Aw, You Know!

Happy 2011, one and all!  Even though we are already threatened with a remake of Footloose and Sherlock Holmes II.

(Wait--I can get it to post at 0000 hours!)

Random Pearl

I don't usually read Pandagon, and I didn't know anything about the MTV (look Ma! No Videos!) program discussed, but one sentence kind of stood out:

It’s fascinating that conservatives basically are admitting up front that they have no argument if they’re not allowed to introduce lies and propaganda into the situation.

Apparently I've missed two Sara Robinson essays on the myth of the self-made American.

1. Why progressives get no respect:

   There it is, in black and white. Sixty percent of people who get home mortgage interest deductions (one of the most important and lucrative middle-class subsidies going) don't see this as a form of government help to their households, even though many of them wouldn't be homeowners at all without it. Fifty-three percent of the people who got through college on student loans -- and 40 percent of GI Bill beneficiaries -- also think they've paid their own freight. And 44 percent of Social Security recipients don't think that Social Security is a government program -- which comes as no surprise to those of us who remember the ubiquitous calls during last year's health care fight to "get your fllthy government hands off my Social Security." 

   What's going on here? How can so many people receive so much, and yet remain in such obstinate denial about where it all came from? 

   A big part of the problem, says Mettler, is that some government programs are simply more visible to the average voter than others. The visible ones tend to be the ones that are administered directly by a government agency, and show up in the budgets as clear line items. In particular, the programs that benefit the poor are often right out there on the table, where voters can see them and activists can ignite them into political issues: welfare, food stamps, government subsidized housing, education, Head Start. 

   But these programs are just a small fraction of America's overall social spending. The bulk of our tax money goes to other programs -- such as the mortgage interest deduction, student loan programs, and military spending -- that are hidden from easy public view in what Mettler calls "the submerged state." This spending is usually done in ways that are not directly visible to voters. A lot of it is corporate welfare, designed to prop up favored industries that are so powerful that no change is possible unless they're somehow bought off with new profit opportunities or subsidies. These industries have a strong interest in keeping this spending out of the public eye and off the political table, where it might be challenged. An important subcategory includes government-funded programs that are run through private companies, like prisons or pre-reform student loans (or, for that matter, Obamacare). The money comes straight out of Uncle Sam's pocket, but the beneficiaries never see his hand directly. 

   The big disconnect occurs because so many of the programs that benefit the middle class fall into this category. Take the mortgage interest deduction. This is, in effect, a subsidy that keeps America's real estate and building trades sectors in business -- and, as we've painfully discovered, was also of huge interest to the banks as well. But even though every homeowner in America profits handsomely from this subsidy, most Americans don't understand very much about it. It's just a line item on their income taxes. And there's strong pressure to keep it that way. If the magnitude of this subsidy somehow moved into general awareness, it might be challenged. It would be subject to political debate. And that's the last thing the builders and bankers want. 

   [...] 

   Making the invisible visible is also essential if we're going to counter the Tea Party's self-serving, denial-wracked narratives, and open the way for Democrats and progressives to get the credit they deserve for the good that they do. We need to start pointing out, loudly and often, all the covert-but-effective ways that government investment and intervention has made the middle class possible. 

   Specifically, we need to drive home the fact that anybody who calls themselves an American cannot, in the same breath, declare that they are in any sense entirely "self-made." This is indeed the land of opportunity. But those opportunities exist only as long as we work together to create them; and willfully denying that is an insult to every other American who sacrificed to make your opportunities possible. It's like saying your parents had nothing to do with raising you. You'd expect them to be hurt, offended, and angry at your lack of gratitude. The rest of us who contributed to your success aren't wrong to feel insulted, too.

2. Who makes $250,000?

   We are living in a fact-free world now. Stories are all that matter. And in hard times, people tend to cling harder to their dreams -- especially the dream that no matter how bad things are now, someday they're going to rise above all this and triumph. Telling them the truth under these conditions is hard, and perhaps even cruel. 

   But one of the hallmarks of countries that are falling into chaos is that people come to believe more and more absurd things. Truth gives way to truthiness; facts aren't given the same weight as feelings. The huge disconnect between people's perceived prospects and their actual prospects shows just what a masterful job conservatives have done. They've convinced people to believe that their potential for mobility is as good or better than it ever was -- even as they've stolen the usual routes to a better life (education, home ownership, public investment, and so on) right out from under them.

One of the points made back in '98, I think in an article about Al Gore, was that a fair number of people (or their descendants) who'd been helped during the Depression by Government programs had taken to voting Republican.  The reason given in the article amounted to "I've got mine; why should anyone else get any?"  But I think there's something else going on.  And I think it has to do with the stories we tell ourselves.

Vagabond Scholar: Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2010

Vagabond Scholar: Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2010

The Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, 2010

Signal boosting:

The much missed Jon Swift/Al Weisel left behind some excellent satire, but was also a nice guy and a strong supporter of small blogs. Blogroll Amnesty Day (co-founded with skippy) is a celebration of small blogs that's still going strong, and coming up again the first weekend in February. Jon/Al also put together a roundup of the best blogs posts of the year, selected by the participating bloggers themselves. (Here's the 2007 and 2008 editions.) I wanted to revive that tradition, both as a tribute to Jon/Al and because it was something special in its own right.

Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar organized this this year.

In Memoriam

Geraldine Doyle, icon.

The name is unfamiliar, but you'd recognize the face.

Magical Mystery Tour

OK, roll up.

• The short-lived experiment with women-only subway cars, via Ephemeral New York.
• Two from Shark-fu of Angry Black Bitch:
1. The Amish are coming! and why some Missourians are freaking (my take is that some parts of said Missourians' hindbrains recognize that that is their involuntary future.  I could be wrong, of course. [grin]);

   Most folks who speak of building a Christian society…and yes, the Amish are Christians…are really talking about building a society around their specific version of Christianity.
   
   Talk of bringing organized prayer to public schools is really a call to bring their kind of prayer to those classrooms. Trust that the same people ranting about that shit would get litigious as hell if their Baptist child came home and tossed up a prayer at bedtime for Mary to pray for them.

   (I've written bits to that effect myself.)
2. Thinking about exceptionalism...and striving.

   It is that lack of examination…that serf mentality crying out that we dare not annoy the rich lest they toss us off their lands…that lack of competitive spirit being applied to those areas that need work...it's that shit that makes claims of exceptionalism a joke.

• Daisy at Daisy's Dead Air on feminism's relationship with the State:

  Self-described feminists ran to the state, to the patriarchy itself, to local police forces and courts that had never given a shit about women, to punish other men. Without apology. In fact, quite proudly. No political equivocations or similar excuses were given, i.e. we need mean guys to police other mean guys. Battered-women's shelters became beneficent arms of the therapeutic culture; police were suddenly seen as the good guys, keeping an eye on those other dangerous, brutal men. (The most horrific suffering in these situations came from battered women married to police officers, since those particular men had easy access to locations of safe-houses.) Radical volunteers at these shelters, even women who had initially organized them (such as Sue Urbas, R.I.P.) were suddenly persona non grata in the places they had started themselves. The experts and the social workers, acting as arms of the state, stepped in. (You can almost hear John Wayne: We'll take over now, little lady.) And they did. By the end of the 80s, they were in the process of doing the same thing to Alcoholics Anonymous and various other self-help organizations. The state, massive apparatus that it is, does not take well to being left out. And men, in particular, were NOT going to be left out of the project, any project.

  Also musings on the wars, Mr. Assange, and the late Mrs. Hunt. I don't believe in conspiracy theories, but right now, Coincidence looks a lot like Atlas.
  

Oh, That Blizzard

With pictures, etc.  Fairly hideous.

Although It's Been Said Many Times, Many Ways...

Merry Christmas to you!

(If you celebrate, that is.  If you don't, Happy Holiday!)

Relevant texts from Making Light, most in older forms of English .

It's a Trap

And we have pretty much sprung it.  (Article is by Dana Priest and William F. Arkin at the Washington Post, via Brilliant at Breakfast.

Our Lady in Wisconsin

The Roman Catholic Church has validated an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1859 in Champion, Wisconsin.

In Memoriam

• Clay Cole, New York music TV host.
• Fred Hargesheimer, who was rescued by Pacific Islanders in WWII and repaid the debt by building a couple of schools and a clinic and eventually moving there.

Oh, And...

On stand-up first responders and stepping up to the plate:

One senator, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, made rumblings about living up to his nickname, "Dr. No," and single-handedly blocking the bill.

Coburn really is a doctor, an obstetrician who delivered 4,000 babies. His opera singer daughter, Sarah, often performs in New York. He has never encountered a military allocation too large for him to support.

Yet, all he saw was waste when it came to helping those who responded after the worst single attack in American history. He might very well have carried through with his threat were it not for the Oklahoma City firefighters who came to our aid just as our Finest and Bravest came to their city's aid after the bombing there in 1995.

With the moral authority of a veteran who was one of the first to respond to the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City Firefighters Association chief Phil Sipe pointedly called for Coburn to reconsider. Sipe made clear his view of the failure to support his New York comrades who responded on 9/11.

Moral values and fiscal responsibility, eh?

I would say something mean comparing them (that would be the Republicans opposed to the Zadroga bill mentioned in this article) to the Roman soldiers who scourged and mocked Jesus, but I have begun to think that that is what they aspire to.

Poking at Government Waste

Oh, and so-called "fiscal responsibility."

In Memoriam

Fred Foy, radio voice.

Some things are embedded in the DNA...

Focused Anger

I was going to call her The Incomparable, but so many on the blogroll are Incomparable that it's practically meaningless unless the comparison is to the wastes of print at the New York Times, naming no names (there are two Incomparables and one Hey Not Bad at the Times; it's just that they're overshadowed by the former crew).

Where was I?  Oh.  Jill, at Brilliant at Breakfast, puts it in a nutshell and then knocks it out of the park:

I'd like to believe that over the next two years, Democrats will hammer over and over again that this is what Republican governance looks like -- feed the rich and starve everyone and everything else. There is no penny spent on anything that might do people some good here and around the world that won't be fought, and no tens of billions of dollars shoveled into the pockets of people who already have five houses, ten cars, and fifteen Cayman bank accounts, that's too much to spend.

This is Republican doctrine, folks. This is what they ran on. Republican doctrine is about taking care of the people who give Republican legislators the money -- and no one else. Not even the 9/11 responders they're telling to fuck off and die -- quickly.

You see any small government in there? I'm not seeing any small government there at all.

Note

Opening one's heart even a little facilitates opening it further and letting the Holy Spirit both in and out.

Potpourri for 500

1. Noli Irritare Leones does the part of the Wikileaks story that's not about Assange.
2. Shark-fu flays the No Labels movement at Angry Black Bitch.

   Anyhoo, all of these examples contain a common thread…getting along and doing “something” tends to require fucking one group or another over.
   
   And that is the giant unsaid in this newish No Labels movement – who among us will get fucked over in the name of civility.

3. Via Shakesville, Kate Harding on the contortions around the Assange rape charges.
4. Via The Sideshow, the history of marijuana criminalization at DrugWarRant.
5. Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast has a selection of Stan Freberg commercials!  (I've mentioned him before.)
6. Anna Van Z at Mills River Progressive has one post commemorating this anniversary of powered flight and another (somewhat rude and not for puritanical workplaces) exhibiting contempt of Congress.  I mean Congress's contempt for non-lobbying constituents, of course.  (She got it from Father Tyme.)

Yes, I haven't posted in a week.  Politics is too depressing at the moment, and I feel like I'm snarking on the Titanic.

I'm not dead.  I'm just resting.  And pining for the fjords.  < / straight face >

Mauving Day

Yes, today needs a dose of purple-gray.

1. The Velveteen Rabbi is blogging from the 3rd Rabbis for Human Rights - North America conference; this report concentrates first on Peter Beinart's speech and the troubling ethical issues between Israelis, Palestinians, and American supporters,
   

   "If I believed that this was all there was to Israel, I would not have put up an Israeli flag in my son and daughter's room," Beinart says. Israel is a miracle. It has created a vibrant, liberal democracy, with vibrant independent press, independent universities, independent human rights organizations. "We should celebrate that! But precisey because we see it as an extraordinary acocmplishment of which we are enormously proud, we should not stand by while people attempt to undermine it from within,"he says. There is a profound strggle between people who love Israel for those values and institutions, and people who want Israel to be something radically different. "This Israeli government tried earlier this year to pass a law which would have made it radically more difficult for [American organizations] to operate there." Moshe Alon last year called Peace Now a virus. When these issues come on the table, the American Jewish establishment changes the subject.

   and then on Rabbi Ellen Lippmann's speech.
   

   "Israel is not the worst human rights abuser in the world," Lippmann says. "But it is our human rights abuser." We are Jews, and it is a Jewish state; it is ours. Israel is exceptional because it bills itself as a western-style democracy, so it calls us to judge it by the standards of its own declaration of independence, which says "the State of Israel will ensure complete equaity of social and political rights to all of its inhabitants." The US too strays far from its declaration of independence. We who connect to Israel and criticize and protest its actions, she says, do so not despite our Judaism but because of it.

2. When I was a kid (I was, once.  Really), I used to read my Mom's Ladies' Home Journal and McCall's, and occasionally Good Housekeeping and Parent's.  Dad was a staunch Time reader (Newsweek did not appear in our abodes until I had a sub as part of my American History course in high school) although the Saturday Evening Post and Life occasionally appeared.  (Cosmopolitan was Adult, but not nearly as racy as it is now [your raciness may vary], Redbook appeared once that I remember, and I think I was 14 before I had the leisure [ie, nobody was home] to check out Dad's Playboys [he kept at most 2 issues in a drawer with clothes, and it is possible he knew that somebody was looking at them].  Yes, I outgrew Seventeen at twelve.)
   
    Anyway, this meant that I was exposed to that era's versions of Ross Douthat and David Brooks.  (The particular example I'm thinking of is Marya Mannes; I may not have known what she was doing, but I did know that it stank.)  The measure of the New York Times's descent from damn good newspaper to the Fishwrap of Record (and most of the rest of print newspapers are worse) is encapsulated in the fact that these men take up column inches while better writers are putting out tip jars in the blogosphere.
   
   Echidne of the Snakes points out a couple of things about Messrs. D and B, namely fake evolutionary bullology and what they want the data to say.
3. Terrance at Republic of T notes that the extended unemployment benefits with the tax cuts are

   "...a band-aid on a cut to a major artery."

4. ETA: Driftglass blast-from-the-past.

And how's your fern?

The Question in the Back of the Mind

Via Mills River Progressive, Chris Hedges at Truthdig on why we are not rioting in the streets by now.

Can We Lay Down a Trail of Peanuts, Please?

There’s a big assed smug as hell elephant sitting in the middle of the room sipping tea, people!

Shark-fu on the extension of tax cuts in exchange for unemployment benefits.

The crickets are especially worth it.

Off Season

Talking about possible new stadium for Oakland Athletics.

(Fremont fell through.)

In other news, Straight No Chaser doing "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch."  Or, if you must have the Ravenscroft version (not animated), go here.  (Gotten in an extremely roundabout fashion from wcg on Live Journal.)

Out of the Mouths of Babes

• Little Jimmy Madison (quoted by Scott Horton):
  

  Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations; but, on a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism.

• "Young" Scott Horton (on a torture apologist at the Washington Post):

  The reason that the laws of war condemn “disappearings” and torture, making such conduct universally punishable, but still give combatants broad license to kill their adversaries, is that taking killing out of warfare is a hopeless cause, while eliminating or punishing certain specific practices has been a project of the community of nations since roughly the time of the American Revolution.

• "Mommy, that Emperor has pimples all over!"

Two More Things

• Arthur Silber on Wikileaks, Paypal, and the State:

  Cutting off WikiLeaks' means of survival, be they internet access, funding or otherwise, is another way of seeking the death of those whom they wish to destroy. Make no mistake about the ultimate aim: the U.S. government -- and a number of other governments too, I'm sure -- want to kill WikiLeaks. If they can force enough people to obey their orders to cut off WikiLeaks' lifelines, they may well succeed in time.

• Anglachel on Wikileaks, Mr. Assange, and corporate behavior:

  Assange is releasing mountains of stuff in a general broadside against pretty much every moderately powerful nation on the globe and they are acting to defend their own interests. Duh. The seeming banality of the cables is the true motivating factor for the reactions because their exposure destroys the arena for ordinary diplomatic give and take. It raises the costs and risks of interacting with other nations because, frankly, the variance between public face and private actions is where diplomacy has the chance to turn around explosive situations. To attack this mode of interaction as such is why wikileaks is being steadily, methodically shut down.

Gabba Gabba H--What the Hell Was That?

1. Anthony McCarthy at Echidne of the Snakes has, dare I say it?, a shocking proposal (which still leaves out the working class, tsk) for the President:  

   President Obama, appoint another panel of American citizens who have never had an income of more than $30,000 dollars, 18 or more of them. I'd require that they have a proven ability to read a budget and to not be afraid of mathematics. I'd require representation of public school teachers, first responders, non-profit health professionals and others with a professional or avocational experience in providing disinterested public service. Let them come up with proposals to make cuts and rearrange things. Make it regionally representative. They should be required to sign contracts to prevent them being bought off by the elites that would try to corrupt them. Give THAT commission a staff of real, non-DC insiders, an adequate budget AND THE AUTHORITY TO FORCE A VOTE IN CONGRESS THAT THE ELITE COMMISSION HAD.

   [Original in bold.] Also including the probable reaction of the "presstitutes" and the traditional dare.
   
2. Orcinus' Dave Neiwert had a few things to say last week:
   
1. Obama's vacations and Palin's foot sandwich.

   Does anyone know what Palin's talking about here? Earlier this summer, Republicans tried attacking Obama for taking a vacation, until the WaPo pointed out that Obama at that point had taken far fewer days of vacation than his predecessor, the inimitable proprietor of the Lazy W Ranch in Crawford[:]

   and

   Maybe Palin needs to take a vacation down in the Gulf of Mexico to see some of the consequences of trusting the oil companies too much, eh?

2. Is it conspiracy theory or is it fact?

   Even though liberals don't to resort to the factless fantasies that are the essence of conspiracy theories, they do happen to believe that the preceding eight years of conservative governance in America drove the country to the brink of economic and political ruin -- and their beliefs are very much grounded in real fact. They don't subscribe to the ongoing fantasy by conservatives that "the conservative alternatives - monetary restraint, lower spending, lower taxes" are any kind of solution, because it's been definitively proven that they are not. Conservatives, contrary to reality, do.

3. Conservatives apparently don't believe that Native Americans had anything to do with the survival of the Pilgrims or other early colonists.  

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

• Why Jon Carroll is great:

  I'm also grumpy about Sarah Palin, but what's the point? Not a single mind will be changed by discussing her latest idiocy. Let those who support her continue to support her; I have every confidence that they will reap exactly what they sow. Plant poison ivy, get poison ivy.

• Arthur Silber on Wikileaks and values and implications and we're-in-trouble.

  Do you have any doubt -- any doubt at all -- that many or even most of the same people who criticize WikiLeaks for its "irresponsibility" in allegedly providing support for those who seek still more war would herald WikiLeaks for its heroism and history-changing courage? That the same people would ceaselessly praise WikiLeaks as a unique and uniquely far-seeing and groundbreaking force for peace? I certainly don't.

  and

  But the WikiLeaks revolution goes far beyond that, and much deeper. The precision of its aim is revealed by the great discomfort experienced even by many of those one might have expected to be sympathetic to WikiLeaks' efforts. A closely related aspect of our training to rely on authority and obey is that we are taught to value control. The idea of losing control is deeply unnerving to many of us, which is why that became the title of a separate essay in the WikiLeaks series (and that's my personal favorite among those articles, for whatever that may be worth).

  (Two different essays. Yes, they are long and detailed.)
  
• DBK at skippy suggests something I've suspected for a long time: We need aspirational music. With videos (Sly & the Family Stone, Bill Withers).
• Cartoon.
• Terrance of Republic of T is creating a comic strip!

In Memoriam

• Gil McDougal, infielder
• Bella Akhmadulina, poet
• Stephen Solarz, Congressperson
• Mario Monicelli, director (Italy)
• Irvin Kershner, director (Hollywood)

Mr. Stewart, I'm Borrowing Your Stare

Mr. Dave Stewart.  The pitcher.  His stare turned opposing batters, and any lingering basilisks, to stone.

• Anna van Z of The Mills River Progressive on approaching economic nastiness:

  You've seen [...] a report of how China and Russia have effectively dumped the dollar for trade, and will be using their own currencies. I haven't heard anything on network news about it over the past couple of days, which strikes me as a tad remiss, to say the least.

  followed by an excerpt from Wayne Madsen of Op-Ed News:

  Four million Americans will put financial pressure on municipalities and state governments already facing bankruptcy. Unlike Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and, to some extent, Spain, which have strong central government control, the United States is a federal republic and, as such, the collapse of the economy will be state-by-state and begin at the municipality level [...]

• Ilyka reblogged Blackamazon's point-by-point rebuke of Sady's semi-sarcastic potted history of how Jezebel got to be considered a Feminist Go-To Blog even though it publishes some fairly anti-feminist stuff.  (I think I have snipped all the loose ends.)
  
  One point:

  These spaces often get high traffic, are profitable, and are rewarded with plentiful attention and praise, and the people who create spaces for feminist media but don’t do it for profit, or who do it for a profit that isn’t exactly profitable, join in the praise and support. They welcome those blogs.
  Bullshit and i call it. Women who have had a non capitalistic non white focus or popculture focus , see the articles and within HOURS are predicting and going what in the hot happy hell. The women praising are also WRITING for and at points heavily linked to these larger blogs which SURPRISE SURPRISE up their hit counts . SHOCKING AINT IT? These blogs (XX, jezebel etc. ) are quickly shown to be racist, heteronormative , transmisogynist, and CLUSTER BOMBS of entitlement. Due o the funny thing of the audiences not being well in an way shape form focused on improving women but getting women and anyone who is interested in women as a demographic

  For the record (or the CD or mp3. Whatever): Whenever my attention has been drawn to Jezebel, it has not been for a shining article on feminism/womanism. Just saying.
  

Paging Edwin Starr. Edwin Starr to the Red Courtesy Phone, Please

What investment banking is good for.  (A bit more than "War.")

The article referred to is behind the paywall (abstract here), but the audio portion, featuring James Wood demonstrating the drumming style of Keith Moon is here.

You Better Not Pout...

1. This is approximately the 1,200th post, proving once again that one can say nothing at great length on a blog given the vocabulary size of the English language and serious shamelessness.
2. Santa Claus is coming to town.

Two Things

1. Lincoln Chafee, newly elected governor of Rhode Island (actually, an aide), on same-sex marriage:

   "The governor elect feels that the issue should be addressed as soon as possible by the General Assembly, and does not believe that the question should be decided by a ballot referendum," the letter from Chafee's aide, Michael Trainor, said. “Marriage equality is a basic right that should be extended to all Rhode Islanders — a question not only of fairness and justice, but of economic development as well.”

2. Arthur Silber quotes H.L. Mencken:

   The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism.

   Luckily...

Poking the Fun

Officer: I'm sure I don't know, sir. I'm a trained police detective and all I see here is one Republican who has been beaten and mugged by another Republican.

Brooks: Ah, but to the truly trained eye, Officer, the implicit Liberalness here is evident.

Officer: (sighs) Mr. Brooks , "implicit" is from a Latin word. "Implicitus". It means "interwoven".

Brooks: You know Latin?

Officer: Yes sir.

Brooks: (mutters) Fuck me.

Officer: So explain to my untrained eye exactly in what way are Liberals "interwoven" with a crime committed against you on an empty street by a crazed Republican with a baseball bat?

Brooks: (petulant) Look, that's just the way it works.

Officer: The way what works?

Brooks: "Centrism".

Driftglass, for the win!

I've Wanted to Use This in a Sentence for Years...

I'm not a Dick-head, but I'm actually interested in this book.

Lumpy Cornmeal Mush Was Lumpy

Via Mills River Progressive:  Jon Perr at Crooks and Liars on just how bad the idea of making permanent the Bush tax cuts is.  In ten parts.

Surveying his chart of two generations of GDP growth (above), Leonhardt was surely right to ask, "Why should we believe that extending the Bush tax cuts will provide a big lift to growth?"

Worth Reading for the Following Sentence Alone

And we point cameras at her obsessively because you can never spend too much of America's mainstream political bandwidth huffing stupid straight from the bag.

Driftglass, of course.

Rift in the Space-Time Continuum

In fact, the U.S. military leadership and congressional Republicans are also on opposite sides of everything from civilian trials for terrorist suspects to closing the facility at Guantanamo Bay to Iran to torture to how the U.S. perceives the Middle East peace process in the context of our national security interests. GOP lawmakers haven't even fared well on some veterans' groups congressional scorecards.

Via Steve Benen at Washington Monthly, via Booman Tribune, which is on The Sideshow's blogroll.

Traditionally, conservatives either have or try to get the military on their side.  Something suspicious is going on here.

What I Read

Myself, I’m way less interested in the vocabulary than I am in the attitude. The attitude’s evident right away even with the proper vocabulary, but bullshit has an odor that honest trying simply does not. I am not as worried about how you say what you say as I am about why you say what you say, if that makes sense.

There's more.  ilyka is back!

Sign of Life!

Fafblog!

(Why yes, it's a dinobear licking for honey.  What's your point?)

I Seem to Have Mislaid

The link to Bernie Sanders--oh, wait.

Senator Bernie Sanders on the sheer avarice of billionaires.

The billionaires and their supporters in Congress are hell-bent on taking us back to the 1920s, and eliminating all traces of social legislation designed to protect working families, the elderly, children and the disabled. No “social contract” for them. They want it all.

And today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Face Behind the Masks

Terrance of Republic of T discusses Republican refusal to extend unemployment benefits:

Make no mistake about it. The GOP is saying "Drop dead," to millions of unemployed Americans. This is a conservatism that rejects not only the "compassionate conservatism" of the Bush administration (oxymoronic as the concept was during the Bush era), but rebels "against even the idea that compassion is a legitimate object of public policy." (Not to mention empathy.) This is a conservatism without empathy or compassion, that doesn’t pretend to have either, and is proud of it[.]

(I would think conservatism's lack of empathy and compassion would alienate the evangelicals, but I'm not sure who they think Jesus was.)

Lisa Golden (Hi, Lisa!  I know it's late!) of That's Why sent a letter to her Senators about this a couple days ago.  If you are cursed with have a conservative Senator, perhaps you should let them know that starving constituents have been known to do desperate things.  (Note:  I am not advocating doing desperate things--I leave that to the faux populists of the air.)

It's the Subsonics

Sound of doom.  (Via holyoutlaw on Dreamwidth.)

Oh, And...

Via the White House Blog's feed on my Network page at Dreamwidth (is that enough serendipity for you?), an article from Bloomberg.com's News side:

Health insurers last year gave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce $86.2 million that was used to oppose the health-care overhaul law, according to tax records and people familiar with the donation.

Remember: they were paying that kind of money to continue weaseling on paying your bill should you heaven forbid actually get sick.

Juggling Six Things At Once

So this may not be coherent.

I'm quoting and bolding a statement of Avedon's made in response to an Americablog posting that needs to be emblazoned somewhere (Hmmmm.  Maybe?):

Every time I hear someone saying it will take "a long time" or "years" or "a generation" to undo the mess we're in, I think, "Have you no understanding of history?" It was a miracle the Founders created what they did, and it took unique circumstances and thousands of years to get to that point. You think you're gonna come back from this? Unless something stops this train-wreck now - and I don't see anything like that happening - you can kiss it good-bye. Forever.

The Galt's Gulch gang are too busy hugging themselves to notice; the Tea Party people are mostly going "Nuh-uh, TV tells me so, it's trooooooo-oo!" and conservative/reactionary/Republicans are smacking their lips where no one can see.

When I was a child, I believed that if I could just talk to Fidel Castro, he would stop scaring everybody about Communism.

I don't believe that anymore.  I'd like to be able to cling to the illusion that people given good data make reasonable decisions, but that illusion is melting.

Years ago, I knew somebody who thought he'd survive Nazi Germany.

In Memoriam

Theodore W. Kheel, The Mediator.

...And It Makes a Humming Sound...

Have I mentioned that Orcinus is back?  Mr. Neiwert cites Kevin Phillips, who apparently foresaw the current economic situation, and concludes with:

Until we start electing Democrats who really want to put Americans back to work making things and recognize that Wall Street's speculative utopia is a global nightmare, we're going to be caught in this trap, and real economic recovery will remain out of reach.

Time for a left-wing populist uprising, perhaps?

Echidne of the Snakes, in the course of reporting on Digby's poking at a decision by networks and some websites not to carry ads for a "botanical aphrodisiac," even though Viagra and Cialis ads at the same networks and websites are rampant (complicated enough for you?), makes an observation:

We are finally beginning to notice that what everyone calls "sex" is really "sex as heterosexual guys see it". Whether anything about that will change is a whole different color of fishes, but at least we can start a conversation on pornography and related matters with a shared understanding that it's not "sex" we are talking about.

Driftglass works Stand on Zanzibar into the profane review of Sunday news/discussion fora.  No, you have to read it.  Although among the dramatis personae:

Establishmentarian Marionette David Gregory asked “But don’t we have to have an Adult Conversation, with people...?” of a panel composed almost entirely of has-beens, sell-outs and depraved thugs he himself had assembled.

Gee, the Bath's Getting Awfully Warm...

Anglachel:

The battle to properly institutionalize a movement goal, for example having health care for all on the model of Medicare instead of some hodgepodge of tepid ideas and bones thrown to the insurance companies, or declaring that Social Security is not in trouble and will not be on the table instead of allowing it to be nibbled to death by ducks, or that the banks need to be reformed and their criminal management brought to trial instead of handing them bags of cash, or declaring that there will be a stimulus package big enough to jump start the economy instead of preaching fiscal austerity and allowing unemployment to rise, is what a president is supposed to do.

Anthony McCarthy at Echidne of the Snakes:

[Quote from Ted Ralls' book]

Even if a leader like Obama were inclined to push for the sweeping reforms that might save American late-stage capitalism from itself, as did Franklin D. Roosevelt -- and there is no evidence that the thought has crossed Obama's mind -- his fellow powerbrokers, fixated on quarterly profit statements and personal position, would never allow it.
The media talks a lot about reform. But it's too late for nips and tucks. Reform can only fix a system if the system is viable and open to change. Neither is true about the United States of America.

...Nor can we do it with the lazy click of a mouse as we send another $20.00 to Move-On.org. No, it can only be done by a radical change, and I mean RADICAL, namely, a radical change in HOW WE SPEND OUR MONEY.
If there is something predictable about a call for a real boycott that would have a real impact, it is that the cynics and the slackers will discourage even considering trying it. They will say that it is unrealistic because it is destined to fail. [...] 

One of the first things the left could do would be to BOYCOTT ALL FOX PROGRAMS, ALL OF THEM AND ALL OF THE MURDOCH EMPIRE'S MEDIA PRODUCTS . A left that can't give up The Simpsons to avoid fascism and civil war is a left that has already given in.

The Sideshow:

None of our "Deficit Hawks", of course, are talking about getting rid of the genuinely wasteful public expenditures that harm rather than help us - an over-inflated war-making machine that squanders billions on destructive policies that actually make the world a more dangerous place for all of us, for example. And a security state that terrorizes ordinary people going about their ordinary lives while, with the help of the odiously destructive War on (Some) Drugs, imprisoning more hapless citizens than any other country in the world does.

[...]

For quite a while, now, The Sideshow has been trying to remind people that what the conservative ruling class wants is not merely to make money, but to push the rest of us back down into the dirt. The hard-scrabble existence you and your children face is not just an unfortunate by-product of their "grown-up" program, it is the goal.

Polityx

1. Brilliant at Breakfast has two links for lunch:
   
   1. "Security Theater Update," featuring a letter about the radiation levels of the scanners and the problems therewith, and do you want to be the guinea pig?  Not to mention the charming alternative of being groped (it's time for someone to invent flexible clear plastic armor or even a flexible clear plastic "chastity" belt; and cross-country driving is looking attractive again) by strangers publicly or privately.
   2. "A few plutocrats..." or 

      But as long as we are willing to vote for people who get out on the stump and say, "Look! Look at that [black guy/illegal immigrant/Muslim/Indian guy/welfare mother/pick a boogeyman any boogeyman]! HE's your problem!" -- while they lift our wallets from our back pockets; as long as Americans jump at the red meat tossed at them by opportunistic hatemongers like Sarah Palin and Rand Paul; as long as we persist in this fantasy that if we just stuff enough taxpayer cash into the pockets of the wealthy they might hire a few people, we're going to continue to be like the proverbial frog in the slowly-heating water on the stove -- unable to see our participation in our own doom.

      With bonus analysis by Kevin Hall at McClatchy.
2. Anglachel anatomizes the Democratic Party:
   

   The trouble with the Democratic Party, an organization that is the worst in politics except for all the others, is that it has not discovered a way to recombine the populist and progressive modes of its liberalism in a way that matches the force of the New Deal coalition. Until it purged itself of the Dixiecrats, it could not do this. Since doing so, the progressive faction has not cared to do this.

3. Shakesville's Melissa McEwan writes:
   

   It's not about the "right fight." I don't know any feminist/womanist who wouldn't give anything to never have to worry about rollbacks of Roe ever again. I don't know any LGBTQI activist who wouldn't give anything to never have to spend another moment advocating for rights LGBTQI people don't have ever again. I don't know any anti-racist activist who wouldn't give anything to never have to be concerned with a person of color being denied access or opportunity ever again. I don't know any advocate for people with physical disabilities, people with neurological disabilities, undocumented immigrants, the poor, the uninsured, the unemployed, fat people, non-Christians, abuse survivors, veterans, and/or other marginalized people who wouldn't give anything to never have to fight for equality denied or be obliged to teaspoon oceans of bigotry ever again.

Veterans Day

It's Veterans Day. Even in this funky corner of the galaxy.

Making Light doesn't seem to have its usual crop of links on the Great War, but:

1. bossymarmalade on Dreamwidth reposted the video on Canadian Chinese WWII veterans (link going to this year's repost) with more details (it's still heartbreaking). 
2. Native American Netroots has an article on the situation of the serving military with regard to state tax laws and/or whether they are domiciled on reservations, and it is not surprising to learn that information is not particularly widespread.  
3. Shark-fu's post from last year is so on point that I'm relinking it. 
4. [whoops, wrong again], but last year's post is still pertinent [and this year's post is ongoing documentation]..
5. Prof. Susurro's evocative pictures, with:

   I am grateful to the members of my family who fought in wars to stop Hitler and Fascism, and glad for those members who survived the unjust war in Vietnam to make it home and fight against anymore unjust deployments and raise awareness about the real needs & rights of the Vietnamese and Cambodian people. To all the military families who have sacrificed for our safety and the safety of women and children in times of crisis and ethnic cleansing, in Somalia, Bosnia, and all around the world, thank you. I am forever grateful to those veterans who fought for freedom of enslaved African Americans, founded civil rights organizations, and continue to struggle for the equality of marginalized people inside and outside the military. And to those who continue to sacrifice and to protect innocent civilians from those on both sides who think their lives do not matter or kill them with prejudice, thank you and come home safe.

6. What I said in '08.

[Crossposted and edited to correct misconception.]

Blast from the Past

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Idiculous, to use the formulation at Shakesville) wants to investigate, investigate, investigate, and poke his nose in to the bank bailouts, the stimulus, and health care reform, and he wants to create seven (7) subcommittees.  Via skippy the bush kangaroo's Cookie Jill, who adds:

so, while seniors are worrying about medicare/medicaid being cut, while millions of unemployed people worry that they won't get an extention on their unemployment benefits, while thousands of families worry about where they will live after they lose their home in the foreclosure mess, issa and his bully buddies are spending money to sit around on their fat a****s and flap their lips.

In order to save some time for Rep. Issa and his crew, the following mysteries have already been solved:

1. Some bird named Darrell Issa was a major contributor to the Gray Davis gubernatorial recall election back in 2003.  
2. The Padres choked.  Face it.
3. Contrary to the advice of William Goldman, George W. Bush (remember him?) started not one, but two land wars in Asia.
4. The Beatles are who broke up the Beatles.
5. Dr. Richard Kimble's wife was murdered by the one-armed man.
6. Contadina put 8 great tomatoes in that little bitty can.
7. Everyone rolls their eyes when the Chargers are mentioned.
8. Piltdown Man was a hoax.
9. Both Alaska and Hawai'i have been states since 1959.
10. "Penny-wise, pound-foolish" is not equivalent to "fiscally responsible."
11. Popcorn just basically tastes better with butter.
12. People move to Florida because 
1. Except during hurricane season, the weather is So Much Better, and
2. All their friends are there.
13. I wouldn't say that all virulent homophobes are secretly self-hating gays, but lately that's the way to bet.   There seem to be quite a few in the Republican Party...
14. The Highland Clearances (in Scotland) really happened.
15. Businesses, like children, need regulation, or they will (as they have) run amuck.
16. He got to the parking space before you did.
17. Global warming/climate change does not give a rat's patoot about anyone's politics.
18. Partitioning nations was a mistake we are still paying for.
19. Women don't get recreational abortions, any more than men get recreational castrations.
20. Steve Perry won't be singing in Journey in the foreseeable future.

The Lesson of 2010

Terrance at Republic of T analyzes Republican/Tea party victories, Democratic defeats, and the reasons therefor:

• Part I;
• Part II;
• Part III; and
• Part IV.

Hint:  Neither "bipartisanship" nor "moving to the right" are solutions, at least not solutions the American people, that wondrous mass of contradictions, want.  Also, dismantling and discrediting the 50 state strategy, which was successful in 2008?  Was--what is the technical term again?  Oh, right--stupid, short-sighted, and defeatist.  It's like the Florida Marlins trading everybody after winning the Series.  Think the Yankees won 27 World Championships by dumping their roster at year's end?  Because if you do, I have a nice bridge I'm unloading this weekend, cheap.

Cover Story

Weird analysis of the last election by Hendrik Hertzberg.

Monday, Monday (Ba-daaa, ba-da-da-da)

• Stuff invented in Oakland, CA (and stuff that wasn't):  The Wave (sorry, metsgrrl), the fortune cookie folding machine, fantasy football, et al.
• Glenn Smith at Firedoglake asks the question that's been bugging me for years:  "Why the Fear and Loathing?"  (via The Sideshow)

  I don’t buy the standard line that the anger is all about economic worries. I have economic worries, too, and they haven’t led me to hate brown people or black people or city people or educated people.

• Via Making Light, the BNP brought low in part by marmite.
• The dangers and lesson of "put[ting] two fingers up once too often."  (via Oursin at Dreamwidth.)

  Of course, at 49, I am not the same person I was at 16. The older you get, the more you realise that the complexities of life are unknown territory to the teenage mind: this is not a defence, more a belated plea of mitigation. The past may be another country, where things were done differently, yet even at 16, I knew I had done something terribly wrong.

  (I do know how to blurb, I do I do!)
  
• Ta-Nehisi Coates on "The Cops We Deserve."  He has examples.  (I'd just like to say that I think I deserve better cops than that, and probably so do you.)
• ETA:  Orcinus is back from the grave suspended animation!

Cynical? Moi?

OK.  Certain amount of duplication, but not enough to call it crossposting.

1. Jim Yeager on a scary statistic.
2. Two from Anglachel:
1. Who the Democrats are losing;
2. Audacity deficit?  from Mr. Krugman.
3. In memoriam:  Lance Christie, co-founder of Church of All Worlds.
4. Lisa Factora-Borchers at My Ecdysis on the use and misuse of the term "kyriarchy."  
5. The Republican solution to Life, the Universe, and Everything.  With a side order of Wiscon and principles of feminism/womanism.
6. Not wearing the orange jumpsuit and upholding the double standard (ie, IOKIYAR).

Tiny Buried Blades of Hope

Brilliant at Breakfast must be full of fnords today, because as I sat down to read it, I had a horrible sneezing fit and all my sinuses liquidated.  That's years worth of Jello.  I copied a statement before the eyes started watering and the palate itch returned.

Here's the statement:

Florida has been the receipient of a shitload of Federal stimulus funds, but not one Democratic candidate in this state made note of that. And Florida is just one example.

La La I Can't Hear You...

Scott Horton notes that since Kyrgyzstan's April revolution, their politicians have noticed that what the American government really cares about is the air base.

Also:

Notwithstanding a decision to terminate military aid in 2004 and fairly strong language from the Bush Administration following the massacre in Andijan in 2005, Uzbekistan was able to purchase more than $50 million worth of training and equipment directly from U.S. companies and over $12 million more through U.S. government channels. Indeed, the shutoff of American direct assistance in Uzbekistan seems to have coincided with the mysterious appearance in Uzbekistan of prime U.S. security contractors such as Blackwater.

Ya think?

In Memoriam

Sparky Anderson, baseball manager.

UH-oh!

So in Bible study this evening (which, as usual, got sidetracked, but that is part of its charm), somehow we got onto Our Lady of Fatima and one of the visions of one (two?) of the children.

They were shown a vision of souls tormented in hell, and instructed that these were souls whom no one had prayed for and to pray for those who had no one to pray for them.

I didn't know that.

I have been praying for those who have no one to pray for them during what I call the free prayer period (yes, I'm aware there's probably an actual name.  I'm having a braino right now, OK?) for a few months now.  Sometimes, if I don't, someone else does.  I don't remember hearing the phrase before.  It...just sort of came to me, and I was thinking mostly about the homeless.

Something larger than myself.  OK.

It's November?

Because Santa Claus is back on the case!

Yes

The World Champion San Francisco Giants!

Late Electioneering

Shark-fu is still Getting Out The Vote.

Pecunium writes on a particular election campaign and explains his reasons not to vote for the Republican candidate, which goes beyond the party affiliation and gets into history.  It's a terrific piece of writing, too.

At this rate, I'll have to take the mail ballot in tomorrow. [grimace]

In Memoriam

Theodore Sorensen, adviser to President Kennedy.

He's pretty much the last of them, isn't he?

Something Scary for Halloween...

Via Anglachel's Journal, Yves Smith's op-ed piece written for the New York Times, "How the Banks Put the Economy Underwater."

Evidence is mounting that these requirements were widely ignored. Judges are noticing: more are finding that banks cannot prove that they have the standing to foreclose on the properties that were bundled into securities. If this were a mere procedural problem, the banks could foreclose once they marshaled their evidence. But banks who are challenged in many cases do not resume these foreclosures, indicating that their lapses go well beyond minor paperwork.

And Anglachel, taking off from a Brad DeLong article, ponders the true lesson of 1994:

DeLong seems to think that the lesson of 1994 on Democrats is that "Democratic senators do themselves no good either in the next world or in this when they block sensible initiatives from Democratic presidents," but neatly sidesteps the reason that block of senators was blocking sensible initiatives from a Democratic president in the first place. The fantasy of bi-partisanship remains strong among precisely those Stevensonians who thought (and think) that teaching lessons to hicks is more important than having functional power.

In Memoriam

Leigh Van Valen, evolutionary biologist.

[crossposted because fascinating.]

Occasionally I hit the sidebar at Brilliant at Breakfast.  This time I got Princess Sparkle Pony, who reads Politico so I don't have to:

Politico's "Arena," where important questions are met by talking points and press releases from a diverse group of hacks, lobbyists, publicists, and other compulsive faxers, today asked if it was "refreshing" that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell had promised an agenda of total, nihilistic obstructionism rather than "the usual platitudes about bipartisanship and working across the aisle."

For a change they got hardball:

Is this question a joke? When one of the country's two major political parties announces that it has no intention of joining in trying to solve the major problems the nation faces, that is an obvious scandal. POLITICO is enabling U.S. decline by implying otherwise. No country with 10+ percent unemployment, decaying infrastructure, major wars to fight and educational and health crises can survive the sort of political extremism for obstructionist purposes that the GOP is willfully and proudly engaging in. Only the super rich who want mansions in enclaves at home or abroad benefit from this.

Americans of all persuasions have said they do not want this, but media outlets continue to use fake "debates" like this for marketing purposes.

That would be Theda Skocpol, sociology and government professor.  (She has a Wikipedia entry.)

(Princess Sparkle Pony is now Peteykins, but the blog is still Princess Sparkle Pony.)

I also popped into "Doghouse" Riley, because I never remember that Bats Left/Throws Right is not a baseball blog.

Oh, and McCarthy of Echidne of the Snakes on media consolidation and why NPR is no help.

One Nice Political Anecdote

Southern Beale tells a story about her Congressman.

Remember BP?

Lots of Sense!

Terrance of Republic of T, of course.

There is more than one kind of “boot to the face,” and the Tea Partiers don’t even own the “boot” with which they willingly and gleefully stomp the face of anyone with the temerity to tell them otherwise. The Tea Partiers don’t have the gold, and thus even if they “take the country back” it won’t be theirs. They are merely taking for people who believe they should own it by virtue of nothing more than their monetary might.

The Tea Party gets played.

Scrutiny

Scott Horton on the Washington Post and WikiLeaks:

It’s also untrue that the new disclosures contain no “major revelations.” It will take some time to fully digest this material, but the disclosure of a Fragmentary Order (“Frago”) authorizing soldiers not to investigate cases of torture that do not involve coalition forces is extremely important. It counts as evidence of high-level policy to countenance war crimes and violations of the prohibition on torture, which requires not only investigation but also intervention. Recall this astonishing exchange that occurred between Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace at a DOD press conference in November 2005. Pace stated “it is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene to stop it…” Rumsfeld interrupted and contradicted him, but Pace stood his ground. He was reciting well anchored military doctrine. He was also overruled by Rumsfeld.

The WaPo editors think this is “nothing,” but a court or tribunal examining the matter would likely come to a starkly different conclusion.

If Euripides...Then Eumenides

So next week is Election Day (in the United States, that is) and the media is pushing for Republican or Tea Party victories in the House and Senate races, as well as those states choosing governors and legislators and occasionally judges, not to mention massed ads for all the candidates.

Frederik Pohl, bless him, has a simple algorithm for who should get your vote.

When a politician lets lobbyists “suggest” changes in legislation he isn’t working for the voters any more, he’s working for the people who are giving him money. I’m assuming that isn’t the way you want it.

Arthur Silber has largely written the entire process off.

Also not by the way: this is not at all to say you should give up hope for your personal future, or surrender the desire for happiness and fulfillment. The problem for most people is that they place hope in all the wrong things, and look for happiness and fulfillment in all the wrong places.

And Driftglass remembers 2004 and features a long screed originally posted at The News Blog in 2004.

Commencing with a long quote from Bob Somerby, Anglachel takes a poke at "clueless elites":

That seems to be the true cultural divide - those who want to talk about eroding wages and those who want to pat themselves on the back for their moral superiority.

Personally, I find that if I am yelling "Liar!" during a political ad, I should probably not vote for that candidate.  (It is already on record to whom I refer.)

[crossposted]

ETA:  Shark-fu has not given up. Also, belated hat tip to FKB.

Summing Up

Via Mills River Progressive, George Monbiot of the UK Guardian (I can't remember the proper misspelling right now) assesses the Tea Party Movement.  With footnotes!  Hint:  He compares it to something used on sporting fields.  (The link given at MRP is still arguing with Safari.  Guardian direct link here.)

Astroturfing is now taking off in the United Kingdom. Earlier this month Spinwatch showed how a fake grassroots group set up by health insurers helped shape the Tories’ NHS reforms(18). Billionaires and corporations are capturing the political process everywhere; anyone with an interest in democracy should be thinking about how to resist them. Nothing is real any more. Nothing is as it seems.

The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress

Jane Smiley reviews Republican Gomorrah (for the Huffington Post) and notes their relation to responsibility and the wielding of power in ways that would not shock Arthur Silber or Dr. Alice Miller.

And power plays are the key to right wing psychology. Right wing psychology is the other thing that Blumenthal has to offer. At the periphery of this world is your run-of-the-mill bully, a man like Jack Abramoff, whose brutality is well remembered by his high school classmates, but who sang like a bird once he was caught. At the center of is James Dobson, a much more destructive figure than Abramoff, who advocates, in the strongest terms, child beating, and not only child-beating, but dog-beating. At one point he brags about going after the family canine (who weighed twelve pounds) and engaging in "the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast." As for children, the goal is to keep beating the child until "he wants(s) to crumple on the breast of his parent." In other words, Dobson is a proud sadist who thinks sadism is kind of funny, and who, over the years, has successfully advocated sadism as the only workable form of child-rearing.

And not consensual sadism, either.  Via The Sideshow.

Selling Hot Elections

Southern Beale on the vast sums of money spent on elections by both parties.

The only people campaign advertising makes a difference to is the people selling the air time. And it makes a huge difference to them. It will continue to make a difference to them until the candidates and campaigns themselves decide TV advertising isn’t effective. When that happens, the local and national networks will have a huge sad. Maybe as big of a sad as the one we’ll see by the RSCC, RCCC, DSCC, DCCC, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and every other group with their hand out seeking donations for ad buys that we could all do without.

(Schools?  Highway repair?  A Jedi marketer cares not for these things.)

When Television Was Called Books

The New York Times Book Review has a roundup of books on liberalism and conservatism, in which they explain:

1. Think of it as a distinction between “action liberals” and “movement liberals.” Action liberals are policy-oriented pragmatists who use their heads to get something important done, even if their arid deal-making and Big Money connections often turn off the base. Movement liberals can sometimes specialize in logical arguments (e.g., Garry Wills), but they are more often dreamy idealists whose hearts and moral imagination can power the deepest social change (notably the women’s movement and the civil rights movement). They frequently over indulge in fine whines, appear naïve about political realities and prefer emotionally satisfying gestures to incremental but significant change. Many Democrats are an uneasy combination of realpolitik and “gesture politics,” which makes for a complicated approach toward governing.

2. Republicans’ future electoral fortunes will depend on domestic policy and specifically on whether they can reconnect with “small-c” conservatism — the conservatism whose mottoes are “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” and “Mind your own business,” and the opposite of which is not liberalism but utopianism. The Bush administration was a time of “big-C” Conservatism, ideological conservatism, which the party pursued with mixed results. As far as social issues were concerned, this ideology riveted a vast bloc of religious conservatives to the party, and continues to be an electoral asset (although that bloc, by some measures, is shrinking). Had gay marriage not been on several state ballots in 2004, John Kerry might now be sitting in the White House.

Well, actually the articles meep about both parties being in trouble and out of touch while reviewing several books attempting to give that impression without giving that impression.

Subconscious Weirdness

Wink Martindale?

2010 World Series

Texas v. San Francisco.  Wednesday.  All the players one loves to hate have retired or gone to other teams.

Oh, And...

Bob Herbert on how we treat the troops that we are supposed to be supporting.

One of the things we have long known about warfare is that the trouble follows the troops home. The Times published an article this week by Aaron Glantz, a reporter with The Bay Citizen news organization in San Francisco, that focused on the extraordinary surge of fatalities among Afghanistan and Iraq veterans. These young people died, wrote Mr. Glantz, “not just as a result of suicide, but also of vehicle accidents, motorcycle crashes, drug overdoses or other causes after being discharged from the military.”

Apparently I Missed the News

Texas is going to the Series.  Nolan Ryan talks about his first postseason Series since the '69 Mets.

Candy Corn

1. Anglachel does some history.

   Looking down your upper-middle class nose at the party loyalists who are sliding into poverty because of erosion of wages, pensions, job security, health care and related practical matters because they're fat and white and probably are racists doesn't earn you many adherents.

2. bfp questions the double standard for hateful commentators.

   what the fuck is UP with all the people of color in media being fired over one comment (some of them really questionable in their objectionability see: helen thomas)—instantaneously dismissed within *hours* to *days* of the objectionable comment—whereas actual hate speech, continuous, almost fucking *monotonous* hate speech gets shifted out to the public *daily*—*hourly* by white broadcasters with nary a comment? FOX news, rush limbaugh, glen beck, lou dobbs—their *hate* speech is in every single thing that they *say*. continous day in and day out.

3. Anthony McCarthy warns about the Supreme Court and the Senate.

   For people my age, who were brought up to revere the Supreme Court during the Earl Warren years, facing that reality is very difficult. It's the high priesthood of “justice”, holding seats on the Court which used to be held by far more just people, which is actively and deliberately dismantling, not only the progress in civil rights of the past century, not only destroying protections from wealthy corporations and the robber barons that own them, they are actively and intentionally subverting the possibility of self-government by a population on the basis of accurate information.

Well.  The temptation is to shrug this off as hyperbole.  You know, like Reagan couldn't be as bad as the left was painting him?

Y-y-y-yeeeeaaaaahhh.  Right.

Panicking is a bad idea, but:  Take note of shoals and outcroppings and steer accordingly, because your boat is already shipping water.

Info Collection

The New York Times has put up the Iraq archive:

A close analysis of the 391,832 documents helps illuminate several important aspects of this war:

¶ The deaths of Iraqi civilians — at the hands mainly of other Iraqis, but also of the American military — appear to be greater than the numbers made public by the United States during the Bush administration.

¶ While the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Americans, particularly at the Abu Ghraib prison, shocked the American public and much of the world, the documents paint an even more lurid picture of abuse by America’s Iraqi allies — a brutality from which the Americans at times averted their eyes.

¶ Iran’s military, more than has been generally understood, intervened aggressively in support of Shiite combatants, offering weapons, training and sanctuary and in a few instances directly engaging American troops.

¶ The war in Iraq spawned a reliance on private contractors on a scale not well recognized at the time and previously unknown in American wars. The documents describe an outsourcing of combat and other duties once performed by soldiers that grew and spread to Afghanistan to the point that there are more contractors there than soldiers. [An article on this topic is scheduled to appear in The New York Times on Sunday.]

The Iraqi documents were made available to The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian, the French newspaper Le Monde and the German magazine Der Spiegel on the condition that they be embargoed until now. WikiLeaks has never stated where it obtained the information, although an American Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, has been arrested and accused of being a source of classified material.

They got it from WikiLeaks.  This is in the intro.

Three Unconnected Things

Three items from Scott Horton:

1. Analysis of the situation in Iraq via a 6-question interview with Nir Rosen (author of Aftermath);
2. Slight sarcasm in an explanation of why Attorney General Holder would defend Don't Ask, Don't Tell;
3. A report on secret prisons in Afghanistan.

Maybe not so unconnected.

In Memoriam

Elizabeth L. Sturz, another of those hidden lives of women, and an example of privilege used for good.

All Around the Cobbler's Bench

First:

!!!I'm on Avedon's blogroll!!!
Ahem.

So I guess I'll have to be serious and stuff.

Anglachel writes on the disadvantages of locavorism, getting at one of the things that bug me:

But the bigger picture is that if every person living in Manhattan showed up at the Union Square green market, there wouldn't be enough of these wonderful eggs laid by contented chickens and lovingly packaged by organic Elves as they perform interpretive dance (or however they get in their containers) to go around.

The rest is good, too.  (Another article links to Safe Browsing.)

Mills River Progressive covers unemployment and outsourcing.  Brilliant at Breakfast analyzes spending cuts.  Echidne of the Snakes looks at the Gallup poll on Social Security and Medicare and sees...a wrongness.

One short bit from Scott Horton at Harper's:

The truth at the center of this work is the deforming power of ideology, its power to cause misery in the lives of ordinary people it claims to raise up.

Speaking of Sports

Via Anthony McCarthy at Echidne of the Snakes, an article by Sue Wilson at Buzzflash about the Fairness Doctrine and why we don't have it anymore.

In Memoriam

Benoit Mandelbrot.  That Mandelbrot.

*Sniffle*

Real Live Preacher, which I've been reading almost since its inception as a Salon blog (in fact, I think I still have that bookmark [yup!] in a folder of bookmarks), may be going away.

i was a preacher for a long time and i did the best i could with it and i even liked preaching and thinking i was helping people
i was real live preacher for a long time and i did the best i could with it and i even liked writing and i think i wrote some good things here
but every thing has its season and if you dont know when that season is over you end up shrinking and becoming small and protective and boring so i have to say goodbye to real live preacher i have to shut this down

He does not sound as though he's in a good place.

[crossposted]

Oh, And...

Daisy Deadhead begins to dissect the American left.

And my question is, why doesn't this happen now? Why has the right-wing Tea Party movement been so successful in cashing in on class resentment?

Where is the Left in these harsh economic times?

I have decided the Left is largely IN ABSENTIA because the American Left now comes from the elite class itself; their political convictions are basically a reflection of the warmed-over liberalism they obediently ingested while attending Good Colleges. They believe what they believe out of a sense of common decency, fairness and goodness. But not because most American Leftists have experienced classism themselves.

Read the rest; it's all good. (Note:  This may dovetail into some arguments on the "Left."  I do not have a dogma in this fight.)

Analogies of Superficial Applicability

Slate article on liberals, conservatives, messages, and marriage counseling.  Pointed at by wcg.

If you could haul liberal and conservative America into a counselor's office, the left would produce loads of evidence showing that conservatism is regularly anti-intellectual when it comes to questions of evolution or global climate change. Sarah Palin really did evince a limited knowledge of foreign affairs during the 2008 election. George W. Bush really did say "misunderestimate." Conservatives would tell the counselor about how liberals are always slow to see threats to national security, always "blaming America" and always quick to support international institutions such as the U.N. and the International Court of Justice.

At least the article was not written by Saletan or Hitchens or Yoffe.

Legislators think people earning the minimum wage are overpaid.

It’s not just that conservatives are opposed to minimum wage. It’s like with Social Security. It’s not that conservatives are opposed to Social Security, the program. They are, of course. It’s that their really opposed to the idea of social security (with a small “s”) for any American who work for a living and make less and a few $100K a year, at least. What they’re in favor of is social security only for those whose bank statements prove they deserve it.

It’s not that conservatives are opposed to a minimum wage. They are, of course. What they’re in favor of minimal wages for everyone. Or almost everyone, anyway.

Read the whole thing, because that fountain pen? is pointed at you.

Fafnir Posts a Video

It's 53 seconds long and makes me want to break out a Janet Jackson song.  Oooo-oooo-o-hooooo, yeah!

In Memoriam

Joan Sutherland, soprano.

In Memoriam

Solomon Burke, singer/songwriter.

Dance Dance Sing Revolution Sputnik

Media Justice at flip flopping joy on the Jiggly Boo Dance Crew:

I knew I wanted to join. Every part of my body and mind and spirit needed this. I even began to shamelessly plug the crew to my friends, encouraging them to join with me. One of my current homegirls, Sparkle, who I’ve mentioned before , decided to go for it and signed up for an interview. When we first met Kantara and Alice at the NYU campus, of which I graduated from 10 years ago with a masters degree but still got lost, I knew it was love. Not just love like puppy, butterflies-in-the-stomach love, but love in all the most revolutionary ways. Love for our bodies, love for how we move, love for what we bring, love for simply surviving in a world that doesn’t love us back in the same way we love the world.

Yesterday I croaked sang with a pair of subway musicians (I really do know all the words to "Hard Day's Night") for three songs.  And now I'll have to avoid that station for at least a month!  They were really advertising a church but I'll take free music wherever I can get it.

Dancers of size other than stick are routinely disappeared.  (Judith Jamison, you say, and I say that by and large, you should excuse the expression, her size got disappeared.  Because she was Judith Jamison.  Still is.)  I'm looking forward to further dispatches from Media Justice.

[crossposted]

Norton Nork, You've Done It Again

Lisa Golden on the unforeseen consequences of privatizing services.  It's about the Cranick matter, but not just about the Cranick matter:

People who think we can have nice, safe, clean communities with good educational systems, and up to date infrastructure without having to pay the taxes to support it are simply idiotic. Someone has to pay for it. That's why we have the common good and the tax structure. We all contribute and if we don't, our houses may not burn to the ground, but the taxing body has some kind of legal way of getting the money from you.

Being opposed to the common good and the taxes that support it seems just fine until your house is on fire or you get hit with a bunch of new fees (shifted from taxes to fees) when you go to renew your license plate or your kids are now in classes with thirty kids or more or you flatten your tire because the road debris on I75 is left to lay because budget cuts mean road maintenance has been reduced to next to nothing.

Read the whole thing, please.

A Medley of Extemporanea

1. Bugs Bunny on DVD.  Actually, the review of Bugs Bunny on 2 DVDs.  Which I must now get, you'll excuse me...
2. Metsgrrl's ranking of teams she's rooting for in the postseason, since the Mets didn't make it.
3. Via Shakesville, student finds secret tracking device on his car.  FBI wants and gets it back. By the way, the trackers don't have battery packs anymore.
4. ETA:  Tiger Beatdown throws a dead fish in Ted Hughes' grave.

Ave Atque Vale

So I was having a look around and noticed Bitch Ph.D. on somebody's blogroll, and said, gee, I haven't looked in on that in ages.

Good thing I did.  They're shutting down.

Déjà Vu

We Have All Been Here Before...

(There was so much I wanted to link to that the brain just shut down.  Republic of T is up to the third installment of the Eddie Long saga, Echidne of the Snakes has two posts on feminism, and there is the continuing mess that is the U.S. government.  Conservatives want to preserve bullies and puppy mills [the former so that there will continue to be conservatives; the latter so that something, human or not, will continue to suffer].  Also, it's election season, and I am just putting all that stuff through the shredder.  Without reading it.  I am disgusted with people, and you all are very lucky that I am not God, because it would be Ugly City on this planet.)

The War on Education

Via B@B, from Tata's blog:  Why you don't want to union-bust the teachers' union.

If you take a step back, busting up the teachers’ union has two other goals: 1. to de-stabilize one of the largest employers of women in this country, and one of the few where being a woman is only a small impediment; 2. to privatize a large public revenue stream. Once the union is wrecked, you can count on whole towns closing their public schools the same way you now see towns replacing roads they don’t want to maintain with gravel. De-stabilizing the teachers’ union is the path to permanent feudalism.

And the Middle Ages were not nearly as much fun as the SCA makes them look.  (I suspect that a lot of Tea Party people would not like where they'd end up under the feudal system.)