Fine Lines

One of my favorite blogs, the Middle American Progressive, has gone dormant. He used to publish his favorite current quotes from other blogs under the title I’ve used here and, since he isn’t doing it any more, I’m going to steal his title. I hope he’s still a NFL fan, my Chargers open the season against his Bears nine days from now. Anyway, here’s the current edition of my version of Fine Lines.


From Ian Welsh, in Why Japan From Is Eating America's Lunch On Broadband at The Huffington Post,

The modern "conservative" fallacy is that free markets means lack of government regulation. That isn't even close to what it means -- what it means is a market with many actors, relatively transparent information, and no one actor or group with pricing power, whether through collusion or monopoly.


From The Maha, in The Big Picture Aug 1, 2003 at The Mahablog,

As Grover Norquist’s dream of drowning the government in a bathtub becomes so much closer to reality through the actions of the Bush Corporation, we might want to wonder the larger scheme.

What would take the place of a ‘drowned’ US government but a confederation of corporate states regulated not by the consent of the governed but by the edicts of the privileged and moneyed few. Indeed, that looks to be the goal of the Bush tax cuts – the substitution of rule by law with rule by corporations.


From D.R. Scott in White Noise at Brilliant at Breakfast,

Uh-uh, "nigger" isn't just a word in the African-American community, It's a burglar alarm. It's telling me that somebody who hates me is knocking down my front door.


And finally from Glen Greenwald in an update to Warrantless surveillance and the new Coretta Scott King disclosures at salon.com,

Congressional Democrats actually seem to become weaker and more accommodating with every day that passes. Even when you think that they cannot get any weaker or more accommodating, they always manage to prove you wrong.