Ev 20

NAFTA:  The bad news.

(Remember I mentioned Welcome to Pottersville 2 almost three weeks ago?  Regular posting now.)

Scarlet Standard

Via james davis nicoll on dreamwidth, Guitar Center's problems and why we should be alarmed.

Music, you see, is about about way more than just money – it is about a crazy, primal, uncontrollable passion. Most people who have dedicated their lives to music realize that it is an irrational thing – a little unhealthy but strangely fulfilling. The “industry” is actually a culture built by men and women who obsess over the rich sound of analog synthesizers; the warm thud of Leo Fender’s Precision bass; the sublime beauty of the sunburst on a vintage Les Paul; the roar of a Marshall amplifier; the silky vocals behind Neumann tube microphones. Note the prevalence of family names in these company names – the real industry was built on the artistic endeavors of individual geniuses who acted out of pure inspiration, not banks. Financial return represents but a small fraction of the motivation behind the involvement of the vast majority of people in the musical instrument business.

Yet for Bain Capital and Ares Capital, it is 100% of the reason for their involvement – and that is not good enough for the rest of civilization.

Eric Garland goes into considerably more detail about the financial chicanery involved here.  Basically, it's the same playbook used in the mortgage industry.  Presumably 2008 is not too far down the memory hole...

Cover Songs

Cerberus (Sadly, No!) on conservative attempts to reclaim cool.  (Short version:  In your dreams, Buster.)  But the supporting arguments are much more fun.

And it’s a real shame, because these posts practically write themselves with their total failure to grasp even the outlines of the broader culture the wingnut finds themselves lost and confused within. I mean, with their insistent demand to dominate all culture and gain its reputation without work or effort, and of course their myopic failure to grasp just why they will never ever understand the culture they flail around, it’s pretty much a gold mine for us snark merchants.

Even more so when the whiny conservative in question decides to mix some good old fashioned dominant group with a persecution complex baggage into the mix in order to blame his personal failings on some Lovecraftian conspiracy of PBR beer cans and trucker hats.

In short, ladies, gentlemen, non-binary individuals, and fluberts, start up the popcorn, because we are in for a treat.

(That may be one of the reasons reactionaries keep trying to clutch meaningful rock/folk songs in their dripping claws--they know music gets to the emotions, but they don't know how to write anything but dreck.)

"All Your Life, You Were Only Waiting for This Moment to Arrive"

Terrance Heath reports on What Money Buys, I mean, the Billionaire's Primary, um, I mean a spring meeting/conference in Las Vegas for Republican politicians and donors.

[Sheldon] Adelson and the Kochs show how the wealthy can use their wealth — in a post-Citizens United political landscape — to impact races and shape policy. Their fire-hoses of money can easily drown out other messages, and narrow the field of candidates for office. The cost of running for office increasingly requires candidates have personal wealth, or wealthy patrons. Those who have neither almost need not apply, even at the state and local level.

See also Zandar Versus The Stupid.  Fair warning.

Things of Note

1. Metsgrrl's collection of best posts is out on Kindle, if you want to read a real baseball fan.
2. Southern Beale on voter suppression shenanigans (riffing off this piece in the Palm Beach Post) that even embarrass a Wisconsin Republican.
3. Culture, class, history, pathology, race, and gender.  Also codeswitching and conflation of similar things.  Ta-Nehisi Coates for the win.  [ETA:  See this article for a response to the response Coates got.]
4. Red Emma of WiredSisters at Noli Irritare Leones looks at the Hobby Lobby case through the lens of conscientious objection.
5. Pacifica Radio is at war with itself and losing.  (I am an ex-listener; some people I know may still have shows.)  [ETA:  via Oakland Local]

Good News and Good News

Conflict:

1. Monday there will be official baseball for the next seven months.
2. Monday there is a greater than 50% chance of rain.

It's a tossup. Possibly a fielder's choice.

(In local news, it has been a week of reading the news and screaming "What are they, stupid?"  This makes analysis and understanding difficult.  When I saw this article (via Making Light):

FBI agents are interviewing employees at FEMA in an investigation of unusual changes in federal flood insurance maps that benefited oceanfront condo buildings with a history of flooding, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

The investigation follows a report by NBC News documenting more than 500 instances in which FEMA has remapped waterfront properties from the highest-risk flood zone, saving the owners as much as 97 percent on the premiums they pay into the financially strained National Flood Insurance Program.

I wanted to flail about with a week-old codfish (thank you, oursin) upon both the developers and the residents.)

Game Over

"First direct evidence of cosmic inflation."

When asked to comment on the implications of this discovery, Harvard theorist Avi Loeb said, "This work offers new insights into some of our most basic questions: Why do we exist? How did the universe begin? These results are not only a smoking gun for inflation, they also tell us when inflation took place and how powerful the process was."

Speaking of Health Care Stories

Beverly Mann at Angry Bear suggests that it might be smart for Democrats to boost the ACA.

• "Unaffordable," long-term illness:

  Here’s a suggestion to these candidates: Why are you not using people like Terry Coppage and his wife to illustrate that only Americans, among citizens of the entire world’s developed economies, face financial ruin because they or a member of their nuclear family needs extensive medical care. Only Americans. [Emphasis in original]

• Free political consulting offered:

  Maybe by the time the insurance industry realizes that the AFP ads need to be countered with an ad campaign of hard-hitting refutations and real-people stories, the Dems will have figured that out, too. I never got this idea of addressing the ACA with generic we-need-to-fix-rather-than-repeal it, and hope that that nullifies the law’s unpopularity as a political problem.

(I don't believe Democratic party "refusal to thrive" is mere cowardice, by the way.  A really long time ago now somebody (bugsybanana on Live Journal?  Somebody) (bugsybanana it was, linking to an article at Fact-esque in 2010) referred to the exhibitions of the Harlem Globetrotters vs. the Washington Generals and nothing has changed even as the Republican party moves further to the right and harks back more to the past.  Remember Howard Dean in 2008?  Remember that almost as soon as the 2008 elections were over, he was disappeared let go?  Is the manager/coach whose team wins the championship usually dismissed immediately?  I wouldn't crack that egg if I were you.)

Spring is Close Enough to Touch

• First:  I know someone who now has health insurance thanks to Obamacare.  Let me expand on that:  I am personally acquainted with someone who, because of preexisting conditions, could not  get health insurance; who now has health insurance for the first time in several years because of Obamacare.  (Hey, anecdotal evidence is good enough for conservatives!)
• Via skippy:  Corn-eating worm evolves to feed on GMO corn designed to kill it.  Excuse me while I giggle.  Not the desired outcome, what?

Yahrzeit

Yahrzeit.

Mittwoch

1. Yes, I did rearrange the blogrolls, somewhat, even though Blogger really didn't want me to, and doesn't like titles for my blogrolls.  Migrating this mess to Wordpress is not on the agenda.  Yet.  (Incidentally, the signing party for Metsgrrl is today.)
2. Terrance Heath is totally incandescent lately.
1. Another conservative outraged that the poor still eat.

   Only a conservative like Varney — and possibly Paul Ryan — could be outraged that poor people aren’t starving in the streets, for the sake of the national debt. It’s par for the course for Varney, who has in the past boasted about being “mean to poor people.”

   With videos.
2. Why conservatives keep trying to undermine Obamacare, part umpty-ump.

   Obamacare isn’t perfect. It still leaves 31 million uninsured, because it’s not a universal program. But conservatives don’t have an alternative path to health care reform that even comes close to accomplishing what Obamacare does, because it would run counter to their core ideology. That’s not a “bug” of conservative health policy. It’s a feature.

It is disgraceful that Mr. Heath is not better known than Mr. (ugh) Brooks. Speaking of whom,
3. Driftglass (complete with Fail-Safe and Fawlty Towers videos) observes the rest of the MSM finally catching up to Mr. Brooks' lack of substance.
4. Jurassicpork (Welcome Back to Pottersville) on voter turnout.  (Actually, ahem, lack of voter turnout.)  [ETA:  Seeing the Forest suggests that the voters had no reason to turn out.  Hmmmmm.]
5. Late in this article by Cerberus at Sadly, No!, this sentence appears:

   The more homophobes seem to think that people will stop having straight sex the second that people are allowed to be in queer couplings, the more I am convinced that the homophobes arguing this don’t have a straight bone in their bodies.

   That's why I love the blogosphere.  Another mewling right-wing-identified writer's column thoroughly analyzed and found to contain negative nutritional value.
6. Lagniappe:  Long post at Welcome to Pottersville 2 touching on various subjects, including Mr. Varney.  (I am restraining myself from typing "the Vampire" because it's too obvious.)  I forgot this blog's existence because it didn't update for a while, but apparently now it's current.

70 degrees F. Why am I indoors?

Why There Are So Few Black Conservatives

Zandar deconstructs one with a hand tied behind their back.

Let's understand that the entire point of being a black conservative pundit is saying whatever President Obama does or does not do is "downright offensive" to blacks, because all the grim statistics backing up the notion of centuries of struggle by black families in America only became a problem on January 20, 2009.

I might support the idea of the "level playing field" if such existed (in the same way I support the Kingdom of God on Earth), but it doesn't, and pretending that it does just gets people hurt and/or killed.  Plus the conservatives/reactionaries are in fact doing their utmost to un-level the playing field.

Watch This Space

Requested reading:

• Healing and disinformation about cannabidiol, from AlterNet.
• The Prodigal Son analogy, from Spocko's Brain.
• Work…and work, from Lance Mannion.

I'll wait over here.

OK.

ETA, 3/8/14:  Apparently I am not going to write this because the thoughts these essays sparked seem to have escaped and taken up residence in an ancient oak.  Very annoying.  And I have been slacking except for comments.  (I won't promise more frequent writing because that leads to semiannual posts.)

Meanwhile, Bartcop, who had a blog before the word was invented, died.  Skippy had the news and a link;  Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast has a meditation on grief and loss.  If any of you could spare some help for Bartcop's widow there's a Paypal button at the site.

Also, I see that some folks on my blogroll haven't updated in over a year (Metsgrrl has, actually, but either Blogger isn't picking it up or her blogging software isn't laying it down).  Archiving is on the agenda.  As is deletion (Santa Claus, alas, is gone and so when I get a Round Tuit, he will be delinked).  Spring cleaning is coming.

"The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York"

• Via Mercury Rising, "Republican IRS Witch Hunt Cost $14 Million and Counting" (at Politicus USA) has shall we say a familiar name attached:

  We only know because Representatives Sander Levin and Elijah Cummings, the Ranking Members of the House Ways and Means Committee and Oversight and Government Reform Committee, asked the IRS on February 7 in a letter. Today they released a letter from IRS Commissioner John Koskinen regarding the money and resources spent on the Republican witch hunt.
  
  The costs, which are explained as the “conservative approach”, detailed in Koskinen’s letter are $8 million in direct costs like salaries, benefits, and travel, plus an additional $6 million to $8 million to “add capacity to information technology systems to process materials to investigators.”
  
  All of this was spent when Darrell Issa knew from the beginning that there was nothing to see.

  Mmmmm-hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
• Mills River Progressive reposts from OpEd News an article by Alan Grayson on China and the Keystone XL pipeline.    

  There are plenty of reasons to be against the Keystone XL pipeline. Environmentalists recognize it as the ultimate "bonfire of the vanities" - planet-wide carbon bonfires. The pipeline passes through an active earthquake zone. One bad spill could permanently poison the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides drinking water to millions of people, and 30% of our irrigation.
  
  Here is another reason, perhaps the best reason of all: It doesn't do us any good. China, yes. The Koch Brothers (who own the refining capacity that would be used), yes. Us, no.

• Also via Mills River Progressive from OpEd News:  Roundup is not good for you or the food chain.  

Warning: Pop-up ads.

In Memoriam

Harold Ramis, director/writer/actor (see also Chicago Tribune's 's summary of his career [warning: video plays]).

Because I'm Avoiding Writing an Essay With Footnotes Links

Many "conservatives" are not frauds, but an awful lot seem to be.

Take Brent Bozell.  Please.  "Uncredited underling" = "ghostwriter."   Underpaid ghostwriter.

"Oh scribbler, change your ways today, or with us you'll engage,
A-tryin' to catch the devil's words across an endless page!
Yippee-ki-yay,
Yippee-ki-yo,
Ghost writers in the sky!"

Sorry.  Fortunately, baseball season is almost close enough to smell the grass.

In Memoriam

Jim Fregosi, ballplayer and manager and what the Mets got for Nolan Ryan.

In Memoriam

Shirley Temple Black, actress and diplomat.  (Link via Avedon)

ETA:  Sid Caesar, tower of comedy.  Via skippy, who includes a video.

Over at Sadly, No!, A Simple, Non-Desultory, Non-Verbal Philippic

With interpolated "Shorter" translations.

Cerberus on systemic oppressions in the United States. A short excerpt:

But more seriously. On the moocher point… the right wing is actually on to something. This nation has genuinely been hit by an epidemic of moochers, people who have stolen great big chunks out of the economy and production in order to serve no real purpose or make any real difference in their lives other than to compete in a game of randomly increasing numbers with other asshole moochers.

All over the country, the hard-work of millions of Americans is stolen and abused by fear of unemployment and death in order for all the production that it creates to go to a handful of assholes who sit in a chair and pretend like they fucking matter. And those same people are in turn are marks for a group of even bigger moochers who just convince everyone to put their money in a great big casino they have rigged in their favor, when they aren’t straight up bribing congresscritters to make them richer.

These moochers steal the bread out of the mouths of children and do not even remotely give back an equivalent amount of value.

Which is the real reason why the right-wing is so loud about various forms of moochers, including literally everyone else.

Read the whole thing.  It's well written and takes to task corporations, conservatives, and the system.

Hat tip to Simon & Garfunkel for the idea for the title.

In Memoriam

Ralph Kiner, ballplayer and broadcaster.

Radio and television games, from April to October, doubleheaders, really long games, losses and wins, there those three were, describing the game, weaving statistics with baseball lore.  George* Bob Murphy, Lindsay Nelson, and Ralph Kiner, the announcing team for the New York Mets for many years.

(His days with the Pirates were before I was born.)




* My mistake.  I blame old age and having missed the obituary.

In Case You Wondered

"Why Republicans Keep Calling Women Sluts." By Paul Waldman at The American Prospect, via The Slacktivist.

The simple answer is that they can't help themselves, but more specifically, it's a combination of ignorance, contempt, and Puritan morality that inevitably leads to these eruptions. And it's going to keep happening.

And

This seems to come up again and again: Republicans think they're talking to a nation of nuns, when in reality they're talking to actual women whose lives and experiences are different from what Republicans imagine them to be.

Apparently conservative Republican women don't slap Republican men silly correct them for getting basic biology wrong.

In Memoriam

I am now down to 6 articles in the NYTimes.  Fortunately February is a short month.

• Philip Seymour Hoffman, actor.  No, I didn't know any of that, but the details will come pouring out now.
• Maximilian Schell, actor.
• Leslie Lee, playwright.

In Memoriam

Pete Seeger, singer, songwriter, environmental and peace activist.

One of my neighbors has a bumper sticker promoting Pete Seeger for the Nobel Peace Prize.  Not gonna happen now.

ETA:  Jurassicpork bites Grover Norquist on the incivility leg:

The next time one of the sons or daughters of Ronald Reagan accuses the left of incivility when one of their own war-mongering, tax-dodging icons shits the bed, think of asswipes like Grover Norquist jiggling his pudgy body in a spastic jig over the undug grave of progressive heroes like Pete Seeger, who died at 94.

There's a reason why folk singers are invariably progressive and are never Republican. When did Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary, Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs or Bob Dylan ever sing songs glorifying Exxon or any multibillion dollar multi-national corporation? It would never occur to a Republican to become a folk singer because that would mean having to, you know, actually embrace and take up the causes concerning common folk since time immemorial.

Bonus: Comrade Misfit has a video playlist up.

Supplemental Reading

Because frankly, I didn't get why Spider-Man's costume became Venom, either.

• Installation of obedience in children and where that leads:  Arthur Silber calls out the government and its representatives.
• The high conical headdress for medieval/Renaissance women was not a European invention.
• Yeah, he said "Class war." Bill Moyers on, well, class war. 

  We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.

• Americans are being cheated out of their retirement money, and no, privatization is as usual not the answer.
• Dumbing us down?
• s. e. smith has an interesting essay on "sex strikes"--ie, Lysistrata et al.

And now I can close all those tabs.  Phew.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, 2014

• Via Shakesville, the I Have A Dream video, in case you need a reminder of the power that speech contained.  (Shakesville has a transcript.)  I'm playing it right now.
• Jesse Curtis looks at Dr. King's words and the present.

  Dr. King spoke of the interrelated problems of racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism--problems that were so embedded in the fabric of American life that they compromised the very structure of society. We modern Americans, appropriately colorblind and tolerant, believe that we've fulfilled the promise of the Black freedom struggle by...wait for it...being nice to each other.

[crossposted]

You Thought I Was Kidding

Via Zandar Versus The Stupid:  Wisconsin Republicans propose 7 day work week.  (Raw Story.)

You didn't believe me when I said conservatives want to steal your weekends.

Weekends are not, apparently, sacrosanct.  You want to keep having them, you're going to have to fight.  Now.

Yahrzeit

Yahrzeit.

Hall of Fame Honorees, 2014

Messrs. Glavine, Maddux and Thomas.

Pitchers and Catchers Report is before Ash Wednesday this year!  36 days!

Letter and Spirit

1. Jesse Curtis on what the Bible actually says about poverty, with quotes from The Big Guy:

   It is not hard to see that such practices are rampant in our culture. Just think of the schemes of the banks, mortgage companies, and payday lenders. But the more subtle practices the Bible so wisely notes are present here too, and we are implicated in them. The norm in American culture is to live in the best community one can afford, putting as much distance between us and the poor as money will provide. The rich do indeed have many friends, while the poor suffer for want of connections. The Bible speaks of such states of affairs not as age-old ways of the world that we must resign ourselves to, but as expressions of cultures nearing the extreme limits of depravity. When God spoke through the prophet Jeremiah to decry extreme evil he focused on treatment of the most marginal members of the society[.]

2. Having, eating, and complaining about one's cake.

   “Ma’am, if we were closed today, how would you get these things you’re buying right now?”

Probably not a Journey to God post.

In Memoriam

Phil Everly.

I grew up with the Everly Brothers in my ears.  It was always easy to understand the lyrics, even when I didn't understand the lyrics (I didn't get why little Susie couldn't just sleep for the longest time).  They were pretty much the standard for two-part harmony.

COPD.  "Lifetime of cigarette smoking."  Yeah.

[News first seen at Making Light.]