Poor Mojo's Newswire

It's been a MONTH! PLEASE just ANSWER MY QUESTION: I read a thing that made me think I might be spending too much time online. How can I tell if I should cut back on reading Internet news sites and editorial columnists?

unsigned

Dearest Reader,

When I left off last week, I had just explained how Poncho the Villa, the Deathless Quasi-Spirit of Ambrose Bierce, and I had come to be trapped in a cave while Villa's soldiers were slaughtered by stoney Tarahumara indians and their disturbing horde of songbird-wingéd garter snakes and flying scorpions. As we bravely cowered in that cave, Bierce used a crank-operated telephone to call forth the Nahuatl psychopomp Xolotl who, according to Bierce, would only be too happy to take us into the Underworld and guide us to the City of the Dead, Mictlan, so that he, Bierce, might negotiate with its king, Mictlantecuhtli, and sort out his unseemly, and tedious, deathlessness. . . .

impatiently waiting
for their turn to be given
a diagnosis . . .

In a document dump that includes private forum messages, emails, organization notes another other information the group found numerous connections between Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul and A3P. According to the documents, all hosted here, Paul himself regularly met with many A3P members, engaged in conference calls with their board of directors and engaged in a “bridging tactic” between A3P and the Ron Paul Revolution.

Other excerpts show A3P webmaster Jamie Kelso (whose email account was one hacked by the collective) coordinating meeting between Paul and other members of A3P such as corporate lawyer and chairman of the neo-Nazi group Paul. “I’m going to go to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with Bill Johnson,” reads an email to an A3P member dated January 2011. “Bill and I will be meeting with Ron and Ran Paul. I have a teleconference call with Bill (and Ron Paul) tonight. Much more later. Things are starting to happen (thanks to folks like you).”

In another passage, Kelso, a former Scientologist and account owner of other German Nazi forums, wrote: “I’ll be at CPAC from Feb. 9 to Feb. 12. I’ll send back reports to you from personal meetings with Ron Paul, newly-elected Senator Rand Paul and many others. It’ll be here on WhiteNewsNow, a place that is really starting to get interesting because of the presence of folks like you. Birds of a feather flock together, and we are really gathering some quality here.”
. . .

After following the modification payment plan, to my surprise I received a foreclosure notice in the mail. The bank informed me that my modified payments did not actually apply to my mortgage. I was then “re-modified” several times, each time at a different amount. I again maintained my payment agreements, yet still continued to receive foreclosure notices. None of the payments that I made went to the balance of my mortgage or the interest that I owed, they were applied to “fees” that the bank added to my account for late and missed payments and my tax escrow account.

After receiving my third foreclosure notice I contacted my State Representative who sent me to Community Action Southwest. They assisted me in dealing with the bank to ensure they followed the remodification guidelines they had been ignoring. I was finally refinanced, with no credit check or financial documents.

I am now stuck with a mortgage that is fifteen years longer than it originally was. The bank took all the modification payments I made and, after applying them to escrow, kept the rest as profit. They decided those months were “missed payments” and added that sum to the original mortgage, increasing it by $25,000. My equity is completely gone and my credit is destroyed.

Wait. Shit. Wrong Brother. Let’s try that again.

I’m a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco’s sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world.

Yeah.

Is this comparison unfair? I don’t think it’s unfair. Doctorow has chosen to allude to Orwell in the title. He could’ve called the text Magical Adventures in Libertarianism, or The Founding Fathers, but with Leetspeak, or whatever, much like Orwell could’ve easily dropped the April part. He didn’t; he constantly keeps invoking Orwell, and so the spectre of old George must come when called.

(April — I hope it will not be too condescending to explain — is the most literary month, because of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the cruellest, because of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I don’t particularily like this allusion, it feels like Orwell lays claim to Great English Writerdom right there in the opening instead of just telling his damn story, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Do I even need to say anything about how these two sentences compare? Say “bright cold day in April” to yourself, run your tongue around the resounding diphthongs. Now say “a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco’s sunny Mission district”. Be sure to take a deep breath first, and pretend you’re a great big lumbering Komodo dragon as you hiss out the sibilants. Contrast the second clauses: the clunky “one of the most surveilled people in the world” and the clocks striking… wait, thirteen? In England? Isn’t there something ever so subtly off about that, something ominous?

At least we know from the outset what to expect from Little Brother: definitely not subtlety. That’s fine, though. Not everyone likes understatement, and not everything needs to be understated.
. . .

Corporate tax receipts as a share of profits are at their lowest level in at least 40 years.

Total corporate federal taxes paid fell to 12.1% of profits earned from activities within the U.S. in fiscal 2011, which ended Sept. 30, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That’s the lowest level since at least 1972. And well below the 25.6% companies paid on average from 1987 to 2008.

Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.

First of all, just a few days ago, Mr. Romney was denying that the very programs he now says take care of the poor actually provide any significant help. On Jan. 22, he asserted that safety-net programs — yes, he specifically used that term — have “massive overhead,” and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.”

This claim, like much of what Mr. Romney says, was completely false: U.S. poverty programs have nothing like as much bureaucracy and overhead as, say, private health insurance companies. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, between 90 percent and 99 percent of the dollars allocated to safety-net programs do, in fact, reach the beneficiaries. But the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for their welfare?

Also, given this whopper about how safety-net programs actually work, how credible was Mr. Romney’s assertion, after expressing his lack of concern about the poor, that if the safety net needs a repair, “I’ll fix it”?

Now, the truth is that the safety net does need repair. It provides a lot of help to the poor, but not enough. Medicaid, for example, provides essential health care to millions of unlucky citizens, children especially, but many people still fall through the cracks: among Americans with annual incomes under $25,000, more than a quarter — 28.7 percent — don’t have any kind of health insurance. And, no, they can’t make up for that lack of coverage by going to emergency rooms.
. . .

The United States has indicted St.Gallen-based Wegelin, the oldest Swiss private bank, on charges it enabled Americans to evade taxes on at least $1.2 billion in offshore bank accounts.

The indictment, which was announced by the U.S. Justice Department on Thursday, set Wegelin rivals in Zurich and Geneva buzzing on Friday, highlighting the fear of another U.S. strike against a private bank.

"It seems the U.S. is shooting at everything in sight and we don't know when it's going to stop. I think the chances of another bank being indicted are pretty big," a Geneva private banker said.

"After all, why should the U.S. stop? Switzerland is small, it's an easy target, but a lot of money can be made out of it. When this whole thing started we didn't know how far the U.S. would go, but now we've found out."

“People have no problem paying $900 for an iPad,” Santorum said, “but paying $900 for a drug they have a problem with — it keeps you alive. Why? Because you’ve been conditioned to think health care is something you can get without having to pay for it.”

The mother said the boy was on the drug Abilify, used to treat schizophrenia, and that, on paper, its costs would exceed $1 million each year.

Santorum said drugs take years to develop and cost millions of dollars to produce, and manufacturers need to turn a profit or they would stop developing new drugs.

I was 18 and a freshman in college on September 11th, 2001. That day stirred up a lot of things in my mind. Until then, I’d been fairly laissez-faire about religious pluralism. I was of the opinion that people could believe what they wanted, and that no religion was inherently bad. I tried to hold on to that belief after 9/11. “These are just extremists…” I said. “There’s nothing inherently evil about Islam.” Everyone was talking about Islam all the time. “Religion of peace!” “No, a religion of death!” I bought a Qur’an, and started reading it. I was shocked by how blatant its message of subjugating and slaughtering infidels was. And by how brutal its treatment of women was. The terrorists weren’t extremists as far as the Qur’an was concerned. I got into arguments online. At first I was on the side of the “terrorists are perverting their scriptures” argument. Then, once I actually studied the scriptures, I was on the side of the “no, this stuff is vile” argument. An uncomfortable thing happened: people started combating me with Bible verses. And they weren’t substantially less vile. I was presented with Bible verses condoning slavery, genocide, rape and plunder. Pretty much all of the most heinous crimes I could imagine were sanctioned in the Bible. I finally began to see religion as a potential force for evil in the world. I saw it as being a justification for all sorts of atrocities. The hijackers of United flight 93 shouted “God is great” as they flew a plane full of people straight into the ground. The Nazis during World War II had belt buckles that proclaimed “Gott Mit Uns” (God with us). The Crusades. The Inquisition. Slavery. Religiously justified immorality. Looking at history, everyone seemed to think God was on their side. And the product of that belief was misery and suffering. I found that I had pivoted from being slightly skeptical of my purported religious beliefs, to being outright opposed to the great majority of them, and even being opposed to the idea of religious doctrine in general.

I was seventeen, my mom 40, when she began bleeding more and more often. She was in constant pain, but she didn’t have health insurance (she was recently laid of during the 2008 recession) so she was unable to go to a normal doctor. So, after convincing her that her health really was important, she went to Planned Parenthood.

They found over a dozen tumors in her uterus, one almost the size of a baseball. If she hadn’t gone then, they may not have caught it in time. The people at PP helped my mom get on emergency healthcare, helped her find a compassionate doctor to have her tumors removed and perform the hysterectomy she was denied after having me (it seems you weren’t allowed to choose whether or not you wanted more kids back in the early 90’s.).

I donated to Planned Parenthood today, and I will do so every month for as long as I can. I owe Planned Parenthood everything—without them, I wouldn’t have my mom.

At will and sometimes against his will, Sam Brown can return in his mind to that hour in the Kandahar desert when he knelt at the edge of a blast crater and raised his flaming arms to the Afghanistan sky. He'd already run through the macabre slapstick routine of a man on fire, trying to put himself out by rolling on the ground. He'd resorted to pelting his face with fistfuls of sand. That failing, he'd run in helpless circles. Finally he'd dropped to his knees, lifted his arms, and screamed Jesus, save me. Each scream drew fire deeper into his lungs. Behind him his Humvee was a twisted inferno. Bullets whizzed around him. His men were scattering, taking cover, moving dreamily in clouds of so-called moondust, that weird powdery talc, which hung in the air and gave the soldiers the appearance of snowmen. It was going on dusk, and in the fading light the enemy gunfire blazed behind the walls of the village.

Only the day before, Brown's brother, Daniel, had told him, in a phone call, You're invincible, they can't kill you. Best he could remember, he'd always felt invincible. Pretty much right up to the instant they rolled over the IED, he had remained the same man he'd been at West Point. That is, he was a man whose life still had meaning. Every action had been meant to hone him for the glory of battle. Even as varsity stroke, in command of a shell on the rowing team, out on the water every morning at dawn, the sun dripping off his oars, his arms burning as he counted off the strokes, welcoming the pain into his body, bronzed, sculpted, almost too good-looking, he sought hard perfection in himself and those around him.

A diligent cadet who would spend the whole of an afternoon in the library reading about ancient Greek wars in Herodotus, immersed in the virtual reality of history, yearning for his own chance to test his mettle—but that was before eight brain-dead weeks of providing security for the construction of a new FOB in the middle of nowhere, watching bulldozers push sand, anxious for anything to break up the tedium, anything. When he was told his platoon would have to help provide security for a convoy coming through his sector on its way to a hydroelectric dam out in Helmand—delivering turbines, on a hearts-and-minds mission—he was all for the diversion, almost ecstatic when the call came from First Platoon reporting they'd been ambushed and needed backup. Brown had responded immediately. He was on the radio to his lead vehicle when he saw the bright flash. His body went inert as the Humvee lifted into the air. How he escaped from the wreck he couldn't recall.

Kneeling there, on fire, he'd resigned himself to death. All he'd wanted to know was how long? How long would he have to burn? How many more torturous fractions of a second would he have to remain alive?
. . .

In her lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the intern, Xuedan Wang, and her law firm are asking to make the case a class action on behalf of what they say are hundreds of unpaid interns at Heart Magazines, which also publishes Cosmopolitan, Seventeen and Good Housekeeping.

Employment experts say a growing number of young people, hundreds of thousands of them, do unpaid internships each year as they seek to get a foot in the door and gain work experience. But some interns and labor advocates assert that many employers are taking advantage of these interns — and violating Labor Department rules in the process — by using the interns essentially to do the jobs of other workers and not providing a bona fide educational experience.

The lawsuit against Hearst states, “Employers’ failure to compensate interns for their work, and the prevalence of the practice nationwide, curtails opportunities for employment, fosters class divisions between those who can afford to work for no wage and those who cannot, and indirectly contributes to rising unemployment.”
. . .

Josh Fox, the documentarian whose Oscar-nominated film “Gasland” exposed the risks of unregulated natural gas fracking, was arrested in handcuffs by U.S. Capitol Police at the behest of Republican lawmakers after refusing to stop filming today’s GOP hearing attacking EPA oversight of fracking’s air and water pollution. “I’m within my First Amendment rights, and I’m being taken out,” Fox shouted as he was led away, Politico reports. Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) called a motion to suspend the committee rules and allow for Fox and an ABC crew also present to film the hearing, but Republicans rejected the motion.

As does Veep, HBO’s terrific comedy about a female Vice President dealing with needy staffers, a president who ignores her, and a press corps that picks up on her every misstep. The sitcom, which premieres April 22, certainly is heightened and ridiculous, but the pilot nails the rhythms of speech and attitudes in Washington, along with the obnoxious and prickly gatekeepers and the minor screw-ups that become major catastrophes. “I want it to be right. I want it to be accurate,” creator Armando Iannucci, the force behind In the Thick of It and In the Loop, told me at the Television Critics Association press tour. “I want to know the dull stuff. What time do people get in in the morning? Who do they sit next to? If someone calls from a newspaper or a television show, who takes the call? How do they issue a retraction?” He and star Julia Louis-Dreyfus told me that they continue to consult with advisors on both sides of the aisle in the city, and from what I’ve seen of the show, that care and attention pay off. When a prominent and aged Senator dies, the Vice President muses about the last time she saw him: “He was full of bourbon, and he grabbed my left tit.” Later, when Amy (Anna Chlumsky, who appears to be Iannucci’s current muse), her chief of staff signs her own name to a condolence card for the man instead of the Veep’s, she moans of the screwup “it’s going to look like the Veep couldn’t be bothered to sign a condolence card for one of the most celebrated perverts on the senate.” And the show mines a lot of humor out of the Veep’s lame attempts at humor, a perfect example of official Washington squareness. “I have stepped into the president’s shoes this evening and who knew he wore kitten heels,” the Veep says to kick off a speech. ” Just kidding. He’s more of a stilettos guy.” Sometimes, politics is both small, and small-minded (as is also the case with Hulu’s first original scripted series Battleground, about campaign workers in a Wisconsin Senate race).