While He's Gone

Via Roger Ebert.com:  Steven Boone reviews Phil Ochs:  There But for Fortune and sketches some background on Mr. Ochs.  Includes a video and a trailer.




[crossposted]

Playing Catch-Up

John Perry, philosophizing at the New York Times, figures out what a mess of people figured out ten years ago.

Why I Love Margaret and Helen

This:

[Helen:] Three states and three winners so on we go to the land of the hanging chad. This year’s Republican Primary has a very good chance of winning next year’s Golden Globe for Best Comedy. I mean it. Really.

[Margaret:] Helen, dear, the only thing I know for sure is Newt Gingrich will be one challenging role for that Meryl Streep to play.

Hey, Daisy!

The New York Times has discovered Greenville!

(Grief, you people are under siege!)

They seem to have missed this, though.

In Memoriam

Etta James, singer.

Video for "I'd Rather Go Blind" because you should have no trouble finding video for "At Last."

ETA:  Brilliant at Breakfast posted 7 videos.

As a Side Note

Driftglass, in today's post which I linked to earlier but will link to again because you can't find the earlier post, links to a previous post of his in which Mr. Brooks fulminates about evil.

Arthur Silber has something to say about evil.

Putting Stuff Together

• Thought-experiment re:  SOPA/PIPA, in case you missed yesterday.
• Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast tackles "The Myth of 'Hard Work'," or that social mobility stuff is quietly drying up and blowing away.
• Going further on that topic, Jurassicpork on, well, the American psyche, and what we had in common with high points in the Middle Ages.  (Avedon has mentioned this often.)
• Driftglass discusses the current reality of the working class and the current unreality of New York Times pundits:

  Consider that...
  
  ...if you want to get a low-wage job a banging out dents and welding cracks on public transit buses, you will first have to pee in a cup.

  (There's more. Because David Brooks lives in Petit Trianon in 1788, don'tchaknow.)

I DON'T KNOW HOW TO TAKE DOWN THIS BLOG FOR JUST ONE DAY,

SO.  Link to Making Light's one day protest.  Link to Whatever's until-8-pm-Eastern statement.  ETA:  Link to SOPA (and PIPA) Blackout.

Entirely aside from the fact that the piracy figures have been inflated by RIAA (I would link if I could remember where I saw that item via Making Light), this legislation is akin to throwing water on an electrical fire.

Doesn't anyone remember -- oh, right.  The generation that had first-hand knowledge of Prohibition is dying out.  Haven't any of you who thrilled to gangster movies at least looked up Prohibition?  (You can't do it today because Wikipedia is down in protest.)  Prohibition was such a disaster that it became the only Constitutional amendment to be repealed.  

Please read those links carefully.  If you're USian, call your representative and let them know--politely, please--what you think.

In Other Words

Happy actual birthday to Dr. King.

Eavesdropping May Be Hazardous To Your Health

In the interest of sanding off the serial numbers, I will say I was standing in line somewhere.  The guy ahead of me was talking to someone next to but not actually in line.

I try not to listen to the conversations of others.  I am a city person--an urbanite, if you will--and jumping into or acknowledging an overheard conversation is considered rude.  And so I tuned out the fellow in front until he said something...off...and followed up with something so Out of Reality that my eyeballs rolled to the back of my head and almost got stuck.

The other man managed to bring the talk to politics, and they mostly sounded normal (well, normal for here; they'd have sounded like raving radicals in Texas).  But, you know, I blame this culture-of-vomit-every-thought sort of thing on the sort of forum that never bothers to correct anyone or mention that something is seriously weird and illogical.

In the Wrong Line of Work

Apparently the complementary subscription to the New York Times has run out and I'm back to the 20 free articles per month.  I thank the probably-not-at-the-time anonymous party who fronted me the sub; I hope I used it well.  I'll probably have to get my obituaries from other papers now.  The Los Angeles Times helpfully paired Geraldine Washington and Denise Darcel, an activist and an actress.

However this means that I have to get the unbelievable article by the public editor from Shakesville.  Which has a posting detailing what is Wrong with this particular editorial.  As does  Southern Beale, with a side order of why let some statements go unchallenged.  And the readers in comments basically let him have it with both barrels and then threw the gun at him.  So he is now claiming to have been misunderstood, but that was my last free article of the month, so you'll need to get it from Shakesville.  And Fred Clark uses the codfish.  [ETA:  Glenn Greenwald of Salon gets his licks in.  "Selective stenography."  Via The Sideshow.]

Basically, Mr. Brisbane has signed up for a cruise without realizing that it involves water.

Signal Boost

Terrance (Republic of T) calls it:  "Mitt Romney, Vulture Capitalist."

No, I'm not giving you taste quotes.  Go read it.

Some Perspective

Sappho of Noli Irritare Leones on ghostwriting and responsibility (are politicians required to fail courses in ethics?).

It’s just that the normal way ghost writing operates isn’t that you have no clue who your ghost writer is, that you have no clue what he’s been writing for years in your name, and that none of your friends even thinks to tell you if he writes something that everyone who knows you knows you’d completely disagree with. Normally, ghost writing works more the way it did for the Autobiography of Malcolm X, where you know Malcolm X didn’t put the words in their final literary form, but where you can trust that Alex Haley is faithfully representing what Malcolm X told him, and that Malcolm X had some clue what Alex Haley was writing in his name. Normally, if someone’s been ghost writing your newsletters who, according to many of your associates, is your good friend and was your congressional chief of staff, and whom you continue to associate with him long after the newsletters in question were written, the reasonable assumption is that your former congressional chief of staff correctly reported your voting record and that, in his role of ghost writer for your newsletters, he expressed views that he reasonably thought you’d be OK having published in your name.

And Southern Beale notes the Janus-like behavior of Caterpillar in Tennessee, some job fairs, and a recent coal slurry release:

This is how the “free hand of the market” works in America. Coal is cheap, we tell ourselves, and it fuels our glorious lifestyle, and government support of clean technology like wind and solar is socialism. And then when the inevitable disaster strikes, we make our poorest citizens suffer the longterm consequences. Oh right, and be sure to tell these poor people living with radioactive, arsenic -laden coal sludge that their health problems are just proof of how irresponsible they are. Any notion they had of getting some kind of access to the world’s best healthcare is just more crazy socialism talk.

Which means I need to do something frivolous today because pitchers and catchers report isn't for another 4-5 weeks.

Election News

Barry Larkin has been chosen for the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

What?

Yahrzeit

Yahrzeit.

Annual Note

Quickie yearly reminder:  Comments are open for ~10 days, after which they go into moderation (I do check moderation at least once a day).

Some Patriotism

The Patriot Guard Riders pay respects to a fallen soldier and then escort his body to the cemetery.  Via Daisy's Dead Air. Why, you may ask?

Many of them were wearing Christian-oriented biker wear, and I realized, they feel responsible for confronting WBC as Christians. They will not let these people do this nasty stuff in the name of Christianity, at least not without their own Christian witness alongside them. I have a great deal of respect for that.

[Emphases restored.]

In Memoriam

Ronald Searle, cartoonist.

An appreciation, also from the BBC.  Because he did other things.




[crossposted]

Plus Ça Change

...the more it's the same stuff on a different day.

1. Shark-fu at the top of the hour post:  On the Iowa caucus.
   

   I like to think of Iowa as being the political version of when a single person logs on to an internet dating site and sets up preferences…with Iowa being the first narrowing of the field…
   
   …and New Hampshire and South Carolina being a set of disappointing coffee dates at Starbucks.

2. And a double header from Ta-Nehisi Coates:  
   1. "Banality of Racism"
      

      It certainly is possible that Ron Paul never read a publications produced in his own name, just as it's possible to sincerely believe that the Civil Rights Act destroyed personal liberties, and it's possible to sincerely believe that if you are going to vote, you should be able to read the names of the candidates, or that Lincoln destroyed the original values of the republic. But it's also true that those beliefs have long been used to shield more odious ones. Forgive me for being suspicious when I see them employed in combination.

   2. and an article comparing Ron Paul to Louis Farrakhan:
      

      I have heard this reasoning before.
      
      As surely as Ron Paul speaks to a real issue--the state's broad use of violence and surveillance--which the America's political leadership has failed to address, Farrakhan spoke to something real, something unsullied, which black America's political leadership failed to address, Both Paul and Farrakhan, in their glamour, inspired the young, the disaffected, the disillusioned.
      
      To those who dimly perceived something wrong, something that could not be put on a placard, or could not move the party machine, men such as this become something more than political operators, they become symbols. Substantive charges against them, no matter the reasons, are dismissed. The movement they represent means more. But as sure as the followers of Farrakhan deserved more than UFOs, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, those of us who oppose the drug-war, who oppose the Patriot Act deserve better than Ron Paul[.]

3. Roy Edroso thumps Republican libertarians:  [ETA:  via Skippy; Edroso provided link to Digby below, so I owe Skippy twice.]
   

   These guys can always work together, because they all came out of the same Big Bang of hatred for the New Deal and its legacy: Big Government and the coalition that sustains it -- blacks, gays, unionized workers, women, et alia. Each conservative tribe has its own relationship to that legacy -- some of them (the more intelligent ones, generally) are deeply cynical, and some are as sincere as any schizophrenic street preacher. But all of them deeply hate that a bunch of minorities have coalesced to get something that they think belongs by right to them and people like them, and many of them have learned that it would be more effective (and, these days, more popular) to strike at the state that enables that coalition than at the minorities themselves.

4. Digby points out some inconsistency in Ron Paul's positions:
   

   When I talk about Ron Paul's antebellum politics this is what I mean --- a reversion to the way the country was fashioned before 1860. Indeed, these states' rights arguments stem from the original arguments over slavery. In this case, the position is being held by someone who believes that gays should be executed under biblical law. The entire idea of inalienable rights under the US Constitution is called into question by this kind of states' rights (which is interesting since the whole thing is supposedly predicated on an originalist view of the Constitution.)

I'm listening to vocal group harmony from the '50s. Because that's what we really built this city on.

Underpinnings

A review of a review of a book:  Anglachel examines Mark Lilla's article reviewing The Reactionary Mind:  Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.

It helps that there is almost no true conservatism in the US, as Lilla points out, "Americans’ assumptions about human nature are basically liberal today. We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn’t constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves." Our collective view of human nature is liberal. This is how you can end up with a "conservative" Eisenhower endorsing Social Security because it has now become part of the warp and weft of the (modern, abstract, liberal, rights-based) US society into which particular human beings are accidentally born. Perhaps ironically, the liberalism that venerates and celebrates the centrality of freedom to the human condition is committed to the preservation of formal structures that cannot be changed very easily, lest the space for the enactment of freedom be endangered. The duty of a liberal institution is to conserve.

Hmmmmmmmmmm...

If God is in us and around us, then we don't have to look for God; we just have to quiet the vocal and mental processes (i.e. Shut Up) and listen.

What Is It With Tennessee?

Via skippy, an elderly Tennessee woman told her ID not good enough to vote.

The incident is the just latest in a series of reports of senior citizens being denied their constitutional right to vote under restrictive new voter ID laws pushed by Republican governors and legislatures. These laws are a transparent attempt to target Democrat constituencies who are less likely to have photo ID’s, and disproportionately affect seniors, college students, the poor and minorities.

So Many Tabs, So Little Time...

Happy New Year, for those who celebrate it!

Oh, and visit the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2011 at Vagabond Scholar.  It is well worth your time.  (I don't seem to have linked to any of those!)

Theme & Variations

Avedon Carol:

The only thing liberals have been asking the White House to do is to tell the truth about the greater efficiency and promise of liberal programs and quit lying about the necessity of making us all live like Chinese slave laborers. Tell the public the truth about real single-payer medical systems, and then they won't worry about having to pay more taxes for a single-payer system. Tell the public that Social Security is not broke and that there is no reason on earth to raise the retirement age. The public already supports SSI, as the Dem leadership knows, which is why they keep lying about it to make it less popular. The truth is that the White House is perfectly happy to use the bully pulpit to push right-wing memes they know are false in order to try to make the public less likely to put their heads on pikes for trying to wreck Social Security and Medicare.

Amanda Marcotte:

Right wing media has quite literally cast its audience as belligerent, picky children and Michelle Obama as Mom standing over them telling they they can't have any dessert if they don't eat their vegetables. One could argue the facts on this until the end of time---do they seriously believe the First Lady has such all-encompassing powers that Olive Garden would rather cater to her than make money?----but I'm more interested in the psychology of this. Why are so many conservatives eager to imagine themselves not just as children, but as annoying, picky children? You'd think a bunch of authoritarians would at least prefer the image of well-behaved children who politely eat what's served, but their hatred of the Obamas runs so deep that they are willing to cast themselves in the role of the pointlessly petulant child.
Of course, it probably runs deeper than that. The truth may be that they don't realize that they are casting themselves in that role, but are just naturally drawn to it, because they are petulant and childish.

H. L. Mencken:

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Knew I'd Forgotten Something...

Merry Christmas!  (to those who celebrate)

(Also Happy Birthday to Isaac Newton!)

Truth and Rudeness

"Emperor, you have no clothes."  (Paraphrased from the Rude Pundit.)

Musical Interlude

Via, in roundabout fashion, Shelleybear at Live Journal, Darlene Love on Letterman.

Because it's not Christmas until Darlene Love Sings.

And have a terrific Solstice!

Happy Hanukkah

to those who celebrate it!

(Meanwhile, my Brazilian readers have taken the week off.)

Oh, And...

1. Via skippy:  Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is costing Wisconsin 18,000 jobs this year. (Actual report as a .pdf here.)  Y'know, when I was a kid, Republicans stood for prosperity...
2. Roz Kaveney actually knew Christopher Hitchens and has begun a series of poems memorializing him: here, here, and here.  (Via Avedon)
3. I got frustrated with the standard ordered lists and went and looked up the HTML tutorial, that's why.
4. Two items from Notes from the Lizard Lair:  When to use old language and slang in your stories; and On gender roles and (fictional) women in power.
5. For the halibut:  A slideshow of Seattle movie theaters, then and now.  (A lot of them are gone.)

Tin Pots

Jurassicpork examines the failure of the US to deal with the late Kim Jong-il.

Kim's 17 year-long reign as North Korea's dictator, a mantle reluctantly handed to him by his father after years of relentless campaigning for more power, also represented the ultimate failure of one of the last Communist states on earth. The belligerent and maddeningly stubborn Kim was so focused on harvesting every single scrap of fissionable nuclear material to create a pitiful arsenal of 6-8 nuclear warheads that he forgot how to feed his own people, depending on his enemies South Korea and the United States to do it for him.

Like Gadaffi and Bush, he was an international punchline, a man who benefited more from the cult of personality and nepotism than any other ruler of his time.