Why don’t people vote?

When commenting on the election results, I noted the low turnout of around 36%, the lowest since during World War II ,and said that I was curious as to the reasons why. It turns out that the Pew research organization has conducted a post-election survey to gauge the opinions of people on a range of issues concerning the election and one was the reasons they gave for not voting.
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This should not be a surprise

The Hill reports with surprise something that could have been easily predicted. Under the headline “Obama veers left after red wave”, it says:

President Obama has taken significant steps to the left since his party’s devastating losses in the midterm elections.

In a surprise, he announced a major deal on climate change with China during a trip to Beijing Tuesday. That followed another unanticipated move — a Monday statement pressuring the Federal Communications Commission to adopt new net neutrality rules for the Internet.

The moves are helping to rally a dispirited Democratic base while re-establishing Obama’s political leadership after he was sidelined during the midterms.

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Democrats are free at last! (To sell out their supporters)

The Associated Press reports that president Obama feels ‘liberated’ by losing the senate to the Republicans.

White House officials say Obama’s optimism reflects a president who feels liberated by even the limited prospects for striking deals with a Republican Congress and relieved about shedding the narrow Democratic majority that would have guaranteed Washington stayed locked in a stalemate.
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Buying absolution for drone murders

It used to be that in the Catholic Church, one could buy indulgences to provide absolution for one’s sins, giving an advantage to rich people trying to get to heaven. Although the church has discontinued that deplorable practice, the US government still seems to believe in it. Cora Currier writes that the US government makes secret payments to the relatives of civilian victims of its drone strikes while publicly maintaining that the dead are militants.
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Will Udall go out with glory?

Last Tuesday, senator Mark Udall of Colorado lost his bid for re-election. He now faces a choice. He can fade away into the political sunset or make a significant contribution. How? By going on the Senate floor during the lame duck session from now until the end of the year when he formally leaves and reading into the congressional record the CIA torture report that has been kept concealed up until now.
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The Day Israel Attacked America

One of the ways you can tell that much of the major US media functions as a propaganda system is the way that inconvenient stories are sent down the memory hole. One such story is when Israel attacked a US warship the USS Liberty during the six-day war in 1967, killing 34 US servicemen and leaving the state-of-the-art intelligence gathering ship to be disposed of as scrap. The motives for the attack were never made clear and the US government seemed to have little interest in taking any action against Israel for that act.
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Another humanitarian success story!

Glenn Greenwald writes that the country of Libya is now in a state of total collapse and anarchy, not quite what we were promised when we bombed that country on ‘humanitarian’ grounds.

So widespread is violence and anarchy there that “hardly any Libyan can live a normal life,” Brown University’s Stephen Kinzer wrote in The Boston Globe last week. Last month, the Libyan Parliament, with no functioning army to protect it from well-armed militias, was forced to flee Tripoli and take refuge in a Greek car ferry. The New York Times reported in September that “the government of Libya said . . . that it had lost control of its ministries to a coalition of militias that had taken over the capital, Tripoli, in another milestone in the disintegration of the state.”
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