A collective statement from Occupy Wall Street (video)

As regular readers know, Keith Olbermann is not one of my favorite commentators and ironically he, too, is guilty of the criticisms of the media offered in Occupy Wall Street’s collective statement.  But in this Special Comment (Current TV), it must be acknowledged that Olbermann performs a valuable public service by reading Occupy Wall Street’s statement in its entirety. Watch the video:

Amanda Knox comes home after four-year ordeal (video)

Photo courtesy of arabnews

Story follows video of Amanda Knox’s return home.

By PHUONG LE and MANUEL VALDES, The Associated Press

SEATTLE (AP) -- Amanda Knox returned to her hometown of Seattle on Tuesday and was as overcome with emotion as she was a day earlier in Italy, when she was acquitted on murder charges after four years in prison. "Thank you for being there for me," she tearfully told her supporters in front of a crowd of international reporters.

"I'm really overwhelmed right now," she said at a news conference minutes after she was escorted off a British Airways flight out of London. "I was looking down from the airplane, and it seemed like everything wasn't real."

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Elizabeth Warren "whacks Scott Brown" in her debate debut (video)

The Boston Herald’s Dave Wedge reports:

Elizabeth Warren officially kicked off her much-anticipated foray into the political arena by whacking U.S. Sen. Scott Brown on the economy and trumpeting her record of going “toe-to-toe” with financial behemoths, as she did battle with five Democrats in this first 2012 Senate debate.

Wedge quotes Warren:

“Forbes magazine named Scott Brown Wall Street’s favorite senator. I was thinking that’s probably not an award I’m going to get,” Warren said, storming out of the gate in her first public debate, which was streamed live on bostonherald.com.”’

Here’s the video from the US Senate debate in Lowell, MA this evening, Oct. 4:

Elizabeth Warren to debate other Democrats opposing Scott Brown today, Oct. 4

Photo courtesy of http://www.hapblog.com/

Heads up: Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats challenging incumbent US Senator Scott Brown, MA will debate today, on Tuesday, Oct. 4 at 7 p.m. on the University of MA Lowell campus.

The following was posted by the Univ. of MA, Lowell, Sunday, Oct. 2:

LOWELL, Mass. – Elizabeth Warren is in a virtual dead heat against U.S. Sen. Scott Brown and holds a commanding lead over other Democratic challengers in the Senate race, according to a UMass Lowell-Boston Herald poll released today.

Thirty-six percent of potential Democratic primary voters surveyed say they’d prefer to have Warren face Brown, a Republican, in November 2012, according to the independent, nonpartisan poll of more than 1,000 registered voters across Massachusetts. None of the other five candidates – state Rep. Tom Conroy, immigration attorney Marisa DeFranco, City Year co-founder Alan Khazei, Global Reporting Initiative co-founder Bob Massie and engineer and activist Herb Robinson – garnered more than 5 percent support from those surveyed. 

The poll is the first for a new partnership between the Boston Herald and UMass Lowell’s Center for Public Opinion. The partners will also co-host a debate on Tuesday, Oct. 4 at 7 p.m. on the UMass Lowell campus. All six of the declared Democratic candidates have said they will participate in the debate, which is free and open to the public. The debate will be streamed live at www.uml.edu and www.bostonherald.com, and the public can participate on Twitter using #UMLDebate.

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Why Obama can kill Americans

With the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaqi has Barack Obama set a precedent that hereafter will allow U.S. presidents to kill Americans anywhere in the world without due process? That’s what the Department of Justice’s secret memo suggests. This is scary stuff.

Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic has the story:

Outside the U.S. government, President Obama's order to kill American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without due process has proved controversial, with experts in law and war reaching different conclusions. Inside the Obama Administration, however, disagreement was apparently absent, or so say anonymous sources quoted by the Washington Post. "The Justice Department wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting of Anwar al-Aulaqi, the American-born radical cleric who was killed by a U.S. drone strike Friday, according to administration officials," the newspaper reported. "The document was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi, the officials said."

Isn't that interesting? Months ago, the Obama Administration revealed that it would target al-Awlaki. It even managed to wriggle out of a lawsuit filed by his father to prevent the assassination. But the actual legal reasoning the Department of Justice used to authorize the strike? It's secret. Classified. Information that the public isn't permitted to read, mull over, or challenge.

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A stealth campaign against scientific validation of a more egalitarian and humanistic political order

Glenn W. Smith’s post today at FDL highlights one of those recurring controversies between liberals and conservatives. 

This one goes deep. It’s about the human capacity for empathy over against our need for aggression in defending our rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

It reminds me of the debate that erupted in the 60s and early 70s between authentic anthropologists, who argued that human beings were as wired for cooperation as they were for competition, and pseudo-anthropologist Robert Ardrey, who theorized in “The Territorial Imperative” that we were all innate killers.

Smith is taking on NY Times columnist David Brooks, the modern day incarnation of Robert Ardrey:

New York Times columnist David Brooks has long been engaged in a stealth campaign against the discoveries of science – especially neuroscience – that validate a more egalitarian and humanistic political order.

Brooks has skillfully branded himself as the Pundit Who Will Tell You About New Findings in the Human Sciences. But in Brooks’ hands all the new science somehow becomes justification for top-down, conservative and even authoritarian government. It’s all just a magical confirmation of Hobbes.

Smith continues:

Conservative political philosophy is built upon the Hobbesian premise that only an elite authority can keep us from killing one another. So, when the human sciences are discovering that we are hard wired for empathy and cooperation – not self-interest and war – Brooks & Company move into action.

They first attack empathy, misrepresenting it as some kind of hippy conceit that would lead us to a peaceful utopia if we’d only pay attention. This is Brooks’ ploy in last week’s column, “The Limits of Empathy.”

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Analysis: why the Left crucified both the Clintons in 2008

Photo courtesy of CentralIllinois912project.com.

Whether they admit it or not, most semi-conscious Americans are now aware of how the Left dug up the right’s discredited talking points from the 1990s in its efforts to destroy Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary, well described by Melissa McEwan and Maureen McCluskey in their two-part post at the Guardian.

What hasn’t been so clearly elucidated has been why the Left, allied with Democratic party leaders and so-called liberal pundits, chose to crucify both Bill and Hillary Clinton in 2008.

In his post titled 20 Years Later: How Bill Clinton Saved Liberalism From Itself, Sean Wilentz, professor of history and social studies at Princeton and contributing editor of The New Republic, clearly outlines why the Left so disdained the Clinton Administration and would continue to show such contempt for both Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In a nutshell, according to Wilentz:

Clinton aimed to win back alienated traditional Democrats not by shifting to the right, as some pundits have claimed, but by retrieving basic political principles enunciated by FDR and those successful liberal Democrats who followed him.

Wilentz, the Princeton historian continues:

Nothing cost Clinton more political capital inside the left wing of his party than his advocacy of welfare reform. “We should expect people to move from welfare rolls to work rolls,” he proclaimed in his announcement speech. “We should give them the skills they need to succeed and then insist that they move into the workforce to become productive members of society.” These were fighting words to some liberal Democrats. Yet in 1936, in a rip-roaring attack on Republican callousness, FDR had defended those forced on the relief rolls while adding, “Of course we will provide useful work for the needy unemployed; we prefer useful work to the pauperism of a dole.” As a matter of policy, Clinton aimed to return liberalism to its basic ideas, not to forsake its ideals. And in doing so, he would help accomplish the crucial political task of removing from national politics one of the issues that had helped Republicans inflame the middle class against the poor, especially the minority poor, as well as against the Democratic Party.

In an era in which the government is mistrusted as never before and poll numbers for both the administration and congress continue to head south, Wilentz reports (emphasis mine):

In order to overcome the Reagan ascendency Democrats needed to advance the rights secured during the 1960s while returning to more traditional political bedrock. To a remarkable extent, Clinton delivered on that promise. In doing so, he made the nation comfortable once again with the idea that the well-being and future prospects of most Americans require strong and effective leadership by the federal government.

How’s that again? Strong and effective leadership by the federal government? !!