My Appointed Rounds

Arms Control Wonk on government secrecy about the US-India Nuclear Deal:

Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Union of Concerned Scientists organized a panel for the 27 EU Political Counselors at the Embassy of Slovenia tomorrow....

The State Department has now uninvited PSR and UCS to their own meeting — or at least the portion about India — because they will be sharing “sensitive” information.

I’d really like to know what sort of “sensitive” information can be shared with 27 foreign nationals, but not US citizens.

CKR on polling:

[B]ecause the polls drive the campaigns, and because the polls divide the electorate in particular ways, the campaigns move toward “demographic”-driven strategies (we need a few more working-class white men, and maybe some urban Latina women). If you aim your message at working-class white men and urban Latina women, you probably will get more of those groups to vote for your candidate. But does this say more about those groups or about the campaign tactics? Further, the “demographics” are not fully separable from racism, as we are now seeing.

Sir Oolius on ecoterrorism and the housing market meltdown:

As usual, high-end real estate burns and right-wingers shout "eco-terrorism!" But they have been wrong before. What's certain is anyone could spray-paint the letters ELF on a sheet.

RMJ on war and hate:

The question of why "they" hate us, can be postponed for yet another day. I understand, too: politicians stand on the shoulders of prophets like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but they only do it a generation or so later, when the prophet is safely dead. Thus does this "more perfect union" get "perfected," in Mr. Obama's words.

Athenae on the government's bailout of Bear Stearns:

Let me ask how on earth we can take all the time it takes to think up all the ways we think up to sit in judgement on every individual case we hear about, about how that person just didn't work harder, didn't suffer enough, didn't earn "our" money, didn't deserve "our" charity, didn't bleed in front of us enough, and all the while, all the fucking while, we give it away by the millions and never ask where it goes. All the while.

Let me just ask. I'm sure somebody out there has the answer. After all, they had reasons why Katrina victims deserved to drown and die, be forced from their homes and screwed by their insurance companies and disregarded by their country. They had reasons why uninsured children didn't deserve health care, why those who died from a lack of medical attention only got what they had coming. They had reasons why the people who came to emergency rooms were just looking for drugs, they had reasons why thieves got rich and saints got shot, they had all kinds of explanations for everything that looked to everybody else like a fucking problem we needed somebody to solve. I'm sure the answers here are just as simple, just as easy.

(Illustration: "Snail tongue microphotograph by Carl Strüwe, 1929.)