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!