Early Spring

The leaves on the beeches started blowing off yesterday afternoon, some of them brushing past a deer who was visible only when she moved, looking for bits of brush to munch and probably flicking deer ticks into the wood pile I'm working on getting stacked before it's too hot to move. (That Fiskars axe Libby had found out about last fall saved me 2K on a wood splitter, by the way.) We were practicing some music with Bryan and Barbara--got a nice gig with them later this summer over in Durham. I was sitting facing the slider, and watched this tableau unfold. They got back on the road to Glocester about 5:30 and we turned on the Heels, some concerned after their barely winning performance on Friday against a play in 16, some gutsy midgets from Vermont who could hit 3s. Creighton was another such team, but a lot better, with a big center who could shoulder and muscle. First thing that happened was a wack on Henson's sprained wrist, which most definitely annoyed the lad to the extent of getting a T no less, and which fired up the Heels for the afternoon. They looked like they did against Duke, second time around, to put it in a nutshell. They looked like serious contenders for the Kentucky freight train coming down the other bracket--and after all, they only lost to the Wildcats by a bucket early in the season, back before Christmas, back when the oak leaves had still been clinging to the upper branches and trying to stay green, which wasn't all that hard considering the days of 70 we were having off and on.

We watched the game. Unlike a lot of games, the Heels didn't let their opponents get a run going in the early second half. It reminded me of the Championship game against Illinois, although this one had bigger margins. It was called control. Nobody was bored. Every piece of the arsenal, offense and defense, was working. Need a 3? Barnes had one, or Bullock. Zeller had his inside game. Henson, who looked like a guy who'd found a glass of water in the middle of death valley, had both his typical great defense, and his shot. And Marshall was not only passing, but hitting shots--drives, 3s, whatever was there. There wasn't anyone Creighton could ignore. And that makes a hard situation. The announcers were saying he'd made his season high, 18 points, and 9 assists. He went out and White came in to spell him. The game was no longer in doubt. We were cooking and sorting out the room where we'd been practicing. I was getting my head around work a'comin. The light faded into a soft twilight. The Heels won. I switched over to see what was happening on Ax Men. Stanga was diving into some muddy bog and dredging up a sopping log he claimed was worth a K. Damn if I know. The son and pop fightin' duo down on the Swanee were arguing and had enlisted a shrink--I flipped it over to a bit of the Leigh game, hoping they'd win at least one more, deserving all they could get after taking Duke apart.

Libby came into the room and said Marshall had broken his wrist.

Fuck.

I wondered when the women's college softball season would arrive on ESPN. I wondered if the gas from last fall was still good, and if the mower would crank. I didn't take the battery out, like no one ever does. I had put stabilizer in the gas, and it's so expensive I hate to buy more if it is ok. It looks like the grass grew about six inches since Friday afternoon.

All You Have To Do Is Look

So where did Limbaugh get the idea he could rant on for three days about Ms Fluke's personal "morals," producing a sustained rant which was in all details entirely a fantasy, and figure that he'd basically get away with it. Which apparently is what is happening. I turned on the radio yesterday on the way to the recycle center and there was a Rush rerun (our local "Rush Radio Network of stations also carries Tar Heel basketball, unfortunately). He was back, gloating, preening, and suggesting that Bill Maher was for some reason in more hot water than he was. (And hell, Maher has actually defended Rush on this Fluke story, in a context of free speech issues.)

Well, Limbaugh got the idea because of stories like this one:

http://www.thenation.com/article/166664/protect-pregnant-women-free-bei-bei-shuai

This is a Democratic attorney general.

How many Democrats are still pretty unhappy that Hillary Clinton made that comment about cookies, back in '92?

Empathy: Liberal Poison

I used to argue with the guy at the Texaco about how all these draconian legal-document laws coming down the pike from legislators apparently entirely immune to the real effects of the laws they were promulgating actually had terrible effects on real people, including even thousands of American children. He had his DeKalb hat after all, so I figured he was maybe a farmer of some kind, and might actually need some help now and then to get his maters up, or his melons, or his tobacco. And if he needed help, maybe he'd actually realize that "help" is real people. As opposed, I mean, to some fantasy demon Mexican drug biker with tongue jewelry, frightening tattoos, and dirty fingernails. I was mildly shocked to find the guy countering me with "that's just empathy--you need to stamp that out of your system."

This would be, you see, one formulation of the dissonance law I've been asserting lately on these pages. As the dissonance increases, shout louder. Examples seem to fly off the teevee every day, and I sometimes feel like Newton must have felt when he realized the thing about falling apples. Suddenly there was a snowstorm of apples. Suddenly things fell into place. No pun intended.

It turns out that farmers are now hurting from a lack of farm labor. Unfortunately, farmers are a tiny minority in the US, and they aren't going to even raise the attention of legislators until it's pretty late in the game. Meanwhile, the legislators can buy their food at any price from the best markets in town, and move along to new agendas--new places to make pain and sorrow for millions of real people who, just like the farm laborers, have preciously little to do with the stereotypes on which their laws are based.

These days of course it's the women's health agenda that's on the card. I give you the following column, which comes via Digby:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/dispatch-from-torture-nation-pregnant.html

Here's a bit from the piece. Read it all:

The doctor and nurse were professional and kind, and it was clear that they understood our sorrow. They too apologized for what they had to do next. For the third time that day, I exposed my stomach to an ultrasound machine, and we saw images of our sick child forming in blurred outlines on the screen.

“I’m so sorry that I have to do this,” the doctor told us, “but if I don’t, I can lose my license.” Before he could even start to describe our baby, I began to sob until I could barely breathe. Somewhere, a nurse cranked up the volume on a radio, allowing the inane pronouncements of a DJ to dull the doctor’s voice. Still, despite the noise, I heard him. His unwelcome words echoed off sterile walls while I, trapped on a bed, my feet in stirrups, twisted away from his voice.

“Here I see a well-developed diaphragm and here I see four healthy chambers of the heart...”

I closed my eyes and waited for it to end, as one waits for the car to stop rolling at the end of a terrible accident.

If that makes you feel kinda bad, you still have a little empathy. If you still have a little empathy, you'd better vote for some Democrats, and p.d.q. Democrats are by no means perfect, and in some areas they have a lot of big issues. It'd actually be wonderful if people who still had some empathy had time to start working on making the Democratic Party a better place. What's happened over the last thirty years is that a lot of folks who would in a better world be centrist Republicans have simply moved to the Democratic side because there's no place for them at all left on the Right. As I used to say back in the early '90s, Bill Clinton was mostly a Rockefeller Republican. I still believe that's true.

Back in 1990 or so, another moderate Republican, Barack Obama, was talking about making the US less "mean spirited." As Ms Maddow rightly pointed out this week, Mr. Obama's words are little more than a rephrasing of George Bush's "kinder, gentler America." On the current thing we call the "Right," Obama's new ancient comment is being offered as "evidence" that he is somehow, just as they all thought, "un-American." Woohoo.

Meanwhile, in the real world, where we actually all must live and suffer and die eventually, a nice doctor gives his third ultrasound to a woman carrying a fetus which must, for sound medical reasons, be terminated. And no doubt over on the right, people are shaking their heads at that story from the Texas Observer. "It's just more empathy fodder," they'll say. "Anectdotal testimony, of limited scientific value." It is a known scientific fact that "pro-life" women who use abortion facilities will frequently return to the picket-line within days of their procedure.

As the dissonance increases, so does the volume and intensity of the response.

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