Briefly

Digby put up a good piece yesterday on Social Security and its "alternative."

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-elderly-poor-had-it-so-good-back-in.html

It is breathtaking how the right wing manages to gin up any grass roots support at all for a program which, in fact, nearly every citizen depends on and expects to remain solid. The power of propaganda is immense. Put Limbaugh and his cohort on the air daily for 25 years and at the end of the experiment you find a huge body of voters clamoring to cut their own throats. The oligarchs of course have no need for social security. Nor do they need the people who work for them and produce much of their wealth to end their days in any comfort or security. The great battle has always been about whether people who work are more than a component of production, just part of the list, along with raw materials.

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I have been trying to get a grip on why "American Sniper" is such a jarring title. Then it came to me:

This is our other mental image of an American sniper, at the moment of his assassination actually. This is why sniping has not been an entirely positive concept--something Chris Kyle toiled to change after he left the armed forces and began to build a "brand" for himself. The problem with Kyle's efforts to improve the public's image of "sniping" is that in the process he seems to have made a lot of stuff up, including a proven liable of former Governor Jesse Ventura, himself a Navy Seal. There are some facts in this case. Perhaps Kyle and Oswald can exchange technical expertise from their adjoining apartments in Lucifer's dominion. Everyone else can at least agree that the job of sniper is one of many depressing necessities in the business of war. As General Lee said, "it is good that war is so terrible, else we would love it too much."