Saturday Cat Blogging

This is Popeye last night on Mrs. JP. He has his moments and lately has taken to cuddling up with us at bedtime and using us as massaging chairs. But come next morning, it's time to punch in and get to work serving him.

Cats. They ask for so much and give so little.

The Toy Cop is on Sale

The Toy Cop
Your ex-spouse just took a US senator and a dozen other people hostage in the most impregnable place in town: The armory. You're a rookie patrol officer and your ex demands to speak to you and you only. His demands: Stop the federal execution of the most notorious child killer since Albert Fish. Have him brought to the armory. In other words: Unreasonable. The FBI can't help you, no one can but a disgraced FBI negotiator struggling with his own demons.

What do you do, especially when the Bureau finds out that your ex is either working in collusion with or accidentally invited in with him the world's most dangerous terrorist, a man who stole 10 canisters of lethal VX nerve gas and plans to use them on thousands of innocents? What do you do when a major television network is manipulating the hostage situation? What do you do when disparate elements seeking their own agenda risk touching off the worst mass murder since September 11th?

What would you do then, rookie?

The Toy Cop is now up for sale on Scribd at the low introductory price of $4.99. When it's available on Kindle, I'll be posting a link to that page, as well.

(Update: The Toy Cop is now available on Kindle.)

Yes, Virginia, There is a David Duke...

...and he lives in Massachusetts.

Some people on Worcester, Massachusetts Craigslist's Rants & Raves section have a problem with this being Black History Month. Every time I put up a post defending Black History Month (as if I should have to) while reminding people of what Mighty Whitey has done for them, not only do my posts immediately get taken down, rejoinders like this replace them and stay up.

Keep in mind, this is an actual post and was actually written today in Massachusetts, supposedly one of the most enlightened and bluest states in the Union (outside of Roslindale, where Jim Crow went to die) which is where this racist asswipe who fancies himself Rudyard Kipling's second coming lives. As proof that I did not make this up, here's the original URL. It's entitled, I shit you not, "White History Month."

Slavery? The evil white man is responsible for slavery. Look up the violent history of African and you will see where white folks got the idea from. Africa has had a LONG, LONG, LONG history of slavery....Even back to the days of when the Moors were conquering the middle east, and I can say with certainty anything the white folks did during the time of slavery would of looked like a Godsend compared to the slavery of Africa. Black people used to trade and sell other black people. It's not only a white thing. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Why is America all about white history? Look at the founding fathers, White. America is a white culture that focuses on white history beacuse we have a white past. You wouldn't go to Africa and expect them to change their school curriculum to focus on white people because they are a black society. Out government is a white government solely built to better the white people, same with a german government; it is designed to better german people....Same with a chinese government. The whole idea of co-existing does not work. Sorry to burst your bubble. Look at a party or even when you went to highschool. Black people mainly stuck together as a group, Brazillians stuck together as a group, white people stuck together as a group. It is not a reflection on the devil white man.....it is an instinctual habit. People stick to their own kind and EVERY one wants to be the "top dog". We as humans are built on competition and want to be number one. The majority of society is white, see where I am going with this? White people want to help white people, black people want to help black people...... Unfortunately the idea of a perfect melting pot will never work, it can't.

You really want me to get you fired up? Look at Africa, the tribes in the jungles that have still been untouched by the white man. They are living in mudhuts wearing leotards. Are there any white communities ANYWHERE in the world that are living that primitive? It seems white people are smarter, even the most remote parts of Australia have some sort of running water and means of outside communication. But not in those primitive tribes of black men and women, they have not evolved past the ways of a basic society. Science is a white man's achievement. The black man should be thanking us for introducing them to the benefits of the white man's inventions. All they are good for is playing sports; that will really help out society. PROVIDE US WITH ENTERTAINMENT! leave the tricky stuff to the hard working white man.

Sounds like something Neil Boortz would write if he was on mescaline and purple microdot.

Got that? Birds of a feather flock together; niggers in "African" thought up slavery all on their lonesome so if they do it, so can we; Them there darkies ain't good for nothing but running and entertaining (they can also tap dance, doncha know?); they wore leotards in Africa (remember, they can all dance) they should just get the fuck out of the way and let the white man take up his burden doing the real impoh-tant stuff. Ordinarily, I would've taken this down as bottomlessly offensive but this contains such a distillation of pure, concentrated, Strom Thurmond-class of inbred, ass-backwards, down home, sitting in the outhouse, good ole boy racism that it really has to stay up to remind those of us who don't walk on our knuckles how little we've come since the Civil War.

God damn, boy, can't you just hear the grits sizzling on the griddle while the banjo plays softly in the background? YEE-haw!

The Bastards of Goebbels

It would be all too easy to confine the failures of the mainstream media to Fox "News", the place where journalism went to die but to any aware news consumer, that would be in itself misleading and unfair. Fox just presents itself as a big, easy target because of their refusal to report the news in a nonpartisan fashion. They're just more unabashedly blatant about it than other networks.

But we've been seeing over the last several decades the mainstream media playing the part of war cheerleaders, the material witness that never seems to be where it's supposed to be to tell the full story. And the failures of the MSM to report the news fully and accurately extends far beyond television. It's also crept into the once-trusted venues of newspaper, magazines and radio.

When we began letting corporations, especially defense contractors and media giants, own networks, the slow but steady destruction of the news was all but inevitable. Eric Boehlert in Lapdogs and Norm Solomon in War Made Easy are two especially damning indictments on the neverending failure of the media to report the news the way it ought to be reported. If the media did their job, we wouldn't need people like Boehlert or Solomon or Media Matters or Newshounds or Buzzflash or... Well, you get the idea.

Every year, someone has to publish a list of the top 10 or 25 news stories that were never or hardly reported on. In fact, it's a book series. TV networks and stations would claim there's only so much news that can be fit into any one news cycle. Yet they utterly fail to explain why the Balloon Boy and Anna Nicole Smith's and Michael Jackson's deaths or Britney Spears shaving her head qualifies as real news and why we shouldn't shove such trash to Entertainment Tonight to make more room for real news.

The incomparable and indefatigable Michael Collins in Egypt and the False Dilemma reminds us of the MSM's latest failure. He begins,

The people of Egypt have had enough of a failed dictatorship masquerading as a democracy. As events unfold, we're seeing a cautionary message entering the corporate media coverage of this event. Having never exposed the dire conditions that prompted the massive protests and demands for change, we're now told that this could negatively impact oil supplies, the stock market, and anti-terror efforts. No foundation for the claims was provided but they're repeated regularly on CNN, the NBC's, Fox, and the print media.

Thus, a false dilemma is created for the public: support the right of people to determine their own fate or protect your safety and the current standard of living, as it were.

Indeed, precious little context is given for the protests in Egypt and Tunisia and next to nothing about those in Jordan and Yemen. The spectacle is everything and if you have enough spectacle, especially when it's tinged with human blood, who needs context?

The overwhelming impression given to the cautious and cynical news consumer is that telling the unvarnished truth about a tyrannical regime with whom the United States and its corporations have longstanding ties is akin to biased, slanted, gonzo journalism. Obviously, that's not true. Despite what faux conservative Stephen Colbert asserts, the truth does not have a liberal bias. As we all know, it's supposed to have no more bias than a mirror.

Plus, over the last several decades, we've seen an uncomfortable reverse mitosis of what used to pass for real, hard news and the infotainment that appeals more and more to the reptilian part of the human brain (most vividly delineated by the Balloon Boy who wasn't in his shiny balloon). It appeals to the curiously peculiar racist American mindset that only cares about missing children, teens, murder victims and runaway brides as long as they're white and good looking.

For every Pat Tillman there are 100 or more LaVena Johnsons. Tillman, a smart, handsome and very white NFL safety, was branded a war hero, one whom the DoD claimed was killed in combat. LaVena Johnson, a young black girl stationed in Balad Iraq, was dismissively ruled a suicide in spite of a mountain of evidence all but proving that she was robbed, beaten, killed and immolated to destroy the evidence.

The mainstream media fawned all over George W. Bush when he pissed and moaned that the worst moment of his so-called presidency was when Kanye West told the truth about him in one of his milder public outbursts: "George Bush doesn't like black people." Meanwhile, the press had long since given up on Susan Lindauer, the first major American casualty of the USA PATRIOT Act, someone who was falsely and illegally imprisoned, persecuted and financially ruined for simply doing her job.

While the press gleefully reported that war criminals Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Bremer were being awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom by their crime boss, the aforementioned George W. Bush, they yawned and strenuously ignored the likes of Bunny Greenhouse (who is black), Sibel Edmonds and other whistle blowers for simply doing their job.

While the press gathered around their self-made glitter surrounding Julian Assange, the glamorous international provocateur, they all but had forgotten about Bradley Manning's inhumane treatment. The only reason we know these names is because of the better political blogs, another necessary antidote to a failing mainstream media that puts corporate interests above that of the nation's need to know.

Back in World War Two, we had a word for this kind of misleading, criminal censorship and cherry-picking. It's "propaganda", the kind of thing that Hitler's right hand man Goebbels was responsible for (his official title was even "Minister of Propaganda"). At least the Nazis were up front about what they did and what they were.


You ask Roger Ailes why his network is so biased in favor of the Republican Party, why, he'll quiver his jowls in righteous indignation, call you a liberal rabblerouser and a Nazi and claim that Fox "News" is "fair and balanced."

But the pseudo-intellectual DNA can be traced back to the Nazi Minister of Propaganda and well beyond him. The only difference is Goebbels was more honest, upfront and ballsy about it than his little bastards in latter day American newsrooms.

The Insane Clown Posse is in Town

In case you haven’t been paying attention or are trying (understandably) to block it from your memory, the annual CPAC conference is going to be at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington from February 10-12th. Among the confirmed speakers:

Rep. Michele Bachmann, Inspiration for the Who’s “suicidal psychopath.”
Gov. Haley Barbour, bloated racist
Hon. John Bolton, group sex-loving psychopath
Andrew Breitbart, lying, racist psychopath
Ann Coulter, anorexic, Islamophobic closet trangender psychopath
Hon. Newt Gingrich, Islamophobic, chronically unemployed psychopath
David Horowitz, Liberals on the campus-fearing psychopath
Sen. Mike Lee, unregulated child labor loving psychopath
Sen. Mitch McConnell, human sawhorse, do nothing racist
Rep. Ron Paul “Please Love Me, Conservatives!”
Sen. Rand Paul Civil rights hating, mountaintop removal loving psychopath
Hon. Tim Pawlenty, Defund ACORN even though they don’t get funds from Minnesota
Gov. Rick Perry, Molly Ivins’ “Governor Goodhair”, secessionist loving psychopath
Hon. Mitt Romney, “Don’t hate me because I mandated health care in Massachusetts.”
Hon. Donald Rumsfeld "We know where they [WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
Hon. Rick Santorum, Admitted snuggling dead fetuses years before George W. Bush.
Phyllis Schlafly, Ancient conservative artifact, personal friend of Clare Booth Luce, farts dust
Rep. Allen West, Gun shooting, disgraced Lt. Col of a psychopath

Sounds like the DSM IV come to life, doesn’t it? Let’s take a look at some of the scheduled events:

Schedule of Events
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10th
Introduction: David A. Keene, American Conservative Union CONFIRMED
10:00 Secrets to Landing a Conservative Job – Wilson AB

Oh, so only conservatives need jobs, now? And what, exactly, is “a conservative job”? Selling toxic mortgage-backed securities? Holding public office that enables those who sell toxic mortgage-backed securities to get bailed out? Fucking up the ecosystem with utter impunity?

11:00 How Political Correctness is Harming America’s Military – Marshall Ballroom
Elaine Donnelly, Center for Military Readiness CONFIRMED Ilario Pantano, former Marine and author of Warlord: No Better Friend, CONFIRMED No Worse Enemy

Oh here we go again. More pissing and moaning about the repeal of DADT. I wonder if GOProud will attend that panel?

11:00 Iranium – Citizens United’s CPAC Theater – Delaware Ballroom
Presented by Clarion Fund (1 hour) Explores the dangers posed to the United States and the international community by a nuclear Iran; Followed by Q & A on Iranium.

Iranium! Isn't that clever? Yep, nothing sells like fear, however unfounded and unsupported by intelligence assessments.

1:00 Reagan at 100: Role Model for the Next Generation – Marriott Ballroom
Paul Kengor, author of God and Reagan CONFIRMED
Mark Joseph, producer of Reagan CONFIRMED
Brodi Conover, Reagan Centennial Youth Committee CONFIRMED
Craig Shirley, author of Rendezvous with Destiny CONFIRMED

A role model for the next generation of hypocrites, or how a former liberal Democrat who was the president of a large union became a rock-ribbed, union-busting Republican when it became politically expedient, someone who railed against “socialized medicine” then became a beneficiary of it from 1981 until his death.

Yeah, they sure know how to pick their role models, don’t they? I’m amazed there isn’t a scientific panel discussing ways to reanimate Reagan’s rotting corpse so they can trot him out in 2012.

Moderator: Kate Obenshain, Young America’s Foundation CONFIRMED
1:00 Rep. Steve King (IA) – Marshall Ballroom CONFIRMED
Introduction: Kayne Robinson, National Rifle Association CONFIRMED
1:00 Blogger Lunch with Citizens United Productions – Delaware Ballroom
President David N. Bossie & short video presentation: David v. Goliath: The One Year
Anniversary of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

What they seem to forget during their celebration of the SCOTUS selling our elections to the highest corporate bidder is that when the GOP falls out of favor with corporations, they’ll inevitably start flooding the Democrats with their billions.

1:00 Hon. Newt Gingrich – American Solutions Booth
Book Signing – To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine; Valley Forge:
George Washington and the Crucible of Victory, among other titles.

The book title says it all. The Wall Street-coddling, corporate-friendly Obama is a secular Socialist. Right. I suppose next you’ll be telling me he’s Muslim and was actually born in Kenya and… oh, wait…

1:15 Policy Recommendations for Real Immigration Reform – Marshall Ballroom
Secretary of State Kris Kobach (KS) CONFIRMED
Jayne Cannava, Pro-English CONFIRMED
Dino Teppara, Indian American Conservative Council CONFIRMED

Conservative Indians?! Is there actually any such thing? What are they going to arrive in, a Miata?

Moderator: Mark Krikorian, Center for Immigration Studies CONFIRMED
2:00 Hon. Rick Santorum – Marriott Ballroom CONFIRMEDIntroduction: Foster Friess, Jackson, WY CONFIRMED 2:00 America At Risk: The War With No Name – Citizens United’s CPAC Theater – Delaware Ballroom Live introduction by co‐hosts Newt and Callista Gingrich (1.5 hours)

“Getcher fear right here, get it while it’s hot!”

2:30 Traditional Marriage and Society – Marriott Ballroom
Tom Minnery, CitizenLink CONFIRMED
Bishop Harry Jackson, Hope Christian Church CONFIRMED
Michel Faulkner, author of Restoring the American Dream INVITED
Moderator: Carrie Lukas, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to CONFIRMED

“Getcher fear of the teh gays right here, get it while it’s hot!”

3:00 Your Guy Won. So What? Holding Conservatives’ Feet to the Fire – Wilson AB
Sponsored by the Leadership Institute

Note no one from the mainstream media will be at that one.

4:00 Two-Minute Activists – Marshall Ballroom
Ryan Hecker, Houston Tea Party Society CONFIRMED
Ana Puig, Kitchen Table Patriots CONFIRMED
Deneen Borelli, Project 21 CONFIRMED
Catherine Engelbrecht, King Street Patriots CONFIRMED
Gena Bell, OH CONFIRMED
Burnell Bailey, ME CONFIRMED
Darcy VanOrden, UT CONFIRMED
Katie Kieffer, Blogger CONFIRMED

More like the Two Minutes Hate.

Moderator: Amy Frederick, 60 Plus Association CONFIRMED
4:00 Presentation of Defender of the Constitution Award – Marriott Ballroom
Presenter: Brad O’Leary and David A. Keene
Recipient: Hon. Donald Rumsfeld CONFIRMED

This Bizarro World. In Bizarro World, Donald Rumsfeld get Defender of Constitution Award. In Bizarro World, Obama also get Nobel Peace Prize and Paul Bremer get Preznitdential Medal of Freedom Award.

6:30 C4L Reception w/ Ron Paul & Rand Paul – Wilson AB
Sponsored by Campaign for Liberty (1.5 hours)
Appetizers and Open Bar
Open to Campaign for Liberty Sponsors Only
7:00 Perfect Valor – Citizens United’s CPAC Theater – Delaware Ballroom
A patriotic salute to Iraq war heroes, narrated by Sen. Fred Thompson (1.5 hours)

If you fought in Afghanistan, meh. Fuck you. But if you fought in Iraq without adequate armor, got wounded and flown to a slum named Walter Reed then was blamed for your nightmarish living conditions, we salute you! That is, if we can keep Fred awake long enough.

9:00 Rediscovering God In America I & II – Citizens United’s CPAC Theater – Delaware Ballroom
Citizens United Productions’ Double Feature

I already rediscovered God. I found him loitering at the AF Academy at Colorado Springs.

9:30 The Left’s Campaign to Reshape the Judiciary – Marshall Ballroom
Dan Pero, American Justice Partnership CONFIRMED
Timothy Lee, Center for Individual Freedom CONFIRMED
Ken Klukowski, American Civil Rights Union CONFIRMED
Moderator: Kelly Shackelford, Liberty Institute CONFIRMED

Oh, yes. Liberal judicial activists. Not to be confused with neoconservative judicial activists who elect presidents through conflict of interest, get involved in the 2nd Amendment and sell our electoral system to the corporations with the most cash.

There’s 11 more pages of this shit but I’m sure you get the message by now. This is going to be just another fear fest starring the usual suspects, crooks, liars, psychopaths, bigots and hypocrites. If you live in the DC/Virginia area, be somewhere else that weekend in case crazy got communicable.

Walk Like an Egyptian

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

OK, so now in a reprise of June of 2009 when blood literally ran down Tehran's streets, our president is once again, no pun intended, Tut Tutting the violence and chaos that's essentially replaced the Egyptian government. Egyptians are so hostile toward authority figures that they're literally ripping the heads off Pharaoh mummies and otherwise looting or vandalizing their national treasures.

The very fact that the violence is escalating and that the protesters are winning proves that saturnine Obama calling for restraint and siding with a tyrannical, oppressive regime such as Mubarek's makes the leader of the free world look about as effective as a junior high school cafeteria monitor during a food fight.

If nothing else, the metastasizing unrest and bloodshed (at least 74 Egyptians have been killed since this week's riots) puts our government in an extremely uncomfortable, and untenable, position. As stated earlier, Obama is forced to stick with his man Hosni despite the fact that Africa's one superpower is among the most brutal, barbaric and oppressive nations on earth, the kind of sadistic dictatorship to which the Bush administration turned when it wanted to extraordinarily rendition terror suspects.

In other words, Egypt these past 30 years has no more resembled a democracy than post-Soviet Russia. At the risk of oversimplification, a vote for Egypt is a vote against democracy. Hosni Mubarek had literally turned off the internet, shut down al-Jazeera while revoking press credentials, sent troops onto the streets to kill at least 74 protesters, place Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed elBaradei under house arrest and fired his entire government while naming a puppet as his "successor", thereby officially making Egypt a one man dictatorship. Yet Obama still stands by his man at a time when even his own son wouldn't, even flying in the face of a fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

The desire for democracy across the Middle East and North Africa these past two weeks, if nothing else, had brought into razor-sharp focus our ongoing hypocrisy as regards democracy. Our pious platitudes about democracy, belied by years of deadly adventurism across Latin America from the 50's to the present day, ring hollow. We'd rather support one dictatorship after another in the Middle East as long as they momentarily ally themselves with the United States' War on Terror.

Here's a something else that's huge that ought to be getting more play in the media: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is actually encouraging the protesters in direct contravention to Obama's "policy" of noninvolvement. In fact, as long as Obama chooses to remain saturninely detached from these proceedings as if they really don't involve the United States, then Mrs. Clinton's hands are tied. It's telling that Clinton, in direct and almost unique contravention to a president whose policies she is constitutionally bound to support, is instead supporting the unrest in Cairo and elsewhere while her immediate predecessor, Condi Rice, had called for Egypt to move closer to a democracy. If that doesn't put Mrs. Clinton and Dr. Rice on the same page, it certainly puts them in the same chapter.

In short, what's happening in Cairo is actually fragmenting our government so that now our commander in chief and secretary of state are at stark odds with each other.

For all its massive faults and foreign policy failures, it had to be said that the Bush administration was at least cognizant that Egypt had nothing than a mere sham of a democracy and, however lazily or timidly, attempted to make some inroads toward effecting that.

To listen to the Obama administration, the unrest in the Middle East and northern Africa doesn't really affect us or our foreign policy but it's impossible to see how this will not involve a necessary paradigm shift from Foggy Bottom to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This ought to force the Obama administration to rethink its foreign policy priorities both for our present nation as well as the generations of Americans and presidential administrations to come. If you need a predictor of how disastrous it is for one administration to blindly and stupidly take up the initiatives of the previous one, look at Obama's very insistence on supporting the dying dictatorship in Egypt, look at Iraq, look at Afghanistan and tell me how Obama has improved things in those geopolitical arenas.

New World Order

"It's time for this government to change. I want a better future for me and my family when I get married." - Amal Ahmed, a 22-year-old Egyptian protester.

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

If one takes even a cursory, hurried look at events in the Middle East this month, especially Tunisia and Egypt, it makes Time's Choice of "Person of the Year" seem unforgivably shallow and superficial. In an unexpected turn perfectly delineated by his apparently clueless and astonished face on the cover, the always-dubious honor went to 26 year-old billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, founder of an online community that made its, and his, fortune not the old fashioned way with advertising revenue through ads but by selling personal information to marketing companies, information we gladly give away to an overachieving Harvard grad nerd so we can more easily supplant actually meeting people.

To bring his amorality into conspicuous relief, Zuckerberg has recently climbed into bed with Goldman Sachs, a bailed-out Wall Street bank that no doubt can give the billionaire boy wonder another Ivy League education in corporate sleaziness. So far, all this has done is to grossly inflate Facebook's net worth and share price and, if one is smart, one will reserve a front row online seat to wait for the Facebook.com bubble to burst like a massive prank cigar.

In the meantime, as Time is quick to point out, the "Person of the Year" award doesn't necessarily go to the best, most do-gooding or even the most popular but to the person or organization that was the most catalytic. Zuckerberg's elevation puts him in rarified company, including presidents, other corporate titans and tyrants like Adolph Hitler. And it only serves to bring into merciless focus our own bottomless superficiality in that Facebook's founder would prove to be more catalytic to American society than President Barack Obama, former Senator Russ Feingold, former Rep. Alan Grayson or, (here's a crazy-ass idea), Wikileaks.

Not to give short shrift to Zuckerberg's Facebook, which easily toppled in a couple of short years MySpace's hegemony in the online networking community (It can be easily argued that as recently as the 2008 general elections, MySpace was much more instrumental in getting then Senator Barack Obama elected president than the still-fledgling Facebook). But a volatile online community that's just one major hack or Conficker virus away from complete and utter oblivion should not be considered more catalytic to American society than Wikileaks' Four Horsemen of Disclosures. Yet it is and last year's winner is as pitilessly reflective of our current values as the year in which the mirror-covered Time named us as the "Person of the Year."

There is a New World Order taking shape that's far more profound and important than a domain that plasters spam ads all over the place, harvests our too-free personal information and features groups such as "I'll Bet This Steak Can Get More Friends Than Sarah Palin."

Julian Assange's Wikileaks, to descend into a platitude for a moment, simply changed the world forever. It put and continues to put the largest and most powerful governments and corporations on notice that secrets are no longer safe and that they will not be allowed to practice their Machiavellian schemes in the shadows any more.

Of course, Wikileaks, as laudable as their intentions and catalytic effects is, is a mere conduit and Julian Assange is a mere conduit of a conduit. The power of Wikileaks comes from people like Bradley Manning, people who seem to have a sincere vested interest in proclaiming, "Enough is enough!" and effecting that change through disclosures of information much, much more devastating than anything your 13 year-old daughter or co-worker will post on Facebook.

"But, but... What does this have to do with me or my Facebook avatar?"

There's a New World Order that's superimposing itself over the world we used to know, a more transparent and (if you'll pardon the alliteration) pitilessly punitive palimpsest in which the people of the Middle East are also rising up against decades-long tyrannies such as the ones in Tunisia, Egypt and now Yemen. Understandably, the hypocritical and dictatorial Saudi Royal Family is nervously eying shaping developments with their neighbors.

It's notable that a few rock-throwing young men with bandannas over their mouths achieved in mere days in Tunisia what George W. Bush tried and failed to do in eight years and with the world's most powerful military at his disposal: Kickstarting the democratization of the Middle East. And the protests against autocratic rule puts our own president in the ridiculous position of actually supporting these despotic regimes simply because they're "our allies in the war on terror" (so was Yemen's dictatorship).

The riots in Tunis, Cairo and elsewhere in the Muslim world have brought about some startling changes and things we would've thought impossible a mere year or two ago: That the once popular Hosni Mubarek, Egypt's answer to Lyndon Johnson, would have his image disrespected by shoe soles (a grave insult in the Muslim/Arab world). For once, the mainstream media had actually gotten it right: This appears to be a region-wide revolution on a Che Guevaran scale.

But it's easy to scan the headlines and to assume that developments in the Middle East have nothing to do with us but they do.

One of the reasons the people of Tunisia rioted against the quarter century-long autocratic rule of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was there simply weren't enough jobs to go around. And they were organized and energized enough so that they'd actually routed the police and even regrouped when they themselves were routed. Now we're seeing the same thing in Egypt. As something of a sidebar, it also ought to be noted and remembered that this wave of democratization we're seeing in the Middle East is being effected from within with no need of invasions, carpet bombings, smashing of economic infrastructures nor the bank-busting involvement of American war profiteering corporations. Regime change is almost always untidy but ultimately streamlined and less costly in terms of life when effected from within.

Joblessness is and was during the 2010 midterms the single biggest concern for the average American voter. It would be easy to claim that online entities such as Facebook have taken the place of Juvenal's circus and that we're too distracted or anesthetized to similarly gather on Wall Street and Washington, DC to demand our jobs back. But we must remember that Facebook is also available in Tunisia and Egypt as well as virtually everywhere else in the Middle East. Yet these people were able to tear themselves away from their computer chairs and Facebook mood updates to risk (and give) their lives in the endless and timeless call for freedom.

What's happening in the Middle East isn't a Middle Eastern or a Muslim thingie. We are all human and have the same anxieties and concerns as Amal Ahmed and others 7000 miles away. We all want jobs, security for our families present and future, we all yearn to live freely and to have a voice in our governments, hence our destinies.

And, the last time I checked, these things were far from being guaranteed in our own country. The world is indeed changing and not necessarily for the worst. I see the Tunisian, Egyptian and Yemenese protesters, I remember the protesters in Iran, Mexico and Kenya and I see hope that the eternal flame of the human demand of freedom is far from extinguished. In the meantime, I wait and wonder when the day will come when the United States finally gets meaningfully involved in a worldwide cause that's even larger than national corporate interests.