Picking Your Feet in Poughkeepsie

Even the Economist thinks U.S. locks up too many people.  (A hard copy of this issue turned up at the laundromat.)

I Wonder If That Includes The MicroPrint Version

Oxford English Dictionary may be online-only next edition.

Also

No three people can agree on The Perfect Pizza.

(Statement courtesy of two threads involving pizza ingredients in the last week.)

Where The Money Goes

Hint:  Not to you.

Thanks to Mills River Progressive, which has a link to antiwar.com.

The Columnist at the New York Times I Actually Read

Probably crossposting this:

Bob Herbert.

Facts and reality mean nothing to Beck. And there is no road too low for him to slither upon. The Southern Poverty Law Center tells us that in a twist on the civil rights movement, Beck said on the air that he “wouldn’t be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and fire hoses are released or opened on us. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of us go to jail — just like Martin Luther King did — on trumped-up charges. Tough times are coming.”

He makes you want to take a shower.

I would only add "And scrub!"

Just in Case

The headline on this article is "David Broder Rushed to Hospital for Emergency Craniorectal Procedure."

Screen shot, because it happened.  (And because someone in editorial will clutch pearls.  Thankfully, not any of our pearls.)

[ETA:  Welcome, Shakesvilleans!  Pull up a chair, have some coffee or tea!  I think that pot of essay might finally be ready to boil.]

Unrelated Snippets

1. Cookie Jill marks the birth of Howard Zinn.
2. At Noli Irritare Leones, a breakdown of the First Amendment and what that has to do with the community center to be built in the former Burlington Coat Factory.
3. Mills River Progressive:  Hey Wingnuts, I got your "Welfare Queens" right here!

R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Find Out What It Means to Me

Dave Hingsburger of Rolling Around in my Head waxing eloquent on slurring people who are slower to learn:

No matter what the fearless defenders of freedom of speech say, there is a huge difference between a word to describe something that slows fire and someone who learns differently. There's a huge difference between a thing and a person - but, no, maybe not. After reading their diatribes regarding their freedom to spit out hurtful words, they may, really, not see people with disabilities as fully human with a human heart capable human hurt.

People mock the concept of respectful language regarding disability. People make odd arguments about the latest gaffe by ... no, I won't say her name here ... they say 'she was saying that of herself not anyone else' - um, so? The word she used was one referring, not to a commercial product, but to an oppressed minority. Yet the debate rages on and the fierceness of the attack by those who are proponents of the use of hate language are both hysterical and who often purposely miss the point. One wonders what's at stake - their personal liberty to hurt others?

It's time to recognize that the 'R' word is an attack against who people with with intellectual disabilities 'are', it is an attack against the group that they belong to. It is like other words that exist to slur an entire people, unacceptable. The fact that people do not see the seriousness of the word and the attack it represents is simply a result of the fact that they do not take the 'people' who wear that label seriously. The concerns of those with intellectual disabilities have always been diminished and trivialized. There is a sneaking suspicion that they 'don't understand, poor dears', that they 'miss the point, little lambs' so therefore their anger need not be feared as justified.

Damn, he's good.

You Know How Novels of Libertarian Revolution All Have Shady Wealthy Guys With Grudges as the Purse?

Does "billionaire libertarian brothers" sound threatening?  Or like a good name for a rock band?

The New Yorker has a profile on the billionaire libertarian Koch brothers.  Who, apparently, oppose Obama and all he stands for:

At the lectern in Austin, however, [Peggy] Venable—a longtime political operative who draws a salary from Americans for Prosperity, and who has worked for Koch-funded political groups since 1994—spoke less warily. “We love what the Tea Parties are doing, because that’s how we’re going to take back America!” she declared, as the crowd cheered. In a subsequent interview, she described herself as an early member of the movement, joking, “I was part of the Tea Party before it was cool!” She explained that the role of Americans for Prosperity was to help “educate” Tea Party activists on policy details, and to give them “next-step training” after their rallies, so that their political energy could be channelled “more effectively.” And she noted that Americans for Prosperity had provided Tea Party activists with lists of elected officials to target. She said of the Kochs, “They’re certainly our people. David’s the chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very appreciative of what they do.”

and

Oddly enough, the fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer who settled in Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration. He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had been destroyed in the Second World War. Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up. I think it bothered him a lot.”
In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover.

And then it gets interesting.  Really, rich men with bees in their bonnets can do a lot of damage.

Right. If He Is, I'm a Mithraist.

Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast on the current fact-challenged allegation making the rounds:

And a lie it is. It is not "confusing." It is not "misinformation". It is not a "controversy." It is not "speculation." It is not "Some say..." It is a LIE. That nice one-syllable word that even an incurious, willfully ignorant, bigoted, narrow-minded, xenophobic moron can understand.

Including "An" and "The"

This will probably get crossposted.

Conservative minion tries to sink feculent claws into Ray Bradbury.  Driftglass deconstructs.

So, according to our local Breitbart-knockoff, Obama is the sinister author of a Big Brother Government, and it is against Obama's Insidious Liberal Triumvirate of "welfare spending, the so-called stimulus" and "Big Brotherism" which the nearly-90-year-old science fiction Grand Master was inveighing.

So, is any of that actually true?

Nah.

How do I know?

Because it says so in the very first sentence of the LA Times blog/article to which our local Breitbartlette was referring:

"Ray Bradbury is mad at President Obama, but it's not about the economy, the war or the plan to a construct a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City."

So what specifically is it that Ray Bradbury is pissed at the President about?

Conveniently, the article makes that clear in the second paragraph:

“He should be announcing that we should go back to the moon,” says the iconic author, whose 90th birthday on Aug. 22 will be marked in Los Angeles with more than week's worth of Bradbury film and TV screenings, tributes and other events. “We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever."

Well, shit, I'm pissed about it too. Yes, this filthy, America-hating Liberal of the First Water could (and has) done thousands of word on both the pragmatic, dollar-and-cent value of sending human beings to space, as well as how vital it is to the human soul to have crazy, awe-inspiring, long-term goals to shoot for.

Hell, the space program's educational and technological spin-offs alone are enough to justify tripling our investment.

So what does any of that have to do with ""welfare spending" or "the so-called stimulus" or "Big Brotherism"?

Nothing, of course. Nothing whatsoever. Just another steaming bit of offal dropping off the assembly line at the Breitbart Conservative Lie Factory[.]

There's more.

I think I might have seen something like that somewhere; I probably shrugged.

...Something

Rand Paul said something like reducing unemployment will decrease drug use, but only if the jobs are created by the rich.  Posted by Republic of T.

In Memoriam

Bobby Thomson, hitter of a fairly famous home run.

What's in the Box

• Daily Howler's post on Social Security, with side order of media failure to call out lies.
  

  What would Ohio voters think if they heard these claims corrected and/or examined? There is no real way to know; we don’t currently live in a country where such interactions occur. But Gingrich has made an astonishing series of statements about this topic. This morning, the editors, wringing their hands, barely scratch the surface of his statements. Nor do they make any real attempt to explain why his claims are “intolerant.”

• Michael Moore:  "Profits are up at GM! And you're stll unemployed"
• "Quintessential Republican candidate":  Successful businesswoman with scandal.

Putting Out a Call for the Next Molly Ivins

Lisa, in Black Magpie Theory, on the need for a fearless and witty writer to advocate for people rather than corporations:

Of course, what these folks don’t realize is that while they think they’re buying the “Keep the Gov’t Off Our Backs” Pig, what they’re really getting is the “Kill the Public Education System” Poke.

Read the rest; actual Ivins quotes used!

(Psssssst, Lisa!  T-shirt!)

Signal Boost

Dave Hingsburger, with addresses and phone numbers, calls out some Canadian politicians for using slurs.

For those of you who have a personal blog, disability themed or not, who are looking for something to blog about, please join in and maybe we can blogswarm this topic. It's inappropriate for public figures to speak disparagingly of any member of the disability community. If you do blog about this, put the link in the comments so we can all visit and get a sense of the length and breadth of our community.

We're a Political Blog

(We're comin' to your town!  We'll help you party down!)
Hey! Hey! Hey! Heeeeeyyyyyyyyyy!

1. Avedon Carol, as usual, has the best links.  I'm stealing her link to the Conceptual Guerilla piece, "Defeat the Right in Three Minutes,"and quoting a different section because she's right:  some people will not click through on links, and this is illuminating to read, even if familiar.
   
   Long excerpt from Conceptual Guerilla:
   

   But the cheap-labor conservative isn’t really interested in “freedom”. What the he wants is the “privatized tyranny” of industrial serfdom, the main characteristic of which is – you guessed it – “cheap labor”. For proof, you need only look at exactly what constitutes “big government tyranny” and what doesn’t. It turns out that cheap-labor conservatives are BIG supporters of the most oppressive and heavy handed actions the government takes.
   

   • Cheap-labor conservatives are consistent supporters of the generous use of capital punishment. They say that “government can’t do anything right” – except apparently, kill people. Indeed, they exhibit classic conservative unconcern for the very possibility that the government might make a mistake and execute the wrong man.
   • Cheap-labor conservatives complain about the “Warren Court” “handcuffing the police” and giving “rights to criminals”. It never occurs to them, that our criminal justice system is set up to protect innocent citizens from abuses or just plain mistakes by government officials – you know, the one’s who can’t do anything right.
   • Cheap-labor conservatives support the “get tough” and “lock ‘em up” approach to virtually every social problem in the spectrum. In fact, it’s the only approach they support. As for the 2,000,000 people we have in jail today – a higher percentage of our population than any other nation on earth – they say our justice system is “too lenient”.
   • Cheap-labor conservative – you know, the ones who believe in “freedom” – say our crime problem is because – get this – we’re too “permissive”. How exactly do you set up a “free” society that isn’t “permissive”?
   • Cheap-labor conservatives want all the military force we can stand to pay for and never saw a weapons system they didn’t like.
   • Cheap-labor conservatives support every right-wing authoritarian hoodlum in the third world.
   • Cheap-labor conservatives support foreign assassinations, covert intervention in foreign countries, and every other “black bag” operation the CIA can dream up, even against constitutional governments, elected by the people of those countries.
   • Cheap-labor conservatives support “domestic surveillance” against “subversives” – where “subversive” means “everybody but them”.
   • Cheap-labor believers in “freedom” think it’s the government’s business if you smoke a joint or sleep with somebody of your own gender.
   • Cheap-labor conservatives support our new concentration camp down at Guantanamo Bay. They also support these “secret tribunals” with “secret evidence” and virtually no judicial review of the trials and sentences. Then they say that liberals are “Stalinists”.
   • And let’s not forget this perennial item on the agenda. Cheap-labor conservatives want to “protect our national symbol” from “desecration”. They also support legislation to make the Pledge of Allegiance required by law. Of course, it is they who desecrate the flag every time they wave it to support their cheap-labor agenda. [Ouch! That was one of those “hits” you can hear up in the “nosebleed” seats.]

   Read the rest; it's all good.
   
2. Problem Chylde: Poor people aren't supposed to want nice things.
   

   Your goal, Poor Person, should you choose to accept it, is to forget about any presumption of haves and have-nots. Your job, Poor Person, is to get as far away from the have-nots as possible in thought and deed and investment. Otherwise, you will tip people off to the fact you are or have been poor. They are only supposed to suspect that you have been poor when you approach the dais to give a motivating speech, or when you are filling out an application to fund more education for yourself, or when you have fallen upon dire straits but grow accustomed to those circumstances with aplomb. Then, dear Poor Person, and then only may you say, “I did not always blithely accept the presence of Nice Things in my life; I lived a joyless existence under the poverty line.” After that statement, you counterbalance those tales with your jaunts to an expensive school among Those Who Have a Lot, the blatantly poor, and the secret poor. You omit the mental gymnastics you played to hide how much you wished that Those Who Have a Lot knew you when, so they’d understand how much it hurt when they’d pipe up in class about how poverty is a birthright of the irresponsible and the deranged, the deviant and the demented. Instead, you speak of overcoming the Blue Bloods, the Jacks and Jills, the Nouveau Riche as a general learning experience that the only time you can say, “I wasn’t that upset or deprived or needy when I was poor” is to yourself or to your progeny, as a whispered admonishment when they laugh at a homeless man on the street or when they sneer at a story of a single mother with four kids and a 58″ flat screen television in her home.

3. I am quoting from Anthony McCarthy entirely too much lately, but he's been on a roll, so here's his take on the Founding Fathers fetish the "cheap-labor conservatives" (yeah it's easy.  Too easy) are trying to push:
   

   Racism and other forms of bigotry are inseparable from the Founders Fetish, the contemporary assertion of “states rights” and a host of other Federalist bromides having gained their most ardent advocates among the neo-confederates. Another line feeding into it is the opposition to the Income Tax and regulatory agencies. As seen in a large number of instances, such as DOMA, when it is in their interest for the federal government to usurp powers granted to states, they’ve, mostly, not had any problem with violating the sacred writ of the Founders. It’s telling that the instances in which they are opposed to this have included the federal protection of individual liberties and their endorsement of federal encroachment has usually been in favor of quashing state protection of rights and liberties.* And it’s the rarest of right wingers who opposes taxes when it’s for the military or other things they support.

   (Footnote concerns his distrust of Ted Olson.)
   
4. Mark Kleiman proposes legal but non-commercial marijuana.

And so off to church.

Journalism 101

Also:  Check out yesterday's Daily Howler for

1. Getting the details of the story wrong; and
2. The 14th Amendment amendment people, and the throwing around of accusations of bigotry, xenophobia, and eugenicism.

Fun for the Family

Via supergee on Dreamwidth:  Journalism Warning Labels.  And they're printable!

No Editor Would Buy This Story

Anna van Z of Mills River Progressive links to Raw Story story; apparently now the conservatives are scaring themselves with "terrorist anchor babies."

How are those clones doing, by the way?

Not Sick, Just Grumpy

I have socimages (Sociological Images) as a feed at Dreamwidth, and was, as a baseball fan, gobsmacked by the idea that in 2010 a paid sports commentator (OK, for Fox News, but I think they have a minimum requirement about being knowledgeable about your sport; I could be wrong) finds women (!) at a baseball game unusual.  (Also, at first I thought our piano bar guy [Rod Dibble] had taken up a new gig.)

Metsgrrl, though, was up to the challenge.

Health Front

Rocketing toward the eleventy-hundred post.  Meanwhile:  Anna van Z at Mills River Progressive on a "free, all-day medical and vision care clinic."

What's interesting to me about this is the fact it happened in a conservative city in a very conservative state. One that has seen a majority of taxpayers opposed to "Obama Care" and anything resembling government-assisted healthcare. But it's also a region hard-hit by unemployment, and record numbers of people have been forced to seek help - a subject that the local media seem determined to downplay.
No local t.v. channel I saw offered any interpretation about what such a massive turnout for the free health care help might mean, or discuss any of the problems inherent with a system in which millions have no access to care because they lack the money and coverage required in our for-profit corporate medical system.
I wonder what conservatives tell themselves when they see such scenes. And those other folks ranting about "death panels" when in reality thousands of Americans die every year from lack of health care. Millions of people are already subjected to (corporate) death panels - they're called insurance companies. And they thrive primarily through denying care and coverage to people who need it. Care for children, babies, men and women. Any color, gender, or disease - they actively seek to deny claims and care across the board. This is how they operate - because they are for-profit corporations; your loss is their gain.

And Words are All I Have To Take Your Heart Away

At Echidne of the Snakes, Anthony McCarthy notes a sudden upswing in free-speech absolutism on the "right" coinciding with unrestrained commercial communications media:

We have a media which promotes a nihilistic, steroid soaked profit worshiping dystopia which is mindless and violent, thriving on a system in which people can’t even face their personal finances realistically. And that's not mentioning misogynist, bigoted, caste bound and enthusiastically unequal. The stream of consciousness that an increasing number of people are floating is nightmarish and more polluted as it flows on.

(I am not at ease with his call for morality because absolute morality is, um, relative.)

On the "words have meaning" bench, we have a published author who used a term associated with a war atrocity and a number of people who have eloquently called the author out on this (and this is not this author's first transgression with this term) matter:

1. On history and memory;
2. That stupid business about mythologizing;
3. Patalim;
4. Only our life, our life, and its forgetting;
5. Your broken project is not a war crime; and
6. One reason why anybody using 'PC' bugs the [everloving] crap out of me.

And now I need to be away from the Net for a bit. Later!

CONTROL, KAOS, and No Smarts

Next installment of Arthur Silber's series on Wikileaks (yes, the essay addresses many topics, including control and Mad Men, but what unites them is Wikileaks, OK?) is up.

In the United States, this is another aspect of the American exceptionalist myth. Yet if we are at all honest, and if we acknowledge the truth of American history, we know that even the possibility of acting in the "right" way in this manner has been systematically denied to vast numbers of Americans: to Native Americans, who were almost entirely slaughtered, thus making all possibilities eternally meaningless, and who were thereafter severely restricted with regard to physical placement and social mobility; to blacks, who were denied human status altogether for centuries through the abomination of slavery, then grudgingly granted semi-human status for another hundred years through formal and informal systematized discrimination, and who today are still denied full equality through the continuation of institutionalized discrimination, together with destruction targeted at them with hideous specificity via the endlessly destructive "War on Drugs" and other mechanisms; to women, who were treated as chattel for the first half of American history, both formally and legally as well as by social convention and informal decree, and who today still must continually struggle against the cultural presumption that they are inherently weak, inferior, undeserving of full human recognition, and even evil, which belief is the root of the lesser charges; to gays and lesbians, "illegal" immigrants, and on and on .. the full list, even in the comparatively brief span of American history, is of a length that must profoundly shock any person of decency and conscience.

Also up is an essay touching on his journey away from libertarianism toward anarchism as part of his critique of an article on Ludwig von Mises that appears at Corrente.  This essay is what you should read if you find yourself finding Ron or Rand Paul's snake oil attractive.

Instead of analyzing and evaluating Mises' ideas, we need only consider who his friends, acquaintances and those he worked with were. Remind me: why were liberals and progressives so profoundly and passionately opposed to McCarthy? This approach also necessarily relies on tribalist assumptions -- here, that Mises' ideas are self-evidently wrong and even batshit insane, about which more below.

and

[W]hatever else might be said about Mises (and about Hayek, as well), these men were serious thinkers and writers. Even if one finally considers their views to be intellectually indefensible, and possibly even deplorable in moral terms, they deserve the basic consideration that should be extended to anyone who has set forth detailed, lengthy explications of those views over an extended period of time, who has consistently demonstrated a serious attempt to grapple with complex issues. Debunk and refute their views and theories all you wish; demolish them entirely if you can. But address yourself to the content of their views, not to circumstantial, often highly dubious connections alleged to prove demonic intent. (Note this example from late in the Corrente post: "It is no stretch to assume that some portion of von Mises’ funding came through his association with..." Is this truly the way we "argue" now? Oh, Senator McCarthy, we do miss you so!)

(Whenever I see someone linked (in the old sense) to various names ending with the Trilateral Commision or whoever the Boogeyman Du Jour is, I tend to laugh.  I, personally, am one degree of separation from Kathy Boudin, two from the late Robert Vesco, one from Dana Rohrabacher, and have shaken hands and had dinner with a number of science fiction writers.  I'm sure there's a conspiracy in there somewhere, but it would take Tom Robbins to write it.)

ETA:  Part VI of On Wikileaks.

New York Mining Disaster 1941

Republic of T slaps Rand Paul with a codfish:

My aim was to illustrate what Rand Paul exemplified in his most recent remarks on mine safety: the right-wing defenders of BP, Massey, and just about every other corporate polluter or regulation-dodger don’t know much about the history of industrial disasters, the negligence that caused them, or the regulations and reforms they sparked. 

Spark. It’s an apt word choice, given the subject matter, and how many times in our history a mere spark here and there has led to conflagration and carnage on record-making scales, and grief for working Americans and their families.

and

Clearly Paul thinks that mine owners should be able to do what they want with their private property. (Paul’s politics on property sometimes seem easily summed up by one of the favorite exclamations of our two-year-old: "Mine!")

and

Dr. Paul could even shake the hand of the sole survivor — Peter Urban, who found a hole to crawl in before the toxic gas that would cause the death of his twin brother, Stanley, in the same mining disaster. Paul could tell the miner how fortunate he was to live in a time when he was free to work without the protection of unions and government regulations. I’m sure

Never mind that mine disasters declined dramatically, thanks in large part to the kind of oversight and regulation Paul denounces.

I think the citation of Mike Lux's "19th Century Conservative" is particularly telling.

Judge's Ruling In

U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker struck down Prop 8.  PDF of the text of the decision.

Via The Usual Suspects

1. As I remarked to Lisa in a comment below, when it comes to the unemployment situation, an awful lot of people dwell on the banks of That River in Egypt.  For them (assuming they find this, because I've deliberately made it Not Easy), some more straw for their camels:
• Avedon Carol:
  
  

  And, honest to gods, I so want to smack people around when they talk about retraining. Some of the most skilled and educated people in America are out of work and will probably never have another job because they are regarded as too old. For the most part, they will have better educations and be more literate and have wider experience than the younger people who come up behind them because they were educated before the Reagan administration set to work destroying our educational system. More of these people than you might imagine are pretty up-to-date with the skills required for modern technology, but even in the wonderful high-tech area, there are only so many jobs to go around. And, in addition to that, an awful lot of modern management is actually uninterested in anything other than mediocrity, because they want to make sure you all know that you are utterly replaceable cogs in their engine. They don't actually like the highly-skilled and would rather have a bunch of people with limited skills around. People who know their place - they think less of themselves, and it's easier to convince them that they are just lucky to have a job, you see. (And, I don't know if you've noticed this, but you seldom get to be Director of the IT department by knowing anything about IT. You usually get there by knowing how to push people around and demoralize them sufficiently that they are afraid to ask for anything - not a particularly modern skill at all.)
  
  Even at the lower levels, it doesn't exactly take all that much training to get up to speed. There was a period back there in the '80s when companies were desperate for programmers and various sorts of hardware people and they were grabbing secretaries and turning them into software designers. Now they won't even grab experienced programmers and let them maintain software. At least, not if they actually want to earn a living at the job. As far as modern corporations are concerned, there is no percentage in providing real products and services; the important industry is figuring out how to cheat you out of a living wage and take away your property.

• David Michael Green, via Jim Yeager, formerly of skippy the bush kangaroo [ETA: Mr. Yeager, in a tsunami of political frustration and Goodbye To All That-ness, has deleted all his posts at skippy's, so this link will now go to the article itself]:
  
  

  One day you’re gonna wake up and go to your lousy job with its lousy salary and non-existent benefits. You might even remember the good job you once had. Or that the government you once supported gave tax breaks to companies like the one that exported that good job of yours to the Third World (which is what they’re now starting to call your country). Or that that same government undermined the labor unions which fought to get you your good wages and benefits.

2. Ayelet Waldman (guestblogging at Ta-Nehisi Coates' stand at The Atlantic) goes to a seminar at Army War College:
   
   

   When I pressed the commandant about why he invited New Members to the seminar in the first place, why the Army paid for our (admittedly spartan) motel rooms, schlepped us on a tour of Gettysburg, threw us cocktail parties, and encouraged us to participate in the debate in the seminar rooms, he told me, essentially, that it came down to two things: 1.) Publicity. He wanted us to go back to our communities and describe our experience, presumably because he knows how well it reflects on the Armed Services; and 2.) Because by the time officers reach the level of colonel, they often know very few people who aren't in the military. Their experience is confined, thus, to people who, in most instances, think like they do. To be strategic thinkers, the commandant told me, they need to be exposed to a wide variety of points of view. In fact, he is so eager to expose his students to a diversity of opinion that he urged me to recommend more liberals, more people from the West Coast, more women to be civilian New Members of the Seminar. [Emphasis added.]

3. Shark-fu sees Mormon ads.
   
   

   ‘Cause while these ads show nice as nice can be people who anyone would like to share a cup of coffee with, they completely ignore the other Mormons up in the temple…you know, those Mormons that tossed enough money to feed a developing country for years into anti gay marriage campaigns a couple of years ago and are proud to have done it.

4. Scott Horton points at examples of "suspended" judgment.
   
   

   In this case [quote from article by Roger Berkowitz above], suspension of judgment was not neutrality. It was substituting euphemisms for the direct words that the English language furnishes.

   He also has a short piece on neoconservatives:
   
   

   Yet neocons still fill the pages of opinion in America’s best-known journals and newspapers. Their errors in judgment—not to mention flagrant dishonesty—go unremarked upon.

1. For one thing, no pony.  Ever.
   

   As long as people insist that there are pat answers for the long-term unemployed -- go live with family (without knowing what any individual's family situation is), dumb down your resume (how do you do that with 30 years of ever-increasing knowledge level jobs?), work at McDonald's (as if every fast food restaurant has a "come on in, the money's fine" sign out front...

   Shorter Jill: People who work for a living and don't have a million dollar trust fund are in trouble.  (Also, remember I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang?  You might want to mine that movie for survival tips.)
2. Ta-Nehisi Coates puts Race and Gay Marriage in Perspective.  (Which is to say the comparison with Loving v. Virginia works in some ways and doesn't work in others.  Surprise.)
3. Arthur Silber on Wikileaks and the threat to order and hegemony Wikileaks represents. (The two previous articles on Wikileaks are linked at the above articles and below.  Also,
   
   

   Long-time readers probably know that I profoundly admire the superlative artistry of Maria Callas. So if you happened to be wondering (because, for example, you have nothing to occupy your time and, every now and then, the most astonishingly insignificant questions happen to wander through the echoing spaces of your mind) whether I have a somewhat higher opinion of Mr. Obama because he has Callas on his iPod, my answer would be a very emphatic:
   
   No.

4. I will not be voting for Meg Whitman for governor of California, and if you need to ask why, I would think that any random post would be fairly clear on reasons, even if it doesn't directly address the question.  The current ads are touting a "business plan" for the state, and, entirely aside from California's size and diversity, she sounds as though she is confusing the place with eBay.  And I don't believe her.  Nor will I be voting for Carly "HP" Fiorina.  
5. Lagniappe for the Day (via Shakesville):  You're still not poor enough!  (Link to Richard Roeper (yes, that Richard Roeper) discussions with readers about Illinois gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady (guess which party.  Go on, guess) wanting to reduce the minimum wage.

OK, I need to go off and be gloomy for a while.

In Memoriam

Mitch Miller, record executive and oboeist.

On the one hand, he disliked rock 'n' roll.

On the other hand, a number of the tunes lurking at the back of my brain were learned from the radio version of Sing Along With Mitch, principally "Be Kind to your Web-footed Friends."

Remember Turkey?

Update on Turkish policy concerns and the investigation into the Israeli raid on the aid flotilla.

Enshrining Fear

On the cultural center in New York City that will include a mosque, and the opposition thereto:

• The Velveteen Rabbi is "deeply disappointed" in the Anti-Defamation League:
  

  I'm having a hard time understanding why anyone would oppose the building of an arts, community, and prayer space -- maybe especially a Muslim one which is meant to be built near the site of the 9/11 tragedy. If a Muslim group were opposing the construction of a Jewish arts, community, and prayer space because of the murders carried out by Baruch Goldstein in God's name on Purim some years ago, the ADL would be first in line to speak out against the antisemitism. Shame on the ADL for opposing Cordoba House's construction (see their statement) on the grounds that those who lost family on 9/11 would be further wounded by the prayerful presence of Muslims in this corner of the city that they call home.

• Scott Horton quotes a Founding Father (he was answering a letter addressing something else but touching on freedom of religion):
  

  But, as George Washington explained, they do not have the right to oppress their fellow citizens by institutionalizing their bigotry in government action.

[crossposted]

Indeed

Four key components of that team — General Manager Frank Cashen, Manager Davey Johnson, and the star players Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry — were inducted into the Mets’ Hall of Fame in an on-field ceremony before the game. Each inductee was feted with a video tribute showing highlights from that historic season and gave a brief speech. The fans applauded throughout, reveling in happy memories of accomplishments that have yet to be duplicated.

Then the game began, and the 35,014 in attendance came to a sudden realization: this year’s Mets do not resemble the 1986 team.

Yeah.

ETA:  metsgrrl covered the ceremony.

Seriously, I give the Mets such a hard time about abandoning their history, but this was a great day and they have a right to be proud of it. 2010 has shown demonstrable improvement in this regard. Let’s keep making progress.