Obama voters increasingly frustrated with Obama

Drew Weston has captured my frustration with Obama:

I happen to be one of the lucky ones. I don't carry a balance on my credit cards, my home is still worth more than my mortgage, and I still have a job. But if Americans are starting to turn populist anger toward a White House that has doggedly refused to focus that anger where it belongs -- toward the banks, the mortgage brokers, the regulators who failed to regulate, the oil companies that have blocked energy reform for decades while racking up record profits, the health insurance companies that make their profits by denying coverage and discriminating against the ill, the pharmaceutical companies whose lobbyists have negotiated away the right to negotiate, and the Republicans who bankrupted the treasury during the eight long years of the Bush Presidency and crashed the economy on their way out -- I can understand why.
We are not seeing major change where we most need them. I'm increasingly thinking that Obama is way over his head. I do think Obama is a good and decent man, but it's becoming increasingly clear that large corporations completely own and run Congress. It will remain this way unless the people get mad enough to get up from watching movies on their big screen TVs and take to the streets. But anger is not enough. First, the people have to take the time to understand how bad things are and how they are having their way of life stolen by plutocrats. This is unlikely to happen on a mass scale given that so many of us can't or won't take the time to self-critically study complex situations.

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3D video of what you are seeing when you point the Hubble telescope at nothing

Check out this mind blowing 3D simulation of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. The context is all-important. The image was of a patch of empty sky as small as a grain of sand at arm's length. Also, this fantastic image was gathered in 1993, before the most recent upgrades to Hubble. This image is a big reason why I would be tempted to check the box for "spiritual but not religious." Here's a bit of history of the deep field images.

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Heck of a job, CIA psychologists!

Who were the psychologists who created and oversaw the U.S. torture of its prisoners? Consistent with much else that occurred during the Bush Administration, it turns out that even though they were psychologists, Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were shockingly unqualified, according to the NYT:

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.
According to the NYT article, Mitchell and Jessen now face a possible criminal inquiry.

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Corrupt bankers and corrupt government regulators

Robert Scheer sums up the cozy relationship between the U.S. government and the financial sector and it's ugly. One federal judge has the guts to tell it straight, but where is the SEC and where is the Obama Administration? In the process of acquiring failed brokerage house Merrill Lynch, Bank of America sneaks more than $1 Million in bonuses each to 696 Merrill Lynch executives who ran the company into the ground (Merrill Lynch had lost $27 Billion). These outrageous payments occurred while BofA was receiving $45 Billion in taxpayer money as part of the "bailout." On top of that, 39,000 additional Merrill Lynch employees were each paid an average of $91,000 in bonuses, an amount that the Bank of America attorney suggested wasn't a significant amount. New York federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff disagreed, saying:

"I'm glad you think that $91,000 is not a lot of money; I wish the average American was making $91,000."

How corrupt is the government/banking relationship? The SEC did sue BofA of misleading it's shareholders, but this sweetheart settlement stinks to high hell. Consider this quote from Scheer's article:

The SEC complaint did accuse BofA of misleading its shareholders, but instead of digging deeply into how such decisions had been made and by whom, a deal was concocted in which BofA got off with a paltry $33 million fine. That is less than the bonus received by one of the Merrill execs. Yet the SEC deal would have closed the case on how that decision was made.

"You filed a rather uninformative, bare-bones complaint," Judge Rakoff told SEC lawyer David Rosenfeld, who lamely defended the decision to avoid going after the bankers involved, and it is instructive of whose interest he was serving that "[t]he lawyer for Bank of America periodically whispered what appeared to be suggestions to Mr. Rosenfeld," as a New York Times article put it. Whispering between government regulators and the Wall Street honchos ostensibly being regulated is what got us into this mess in the first place.

In the meantime, TARP watchdog Elizabeth Warren is repeatedly warning that the same toxic assets that triggered the meltdown are still on the banks' books. She's warning of the "looming commercial mortgage crisis."

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Orange Fish at Shedd

My daughters and I just returned from a long weekend in Chicago, where we visited the Shedd Aquarium. Flash photography is not allowed, so it's always a challenge to get good existing light photos. For this photo, I couldn't get a sharp image of the moving fish, even with a high ISO setting. Therefore, I tried to pan the camera slowly with the moving fish, guaranteeing a blurred background.The fish is not in perfect focus but the image intrigues me; it's almost like the fish is floating in air. I call this image "floating orange fish" because I forgot to read the sign to actually know what this species is. Click for larger version. Image by Erich Vieth Here's another shot from the Shedd, from a delightful display of jelly fish, and below that a variety of other stunning images from Shedd: Image by Erich Vieth For a gallery of a dozen more photos, click on the title to this post.

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