a pill.

After extolling the virtues of his students, he gives them the bad news:

The bad news is that you have been the victims of a terrible swindle, denied an inheritance you deserve by contract and by your merits.  And you aren’t the only ones; victims of this ripoff include the students who were on your left and on your right in high school but didn’t get into Cal, a whole generation stiffed by mine.  This letter is an apology, and more usefully, perhaps a signal to start demanding what’s been taken from you so you can pass it on with interest.

Swindle–what happened? Well, before you were born, Californians now dead or in nursing homes made a remarkable deal with the future.  (Not from California? Keep reading, lots of this applies to you, with variations.) They agreed to invest money they could have spent on bigger houses, vacations, clothes, and cars into the world’s greatest educational system, and into building and operating water systems, roads, parks, and other public facilities, an infrastructure that was the envy of the world. They didn’t get everything right: too much highway and not enough public transportation. But they did a pretty good job.

Young people who enjoyed these ‘loans’ grew up smarter, healthier, and richer than they otherwise would have, and understood that they were supposed to “pay it forward” to future generations, for example by keeping the educational system staffed with lots of dedicated, well-trained teachers, in good buildings and in small classes, with college counselors and up-to-date books.  California schools had physical education, art for everyone, music and theater, buildings that looked as though people cared about them, modern languages and ancient languages, advanced science courses with labs where the equipment worked, and more. They were the envy of the world, and they paid off better than Microsoft stock. Same with our parks, coastal zone protection, and social services.

I will just post the entire letter because it is crucial that students have this information.

This deal held until about thirty years ago, when for a variety of reasons, California voters realized that while they had done very well from the existing contract, they could do even better by walking away from their obligations and spending what they had inherited on themselves.  “My kids are finished with school; why should I pay taxes for someone else’s?  Posterity never did anything for me!”  An army of fake ‘leaders’ sprang up to pull the moral and fiscal wool over their eyes, and again and again, your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph.

Now, your infrastructure is falling to pieces under your feet, and as citizens you are responsible for crudities like closing parks, and inhumanities like closing battered women’s shelters. It’s outrageous, inexcusable, that you can’t get into the courses you need, but much worse that Oakland police have stopped taking 911 calls for burglaries and runaway children. If you read what your elected officials say about the state today, you’ll see things like “California can’t afford” this or that basic government function, and that “we need to make hard choices” to shut down one or another public service, or starve it even more (like your university). Can’t afford? The budget deficit that’s paralyzing Sacramento is about $500 per person; add another $500 to get back to a public sector we don’t have to be ashamed of, and our average income is almost forty times that.  Of course we can afford a government that actually works: the fact is that your parents have simply chosen not to have it.

I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat (though your children will be even worse off if you don’t take charge of this ship and steer it). Your education was trashed as California fell to the bottom of US states in school spending, and the art classes, AP courses, physical education, working toilets, and teaching generally went by the board. Every year I come upon more and more of you who have obviously never had the chance to learn to write plain, clear, English.  Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively!  You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.

Many of your parents took a hike as well, somehow getting the idea that the schools had taken over their duties to keep you learning, or so beat-up working two jobs each and commuting two hours a day to put food on the table that they couldn’t be there for you. A quarter of your classmates didn’t finish high school, discouraged and defeated; but they didn’t leave the planet, even if you don’t run into them in the gated community you will be tempted to hide out in.  They have to eat just like you, and they aren’t equipped to do their share of the work, so you will have to support them.

You need to have a very tough talk with your parents, who are still voting; you can’t save your children by yourselves.  Equally important, you need to start talking to each other.  It’s not fair, and you have every reason (except a good one) to keep what you can for yourselves with another couple of decades of mean-spirited tax-cutting and public sector decline. You’re my heroes just for surviving what we put you through and making it into my classroom, but I’m asking for more: you can be better than my generation. Take back your state for your kids and start the contract again.  There are lots of places you can start, for example, building a transportation system that won’t enslave you for two decades as their chauffeur, instead of raising fares and cutting routes in a deadly helix of mediocrity.  Lots. Get to work.  See you in class!

Economist Robert Reich makes a further point in an email that O’Hare includes as a postscript:

…one big reason why middle-class Californians began thinking more about themselves than posterity starting in the late 1970s: Their real incomes started to flatten. In the thirty years before that – when their parents invested in California’s education system and infrastructure – the median wage tracked productivity gains. The typical family grew so much better off it could afford to be generous. But then the median wage flattened even as productivity gains continued. Public-spiritedness is harder to inspire among people who feel they’re losing ground.

I’ve posted on this issue earlier this summer. We have in fact been losing ground for decades. Our current troubles just make this trend toward stagnant middle class incomes very visible, a reality that students especially are experiencing.

The shocking story in this week’s Financial Times had this lead: “Call center workers are becoming as cheap to hire in the U.S. as they are in India.” High unemployment in the U.S. has forced down wages for low-paid workers in the U.S. so that in many cases Americans are cheaper to hire than those in a country where most people live on less than $8.00 per day.

She links this story to another about an ongoing strike at a Dr. Pepper/Snapple factory in upstate New York where workers are attempting to prevent cuts in wages and pensions despite healthy company profits.

Unlike other companies that have gotten drastic pay cuts from union members when they opened their books to prove their economic distress—GM, Ford, Chrysler, Goodyear tire company—Dr Pepper Snapple admits they can afford to pay; but they argue (I imagine some with some smugness) that unemployment is so high that competition between desperate workers will boost profits further as workers accept less pay to get and keep a job.

Of course, if you are a free market fundamentalist you will find nothing wrong with this scenario. Workers deserve only those wages that the market will bear. If an increased supply of labor suppresses wages so be it.

But as Ghilarducci argues:

Falling wages is a bad thing, a very bad thing. Even if you are channeling gilded age Jay Gould—who said, “I can hire half of the working class to kill the other half”—you must concede that if workers don’t buy stuff, there is more unemployment, which means even lower wages, leading to more unemployment, in a spiral downward of recession and depression that eventually means you won’t be able buy stuff, no matter how cheap it is.

The only antidote to downward pressure on wages is a strong union movement. But most Americans hate unions and the power of unions has steadily eroded.

We have been through all of this before. Capitalism nearly destroyed itself in the early 20th Century because the business community refused to pay workers enough to create demand for their products. One of the reforms that helped produce mid-20th Century prosperity was laws that protected the right of workers to organize. But anti-union sentiment and globalization have conspired to take that option off the table.

Will capitalism have to learn the hard way again?

Mark Morford knows and he plays the role to the hilt.

Wouldn’t it be horrible if all this stunning, insanely mounting, irrefutable evidence — death, floods, fires, heat waves, the worst this and the most violent that in 1,000 years — were some sort of surefire, cumulative sign that we have, if not directly caused, then wildly accelerated and amplified the imminent implosion of this planet?

But we didn’t! And we haven’t! And we aren’t! I mean, whew.

I am delighted to remember that hardcore science has lied, misguided, misnomered and whatever else weird science does to confuse the world about the real impact humanity has had on global ecosystems. All those thousands of highly trained scientists educated at the finest universities, learning the most difficult and fraught information of our age, all in universal agreement that humankind’s actions directly affect climate change, and they are all totally full of it because they are clearly in cahoots with Nazi Liberal Jesus, the solar panel manufacturers and the hippies who want me to compost my KFC Double Down wrapper.

And it gets better.

I mean, so what if giant icebergs four times the size of Manhattan are suddenly breaking off in Greenland? That’s happening way, way up there. I’m overconsuming energy and blocking out inconvenient truths way, way down here. There is no cause/effect, no connection whatsoever, never mind that dark, nagging sense of self-wrought doom, deep in my bones. I know that’s just a liberal lie, an implant, completely futile — just like those failed climate talks in Copenhagen, and the soon-to-be-failed ones coming up shortly in Mexico. I mean, whew.

For a good laugh on a Friday read the whole article.

In a democracy, the media is the institution in a position to report facts on which to rest a debate.

So it is really disturbing when the media reports outright lies such as the multiple references to the “Mosque at Ground Zero”. It is not a mosque and it is not at Ground Zero. It is a community center roughly two blocks from Ground Zero. Here are pictures of the neighborhood—does it look like hallowed ground?

Most people get their news from headlines and sound bites. When the news media are not careful to make their headlines and sound bites conform to the facts, millions are misled.

This “debate” about the Muslim community center in New York is a farce created by (some) conservatives intent on manufacturing enemies to run against in the upcoming election. It is just another in a long list of “debates” over “concepts” that do not exist in reality. There were no “death panels” in the health care plan, Obama is not a “socialist”,  estate taxes are not “death taxes”, there are no “terror babies” planted by Muslims bent on setting off bombs when they grow up.

But the press likes controversy so they dutifully report the imaginary as if it were real.

And we end up debating the imaginary while real issues (like getting aid to Pakistan or dealing with climate change) are pushed aside.

Apparently CNN’s resident climate change skeptic has recanted. From CNN meteorologist Chad Myers via Climate Progress:

Is it caused by man? Yes. Is it 100% caused by man? No. There are other things involved. We are now in the sun spot cycle. We are now in a very hot sun cycle. there are many other things going on. But, yes, a significant portion of this is caused by greenhouse gases keeping heat on the shore, on the land, in the atmosphere that could have escaped without those greenhouse gases, so, yes, it’s warmer. . ..

Of course, it is a little too late for a mea culpa. Thanks to oil company money and journalist hacks like Myers, a majority of the public is now skeptical of climate change despite the soundness of global warming science and fact that global average temperature is at or near record highs. The window of political opportunity for passing sweeping energy legislation has probably closed for now.

Even in his recantation, Myers can’t get his facts straight.

Unfortunately, “scientist expert” Chad Myers (actually a bachelor-degree meteorologist, not a climate scientist) also made the blatantly false claim that we are “now in a very hot sun cycle.” In fact, the sun is just emerging from an extremely low two-year minimum of activity, with years to go before it will reach another peak. Since 1980, average solar irradiance has been on the decline, even as global temperatures have risen.

Explain to me again why CNN is any different from Fox News?

“I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. Ground zero is, indeed, hallowed ground,” the president said in remarks prepared for the annual White House iftar, the sunset meal breaking the day’s fast.

But, he continued: “This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are” . . . .

There was no political upside to his stand and a good deal of political risk since polls show overwhelming nationwide opposition to the mosque.

This is just another example of conservatives lining up with majorities in the American public to treat an unpopular minority as an enemy. This is not only Anti-American; it is stupid given the fact that we need the cooperation of Muslims in the fight against terrorism. Obama stood by American principles and articulated what is best about us in contrast to the bigotry and ignorance we usually hear from the right (and from the public).

The issue has implications outside of New York. In Tennessee:    

Residents demand construction on Mosque be halted

  Several county residents spoke at Thursday night’s monthly Rutherford County Commission meeting in opposition to a proposed Islamic Center on Veals Road.

   Most demanded construction be halted and stopped short of demanding the buried body of a Muslim on their property be exhumed.

   The 52,000-square foot Islamic Center of Murfreesboro was approved earlier this year by the Regional Planning Commission under a new state law that allows religious institutions to build whatever they want in residential neighborhoods as a “use of right.”

   Residents who spoke want the county commission to reconsider their approval claiming Islam is not a religion and expressing fear that Islamic Sharia law will be imposed on Murfreesboro citizens.

Islam is not a religion? Building a mosque is equivalent to imposing Sharia law? It not hard to detect the ignorance and bigotry here.

Unfortunately, many Democrats have not been so willing to step up. Via the NY Times:

Few national Democrats rushed to Mr. Obama’s defense; party leaders, who would much prefer Mr. Obama to talk about jobs, were mostly silent. Two New York Democrats, Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand and Representative Jerrold Nadler, however, did back Mr. Obama. But Alex Sink, the Democratic candidate for governor here, distanced herself, while Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican-turned-independent, defended the president.

“I think he’s right,” Mr. Crist told reporters during an appearance with the president at a Coast Guard station here.

This is just another example of Democratic politicians lacking the stomach to defend American values. They should do the right thing and support their leader.

Apparently, Gohmert thinks that terrorists plan to immigrate to the U.S. and have babies who, when they grow up, will attack Americans and “help destroy our way of life.” And he claims to have gotten this information from “a retired FBI agent“.

But Tom Fuentes a former FBI Assistant Director from 2004-2008 isn’t buying this latest bit of Republican crazy.

“The FBI has 75 offices overseas, including offices in Jordan, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan,” explained Fuentes. “There was never a credible report — or any report, for that matter — coming across through all the various mechanisms of communication to indicate that there was such a plan for these terror babies to be born.

“Also, I’d like to add, there seems to be a lot of former FBI agents lurking in the halls of Congress and in the legislature in the state of Texas, so I’m kind of curious about that issue as well.”

“I think — in this case, I think the FBI has knocked this story down completely, officially or unofficially,” Fuentes also added. “I think at first they didn’t want to comment on it just because they didn’t want to lend any credence to the people spreading it, but realized that there has to be some comment or else the no comment, you know, means there might be some secret classified information out there, but — but there is no credible information about this particular aspect.”

As usual, Republicans are simply lying to the public in order gin up fear.

Haven’t we heard this sort of thing before? Something about weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds?

The Internets have been all “atwitter” about the new deal between Google and Verizon that would allow some customers access to a higher speed Internet for a price, essentially creating a poor person’s Internet and a rich person’s Internet.

is this a good idea or not. Kevin Drum has an informative discussion:

“So what’s the story on the Google/Verizon proposal that would allow carriers to offer high-speed networks to favored customers at a higher price than standard internet access? Would it spell the end of net neutrality?

There are two parts of the proposal. The first would essentially eliminate the principle of net neutrality over wireless networks. So within that piece of the internet, the answer is yes.

But what about the wireline network? There, the VG proposal is a little more subtle. Basically, they suggest that the current internet — which their document calls the “public internet” — should remain governed by strict net neutrality that treats everybody equally. However, carriers would be allowed to construct complementary networks that discriminate freely. The subtext here is that while well-heeled corporations could indeed buy better service, the public internet — i.e., the one we all know and love today — would be unaffected.

So: is this true? David Post is a strong supporter (”indeed, I’m a religious zealot”) of the current end-to-end design of the internet, a design that essentially enforces net neutrality at the protocol level by placing all processing at the endpoints of the network and allowing the network itself to do very little aside from dumb transport of bits. Here’s his take:

The problem is that there are many things an E2E inter-network (like the one we have) can’t do that people want their inter-network to do and would pay to have it do, and businesses serving those people want to provide those things. Things like guaranteed delivery of packets; the E2E network can’t promise that your packet will arrive at its destination, because that would require the network to keep track of your transmission as it moves along….[etc.]

The problem then boils down to: is there a way to preserve the E2E network — the open, nondiscriminatory inter-network — while simultaneously allowing people to get the services they want? Now in fact, that’s not exactly the question, because we know the answer to that one. There are already thousands, hundreds and hundreds of thousands, of non-E2E networks that do lots and lots of internal processing and provide lots and lots of services the E2E Internet does not provide. Your cell phone provider’s network, for instance. Most corporate wide area networks, for instance. Obviously, if Verizon wants to build a separate network and offer all sorts of glorious services on it, it can do so. The real net neutrality problem is this: if Verizon uses the Internet’s infrastucture to provide those services, will that somehow degrade the performance of the E2E Internet or somehow jeopardize its existence? Put another way: if Verizon can figure out a way to provide additional services to some of its subscribers using the Internet infrastructure in a way that does not compromise the traffic over the E2E inter-network, why should we want to stop them from doing that?

I think this is a good way of putting the question, though I’d expand it a bit. First, there’s a technical question: can Verizon (and other carriers) segregate traffic over current backbones without degrading the performance of other traffic? I’m skeptical on fundamental grounds, but as Post says, there’s always the chance that “technological innovation can do things that I usually cannot foresee.” And it’s certainly true that content delivery vendors like Akamai already provide high-speed access for a fee by pushing the boundaries of the current architecture of the internet as far as it will go. So maybe Post is right. But there’s also an economic question: if carriers put all their capital development into high-speed dedicated networks, does this mean they’ll simply let the current public internet deteriorate naturally as traffic increases but bandwidth doesn’t keep up? That seems pretty likely to me.

If you’re a pure libertarian, your answer is, “So what?” If there’s a demand for high-performance public access, then the market will deliver it. If there’s not, then there’s no reason it should. But there’s a collective action problem here: if the public backbone deteriorates, there’s nothing I can do about it. As an individual, obviously I can’t afford the kind of dedicated high-speed network that Disney or Fox News can. But the public backbone is a shared resource. Unless lots of my fellow users are willing to pay for high-speed service, I can’t get it. And if access to most of the big sites is fast because they’re paying for special networks, what are the odds that people will care all that much about all the small sites? Probably kind of slim.

Again: who cares? If most people don’t care much about high-speed access to small sites as long as they have fast access to the highest-traffic sites, then that’s the way the cookie crumbles. There’s no law that says the market has to provide everything Kevin Drum wants.

Still, there are real benefits to providing routine, high-speed internet infrastructure to everyone. It means that small, innovative net-based companies can compete more easily with existing giants. It means schoolchildren can get fast access to a wide variety of content, not just stuff from Microsoft and Google. It means we have a more level playing field between content providers of all kinds. Sometimes universal access is a powerful economic multiplier — think postal service and electricity and interstate highways — and universal access to a robust internet is to the 21st century what those things were to the past. If, instead of an interstate highway system, we’d spent most of our money building special toll roads for Wal-Mart and UPS, would that have been a net benefit for the country? I’d be very careful before deciding that it would have been.

For now, then, count me on the side of a purer version of net neutrality, in which the backbone infrastructure stays robust because everyone — including the big boys — has an incentive to keep it that way. I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise, but Verizon and Google are going to have to do the persuading. And it better be pretty convincing.”

But Steve Benen does a nice job of capturing this increasingly important issue:

There’s a case to be made — and a fairly persuasive one at that — that the current Congress has been as successful as any in several decades. For all of its many problems, this Senate, in just 18 months, passed health care reform, Wall Street reform, the Recovery Act, student loan reform, Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Hate Crimes Prevention Act, new regulations of the credit card industry, new regulations of the tobacco industry, and a national service bill, and confirmed two Supreme Court justices while they were at it. If the process was completely, irreparably broken, these victories wouldn’t have happened.

With this in mind, Jill Lawrence takes a contrarian view and argues that the status quo in the Senate isn’t so bad after all.

“It’s an impressive record, but it has not been treated that way. Part of the reason is that the journey has been ugly. McConnell and his crew are on track to match their 2007-08 record of forcing 139 cloture votes to end filibusters, while Democrats are taking the usual steps — compromises, cajoling, cringe-worthy deals — to forge onward. Every move by each side is dissected 24/7 by countless armchair analysts on blogs, talk radio and cable TV.”

Lawrence’s larger point seems to be that those demanding reform are proposing solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist. The Senate is frustrating, she says, “but hardly stagnant.”

As one of those annoying people who whines incessantly about the Senate, I’ll concede that the point has some merit. This Senate has achieved a great deal, and really is the most successful of my lifetime. It’d be a mistake to argue otherwise.

But I’m still not persuaded by Lawrence’s argument. The legislative breakthroughs have occurred despite the Senate’s ridiculous system, but the victories are hardly a justification for a broken institution.

There are a few points to consider that Lawrence omitted. For one thing, the Senate Democratic majority is unusually large — at 59 seats, it’s the biggest majority for either party in 30 years. Even at 59-41, the Senate has just barely been able to pass major bills, but therein lies the point — a 55-45 Senate should be able to tackle major challenges, too. As we’re learning, that’s no longer the case. The country can’t wait for once-in-a-generation majorities in order to pass important proposals.

For another, consider just how close the recent breakthroughs have been. The margins have been razor thin on nearly every key bill that’s passed, and a handful of instances in which the ball bounced the other way — Coleman edges Franken, Specter isn’t driven out of the GOP, Lieberman switches caucuses — would have made all of the achievements impossible. The success of the Senate shouldn’t be dependent on a handful of happy coincidences.

Finally, also note that while the Senate has successfully passed several, but not all, of the “big” bills, it routinely fails at everyday tasks, such as confirming the executive branch with qualified nominees. These common breakdowns are so common, it’s easy to forget them while major breakthroughs eke out narrow wins.

I’m not sure what I think about this. Congress has been very productive, but that may  because of an historically unusual make up that will not last.

William Saletan highlights more similarities in pointing the absurdity of conservative objections to the proposed mosque in New York City.

In the years since 9/11, Osama Bin Laden has issued more than 20 audio and video statements to spread his view of the conflict between the United States and al-Qaida. According to his worldview, the U.S. represents Christianity, al-Qaida represents Muslims, Christians won’t protect Muslims, the West hates mosques, peaceful coexistence is a fraud, and the “war on terrorism” is really a war on Islam. By spreading this message, Bin Laden works to turn Muslims against the U.S. and rally them to al-Qaida.

Now Bin Laden has an ally in this propaganda campaign: Newt Gingrich.

Over the past two weeks, in a series of articles and speeches, Gingrich has declared a religious war that suits al-Qaida’s agenda almost perfectly. While denouncing “Islamists” rather than Islam, Gingrich has blurred the distinction by selecting as his initial target the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero. Everything Bin Laden says about the U.S., Gingrich validates. All you have to do is read their statements, side by side.

[…] By opposing the mosque, Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, and other Republicans think they’re standing up to Bin Laden. But Bin Laden isn’t fighting for Islam. He’s fighting to transform a war of terrorists against civilization into a war of infidels against Islam. He’s fighting to persuade Muslims that they belong on his side, not on ours.

And you’re helping him, Newt. You’re giving him exactly the fight he wants. Nice going.

The common thread weaving American conservatism with radical Islam is not behavior. As far as I know, conservatives are not butchering women or flying planes into buildings.

What links them is authoritarianism and the use of religion to exercise social control over anyone they don’t like.

The details of the respective religions don’t matter much. What matters is the ability to seize and hold power—both radical Islam and radical conservatism cynically use religion as a means to pursue their narrow undemocratic agendas.

Of course for Gingrich, the purpose is to maintain the power of the plutocrats in Washington and Wall St.

It is sad that so many people who can never hope to have any power in their lives are so willing to follow them.