BREAKING: Julian Assange Parachutes Into Wisconsin Union Protests

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"If you break the public unions in Wisconsin you can break them everywhere." — Rachel Maddow

Ok, maybe Julian Assange didn't exactly parachute into Wisconsin. But he might have! And the pathetic fact is, that link-baiting baloney is what got you here. And that was my mission.

Why? Because with Gov. Scott Walker's outrageous effort to crush collective bargaining for state workers, the right wing has effectively declared war against unions, progressivism, and the American middle class, while most of the left is still sitting on the side of the road, like a brooding Rent-A-Wreck, with its ass stuck in neutral.

My good friend @karoli can bring you quickly up to speed.

With her usual knack for cutting through all the clutter, via Crooks and Liars:

Conservatives Declare War on Unions While National Media Snores

But my mission here….

Is to point out that while this issue has been building for well over a week, the American left has been mostly asleep until yesterday.  Naturally, the mainstream media did its best to help it snooze for as long as possible.  Only yesterday did CNN even show up in Wisconsin. And until last night, Twitter and Facebook were mostly abuzz with the usual updates about Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, Glenn Beck, a dwindling bit of Egypt, the Chris Christie Minstrels, and the usual celebrity cacophony of moronic blither-blather.

No one was expecting this Battle of the Bulge for the Democratic party and our fading unions to come up in this way, or this suddenly. But here it is. And now, the big question is, will progressives finally fight hard, or just die quickly?  If you can't see what the GOP is doing with this issue, you simply don't get anything that's happened to  this nation over the past 30 years in general, and certainly in the past five years since Fox News became the steering gear for the Republican Party's ship to nowhere. So just shut the fuck up and get out of the way.

But if you do get it, then you realize that this can and should be a magic moment in our history. A moment where we can rise up and show this fetid teaparty army and their plutocratic puppet masters like David Koch and Sheldon Adelson that there is still a strong majority of sensible people in this country who know that a fair society is the only one that will ever survive long term.  And this generation of wrecking crew Republicans won't just delay that fair and just society. They will crush out any possibility of there ever being one. At least in this country.

And that would be a sad fail of unparalleled dimension. An easy win will have passed us right by due to our own apathetic lethargy and a mass delusion that all the horrible things happening to us were never quite as bad as they seemed. Our collective will to resist an obvious insurrection of selfishness will have failed to come alive at the very moment that it must, and the American experiment will probably die right here in the lab.

So maybe we needed a Julian Assange to land in Wisconsin. We shouldn't have needed anything that dramatic to smack us out of our cynical slumber. But now something even better is on the ground our there in cheesehead country. Something very big and very beautiful. We only have to get behind this moment and push it with all our might… and we can win.

We really can win.

Yes we can.

Vital View

Rachel Maddow: Wisconsin Is About The Survival of The Democratic Party

Vital Read

Labor's Last Stand, By John Nichols (The Nation)

Related Reading

Angry Wisconsin workers occupy Capitol (Peoplesworld.org)

DNC Expands Role In Labor Protests To Ohio, Indiana, by Amanda Terkel (Huffington Post)

George Carlin on the American Dream (with transcript)

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

The World And Islam Have Both Changed: Why Hasn’t Our View Of Terrorism?

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This morning, I awoke to the always insightful Krista Tippet—whose "On Being" is one of the only shows on faith and religion that I can listen to routinely—having a remarkable discussion with anthropologist Scott Atran, discussing how in the decade since 9/11, the Muslim world, and its youth, have changed dramatically… but our world view of them has not. 

With anthropologist Scott Atran, we make deeper sense of the human dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa. Atran offers bracing context on the promise of this moment and the response it asks from the watching world.

Being old enough to have worked with Margaret Mead, the bulk of Atran's career has been spent studying the root causes of religious and social conflict, and has followed the track of evolution behind globalism, Islam, and terrorism all over the world.  Among the many fascinating threads of insight that he unravels, intentionally, or not,  are how our perceptions and understanding of these things are completely distorted by our culture biases in general, but especially by the political and economic propaganda that are designed to block any hope of understanding them. 

"And now they are foisting this view of the Muslim Brotherhood on everyone…. these guys are keystone cops…"

In this interview, you will hear things about Islam you have never heard before. Not just that Al-Qaeda barely exists anymore (it's about 100 people, now), but also that Jihadists come from a youth culture that never studied religion as children (in Madrasahs or anywhere else), and that Barack Obama (had been) a bigger hero to much of Islam than Bin Laden ever was (but not because he was purportedly a Muslim).

But those are just a few teasers I picked at random. I have more notes on this interview than any I have heard in many years.

Anyone, but especially those rare thinking conservatives who have been fed such a steady diet of utter bullshit about Islam for years, must listen to this interview end-to-end. The final points are some of the most important. It may be one of the most important educations that any global citizen can hear.

Note:  It is programs like this that make me tremble with rage at the thought of the right wing ever actually being able to shut down NPR. As flawed and corporatist as it can be so often, it remains one of our few mass media links to the kinds of operational scholarly intelligence that built the world that so many of us now take for granted (at great peril to our future).

On Being: The show promo page (listen at upper right)

 

Why The Right Hates Washington, DC

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Doug Terry is veteran television and radio reporter in Washington, DC who publishes the Terry Report. I read him fairly often, and for some reason, I am only now introducing him to you. I suppose the reason is simply that his often brilliantly concise essays just failed to hit any marks I was obsessing about that particular week. 

No matter, you can meet him now. Never mind the ugly website. He'll fix that someday (I hope). Here is some great content to get you started on this very gifted explainer of political memes, moments and mayhems:

*MUST READ* Why The Right Hates Washington, DC

Have you ever wondered? What is the great “evil” that the  Republicans, the right and the far right see in the Federal government? Why does the Tea Party crowd say “centralized government” as if the phrase were a code word for socialism or communism, those twin forces that once united our nation in opposition?

Explaining this phenomenon is certainly a subject worth longer treatment, but, for anyone wondering, a few points can be laid out in short order that might help to clear up the situation.

The Palin Problem

What Palin is doing is amazing. She is raising Reagan into something he was not, she is slamming the entire developmental history of the Federal government going back to, say, Hoover in the 1920s and she, if she were to be believed, she suggests that her own party was asleep at the wheel, because they were making no such exaggerated charges at the time Reagan came into office. Reagan’s famous statement that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”  was preceded by the words “In the present crisis” (whatever that means). It was not a blanket, cover all statement, it was limited to that particular moment and era, even if not clearly defined.

You can follow Doug on Twitter at @terryreport