Dinner with the Family. Not.

Via skippy:  A Walmart Thanksgiving, by Charles Dickens.  Because apparently that bunch (the Walmart Execs, and yes, that's a lousy name for a band) missed the message the first time.  (Crooks and Liars is a terrific resource.)

I understand there is a Walmart somewhere in the region.  I will not be going there.

Death Wish

"How the GOP Is Literally Killing Its Voters," Alex Henderson, AlterNet.  Because you only have to fall through the net once.

Older news, but as teabaggers have been studiously ignoring it (probably because they think they'll benefit.  They're wrong):  The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the reasons to oppose it.  Jim Hightower, AlterNet.

Mass Hysteria

Well, no, more like temper tantrums.

Charles II at Mercury Rising links to and excerpts Ed Pilkington's article in the Guardian, adding his own coda:

These people are evil. There is no other word to describe the attempt to deny health care to people who are uninsurable because they are sick or poor. 40,000 American die every year because of their past efforts. To continue to cause people to die needlessly in the face of having lost the argument and two national elections is, very simply, murder.

Not pro-life, despite the rhetoric. But you knew that.

ALEC does not support legislation in people's best interests.  Remember that.

Working

Driftglass on the employment situation in these United States.

And yes, his headline is deliberate.

ETA:  Jurassicpork concurs.

Four For Texas

• Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance.  I am linking to the article at Transgriot by Monica Roberts, found via Red Light Politics, as part of my remembrance.  No one should be murdered for their gender presentation, their jobs, or their sexuality.  Ever.
• You know, one of the things that apparently needs to be taught in kindergarten is "Never sell or buy drugs from an undercover cop."  Really.  It's been fairly obvious for years now is that the crime is not the buying (or selling) of drugs, but the buying of drugs from undercover cops.  Read any article about someone busted for illegal pharmaceuticals.  If a search of premises is not involved, somewhere the words "undercover police" are guaranteed to appear.  Rep. Trey Radel (Republican, of Florida, of course) is merely the latest slow learner.
• Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast talks about her sister and their relationship over the years, and then weighs in in strong terms on Liz Cheney's dismissal of her sister Mary's marriage.  Frankly, I hope Liz Cheney's ears are hotter than jalapeños.  No decency and no shame.
• Greg Prince shakes hands with Dwight Gooden.  (And writes about meaning.)

Early Sorrow

• In memoriam:  Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize-winning author.
• Batocchio (Vagabond Scholar) on war and human stupidity around war.  A taste because otherwise I'd just quote the whole thing (it's that good):

  Tragically, it's easier to start a war than to end one. And it's easier, in national "debates" on war, for the wiser voices to be drowned out by the foolish, the vain, the frightened, the posturing, the political ambitious, and the greedy.
  
  […]
  
  And here's the thing. The national discourse will never be lacking in Richard Cohens and Megan McArdles eager to sacrifice other people's lives because they feel scared. It will never be lacking Tom Friedmans hungry to have others fight in a war to prove their own toughness. It will never lack Ann Coulters filled with rage and driven to prove their dominance, or George Bushes and Bill Kristols enthusiastic to taunt their political foes and live out macho fantasies. It will never lack highly pedigreed but foolish pundits such as Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon, who try to sell (to themselves and others) blithe imperialism as sober-minded realism. That leaves it to the rest of us to oppose these fuckers and build mechanisms so they can't start more unnecessary wars, not so easily. And that will be the work of sustained effort over many years. [Emphasis added.]

  The old-fashioned term is "vainglory." 
• [ETA: This morning over at Comrade Misfit's place, I saw a post announcing that one of the blogs that had been silent for a year was so because the blogger, Jeff Huber, had died, so I ankled on over and I'm still reading, but this post supports what I've been thinking about war for a while now. A sample:

  Every place we have bombed, boarded, bludgeoned, beheaded and bloodied, from Iraq to the Bananastans to Libya to Somalia to Yemen, looks like a big-city zoo ten minutes after the force-ten earthquake hit it.
  
  Our generals and the sycophant politicians who grovel at their spit-polished feet would have us believe that we now have to dedicate the next 80 years or so into rounding up all the critters we let loose and putting them back in their cages. Well guess what, folks. All them loose critters are making new critters faster than we can give Dick Cheney's pals no-bid contracts to build new cages to put them all in. You cannot win un-winnable wars. The longer you pursue them, the longer it takes to lose them.

  By the way, he has a lovely line in euphemism. "Unrefined used horse lunch," indeed.
  

AlterNet Is Totally On Fire Today

Who's got the marshmallows?

• Why you should be concerned about that global warming climate changing stuff.
• "Anarchist" as substitute for "commie" in the scare-monger arsenal.
• Capitalism's discouragements.
• People who lack empathy--nature or nurture?
• Breaking bad, er, habits.

Weekend…The Long Version

Thank you, Don Pardo.

• It turns out that the head of CBS News is a former Faux News honcho, and that there's a wee bit of possible conflict of interest with the eyewitness who wasn't.  (News Corpse, via Mercury Rising.)
• Ta-Nehisi Coates (Atlantic) and Abi Sutherland (Making Light) dissect Richard Cohen's unconsciously revealing column in the Washington Post; Mr. Coates calls it what it is, and Ms. Sutherland makes of the offending paragraph a pantoum.*  [ETA:  Lance Mannion has another take on that column.][EFTA, 11/24: Chris Clarke, who is probably not the Chris Clarke in my elementary Russian class in college, damnit, composed a pointed parody.  Courtesy of in medias res at Making Light.]

* "pantoum |panˈto͞om|(also pantun )

nouna Malay verse form, imitated in French and English, consisting of quotations with anabab rhyme scheme linked by repeated lines."

It Seems...

that one of the witnesses to the Benghazi attack…wasn't there.

"Careful With That Axe, Eugene"

Still meditating on that generosity thing.  And pondering what it meant that Mom left all that luggage in front of the seat on the train and then disappeared (another dream, more weirdness).  In any case, all these tabs have got to go.

• Via Echidne of the Snakes, another conservative misapprehension.

  For note that a good economy, a safety net which encourages entrepreneurship (and stops the vortex that results in extreme poverty), fair wages and retirement systems would NOT create "a permanent majority demanding government hand-outs." Because the majority of people would be paying federal income taxes and sharing in the expenses of our shared concerns.

• Republic of T on the peculiar things conservatives believe about the Employment Nondiscrimination Act.  With videos.  Bonus:  "Speaker Boehner, Job Discrimination Is Not "Frivolous."  With examples and personal testimony.
• Good news!  Illinois voted to allow same-sex marriages!  (OK, so this is a day or so old.)
• Mills River Progressive on restraining the NSA and on the Farm Bill.
• Fancy that:  Obamacare gaining positive attention in the polls.  Gee.  And in spite of all that negative attention, too.  Gosh!
• Music!  Music!  Music!

We Fight On

Pvt. Chelsea Manning's ongoing struggle to live as a woman (and the obstacles in the way).

The military has said it does not provide treatment for gender dysphoria. Pentagon policy dictates that transgender soldiers are not allowed to serve, but Manning can't be discharged until she's released from prison and exhausts appeals of her criminal convictions. The Army Medical Command has said prisoners cannot receive hormone treatment at Fort Leavenworth, though Manning is apparently the first to request it. Prison officials have said Manning won't be allowed to dress as a woman.

The case may have to go to court.

Oh, And...

Happy Halloween.

Food Stamps

• Republic of T:  "47 Million Americans Are Going Over the 'Hunger Cliff.'"

  The truth is that sometimes those who work still can’t eat. Many food stamp recipients have jobs. They are the working poor, whose wages are not enough to lift them out of poverty. They are low-wage workers for highly profitable companies that refuse to pay living wages. They rely on food stamps to stave off hunger. Some employers, like McDonald’s tell workers to apply for food stamps if their wages aren’t enough to put food on the table.
  These are the people who will be going over the “Hunger Cliff” while members of Congress negotiate even more cuts to food stamps.

• Welcome Back to Pottersville:  "McHammered."

  This cruel brand of wingnuttery (check out the barely literate comments at the end of the article) would drive me crazy even if I wasn't on SNAP myself. Ozimek seems perfectly comfortable with the federal government bailing out bottomlessly avaricious corporations like McDonald's who long ago found a way to game the system and get the American taxpayer to assume much of the burden of their overhead expenses such as payroll and health care. He seems to have not the slightest problem with a person such as Nancy Salgado making minimum wage after a full decade with the company and that company telling her, "Rather than pay you even a penny more an hour, go on public relief."

Five billion dollars funding the SNAP/food stamp program are scheduled to expire at the end of the day. No legislator will miss a meal. Just saying.

Via skippy, Lance Mannion on Edward R. Murrow and the news biz.  There were giants in those days.  There were non-giants, too.

There’s a hint in the movie that TV journalism---all journalism---was what it is today, superficial, process and narrative obsessed, prone to the worship of power and success and the celebrification of the rich and powerful, including and especially Washington politicians, fetishizing “balance” and “objectivity”. Chuck Todd would have been as at home then as he is now, although he might have thought twice before blithely announcing it’s not his job to sort out fact from fiction or determine who’s lying and who’s telling the truth out of fear of what Ed Murrow would think of him. But part of why McCarthy was able to get away with things he did---“I hold in my hand a list…” was that the national press corps practiced the same He Said-She Said journalism that lets Republicans today claim climate change is a hoax, tax cuts pay for themselves, government spending doesn’t create jobs, Obamacare will establish death panels, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera... I learned in a history of journalism course back in college that after the Senate finally censured McCarthy and he crawled all the way into the bottle---one thing is clear in the clips interspersed throughout Good Night, and Good Luck: McCarthy was almost continually drunk---there was some collective soul-searching among journalists and editors that concluded with the self-indictment that “balance” was another name for institutional timidity and for some time after, up to and through the Vietnam War and Watergate, news organizations practiced a more aggressive and investigative brand of reporting. That ended with the election of Ronald Reagan and the realization that there was a large conservative audience waiting to be exploited as a market for advertising.

At the daily howler, Mr. Somerby in commenting on a speech by Malala Yousafzai mentions the oppositional tendency of current journalists.

George Takei speaks at the National Press Club (YouTube video -- speech begins 8 minutes in).

Higher Ground

• Falsehoods about Obamacare, take n + 1:

  This year the campaign to recast a program that makes health insurance accessible to millions of Americans as a plague of locusts has risen to fever pitch. The Republican Party and conservative media has pulled out all the stops in a strategy aimed at scaring people from signing up with the hope that low enrollment will collapse the system.

  Mark Howard at AlterNet, folks.
• The 300,000 Floridians; the Blue Cross/Blue Shield CEO corrects the record.  Via Zandar Versus The Stupid. 
• Driftglass is conducting a fundraiser.  Sample post.
• Bob Somerby wonders why baseball games take so long now and invokes the '63 Series and Koufax and Drysdale.

In Memoriam

Lou Reed, musician (Velvet Underground).

Influential, OK.  Pioneer, no.

Hot Fun in the Autumn-time

Well, no; fall is Serious Business.  Winter is coming, and those acorns don't get buried by themselves.

• In memoriam:  Anthony Caro, abstract sculptor.
• Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism, on "The Coercive Power of Capitalism."  Because it's not benign.

  And this might put the “failure of capitalism” theme in context. If you have a system that requires that people sell their labor as a condition of survival, yet fails to provide enough opportunities to sell labor to go around, you have conditions for revolt. Hungry, desperate people having nothing to lose. That, and not charity, is the root of the welfare state, to provide a buffer for when the capitalist system chokes up and presumably on a short-term basis, fails to provide enough jobs (that and to provide for people who are infirm, handicapped, or otherwise cannot work, which communities in England did in the early modern era).
  
  So you can see the obvious tension: the capitalist classes in America, to increase their riches further, have been squeezing workers harder by not hiring as they did in the past. We’ve never had a “recovery” in the post-WWII era with so little of GDP growth going to labor (meaning both hiring and wage increases). In the past, the average was over 60% and the lowest was 55%. I haven’t seen a recent update, but the last figures I saw was that the level for this “recovery” was under 30%. Yet simultaneously, theres’s a full-bore effort on to gut the remaining safety nets. If this isn’t a prescription for social and political instability, I don’t know what is.

  Read the rest; it'll straighten your hair.
• I had thought I'd pointed people at Margaret and Helen's latest.  Apparently not.  Ableist language.  Also, I think it is time for Texas women to rise in revolt.  (See note.)

Obamacare Makes a Difference; That's Why the Fear

• Republic of T on how the Affordable Care Act is already working.  (I've seen blustering by Republicans that they'd do the whole thing differently and better.  Which of course is why it took how many years? for this version of health care to come about.  Pull the other leg, it has bells.)
• That number, again, if you can't reach the ACA website:  

  1-800-318-2596

• Fibromyalgia cause.  (Washington Times article.)

  Now it has been discovered when the AV [arterio-venous] shunt is defective in function and interferes with capillary function, muscle and skin tissue cannot get proper nutrition or waste drawn away. Additionally, temperature regulation becomes an issue affecting nerve fibers.

• Now to go and enjoy some oldies.  Motown oldies.

Just Listenin' to George Carlin

"The planet isn't going anywhere.  We are."  -- G. Carlin

Last year, I linked to Sara Robinson's articles at Orcinus analyzing Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America.  She wrote essays on three of the four folkways, but she never got around to the fourth one, at least not where I could find it (I searched).  [ETA:  This post links to those articles.]

This gap has been filled (not by Mrs. Robinson, alas) by Geenius at Wrok, who has a long piece at (I'm sorry) Daily Kos:  "E Pluribus Contentio:  The Origins (and Dangers) of the Tea Party Shutdown"

One paragraph:

It ought to be, more than anything else, the concept of pluralism itself -- the idea that people with different traits and different values can and should live together under one system that respects the dignity and rights of all of them and gives every one of them a voice. That's what our Founders envisioned, to the extent that the logic of their times would allow. That's what lured generations of immigrants away from repressive monarchies. That's what inspired dissidents living behind the Iron Curtain and enticed many of them to defect. That's what African Americans marched and often died for during the Civil Rights Era. That's what still draws political refugees seeking asylum. If we can't reestablish a consensus behind pluralism now, America as we know it, understand it and revere it is, for all intents and purposes, over.

I think this is either the first or second time I've actually cited the Great Orange Satan. Thanks to supergee on Dreamwidth for the link.

And Then the Creature Invaded My Dreams

• 1-800-318-2596

  is the number to call to register by phone if you're having problems with the Affordable Care Act website.  Spreading the word from Mercury Rising.  
• The Pacific Ocean has dead zones.  Do not touch anything at the top of the page; if you do, at the moment you can get it back by passing over Front Page.
• Tomorrow the Red Sox and the Cardinals start throwing down for the World Championship.  (I'd had hope that the ancient Boston Braves and St. Louis Browns had met back in the distant past, but no, the Browns lost the one Series they were in in '44, and the Braves, who won in 1914, lost in '48.)  We shall see.

But I'm Not Vegan!

Chicken.  Yes, chicken.  Sick-making.

ETA:  And Safeway continued to sell contaminated chicken known to be contaminated.  (Spocko's Brain.  He got firsthand experience.)

Yes, I do prepare chicken correctly.  Nevertheless.

Conservatives Hope You Get Sick

• Wired interview with the Director of U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  

  [TRF:] [...] For instance, here’s what we’re responding to right now: An outbreak of Legionella in a residential facility in Alabama. An outbreak of tuberculosis in another state. An investigation of a fatal case of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever on an American Indian Reservation in Arizona where we’ve been working for two years to control that disease. A serious healthcare-associated infection outbreak in Baltimore. A cluster of infants who have been dying, or getting severely ill, in another part of the country. A cluster of meningitis in a university in the northeast that is going to require a very complicated response. An outbreak of hepatitis B in healthcare.
  
  ‘For every day of government shutdown, about one million emails at CDC go unread.’
  Every day in this country, there are births and deaths and hospitalizations and surgical procedures and emergency department visits and infections, and HIV and TB, and people who get sick from contaminated foods. For every day that goes by, there’s a less intensive investigation, less effective prevention of situations like this. If I had to use one phrase to describe what’s happening: This is a self-inflicted wound.

• Aedes aegypti found in California (vector for yellow fever, dengue fever and West Nile virus).
• Antibiotic-resistant salmonella.
• And 

  Two Colorado cantaloupe farmers plan to plead guilty under a deal with federal prosecutors in connection with the 2011 listeria outbreak that killed 33 people in the nation's deadliest case of foodborne illness in a quarter century.
  
  Eric and Ryan Jensen were charged last month with introducing adulterated food into interstate commerce.

  Because of course that would never happen.

But apparently the CDC was not essential.

Infection control has a liberal bias.

Maybe It Was Written in COBOL...

Sappho at Noli Irritare Leones on the glitchy health care registration website:

In the meantime, Obamacare is fodder for debate about the merits of government vs. private industry. My own sense of the general issue is that government does some things well, and private industry does other things well. Government does more things well, and private industry more things badly, in my observation, than the strictest libertarian arguments allow for. When I was young, “small government” people had “government shouldn’t legislate morality” arguments for why the free market would do a much better job at ending discrimination than anti-discrimination laws would, but, from where I sit, anti-discrimination laws worked much better for this purpose. Similarly, government does better than private industry at addressing certain externalities like pollution, and providing certain public services where both leaving people uncovered and allowing people to be free riders pose problems (for some things, like fire departments, we can all agree to this, even if we disagree vehemently over how far health care fits this model). On the other hand, I think we pretty much agree that government does less well at central planning than some still hoped it would, when I was young.

Large institutional websites take a while to work after launch.  Other factors do not help.

Republicans can say all they want that they are doing what’s best for the country. It feels a lot like revenge, and polls show that Americans are not fooled by Republicans saying otherwise.

Republic of T, calling out some liars.

Psychological Reasoning

Humans have a talent for finding enemies, and if they can't find a real one, they'll turn on the nearest innocent bystander not-friend and mock up a monster.  Jesse Curtis pegs it:

The far right in American politics is always looking for an enemy that's not there. So they make one up. Having done so, the money flows in, the emotional catharsis is achieved, and they can feel secure in their status as the heirs of 1776.

I bear in mind that the "center" and the "right" are in some ways not as far apart as they might look.  (As are the "center" and the "left."  I am of the "left" because I find the "right" morally, personally, psychologically, and intellectually repellent.)

Hard Truth

Arthur Silber:

[M]ost people do not object to power itself. Most people are enormously comfortable with power, and they are more than happy to obey the dictates of those in positions of authority. Their only requirement is that power be exercised by those they approve and view favorably. It should not be necessary to state explicitly a logically compelled further point. But, since the minds of so many "dissenters" and "radicals" seem to be on extended vacation, it is advisable to set it out: You cannot successfully challenge an enemy by adopting his methods. When you adopt the enemy's methods, you no longer challenge him: you become him. [Emphasis in original.]

The essay is about Mr. Greenwald and the Snowden secrets, but that paragraph applies to everyone.

Bit of a Jeremiad

Via Mills River Progressive, Chris Hedges at Truthdig:

In the modern age this toxic, mindless cacophony, our own version of spectacle and gladiator fights, of bread and circus, is pumped into the airwaves in 24-hour cycles. Political life has fused into celebrity worship. Education is primarily vocational. Intellectuals are cast out and despised. Artists cannot make a living. Few people read books. Thought has been banished, especially at universities and colleges, where timid pedants and careerists churn out academic drivel. “Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.” And ours have been destroyed.

It's one and one-third pages long.

I could pick at stuff, but this is prime wailing.  The comments are the usual swamp.

Because Nobody Gets Stalked On Line. Uh-Uh.

Tell me again just how concerned they are about privacy.

(PS:  If you ever run across a Facebook account that alleges to be mine, it is fake; I refuse to have a Facebook account.)

In Memoriam

• Scott Carpenter, astronaut (Mercury 7)
• Stanley Kauffmann, movie critic
• Andy Pafko, Brooklyn Dodger

Conservatives and Republicans So Love the Troops...

Open letter from a veteran on food stamps.

I didn’t risk my life in Afghanistan so I could come back and watch people go hungry in America. I certainly didn’t risk it so *I* could come back and go hungry.

Anyone who genuinely supports cutting food stamps is not an intellectual or an ideologue – they’re a bully.

And nobody likes a bully. Except other bullies.

By the way, I found this link on a porn site.