In Memoriam

In which NYTimes obits are finally used.

• David Stoliar, survivor.
• Yvonne Chouteau, ballerina
• Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence expert

"Read Me, Doctor Memory!"

• Christian political values?  Jesse Curtis (walk on) talks about them:

  I have three simple thoughts that it seems to me ought to help inform our vote. You might come up with a different list, but I'm increasingly struck by the extent to which our political system runs on the values of self-interest, nationalism, and incumbent wealth. I emphasize these three factors not for their comprehensiveness, but for the dearth of attention paid to them. Because these issues cut across partisan boundaries and structure the very terms of political debate, they are often overlooked. Too often, we rush into partisan debate without realizing that the mainstream positions of both parties are troubling.

• Mainline churches decaying?  Chris Hedges, reposted at AlterNet:

  The liberal church committed suicide when it severed itself from radicalism. Radical Christians led the abolitionist movement, were active in the Anti-Imperialist League, participated in the bloody labor wars, fought for women’s suffrage, formulated the Social Gospel—which included a huge effort to carry out prison reform and provide education to prisoners—and were engines in the civil rights and anti-war movements. Norman Thomas, a longtime leader of the Socialist Party of America, was a Presbyterian minister.
  
  These radicals generally were not embraced by the church hierarchy, which served as a bulwark of the establishment, but they kept the church vital and prophetic. They made it relevant and important to the oppressed, the poor and to workingmen and -women. Radicals were and are its hope.

• Department of One Man's Ceiling Is Another Man's Paper Tiger:

  "Look, Barack Obama has done incredible damage to the United States over the last seven years," young Marco said.
  
  Which damage is that, exactly?
  
  Would it be the "damage" that got nearly 18 million more Americans access to health insurance?
  
  Or is it the "damage" inflicted while the President ended two unnecessary wars?
  
  It's awful how much "damage" has been wrought by bringing down the unemployment rate to 5 percent instead of Mitt Romney's projected 6 percent. Cluck, cluck.
  
  Oh, I know! Perhaps he meant the "damage" caused as a result of Wall Street's greed and subsequent meltdown. Oh, wait. That happened under President Bush's watch, and was attributable to Republican policies passed while President Bill Clinton was in office. While they impeached, they stole.

"Bring Me My Pearls, My Fainting Couch, and My Smelling Salts..."

Arch-conservatives Talk About Trump.

18 of 'em, quoted.  #13:

13. He’s re-enforcing (the correct) stereotypes of conservatives.

“Trump’s brawling, blustery, mean-spirited public persona serves to associate conservatives with all the negative stereotypes that liberals have for decades attached to their opponents on the right. According to conventional caricature, conservatives are selfish, greedy, materialistic, bullying, misogynistic, angry, and intolerant. They are, we’re told, privileged and pampered elitists who revel in the advantages of inherited wealth while displaying only cruel contempt for the less fortunate and the less powerful… Trump is the living, breathing, bellowing personification of all the nasty characteristics Democrats routinely ascribe to Republicans.”

—Michael Medved, national radio show host

(I have to assume the parenthetical remark above is editorial comment.)

Those in the path of the blizzard, stay safe.  And warm, if you can.

Another Broken Commandment

• Legendarily, there was one rule that Republicans actually followed when on the hustings; it had the unofficial name of the Eleventh Commandment:
  

  "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican."

  (There was no such guideline on the Democratic side, not that it would have mattered.)
  
  Apparently the Republican "united front" has ceased to be.  (There are other samples scattered about, but this link was there today.)
• *Ahem*.
• Coates on Sanders on reparations;

  Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.
  
  One can’t evade these facts by changing the subject. Some months ago, black radicals in the Black Lives Matters movement protested Sanders. They were, in the main, jeered by the white left for their efforts. But judged by his platform, Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy. Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty. Why should black voters support a candidate who does not recognize this?

• DeVega on Coates on Sanders on reparations;

  Reparations for harms done to a people because of their race, ethnicity, religion or other markers of difference are not bizarre or unusual justice claims. They have firm standing under international law as has been seen with survivors of the Holocaust, in some limited cases with First Nations peoples in the United States and other countries, Japanese Americans during World War II, and victims of political violence in Latin America, Brazil, South Africa and elsewhere,
  
  While public opinion research is clear that white Americans are extremely hostile to reparations for slavery in the case of African-Americans, many white Americans actually support the idea of reparations in the abstract.

• Michigan.  Michigan.  Michigan. [ETA:  Michigan.]  Notice anything?  Hint:  It goes back at least as far as Gerald Ford.  Let me be blunt:  Would this have happened in Grosse Pointe?  Or Hamtramck?

Ah-Huhh!

"Contraception and the Class Divide."  Scratches the surface shallowly, but at least scratches it.

On This Day

Vagabond Scholar posted a video of the "I Have a Dream" speech, and Shakesville reposted "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

Too many allegedly functional adults don't seem to know their history.

For Astute Readers Only

Apparently I didn't squeal with joy or make ALL-CAPS ANNOUNCEMENTS at the time, but:  SARA ROBINSON IS BACK BLOGGING ON HER OWN SITE.

Currently the most recent article up is "A Well-Regulated Militia," which should annoy everyone interested in firearms.

I've missed her so much.

An Incident

From Crooks and Liars (about the incident in Iranian waters):

• This episode has been way overblown by right-wing media, and here's why: We have a political party, the GOP, and its mouthpiece, Fox 'News,' who are rooting for any example of failure or embarrassment to our own country simply because they are not the current political party in charge. Therefore, any slight anomaly that occurs, no matter how small, will be blown completely out of proportion. You'd think these self-professed patriots would know how to at least appear to be good citizens, but we know their modus operandi. Their thinking resembles a middle school child, upset at losing, who won't let anyone play because he's taking his ball and going home.

• Notice anything missing from this rant? Like gladness and relief that our sailors were released unharmed? Where’s that love for our men and women in uniform that [Sean] Hannity flaunts when it's convenient?
  
  I’ll tell you where it is, subsumed by Hannity's lust for war with Iran. From a guy who never spent one minute putting his own flabby fanny on the line for this country.  [Emphasis added.]
  
  Meanwhile, the Great Chickenhawk attacked the Obama administration’s diplomacy – as if safe and sound sailors were some kind of bad outcome.
  
  Hannity should be ashamed of himself.

Because diplomacy doesn't produce enough bar fights.

They can have their war with Iran provided they all enlist first.  Yes, that is moving the goal posts somewhat, but wouldn't Ann Coulter look fetching in camouflage?

In Memoriam

Alan Rickman, actor.

Could invest reading the phone book with emotional resonance.

In Memoriam

Monte Irvin, Hall of Fame ballplayer.

He has a park in Orange, New Jersey named after him.

This is one sad month already.

ETA:  Giants' tribute video.  (Continues with other videos, so.)

Just Now Catching Up with Me

Mr. Trump bothered by Ted Cruz's citizenship all of a sudden.

(Via Buzzfeed.)

In Memoriam

David Bowie.

Not news you want to be clobbered with first thing at 6:00 AM.

All the music this morning is David Bowie.

Indomitable has an essay about the breadth and depth of his appeal.

David Bowie.

• Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast (*sob*) officially hangs up her keyboard.

  Everyone tells me they don't know how I'm still standing. I'd love to believe that I'm stronger than most people, but the truth is that I'm no different from anyone else. When life keeps hitting you, you bounce back because you don't have a choice. If you don't think you could, it's because you haven't been hit hard enough yet.
  
  I'm lucky. I've been able to keep my job and work remotely. A year ago I received a promotion and transfer to a new group where my manager is in Germany, where they don't believe in working 80 hour weeks. So my work/life balance has been somewhat better, and now will be even better because I won't be sitting in northern NJ traffic every day. My two little boy kitties, Eli and Sam, were great in the car and have adjusted beautifully to their new home. My sister has welcomed me into her circle and I am signing up for Meetup groups. It is the fresh start that just could not have happened in New Jersey, in a house too full of memories, too many of them about sadness and depression. Mr. B is now free of the emotional burdens that plagued him here and it is time for a young family to move into that house, now dressed up all pretty with a new kitchen, a nice deck, and a completely remodeled upstairs, and make better memories there.
  
  My weekdays will be spent in my home office that gets the morning sun through the trees in my front yard. When the weather gets nice, I can sit and drink iced tea on my screened porch, or take my laptop outside onto the patio. I am about 20 minutes or less from anything I might want to do. My neighbors are friendly, and I have no doubts that I'll be happy here.

   
• Lying liars who lie.
• More lying liars who lie.
• Toy wars.  Because we're all going to need a lot of comic relief this year,

In Memoriam

New York Times obituaries.

• Natalie Cole, unforgettable singer
• Wayne Rogers, actor (M*A*S*H)

Hope in the Bottom of the Box

This year's Jon Swift Memorial Round-Up.

New Year Strikes at Midnight

Driftglass.

Hullabaloo.

Indomitable.

That blasted bell is tolling.

Happy New Year.

Boxing Day Lutefisk Cider with Pickled Herring

• Down With Tyranny dissects the Democrats.

  Jack Fitzpatrick lays out a scenario which-- if we had a remotely competent DCCC that wasn't utterly crippled with conservative notions and self-serving corruption-- would be considered a reasonable case for the Democrats winning back the House. There's no chance anything like that can happen while the recruiting and messaging precepts put in place by Wall Street puppets Rahm Emanuel, Chris Van Hollen and Steve Israel dictate everything the DCCC does.

• Politifact prevarication poll:  Who lies the most.  (Slideshow/gallery.  Featuring two non-candidates and the current and former President, who cannot run for that office again.  Via sfgate.com.)
• Understanding markets, their history, values, and flaws.  (Prof. Richard D. Wolff, guest-posting at naked capitalism.)  A taste:

  Markets were and are just one mechanism for distributing resources and products among people and enterprises. In markets, prices allocate scarce commodities to the highest bidders for them, to those who can pay the most. Markets differ from many other, non-market mechanisms that human beings, past and present, have used for those distributions. Religious authorities, community elders, local or regional state authorities, democratically composed collectives, kinship and gift-based organizations developed different, non-market, price mechanisms for distribution. Because recent history exalted markets hysterically, it is time to expose their mixed and often horrific results.

  There are matters, values, and things that cannot be priced; assigning a monetary value to some things paradoxically cheapens them.
• Has anyone done "A Christmas Carol:  30 Years Later?"  Because that might explain things...

Merry Mary, Marry Murray

Christmas if  you celebrate; Festivus, Yule, Solstice, Kwanzaa, Boxing, any I've missed if you don't.

(Hogmanay is next week.)

Pre-Road Downs

• From the Mary Sue, via Shakesville:  Japanese women want to keep their original names post-wedlock.  At last!
• Hullabaloo is loading so slowly that the graphics give up.  Seriously.
• Trump.
• Guns.
• Combatting terrorism.
• Litmus testing.
• Cracked.com is a time sink.
• ETA:  It turns out that Dr. Grumpy in the House has been active all year but the blogroll entry refuses to update.  Have the gift guide to Star Wars merchandise that gives one pause.

"I Thought the Woo-Woo Crew Came Out at the Full Moon!"

Some of the local bus drivers used to say that they observed strange behavior and were extra cautious during the full moon--and the two weeks on each side.

• Myself, I'd get boots and a sou'wester.  Talk of Republican convention alternatives.
• "Terrible Ideas" from the Daily Irritant, with bonus:

  You know, if Ronald Reagan couldn't make Reaganomics work, what the hell chance do you think you have?

Not an Onion Headline

"Nazi Party Leader:  Trump's Anti-Muslim plan is ill-conceived."

It's at SFGate.com as of this morning.  (Full email communiqué at Buzzfeed.)

No, really.  (The rest of said chairman's statement is "right-wing" jargon that would embarrass the crew at a Tea Party website.)

I'm trying to be an adult, so I'm not going to snark on said chairman's name.

Thrust, Parry, Riposte

Associate Justice Antonin Scalia had Foot Sandwich the other day (Crooks and Liars).  Andy Borowitz (The New Yorker) serves up horseradish, no chaser.

Ever notice that all of Ronald Reagan's "gifts" tend to include rattlesnakes?

Cannot Brain. I Have the Numb

• No, this is not supposed to be a weekly.  
• Now that it is slightly more seemly (Iowa caucuses now being a month away rather than six months out) to yammer about the primary season, have Jill Stein's campaign page.  The Green Party has also posted an article by Maggie Lee from Creative Loafing, which has interesting (at least for now) comments.  If I have to read about the Republican candidates (and my brain has been holding its nose almost to the point of asphyxia) and the Democratic candidates (who are annoying me on a different axis), then I'd like to read someone who is at least not shouting at me.  (You don't want to see my email inbox.  Cue Joel Grey and Liza Minelli singing "Money" on repeat at maximum volume.)
• So this is midpoint of three consecutive days of tragedies:  Yesterday was the anniversary of the murders at École Polytechnique, today we remember Pearl Harbor, and tomorrow we commemorate the death of John Lennon.  Yeah, OK, not a nice guy, but he didn't deserve that.
• We are expecting rain in a couple of days, in time for an appointment.  Of course.  Northwestern England apparently got a cloudbuster sufficient to restore a waterfall.  (Via legionseagle on Dreamwidth.)
• Well!  Back to work!

But the Fairness Doctrine Was Such a Burden!

• Driftglass:

  He [Donald Trump] pays no price because you and your colleagues decided that it was more profitable to spend the last 20 years playing footsie with the American Fascist Party than reporting on what they were really up to. And once they buffaloed you into selling out honest journalism in order to appease them -- into giving up on the truth altogether and playing the Both Sides Do It Russian roulette with your own profession instead -- they owned you. They could name any price and you would meet it, including mainstreaming their madness by pulling out a chair at your Meet the Press table for conspiracy mongering Conservative crackpots.
  
  [...]
  
  As I have written before, periodically we Liberals chase off the Wingnut Eaters of Worlds for a little while. We run them back off into the angry Confederate mud. Back into the gnawing belly of hate radio. Back into the Armageddonist wet dreams of their Christopath spider holes and morally deformed gospels.
  
  And then some secret signal goes out among the Beltway Media. Wagons are circled. Both Siderist myrmidons are deployed in force. Any dirty hippies who would dare point out that the Beltway clowns are once again restarting the nightmare that almost wrecked the country last time are muzzled and cast out.
  
  Then -- surprise! -- the Wingnut Eaters of Worlds come roaring back, twice as loud, twice as well-funded and twice as immune to factual reality.

• Crooks and Liars:

  The guardians of the media may have thought it was a good compromise when they first capitulated, way back in the Age of Reagan: Back off from the facts whenever pressed by the organ players of the Mighty right-wing Wurlitzer, while hinting at the actual truth in vague, arcane fog speak that convinces no one but those who already know. Problem solved!
  
  No better example than the way they treated the fake Planned Parenthood videos that made such a strong impression on one Robert Lewis Dear Jr.
  
  See, they framed the news stories as if the videos were proven fact. It took all of an hour or so for bloggers who are already familiar with this kind of crap to track down the extremist origins of the videos, and to debunk the videos themselves.
  
  Yet media types refused to use the information as anything but a footnote -- if they even bothered to do that.
  
  You can see the problem: Anyone who knows how to doctor a video can inject any crazy story at all into the corporate media, and it spreads like avian flu. So even if media outlets back off and say the story was "wronnng" (a la Fonzie), it's too damn late.

(Yeah, that's probably too much to quote without explicit permission. My apologies.)

 The dirty secret of "Both Sides Do It," by the way, is not that both sides do bad or even evil things. There are no [living] saints in politics. The dirty secret is that the unspoken implication is that both sides do it equally, and that is Not True.  To go full Monty Python:  "Conservatives" lie, distort, proclaim one value that they violate privately, and Make Stuff Up.  "Liberals" might do the same (remember Anthony Weiner?), but exponentially less frequently than "conservatives."  I mean, really.

Quick glimpses of the Dark Side of the Force prominent Republicans responding to the current latest shooting.  (Yes, it's Shakesville.  Deal.)  Side order of Poor Poor Pitiful Us, posted by Southern Beale.

The Actual Icy Decline

• A boot to the head rebuttal to "rational racism," from Indomitable's Chauncey deVega (I've changed the name in the blogroll), because that stuff needs calling out.  A sample:

  While people of color are the prime targets of such policies as “stop and frisk” and racial profiling, it is in fact white people who are far more likely to be both drug users and to be in possession of narcotics at a given moment. This reality signals to a larger social phenomenon: black individuals who commit crimes are representative of their whole communities, crime is racialized, and there is no qualifier of individual intent. All black people are deemed suspicious and guilty because of the deeds of the very few.
  
  In contrast, white people who commit crimes are unique individuals: the criminals who destroyed the global economy, a group of white men, were not taken as representative of the entire white community. There is a long list of crimes such as domestic terrorism, serial murder, child rape, sedition, treason, and financial fraud that are almost exclusively the province of white people. But again, whites as a group are excluded from suspicion or indictment as a “criminal class.”

• American Christianity's blind spots:

  One of the oddest characteristics of much American Christianity is that we don't think of our country as a place where oppression occurs in any serious way. We read in the Bible about oppression and injustice but we don't make the obvious connection. This is in part because so many American Christians are nationalists at heart. Nationalism is not a Christian value, but many have made it an integral part of their faith, bolstered by the false and offensive myth that this country is or ever was a Christian nation. Our failure to apply Christian notions of oppression to an American context also has a lot to do with our Whiteness. But many Christians are so invested in it they don't even know it's important to them. They just think it's "Christianity."
  
  [...]
  
  For Christians, such reasoning is an abdication of our responsibility. This is another oddity of American Christianity: many of us think we can have conventional White American opinions about racial issues and be faithful to Christ at the same time. We're deluding ourselves.

• Robert Kuttner, Huffington Post via AlterNet:

  A lot of the people who stay home would vote for Democrats if they bothered to vote at all. This problem goes far deeper than better techniques for getting out the vote. It reflects a massive decay of civil society, a deep disinterest and contempt for government and politics, one that often seems richly earned.
  
  This is also the soil in which fascism grows. As political scientists have demonstrated for more than a century, it is mass society, in which people are disconnected from the "little platoons" beloved of Edmund Burke and the local associations celebrated by Tocqueville, where a strongman can suddenly seem the solution to people's inchoate frustrations with their own lives and the irrelevance of politics.

I really try not to think poorly of my fellow passengers on Spaceship Earth, but I deeply resent the efforts they make to return everyone to the trees to the eighteenth century.


([ETA:  Is there a DDoS going on at Hullabaloo?  I haven't been able to read the site in two days.])

"'Cause my hair is curly..."

Mr. Scalzi:

Donald Trump: The GOP establishment would like you to believe Trump was their summer fling, who in September didn’t take the hint that it was over, followed the GOP back home, and now drives by its house every hour to peer through the window, and texts at 4am asking if the GOP wants to go to the local Waffle House just to talk.

And the other candidates are dispatched as befits their public personas.

Because when I look at the pronouncements of the front-runners--Zandar picks up Mr. Rubio's statement--Stephen King's novels just leap to mind.  Specifically, the arc of Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone and the statement in IT that Pennywise the clown did not bother disguising itself when at home.

"Well, It's Certainly Uncontaminated By Cheese."

• Blue states turning red (weirdly, the source website (propublica.org) won't open; fortunately Zandar excerpted a chunk).

  The poorest Americans are least likely to vote, and least likely to be organized to vote. Meanwhile, the second lowest quintile of Americans have become sharply Republican. The result, in Southern and Midwestern states, has been catastrophic.

• Driftglass links to the same article in the New York Times.  There are charts.

More Stops. I Blame AlterNet.

• "New Jersey Mayor Risks His Life Delivering Aid to Syria and Unlike Tough Guy Chris Christie, He's Not Scared of 5-Yr-Olds" Ahem!
• Via Salon, "The Shadows of a New American Fascism: Why Our Surging Xenophobia Could Have Some Very Dangerous Consequences"
• Why am I not surprised?  Via Raw Story.
• Janet Allon summarizes some Paul Krugman on the tendency toward panic among conservatives.
• ISIS Wins If You Block Refugees.  Via Raw Story.

I Have 20 Open Tags and I Must Scream Have to Close at least 15 Before Midnight

• I try to post this annually. I usually fail. I'm still a fighting liberal, and Steve Gilliard's fine essay is my credo in this matter.
• Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.  
• There was a 6 part documentary on the Spanish Civil War that I happened upon via Comrade Misfit, who noted that Franco was still dead 40 years later.
  
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4
  • Part 5
  • Part 6
  Some of this may remind one of Star Wars. This may not be an accident.
• From Mercury Rising:  The New York Times admits error in supporting increased surveillance.  And about time.
• Too much of the bleatings of politicians leads to *headdesking* and the cri de coeur "What is wrong with those people?"  Did none of these people study World War II, if only to play games?  I've long thought that there should be an examination for candidacy at least as rigorous as the citizenship test given to immigrants.  Hello!  At least know what went on in this country prior to 1990!  This may be why "conservatives" want to abridge the study of history.
• Susie Madrak (Crooks & Liars) notes CNN's suspension of a foreign-affairs journalist for alluding to an Emma Lazarus poem.  Yes, that Emma Lazarus poem.
• Driftglass reports on Donald Trump's real face.  
• John Scalzi cites the Cato Institute.
• George Takei (who was interned with his family during WW2) rebukes the mayor of Roanoke, VA, who apparently had never heard of the history of internment in this country.  (I'm afraid I find the word "clueless" too kind.)  By Mike Moffitt, sfgate.com.
• Southern Beale anathematizes her Congressperson.

  Jim Cooper voted “aye” on the “American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act,” AKA the Let’s-punch-Syrian-and-Iraqi-refugees-because-we’re-scared-and-crapping-our-pants-and-also-we’re-ignorant Act.

• Boko Haram. Remember Boko Haram? Boko Haram is worse.
• What's going on with the working class?  

  Here’s a possible explanation that takes us back to economic factors. Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. economy started trending toward greater inequality. The less-educated lost the semi-skilled jobs that they had held in previous decades. The uneducated class became a floating low-skilled labor force, which decreased the marriageability of white working-class men. That impaired family formation. A couple of decades later, the lack of family support started to take a big bite out of the emotional health of working-class whites, causing them to turn to alcohol, drugs and suicide once they reached middle age.

  Warning: It's Bloomberg.  Via skippy the bush kangaroo.
  
• Meanwhile groundwater takes a long time to replace, and we can't drink oil.

In Memoriam

P. F. Sloan, songwriter.

It's an interesting story.