At The Nation, Laura Flanders blogs:
According to polls, only about 6 percent of Americans are following with any close attention the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. But that’s not stopping the media fascination on both sides of the Atlantic with American’s supposed fascination with Britain’s royals. ...
[T]here are the folks like Rupert Cornwall at the UK Independent who argue that people in the US love British royals precisely because they don’t have their own real thing. ...
The only serious and in fact actually quite insidious part about this is that it reinscribes the notion that the US has no class.
Really? When the top one percent of wealthiest Americans own 34 percent of the country’s wealth and enjoyed 80 percent of the total increase in wealth here between 1980 and 2005? No class?
As for ruling class? In the UK the commoners keep state royals on welfare. Here we do the same with our corporations. Billions in tax dollars keep them afloat and keep CEOs in mansions. Why not just give them palaces? At least we could keep them open for tours.
Since the Supreme Court has given corporations free speech rights and personhood—how about marriage equality next?...
The trinkets from a corporate marrriage might be dreary. And the offspring, who can say? But at least we’d get a day off and one hell of a party. Plus we’d move out of denial. ...
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[For your information: The New Yorker is reprising Jane Mayer's June 2009 piece—Can Leon Panetta move the C.I.A. forward without confronting its past?]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:
Back in 2002, George W. Bush had a problem. He couldn't get the intelligence he wanted to justify going to war in Iraq. Oh, he could get lots of information, and some of it even suggested that Iraq was a danger. Only the information generated by intelligence agencies came with lots of caveats, possibilities, and alternatives. That wouldn't do.
Luckily, Cheney had the right man handy in Douglas Feith. Feith was the hardest of hardcore neocons, a protégé of Casper Weinberger who hated diplomacy, hated negotiation, hated every plan that didn't involve a series of loud explosions. Doug Feith was the one guy who could be counted on to never produce anything but black and white answers. In Feith's world, solutions were only generated in the crosshairs of a bomb sight. Negotiation and grey areas were for wimps.