I don’t think there’s been a complete slate on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors during the entire Obama Administration. But that would end if they somehow got these two economists past the Senate for confirmation.

According to BBC radio: Prime Minister David Cameron has gone back to court to obtain actions that will be served to convicted rioters. These actions will cause the eviction of the rioters families as well as the termination of welfare payments.

The United States spies on China as it does on many nations of geostrategic significance – but thus far at least, the Chinese book publishing arena hasn’t yet produced anything as sizzling about its own world of spies and spymasters as David Wise has in his page-turner, Tiger Trap: America’ Secret Spy War with China.

John LeCarre – writing fiction – mastered the art of taking shadows of real world sophisticated spycraft and turning them into some of the best novels of the last generation. What David Wise has done is zero in on and reveal the stories of America’s real George Smiley’s – only problem is that most of them have none of the competence or the layers of complexly organized subterfuge that LeCarre’s principal character had.

Four Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) stations in San Francisco had their cell phone service shut down on Thursday, August 11, to prevent a planned protest from materializing. James Allison, deputy chief communications officer for BART, reports BART staff or contractors shut down power “to the nodes and alerted the cell carriers,” including AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile.

Transpartisan alliances are one of the most powerful organizing tools available to activists today, and perhaps the only one that can force elected officials to become responsive to the will of the people on broadly popular issues. Which is why elite interests manipulate identity politics to castigate those willing to make them as apostates to their respective tribal values (“working with racists…dihmmi”) in order to discredit them and undermine their efforts.

So I imagine by now, most folks have heard that Willard proclaimed at the Iowa State Fair that corporations are people. In light of this (and SCOTUS rulings on corporate personhood), I and some other folks on an email thread started identifying various political movements, documents, songs, and other bits of popular culture that need to be revised to reflect this equivalency. I have gleefully and willfully stolen most all of the following from these friends.

Add yours.

Fifty years ago today, East German soldiers began overseeing the construction of the Berlin Wall. That wall came down in 1989, but as Der Spiegel reminds us, other walls remain elsewhere in the world.

Even more insidious, though, are the invisible walls we build with money and defend with lawyers, all in an attempt to defend the status quo and nail things down as they are right now.

Sorry, but life is like a river, and you can’t nail it down. Count me among those who yearn for life without such walls.

Two years ago, a concerted effort by a corporate-funded Tea Party movement to get conservatives out to town hall meetings changed the dynamic in Washington on health care reform and paved the way for the eventual House GOP takeover in the 2010 elections. In two separate work periods this year, ordinary citizens, with absolutely no help or encouragement from an organized progressive movement, have made their voices heard at town hall meetings, in particular by harassing conservative lawmakers about their plans to end Medicare and put forward a balanced budget amendment, as well as their opposition to tax fairness. If this organic movement were happening on the right, it would be front-page news in every national newspaper in the country. We know because the distinctly non-organic movement in 2009 was front-page news.

In order to find out about this movement, you have to go to local news sites.

Did you know that Stephen Colbert has started his own Super Pac? He may be kidding, but I am not. He’s been raising money, evidently enough money (or Comedy Central is footing the bill?) to do an ad buy in Iowa. You can watch the commercial here. I love the name of the ad “Episode IV: A new hope.”

This is the time of year that I associate with County Fairs and State Fairs. The big deal for those fairs when I was growing up, in a rural area, was the hand-raised farm animal competition, so I still think about the barns full of lowing sheep, snorting pigs, chortling guinea pigs, and the show rings. The midway was beside the point in a farm community.