Let's Get Meta

If you think of "sin" as a sidewalk peppered with bird droppings, it becomes clear that:

• You can try to avoid stepping in it, but sooner or later you will;
• You will look funny while you are contorting yourself trying to avoid the droppings;
• While it is natural and organic and fertilizing and not deliberate on the part of the bird, excrement still stinks up your shoes.

Happy New Year. Time to crash.

A Look at Libertarian Utopia

R. J. Eskow at AlterNet on "What America Would Look Like If Libertarians Got Their Way."  With examples.

It's not just about legalizing drugs.

From the "What Did I Tell You?" File

Voting restriction bills have racial causes.  From Talking Points Memo (TPM)

Two University of Massachusetts Boston academics -- Keith G. Bentele, an assistant professor of Sociology, and Erin O'Brien, an associate professor of Political Science -- recently published a paper looking at the proposal and passage of restrictive voter access legislation from 2006 to 2011. In the paper, titled "Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies," the authors conclude that restrictive voter measures are connected to both partisan and racial factors.

[…]

What about the great Republican specter of voter fraud?

"If you want to be extraordinarily generous, you could say allegations of voter fraud may have been a very, very small contributing factor," Bentele said, speaking more generally about voter restriction efforts. "But in general, these partisan and racial effects seem to be really, really strongly associated with this outcome."

Abstract of the paper.

Have I mentioned that I'm reading Albion's Seed?  Because *gobsmack city*.

Chicken. Yes, Chicken.

Drug-resistant bacteria on chickens.  What, where, why.

(No, food poisoning is not a new way to get high.  Au contraire.  But if you enjoy vomiting and diarrhea and you can't afford booze or catching the flu, here's a way to get really sick.)

In Memoriam

• Joan Fontaine, actress
• Tom Laughlin, actor/writer/director

(Also, the last post was 2301.  I just can't keep up.  And Zandar is taking a break.)

Breakfast Links

Procrastination, mostly.  Shall we begin?

• Spocko on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  Getting his Perot on for a good cause.
• Apparently conservatives gave in to their urge to exhibit their tushes on the occasion of Nelson Mandela's death:  Republic of T has examples.  Especially when misapprehending normal behavior.   Jesse Curtis riffs off Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay on the uses of violence and non-violence.
• And by the way, racism is not "over."
• As for Santa and Jesus…let me see…St. Nicholas was an Anatolian Greek; not too many blond blue-eyed guys in that group; someone posted a possible reconstruction of the saint's face, and I will post the link later. here we go. He would have been "dark for purposes of whiteness," as Avedon used to say.  Jesus, of course, was Jewish, and Jews have only been considered "white" since the middle of the last century.  Ms. Kelly probably also went to Casablanca for the waters.  (Depictions of Santa have tended to pink him up; depictions of Jesus tend to both lighten his skin and hair.  Depictions are not accurate.  Got that?)

In Memoriam

Peter O'Toole, actor.





(has it really been a week and a half?)

In Memoriam

 Nelson Mandela.  Statesman.  Prisoner, liberator, president of South Africa, worker for peace and justice.  In a nutshell, one of the Great Ones.

And More Again

It's a Love song.

• World News Connection to be shut down New Year's Eve.  Via Mercury Rising, which also said:

   "Open source news/intel, like open source computer code, is far less susceptible to manipulation and corruption. Guess that’s why the Open Source Center has to be done away with."

  Uh-huh.
  

• Just three stitches cost $2,229.11? Sealing a wound with skin glue, for $1,696? This is a national disgrace. In all of the haranguing about healthcare, little attention has been paid to the actual cost of simple procedures like this. When Republicans go on TV and tell everyone that we do have universal healthcare — at emergency rooms — and you see hospitals turning their ERs into “profit centers,” you’ve gotta wonder what the hell is going on. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a million times: where there’s shit there’s always flies.

  Southern Beale. Yes, it is now cheaper to check into the Ritz and have the doctor come to you.
• Mills River Progressive links to a .pdf of how corporate espionage, um, interacts with non-profits, activists, and an AlterNet summary of tactics used.  And tracking "authentication" has still not been derailed.
• Zandar Versus The Stupid flushes Peggy Noonan and remarks:

  A president who stakes his entire reputation on a complex scheme gone awry? And who never rides herd on the people who were supposed to make sure it went right?
  
  Hmmm, let me think....
  
  That 8-year selective amnesia about the guy before Obama is a funny thing.

• Shakesville's Melissa McEwan deconstructs a conservative's inability to understand choice and society (no, I shouldn't say that.  They understand choice if it's what they think everyone should choose, and they understand society as something where they make the rules.  They also seem to think [I use the term "think* advisedly] that tax money is supposed to support private schools, apparently having missed the word "private.").
  
  Why do I think that none of the conservatives who write that kind of swill have ever been in the armed forces or even served on a jury?

Wooooooooooooo-Hoooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!

 Chip's a Grand Master!  Chip's a Grand Master!!

Oh, By the Way...

The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, at the one-or-is-it-two-month mark, seems to be working. Via Republic of T.

As in California, Obamacare is working in Kentucky for precisely the people it was intended to help. In places like Breathitt County, with a per-capita income of about $15,000 per year, it’s working for Americans who were unable to afford private health insurance and were previously ineligible for Medicaid.

Health care reform is working as envisioned in Kentucky for two reasons. The state opted to set up its own health insurance exchange, and Gov. Steve Beshear (D) stood alone among Southern governors when he signed on to the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare. Kentuckians who apply for health insurance under the new law simply have to choose from a wide array of plans available either through the state’s exchange or its expanded Medicaid program.

If, as Republicans continue to claim, Obamacare “doesn’t work,” then it shouldn’t work anywhere. If it can work in states as different as California [and Kentucky], then it can work anywhere.

Apparently the Republican reaction in California is to run a fake website.  They still got nuthin'.

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.