Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Fundraising Update from Antiwar.com
"In the first fifteen days of our fund drive, you contributed $61,873. Please help us reach our goal go keep Antiwar.com running for the next quarter."
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Grisly Mama
The tagline from the movie describes the original "mama grizzly" as aptly as anything else.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
CounterPunch and Antiwar.com Fundraising Updates
From CounterPunch:
Our fall fundraiser has almost run its course. We’re nearly there. But not quite. Nearly 1500 CounterPunchers from every state in the union, from every continent have rallied with money and messages of support. For us here at CounterPunch it’s always a nail-biting business. We tell you the truth every time. We don’t make our $75,000 target, we have to think about cutting back. Then you rally. If you haven’t yet, the time is now. We have just THREE DAYS, ending Sunday, to make our target.
From Antiwar.com:
In the first five days of our fund drive, you contributed $25,931. Please help us reach our goal go [sic] keep Antiwar.com running for the next quarter.
The situation for Antiwar.com is more dire; their site could end if they don't raise at least $150,000. They're one-sixth of the way.
Swans should have a fundraising update next Monday.
==
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists also needs your help.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Where My Dogs At?
More from The Daily Grunt Archive
From Kunstler.com:
The Daily Grunt
If I have anything to say
November 11, 2010
The past two nights on CNN, Elliot Spitzer has grilled a couple of extreme Republican electees about their vows to drastically cut the federal budget. Senator-elect Rand Paul came off as a mad dog, blustering, evading, acting like a maniac (and a bully) -- in order to conceal the fact that he has no idea what can really be cut from the federal budget.
I predict that Rand Paul's politiical career will blow up within a couple of months after he takes a seat in the US Senate. He's just too crazy and belligerent to last. Wednesday night it was Texas Congressman Jeb Henserling's turn to embarrass himself with bluster and evasion -- though Spitzer eventually cornered him and drove a bandillario of reality into his neck. Check out the video. Scroll way down for the Rand Paul show.
David Stockman was also on last night and his remarks about QE-2 were positively shocking. The former Reagan budget chief called it the most reckless, dangerous policy he's ever seen, and more.... A real stunner....
http://parkerspitzer.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/09/spitzer-presses-paul-for-specific-cuts/
Now AntiWar Needs Funds
Just as CounterPunch is about to meet (or almost meet) its $75,000 fundraising goal (Day 23: 1,345 donors, $68,750, if you're keeping track), now Antiwar.com says:
Did you ever have one of those dreams where you're drowning, and there's no one to save you?
Well, that nightmare has become a reality for us here at Antiwar.com. We are now facing a situation in which the very existence of this Web site is being called into serious question. The funding we thought we could depend on to make up any shortfalls in our fundraising efforts has suddenly disappeared – and we are struggling to keep our heads above water.
Would you please throw us a lifeline in the form of a contribution?
We're facing a deficit of $150,000 – a shortfall that will probably sink us if we don't get an immediate flood of contributions from our readers.
Keep Antiwar.com alive. Please donate today!
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
CounterPunch and Swans Fundraising Update
From CounterPunch:
"We’ve been telling you for two weeks that either we meet our fundraising goal of $75,000 over the next three weeks or we'll be forced to drastically curtail the operation of our website.
Hundreds of you have rallied with donations. With two more weeks of our fundraiser to go, we’re more than half way to our target. And now a CounterPuncher has stepped forward with a magnificently generous pledge.
"This CounterPunch supporter will match every donation of $100 or more, to a combined total of $20,000. That means that any of you out there thinking of donating $50 should know that if you donate a further $50, CounterPunch will receive an additional $100. And if you plan to send us us $200 or $500 or more, he will give CounterPunch a matching $200 or $500 or more."
Day 14
Donors: 750
Amount: $50,200
==
From Swans:
"FUNDRAISING DRIVE: Thanks to the helping hand of Louis Proyect (see his message below) and the generosity of 13 donors we've raised almost $600 in the last two weeks. This is good news! But it also means that we need to raise another $1,900 before the end of the year. You do remember what Swans is about, right? "In a time of revisionism, faux-semblant, spinning news, and skewed information, Swans is about thinking, questioning, observing, and providing ideas that are lacking in the mainstream media." (It's also about Arts & Culture.) We've been doing it for almost 15 years with authors from many countries who appreciate and agree with our quiet radicalism, our Web exclusivity, and dedication to proper editing. Please help us carry on our tradition of providing you with only original work, not multi-posted stuff you find in most Web publications... Donate now!
"Many thanks to Louis Proyect, Alex Munro, Cecilio Morales, Samuel Bennett, Michael Yates, William O'Connor, Richard Brand, Nick Harlow, John Halle, Raymond Alford, Claudia Resch, Isidor Saslav, and Michael Fahey for their generous contributions."
==
James Wolcott joins the effort on behalf of CounterPunch.
The underlying lesson is that if you have money to spare, donate some to your favorite magazine.
"We’ve been telling you for two weeks that either we meet our fundraising goal of $75,000 over the next three weeks or we'll be forced to drastically curtail the operation of our website.
Hundreds of you have rallied with donations. With two more weeks of our fundraiser to go, we’re more than half way to our target. And now a CounterPuncher has stepped forward with a magnificently generous pledge.
"This CounterPunch supporter will match every donation of $100 or more, to a combined total of $20,000. That means that any of you out there thinking of donating $50 should know that if you donate a further $50, CounterPunch will receive an additional $100. And if you plan to send us us $200 or $500 or more, he will give CounterPunch a matching $200 or $500 or more."
Day 14
Donors: 750
Amount: $50,200
==
From Swans:
"FUNDRAISING DRIVE: Thanks to the helping hand of Louis Proyect (see his message below) and the generosity of 13 donors we've raised almost $600 in the last two weeks. This is good news! But it also means that we need to raise another $1,900 before the end of the year. You do remember what Swans is about, right? "In a time of revisionism, faux-semblant, spinning news, and skewed information, Swans is about thinking, questioning, observing, and providing ideas that are lacking in the mainstream media." (It's also about Arts & Culture.) We've been doing it for almost 15 years with authors from many countries who appreciate and agree with our quiet radicalism, our Web exclusivity, and dedication to proper editing. Please help us carry on our tradition of providing you with only original work, not multi-posted stuff you find in most Web publications... Donate now!
"Many thanks to Louis Proyect, Alex Munro, Cecilio Morales, Samuel Bennett, Michael Yates, William O'Connor, Richard Brand, Nick Harlow, John Halle, Raymond Alford, Claudia Resch, Isidor Saslav, and Michael Fahey for their generous contributions."
==
James Wolcott joins the effort on behalf of CounterPunch.
The underlying lesson is that if you have money to spare, donate some to your favorite magazine.
Monday, November 01, 2010
Kunstler's Letter From Above the Pacific
Now What?
By James Howard Kunstler
on October 31, 2010 10:35 PM
On Tuesday, when the Republican Party and its Tea Party chump-proxies re-conquer the sin-drenched bizarro universe of the US congress, they'll have to re-assume ownership of the stickiest web of frauds and swindles ever run in human history - and chances are the victory will blow up in their supernaturally suntanned, Botox-smoothed faces.
But don't cry for John Boehner, Barack Obama.
The President and his Democrats may have inherited this clusterfuck from the feckless George Bush but they flubbed every chance to mitigate any part of it, ranging from their failure to restore the rule of law in banking (by prosecuting the executives of major banks who oversaw the systematic swindle), to mis-directing our dwindling resources toward ends (such as "shovel-ready" new super-highways) that won't promote a credible future for this society, to misleading the public in the fantasy that alt-energy will offset the disruptions of peak oil (and allow us to keep running suburbia, the US Military, and WalMart by other means).
It's really too late for both parties. They're unreformable. They've squandered their legitimacy just as the US enters the fat heart of the long emergency. Neither of them have a plan, or even a single idea that isn't a dodge or a grift. Both parties tout a "recovery" that is just a cover story for accounting chicanery and statistical lies aimed at concealing the criminally-engineered national bankruptcy that they presided over in split shifts. Both parties are overwhelmingly made up of bagmen for the companies that looted America.
Alas, the damage is now so pervasive in money matters that the federal government could be toast as a viable enterprise, even if a new party or two spontaneously rose up out of the ruins of a plundered democracy. Anyway, one of them will not be the Tea Party, with its incoherent agenda and moron cadres who seek to put Jesus back in the US constitution, where he never was in the first place - though they don't know that.
Nor is there any party on the left or even in the center with a clue or a moral compass. Its just one of those tragic moments in history - like 1850s America, when a strange vacuum of thought occupied the heart of political life, and the scene was cluttered up with mere place-holders like Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. (Can you state a single idea or position, these political ciphers advanced?)
Where we stand now is on the cusp of another giant step into the abyss, since the latest storm of Foreclosure-Gate suggests pretty strongly that mega-tons of mortgage-backed securities are assured of blowing up, as well as the sundry derivatives of these things (CDOs, CDOs-squared, plus the massive fetid matter infesting the alternative cosmos of credit default swaps). If you follow the media-of-record like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, you would have to conclude that there is no extant plausible notion among financial leaders as to how the fiasco of botched mortgage-and-title documentation can be resolved. After three weeks of emerging events around this debacle, the consensus among the power brokers is to pretend that there's no problem, that the issue of missing, forged, post-dated, trashed, or non-existent paper related to claims on property can just be put aside, brushed under the rug, glossed over, ignored.
Let me tell you something: this problem is not going away. At the very least it is going to paralyze the real estate industry for as far ahead as anyone can see. For another thing, it could force the disclosure of what the banks are holding in their vaults in the way of worthless paper and expose their insolvency. For still another thing, it could lead to rafts of lawsuits that would additionally shove the banks toward collapse, demolish the claims that underlie our currency, call into question the meaning of property ownership per se that is the basis of Anglo-American law, and tie up the court system until kingdom come. In any case, every pension fund, state government, and insurance operation would be crippled. I could go on but you get the picture.... This might all sound extreme, but I repeat: nobody with any authority in this land has proposed a plausible way out.
By the way, I haven't even touched on the totally insane but now accepted practices of the Federal Reserve attempting to stage manage the velocity of money by so-called quantitative easing - a.k.a. the US writing checks to itself - because even that nonsense assumes that everything else remains more or less stable.
This is what the two major parties can look forward to as we swing around into the Yuletide season and then into 2011. The proud winners of seats in congress and the senate might as well put on clown suits and little pointed hats on Wednesday morning and drive around the Washington monument in toy cars. There will be a desperate need for a new politics in this country, for people unafraid to tell the truth and act in the genuine public interest. If we can't generate it from the saner quarters of this country where people think thoughts that comport with reality, I'm afraid we could see some generals step into the picture.
I write literally over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, en route from Australia where I spent the past week - not on vacation. It's a reminder that there are a lot of other players in the wide world - not all of them nations on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
By James Howard Kunstler
on October 31, 2010 10:35 PM
On Tuesday, when the Republican Party and its Tea Party chump-proxies re-conquer the sin-drenched bizarro universe of the US congress, they'll have to re-assume ownership of the stickiest web of frauds and swindles ever run in human history - and chances are the victory will blow up in their supernaturally suntanned, Botox-smoothed faces.
But don't cry for John Boehner, Barack Obama.
The President and his Democrats may have inherited this clusterfuck from the feckless George Bush but they flubbed every chance to mitigate any part of it, ranging from their failure to restore the rule of law in banking (by prosecuting the executives of major banks who oversaw the systematic swindle), to mis-directing our dwindling resources toward ends (such as "shovel-ready" new super-highways) that won't promote a credible future for this society, to misleading the public in the fantasy that alt-energy will offset the disruptions of peak oil (and allow us to keep running suburbia, the US Military, and WalMart by other means).
It's really too late for both parties. They're unreformable. They've squandered their legitimacy just as the US enters the fat heart of the long emergency. Neither of them have a plan, or even a single idea that isn't a dodge or a grift. Both parties tout a "recovery" that is just a cover story for accounting chicanery and statistical lies aimed at concealing the criminally-engineered national bankruptcy that they presided over in split shifts. Both parties are overwhelmingly made up of bagmen for the companies that looted America.
Alas, the damage is now so pervasive in money matters that the federal government could be toast as a viable enterprise, even if a new party or two spontaneously rose up out of the ruins of a plundered democracy. Anyway, one of them will not be the Tea Party, with its incoherent agenda and moron cadres who seek to put Jesus back in the US constitution, where he never was in the first place - though they don't know that.
Nor is there any party on the left or even in the center with a clue or a moral compass. Its just one of those tragic moments in history - like 1850s America, when a strange vacuum of thought occupied the heart of political life, and the scene was cluttered up with mere place-holders like Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. (Can you state a single idea or position, these political ciphers advanced?)
Where we stand now is on the cusp of another giant step into the abyss, since the latest storm of Foreclosure-Gate suggests pretty strongly that mega-tons of mortgage-backed securities are assured of blowing up, as well as the sundry derivatives of these things (CDOs, CDOs-squared, plus the massive fetid matter infesting the alternative cosmos of credit default swaps). If you follow the media-of-record like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, you would have to conclude that there is no extant plausible notion among financial leaders as to how the fiasco of botched mortgage-and-title documentation can be resolved. After three weeks of emerging events around this debacle, the consensus among the power brokers is to pretend that there's no problem, that the issue of missing, forged, post-dated, trashed, or non-existent paper related to claims on property can just be put aside, brushed under the rug, glossed over, ignored.
Let me tell you something: this problem is not going away. At the very least it is going to paralyze the real estate industry for as far ahead as anyone can see. For another thing, it could force the disclosure of what the banks are holding in their vaults in the way of worthless paper and expose their insolvency. For still another thing, it could lead to rafts of lawsuits that would additionally shove the banks toward collapse, demolish the claims that underlie our currency, call into question the meaning of property ownership per se that is the basis of Anglo-American law, and tie up the court system until kingdom come. In any case, every pension fund, state government, and insurance operation would be crippled. I could go on but you get the picture.... This might all sound extreme, but I repeat: nobody with any authority in this land has proposed a plausible way out.
By the way, I haven't even touched on the totally insane but now accepted practices of the Federal Reserve attempting to stage manage the velocity of money by so-called quantitative easing - a.k.a. the US writing checks to itself - because even that nonsense assumes that everything else remains more or less stable.
This is what the two major parties can look forward to as we swing around into the Yuletide season and then into 2011. The proud winners of seats in congress and the senate might as well put on clown suits and little pointed hats on Wednesday morning and drive around the Washington monument in toy cars. There will be a desperate need for a new politics in this country, for people unafraid to tell the truth and act in the genuine public interest. If we can't generate it from the saner quarters of this country where people think thoughts that comport with reality, I'm afraid we could see some generals step into the picture.
I write literally over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, en route from Australia where I spent the past week - not on vacation. It's a reminder that there are a lot of other players in the wide world - not all of them nations on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
