I know this is often hard for professional politicians and political aides to comprehend, but regular Americans really don’t pay attention to abstract congressional maneuvers. If the Senate Democratic caucus thinks reforming Senate rules is a good thing that would eventually will lead to better policy outcomes, they should implement them. If they don’t think it will, they shouldn’t make the change. But what definitely shouldn’t be part of their decision making process is any concern that slightly modifying the rule could cause a broad political backlash. There simply won’t be any.

Instead, the American Left’s strategy must be to re-create itself wholesale – a project likely to take at least two decades. It will have to eschew the Democratic party in the same way that, back at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, European labor had to eschew the various liberal/whig parties which shared only a part of the Left’s agenda and had no intention of ever delivering on anything else no matter how often Lefties voted Whig. It will have to begin to see the neoliberal pundits of today as political rivals, rather than as outright allies. It will have to mobilize, turn into voters, the 30% or more who are currently able to vote but do not do so. They come overwhelmingly from the poorest segment of society and do not vote purely because they see neither mainstream party as having anything for them. The Left must build its own electorate and its own party, and leave the Democrats to sink or swim as they are able.

William Kunstler, Disturbing the Universe recounts the historic explores the live and career of one of the most controversial lawyers whose believed in justice for. Directed by his daughter Emily and Sarah the film explores not only his civil rights work and his private clients, but also how his family coped with his work

Justice is not a popularity contest

The Freedom Riders, Chicago 8/7, Wounded Knee, Martin Luther King, Jr. , negotiating at Attica made sense for a civil rights lawyer.

We have clear evidence that there may be an ongoing policy of collective punishment and expulsion, war crimes under international and US law, happening in Afghanistan, and it’s time for the House oversight committee to investigate.

You’d think after it had become the poster child for robo-signing foreclosure fraud, at a time when it was facing a class action suit arising out of that fraud, and at a time when all servicers had been anxiously awaiting the result of the US Bank v. Ibanez suit in MA, GMAC would be very very careful about the way its purchase of mortgage notes interacted with its servicing department.

You’d be wrong.

The Congressional representative was targeted because she responded to a question from the shooter in a way he could not understand. “What is government if words have no meaning?” It is a difficult question. In the reality of the shooter the government, the frustration and anger and the Representative are conflated. To the rational mind the reality games, the internet, fascism and cannabis are incidental, not causative. But cannabis, particularly an Indica with high cannabidiol content, might be therapeutic. Using this unfortunate individual to support a particular political party or policy is irrational.

What company wouldn’t want to have the government let it sell a product for whatever price it wanted, have the government use its power to stop anyone else from selling the product, and have the government directly or indirectly pay for buying the product?

Fifty years after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s January 17, 1961 speech on the “military-industrial complex”, that threat has morphed into a far more powerful and sinister force than Eisenhower could have imagined. It has become a “Permanent War State”, with the power to keep the United States at war continuously for the indefinite future.

These initial judgments have the effect of turning mortgage backed securities into non mortgage backed securities. If the note never transferred to the mortgage pools, then the investors and their loan servicers cannot foreclose and cannot collect payments. In response, the investors will surely try to put back the securities, which are essentially worthless at that point, on the banks from which they purchased them. And that’s when these enormous losses in the mortgage market go back to the banks. They don’t have enough money to deal with the repurchases.

I scoured the bowels of the wingosphere today looking for the wingnuttiest piece on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day — and ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.