In Memoriam

• Meshach Taylor, actor
• Frank Cashen, baseball executive
• Frank M. Robinson, author, activist, editor, scholar.

In the Matter of That Supreme Court Decision

Iron Tongue of Midnight said it best.

(The decision, if you missed the news this morning.  The summarized dissent.)

Better make sure you're not employed by Christian Scientists or Jehovah's Witnesses or really strict Muslims or ultra-Orthodox Jews.  Or any corporation professing any religious belief.  Lest, you know, you get bitten somewhere you weren't expecting.

On the Value of Kotter, et al.

• One of the mysteries of life is the variety of international readers of this blog.  Not long ago, Indonesians made up a sizable chunk of my readership; currently I'm having an influx of South Africans.  Is it something I said?
• I may have mentioned a while back that I have a thing about teaching, possibly because I believe in education (yes, I'm one of those) and because I mostly was dealt excellent teachers (a few crummy ones, too, whose names are mercifully forgotten) and because I was smart, which is not to say that I liked school, but that is another story altogether.  Because my communication skills are non-existent (what works for me is writing and polishing sentences, which is very difficult in real space and time unless both parties have iPads), I bailed on an educational career, but that doesn't mean that meta doesn't interest me.  Anyway.  Lance Mannion has a thought or two on teachers (his son is graduating from high school) that resonated:

  Every era has its own peculiar insanities. One of ours is a sudden vituperative disrespect for teachers bordering on out and out hatred. All over the country there are concerted efforts to put teachers back in their place as mere employees, and temp workers at that, grateful for whatever pittance the local school board deigns to pay them. Several cohorts of teacher-bashers are behind this, for different but overlapping reasons. […] But they really don’t value talent.
  
  They don’t appear to even know what it is.
  
  What they value is productivity.
  
  That’s another way of saying they value making a maximum amount money at a minimal cost.
  
  Teachers are anything but “productive” in that way.
  
  And it’s clear that these reformers think teachers aren’t productive because they are lazy, not intelligent, without talent, and not incentivized to work harder and become productive by money---that is, by the fear of not having it, not by the real prospect of earning more of it. […]

• 100 years ago, the precipitating event for World War I happened (I thought I'd linked to an article seen in the Smithsonian magazine, but apparently not.  Damn).

*Innocent Look*

• Shenanigans in Mississippi.  (From Republic of T, with lots of links.)  Bonus Nina Simone video and a week of bad conservative behavior in review.  (One of the people accused of conspiring to photograph the wife [who is in a hospice and has dementia] of one of the candidates was found dead [and may have committed suicide].)
• Also from Republic of T:  When is Congress going to focus on employment?  Rather than bashing the unemployed, that is.
• Getting the wrong lessons from Vietnam and the Cold War and applying them to Iraq.  Obsidian Wings' Doctor Science explains how that happened.

Irrelevant and Immaterial

In a bid to garner a soundbite, silly person downvotes soccer.  Nah; no Googlejuice for that.

Projection Much?

They're concerned about "voter fraud" because they practice it.

Monroe faces 13 felony election fraud charges in all, including voting more than once, voting as a disqualified person, registering in more than one place, and providing false information to election officials. He could spend up to 18 months in prison, and pay a $10,000 fine for each charge.

Via Raw Story, while looking at something else.

In Memoriam

• Gerry Goffin, songwriter (solo, with other collaborators, and with Carole King)
• Stephanie Kwolek, inventer (Kevlar)

Fragments of the Mosaic

• Consultant and diplomat who guessed wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Nevertheless, Khalilzad thought Maliki was just the man to make piece with the Sunnis, crack down on Moqtada al-Sadr (whom the American government mistakenly believed to be an Iranian pawn), and stand up to the Iranians. Summoned by Khalilzad, Maliki was abruptly informed that he was to become prime minister. “Are you serious?” said the astonished erstwhile butcher. The British ambassador, William Patey, had been invited to attend the meeting but when he started to object to Maliki’s anointment, Khalilzad promptly kicked him out of the room.

  From Harper's.
• Not even slightly surprising:  "Study finds strong evidence for discriminatory intent behind voter ID laws."

  The Supreme Court's 2007 justification for these laws rests on two pillars.
  
  The first is the notion that voter fraud even occurs at significant levels. Recent research has overwhelmingly debunked this idea: a recent study by political scientists at Stanford and the University of Wisconsin found that "virtually all the major scholarship on voter impersonation fraud – based largely on specific allegations and criminal investigations – has concluded that it is vanishingly rare, and certainly nowhere near the numbers necessary to have an effect on any election." Or, to put it another way, about as many people say they've been abducted by space aliens as say they've committed voter fraud.
  
  The second justification for voter ID laws is that they aren't motivated by discriminatory intent. But this new paper finds a solid link between legislator support for voter ID laws and bias toward Latino voters, as measured in their responses to constituent e-mails.
  
  In short, voter ID laws are simply racially-motivated solutions to a problem that never existed.

  From Washington Post.  [ETA:  via skippy]

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise!

Prosecutors allege Gov. Scott Walker was at the center of an effort to illegally coordinate fundraising among conservative groups to help his campaign and those of Republican state senators facing recall elections during 2011 and 2012, according to documents unsealed Thursday.

The Milwaukee, Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, picked up by Zandar Versus The Stupid.  There are forces trying to quash the investigation, so this may not mean much.

Speaking of Zombies

• Mercury Rising excerpts a Democracy Now! interview with Raed Jarrar discussing current events in Iraq:

  There has been a lot of focus on ISIS because it makes a good media story. It’s this crazy group. Everyone is an expert now on ISIS and where it came from. And it tells a compelling story for a U.S. intervention: There is an extremist terrorist group that is threatening a legitimate central government that is our friend. That is the narrative now. I think that is important to unpack and deconstruct, because, on the one hand, ISIS is one of many players in this uprising. It’s really naive to believe that one crazy terrorist group can take 50 percent of Iraq’s territory in a week. There are many other players, including—I think the most important players are tribal leaders in all of these provinces, and their armed militias, and former Iraqi officials from the Saddam Hussein government, led by the former vice president, Izzat al-Douri, who runs a group called al-Naqshbandi, a group. There are other smaller players like the Iraqi Islamic Army, the Mujahideen Army, the 1920 Brigades. There are, I would say, at least 12 other players. So it’s more indigenous. The vast majority, I would say, maybe almost everyone who’s fighting, is an Iraqi, unlike what the image that is being drawn by the Iraqi authorities.

• Sing it, Southern Beale:

  We should never, ever have gone into Iraq. Never. End, full stop. What’s happening now in Iraq is exactly what we peaceniks said would happen waaaay back in 2002 when this was being “debated” the first time. Sectarian violence, civil war, Sunni vs Shia, etc. etc. etc. All of that stuff. We were told we were unpatriotic. We were told to support the troops. We were told to shut up and clap louder and put a yellow ribbon on our cars and stick a cork in it and stop talking about how much the war would cost because “deficits don’t matter.” We were right then, and we’re right now.
  
  And to the mainstream news media, who banged the war drums so loudly 12 years ago: stop trotting out everyone who was completely wrong last time to offer “expertise” this time. There are no do-overs in warmongering.
  
  I find it completely unacceptable that we live in a country where Americans will take to the streets to prevent their fellow citizens from having health insurance, but they refuse to acknowledge that this country sent its soldiers to die for oil company profits. Wake the fuck up, people.

• ETA:  James Fallows, The Atlantic:

  Am I sounding a little testy here? You bet. We all make mistakes. But we are talking about people in public life—writers, politicians, academics—who got the biggest strategic call in many decades completely wrong. Wrong as a matter of analysis, wrong as a matter of planning, wrong as a matter of execution, wrong in conceiving American interests in the broadest sense. None of these people did that intentionally, and many of them have honestly reflected and learned. But we now live with (and many, many people have died because of) the consequences of their gross misjudgments a dozen years ago. In the circumstances, they might have the decency to shut the hell up on this particular topic for a while. They helped create the disaster Iraqis and others are now dealing with. They have earned the right not to be listened to. [Added emphasis mine.]

In Memoriam

Tony Gwynn, mainstay of the San Diego Padres.

I Have to Stop Getting Up Mornings...

• In memoriam: Casey Kasem, radio personality and voice-over actor.
• On this day in 1215, King John signed the Magna Carta.  The barons rather forced him.  Conservatives have lamented ever since.
• Tony Blair still believes.

  The first is there was no WMD risk from Saddam and therefore the casus belli was wrong. What we now know from Syria is that Assad, without any detection from the West, was manufacturing chemical weapons. We only discovered this when he used them. We also know, from the final weapons inspectors reports, that though it is true that Saddam got rid of the physical weapons, he retained the expertise and capability to manufacture them.

  Via Zandar Versus The Stupid.  ETA:  Ken Houghton at skippy the bush kangaroo (via Erik Loomis, Lawyers, Guns & Money) thinks Blair most culpable for Iraq war and cites Love Actually.
• EFTA:  Via thnidu on dreamwidth:  Naval intelligence officer tells how we were lied into the war with no reason by men (mostly) who had not served and whose children were not in the military.

  And so, the objective became … what?
  
  Hearts and minds and freedom and democracy and nation building and magic bunnies who fart sunshine and rainbows.
  
  Unfortunately, it turns out we’re real good at the blowing shit up part, not so good at the magic bunnies part.

• Comrade Misfit:

  So here is the essential truth of this nation in this new millennium: It doesn't matter if you skin color is Irish-pasty, Somali-black or any shade in between. It doesn't matter what your profession is, whether you're a neurosurgeon or you dry cars at a car wash. Doesn't matter what your gender or sexual orientation is. If you aren't one of the politically powerful or if you don't have at least a nine-figure net worth, you're just one of the mouthy [redacted word I don't use] that the oligarchy has to hear nattering in the background. Their only fear is that we'll show up at the polls in numbers enough to defeat a chosen candidate (i.e., Scott Brown, for one).

• "Second screens" at movies (or why I mostly don't go to large chain theaters anymore, even for stadium seating and stereo THX sound).
• A temptation (or, for that matter, a Temptation) is not responsible for people yielding to it.

In Memoriam

Bob Welch, pitcher.

(You're thinking of Bob Welch.  Different guy.)

In Memoriam

Ruby Dee, actress.

She was electric.

61

61

"What is veiled now soon will be shown"

(Jefferson Starship, "Stranger," Modern Times.  Because I heard it twice back in the '80s, thought it was called "Familiar Stranger," and that it was by a different group that sounded like Starship.  "Stranger" doesn't atone for "We Built This City," but it lets me bury that crap beneath crunchy bass.  Crunchy bass rules.)

Right.  Where was I?

• Two Scott Horton (Harper's) pieces on Guantanamo:
• Six Questions to Prof. Mark Denbeaux on the Guantanamo "suicides" in 2006;

  The medical history of one detainee was missing from the NCIS file, but we found it in his medical records. His history contained a description of the cause and manner of his death by the senior medical officer who declared him dead at the clinic. The officer’s report did not mention hanging. It stated that the cause of death was asphyxiation caused by clogged airways. That would be consistent with having rags stuffed down their throats, but not hanging.

• Conversation with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!  (YouTube video; apparently isn't loading today)
• Fund-raising banquets and their discontents.
• Via Southern Beale:
• Autism linked to male hormones.  Uh-oh…
• Prototype Flying Saucer from, um, Earth.
• Sappho at Noli Irritare Leones on the stupidity of racism.  Featuring, oh, history.

  In fact, I question whether there are enough people left in the US who are white by this definition that it could be applied and still keep whiteness a going concern. Perhaps you could bar Jews from whiteness and still have a white majority, since Jews are a small fraction of the population anyway, but if you’re barring Jews and many Greeks and many Southern whites, is there really a white majority left? Exactly who was supposed to raise money sufficient to buy out Steve Jobs and send him on his way?

• In memoriam:
• Don Zimmer, literally in baseball before I was born.
• Chester Nez, last of the original Navajo code talkers.

"Come walk with me through the Unknown."

Busy weekend. Yourself?

• In memoriam:  
• Bob Bailey, integrator of Las Vegas
• Ann B. Davis, actress (never saw The Brady Bunch.  Did see the Bob Cummings Show in syndication.)
• Storme DeLarverie, gay activist  (NYTimes obit)
• Herb Jeffries, The "Bronze Buckaroo" of movies  (NYTimes obit)
• Joan Lorring, actress
• ETA:  Yuri Kochiyama, activist
• Deciding on whether we'll breathe next year.  (from Zandar Versus The Stupid)  Atlantic article quoted.
• Apparently very few of us ever leave high school.  (Article from last year, via a link from a comment at Making Light.)  Cue representations of Archie comics as the modern Inferno in 3…2…1...

Ten Years After

So it's the tenth anniversary of Lawyers, Guns & Money.  Lance Mannion does an overview, and Ken Houghton at skippy the bush kangaroo posts links to LGM's celebration.

Hey, they survived and thrived.

Three from The Smirking Chimp

• Inequality and "just happened."
  

  Think about some of the things we have come to take for granted. For example – and just one of many, many examples – we are told that corporations are only supposed to be about making money for the shareholders. But would a country run by We the People to do things to make our lives better have set up these things called corporations to be like that? What do We the People get from a system like that? Would corporations have been created for the purpose of doing things that benefit We the People and our country and our economy, not only a few already-wealthy people at the expense of our country and economy?

• Amnesia:  Not just for soap opera anymore.  (Braying about Benghazi.)

  Indeed, the hyper-partisan focus on Benghazi actually reflects the thoroughly bipartisan nature of America's fubarish foreign policy. We should be having long, heated, intense hearings on the US-NATO military intervention itself -- an illegal and utterly foolish assault which has plunged the country into violent chaos, empowered violent religious extremism and destabilized large swaths of Africa. It sparked violent civil war in Mali, for example; and even the dreaded Boko Haram in Nigeria have acquired copious arms from the flood of weaponry released by Western intervention, as well as funds and training from the extremist groups empowered by (and sometimes directly supported by) the Western powers in the regime change operation.

• Both sides of their mouths:

  The larger Fox message machine has been focused: There's nothing worse, nothing more callous and unimaginable, than vets being denied the government health care they're entitled to, and some dying as a consequence.
  
  Left unmentioned from Fox and friends? In the case of the recent implementation of Obamacare and the federal government's effort to expand Medicaid benefits, Republican governors and lawmakers in 24 states have refused, for partisan reasons, to accept the federal funds to insure more of their citizens. The result? Citizens are being denied government health care they're entitled to, and thousands may die as a consequence.

There was never any truly idyllic time, and now all the institutions, the counter-institutions, the zeitgeist, the culture, and the personal sphere are all poisoned.

Poisoned. Toxic. Lethal.

In Memoriam

• Maya Angelou, poet, writer, actress, dancer, activist (friends of mine met her once in Wisconsin).
• Massimo Vignelli, graphic designer (I love that subway map, even though I was tired of Helvetica Bold by 1985).

Another One Bites The Dust

Pennsylvania's ban on gay marriage ruled unconstitutional.  (Via Shakesville.)

It keeps coming down to what Judge Jones said: "...all couples deserve equal dignity in the realm of civil marriage."

Yesterday, Oregon's ban was also struck down, but the state won't appeal that ruling.  (Via Zandar Versus The Stupid.)

Meanwhile, via Feministing, "right"-wingers claim that Common Core educational standards--no, really, one of them said this--no, really!--will make children gay.  (Video [of Florida State Rep. Van Zant] at link.)  

(Yes, I need to post more often, but the sheer tinfoil-biting foolishness happening in the world has caused me to retreat to variants of 2048, and you know how addictive that is.  The choice of movies today is Godzilla, Neighbors, and Million Dollar Arm, none of which seem to be worth the price of admission.  Feh.)

Awww, Geeeee...

Co-founder of NOM gets realistic about the battle against same-sex marriage.

(Many on the "right" are not realistic.)

Good and Bad

• Chelsea Manning name change approved.

  "Hopefully today's name change, while so meaningful to me personally, can also raise awareness of the fact that we [transgender] people exist everywhere in America today, and that we must jump through hurdles every day just for being who we are," Manning said.

  From Al Jazeera America.
• Conservatives want us dead.

  Conservatives are willing to let poor and struggling people like Charlene Dill die because they believe poverty itself is a moral failure. Thus saving the Charlene Dills of the world is immoral.

  From Republic of T.

In Memoriam

Gabriel García Márquez, writer.

Coup Coup Cashew

Nice tusks.

Throwing coups d'etat since 1953, or why Ukraine is in for it.  Nicolas J.S. Davies, AlterNet, includes a bit of history, the escalating steps in regime change, and a list of coups, several of which surprised me.

(Yes, I do need to post more than once weekly.  Thanks.  Almost done with the tax stuff.)

And the Flat Earth Society is Lurking in the Wings...

Because science is just an opinion…  (Sarcasm off.  Spitting commences.)

• Via The Raw Story, apparently there is a movie narrated by Kate Mulgrew with a "geocentric universe" viewpoint.  It's bankrolled by an ultra-conservative.  'Nuff said.  [ETA:  Kate Mulgrew responds (It's Facebook, and I can see it though I don't have an account. Basically, she says:

  I am not a geocentrist, nor am I in any way a proponent of geocentrism. More importantly, I do not subscribe to anything Robert Sungenis has written regarding science and history and, had I known of his involvement, would most certainly have avoided this documentary. I was a voice for hire, and a misinformed one, at that. I apologize for any confusion that my voice on this trailer may have caused. Kate Mulgrew")

  It turns out she was not the only person whose voice was misused; the physicist Lawrence Krauss also has a line in the trailer.]
• No More Mister Nice Blog's Yastreblyansky gets to the point:

  The difference now, because of Obama (and I know he really hates this, but it's true), is that when we call racism people believe it, and they believe it because it can't be rationalized away. The elephant in the room could be a hallucination, but not the dump it just took on your rug.

• Cerberus at Sadly, No! on the rediscovery by conservatives that young people have sex.

  There’s still a lot of work to be done. There’s a number of religious communities (you know, the one’s that are more conservative) that try and demonize safe sex and thus have proliferation of STDs and massive increases in unwanted pregnancies. And there’s all the fallout from the disastrous Abstinence-only education where a bunch of fucks like you demonized condoms and told kids that never having sex was the only way to stay safe. Also all the ways you’ve tried to undermine contraceptive access and sex education at every turn. In fact, I’m having a hard time imagining anyone to be less credible right now giving a lecture on safe sex.

• Drugs.  (Booman Tribune.)
• What, no rock 'n' roll?

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.