Brain is Offline

If I don't post something soon I'm going to turn into *don't say that name!* -- oh, all right.  I won't.  But at the moment the political scene would cause me to chew off my arm out of frustration if I weren't so depressed.

So apparently Mr. Romney is in Britain and is having trouble keeping his feet from his mouth, and John Cassidy, one of the bloggers for The New Yorker introduced his readers to a slang term:

In its Friday edition, the Sun, Britain’s best-selling newspaper, labelled him “Mitt the Twit.” It may not be entirely coincidental that the Sun is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who has recently been busy denouncing Romney on Twitter. But other British papers have been equally critical of Romney, including the conservative ones that are apt to be sympathetic to Republicans. A columnist at the Daily Telegraph—a.k.a. The Torygraph—called him a “wazzock,” a term of abuse that I hadn’t heard since my childhood in Leeds, West Yorkshire.

[...] When I was young, it was used to describe a hapless idiot who blunders around doing and saying things he or she shouldn’t. Wazzocks don’t necessarily have bad intentions, but they tend to bring trouble to themselves and others. Romney, for all his business success and Harvard degrees, sometimes seems to fit the description.

More when the brain comes back online.

In Memoriam

Dr. Sally Ride, astronaut.

Unravelling a Ball of Twine

Via Mercury Rising, a couple of tangles:

1. Scroll way down for this:

   Minnesota Majority has already produced an ad calling Ritchie's integrity into question. The ad includes this text: "
   

   Well, guess what? Minnesotans recently learned that one of Secretary Ritchie's own employees appears to have voted illegally in at least two elections using a false identity. If Mark Ritchie can't smell voter fraud when it's right under his nose, how can we possibly trust him on Voter ID?

   A fascinating question, and what Minnesotans don't learn from that ad is that the indicted individual first voted in 2004, when Mary Kiffmeyer was Secretary of State; the employee was hired in 2005 and promoted in 2006, under Kiffmeyer's administration, as Fox9 News reported in Ritchie commends use of facial recognition tech in finding fraud.
   
   Kiffmeyer was the first executive director of Minnesota Majority. Using the group's own logic, if she couldn't smell fraud when it was right under her nose, how are we to trust her or Minnesota Majority on Voter ID?

2. From the description:
   

   Mary Kiffmeyer, former Secretary of State and executive director of Minnesota Majority, said in 2009 that it would be too expensive to ask the Department of Corrections to produce electronic data on convicted felons to the Secretary of State.

   Section 9 dealt with automatic motor voter registration, substituting an opt out system for the current opt-in provision, but Kiffmeyer's objection had to do with the supposed cost of constructing data systems to prevent felons and non-citizens from voting. Sections 6,7, and 8 of the bill would have required monthly review of data by the appropriate departments to make sure that people registering were eligible.
   
   This is a surprising argument from a supporter of "voting integrity," because we're told repeatedly that no cost is too great to the counties and townships to prevent voter impersonation by requiring a government-issued PhotoID to vote.

Both of these stories are from Bluestem Prairie and overlap to some extent. Apparently a spot of voter fraud committed by someone hired and promoted by the then-Secretary of State of Minnesota and discovered by the current-Secretary of State of Minnesota is the fault of...the current-Secretary of State of Minnesota.

No, I don't get it either.

Induction

 Barry Larkin and Ron Santo (posthumously) enter the Hall of Fame.  Photo gallery.

To Those Who Do Not Think Things Through

...who of course don't read this because *aaaack* liberal bias.  There, I said it.  (If you have not figured out by now what I think/how I feel about conservatism/the "right wing"/fascism, perhaps you should return to this blog after recess is over and catch up.)

Regarding the tragedy yesterday at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, a Congressperson from Texas who apparently still lives in movies even though he turns 59 this year actually said:

“Well it does make me wonder, you know with all those people in the theater, was there nobody that was carrying that could’ve stopped this guy more quickly?” Gohmert said. “I mean in Tyler, Texas, we had–my hometown–we had a shooter come in over a domestic matter, and just start shooting people. And it was a guy with a concealed carry–he got killed, but his shooting at this guy caused him to run and no doubt saved a lot of lives. He was a real hero.”

(Link to ABCNews.go.com, which may go stale.  Quote taken from radio program not linked to.)

Comrade Misfit, who owns and uses guns, has the rebuttal to that statement:

Bottom line: It would be like trying to stop a fully-involved house fire with a garden hose.

(Also, it's probably not a good idea to take a gun to the movies; someone might answer a cell phone and talk loudly during the show.)

Holding My Nose

Driftglass demonstrates the sheer meretriciousness of David Brooks from many samples of his writing (no, wait, 'meretriciousness' indicates some attractiveness or value, and we're talking David Brooks' prose here.  Fake morality, demonstrable untruths, and hippie-bashing) over a span of 15 years.

There is a chapter in Les Misérables (the book) in which (wait, I'm not spoiling anyone here, am I?  Do I need spoiler space?) Jean Valjean has to carry the mercifully unconscious Javert through the Paris sewers, part of one tunnel of which has sunk.

No, I don't mean the heroism.  I mean being up to one's neck in waste.  Reading Mr. Brooks is like being up to one's neck in waste.

(Incidentally, Drifty is taking donations, so if you have cash to spare, you could do worse.  He reads David Brooks so that you don't have to.)

Morning Readings

• Driftglass has an illustrative clip from Save the Tiger.  Also foreshadowing.
• Dean Baker at AlterNet disputes economists' allegation that high-tech is reducing the middle class.  (The second page seems to be missing right now, as is any way to comment.  Fixed.)
• Also at AlterNet, Sara Robinson suggests that corporate rule is mimicking the Soviet Union model.

  It's not just that the corporations have taken control over our government (though that's awful enough). It's also that they've taken control over -- and put serious limits on -- our choices regarding what we buy, where we work, how we live, and what rights we have. Our futures are increasingly no longer our own: more and more decisions, large and small, that determine the quality of our lives are being made by Politburo apparatchiks at a Supreme Corporate Soviet somewhere far distant from us. Only now, those apparatchiks are PR and marketing executives, titans of corporate finance, lobbyists for multinationals, and bean-counting managers trying to increase profits at the expense of our freedom.

• Charles II at Mercury Rising is doing a "No One Will Care..." group of posts; the current one is about elite impunity and how that relates to the Catholic Church's and Penn State's scandals.
• Shock!  Horror!  Married couple caught kissing in public!  (Link via another link at skippy.)

So I was looking at the links at Raw Story, and one was to a claim that NASA had been "outsourced" to the Russians, and said claim apparently came from John Sununu, of whom I had not heard since the senior Bush presidency (the Senator of that name was his son).  He's plugging for Romney, and this claim is supposed to counter ads pinning Romney as an outsourcer to the max.  As it turns out, however:

... it was president Bush in 2004 who announced that the Shuttle program would be retired before the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and Ares 1 launcher was ready to take American astronauts into space.

In 2008, Bush signed a waiver allowing U.S. astronauts to fly to the International Space Station aboard Russian Soyuz vehicles beyond 2011. [Added emphasis mine.]

See, in baseball, if the pitcher loads the bases and is then taken out and the reliever serves up a tater, only one earned run has to be factored into the reliever's ERA (the previous pitcher, depending on how the runners got to base, gets dinged with those).

In New York City, if you need to go someplace the subway and bus system don't go and you don't have a car and you have the money, you hire a taxi.

Think of the Soyuz vehicles as a taxi.  (They're probably charging taxi rates, too.)

Sheriff on the Other Side

Editorial at the New York Times:

Five years after he started “crime suppression” sweeps that terrorized Latino neighborhoods across Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio is finally having to explain himself. Not to TV crews in Phoenix or to fawning hosts on Fox News, but before a federal judge.

It's a class action lawsuit; Arpaio is accused of violating civil rights.

We'll see how it plays out.

Sunday Morning

(Spanky & Our Gang.  You had to be there.)

Oliver Willis's Like Kryptonite to Stupid is now under the aegis of The Daily Banter and thus is playing nicely with Safari.  (I have to check on the other instances that were giving me that trouble.)  He presents "The Worst Conservative Lie About Health Care."

Generally speaking, if you’ve had to go to the hospital for emergency care, you will need medical follow-up. Again, if someone doesn’t have insurance, is forced to let a condition reach the emergency stage — how are they to afford a follow-up?

And then they end up in emergency care again.

And guess who pays that bill? We do.

So by denying these people — our fellow citizens — health insurance, just ends up costing us more than if we provided care up front. Not to mention the immorality of making someone reach the emergency stage before they can be looked after.

Entirely aside from the fact that one can stay at Expensive New York Hotels for less than overnight in a hospital, it turns out that having to do it that way, ie emergency services for conditions at emergency levels because intermediate care isn't financially available, is not cost-effective.  In short.

Apparently Britain's National Health Service didn't understand that mental illness can be treated:

The under-treatment of people with crippling mental illnesses is the most glaring case of health inequality in our country. It is a shocking form of discrimination because effective psychological treatments exist but are still not widely enough available.

Therapies like cognitive behavioural therapy lead to rapid recovery from depression or anxiety disorders in over 40% of cases. If they were more widely available, this would cost the NHS little or nothing because of the savings on physical healthcare. The cost would also be fully covered by savings on incapacity benefits and lost taxes.

People really don't understand that any brain can get fouled, badly programmed, or dosed with errant neurotransmitters, do they?

Speaking of "What they really meant..."

It's Bastille Day! Set Prisoners Free!

C'est le 14 juillet.  Alors, enfants de la Patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé!

OK.  Walk on has some more good stuff.

• More thoughts on the Christian right:

  And as much as it wants to be, the Christian Right is not a persecuted minority. It's just another interest group trying to impose its vision on society, but it pretends to be promoting the agenda of God himself. That, perhaps, is why it has caused an unprecedented number of Americans to reject Christianity. Most Americans can see that the Christian Right's agenda is basically arbitrary -- it has some roots in Bible verses, sure, but a radical leftists agenda could be constructed the same way -- and that leads many Americans to reject the supposed God of that agenda.

• Politics and church:

  Do these things and more, and it changes the politics. Do these things, and the politics begin to almost take care of themselves. Do these things and find out that our excessive focus on politics and all its polarization and partisanship is a function of a hollowed-out church that would rather impose its will on America's laws than do the hard work of sacrifice and service that is required to build the kingdom of God.

On the Minnesota front: Weird scenes inside the gold mine (less about the recount than about the finances of the recount.  Specifically, paying for it).

General "Boy Howdy I Tell You What" Notes

• Mills River Progressive linked to an article on the non-prosecution of the bank bandits by Richard Eskow at The Smirking Chimp that begins thusly:

  If only. If only Brian Moynihan designed fashionable shoes, Jamie Dimon pitched a mean slider, and Lloyd Blankfein had written the song "Boyfriend" for Justin Bieber. Then they'd prosecute bank fraud.
  
  The Justice Department used as many people to investigate one baseball player as it's doing to pursuing Wall Street housing fraud. It has coordinated fifteen Federal agencies to seize counterfeit goods worth $178 million, yet all but ignored a bankers' crime wave which cost the global economy trillions.

• Jesse Curtis is reading about Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and provides a paragraph:

  One of the things that stands out to me is that in economic matters Roosevelt was far to the left of any current political figure, including President Obama. To the hard right, of course, President Obama is a socialist, which I guess makes FDR a full-fledged communist or something. Of course he was nothing of the sort; he lived at a time when communism was a real thing and people could see the difference. It is easier now to paint Obama as a radical because fewer and fewer Americans remember a time when there were actual radicals around.

  [Emphasis added by me]
• One more essay about Willard Romney at the NAACP convention by jurassicpork.  Because Mr. Romney makes panderers look good.

At some point or other, I am going to have to set out in small words exactly why black people of sense, education, and civic-mindedness give Republicans like Willard Romney what Pamela Merritt would call "side-eye."

I Am Not Goldilocks

I still hate this interface.  Just so you know.

The Three Bears:

1. Outraged Bear:  Everything you need to know about Willard Romney in one sentence.  (Full article at Mother Jones, but Jill extracts the meat.) Also "sometimes Willard can't hide what he is."  I begin to wonder whether conservatism requires lacking clue.  See also below.
2. Rebuke-to-Hypocrisy Bear:  Mr. Romney spoke at the annual NAACP convention and (see the pictures) got the stoniest looks since Mt. Rushmore.
3. Succinct Bear:  Feminist Hulk.  (There's a commenter with no clue, but I'm not getting a Twitter account just to smack him one.  Those people are tiring, and they don't listen.)

Before the Ice Cream

Food for thought this morning:

• Three posts from Jesse Curtis (walk on):
  1. Part 1 of a review of God's Own Party, this part focusing on Jerry Falwell;
  2. Part 2 questions the religious right's values:

     This raises a glaring question because, of course, shortly before the Christian Right there was another political movement, largely Christian, that transformed American society, and did so without tarnishing the image of Christianity. The question of why black churches succeeded where white conservative Christians have failed may seem obvious or silly to some, but to me the answer is not at all clear. I hope to get into this later. In the meantime, as Ta-Nehisi Coates says, talk to me like I'm stupid: why was the civil rights movement a good and legitimate assertion of Christian values in a contentious political question, while the efforts of the Christian Right seem like a power grab that has damaged the reputation of Christianity?

  3. Part 3:  Is there repentance?
• Terrance at Republic of T on all those jobs bills and no jobs.

  Romney’s "jobless plan" is the same old job-killing madness that went on under Bush, which resulted in a lost decade of zero net job creation. It’s likely to create more jobs in China than in the U.S. It won’t lower the unemployment rate, and will add thousands more to the ranks of the unemployed – like teachers, police officers, and fire fighters. Apparently, Republicans think losing those jobs is a good thing. That’s why congressional Republicans sat on their hands while state and local governments laid-off thousands, and refused to save those jobs.

  There is a jobs bill that's been hanging around for almost a year, but:

  Let’s place blame where blame is due, Congress did act. Senate Republicans successfully filibustered it, but eventually allowed the Senate to pass one small piece of it. House Republicans whittled it almost down to sawdust, and then passed what was left.
  
  To be fair, Republicans got their usual assists from depressingly predictable Democratic bickering and cowardice. But most of the blame belongs to the GOP. Republicans should consult a mirror, if they’re looking for someone to blame for inaction on jobs – and the consequences.

• Aphra Behn at Shakesville points to government actions that make life easier for rural residents.  

A Happy 10th Anniversary

to skippy the bush kangaroo!

(There are several posts up commemorating the anniversary and paying tribute to the stalwarts who keep the site going and the bloggers who have passed away.  Naturally, the Web is acting up right now.  It's behaving.  At the moment.)

Ahead of the Curveball

About 5 days ago I noticed that a congressman was criticizing his opponent for being a veteran.

I thought that was strange. Not because I'd forgotten about the smearing of Max Cleland or John Kerry, but because that's not usually the way those smears have worked.

No, apparently the veteran mentions her service too often for the congressman's taste.

Poooor baaaby.

And I admit to being sufficiently intrigued that I looked him up in both Wikipedia and the Congressional Biographical Directory, which is incredibly handy, and, wouldn't you know? He never served.

Never. Served.

In other words, the veteran out-butched and out-patrioted him and therefore Made Him Look Bad.

I wasn't going to say that. Sorry.

However, someone who has a far better flamethrower than I did.

That is, yes, Elizabeth Moon. Via . Joe Walsh (not the singer/songwriter) running against Tammy Duckworth. (I have not forgotten about last year's unpleasantness.)


[crossposted]

Two Things and a Memorial

• Negro Leagues Baseball Museum needs money.

  Twenty players from the Negro Leagues moved to the majors, seven of whom are living, including Willie Mays.
  
  "All these guys came way before me, but Monte (Irvin) told me about it. Monte played with and against a lot of these guys," Mays told me, referring to his old New York Giants teammate. "I know the history because of Monte."

• Sports wit:

  Was the All-Star voting suspicious? Not unless you think it's odd that the starting shortstop for the American League is Jimmy Hoffa.

In memoriam: Ernest Borgnine.  Who had varied roles, both heroic and villainous, and was still working.  I was reminded of him, oddly enough, by watching the remake of Willard a couple of months ago.

Scum

• This Congressman has no clue.  And there are more like him.  (Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast.)
• Legislative bodies in general have no clue.  (Angry Black Bitch)
• Reporter gets Roberts wrong.  (the daily howler)

None of them (they believe) will ever have to live like the poorest of their constituents.

I am reduced to praying for the Second Coming.  Or aliens.  Aliens might work out better.

94

94

(I forgot last year.)

More Study Needed

Ta-Nehisi Coates on democracy.

Bouillabaise

Oh, let me see...and then there will be Red Sauce!

• Video clip from The Thick Dark Fog, about Native American multigenerational trauma, from Tata at Brilliant at Breakfast.
• Ralph Nader is still writing, and Arthur Silber takes exception.
• One of the things I enjoy about Driftglass is that he can take an artifact of pop culture and use it to illustrate conservatism's essential hollowness of soul.

  So Conservatism is...software. An app, that can be loaded into any platform that features "traditional rules and existing institutions" under assault by headlong revolutionaries.
  
  Fine.
  
  But like so many of Conservatism's dilettante Useful Idiots, Mr. Sullivan cannot bring himself face what happens in the real, non-Beltway world when those abstract, dorm-room ideals are adopted by bad people fighting to preserve despicable institutions.
  
  What happens when those "traditional rules" are the pro-ignorance, anti-science, anti-female, homophobic tenets of Conservative Christian fundamentalism?
  
  What happens when the "existing institution" is white supremacy, girded generation after generation by an ancient, paranoid, rage against those damn Yankee devils and their Evil Gummint in Washington interfering with their traditional, bible sanctioned way of life?
  
  These are the true and terrible realities of what happened to Conservatism in America, which is why Mr. Sullivan instead prefers to jerk off endlessly about what I refer to as (and am probably borrowing from some cleverer person) "Firefly Conservatism". A Conservatism with all the glories and grace notes of the antebellum South -- the nobility of a Great Cause all dressed up in buckskin and clever dialogue about liberty and scrappy underdogs standing up to the Oppressive Buttinski Central Gummint -- shorn completely of the brutal, racist realities out of which that culture grew.

  ETA: Via drifty, Esquire's Charles P. Pierce administers a vivisection of Mr. Brooks, who is attempting to think above his logic.

  This may be the God Particle of moronic right here. Boot camps do not "engage people as they are." They break people down in order to build them into a homogenous model dedicated to a single purpose. I've never been any closer to Parris Island than Brooks has been, but, Jesus Mary, even I know that dedication to "cultural diversity" never has been high on the To-Do list of drill instructors. Haven't conservatives been battling the idea of "cultural diversity" as contrary to "military virtues" in the con[t]ext of female soldiers, and then gay soldiers, for decades? And, not for nothing, I would not want to be the teacher or the principal who puts David Brooks's idea of a well-rounded education into practice on David Brooks's kid. You wouldn't be able to get Brooks off the ceiling with a crowbar.

   The soundtrack suggestion was on the money, too.
  
• Cara at The Curvature has begun a series on Motown's singles!

Not Long. Sweet.

Back when I picked up walk on, I described the writer as a conservative Christian with a brain.  Jesse Curtis just goes on evolving right there and chronicling the changes.  Here, he explains why he won't be voting Republican this year.

Still, I take comfort in the fact that before there was any inkling of change in my politics, three other things happened. 1) I moved to Chicago and saw injustice, 2) I met Alicia, this strange girl who seemed to care so much about the downtrodden, 3) I began reading my Bible anew, and saw all the teaching about poverty and injustice as if for the first time. Only then, after a period of years, did my politics begin to change. I'm thankful that it happened in that order.

And then he lays out his reasons.

Carefully Refined and Sealed Over

Obsidian Wings' Dr. Science on conservative cowardice as seen through the reaction to Chief Justice Roberts' vote to uphold the health care act.

In case I'm not being clear: if you can't even listen to someone who might disagree with you, lest they influence your thinking, you're not being "principled", you're being cowardly -- you obviously don't think your ideas stand up to the challenge. This is aside from the fact that calling the NY Times "liberal" is laughable.

Parallel Lines

Robert Cruickshank draws attention to similarities between the U.S. and the Weimar Republic (Germany) before the rise of the National Socialists.

None of this means that the United States is about to fall victim to a fascist coup d'etat as Germany did in January 1933. Remember that no outcome is inevitable. Nor would it be accurate to say that the United States is repeating the exact same events and taking the same course as Germany did during the 1930s, because many other important details are different. For example: Germany was a nation saddled with huge debts and lacking the global political power it needed to reverse its situation; but even with today's high unemployment rates, the United States remains the globe's largest economy, and therefore doesn't face the same fiscal constraints Weimar Germany faced. In fact, a better current analogy may be Greece, which is in a far more similar predicament now.

Yet the underlying similarities ought to be troubling -- and are enough to give us pause. The combination of austerity and well-funded right-wing political movements hostile to democracy destroyed Weimar Germany.

AlterNet has lots of good stuff.

Also,

I'm linking to Bats Left/Throws Right (not a baseball blog) so I can quote Doghouse Riley:

(Is it only in America, or only inside the Beltway where baldly selling out to your professional ambitions is a mark of integrity? We owe Axis Sally an apology.)

[...]

Fer cryin' out loud, the reason it's necessary to "rekindle" "conservative" interest in the only thing "conservatives" have been talking about since the 1980 election is the lack of fuel once you get the fire started.

The "Framers' design for limited government", such as it was, didn't survive the Washington administration, let alone two centuries of unimaginable scientific and technical advancement.

[...]

Do we really have to note just how much the modern "movement" "conservative" gleefully accepts (Republican Presidential war powers, the five-ocean Navy, warrantless government eavesdropping, "extraordinary rendition", the entirety of corporate law) which would have made John Adams blanch? Can't we at least hold them responsible for their facile libertoonianism? Can't somebody punch George Eff Will in the nose, just figuratively, just once?

Also, Jon Carroll on why you want a government around.

Happy Fourth of July!

(Other countries have different Independence Days.)

In memoriam:  Andy Griffith, actor and singer.

A new subatomic particle that may be the Higgs boson has been discovered.

Dr. Heuer and others said that it was too soon to know for sure whether the new particle, which weighs in at 125 billion electron volts, one of the heaviest subatomic particles yet, fits the simplest description given by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half century, or whether it is an imposter, a single particle or even the first of many particles yet to be discovered . The latter possibilities are particularly exciting to physicists since they could point the way to new deeper ideas, beyond the Standard Model, about the nature of reality. For now, some physicists are calling it a “Higgs-like” particle.

Daughters of the American Revolution in Queens.

And so off to enjoy the day.

Another Way to Look At It

Right now, a lot of our problems stem directly from the fact that the wrong sort has finally gotten the upper hand; a particularly brutal and anti-democratic strain of American aristocrat that the other elites have mostly managed to keep away from the levers of power since the Revolution. Worse: this bunch has set a very ugly tone that's corrupted how people with power and money behave in every corner of our culture. Here's what happened, and how it happened, and what it means for America now.

Mrs. Robinson examines a particular strain of "elite" and its values.  (For background, because this article seems to generalize more than usual:  Sara Robinson did a series at Orcinus reviewing a book about the first English settlers [David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America]; the relevant segment is this one about "The Cavaliers," who settled in Virginia and parts South.  It's...scary.  To balance it off, there's the Introduction, where she explains why she's writing about an old book [and says some problematic things], and Part I, which deals with "The Puritans."  Part III takes up "the Quakers" and Part IV doesn't seem to have been written.)

I wonder if the local branch library has a copy?

Full-Body Masks

Gotten from someone this morning:  Two Santa Clauses (not to be confused with "Two Magicians" or The Two Mrs. Carrolls), or the long con, conservative style (first posted in '09, still timely, much as Steve Gilliard's "I'm a Fighting Liberal" is still timely).