Some Tom Morello Guitar Solos

Tom Morello: “I don't believe that the Democratic party has anything to do with the Left. We have two political parties: a right wing party and a right centrist party. That's the Democrats.”

Harry Reid: Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years

By Ed O'Keefe

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/post/harry-reid-mitt-romney-didnt-pay-taxes-for-10-years/2012/07/31/gJQADXkSNX_blog.html

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) claimed Tuesday in an interview that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney refuses to release additional tax returns because he didn’t pay taxes for 10 years.

The interview, published Tuesday by The Huffington Post, includes several swipes by the Senate leader at the GOP candidate.

“His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son,” Reid said in reference to George Romney’s decision to turn over 12 years of tax returns when he ran for president in 1968.

Reid suggested that Romney’s decision to withhold tax information would bar him from ever earning Senate confirmation to a Cabinet post. Then, Reid recalled a phone call his office received about a month ago from “a person who had invested with Bain Capital,” according to The Huffington Post.

Reid said the person told him: “Harry, he didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years.”

“He didn’t pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain,” Reid told HuffPo. “But obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look?”

Neither Reid nor his aides would identify the alleged investor, HuffPo reported.

The Romney campaign has previously denied rumors that Romney hasn’t paid taxes in a single year and he recently told ABC News that he couldn’t recall if there were years when he paid below the 13.9 percent tax rate that he paid in 2010.

In that ABC interview, Romney said he would be “happy to go back and look” at his tax records, but his campaign aides haven’t replied to several requests to clarify the former Massachusetts governor’s comments.

As for Reid’s assessment of the state of Senate races, he told HuffPo that “We feel comfortable in the Senate,” but said the growing influence of independent political groups could tip the balance of power toward the Republicans.

“Where the problem is, is this: Because of the Citizens United decision, Karl Rove and the Republicans are looking forward to a breakfast the day after the election,” Reid said. “They are going to assemble 17 angry old white men for breakfast, some of them will slobber in their food, some will have scrambled eggs, some will have oatmeal, their teeth are gone. But these 17 angry old white men will say, ‘Hey, we just bought America. Wasn’t so bad. We still have a whole lot of money left.’”

The Year of Dreaming Dangerously

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-78168-042-1

Slavoj Zizek. Verso (Norton, dist.), $14.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-1-78168-042-1

Renegade philosopher and cultural critic Zizek (Living in the End Times) again attempts to goad us from our comfortable political positions and rethink the philosophical and social meaning of 2011’s major protest movements—including the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. Drawing heavily on Marx and Hegel, Zizek probes the nature of these movements as they seek to fight the system of antagonistic capitalism without contributing to its enhanced functioning. For example, those involved in Occupy Wall Street, he observes, are “reacting to a system in the process of gradually destroying itself” as they wake “from a dream that has turned into a nightmare.” Similarly, despite the democratic elections forced by the Arab Spring, such protest movements have not flourished, and the cultural landscape is eerily bleak for the moment. Zizek argues that subterranean dissatisfaction still exists. We should view such movements as “limited, distorted (sometimes even perverted) fragments of a utopian future” whose greater potential flickers in and out of dormancy. Zizek’s staccato prose is often maddening as it jumps quickly from idea to idea, often repetitiously, without offering us a pause to ponder, but he’s as provocative as ever, forcing us to confront contentious matters head-on without flinching. (Oct.)

jouissance

"Unless you think I'm a fool."

US Justice Scalia steps up criticism of healthcare ruling

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/29/usa-court-scalia-idUSL2E8IT1BM20120729

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Sunday renewed his criticism of Chief Justice John Roberts' reasoning in upholding President Barack Obama's 2010 healthcare law and also said the Constitution undoubtedly permits some gun control.

The 76-year-old Scalia - a leading conservative on the court who has served as a justice since 1986 - also was asked whether he would time his retirement in order to let a conservative future president appoint a like-minded jurist.

"I don't know. I haven't decided when to retire," Scalia told the "Fox News Sunday" program. "... My wife doesn't want me hanging around the house - I know that."

"Of course, I would not like to be replaced by someone who immediately sets about undoing everything that I've tried to do for 25 years, 26 years, sure. I mean, I shouldn't have to tell you that. Unless you think I'm a fool."

Roberts, also a conservative, sided with the nine-member court's four liberals in upholding the constitutionality of Obama's healthcare law, considered the Democratic president's signature domestic policy achievement.

Scalia joined in a sharply worded dissent on the day of the June 28 ruling and added to his criticism on Sunday.

A central provision of the law is the "individual mandate" that most Americans obtain health insurance by 2014 or pay a penalty. The ruling found that this penalty "may reasonably be characterized as a tax" and thus would be constitutionally permissible under the power of Congress to impose taxes.

"There is no way to regard this penalty as a tax. ... In order to save the constitutionality, you cannot give the text a meaning it will not bear," Scalia said.

"You don't interpret a penalty to be a pig. It can't be a pig."

Supreme Court justices rarely give media interviews. Scalia is making the rounds to promote "Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts," a new book he co-wrote.

Scalia brushed off Obama's comments aimed at the court regarding the healthcare law and a campaign finance ruling.

"What can he do to me? Or to any of us?" Scalia said. "We have life tenure and we have it precisely so that we will not be influenced by politics, by threats from anybody."

He was asked "why you push people's buttons every once in a while." Scalia said, "It's fun to push the buttons."

GUN CONTROL

Scalia wrote the high court's 2008 ruling that a ban on handguns in the U.S. capital violated the right to bear arms enshrined in the Constitution's Second Amendment.

In light of the July 20 massacre in which a gunman killed 12 moviegoers in Colorado,

Scalia was asked whether legislatures could ban the sale of semiautomatic weapons.

He said the 2008 ruling stated that future cases will determine "what limitations upon the right to bear arms are permissible. Some undoubtedly are."

Scalia - a proponent of the idea that the Constitution must be interpreted using the meaning of its text at the time it was written - cited "a tort called affrighting" that existed when the Second Amendment was drafted in the 18th century making it a misdemeanor to carry "a really horrible weapon just to scare people like a head ax."

"So yes, there are some limitations that can be imposed," he said. "I mean, obviously, the amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried. It's to 'keep and bear' (arms). So, it doesn't apply to cannons. But I suppose there are handheld rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes that will have to be ... decided."

Regarding the death penalty, Scalia said opponents want it struck under the ban on cruel and unusual punishment included in the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.

"But it's absolutely clear that the American people never voted to proscribe the death penalty," he said. "They adopted a cruel and unusual punishment clause at the time when every state had the death penalty and every state continued to have it. Nobody thought that the Eighth Amendment prohibited it."

Scalia also took issue with decades-old Supreme Court precedent, saying the Constitution does not provide Americans with a right to privacy, despite a landmark 1965 ruling finding that it does. That ruling helped pave the way for the court's 1973 ruling legalizing abortion.

"There is no right to privacy - no generalized right to privacy," Scalia said. "No one ever thought that the American people ever voted to prohibit limitations on abortion. I mean, there is nothing in the Constitution that says that."

Scalia also was asked about his past criticism of rulings by Supreme Court colleagues in which he called them "folly" and "sheer applesauce."

"I don't know that I'm cantankerous," he said. "I express myself vividly."

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Bill Trott)

Happiness is the Betrayal of Desire

Tim Lott: You've got to fight for your right to frown

Our writer is sceptical about those who find it easy to be happy

By Tim Lott

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/tim-lott-youve-got-to-fight-for-your-right-to-frown-7984910.html#

One of my favourite quotes comes from the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who, when asked what he found most depressing about the world, answered "the happiness of stupid people".

It is so much easier to be cheerful when you are a slack-jawed nitwit. This is something that was not mentioned in the publicity around last week's first publication by the Office for National Statistics of the happiness survey.

When I try to visualise happy faces at random, the images my brain comes up with – Alan Titchmarsh, Jeremy Clarkson, Sarah Palin, Cliff Richard, or, worst of all, Nigel Farage – are unappealing as role models.

But smart, creative people aren't going to figure because they tend to suffer a disproportionate amount of unhappiness. Bruce Springsteen, who revealed last week that he was suicidal at the height of his success in the 1980s, is just one of the endless examples.

One research finding after another has demonstrated that happy people have a less accurate view of reality than depressed people. All this leads me to an uncomfortable conclusion for happiness academics – being happy is not the most important thing in life.

A re-statement of stoic principles is overdue. My father's generation did not expect to be happy. It was the last thing on their minds. They simply wanted to muddle through, and if happiness came, then they considered themselves lucky. This attitude saved them the daily pain of disappointed hopes.

The trouble is that we have followed the American path of thinking that happiness is not only a practical goal but a moral imperative. People who are unhappy are perceived as dangerous failures. So-called "negative" people are to be shunned, as if they carried a dangerous, transmutable virus.

I have a face like a collapsed cabbage when I am in a bad mood and people in the street are inclined to ask me – no, tell me – to cheer up. I resist the temptation to tell them I have a week to live or to punch them on the nose.

What I really want to ask them is what gives them the right to decide how I should or shouldn't feel? I would like to be happy all the time, of course. But it would be inhuman.

There has been a spate of literature that suggests that it is the happy people who are the sick ones. Eric G Wilson's Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy points out how "generative melancholy" can be a hugely creative force. Barbara Ehrenreich's Smile or Die is a counterblast against American "positive thinking", the idea that every disaster or setback is an "opportunity" for "moving on".

But the world is run not by realistic melancholic introverts, but fantasising, optimistic extroverts – politicians, for instance, and bankers. This is good, to an extent. We need people who can believe in success against all the odds – believe that anything can be possible, believe that change can come, believe that they can make huge unearned profits.

But we need pessimists too. Sadness should not be taboo – it should be respected, like the priest and the funeral director. We treat it like the embarrassing guest at the wedding, we want it to shut up and go away, but it is in all our hearts and so it should be. Life is brief, life is fatal, and it is packed with small losses as well as small joys.

Springsteen would never score highly on the national happiness index. Neither would I, or most of the people I admire. I like happy people, and I like to be around them. But don't disown the frown. Without it we'd be – well, American. Or, even worse, Nigel Farage.