RAMBLINGS

But is there a Plan?

2012-02-14T06:59:00.001-05:00

[from The Wild Bunch]

Well this week Ed Schultz is figuring Rick Santorum might actually be The Man, and watching his numbers pass Romney's in various states including Romney's original home state of MI, where Romney grew up and became a multi-national. Maybe he'll end up being the GOP nominee, who knows. One argument would be that his incompetence, ignorance, small-mindness, and utter inability to empathize with anyone other than another white male actually masks the greater problem which Romney presents, ultimately, to people who really think through what Romney stands for.

Go look at Romney's arch, smug rejection of the auto industry bailout, or the equally arch, smug rejection of any safety-net type solutions to the truly horrible situation millions of Americans are facing with regard to their mortgage commitments. Then ask yourself--on Romney's grounds, isn't the auto bailout (for example) still wrong even if it has succeeded? The answer must be yes, mustn't it? Because Romney has taken a principled stand, a stand based on his fundamental economics--which asserts that things are ultimately better when the free market forces simply are allowed to operate without any government adjustment or guidance (but keep taxes low on the job providers).

Romney's problem is that since he's running on a supposedly fundamental economic philosophy, when government does act and then things do get better, he's got a problem: his fundamentals turn out to be simply wrong. Santorum does not have this problem. As a muddled right-wing patriarch and defender of the keep em in the kitchen school, Santorum has no general economic view, no clarity, nothing but the right wing radio hate-ranter's ability to take Texaco cracker-barrel opinionations, his Pepsi stuffed with peanuts and fizzing over the top of the bottle and down over his nagging, pointing finger. Yes, his wife does look a little haggard these days, but soon he'll learn to leave her at home. Santorum has no fundamentals. He's just another pissed off redneck.

For the GOP candidate this year, it's looking like it's better not to have a Plan. Ain't that a pickle. Of course there is also the Mike Miller view--that people who actually think about stuff like this are so few as to be an inconsequential factor in national elections. This would explain a lot, such as the decline of the mainstream media.

The Eastwood Ad

2012-02-08T07:22:00.002-05:00

[heading south on Old US 421 between Staley and Siler City, NC, 2-8-12]

It is instructive to consider why insiders such as Mr. Rove would explode in indignation over a Chrysler ad featuring Clint Eastwood. The ad wasn't something that was going to burn into our subconscious for the next nine months. Mr. Rove, who is nothing if not savvy about advertising--he's been successfully selling the American public shit sandwich after shit sandwich for several decades now, and we keep wrinkling our noses but responding, "mmmmmmmm, good, though." Why not just let the ad drift down into oblivion, like all the other ads do.

Instead, Mr. Rove tells us all that he's "frankly, offended." By a message that asserts that America is in some ways a whole--a shared struggle which seems to be slowly paying off? What sort of offensive message can that be? Is the GOP really going to close the loop and now assert that not only were they against the Auto Industry Bailout (and Chrysler was bailed out by Mr. Bush, um, by the way), they're still against it, and still think the whole thing should have been allowed to collapse into ruin. Apparently that's the position.

And what bothers Mr. Rove is that by using Mr. Eastwood in the ad, the advertising company picked a voice that is deeply credible with the GOP base, and gave him a credible script so that he could in the ad say credible things to said base. And what that does--for the GOP--is a bit of spell-breaking.

The GOP has woven a powerful spell over the folks who listen constantly to right wing radio and otherwise buy into the idea that Mr. Obama is illegitimate in some or various ways. Every GOP candidate drums the same spell-binding message--spell-binding primarily because of the consistent across-the-board agreement. From Romney to Santorum, from Limbaugh to Krauthammer to Will, they all agree--Obama is somehow making America into something, well, "not-American." They all want to "take the country back." Yesterday on Chris Matthews, former Colorado congressman Tancredo said his dog was smarter than Mr. Obama.

Yet here's Mr. Eastwood--a credible voice--saying things are getting better. This might shatter the illusion. As well as consternation from Rove and many others about the ad, much air is being consumed this week arguing that the modest rise in employment is also somehow an illusion. "The statistics are from the (gasp) Labor Department." Well, no wonder then. Once again, the spell is being broken.

What the GOP wants is a profoundly divided America, a world of "us" and "them." Anything that suggests otherwise works against a voter choosing an obvious religious zelot muddle-head, or an obvious blowhard, or an obvious egotistic fratboy who still believes there should be no bailout of the auto industry, and no help for the millions of people entangled by their own home mortgages. If things are actually getting better, a conservative vote becomes "stay the course."

Well, driving to work the last few days I've noticed a sign at the gate to a plant I go past. It says "hiring riggers." It strikes me as a small indication that things are getting better--in some ways a more real indicator than the accurate graphs of employment which also show the same thing--that things bottomed a few months after Obama took office, and have been getting better since.

What the GOP continues to insist is a version of "believe me, or believe your lying eyes." For the Super Bowl, that bizarre balloon of celebration of everything middle-American, to feature an ad by Eastwood of all people--that amounts to an arrow straight into the confusion that the GOP works tirelessly to maintain. Eastwood is the ultimate straight shooter. You're going to believe Rove over him?
I doubt they can even argue that somehow he was "tricked" by some sneaky liberal advertising agency. He makes movies, after all, and that takes quite a lot of perspective and ability.

Hell, maybe another straight shooter will get back onto the radio in the wake of this flap. Next year, let's get the Hag up for the half-time show. He used to tell it straight, till the money boys pushed him off the big stage.

Evidence

2012-02-05T21:00:00.000-05:00

Compare the video in the first link:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/honest-rape-because-lying-women-cant-be.html

With that in the second link:

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2012/02/02/women-arent-funny/

QED

Back to Work

2012-02-03T06:53:00.006-05:00

Although I hate to move on, I'll start by simply offering you a link:

http://www.ginandtacos.com/2012/02/02/race-for-the-cure-to-being-relevant/

After you've digested this, read this next one too:

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2012/02/02/komen-sucks-part-47/

Now, have a nice day! The poisionous, vile Republican candidates continue their remarkable speeches, so I'll have new comments up soon on life in the US of A, Feb. 2012 edition. TGIF.

Saturday Morning Update. By the end of Friday, the Komen Foundation had backed off its policy re Planned Parenthood. For the moment. Until things quiet down. Until the heat's off. Go find Ms. Brinker's explanation of the original policy change in an interview with Andrea Mitchell, on Thursday last. It's posted, I'm sure, on MSNBC.com. Then ask yourself how this is some sort of "mistake." Rather than what it is--a prevaricating lie, boldfaced, in technicolor. And don't be fooled into thinking that the Komen people have actually conceded:

http://studentactivism.net/2012/02/03/komen-statement-on-planned-parenthood-is-a-pr-move-not-a-policy-reversal/

This is, by the way, exactly like Mr. Romney's most current "mistake," or as he puts it, "misspeak." It is Republicans caught in their tangle of bullshit, nothing more. It is yet another example, among thousands, of the tragic dark road Republicans have taken--have CHOSEN to take--a road of lies, of fear, of power at all costs, including the cost to their tattered reputations. It is fitting that Mr. Romney is their nominee (apparently). He is not only a liar of the first order, who continues to create new lies at the mere whiff of resistance to anything he might have previously asserted (what a guy to negotiate with some country who doesn't want to "toe our line," and has the wherewithal to back that resistance up. Like, say, Pakistan). As a methodology to power, this is just a new fill-up on a long road across a desert to nowhere--it started out back in the '60s with the "Southern Strategy," and it continues apace, even as the Grand Ole Party boils itself down to crusty, cinderous nuggets of pure black evil and hate, the little black train a-comin' if we don't get our business right and see them for what they are.

Let's hope the Komen Foundation is history. Meanwhile, since the march of history isn't going to occur this rainy February morning, take a look at a far better analysis of Mr. Gingrich's ever expanding ego than I could possible give you here. You'll find it at James Wolcott's blog, which is part of the Vanity Fair consortium.
I'll just quote the first bit, it's all just as good:

My favorite part of Newt Gingrich’s Florida-primary concession speech last night--only Gingrich could make a concession speech sound like Augustus Caesar risen from the Roman dust--was when he started reeling off all the executive orders he would issue on Inauguration Day like some madman.

“On day one, moments after I have sworn the oath of office, even before we begin dressing for the round of balls that night that some have called Venetian, others Viennese, I will sit at my desk in the Oval Office and issue an executive order repealing and revoking the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is the font or fount, if you will, of the secularism and overreliance on scientism that plagues us today, and frankly anyone who can’t see that Voltaire led to the horrors of the Third Reich is fundamentally unequipped to debate the matter..." http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2012/01/Newt-Loops

Gingrich and Romney both deserve to be called what they certainly are, laughing stocks. Both are utterly unqualified to be President, though both could certainly play a President in a comic movie like Doctor Strangelove II. This fact, too, reflects the truth about the GOP--it's what they nominate, because it's what they believe--that a President should have no power precisely because he (or she, La Palin) is a result of a democratic process, and is thus awarded his position by fools incapable of governing themselves.

Yoey

2012-01-28T08:44:00.002-05:00

Our kitty made her way through our woods when she was about 5 or so months old, from somewhere, and ended up hiding in a drainpipe near the stone kitchen stoop where we fed our cat, and sneaking out to grab a few bites of food when she could. She was fast. I spotted her accidentally after putting some food out. When I saw her several more times I decided I'd better make friends, and she was most willing to come inside and consider the situation, although Mittens, the big grey cat whose food she was eating, didn't much like the idea. Eventually, when we decided to go live on Ocracoke for the summer of '95, Yoey came along. I didn't stay on the island all the time, and we had a house sitter up here in Chatham County, so Mittens was still taken care of ok.

Turned out Libby and I shared Yoey's life and spirit for quite a spell--from winter '94 until yesterday, January 27, 1012, when she died of old age and it's various infirmities while Libby brushed her, something she always loved from start to finish. We had known she was going to leave for a few weeks, and most particularly when she started refusing all food about ten days before she died. She'd still drink a little broth, but we felt that she was just wearing out--we'd already done quite a lot of vetting, and many of our efforts had brought her back to some health several times. This was just the end. As it comes to all of us of course.

We travelled a lot during the Yoey years, and she came along on many trips. She should have put state stickers on her carrier. She stayed in various motels, with various folks who put us up for the night or weekend while we played gigs. Sometimes we'd have to barracade the room she was in to keep the house dog or cat away, and now and then a house cat would hang around outside Yoey's door and if possible even stick a paw under it, knowing something was up. Yoey was usually undaunted, growling from the other side of the door. She had a survivor spirit. She'd lived in a drain pipe! My favorite travel moment, which happened a lot, was when she'd decide to ride on top of the carrier in the back seat so she could look out the window at traffic and the world. And now and then, when she didn't particularly want to go--this happened on Ocracoke once or twice--she'd find some hiding place and we'd miss the ferry. Like I say, she'd lived in a drain pipe. Hiding places probably beckoned to her from every corner of her world.

So, now she's gone. As she was my main alarm clock, I'll have to resort to the radio now. And when we come in at night, it'll be too quiet, and there'll be no little head popping up from the bed or couch to greet us. We won't have to be sure the door's shut either, when we're bringing a lot of stuff in at night. She won't be going out into the night to explore. I'll miss all sorts of little things--the "tail game" and the "other tail game." Her purrs when you petted or brushed her. Even just feeding her, or--later, when she was old--taking her out to the garden and sitting with her while she ate some grass or rubbed her cheek in the catnip, then lead us back to the house when she decided she'd had enough nature.

It was hard to just endure the last week--we kept asking each other if we should just take her in to be put down. There's no ultimate answer to that question, and in my book, the pet has to have a say in it too. I figured Yoey was still happy to be alive up till the very end--she liked to sleep by the door with the light on her, she purred when we'd hug her, and wanted to climb up on the couch to be beside us. Libby said she wanted to come upstairs to the bedroom, and as I said, she died while being brushed, something she loved. So I think we did her right--let her have every second of life. That's just us and Yoey. Thank god she didn't get into a corner of pain, thank god she was never unable to walk. We tried just to stay in the moment, to perceive was was happening. We were ready to take her in, even to make an emergency call if that's what the circumstances required. And thank god she died in Libby's arms.

Pay No Attention To...

2012-01-26T06:18:00.002-05:00

Just a couple of comments on the week's political flow:

1. According to a CBS Poll, 91% of Americans approved of Obama's speech Tuesday night, while 8% disapproved.

2. Last night the Rev. Al tried to discuss with some Republican Congressman from Kansas whether they could at least agree that the so-called "Buffett Rule" (asserting that millionaires should pay more taxes than their secretaries) addressed a question of "fairness." While Al wasn't entirely prepared for the Congressman's response: a retort that it's not fair that millions of Americans pay no taxes, it remained remarkable that the Congressman would never directly address a clear question, eventually looking like a 3-year-old just saying "no" over and over again. Surely any reasonable person can evaluate what amounts to a hypothetical and come up with a direct response. I wish Al had dealt with the canned response though. He might have pointed out that most of those millions of Americans don't pay taxes because they don't make enough money to qualify for taxes, since presumably the Congressman wasn't talking about millionaires who find enough loopholes not to pay anything, versus those who simply find enough loopholes to pay less than their secretaries. The whole conversation was instructive, nonetheless.

3. Mr. Daniels' response to the Obama speech featured an important if pernicious suggestion--that the government means-test social security. Should this idea gain legal status, it would be the book-end to Reagan's pernicious law capping social security taxes, which also serves to define social security as in some sense "welfare" for those who didn't manage to climb atop the bloody pile of scrabblers in life's game of business success and failure. Mr. Daniels proposition seems oh so reasonable--rich folk don't "need" social security. So let's let rich folk decide who does need social security. And while they're at it, let's let rich folk decide how much the check will be. Social security was designed to be a program which reflected the fact that we're all Americans. It bound us together. Everyone paid in, and everyone got a pay-out. This has galled the Right from the get-go, and they've worked a long term strategy to destroy the program, and they continue on this path.

4. Chris Matthews made one prescient remark, prior to the speech. The Republicans have not been the "loyal opposition" during Obama's term. It was clear that this remains true. Apparently a good majority of Americans at least for the moment realize this--judging by that CBS poll. It will be the Democratic Party's job to keep reminding Americans about this, which will mean keeping the racist dog whistles emitting from the Gingrich camp at bay, not to mention the endless other prevarications and dissemulates. This job, unfortunately, is akin to the little Dutch Boy's. See, e.g.:
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2012/01/26/what-really-matters/

Newt's Theme

2012-01-22T08:53:00.005-05:00

According to a little historical blurb accompanying the video at Youtube, Ms Simon is perported to be singing about Mick Jaggar in the song, but has never said if that presumption is true. Obviously, the song is a perfect ode to vanity. Jagger has a wonderful sense of humor--I'm surprised he hasn't covered the song by now if it is "about" him, and his "Some Girls" (see the Shine a Light movie) is close to being an ironic comment on the same territory as Carly's masterpiece.

Newt, on the other hand. If the press just covers him, he should win the marble on the GOP side. After all, he expresses all the GOP themes, and with gusto. If they keep having debates, he should blow Romney right off the stage, and Santorum as well. Then we'll see just how deep and wide the dark, bigoted underside of America and American history really runs. Newt as candidate is George Wallace and Rush Limbaugh, with just enough fey to bring in the Log Cabin Republicans one more time. And Newt will have Hannity, Limbaugh and all the rest as a free advertising campaign, 24-7.

This, then, will be the cholce:

Driftglass, who creates genius images like this nearly every day, will have much more articulate things to say about this particular banality of evil in the coming months. Be sure to check his site often. driftglass.blogspot.com It's an easy address.

The Romney Stare

2012-01-21T09:23:00.001-05:00

[photo from New York Daily News]

Who knows, if they work the machinery with such awkward transparency, at some point in the distant future our electorate may begin to perceive their own emotional manipulation and have some reaction tending back towards rationality and clarity. It's possible. Hell, several hundred years before Jesus's time on the planet, a guy in Greece realized that we live mostly in illusion, and even taught a small group of students that we could actually turn around, away from the back of the cave wall, and look out at the sun.

Of course it's true that his contemporaries made Socrates kill himself, and Jesus was not only dispatched, but his teachings were then pretty much reversed into a death cult. It ain't easy being true.

Still. On the one hand, Ms Maddow last night offered a most wonderful analysis of the silly question which Mr. Gingrich hit out of the park to the delight of his attending base (and Mr. Hannity yesterday, on my drive home), noting that the John King question was pathetically ill-formed and allowed Gingrich to attack the questioner will a clearly rehersed retort which deftly sidestepped the obvious--that Gingrich was the guy who drove the impeachment proceedings of President Clinton, the man who literally personified his very complaint that personal attacks are allegedly driving the best away from politics.

Well yes, Mr. G. And one can see the next ratchet cog before the handle reaches it--when character of quality leaves the field, nature still abhors a vacuum, and what rushes in is--viola--Gingrich! It's a virtual personification of the general Republican pirouette, which has been executed so many times there must be a hole on the dance floor by now: Gubment is incompetent. Elect us and we'll prove it again and again. Because we believe gubmet is incompetent.

At this point you can see it at the personal and at the macro level--the great Tea Party Revolution of 2010 accomplished what? And Gingrich now leads in the Gamecock state, the place where the ancestors of these voters decided some 150 years ago that it was a good idea to ignite the Civil War, shelling a little island garrison in Charleston Harbor. We may recall how that turned out: Mr. Davis fleeing with the remains of the treasury, on the night train to Georgia, and the tragic retreat from Richmond to Appomattox finally ending with more rational leaders admitting that further slaughter was pointless, i.e., walking at last to the Cave entrance and checking out the sunrise.

Meanwhile, there's the hilarious Mr. Romney, who has developed a deer in the headlights stare. Romney's base knows that stare, they recognize it. Some of 'em spot light deer themselves, of an evening. I asked Libby last night, "didn't Romney know going into this that he had tax issues?" He's starting to look as foolish as our own John Edwards, who embarked on a Presidential Run with a bun in the oven.

How the nation averted that disaster I don't know. We'd have been living in the McCain Presidency today had Edwards won the nomination in 2008, with Ms. Palin offering her views on Turkey from the balcony rather than from a bus book tour in Indiana.

The folks in the know still say Romney will carry the GOP banner in the fall. I sure hope so. With Gingrich we'll get to replay George Wallace in '68, and with a black opponent no less. Then we'll have an actual measure of the level of racism that still exists in the United States. No sane person wants to directly calculate that measure.

But that racism exists in ample measure is certainly not in doubt. In the very safe reaches of television, we have Gingrich just this week "putting Juan Williams in his place" when the former NPR reporter who now plays Alan Colmes on Fox News asked a slightly better phrased question of Mr. Gingrich than John King's pitiful effort on Thursday. In the very unsafe reaches of Arizona, meanwhile, this travesty is going on:

http://wonkette.com/460717/arizona-schools-ban-mexican-american-studies-angry-kids-given-janitorial-duty

What a tragedy, and in beautiful Tucson, where Libby and I have played dances and wandered the sunny streets looking for treasures in junk stores. I'd hoped Tucson was immune from the Phoenix racism, that somehow that was one of those big-city things. Tucson's not so big, not so classically urban, and so much closer to the border, you'd think folks there would have a much easier time with the complexities of interwoven border life. Moreover, it's really crappy when adults are just assholes inflicting injustice on kids who don't have much power to respond. What we're seeing in Tuscon is modern segregation--what the Warren Court directly ruled, back in '54, was inherently harmful to American children. It still is. And harming children is still one of the very worst things people can do. There's not much difference, really, between Mr. Sandusky and this unnamed school official in Tuscon. Of course the GOP Presidential Hopefuls remain silent.

Contrast and Compare; or This Guy? 1.1

2012-01-16T07:04:00.000-05:00

From an essay on breasts implants:

"...I assert that even adult women who ostensibly agree to breast mutilation cannot have arrived at that choice from a position of full human agency. I assert this because no woman anywhere enjoys full human agency."

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2012/01/15/fairy-tale-sunday/

From an essay on Mormonism by a resident of Salt Lake City:

"... Mormonism is a successful religion precisely because it's a business that requires total belief in a paternalistic dogma. Big Daddies are at the top. Mommies are in the kitchen popping out babies and children fall in line to do their share based on their gender. Chores are gender specific and so are rewards at home and in the Church. As it is on earth so it is in Heaven. Heaven is as hierarchical as the Church."

http://utahsavage.blogspot.com/2012/01/mitts-mormon-and-mormonism-is-great.html

Curiously, what one might term "gender issues" are not even in the primary discussion of our Presidential conversation this time around. They're buried, way down the page, or amount to a footnote. We'll probably be killing Iranian children before the question surfaces. And that's no matter who's elected in November.

Last week at work someone called to asked whether we took today off for "Martin Luther Day." Plus, they even messed up the quote on his statue in D.C. I said, "No, we're gonna do Martin Buber Day this year."

Pekinpah

2012-01-11T09:12:00.002-05:00

[still from "The Wild Bunch", (c)Warner Brothers/Seven Arts]

http://mrpeelsardineliqueur.blogspot.com/2012/01/kind-of-simple-glory-about-it.html

This terrific elegy on the end of commercial 35mm film presentation includes some great paragraphs about Sam Pekinpah's "Ride the High Country." I agree with the author, and am delighted to find someone else who keeps finding new facets to Peckinpah's great work. I happened to watch "The Get Away" a few weeks back, probably for the first time since it came out in the mid-'70s. While it isn't "The Wild Bunch," or "High Country," it's a brilliant movie, and with a romantic ending no less! Maybe we should all watch it this year, as it suggests that there might be a possible, if improbable happy ending out there for America. Of course one could also wonder if the rosy mist into which McQueen and McGraw disappear at the end of "Get Away" doesn't dissolve, eventually, into "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia." At any rate, a nice double bill, and surely such a showing would be true to Peckinpah's deeper belief that romance isn't to be trusted. (Which of course is the lesson Hartley learns too well in "Ride the High Country," to end where we began.)

Peckinpah can be considered on many levels. He's like war that way. No matter what you think of "The Wild Bunch," look up the bridge scene sometime. It's not something they did on a computer. They lived that drop into the river, and nobody got killed either.

Update (but not about Peckinpah)--last night on MSNBC every program mentioned the Romney dog-on-car thing. I can't claim I scooped them by a week. All I did was read about it in James Wolcott's blog in Vanity Fair. Congrats to Mr. Wolcott.

Oil--You Have to Pay For It

2012-01-10T07:18:00.001-05:00

[from earlyblurs.com]

http://www.juancole.com/2012/01/ahmadinejad-in-latin-america.html

Nothing particularly amazing about the link, it's just one of a million random samples of the reality that being an oil-based economy has implications for the knee-jerk "wahl I thank we orta just kick some ass" boys down at the Texaco. Of course they'll still vote for Romney, still nod that he's durn tootin' when he opines that our current President has a weak foreign policy when it comes to Iran and the Middle East, running around apologizing and all.

The fact is, President Jimmy Carter, who knew a thing or two about putting peanuts in a Pepsi bottle, was absolutely right back in '77 when he said we needed to get unhooked from oil, and particularly from Middle East oil. The GOP of course harrumpfed, and Reagan ripped those solar panels right offen the White House roof as his first official act. And there's surely nothing but coincidence in the strange fact that Iran was in Reagan's corner in the election of '79, releasing the hostages which helped to sink Carter only after Reagan was absolutely and certainly elected and in office.

So here we are. Looking back, at the days when gas was 50 cents a gallon and the original Red Clay Ramblers, my self included, made a sort of living riding around the country in a gas guzzling Dodge van and playing bar gigs and festivals for more of Carter's peanuts, it's easier to see that if we'd just made a concerted effort, back then, to find a solution to a dependence on a fuel supply which came with being leveraged by people who didn't care to go along with our American solutions to life elsewhere, well by now we might have plumb avoided two or three nasty, costly wars, and for that matter, might even still be riding the elevators to the top of the World Trade Centers if we cared to.

Instead, we're pretty much still in the same place, and we still haven't figured out that using oil as a club tends to wack us as much as the club's intended addressee. As someone pointed out recently, if we manage to reduce the world's oil supply due to embargoing Iranian oil, a consequence will be rising fuel prices. And that will make money for oil producers, probably including Iran, and certainly including the other oil producing countries.

Oh, and yeah, the Oil Companies too. This, by the way, is how it also works for a guy like Romney, who has so much money that some of the green always flows his way.

This Guy?

2012-01-05T20:43:00.001-05:00

Then Mitt put his sons on notice: there would be pre-determined stops for gas, and that was it. Tagg was commandeering the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, when he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. “Dad!” he yelled. “Gross!” A brown liquid was dripping down the rear window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours. As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Mitt coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the road with the dog still on the roof. It was a preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management. But the story would trail him years later on the national political stage, where the name Seamus would become shorthand for Romney’s coldly clinical approach to problem solving. (From The Real Romney by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, as quoted in Vanity Fair)

Dear God. This is the so-called moderate candidate, the alternative to the moderate President we now enjoy, a guy who has pulled the country back from a depression engendered by full-on Republicanism for eight years, a man who entered office during a job-loss event in full swing, and who has had about .001 support from the Republicans who were elected to help govern the country, not stymie every presidential initiative, act or suggestion from the get-go. Watching Romney's preening "acceptance" speech after his Iowa landslide of 8 votes, I told Libby it was like seeing George Bush over again--the arrogant frat-boy rich guy, so glib with his "failed President" talking phrase, so certain that he can roll over any and all opposition, hitting yet another of his life's grand slams from the perfect spot to be born standing--ten feet off third base towards home. Nice work if you can get it. I guess.

And Chris Matthews praises Romney because, unlike his most dangerous challenger, Rick Santorum, Romney isn't quite putting all out war with Iran right into his platform, but only hints at it with a wink and a nod, and perhaps with the nudge to the reluctant that, after all, the Romney is basically "speaking to the base" right now and all his turns of phrase must be taken with some digestively helpful sea salt by those in the non-base who are, for whatever reason, just bored with the guy who turned out not to be up to changing everything but the tide schedule, no matter what he promised in 2008.

After all, as far as we now know, Mr. Romney did not blow up frogs with firecrackers, like young Master Bush. I'll keep saying it here, from time to time. We just get the limited either/or choice in this here land of Liberty. There's the D. There's the R. If you don't turn out, that doesn't mean you can say it ain't your problem. And meanwhile, the selling and framing goes on at every level, all the live-long day, and don't you forget it. While Mitt will use the phrase "failed Presidency" so frequently that by the end of next week, if you watch enough teevee, you're going to be thinking maybe you don't really want to vote for a failure even if he does seem to be a nice Negro with a beautiful family and a great vocabulary, at the same moment you are also being sold quite a few other things. Who can pay conscious attention to all of it? Mostly, it all just goes to shape a point of view that feels entirely "objective", an ordinary 4-square picture of just what's "out there." Consider, for example:

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2012/01/03/shoe-company-to-women-youre-deformed/

As usual, the deconstruction is brilliant, and even more so because we never even noticed it was there to deconstruct. So, I ask you, is there still a debt crisis? Do you actually want Chevy Chase for President?

2012.1

2012-01-01T08:55:00.000-05:00

The Cross Hairs

2011-12-29T07:09:00.000-05:00

This could be added as an "update" to my last post, but anyways... The following link is worth a read:

http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/12/28/oddly-passive-in-the-world-of-drone-killing/

On the one hand, we can surely all agree that the rough justice of Mussolini's end, hanging upside down under a bridge, is indeed entirely what he "deserved." So, for that matter, is the sordid end of Hitler and his intimate cohort. The photographs of various German higherups, heads on desks, dark blood pooled beside, and the Luger still in a cold, dead hand--that is justice, in some understandable larger sense. And given this--call it a moral fact if you like--it is surely understandable that a President finds himself with a moral duty to deal with people like bin Laden using the rough justice available.

But there is also a slippery slope, as the emptywheel article rightly attests. There is the "young wife." There are the faceless civilians who almost always are noted as collateral damage when these various actions are taken. And there is the problem, too, of just how easy it all becomes--the bright kid from Yale or the Air Force Academy, assigned to some virtual cockpit in some comfortable American city, putting in his shift watching a screen, pressing a red button, having a nice fresh-brewed cup of coffee and a danish. And a President who didn't actually "decide" anything beyond not rejecting a plan which might have been written entirely in the bloodless language of operatives and objectives, and who gains a political advantage of sorts by contradicting some Republican's cheap shot "appeaser" rhetoric. "Appease this, fucker!"

So. Just sayin'. Here's a place that demands some serious thinking. And of course who's doing that in this hilarious campaign season, where the best news is probably that Mr. Gingrich is at last confronting his own petard, and squirms like a fishing worm as Mr. Romney slowly skewers him with silence and unlimited advertising money used for not one syllable of serious conversation or consideration.

One might hope, and probably vainly, that at least Mr. Newt realizes that he contributed directly to this electoral context, where the battle is to the death. "But I have ideas," Gingrich mewls. No doubt to many on the right, Romney's strongest qualification has become his willingness to press the sword deeper, looking into Mr. Gingrich's eyes, enjoying the vanishing light in them. No doubt later at supper he can remark to his advisers that sunsets in Iowa in January are the best to be found anywhere. The clink of glasses and bitter laughter. Fade to black.

In this Christmas Season

2011-12-22T07:09:00.002-05:00

(from Bukowski.net)

http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/12/21/obama-apologists-ignoring-the-rotting-corpse-of-anwar-al-awlaki/

This is our reality. Mr. Obama has with this law reduced the choice of President to a vote based on which of two people is the more reasonable, fair-minded person. As an historical event, this bill probably represents a famous principle of Presidency--namely, that all Presidents want as much power as they can get. So, e.g., the Republicans opened the door, and as President Mr. Obama simply isn't going to close it. Indeed, with this bill he opens it wider. It's a matter of perceived practicality versus legal theorizing. Mr. Obama thinks, no doubt, "I'm the guy that has to stop this bastard." And in this clarity Mr. Obama proves decisively that he's a better President than Bush, who saw the world through muddled glasses first day to last, and for all his blather and all the killing, stopped nothing.

But the down side is Ms. Wheeler's point--what will Newt (say) do with this power. Because the track record looking back to 1980 is very very bad for American Democracy, as an invisible hand. And perhaps this is why polls are trending now for Mr. Obama. Maybe most Americans would still rather not give the keys to a guy in a clown suit who walks down the street talking to himself.

See, here's the thing. There is going to be a guy in the White House who has to deal with stuff that no one wants to deal with. The GOP can apparently convince their boys that this problem is really not much, that all that guy has to do is just say "ok" when it really comes down to it--the rest of it gets decided by "experts," and the prez is just the legal on/off switch, and how daunting can that be. The Dems, they tend to think their guy actually has to decide stuff more like we humans decide--thinking about consequences intended and otherwise, understanding that doing nothing is a decision, trying to balance interests, or ignoring interests, staying up late, getting up early, pretty much spending his whole life on the job. And all of us just have the little choice we can make, the little vote, and we'd best remember that any choice we make, including spending a November Tuesday at the movies, or checking some Nader off the list to make a "point," that has implications too, about who ends up with this crazy job of dealing with stuff that one one wants to deal with.

There's a nice Bukowski poem on this theme--the guy in the clown suit I mean. I'll hunt up for you sometime.

Feliz Navidad

2011-12-21T09:08:00.001-05:00

http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/could-dismantling-the-submerged-state-surrounding-student-debt-pay-for-free-colleges/

If you ever have to walk some place, like say 5 miles to town, you will discover that the road you drive every day in a few minutes is actually crammed full of minutia that you have never ever noticed before. You will see that the mailboxes you pass have small differences--dings, dents, scratches, a slight askew-ness. You will see trees in various stages of life and decay, and perhaps wonder when that big oak was struck by lightening, or why the power company hasn't yet removed it--since it is clearly going to take out a feeder line at some point, and possibly under much worse weather conditions for the men who have to deal with the problem when it happens. You'll notice the various loose dogs, some of which will come out to threaten you for walking past "their" driveway, and you'll wish you'd brought along a good sized stick. Eventually, after quite some time, you'll get to town. Then you'll have to carry that full gas can all the way back, or that one sack of groceries. Perhaps you'll understood more deeply why George Jones drove a riding lawnmower to Nashville when he ran out of whiskey, and not just see the event as yet another funny story about the Ole Possum.

So it is with the American tragedy that is the so-called "Reagan Revolution." Because it really happened, in thousands of bits and pieces, just like the little events which in the end led to that rich tapestry of entrophy-tending which you finally discovered on your walk to town.

And while there may at some point be enough political will in the country to start pushing back against this pervasive rot, the question now is almost one of where to start. And at one level of understanding, the facts described in the Rorty link which starts this post imply policy suppositions which will take a generation to rebut assuming there's anyone out there to actually do the rebutting where it counts--in the classrooms of the future policy makers. And at another more obvious level, one entire political party fields a body of presidential contenders none of whom have the credibility to hold the office, while the other party pretty much governs on the very economic suppositions which support, e.g., the idea that a student loan structure such as Rorty describes makes more sense than a system that can be truly called "public" education.

That is, Obama's economics are pretty much Reagan's, whereas Romney, who was born rich, prattles on about "economic freedom," and Ron Paul would like to return to a world where metal is money, and paper is just paper.

On the road to town this December, the bows on the mailboxes all came from Walmart. And while old-timers send out "analog" Xmas cards to old friends, finding their addresses in tattered address books that tend to drift down through the little used clutter like leaves from last years fall, in the digital future, where everything is mathematics to be mined, this stirring prospect slouches towards Bethlehem to be born:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/246511/how_facebook_can_hurt_your_credit_rating.html

Feliz Navidad.

"I Paid for ths Microphone"

2011-12-11T09:19:00.001-05:00

[photo from http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/12/elizabeth_warren_and_sen_scott.html ]

If you want to understand what's going on, you simply have to get past teevee news and opinion shows, be they on Fox or even on MSNBC. Consider the following excellent post:

http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/the-new-and-old-attack-on-elizabeth-warrens-congressional-oversight-panel/

Well, probably you should have at least watched enough teevee to know that Karl Rove has put out the ad cited in Rorty's post. But that's about it. I watched two or three shows that discussed the ad in the past couple of days and gleened nothing of substance concerning the issue in question--whether Elizabeth Warren has changed positions, and more importantly, what positions.

In Rorty's post you have that answered. Turns out there's some serious economic analysis going on about the relationship of household debt to other major facts about our current economy. Turns out there may even be an ongoing effort to obscure that relationship, to the benefit of the big players (that's at least my tentative conclusion).

I hope Ms. Warren wins her election next fall. I sure do wish NC had a senator like she'll be. As I keep saying here, in different ways, the GOP has chosen a path that amounts to evil--they are more and more an amalgam of every prejudice and hate that can be found in the world of men--every disgruntled, shortsighted, angry voter is welcomed to the fold--plus the richest folks in the land, or at least the ones who have no larger vision beyond buying yet another villa or yacht or fillet mignon or trophy female, and no comprehension of the true fact that there's only so much money that one can actually spend, short of living like an illiterate former heavyweight champeen who has no financial advisors.

I am pleased to read that Bernie Sanders, Vermont's fine senator, is offering a constitutional amendment aimed at cancelling the pernicious Citizen's United Supreme Court Decision, which codifies the terrible practical fact that money and power do in the US convey a special First Class Citizenship. Of course Mr. Sanders will never succeed in this effort, but perhaps it'll help wake up a few people.

Sadly, the powerful seem long long ago to have decided that even the most basic effort to keep it between the ditches amounts only to a weakness in an all out war for power. Thus, the current Rove ad, presented with a straight face. Rove's candidate, on the other hand, is a handsome cowboy with an empty head and a nice pickup truck. Maybe Scott Brown should go down to Austin. He's more qualified to be governor of Texas than the current occupant of that office. As we've all discovered. It's remarkable that both Brown and Warren are reported as "decrying" the Rove ad. So Mr. Brown wasn't aware that Rove was running such an ad? More proof that he's Texas Governor material I guess.

Quick Update: the mendacity of the GOP is no better evidenced than in Newton Leroy's recent assertion that "really" there are no Palestinians. Here's a good rejoinder to such absurd panderings--with a dose of reality for the alternative to the Newt in our politics as well:

http://www.juancole.com/2011/12/washington-actions-on-palestine-dont-differ-from-gingrichs-words.html

(When Mr. Cole starts appearing weekly on PBS, replacing David F-ing Brooks, I'll consider sending in another check.)

Ginger White

2011-12-02T07:10:00.002-05:00

Give me a P. Give me an A. Give me a T. Give me an R. Etc.

There will be a discussion later.

The Necessary and Sufficient Reason

2011-12-01T06:32:00.001-05:00

Dean and Phil Ford (sports.espn.go.com)

Yesterday riding home from work Mr. Hannity was "interviewing" Mr. Romney. Mr. Romney, concerned no doubt that many of Hannity's listeners might still think him too "liberal" for their taste, said the following:

"Any candidate in our Republican field of candidates would be a better President than Mr. Obama."

With this statement, Mr. Romney has moved himself into the John McCain camp, at least in my book. I decided, in the fall of '08, that Mr. McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as a Vice-Presidential candidate, was clear proof that Mr. McCain was not capable of being President of the United States. This was McCain's first presidental act, as it were. For whatever reasons, he was willing to pick a person so obviously unqualified to be President that the mere fact of his choice implied that he, McCain, would likely not be capable of looking rationally at whatever deeply serious events might cross his path, should be actually achieve the office. And of course--as well--should Ms Palin have found herself elevated to President--Mr. McCain would have left the nation in that dire strait--a fate almost too disorienting to even contemplate in detail.

With Mr. Romney's unqualified statement yesterday, he falls into the same problem. We must assume that he isn't lying--if only because if he's lying about this, what can we believe? Yet there is no doubt at all that a good number--if not all--of the current Republican Presidential candidates are obviously and utterly unqualified to hold the office, much less manage the office better than Mr. Obama has done. Simple logic, then, leads me to the conclusion that Mr. Romney is himself unqualified to be President.

At least I can now deal with more pressing problems at hand--firewood, Christmas shopping, a new battery for the truck, the cat's more and more finicky eating habits. The Presidential Election is now just a matter of getting to the polling place next November (on the correct date, no help to the most unqualified Mr. Perry) and voting for the only choice--Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama is now a seasoned President. His second term should be better than his first--particularly if America also gives him a better Congress to work with by tossing out a goodly number of the unqualified Republicans who now hold office therein.

In the meantime--being from North Carolina--I'll also be sure to get to the polls in May to vote against our NC GOP's current effort at nasty--an anti-same sex marriage amendment. Just what NC needs--a divisive, pointless constitutional amendment to get out the homophobe vote. Only last week our GOP Legislature voted to rescend a law aimed at reducing racial bias in the court system. Way to go, fellers and "gals."

It's a weird thing to watch the clock running backards while the seasons progress in their more or less usual manner, leaves falling, the frost needing a scraping before I leave for work at more or less the crack o dawn. Any day now I expect to see Jesse Helms appear again on Channel 5, Raleigh's flagship Teevee station, sneering about Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, and the dirty hippies in Chapel Hill. Back in '61, when I started my college adventure there, the students burned Dean Smith in effigy because his first season was a losing one. Ramblin' Jack Elliot played on campus that year, and was booed when he refused to sing "Ghost Riders in the Sky", the only song in the folkie vein some front-row rowdies had apparently ever heard. Later Josh White played--and sang "Strange Fruit." I had no idea, of course, of that song's history. I had never heard of Billie Holiday at that point in my education.

Two Days After T'giving

2011-11-26T09:26:00.000-05:00

Surely one of the most absurd ideas to have surfaced during this brief season of feasting is the Pam Geller rant about halal turkeys. Here's some info, if you find stupid interesting:

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/11/halal-turkeys-are-tainting-thanksgiving.html

I think the best "response" might be Marcy Wheeler's, and it isn't really a response at all, just a good formula for making a good turkey (I think we'll try it at when Xmas arrives; we decided to have salmon fillets for our big meal this year. That way our elderly kitty could sit at the table with us. Anyways, here's Marcy, from her blog Empty Wheel (listed in my blog-roll):

I’ve had a request to explain how I use bacon on my turkey. As I’ve explained, I think the bacon serves the same purpose as brining (slow application of salt), without the meat losing it’s “bite” as I think can happen with brining. Plus, it protects the breast from over-browning. And best of all, you can pick it off at that point of the afternoon where you start to get really hungry but don’t want to ruin your appetite. And once you’ve cleaned the bacon off, it’ll brown nicely.

As you put the bird in the oven, cover it with bacon. I will use a full pound for a big bird, which is what we have this year (14 pounds).

I’ll tent my turkey for about an hour, then let the bacon brown for about 1.5 hours, and by then I’ll be ready for snacking. Which, after a couple of trips back to the oven to strip the bacon, should leave about an hour for the bird to brown.

In other matters, Doghouse comments today on a mass thievery occurring somewhere in Indianapolis just prior to the advent of Black Friday--seems some people figured out that all the cars parked in a shopping center lot, unattended, to save spaces for when the stores opened for the rush, might be full of good stuff already. This puts me in mind of an idea I had a while back. As many surely know, the price of copper has gone so high (probably due to a combination of demand and speculation) that people in desperate straits (or just plain crooks) are stealing copper right off the electric poles. All one needs, after all, is a boom truck, some insulated snips, and some knowledge about which wires not to mess with.

So, me wonders. Given that the larger problem we face is that speculators have cornered the market on success, and that the "job creators" have moved all the jobs to other corners of the world, why don't these copper coppers be channeled somehow to stealing the particular copper bits which transmit speculations concerning, e.g., copper. That way the circle would be closed in an obvious way to all concerned, rather than there being this convenient disconnect (no pun intended) between the people who drive up the prices and the people who are tempted by the "free" money festooning our environment everywhere they look.

Thanksgiving Day Fact

2011-11-24T06:56:00.001-05:00

From the National Priorities Project via Digby:

The average Bush tax cut in 2011 for a taxpayer in the richest one percent is greater than the average income of the other 99 percent ($66,384 compared to $58,506).

Thanksgiving Day Extended Metaphor:

http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2011/11/the-crash.html

Headline of the Week

2011-11-23T07:37:00.001-05:00

From Doghouse:

Nobody Pepper-Sprayed The Dade County Rent-a-Mob

'Member that one? Where this mob of people, a lot of 'em from D.C. it turned out, stopped the vote recount in Florida's 2000 Presidential election. The count stopped as I recall, and that cranked up the amps on the "we have no President" fear being shoveled by nearly all the ordinary media of the era. And that fear brought in the cavalry, in the form of the Supreme Court.

I might also wonder just where all the batons and canisters were when rallies sporting weapon-carrying citizens were blossoming during the big panic over the death-paneled government health care thing.

Well, Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.

Where We Stand

2011-11-22T07:02:00.001-05:00

I've gotten into this sort of argument with a poster called (shorthand) Thunder, who makes many excellent remarks in comments sections at several blogs I read daily. The argument circles around a question of perception, which might be phrased as a question: do we really live in a democracy? Yesterday he cited Glenn Greenwald's piece in Salon, which documents the fact (documented in zillions of ways and places, of course) that the Democratic Party is very seriously compromised by money and the monied, creating a situation in which there actually is in far too many instances no one at all to vote for, if you think the answer to Occupy's question is just "trow de bums out."

So to Mr. Thunder (if he ever drops by)--I sure do definitely get your point, my man, I see the same problem you do, and it tempts me daily to just walk away from political solutions entirely. Indeed--been there. I think my generation mostly already did that, in fact. That's the politics of "turn on, tune in, drop out." And of course it's also the politics of finding some sort of direct action answer to the problem of voicelessness. But what can a poor boy do, 'cept to sing in a rock and roll band, cause you see there's just no doubt there's just no place for a street fightin' man.

We're all watching the reaction to powerlessness welling up in the form of the Occupy Movement. None of us know what long term effects will eventually ensue. I'm thinking (as is Thunder) that there are going to be some good consequences.
It's possible that some of the gross brutalities being committed by police in conflict with the Occupiers are going to generate a backlash. Pepper spray dude is going to maybe get fired. Whether Wall Street (or the military-industrial complex if you prefer) is going to get "smashed", well that's another story.

Go watch Harlan County, USA again, it's been a month or two. It takes a striker getting his brains literally blown out to generate a solution to the impasse. We get to see the brains on the pavement, literally. This most profound documentary is the blueprint for the building we keep building, over and over again. Ordinary citizens--gram-mas--will need to start stashing pistols in their bras, and brandishing them now and then. But it's the grandma who gets martyred, which then causes just enough remorse to generate a brief moment of togetherness, where a few things get fixed, somewhat.

How do you keep the circle from just being re-squared is my question? It's clear that, for one historical example, JFK's assassination engendered enough spirit of compromise to get some basic Civil Rights laws passed in the years immediately following his death. But the same years that gave birth to those laws also gave birth to the GOP "Southern Strategy." Which is the same story we already saw a century earlier, when the utter carnage of the American Civil War led to a few relatively brief changes in our culture, but then segregation was imposed--and let us face it--segregation was an act of democracy, at least with a small "d," albeit laced with terrorism and denial.

The principle I have come back to, again and again, when I tire of looking into this abyss, is just good old Robert Creeley's: "drive, he said, fr christs sake, look out where yr going." I find that a workable solution. Perhaps it's just my fundamental psychology. Camus might go shoot some random pedestrian in existential exasperation. The Berrigans might offer you a communion wafer. Drive he said ends up meaning a lot of things, including "write a song," "learn a new tune," or just "play the hell outa the ones you know," or "get up there and fix the roof."

I suggested the other day that some of the Occupy momentum might be successfully applied to specifics--such as kicking Scott Walker, that odious toad--out of office. Mr Thunder responds that such an idea risks co-opting the Movement to the smaller ends of the already corrupted Democratic Party. Maybe it does. The final scenes of Harlan County, USA, are instructive. In the end, after the blood is hosed away, small things have improved, somewhat.

At the same time, Southern Strategies keep being reformulated. In the face of good will, the Right creates a Think Tank and a new Pundit Line for the Xmas Season. And Mr. Obama keeps Gitmo open, and Pvt. Bradley Manning in the slammer. Because Tasers don't kill as much as .38 Specials, they are employed more frequently, and become a comedy prop on ESPN.

Billie Holiday wrote "Strange Fruit" in the early '40s. Michelle Obama may have said she wasn't proud of America till they elected her husband. For that NASCAR fans booed her last Sunday, as she stood with an Iraq War vet and his wife and children to say "start your engines."

Update: I'm delighted to read (via Doghouse) that the police chief at UC-Davis has resigned. One hopes that political pressure will be maintained--that this isn't just a matter of tossing one tasty bit to the wolves in the hopes that nothing at all about the current method of "crowd control" in the US will be seriously changed. This would surely be a "win" for the Occupy. Of course it's not exactly what they are objecting to, but rather a tertiary symptom. Still, have to start somewhere.

It's Just a Shot Away

2011-11-19T20:31:00.001-05:00

(photo via Digby, probably more or less viral at this point)

Yesterday someone being interviewed by NPR at an Occupy site said something along the lines of, "well, either the system is going to change, or we're going to smash them." That's a brave statement, coming from what sounded like a nice young woman of 20-something. Now what? Are we rushing towards Kent State? Four Dead in Ohio. It made a hell of a hook for Neil Young.

It might be argued that Nixon's over-reach at the Watergate is why Vietnam finally ended, and not with a bang but with more or less a whimper. And the military-industrial complex did not end with Vietnam, but went to school. And after a time we got Reagan, and Iran/Contra, and a country uninterested in more congressional inquiries into Presidential illegalities.

One hopes the righteous indignation fueling OWS finds some clear focus. There's no doubt the state efforts in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere are related to the spirit of OWS. But I fear that street battles with police will galvanize no one but a hard Right that already fantasizes new Kent States and worse. People trying to drive home from work, and thwarted in their effort by masses of pedestrians with vague objections to overpaid speculators and bankers will most likely just pound their steering wheels and honk their horns till the jam is cleared. People trying to get home from work are, mostly, in the 99%. The bankers can, if necessary, rent a chopper.

I hope for the best. It seems to me that if there are to be changes for the better, they must come through a revitalization of good government--a government that can push back against this same 1%. The problem is, money is power. It's not a new problem, and the government we built to mitigate money has been systematically destroyed over the past forty or fifty years. There are countless studies of this process, if you care to find them. Our only real choice remains the simple bipolar one our politics gives us--D/R. We need a lot more good Ds. It's that simple. The statistic of the week is an historical one--in the aftermath of the Kent State massacre, most Americans sympathized with the Ohio National Guard.

While the exercise of homespun democracy in the Occupy camps seems to cause joy and wonderment to those who experience it, the fact is that the Occupy Movement needs seasoned leadership and focus. There was a moment in the immediate aftermath of Woodstock when some imagined a new world had been invented. It wasn't that long before Altamont revised that view. I'd recommend a nice Saturday night double feature, before you head out to the barracades: Woodstock, then Gimme Shelter.

In the fall of '69 I headed out to San Francisco. I'd heard about all the fun, the new world awaiting. It was fun, when I got there. At the movies, joints would simply come down the aisles. Same with catching a ride from San Francisco over to Oakland. Everybody was stoned. At the corner of Height and Ashbury, bikers would lounge on their Harleys whispering "acid, speed, pot." People drummed in the park for hours on end. After a winter of poverty, I got on a Trailways and headed back to North Carolina realities. I applied for a job in the Durham County social services system, and was told not to wear "curious shoes" to my next interview. I was also told that I was "overqualified." Kent State was still in the future, and the Vietnam war had 5 years to run. I started playing fiddle in the Fuzzy Mountain String Band, and edited books at Duke University Press for a living. My draft number was 310 as I recall.

Smashing the system, that's the ticket. Thing is, people want order. If you don't take that fact into account, you may run into it on a dark night, unexpected.

Update: The plain fact that we humans can manage to hold contradictory "positions" at the same instance is well illustrated by the Occupy situation, and by the following post:

http://firedoglake.com/2011/11/21/the-first-amendment-is-only-for-those-places-that-dont-have-it/

If voters would just take the small step of noticing the gross inconsistencies which emanate daily from the Right, they could then reach out for opportunities to improve government which come their way now and then in the form of honest, capable candidates and even now and then folks hoping for re-election. Without the endless appeals to cliche, prejudice, illusory class snobbery and down right panic, the Republicans have absolutely nothing to run on in their quest to destroy government. Mr. Romney is their "best" candidate; he could have been drawn by Tom Tomorrow.

In the Pit

2011-11-16T09:02:00.004-05:00

photo (c) 2003 Bill Hicks

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2011/11/15/pliers-and-hot-pokers-and-cat-o-nine-tails-that-sting-these-are-a-few-of-my-favorite-things/

In the GOP, the back benchers (so to speak) still toil on, defending the pretty much indefensible. Tbogg has very little trouble illustrating the problem with the torture defense. But that there is a "torture defense," that illustrates a larger problem, the GOP problem.

There are of course quite a number of illustrations of this larger problem. August bodies such as the New York Times are now writing pieces musing on the almost mysterious fact that the GOP seems unable to field any candidate for President this cycle that can be taken seriously. This is a worrisome fact, because it implies that our system is seriously broken in some kind of structural way. Consider, for example, that it is quite possible that instead of Obama as a re-electable and now reasonably seasoned candidate for the job, there were some candidate who was as patently unqualified as, say, Herman Cain. It's certainly a theoretical possibility isn't it? So what, then? If the electorate is stuck with two dangerously incompetent candidates as their final choice, how is the magic of democracy to save us, in a world where the President can order the deployment of nuclear weapons, submarines, aircraft carriers, and the most powerful military organization ever devised. If the GOP can become this broken, what if Democratic strategists decide to undertake the same strategy?

The corruption of the Republican Party has been a long time coming, of course. For some reason, strategists in that party have chosen, at nearly every turn, to take the dark path of fear and confusion, and this after their last great President, Dwight Eisenhower, warned the nation of the powers and dangers of the military-industrial complex. Joe McCarthy, in the '50s, provided a counter-point to Eisenhower's optimism, stirring the pot of paranoia with fears of a domestic "red menace" beyond all rationality. In the '60s the GOP chose the "Southern Strategy," raking in racist voters who were leaving the Democratic Party because the Democrats had finally and belatedly gotten on the right side of the terrible "race issue" which blights our history in its entirety, from 1776 onwards. In the '70s, after the Supreme Court ruled that women had a constitutional right to medical care which could include abortion, the GOP once again encouraged a "right to life" movement which has on occasion used even deadly terrorist tactics to achieve its ends--the denial of equal medical care for women. Then there's the scapegoating of homosexuals, the endless absurdity of resistance to the very simple idea that people of the same sex can marry, draconian immigration measures (see, e.g., Arizona, Alabama, et al.) which can break up families wholesale, deny even water service to undocumented people. The list goes on I'm sure, but is tiring. I haven't even mentioned the whole tangle of Second Amendment positions which the GOP stands on, or the current attack on historically established labor rights, or the various efforts by Republican-governed states to roll-back voting rights--an effort which may in the end give us a President Romney or Cain via voter suppression alone.

One can generalize for the sake of space. The GOP fear-mongers at every turn. It is supported in this general effort by a body of highly capable paid salesmen--the right-wing commentators, such as Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Bortz, etc.--not to mention a whole "news" network, Fox, as well as much of the more "mainstream" media including even NPR, which now cringes in fear of being called "liberal" and in response makes every absurd effort, day in and day out, to "balance" every issue in their reportage. Next weekend NASCAR holds its final race of the season, and a Championship is at stake. Mrs. Obama and Mrs. Biden are attending officially. You should read the bilious consternation voiced by some of NASCAR's worst fans on their bulletin boards. There is even a frequently expressed fear that somehow the "gubment" is going to make NASCAR switch to electric cars. "He'll take away our guns," anyone? This is a symptomatic result of the fact that one whole national political party has, since the 1950s, picked the dark side of every political issue, including some that otherwise wouldn't even exist. If anybody gets their news from RightRadio, it's the NASCAR fan (or at least the bigoted segment of the cohort; some of my best friends are NASCAR fans I have to say).

The overarching GOP strategy has its short term successes. In the long run, it is disastrous for America and may well in the final analysis bring our democracy to an end. It yields in 2011 a list of potential Presidential candidates who are all--every one--deeply lacking in Presidential ability, although one or two might manage to be spokesmen for hidden sources of power. This strategy yields a contradictory governing philosophy which is against all taxation--which is the only method by which our government can do what we want it to do. And of course this anti-tax "plank" is part of the reason all the Republican candidates teeter on the abyss, with Romney, who used to be more attached to realities such as the basic concept of "contradiction", teetering the most obviously, changing his positions like a weather-vane in a hurricane.

Meanwhile, although Mr. Obama is capable enough, on many issues it's not as though he's got the only view. Many of the Bush Administration's erosion of fundamental constitutional rights continue. Guantanamo still exists. New York City can terminate press freedom for the evening while it rounds up, arrests, and expels the Occupy group. Pretty quiet on that one, Mr. O? Perhaps because New York's police efforts are assisted by the Federal Government:
http://www.examiner.com/top-news-in-minneapolis/were-occupy-crackdowns-aided-by-federal-law-enforcement-agencies#ixzz1dp02mDDE

Under Obama's tenure, the military-industrial complex continues to thrive, as does Wall Street. Aside from the inchoate Occupy event, the presidential campaign is not being run on these real issues--issues which might ought to be actually at issue. Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the White House agree, pretty much, that the long-term commitment of the US Government to our senior citizens, embodied in Social Security and Medicare, cannot be sustained as promised. That's a pretty remarkable fact, isn't it. One might even imagine it were an issue free for the taking, if the "out" political party hadn't already decided that it's more effective to red-bait, race-bait, queer-bait, gender-bait, and fear monger. And of course toady to big money--back in the mid-80s it was the Reagan Administration which presided over the income cap on social security taxes which both turns social security into a welfare program, and starves it of the funds required to make it at least a somewhat adequate pension program for Americans who manage to live to an age which they can no longer work.

In such circumstances, and given that there is only, in the end, a choice between the D and the R, people not consumed by fear must end up voting for Obama. Unless, of course, when they get to the polls they are turned away because they didn't know they had to have some special picture ID that their legislature has just edicted.

Update: with regard to the collaboration of Federal officials with various city officials, re expelling the Occupy, from Juan Cole today:

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan let slip in an interview with the BBC that she had been on a conference call with the mayors of 18 cities about how to deal with the Occupy Wall Street movement. That is, municipal authorities appear to have been conspiring to deprive Americans of their first amendment rights to freedom of assembly and freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances.

Likewise, A Homeland Security official let it slip in a phone interview that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had been strategizing with cities on how to shut down OWS protests. The FBI is said to have advised using zoning ordinances and curfew regulations, and to stage the crackdown with massive police force at a time when the press was not around to cover the crackdown.

Wonkette suggests that the PATRIOT Act is implicated here, but I’m not sure how that works. Actually the techniques discussed are standard for US police forces in dealing with peaceful protests (the only routine technique missing is that of putting saboteurs among the protesters who cause destruction and create an image of them as violent.

What these two reports show is a high-level conspiracy to deprive Americans of their constitutional right to protest peacefully.

When will we see Occupy Wall Street protesters hooded, dressed in orange jump suits, and sent to Guantanamo for military trials? When you let the government act without regard for the rule of law toward foreigners suspected of terrorism, you open yourself to be treated the same way if the rich decide to sic their police on you (it is mostly their police). This is why a rule of law has to be maintained. Anything less ratchets toward tyranny.

(There are links at his site.)

You May Find Yourself

2011-11-15T07:12:00.000-05:00

As usual, Doghouse nails the problem:

Kneel and pray all you want (hypocrites!). You think a lack of public sanctimony is what ailed Penn State? Jerry Sandusky was all about good works. Maybe one more minute of silence, on top of a decade or more of silence, wasn't exactly the best approach.

On the Right, apparently the "answer" to the problem posed by a ten year cover-up of an extremely nasty sex scandal involving multiple child molestations and one of the top BCS football programs in the country, plus the winningest coach of all time and a major university, is to just blame the "liberals" and the nanny state. Citations to this absurdity abound--you can just surf and find them. Even straight forward sports writers are cringing at the idea of possibly imposing major immediate sanctions on Penn State. Over at CNN the sports guy and the news guy got into an argument over whether the Penn State problem was even NCAA sanctionable, in principle.

There's just too much money at stake. Public prayer will have to suffice.

And same, apparently, goes for the suppression of First Amendment rights which New York City just imposed, in the early morning. There was no official media coverage either. Air space above the park was closed! No cams allowed. Coverage no doubt exists on YouTube. For the moment. Until Congress gets around to dealing with the money problem.

Hopefully New York's greatest band will throw a reunion concert, featuring their most remarkable song. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was.

It's Really Always in the Weeds

2011-11-12T09:05:00.000-05:00

(c) MGM

http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/11/11/wyden-will-place-hold-on-internet-censorship-legislation/

Read the article and the comments. Here's a parallel: back in the day, the Beatles just turned the music establishment upside down. After a time, things were back in their orderly places, with business executives in charge. I remember driving down East Franklin Street in Chapel Hill and hearing "Hey Jude" for the first time, on an ordinary radio station no less. My thought was, they just keep doing this, they are really amazing. It felt as solid as the thought that of course property values will keep rising, because of course "they aren't making any more land."

Of course people will "always" be able to say what they want on the internet.

Of course corn will always grow in Iowa.

Today I'm playing a dance down in Greenville, NC. Onward and upward with the arts, I say. Credit to Mr. Shawn of course!

Underlying Concepts

2011-11-11T06:57:00.000-05:00

(http://www.wayfaring.info/2009/07/13/base-jumping-amazing-dont-you-think/)

Over at Jack Balkin's blog I ran across the following post:

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/11/constitutional-ideology-ayn-rand.html

It's remarkable that this take down of a "philosophy" which seems to dominate the entire Republican Party is accomplished not by some liberal, but by Whittaker Chambers, and in National Review no less. Says the reviewer of Chambers' piece:

While he had no love for the (socialistic/bureaucratic) governing elite, Chambers pointed out that it did little good to simply “plump for” a would-be “industrial-financial-engineering caste” to take their place. These people, fed on Randian fairly tales about “an aristocracy of talents,” would soon imagine themselves to be “living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto [themselves].”

As the poster points out earlier, Rep. Paul Ryan requires his staff to read Rand. It is no wonder that the fundamental social contract forged by 200 years of American History is being destroyed by the current edition of the Republican Party. What the Republicans propose to replace democracy with is simply pure power, and we all know that money IS power. Mr. Perry cannot even remember which agency he wants to destroy. Mr. Cain's lawyers threaten anyone who dares to come forward. Mr. Romney tells us over and over that corporations are people. Representative Walsh wants to destroy any government job he can. So goes the week.

And the tragic end to Mr. Paterno's career is a lesson in the failure of near-absolute power, the riot by Penn State students a symptom of how thin the eggshells we stand on really are. The Randians want us to stand on thin air.

Pro-Life

2011-11-05T07:08:00.002-04:00

(photo (c) Marion Post Wolcott, 1941)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/02/deportation-immigrant-children-foster-care_n_1072553.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

This phenomenon was predicted, over and over again, by people who could see the obvious--that draconian deportation policies founder on the rocks of the plain fact that many undocumented residents are parents of American citizens who cannot legally be deported.

As with many right wing political policies, logic bears little leverage on action (or as in climate change, inaction). And so we find the same people who are trying to pass a life-begins-at-conception amendment in Mississippi arguing for deportation (and electric fences). And probably those same people are fine with drone strikes in far away villages, and the collateral damage ensuing.

Mr. Cain is absolutely the candidate for these folks. Like them, he is uninterested in logic and implication. Mr. Cain is the Right Wing Talk Show Host candidate, and better at the "candidate job" than the last guy who tried it, Alan Keyes. He appeals to "jes folks." He's the guy on the nail keg, down at the Texaco, with a Pepsi bottle full of floating peanuts, on a hot August morning. He's got in all the shingling he's gonna do for the day, started at 5 when it was cool. He's on the way, slowly, to the river, with a pole and a can of worms. Along his route he's gonna visit some with whomever stops to fill up the tank, about whatever he feels like talking about.

"You know ma," the farmer says driving away from the pumps. "I'da vote for that guy if he was running. The pointyheads are just ruining the country. You'd a thought when we fried those two jew scientists for stealing the A-bomb, things would a changed."

9-9-9 is the same way. Polls now show that Iowans believe by a significant margin that Cain's tax plan is going to save them some serious tax dollars. In fact, math shows that for a person with an income below $100,000 it will actually cost them thousands a year more in taxes. But an appeal to math is really an appeal to "elitist thinking." It's the pointy heads again. Them jew scientists were traitors, but they were good at math.

This is where the mystery of poll results meets the political designs of oligarchs who aim to win the Presidency. In Herman Cain they might have got 'em a winner. After a week of "scandal," he's up in the polls, and the voters believe it's all a plot by the Liberal Press.

(I thought this post up entirely independently of Mr. R. Pundit (see his post of 11/1/11), who says it better:
The Rude Pundit )

Hannity, Twisting in the Wind

2011-11-04T07:18:00.000-04:00

(tucsonweekly.com)

I'll have more to say, perhaps, on the wonderful and distracting Cain "story," which is now the unfolding rather than the initial Politico piece. For the moment, it being time for work, I'll just rejoice that Mr. Cain's complete arrogance (for such it is) is driving him to leave even his most passionate supporters, such as the odious Mr. Hannity, entirely hanging out. This also goes for his buds at National Review Online, not to mention the Colters of the Right, who are actually now using terminology (thanks to Jon Stewart for this info) like "our blacks" and "their blacks." Yesterday's Hannity radio extravaganza featured a long interview with Cain, who continued to muddle and dissemble, with nary a serious question from Hannity, until apparently the both of them just ran out of air. Then Mr. Rove came on to discuss, and I thought he was some leftist, since his fairly sensible remark hung in the air like the Hindenburg over New Jersey: "why doesn't the National Restaurant Association," Rove said, "just put out all the documentation on these cases, with the names blacked out?" Well golly willikers. What an idea.

Anyways, for the moment Mr. Hannity has been utterly used by Mr. Cain, his credibility sopped up like turkey gravy on white bread. Last night much was made of Mr. Cain's blanket assertion, back in March, that he was pure as the driven snow, that should anyone suggest anything scandalous about him, that suggestion would be, per se, a lie, made up. Apparently Mr. Cain was certain that those agreements of confidentiality were as tight as Fort Knox, and that he could simply brazen things out. That is an expression of arrogance in the extreme. He continues on the path, knocking the pins asunder as he finds them. And of course in the end of this he may find even his book sales have fallen off to remainder bin levels, and his jaunty jive hat knocked to the curb by a reality that is immune to arrogance, if slow to rebound from the initial impact.

Nein, nein, nein, Herr Cain. Tbogg has it right:

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2011/11/03/the-princesses-and-the-penis/

What sustains Mr. Cain at the moment is only the almost erotic delight in victimhood which the Teaparty Right swims in, oblivious. I don't think that will sustain a presidential campaign.

That Dream Press

2011-11-02T09:06:00.000-04:00

(from http://jcdverha.home.xs4all.nl/scijokes/2_10.html#subindex)

http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/10/28/the-scandal-is-that-jonathan-alter-doesnt-see-the-scandal/

This excellent piece by Marcy Wheeler exposes the problem with our mainstream media even better than, say, a random half-hour with Shepard Smith. Or perhaps it exposes the depth of the problem I keep making efforts to address herein. That is, one can mitigate the pernicious brain-cell killing effects of Fox News, or ABC News, with counter-doses of MSNBC. But MSNBC has its own issues, which are more subtle but still there. (And this is NOT an invocation of the horrible "balance" mistake yet again--a catch-all sewer which has sucked most of the thinking that used to occur in reportage right down the drain and into the Delta.) Jonathan Alter, for example, is frequently an analyst-guest on various MSNBC shows, and he is a thoughtful analyst and has his insights. But, as Marcy shows in the link, he also has blinders on.

Look at it this way: we're all seeing this phenomenon, the Occupy Movement, as an ongoing news story. But understanding it, that's the hard part. One proffered explanation is to be found on the Fox side of things--it amounts to a prolonged sneer, a Major Hoople snap of the evening newspaper, a hope that Oakland's rubber bullets are but a beginning, perhaps even a nostalgia for those glorious moments when fearful boys in the National Guard started shooting students at Kent State.
Hannity's big lead yesterday was, "Alleged Rape at Occupy Wall Street." That's the Right--the same Right that finds alleged racism in the simple reportage of facts.

But as Ms Wheeler rightly points out, the Obama Administration is also far too cozy with the same One-Percenters that are the focus of the Occupy Movement. Indeed, what the Occupy Movement is attempting, more than anything else, is an end run around the blanket media perception of power and wealth in the United States--a perception which in many ways forms the very field upon which the so-called "left/right" dichotomy plays out. Want an example? Ok. One of the biggest current sponsors of the various MSNBC shows running during prime time is the Natural Gas Industry, which is featuring a series of extremely well-crafted advertisements reassuring all of us that our nation's water supply will not be endangered by the fracking process used to release deep natural gas reservoirs. This claimed fact--that fracking is entirely safe--is (as far as I know) never challenged on MSNBC, not even by Rachel Maddow, who runs frequent stories on other energy industry pollutings. (Last night, between kindly ads about the safety of fracking, she showed pictures of a collapsed coal-ash slurry flood which poured into Lake Michigan.)

Or to put it another way, I have never heard Ms Wheeler's pointed conclusion stated on any MSNBC analysis of the upcoming Presidential contest. I'll paste it here for you:

There are people occupying squares all around this country to protest, largely, bankster corruption. The bankster corruption Obama has enabled. The corruption that caused the lousy economy.

And yet, because Alter doesn’t get that Obama’s coddling of the banksters exacerbated the lousy economy, he doesn’t see that that scandal–Obama catering to his donors the banksters while the biological people of this country suffered as a result–might be the only thing that gives the parade of nutcases auditioning to run against Obama an opening against him.

This is not an arcane bit of analysis. This is where we are at in the country, and this is the framework for our next election of a President.

It is remarkable that to find this analysis I had to dig deep into the blogosphere, to a place a relative handful of people even know about. This is the failure of the media system without which we cannot possibly have informed choice, not to mention a particularly pointed example of how both our national political parties are co-oped by monied interests--by the One Percent, so to speak.

One would almost think a kind of Heisenberg Principle is at work, with the Democratic Process being the moving parts of the atom, and money being the light electrons which affect things we're trying to "look" at. It didn't used to be this way.

Whoo Hooo, Sex Scandal

2011-11-01T07:13:00.000-04:00

(photo Jack Delano, 1941, "Backstage at the Rutland State Fair")

Since I was away from the news and the computer for a few days due to the race, I watched a good deal of MSNBC last night--Matthews, Schultz, Maddow, O'Donnell. The primary focus was the Cain sex story, as it might be described. It's a complex "thing," this story. First, there's the Politico story itself, an assertion that Cain has settled one or possibly two sexual harassment accusations out of court, for cash. Second, there's the story of Cain's changing reactions to this assertion of fact, upon being confronted with it. Third, there's the hard right punditry's knee jerk reaction that it's an attack on a black conservative by the liberal press, a kind of accusation of racism. Fourth, there's the mystery of where Politico got its tips, which led to the story.

And there's the fifth aspect or facet of this story. That as is typical with such stories, it obliterated at least for a time the much more significant story that should be required work for the whole realistic American press--that right wing billionaires are successfully distorting our political process to their own ends, and that one of their smaller efforts in this regard is actually the candidacy of Mr. Herman Cain. For amongst the obliterated features of yesterday's news was the story that Mr. Cain received quite a bit of illegally contributed loot in his Presidential bid from groups directly associated with the Koch Brothers.

With regard to the sex story, seems to me that Mr. Cain's inept reaction to it is yet another proof that he has an extremely minimal campaign team, i.e., his candidacy is not serious, but is more like Gingrich's and the collapsed Palin phenomenon--an effort in self-promotion, a "book tour" so to speak. Had Mr. Cain a body of staffers, likely he would not have been personally surprised by the story, which led to his ever changing reactions to it (a feature of himself which isn't new to this story either, see., e.g., how his 9-9-9 plan is being revised on the fly as he runs into successive questions which reveal problems with it in its simple form--problems which actually go to prove the obvious, that a simple "flat" tax is grossly unfair and would be unpopular with almost everyone). Mr. Cain's lack of a body of staffers is in turn proof that his campaign isn't serious, which is in turn proof that the Republican Party finds itself unable to sift out the cranks from the serious candidates--a disastrous problem for an allegedly major party. And, one might also surmise from Mr. Cain's inability to settle on a truthful answer to the factual question he confronts--namely, did you in fact settle sexual harassment suits out of court for cash--suggests his inability to deal with the most important aspect of the job of President--being able to make firm decisions on important matters in real time. (But of course this inability is in a sense moot in Cain's case, since he isn't "really" running. Cain, like Gingrich, like Bachmann, like Santorum, is (as we say at Martinsville) just another Nemachek.

For a disinterested observer, which only means a person who understands that in the end they have but one vote, and that one vote is tho important, not a big fraction when it comes to Presidents, the question is more and more, how broke can this American system really get, before it actually breaks down. In that regard, my guess would be, on the question of who whispered in Politco's ear, Carl Rove. Certainly Democrats have no interest in derailing Mr. Cain, who derails himself with nearly every public appearance and appeals primarily to the people who ache to be derailed and distracted. Like Palin, Cain would be a candidate of choice for Democrats. Moreover, Politico is not a particularly liberal part of the press.

More generally, it seems to me that the de facto oligarchy is clearly of two minds about the direction the Kochs are trying to steer the country in. Last week the Dow went above 12 thousand. Mr. Buffet's editorial flutters on invisible wires in the air above the whole Congressional Republican delegation, a Mission Accomplished reproach to their patently obvious strategy of derailing any recovery in the hope that they will thereby derail Mr. Obama. Old money, such as the Koch family, brings with it a certain myopic perspective not shared generally by successful players, at least not in toto. While the Kochs imagine a stooge who distracts while the real game is played behind the scenes, the Buffets may consider a President of some capability to be of real value, as long as they still have his ear. It's possible that in the real world, yet another war, such as one with Iran or Pakistan, seems as big a mistake to the oligarchs as it does to everyone else living outside the blinders of "true belief," e.g., al qaeda or Palintot.

Nontheless, wouldn't it be nice if the public weren't distracted so often by the folks who are supposed to be windows to the world. It would help if institutions who are supposedly committed to maintaining those windows didn't collapse in the slightest breeze.

I'll repost the link for that sad remark here:
http://gawker.com/5854118/how-occupy-wall-street-cost-me-my-job

I have to wonder how NPR is "covering" the big Cain Sex Scandal.

Et tu, NPR

2011-10-31T18:51:00.001-04:00

(photo: irldefender.wordpress.com)

http://gawker.com/5854118/how-occupy-wall-street-cost-me-my-job

Really, that's it. No more contributions. Sorry. You cannot give the Right Wing your very balls and still be NPR. It's a bummer.

In other news, Martinsville Fall 2011 edition was excellent, not quite as cold as the March '09 event plus we wore better layers and some good winter socks. Kyle had a good race but was entangled in a wreck not of his doing late. Jimmy Johnson, Libby's fave, could well have won. And in the end, it was the grizzled old warhorse, Tommy O's own Tony Stewart, who finds himself only eight points back of a guy who looks a little too much like Eddie Haskel. I'm hanging a number 14 up on a tree till it's over later this month. Tony deserves another Championship.

He Thanks I'm Stoopid

2011-10-26T08:12:00.001-04:00

(from http://www.wendyswizardofoz.com/frank.htm)

It's not too hard to remember back when I thought each election was a kind of clean slate, with the various candidates for each office all being at least genuine, earnest citizens who, at least in their own minds and perspectives, really believed that whatever they were offering as a way forward was indeed the best way for all of us. There was, that is to say, a bond of shared citizenship. And the differences were a matter of reflection--because the world was big and complex and of course one guy or gal could see things different from another. And sometime or other way back then I ran into a cynic at a party (I think it was back when people drank martinis--I have a vivid picture of this guy with a martini in his hand, the olive bouncing around down at the bottom as he gestured, the clear liquid sliding around the edge of the glass like oil--I probably had a beer in my hand). This guy was older than me by about a generation, and had been in Korea, and had come back to the States to start a little newspaper. He rode an old BMW, and had a '55 Porsche in his yard that hadn't run in six years. This was just before Vietnam really got going, but after Kennedy had been shot.

So, he says to me, you have to understand that the Republicans do not care about anybody but the very rich. That's who they are working tirelessly for, 24/7. That's the only way to understand who they are, what they say and do. And... He took a drink and put his empty glass on a glass table that stood nearby... They very well know that they cannot operate on such a program openly and honestly, because no one would vote for them.

Well, I was kinda shocked at this Yankee attitude. (This guy was from New York, and I'd played poker with him once, and he'd won all the money simply by raising the ante until no one else had any courage left to play their hands.) I'd grown up a nice Methodist in Raleigh, NC. We believed in giving everyone an even-steven chance.

But then along comes the rest of my life. And now, day before yesterday, the one Republican candidate who is allegedly living in the actual real world says on the Hannity radio show (I heard this myself), "I'm troubled by the fact that this President has run our economy into the ground." That's simply a lie. That Mr. Romney says it in the reasonable tones of a guy at the Club doesn't make it less a lie. It's been only three years since Mr. Obama inherited an economy that was cratering, and we can all go look at the stats, month by month, from say mid-'08 to now, and see that everything was falling when Mr. Obama can in, and that mostly things are significantly better today.

Then Mr. Perry, the other supposedly serious candidate, comes out with this "flat tax" plan yesterday. His big selling point is that it's "easy." You can keep your lawyers and accountants and keep using the old system, or you can just send in your taxes with a post card. Take your pick. And that's an even bigger lie. It takes only seconds to figure out that the flat tax is simply a big tax break for the very rich, and a big tax increase for the rest of us. And perhaps it takes a whole minute to realize that there ain't no way a government is going to keep parallel tax systems in place for long, because it would be a huge waste of money. And it might take three whole minutes to get the picture that with such a huge revenue drop as this new flat tax plan would initiate, the Republican congress would be sure to make up the deficit by huge cuts to so-called "entitlement" programs such as social security and medicare.

In other words, Mr. Perry is simply and obviously flimflamming the people he's asking to vote for him. He's simply lying to them, offering to trade them a post card of convenience for their social security checks, and not even bothering to mention that people who are out of work, because for example they've simply aged out of the work force, ain't gonna need to be worrying about paying taxes anyways, whether it's on a post card or a regular sized piece of paper.

How can they think we're so stupid? I really don't know. I asked Libby last night, because this just boggles the mind. She said, well, they've been acting like this--brazen you might say--ever since the Tea Party showed them that they'll respond to anything. Then she mentioned a couple of things: "death panels," "Kenyan Marxist," "Sharia Law."

Yesterday listening to NPR report on Mr. Perry's Amazing Post Card, I was close to wrecking the pickup when the closing paragraph of their story asserted that, "actually," there's little difference in the Perry Post Card and our current tax system for "most" people.

Oh really. If NPR is saying it, and Perry is saying it, what are even reasonably intelligent people to think. I mean if they don't want to be bothered to just. Errrrrrrrr. THINK. I don't know. I know NPR has gotten my last nickle. That's a start. And as for Perry and Romney--I sure don't think I'll be voting for any bold-faced liar anytime soon.

World Series Starts Tonight

2011-10-19T09:10:00.001-04:00

(latimes.com)

Well lets start with this little bit of information:

http://www.juancole.com/2011/10/news-that-makes-you-go-hunh.html

Ok, back? Now the other day Libby took her dad to Duke Hospital for some consultation, and she was sitting in the waiting room there and of course there was a nice color teevee the Hospital provides to help families pass the time while they wait, and on the teevee was Fox News. There was no way to change the channel either. The same experience awaits you at the airport, and at your McDonald's or Bo Jangles, although now and then you might see CNN or the Weather Channel. According to Cole's observation (based on media analysis), Mr. Obama and the government generally is framed in a certain negative way, while the framing of private endeavor is framed in a more positive way. Same with the ongoing and currently simmering political campaign for President, 2012, where, for example, only MSNBC takes note of the rather obvious fact that the GOP is putting forward candidates who are either craven or entirely muddled, and that no GOP candidate would make a competent President unless by President you mean (as perhaps the GOP does mean), a mouthpiece for hidden power who will never take the power of the office into his own hands. That is, one simple step back from even George W. Bush's view of the Presidency--that it comes down to a simple bi-pole light switch, On/Off--"I am the Decider." That is, one would still think, viewing the possibilities of a Republican President as the "clown car" stops in your living room each week, that none of these people would actually be President if elected. Rather, they would be the spokesman (...errrr... spokesperson) for the United States, reading the country's position on various issues from a script cobbled together the previous evening by skilled analysts and advisors. This sort of President, more and more the GOP definition of the office, never has to deal with anything in "real time." (Thus, that lurid few hours when W. Bush found himself flying hither and yon whilst the country seemed under attack.)

But, meanwhile, the World Series starts tonight. And it starts on Fox Sports, which will also carry the NFL on Sunday. And as the American people live their lives, teevees murmuring mostly in the background, it is reassuring that Fox, which brings them the National Passtime's season-crowning conclusion, and the fall/winter background of professional football, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years Day, and then the start of NASCAR, Daytona 2012--well of course it's reassuring to know what Fox thinks about economic and political events and just plain old-fashioned news--such as the big blizzard/heatwave, or the psycho in Des Moines, or the plane that barely lands safely or doesn't, while the spaghetti sauce simmers and the kids do their homework, and dad gets home from work if he still has a job, or cracks a beer if he doesn't.

Also, October is Five Dollar Footlong Month. So did Subway steal this from Mr. Cain, or visa-versa? Perhaps Fox will tell us next Sunday, in the voice of George Will, who loves him some baesbol.

Meanwhile, the real world does its thang. For example:

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2011/10/15/storytime-korner/

Pink Hats

2011-10-15T08:40:00.001-04:00

You will have noted that sports has decided over the past few years to take note of the fact of life that is breast cancer by wearing pink in different ways at different events. NFL players sport pink pumps some random Sunday. Basketball players wear pink sneakers or pink uniforms. Last night at the Nationwide NASCAR event in Charlotte there was a big pink logo on the infield grass, and some drivers had pink in their race car color schemes, and there was even mention of breast cancer in the prayer before the race.

Certainly it's a good thing to so mention this terrible disease, which kills and ravages far far too many people. But I did find the dissonance a bit unnerving. NASCAR, after all, is about as conservative (or "conservative" to be more accurate) as it gets. NASCAR is the sport of official Country Music, its renditions of the National Anthem mostly the music run through the Dolly Parton Method, its religion as Southern Baptist as you can get, its audience and participants as white as a Republican Convention. Every event features more military than even the NFL--with flyovers that in aggregate would rival a May Day Parade in Kremlin Square.

So then. How come somebody or other didn't at least note that this week in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the Republicans passed a bill which makes emergency health care for women an optional requirement of American hospitals, a sort of Libertarianism of gender rights which flies in the face of the plain fact (which would in other contexts be an Ace of Spades trump) that women have the Constitutional Right to an abortion. I mean, given all that pink, couldn't Mrs. Harvick have had a word to say about this remarkable Congressional travesty? Or what about Kyle Busch, who has built his whole public persona on being outspoken? I noticed that he wasn't even interviewed after the race last night (and he finished 2nd)--I'd like to hope that he was going to dip his toe in these waters, and that that was cause to shut him up. But I doubt it.

Republican millionaires pretty much run NASCAR, as they do Nashville, as they do the Republican Party and a significant part of the Democratic Party as well. In NASCAR they do not like dissent, but they can deal ok with dissonance. This is quite in keeping with the nature of the NASCAR fan. And so the little ladies can be acknowledged for their courage in the face of breast cancer (and the medical industry can keep a woman's public visage palatable even in the face of a double mastectomy, dissonance held safely at bay), and ain't nobody going to say one single word about that pretty in pink young lady bleeding to death as she is Federally required to drive from one Emergency Room to the next in the hope of finding just one, somewhere, somehow, willing to perform a life-saving abortion before she dies in the backseat of the cab.

Gentlemen, start your engines. If you want to look a little deeper into the unexamined, you could read this a few times:

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2011/10/14/new-study-shows-makeup-is-not-optional/

What Civil Rights Voting Act?

2011-10-08T08:54:00.000-04:00

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/suffer-little-children.html

The digby piece is reportage. It's what's happening in Alabama right now. There's also a fine New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer just out on my state's own Art Pope, a multimillionaire who is funding the state-by-state counter revolution which is likely to end in a Republican President in 2013. As someone on the teevee asked the other night, "Do you think Mr. Obama is going to win North Carolina or Virginia this time around?" It might have been the same show, but on Chris Matthews they were speculating on whether Mr. Obama might just, like Lyndon Johnson, resign, or choose not to run.

Money is power, always has been. The Citizens United Supreme Court ruling has unleashed unlimited monetary power on a voting public which in the main doesn't have the time or interest to really pay attention, but instead allows itself to be whipsawed by 30-second sound bites which are primarily lies and distortions. Some people with lots of money believe that poor people shouldn't even be allowed to vote, since they will only vote for people who will take money away from the people who "earned" it. (You think that proposition is absurd--well I do too, but it is being argued by highly skilled professional rhetoricians on our so-called public airways every single day.)

At any rate, one would hope that people who spend so much of their time obsessing about the civil rights of zygotes will spare a few seconds to consider what's happening to the children of Hispanics in Alabama, even if Mr. Sessoms just brushes all that aside as "collateral damage." A lot of those children are American citizens, after all. And the ones that are not are still just CHILDREN.

(I hope Digby will forgive me using the photo from her piece, in the interest of furthering her message.)

In the Streets

2011-10-06T06:51:00.001-04:00

(from dealbreaker.com)

I'm watching the "Occupy..." Movement grow from NYC to many cities around the US. As a witness to both the Civil Rights struggles and the efforts to stop Vietnam, there are somewhat predictable arcs. The Right has begun it's public counterattack via Limbaugh. Surely in one city or another there will be efforts to smear the movement with acts which are actually carried out by persons aiming to defend the status quo at any cost. (See, e.g., the first ten minutes of Battle of Algiers.) One thing that concerns me, just watching the media coverage of Wall Street, is the fact that signage expresses outrage at just about everything under the sun. There is a muddled, 'whadaya got' quality to that impression which will disturb the already fearful. Massaged by the Limbaughs they get all their "facts" from, the fearful will provide a base for all sorts of draconian counter actions, should there be any sort of provocation. It won't take much either.

Given those obvious concerns, then, here's a good link to beginning to understand what's happening:

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/10/recommended-reading-on-occupywallstreet.html

Be sure to read the post as well--the author is thoughtful, and he's been to the protests and talked to a number protesters. I have heard over the past two years quite a few people wondering why there isn't more street action viz our terrible economy, and in particular about the loss of jobs in the United States. Well... this is the street action, and the center of the issue. As long as the Right Wing Pundits aren't allowed to reframe this (and they'll try mightily), there are very large majorities in the US who are surely on board. Who knows--we might actually witness something positive coming out of this. For starters, it's a fact (supported by many polls) that a majority of Americans of all political affiliations support higher taxes on the very rich. That's very heartening, because it only makes sense. Governance which makes no sense--what we're witnessing in Congress, and particularly the House--cannot stand forever. The question is, what comes after the country realizes where the radical House is trying to take us.

Hank Jr. on Fox

2011-10-04T07:05:00.004-04:00

(Hank Williams, Jr.)

http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/obama-is-hitler-hank-williams

This is pretty funny in many ways. Of course it's funny at one level that Fox News actually got upset because Hank Williams, Jr. trashed Mr. Obama. Must be the nuance meter was set on 7 and Hank ran it up to 13 or something. It's not like Fox News doesn't insinuate that Obama is Hitler, Stalin, Jomo Kenyata, et al., every day. It's not like Fox News didn't carry the Glenn Beck show until fairly recently. Where's Claude Rains when we need him.

On the other hand, Mr. Amato's piece in crooksandliars is pretty pathetic too. Who cares if Hank, Jr. was drunk? It's part of his public persona. The shades? He always wears shades, always. He has since he was in a bad accident which disfigured his face. And ESPN jumping on board and kicking Hank off Monday Night Football? Exactly why? "All my rowdy friends are coming over tonight." That's the Monday Night Football theme song fer christs sake. One of Junior's biggest hits, now decades old, featured a chronicling of the Williams' family traditions (that was the name of the song I think), including using drugs and alcohol to excess. And really--Hank Williams himself died in his twenties from a drug overdose while riding in the back of a Cadillac in West Virginia on the way to a New Years Day gig. At least back then Country Music was about real things--that's what Hank wrote about, over and over again. So yes, ESPN should have some principles, and yes, while Hank, Jr. always represented the Copperhead Road side of country, he hadn't come right out and screamed it, or at least not on the teevee. Maybe ESPN should have at least made a bargain of some sort: if SC removes the stars and bars from its state flag, we'll drop Junior. That'd work.

Liberals don't need to be nambypamby about country culture. It is what it is. Mr. Amato and his commenters ought to give a listen to James McMurtry's "Choctaw Bingo" some time. That's where Hank, Jr. is coming from. It doesn't have to be laced with political genius. In fact, the trouble with political genius is, it comes often packaged in Rush Limbaugh, who knows how to stay perfectly on the razor's edge of whatever line the long-term crafters of our fascist future are walking at the moment. While Amato was wringing his hands about something as predictable as Hank Williams Jr.'s political views on President Obama, Limbaugh managed to get Herman Cain to walk back his mild-mannered objection to Gov. Perry's having a hunting ranch called "Niggerhead." And if Mr. Cain can't say Fuck You to Rush Limbaugh on that topic, he's as weak a plank of "presidential timber" as John McCain was for selecting Ms Palin for Veep.

Hank III already said all that needs to be said about his uncle Hank's generation of Country Stars. "If Toby Keith's country," Hank III said, "then fuck country."
Hank III might have said that around the fire at Uncle Slayton's big birthday party in Oklahoma. At least Hank Jr. wears his gun outside of his pants, for all the honest world to feel.

Look, this is country, courtesy of McMurtry. Read 'em and weep. That's the point:

Strap them kids in
Give 'em a little bit of vodka in a cherry coke
We're going to Oklahoma to the family reunion for the first time in years
It's up at uncle Slayton's cause he's getting on in years
You know he no longer travels but he's still pretty spry
He's not much on talking and he's just too mean to die
And they'll be comin' down from Kansas
and from west Arkansas
It'll be one great big old party like you never saw
Uncle Slayton's got his Texan pride
Back in the thickets with his Asian bride
He's got a Airstream trailer and a Holstein cow
He still makes whiskey 'cause he still knows how
He plays that Choctaw bingo every Friday night
You know he had to leave Texas but he won't say why
He owns a quarter section up by Lake Eufala
Caught a great big ol' blue cat on a driftin' jug line
Sells his hardwood timber to the chipping mill
Cooks that crystal meth because the shine don't sell
He cooks that crystal meth because the shine don't sell
You know he likes his money he don't mind the smell....

You can have the saccarine part or you can have the shine, with the good bead. In country, the ladies make the men go out to the car to drink amongst themselves. When they stagger back inside, cheeks flushed and eyes flashing, the ladies don't notice a thing, but exchange glances. This is how it works in the GOP, and mostly on teevee generally. Over on Jon Stewart's show they pointed out that there are old racist names all over the map of the US of A, and they sang a fine alternative verse to America the Beautiful. That's one way to actually see both sides of the coin at the same time. It's dizzying, but it's real.

Renee Ellmers, Symptom

2011-09-28T08:49:00.001-04:00

(Rep. Renee Ellmers, R NC, photo from mofopolitics.com)

Got a letter in the mail Monday from our new Congressional Representative, Renee Ellmers, who defeated last November a long-time Democratic politician, Bob Ethridge, who before becoming our Representative was NC Secretary of Education for many years. I still don't know anything much about Ms Ellmers, except she ran on a kind of Tea Party platform. She's probably not as crazy as NC's own Virginia Fox.

Anyways, her Monday letter assures me that she will fight tirelessly for a Balanced Budget Amendment in the coming months. That is, she proposes to lock the Federal Government into a financial strait-jacket with the power of Constitutional Law. Certain percentages will be constitutionally invoked to limit government spending, such as a requirement that all budgets be pegged to the GDP. The proposal is supposed to have a "safety-valve," which is a super-majority vote to break the lock in certain special circumstances.

If you want to read about the concept of tying up the Federal Government this way, there's plenty on-line, from genuine economists of note. It is yet another example of the intellectual mess in which this nation finds itself that economists can now be labelled as either liberal or conservative, as though political doctrine has now become the very air in which all decision-making occurs. In fact, it takes little more than common sense to see that hamstringing the Federal Government in this way is simply a formula for paralysis, or for a further gelding of the Government's abilities to react to reality.

Thus the Tea Party comes to my neighborhood. It's a bit like finding a dangerous-looking mole on your arm. And indeed, the actions of the radical Republicans grouped around the "tea party" is pretty similar to a cancer, since they are one and all elected officials who are attacking the health of the very institutions to which they are members. These radicals started out, some decades back, by slowly destroying a main-stream media which was tasked in part with helping the public distinguish between real issues and pseudo clap-trap. The prime historical example: Joe McCarthy. When the Fairness Doctrine was abolished by Ronald Reagan, the emotional power of Joe McCarthy style arguments could again be unleashed upon the typical American voter--a person who has much to do besides pay close attention to politics, and a person who tends to vote on the basis of sound-bite information.

And so it has been unleashed, in the form of Fox News and the endless parade of right-wing pundits who toil non-stop (taken as a whole) on the radio, where people hear them as they drive to and from their jobs. And by 2010 we have a veritable "tea party" election, with numerous new Representatives in the Ellmers pattern--people with no particular credentials who have learned to talk the talking points. People just like the radio pundits, that is to say.

And so comes in my mailbox (which may soon be vanished, like Wittgenstein's ladder), Ms Ellmers' assurances that she will work tirelessly in my behalf for a Balanced Budget Amendment. No doubt many folks, including many seniors, will think Ms Ellmers is exactly right. It sounds so good, it must be true. Moreover, Ms Ellmers is a pretty lass, unlike the gangly, awkward Bob Ethridge, a figure only his mother could love, who had the gumption to counter a right-wing urchin's insubordinate ambush-question with a slight shove of his hand. What Ms Ellmers will not care to tell her constituents is that such an Amendment will be used to defund Medicare and Social Security. "I hate it," she'll say, "but it's just the law."

You don't think, do you, that the Balanced Budget Amendment will be used to defund ongoing military operations, or the development of new weapons allegedly aimed at making us safer still, in a hostile world? No, even Renee Ellmers couldn't sell that, could she. Ironic that the pretty nurse who informs you that yes, it's melanoma, could herself be the very political equivalent.

La Chinoise

2011-09-24T12:29:00.002-04:00

(still from La Chinoise, dr. Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

'60s Godard is refreshing in this climate of mind-blowing political cupidity. I watched La Chinoise last night. I think I saw it once, a long time back. The little tidbits that come with a DVD were good too--particularly an interview with the film's leading actress, Anne Wiazemsky, who was Mr. Godard's femme of the moment. She revealed that the film was shot in Godard and her own digs, that she was always having to get everything tidied up early in case a scene might be set in one of the rooms, that it was particularly disconcerting at the time to have to do a scene with her film lover in which a fight she and Godard had had the night before was recreated, line by line. The film also features a wonderful long sequence in which her character discusses the idea of committing a terrorist act with her actual philosophy professor as they travel through France on a train, a discussion made more poignant by the fact that the professor himself was a supporter of the Algerian revolution, and had been tried for terrorism by the French government only a few years earlier. He, by the way, counsels vehemently against her plan of killing a few people to make a point and (she hopes) ignite a revolution. Eventually she ignores his good advice.

Ah youth. Which was part of Godard's point. As a film-maker, Godard succeeds wonderfully in this movie. I hope you'll rent it. It is a portrait of idealistic, confused, youth, of people who have lived very little but read a great deal, who are young, healthy, filled with possibility. Who think that all they need to do is find a small gold key, and the world will be changed. Who know there is a secret garden hiding just behind a tall hedge.

I also tried to watch the Battle of Algiers this past week. It was too sad to watch (for me), too relentless, too true. But when the professor on the train in La Chinoise mentions the revolution which is the subject matter of Battle of Algiers, I was a bit sorry I'd given up.

Of course we live in times when things have changed. On the one hand, a tiny group of young revolutionaries somehow managed to crash airliners into tall buildings and utterly change America. I would imagine that prior to the flights were countless hours of conversations similar to those shown in La Chinoise. Moreover, could any plan be more quixotic viewed in advance than the plan al Qaeda set in motion? Could anyone have imagined that the United States would now be very close to electing a muddled former cheerleader our next President, or that one of the two major parties would hold as a tenent of membership that well-proven scientific positions are a subject for serious doubt. Or that a sitting President could be accused of "class warfare" for suggesting modest tax increases on the top one percent of earners, in a context when the other party clamors for draconian cuts in government programs supported by huge majorities of voters in the name of deficit reduction--a problem which said tax increases would also address, at at far less pain to Americans. Yet "class warfare" surely resonates. Sacre bleu! (Oh wait--that description I just wrote could have been written in 1999. My bad.)

We weren't, of course, privy to the conversations within al Qaeda in the months and years leading up to 9/11/01, We could have, at any time, watched The Battle of Algiers. Or La Chinoise. We were instead too busy watching other things, and anyway, neither movie would have given us practical intelligence. Indeed, even our own more practical intelligence was brushed aside by the Administration of the day. "You've covered your asses," Mr. Bush said. "Now I need to get back out to clear more brush."

It's likely that the people who actually flew the planes on 9/11 were much like the people in Godard's movie. That's what we can know. Things evolved since the days of my youth. In those days suicide bombers were few and far between--bombers, that was a different deal. But even on this fine point, Godard sees deeply into the future, for there is a suicide in his movie, a suicide bomber once removed so to speak. And as I read in a review of La Chinoise, the movie is loosely based on Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed." That book was written in the 19th Century. And probably Lenin would have counseled its protagonists against revolutionary action on much the same grounds as the Algerian professor counsels his former student.

We humans have an ability to see abstract structures, including social and political structures. With this ability comes the perception that if it's built like so, and if you remove these particular supporting elements, why the whole thing might come crashing down. Moreover, with youth comes the notion that sometimes chaos yield a better future. Thus, some can yearn for a "Year Zero."
(Godard sees that, and inserts a brief scene to that point. Rossellini also explores the idea in Germany Year Zero, the companion to his more famous Rome: Open City.)

These days, it is the Right that so yearns. Here's a good piece by Mr. Edroso on the subject:

http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2011_09_01_archive.html#3149819527391351860

Today's my 50th high school reunion, and I'm going. I look forward to seeing a lot of people I haven't seen in 50 years. Back then we were all so young. None of us had even heard of the Battle of Algiers. Or Vietnam. I mention this because it certainly can be pointed out that I am hardly being objective, since I'm an old geezer who wants to keep getting his social security check. That is, USA: Year Zero will not be to my benefit, unless the local Padrone happens to like a fiddler at his beck and call. This is of course quite an unlikely possibility. Around here the folks who emerge after a year zero will probably be listening to Skynyrd.

Still. I used to have a pickup in the case, down under the rosin. That's insurance you can believe in.

Paul Ryan, Genius

2011-09-20T07:02:00.002-04:00

(nostalgic-radio.com)

We went down to Georgia last weekend to play fiddle for a dance. Did not see the devil anywheres, but only some very nice folks who love to shake a leg. I-85 was pretty much as it is, except less construction these days. Surely that'll change once the jobs bill is quickly voted in in a wave of bipartisan cooperation this fall.

Coming back I heard several times Paul Ryan's big new sound bite--that the idea that very wealthy people should have a higher tax rate than at present--was "class warfare." I know he's supposed to be the big Republican genius, but really. "Class warfare" is a cliche. It's tired, stale, and meaningless. It's a phrase that Limbaugh has been dragging out since 1991, when he accused Clinton of class warfare. You'd think Ryan, who is supposed to really understand our economic situation at a level mere mortals can only postulate, would come up with something better. How about "generational warfare"? He definitely gets that one.

It's also strangely ironic, given that Mr. Ryan's on proposed budget is an attack on American citizens who aren't bazillionaires, and who thought that simply doing their best would at least get them to a retirement that wasn't going to be accomplished in a cardboard box, under a bridge, with no teeth. Apparently it turns out that beyond being without any empathy, Mr. Ryan is also simply a dim bulb, a posture, much like his Confederate twin, Mr. Cantor. Surely these people have heard of "projection?" I realize that some day soon all Republicans are going to be graduates of the shadow education system that has been constructed by the far right, but somehow I doubt either Cantor or Ryan matriculated from Regency Law, or Oral Roberts U. Perhaps one can hope that as Ms. Bachmann circles ever downward in flames, the genius twins will follow?

The problem with the Rand position is that it is contradictory in application. Consider that on the one hand the goal is to support and encourage the entrepreneur, the brave citizen who has an idea and just wants the economic space to bring it to fruition, to the benefit of all of us dimmer worker drones. Now and then such an entrepreneur succeeds of course, even when taxes are still above zero. But of course we all know that most entrepreneurs do not succeed, and that their failure (to use a harsh and unfair word) is not due to tax policy, but to the luck of the Irish, the whims of the consumer, the various other entrepreneurs battling in the marketplace, the whims of the Chinese and Indian governments' industrial investment policies, and surely many other factors too numerous to mention.

Now, given that any sensible person in the Randian universe is going to try to invest for their retirement, and given that in the Randian universe there is no public safety net, because there is no such thing in the Randian universe as a "public" or "common" good. Why then should any sensible citizen in the Randian universe dare risk their future on what is by definition a low-percentage investment. In the Randian world, with no safety net, the sensible play is just exactly what parents of the Great Depression told their children--get a job, hold on to it even if your boss is an asshole and plays head games with you every day of the week, keep your head down, survive.

That is to say--in the Randian world it's actually only the small number of successful entrepreneurs who are lauded as examples to follow. The failed entrepreneur is a ruined man desperately in need of a safety net, at least if he's over 65. Talk to the gigantic failed entrepreneur class currently populating the US--that would be the guys who were doing just great building houses until 2008. They were not "wage slaves." In fact, almost all of them, every last nail banger, rock hanger, shingle slapper, pipe fitter, wire runner--the whole kit and kaboodle that made up the housing industry--all of 'em were sole proprietors, hard working entrepreneurs living the Randian dream in a world where housing prices always went up, because that way gravity points.

The reason why Americans built a government that could provide a safety net for its citizens was because Americans who did the building lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War. What has happened since then is that subsequent generations have forgotten that we all shared the load in those very dark days, and that as a result (and of course with some luck) we came out of the tunnel into the light. If you want sensible people to have the courage to try for their dreams, you need to cushion the possibility that they are risking losing everything in the process. Otherwise, sensible people won't take that risk.

The Randian dream is in fact an illusion conjured up by people who are already so rich that they have no risks. What they really dream of is a labor base so battered that they will take whatever jobs there are at any wage offered. This is how manufacturing will return to the US, if the Randians have their way--if Paul Ryan has his way. No safety net--no social security, no medicare, no anything--that creates desperation, not visionaries. The visionaries in that world are people with schemes--people who think they can saw through the gates of the gated at night and come away with their catalytic converters and central air conditioning units. People who figure out how to sell drugs to the children of the gated. Or get elected to sell mind candy to the muddled parents. That's Mr. Ryan's gig.

Oh, That

2011-09-16T06:59:00.000-04:00

(photo from ashtanganews.com)

I was home after work last night and watched some of Rev. Al and this and that, chilling basically with a Ranger IPA, considering whether I had enough energy to go out and pick up some branches that are piled up to move to a better place. About quarter to 8 I remembered the Al Gore global warming special on the Current channel and turned that on. There's Mr. Gore in the midst of a summary of the last ten years on the climate front. Science is still in agreement--it's getting warmer. Records are being set at a pace of 50 highs for each one low. Twelve different chains of data, being compiled by who knows how many serious researchers in who knows how many places, all converge. The graph keeps going up.

A couple of weeks ago some spokesman for some Tea Party outfit said that the President was "abusing" his disaster-declaration powers. "We're having too many disasters these days," the guy said. I guess the idea was, you have to pick two of the three from box 2011: North Dakota record flood, Joplin tornado, or Vermont hurricane. Tuscaloosa? Sorry.

Saw a piece on our local bulletin board where somebody posted a long interview with Dean Baker, a respectable economist, concerning the general economic situation. It was a long thoughtful piece. At the end of it some wag had written, "what do you expect from a socialist?" Earlier I listened in a vague way to Michael Steele shout down Chris Matthews as Chris tried to observe that Mr. Perry seems to revel and indeed embellish his credentials as a dumbass, by claiming in a speech that he finished tenth in a class of 13. Chris was trying (in a fairly unclear way unfortunately) to draw attention to the fact that being a dumbass is now a positive credential in many quarters, perhaps hoping there'd be a serious discussion of why that is. Mr. Steele, who of course used to be a big-cheeze Republician, used the tried and true Tea Party tactic of shouting Mr. Matthews down, and on his own show no less.

It was interesting to see Mr. Gore on the teevee. Of course he's been on the teevee a good bit this week. He was on Colbert a couple of days back, promoting the big climate thing he was doing. As I said, I'm sorry I forgot to watch the whole hour, or to check in on the computer to the 24 hour marathon that was taking place--an attempt to remind people that the climate is still here, still evolving, and not in our favor. As Mr. Gore noted in the bit I did see, while there's a possible world out there somewhere where reality might actually be ignorable, it's not this earth we live on.

And it struck me this morning, waking up as I tend to with some sort of idea my mind has constructed out of the rubble of yesterday, that perhaps the very strange singularity that was the 2000 Presidential Election was the most important event of the past decade. November 2000, now so long ago and over the horizon of 9/11/01, which we were told over and over again changed everything forever, was when we first started living in the politics of denial. The first denial was that Mr. Gore had actually won that election, which was apparent to anyone who simply looked at the facts. Yet our supposed free press agreed among itself not to question a Supreme Court decision which the Court itself asserted had no precedent-setting characteristics--itself a patent anomaly. Then, after a muddled few months which are still historically obscure, but which feature a strange and almost single-minded effort to ignore the concerns being raised by our own intelligence resources concerning al Qaeda, came the shocking attacks (and some other enhancing events, such as the anthrax terrorism). Shortly thereafter, we were engaged--locked one could say--in two wars in the oil-producing region of the world.

Over the decade, what had been a more and more pressing issue--global climate change--receded into the mist. Indeed, in Republican quarters the issue of global climate change has been reduced to a "hoax." On MSNBC these days--the "liberal" channel, the one which addresses quite a few of the questions that ought to be addressed at least--a major sponsor is the carbon based fuel industry, in the form of kindly scientist types explaining how fracking is safe and will liberate a 100 years of natural gas, and how we have more oil than anyone else on the planet if you count our vast resources of "tar sands," which only need "liberating" in some complex way only engineers can understand. On every quarter the basic idea is, there will be cheap fossil fuel, and soon, and it'll last far longer than the flow of social security checks.

Mr. Gore's message, that the world should consider actually changing its mix of energy resources in some meaningful way, that we should adopt available and emerging technologies which do not produce green house gases--that idea has in the United States been pushed under the rug. And if you think about it, Mr. Gore and his message, that we need long-term decision-making about our energy consumption and energy methodology before it kills us, is as "denied" today as his victory in 2000.

And one might wonder if there's a relationship, if that November, 2000, wasn't a kind of historical pivot point, at least for the country--the US--that in many ways leads the world. Or did. It's not clear, is it, if denialism can be said to lead anywhere for very long.

My late friend Bob Barrett said that if Rick Perry is elected, we will just get what we deserve. Mr. Boehner said yesterday that industry was "on strike" because of government meddling. Mr. Perry wants to end "government regulations." Presumably that would include pesky pollution regulations, on internal combustion engines and smoke stacks, not to mention those damn child safety seats we struggle with for no good reason. In India whole families ride around on motor scooters. Think of the savings! Mom, dad, and the three kids can all scoot to the factory and get to work. Perhaps some weekend when we get Saturday off we can run the tivo back to Mr. Gore's speech, and all get a good chuckle, before the power goes off at 10 pm. It's for our own good, and the country's. We all need to be fresh for work at 7 am.

Last of Summer

2011-09-14T09:40:00.002-04:00

(a photo of the Rhythm Devils from their website)

Last weekend I was up in central Michigan, at a wonderful music festival called "Wheatlands." It was the 38th annual event. I'd played at several of the early ones, back in the '70s, with the band that is not to be named. This time I was playing with the Formerly Knowns, and we even sold some of "their" records, having none of our own as yet. Friday night, up on the big stage, a band called the Starlight Six featured a lead singer who said she'd been to the first festival, when she was but a month old, and had attended every one since. That's pretty neat. There were a lot of fine bands and performers.

I was most taken with the Lafayette Rhythm Devils, who play kick-ass cajun music, and whose young fiddler, Chris Segura, is an intuitive genius. If you care to buy their most recent CD, "Devil on a String," check out cut 7, "Je peux pas dormir le soir." You will never hear more remarkable fiddling, at least not this side of Stephan Grapelli at his finest. The Devils also feature the great singing of Randy Vadrine, who is channelling D.L. Menard and just a little of Mac McGaha, and Yvette Landry, who rivets the attention with her joy in music, plays a great bass line, and knows how to sing. Of course the Devils have a website. The seem to play mostly around home. Too bad for us, and damn the oil companies anyways. It's getting very hard to tour by automobile.

The festival itself was a gathering of like minds. People who care about each other, about the land, about the planet. There was a lot of tie-dye. There was a hint of "the chronic." All weekend I was met with the talsmanic phrase, "Happy Wheatland." These folks were getting ready for a Michigan winter. It was a festival of the countryside. We drove ten miles or so on a straight gravel road, through mostly woods, to get to the entrance to the grounds. I didn't see a fast food joint or a grocery store all weekend, and on the last day a stand called "Bob's" gave away it's last ears of fresh picked corn so they could pack up and get going before the bitter end. It was corn so fresh it reminded me of blues tossed out of the skiff and into the frying pan, down on the Banks.

I had to wonder if all these nice folks are going to go out and vote next year, if they are willing to stand against a gathering tide of full-tilt crazy that's coming at the country like gang-busters. I'm afraid a lot of these people are so disgusted by the Right that they're more likely to just focus on local things--put your head down, get up the firewood, grow the corn for the next hog, deal with the day to day, play acoustic music for the dance down at the grange. Keep your head down.

This was my generation's approach to Vietnam and Nixon. It might not be sensible, but disgust is a hard thing. In the liberal blogs I read there are signs of disgust in reaction to the Republican Debates. One person writes of a Republican party where germ theory is now in question. At Digby's place I find the following:

I must say that my reaction to this from out here in terrestrial paradise has been one of motivated anger, yes, but also gut-wrenching fear. At the risk of violating Godwin's law, never before in my 30-year lifetime, not even during the Bush years, have I felt this country was more keenly teetering on the precipice of totalitarianism than it is today. The people on that stage last night, and more especially the people in the audience, have murder on the mind. They have been whipped into a state of near frenzy against their perceived liberal, "freeloader" and "big government" enemies, and the bloodlust is running at a fever pitch. One of the candidates even openly advocated for eliminating social security based on the model adopted by Chilean mass murderer and fascist Augusto Pinochet.

There can be little doubt that if America were in the hands of these people, the country would already be locked in a pseudo-theocratic totalitarian death spiral. That's not the hallucinatory fantasy of a hysterical progressive blogger. That's just reality on its face. If these people manage to gain control of all levers of American power, it could very well mean the end of our nearly 250-year experiment in representative democracy. [David Atkins, 9/13/11]

That's pretty dire talk. And I think his perceptions are accurate from what I've glimpsed of these debates, though I certainly don't propose to watch any of them, or to even consider voting for a Republican, now or ever, period. Indeed, I'd rather watch a full night of "Sons of Anarchy," a family oriented teevee show about criminal bikers and their doings, and the womenfolk who love 'em. I started to tivo a few episodes they were rerunning, but Libby said I'd put it on the wrong hard drive and she wanted to watch Jon Stewart, so the tivo got nixed. Nothing was missed of course--but that's a symptom of putting your head down I think, creeping up on me from home tired from work.

As I keep saying, all we have here is a two party system, a binary situation, just like on a computer. It's not something the vaunted Founders gave us, but it's what we have. Libertoonians and Trotskyists are merely political fantasists, pretending to vote for something that isn't there. If you don't vote at all, you're actually voting for the wrong guy. That's how it works here.

Roy Edroso is so depressed he ended a piece the other day with the suggestion that we all consider dual citizenship. What a sad state of affairs. And then I have to remember all those nice folks, having fun in the ending summer last weekend. And the Lafayette Rhythm Devils, who play so good you will find yourself dancing with an astonishment akin to David Byrne's "How Did I Get Here?" There is water on the bottom of the ocean.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RLitow_1LU

Update. Re never voting Republican, here in NC our Republican majority legislature just voted to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot next May which, if passed, outlaws same-sex marriage. The point of this exercise is to use and encourage homophobia to get out the vote in NC for Republican candidates. That is to say, this Republican majority is quite willing to scapegoat real people--real families with real children, their fellow Carolineans all--for the sake of votes. I can think of nothing more craven, small, selfish, and downright evil that this legislative action, thought there are plenty of challengers of course. NC Republicans did it. Let them live with it. Indeed, let them all be voted out of office, every damn one. This is exactly what James Hoffa was saying last week, and why.

Fair Game

2011-09-08T06:30:00.000-04:00

A brief movie review. I watched Fair Game last night, courtesy of Netflix. It stars Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame Wilson, supported by Sean Penn as her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson (not R, SC). It strikes me as an accurate account of the events it aims to portray, namely the two outstanding public servants who were nearly obliterated by the Bush Administration because Ambassador Wilson had credibility when he spoke out against the spurious claim by the Administration that Iraq was embarked on a nuclear weapons program.

The movie centers on Mrs. Wilson's situation. She was clearly and without doubt an utterly innocent victim of the Bush Administration, who leaked her identity to the press simply in an effort to discredit and pay back Mr. Wilson for objecting to the statements about Iraq's nuclear program that he was certain were false. There was collateral damage as well, including a number of persons Mrs. Wilson was connected with in her CIA work, who were exposed in various overseas locations including Iraq.

The movie portrays and centers on the Wilsons' personal trials--on the shock of having to battle with large political forces, on the sense of exposure and betrayal and even physical danger, and on the stresses to the Wilsons' personal relationship, which in the end does survive. It is a movie about character. Nothing gets blown up. No one gets shot.

When it was over I turned on the Republican "debate" for a couple of minutes, then played some chess on the computer. The movie reminded me that this next election turns on the question of whether the country wants these same people--the people who were just fine with starting a war on false pretenses and destroying two American patriots who objected--back in power yet again. That's as fair a way to look at the upcoming election as any.

(Photo from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/20/naomi-watts-valerie-plame_n_583713.html

"Fixing" the System

2011-09-05T11:10:00.003-04:00

Gil Scott-Heron, Samir Hussein/Getty Images

Here's an article for your consideration, and be sure to read the comments to the end:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/registering_the_poor_to_vote_is_un-american.html

Now do you see how the system is supposed to work? I particularly like the comment that suggests that a CEO should get 750,000 more votes than an out-of-work practical nurse who used to care for my mother in a family owned rest home while she declined with Parkinsons until she (my mother I mean) was living entirely in her memories of 1920 Wrightsville Beach, NC.

It really isn't a new thing, this observation that money is power. It just seems new because it's being made in new quarters, such as Mr. Lofgren's essay of yesterday. One might observe that back in the 1840s, in a land somewhat advanced at that time on the Industrial Revolution railroad compared to say here, where we were using human labor (albeit mostly as free as slavery could make it for the producers), an economist/philosopher with a bit more on the ball than, oh, Ayn Rand or Glenn Beck, was observing the same things. This philosopher was of course Karl Marx. And Marx despaired of making serious changes in the circumstances of working people, although at the same time his own writings aimed at pointing out to those working people who could read some of the illusions under which they labored.

Where did this lead us, oh Israel? Why to Lenin and Trotsky, who decided that up against the wall red neck muthers was the only way things were going to change for working people. And of course what Lenin and Trotsky didn't realize was that once the principle that power flows from the barrel of a gun is fully unleashed, the man who is most willing to shoot people can end up in charge. And thus, just prior to Hitler's invasion of the low countries and slightly more prior to Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Trotsky ended up with an ice pick in his brain, down in Mexico, courtesy of Uncle Joe.

So indeed like old age, embarking on a political career is not for the faint of heart. But one wonders just how tone deaf the Right must be, to make such arguments as the ones cited here in the American Thinker. The point of voting, after all, is to give some hope to the voters that they have some voice in the situation. The expression of hatred and utter contempt for working people (and people who are unemployed, and the elderly, and the poor generally) is little less than evil personified. The Founders are not remembered for their small-minded, craven, selfish "adjustments" to a principle of universal suffrage which is enunciated full throat in the Declaration of Independence. Rather, our history can be seen as a progress towards that principle, and one that crept at much too slow a pace for far too many, generation after generation. Ms Bachmann's efforts to rewrite history are as weak as Uncle Joe's, and come from the same place, and it'll be quite a long time before the Tea Party locks up the Declaration and does not allow entry to the untutored vagabonds (I have heard of efforts by Rep. Joe Wilson to get the thing translated into Latin).

The Cantors, the Ryans, the Perrys, and the multitude of scribblers and punditeers who lick their boots and justify every perversion of the American ideal, proceed at their own risk, at least in the long run. Possibly money has achieved such power these days that change is no longer possible. Possibly the system can be incrementally adjusted towards deeper and deeper injustice, one little state's rights step at a time. Or, possibly, sad, wracked, destroyed Gil Scott-Heron might be proven right in the end. Right now we're just in the middle of this journey.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS3QOtbW4m0

For Folks Who Don't Pay Attention

2011-09-04T10:50:00.001-04:00

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov

This piece comes from a guy who wrote it as he was leaving the GOP. It is a good analysis, although Driftglass and many others have been saying the same things for many many years. One also wonders what took him so long--was it just time to retire, and was the beach house now paid for? Still, it has the value of being in some sense "from the inside."

http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779

He's right about the problems the country faces with its political system, that's for sure. Money is power, and the monied are pretty much all lined up on the wrong side now. Moreover, they have funded via getting their people elected powerful efforts to destroy organized unions, which not only weakens still further the ordinary working folks who are probably 90% of America, but weakens their voice in politics via union donations which to some degree off sets money from business, in our elections. Then there's the pathetic "mainstream" media, which does not inform, and the devolution of the Democratic Party into simply GOP lite (which seems to me is due in part to the defection of people like the author of the truth out piece, who will end up being or at least voting Democratic because we have a simple two-party system).

I'm sure people who understand that we have a two-party system will, in 2012, vote again for Obama. I'm also sure that many of the people who voted for Obama in '08, as a hope of real change in the United States, will now simply not vote. This has happened before. The depressing quality of the Vietnam era lead to lower and lower turnouts, and drove one very good President, Lyndon Johnson, out of office. Mr. Johnson, a master politician who makes Mr. Obama look like he is still in knickers, gave up in 1968. This remarkable fact is seldom appreciated, perhaps because only five years later his successor left office to avoid impeachment. People, in 1968, voted in Richard Nixon. The implausability of Nixon's election should also give pause forever. Nixon's eventual collapse and forced resignation was no surprise, but almost predictable given his history. The more abstract fact, that our system of government can become shockingly unstable almost overnight, is little remarked upon.

Fox, which runs the propaganda arm of the GOP, also televises NFL, MLB, much top college sports, half the NASCAR season, etc. You think they don't have credibility for their ongoing political distortions among people who don't pay attention? They have more credibility where it counts than all the MSNBCs combined (and there's really only just one, plus Olbermann over on the hippie channel, bless his heart).

We are at a place in this country's politics where actual facts--truth--simply doesn't matter. Michael Steele, a fairly thoughtful man and now an MSNBC analyst, said the other day that when a candidate was talking to his base it wasn't appropriate to question any of his statements. Ed Schultz offered an example of this a couple of days ago, comparing Marco Rubio's recent speech on the theme of how social security and medicare weakens the "moral fabric" of the nation, with other speeches of his using examples of his own parents and their usage of social security and medicare. As Mr. Lofgren above notes, Ayn Rand received both medicare and social security, without a complaint. Yet it is without any doubt an effective water torture to press on with the double-speak--e.g., Democrats now routinely refer to social security and medicare as "entitlements," which is a loaded term suggesting that recipients did not in fact pay into these plans. Moreover, the GOP goal is to turn whatever ends up being called "social security" and "medicare" into welfare programs for folks who are in dire need, dire being solely defined by people who are NOT in any need whatsoever, but in fact have wonderful, government funded health programs and magnificent retirement pensions which they voted in for themselves many years ago. Once that happens it will be even easier to tighten the screws on people who have passed their "productive" years. Such people will be merely the "parasites" amongst us. And this sort of language is already being mainstreamed by radio commentators such an Neil Boortz.

I'm glad Mr. Lofgren decided to have his say. At the same time, I do have to wonder, what took him so long. As an insider, you'd a thunk he might have been saying something a couple of decades back? The horses have long left the barn, and their hoofbeats blend with the distant thunder and flickering lightning beyond the far horizon. Strange, that lightning. It's a starry night around here. We ought to get out the telescope and give Saturn a look, maybe we can see the rings. The kids don't have to go to bed early--it's Labor Day. What ever the hell that means?

And speaking of things astronomical, here's a bit of reality which will of course be lost in all the meaningless blather that passes for commentary and analysis. As usual, Mr. Driftglass is right on the money.

http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-time-on-budget.html

Weed Eating

2011-09-03T11:22:00.001-04:00

http://www.bagnewsnotes.com

Here's a terrific post from the always terrific Marcy Wheeler:

http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/09/01/a-convicted-liar-defends-convicted-liars-boss-by-lying/

What this analysis of Elliot Abrams' defense of Dick Cheney shows is that Republicans have been consistently dismissive of the law when it suits their "higher" purposes, for decades. That is, Abrams is surely correct in his assertion that Dick Cheney never changed, from back when he was defending Iran-Contra, right on up to his willingness to forgo bothersome facts when they got in the way of a war he wanted to instigate with Iraq, and on, to his oversight in the outing of Valerie Plame, and even now, to writing this "memoir" which simply asserts his personal vision of reality at every turn, and damn (once again) whatever facts there might be in the other direction.

Perhaps it's a weird blessing that at least Cheney isn't in a position to run for President. One wonders why he hasn't had a convenient heart transplant, however. All he needed to do, back when he was Veep, was hang out near the battlefields he created, and a good healthy, brave heart would surely have come along in due time.

Speaking of the lying Mr. Perry, by the way: for all his talk of making government invisible, here's my prediction. When and if he's elected President (there probably should be some scare-quotes around "elected", since we know the whole process is suspect and has been so since 2000), Mr. Perry is going to turn into the ole Kingfish, p.d.q. There will be big job programs for the unemployed, great new public works efforts, and of course a big military expansion (more jobs), including a new Legion stationed along the border with Mexico, and perhaps a wall to rival the Great Wall of China. Mr. Perry is going to put the country back to work. Just like Mussolini. That's what he is. He has zero principles, and a will-to-power the size of the dearly departed World Trade Centers. Deficits you say? The Democrats will be gone, and they are the party of deficit spending. QED.

Fix It Yourself

2011-08-31T07:38:00.001-04:00

one of several new inlets

Mr. Perry vows to make the Federal Government invisible when he gets to the White House. My guess is that this pledge will not include our overseas military footprint, nor will the Federal Government be invisible to women in need of medical services. Minorities will also notice the Federal Government. But how about folks like those living on Hatteras Island. Think you could get your shovel and fix this, Mr. Randian Superman? It's a certainty your Randian brothers--the ones who don't live on Hatteras--will not come to your aid. Solidarity is not in the Randian dictionary, and even if it was, you simply can't get to Hatteras any more: the church bus will not float across the Pamlico. In Raleigh, our Governor had to argue that since folks on the Outer Banks pay taxes, they deserve to have their roads repaired. That's a pretty simple equation, and one that used to go without saying. After all, it's not like the Outer Baniks don't contribute a lot to the economy (although making that point immediately takes us to a slippery slope). I'd at least like to hear what OBX Randians are saying this week.

While we're at it, let's hope the next hurricane flattens Rush Limbaugh's Florida estate. His message this week--that Irene wasn't a disaster and that it was just the usual liberal news media hyping a situation requiring big government intervention--is about as close to the can't trust your lying eyes argument as it gets. What's going on is a strategy. Since it's pretty much impossible for everyone to actually be in a disaster area at the same time, that is, disaster victims are always a minority of us, why not diminish them and the whole idea of a disaster. Because the problem with a disaster is, it requires a large solution--something a Federal Government has the ability to provide. If we can just reduce the capability for people to feel empathy, we'll keep more money for ourselves. And so they toil on. Talk about exposing children to pornography.

Mr. Paul referred to the Galveston Hurricane of 1903 the other day. We didn't have no big gubment intervention back then, he said. Yet somehow Galveston survived. What a load. Check out the fine book "Issac's Storm" for the details of that disaster. One part of gubment we didn't have was good weather forecasting. Spanish weather folks on Cuba, which we'd just conquered a couple of years before '03, told our folks that the storm was going to go straight across the Gulf. Our folks brushed their cautions aside, believing that hurricanes always turn north at Florida. After the disaster, which killed over 6,000 people, they had to burn funeral pyres. Free whiskey was passed out to the survivors to help them cope. That is gubment you can drown in a bath tub.

It's about time we started seeing the Right Wing for what it is. A radical anarchical program aimed at destroying the country we've slowly created since them thar good old days that never were. The fact that this program is conceived by venal and shockingly stupid people doesn't mean it can't succeed. Ms Rand, after all, succeeded in becoming a best-selling third rate philosopher, and they made a movie of one of her bad novels which starred the very good actor Gary Cooper, and the very good actress Patricia Neal. What will follow the Tea Party success, however, is an utter unknown. Just because you blow something up doesn't mean whatever replaces it will be better in some sense. And if you have any doubts about that, do some more reading. About the French Revolution, and about Stalin. Rick Perry? He's the beast, slouching towards Golgotha to be born. And right now he's leading the race, rolling down hill like a snowball headed for hell, as a better philosopher than Ms Rand once aptly put it.

(I made some additions to this post on 9/1/11.)

& how do you like your blue eyed boy

2011-08-24T08:43:00.002-04:00

Jimmy Roland

Way back when, I thought I ought to try out for the highschool baseball team. I rode my bicycle over to the field near the highschool, and signed up. They were doing batting tryouts, and pitching was Jimmy Roland. He, together with a kid named Jimmy Hussey, were the two star pitchers of my youth. Eventually I got my turn at the plate. Jimmy threw me curve after curve. They probably weren't the really serious curves he could throw by then, and certainly he wasn't the major league lefthander he became a few years later, pitching for the Twins and the Yankees and several other teams for a nice long major league career. Jimmy wasn't quite Catfish Hunter--maybe Catfish is the most stellar NC pitcher in the firmament--but Jimmy, he was damn good. You know how highschool is, maybe. If you leave home, those people, who were your universe, mostly disappear on their various trajectories, never to be seen again, or at least not until way later (like now, dude), when your 50th Reunion is coming atcha.

Like one of Jimmy's curves. So I kept jumping back from the plate, certain the ball was going to wack me between the shoulder blades, and then I'd watch it float over the plate. This went on for several pitches. Finally Jimmy relented, or probably the coach gave him the signal to let up, and he tossed a few straight, easy pitches to me, which I proceeded to hit well south of the third base line and out into the street, so excited to get one I could see that I couldn't wait. And thus endth my highschool baseball career, which was probably as as-it-should-be as is conceivable--an apogee of fairness. Plus, I got to bat that one time against the great Jimmy Roland, who ten or more years later I happened to see on the teevee, pitching for the Twins, and winning a game in the major leagues.

So we have this website featuring all our classmates, and some of them have put up little bios and pictures from their lives, and many others haven't been "found", and there's a departed section, which I was checking after I read one bio by one guy lamenting all the departed, too soon, too soon. And there's Jimmy. He died last year. After his career he had a nice family, and worked in sporting goods, and was called to work in a hospice, and he'd gotten some kind of cancer, and died. It looked from the little obituary like he'd found a fine, centered life, and had become a very commendable person with his head screwed on straight--which would probably be something of an achievement if you were in the Major Leagues for a long time, although it's happened before certainly, including to Catfish. But damn if I'm not sorry I can't go up to him next month and ask him if he remembers ending my major league career. That would have been really fun. And that moment at the plate--it's as real as yesterday, and sparkles like the air after a hurricane.

And here's a footnote which I find simply breathtaking:
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1964/B05190NYA1964.htm
**

I found out about Jimmy's passing on Sunday, as late as I was for his curveball. Last night a friend of mine called with the news that Bob Barrett, the guy who gave me the wonderful hook for my most notorious song, a song which when I first performed it with the Red Clay Ramblers in 1974, at the Cats Cradle in Chapel Hill, caused people to literally fall out of their chairs, that Bob had died of a heart attack Monday night while driving home from Chapel Hill. He'd felt bad, pulled off to the side of the road, and his body was found later by police. It was his 2nd heart attack, his first coming last winter. I'd had dinner with him last week, and we'd had an enjoyable conversation, with much wry comment from him on the current political climate. His wryness was renown--and was evident well before he gave me that hook at his wedding reception, where he married Margaret Ellen, back in 1973, when the Ramblers were just getting started on a marriage that did not last nearly so long as his. I can report, however, that Bob did not expect Rick Perry to succeed in his presidential ambition. Perhaps optimism was coming on in his older, wiser years, I don't know.

Bob was a noted residential contractor in these parts. I have, through the years, built many a foundation for his very well built houses. He was a man who believed in over-building. His stuff stood up to weather, and falling trees. When hurricane Fran came through in '96, he and I did some nice repairs on some good houses in the Chapel Hill area. He said last week that at least he wasn't in debt, like a lot of the building community around here. He'd gotten out at the right time.

Margaret Ellen had died of breast cancer three or so years ago. Bob and Margaret Ellen were as sweet a couple as you could imagine. Now there's just their 30-something daughter left, who went to school back when with my 30-something daughter. I think when Margaret Ellen died, that's what broke Bobby's heart. Eventually the old muscles just couldn't cope with the broken stuff. There is in fact very little that isn't in the end ephemeral. I think of Bob's nice, quirky, self-built house, full of his life, Margaret Ellen's, Sophie's. The piano, which he and I moved in my old green F-150, which nearly fell plumb out of the truck on the sharp curve on his driveway. The many books. The wood stove sitting on a pedestal smack in the middle of the living room, the beautiful sun room past the kitchen, all those windows facing the steep hillside, which bloomed with bulbs each spring, the big shop building up on that hill, with Bob's tools, and a second floor to that, like a hayloft, with a pingpong table and an old refrigerator with beer, and windows looking out on the tree tops.

Now all of that, every bit of it, is memory. What's there today is what's left. I don't know what will happen to it all. Sophie lives far away, with a sparkling life of her own. Maybe she can rent the place out somehow, or there'll be a distress sale. Otherwise, the desperate will eventually find it, and it won't take long in these times. There ought to be a plaque or something though. Maybe I'll have to have one made myself. Sneak over there some night and drive it deep into the red clay up by that shop.

The man who conceived "You were only fucking, while I was making love" lived here. A true country genius, who never went to Nashville and made it rich. Not "Awww, too bad." though. He lived as well as is possible, and grew wiser and kinder with every passing year. He was uniformly generous. He was a good friend.

And Furthermore

2011-08-18T06:43:00.003-04:00

scary ain't it

Doghouse today concludes as follows, with advice to the three rational Republicans left on the bus:

Why are you not making common cause with the moderate 'conservative' in the White House? The goddam Democratic party is yours for the taking, and there's little risk Barack Obama is going to do anything in the next five years. The Other Party refused to stomp a mudhole in your snake handlers' cult. Suck it up and do it yourselves.

It is perhaps yet another symptom of the problem the former other party, the GOP, has, that this very wise remark could have been made all through the Clinton years as well. As my wife and I agreed, in 1992, the real Democrat in that race was Tom Harkin. Mr. Harkin, who somehow manages to survive in Iowa of all places even to this very moment, was greatly concerned about our tremendous loss of jobs overseas. He understood that without consumers, a consumer-based economy wasn't going to work too well. Mr. Clinton, however, was more dashing, more the pol, and in some ways more "moderate." Or as we thought at the time, a "Rockefeller Republican." Why, then, I kept wondering as the Clinton years passed, didn't the Republicans work with him? All they seemed to do was complain that he co-oped "their" ideas.

But as we all know in our rational moments, ideas aren't really "owned," except in the sense that you'd best not put your name on somebody else's book and then sell it for your own. Policy, on the other hand, is policy. If politicians owned ideas and policies, there could be no bipartisanship, in principle. If a particular policy was a good idea, then everyone should support it. Yes, Clinton was a master "triangulator." Maybe that's an issue when there are real principles at stake (as there are now, in Obama's case, viewed from my perspective). But if you believe deep cuts in entitlements is the only thing that can be done to "save" the country, and if the President of the opposing party agrees pretty much--well what the hell is the problem? For example I mean.

Apparently the GOP is just plumb tired of incrementalism. Mr. Perry wants it all, as I said yesterday. He'll bring the jobs home, and sell the shiny stuff to the rest of the world. Made in USA will be a selling point, for sure, in Bangalore and Beijing.

Of course, actually, as has been the case since Eisenhower at the least, the GOP doesn't care to show its hand, but prefers candidates who keep the public interested in the side show part of things. As Ed Schultz correctly pointed out last night, Democrats would never lose if they just stick with working people and look out for their interests. Because almost all of us, in the end, are working people. Current events in Ohio are bearing this out too.

One day after the Wisconsin recalls are over and the Ohio governor, as radical as Walker in Wisconsin, is offering to "talk" if Democrats will not simply run a campaign to repeal his nasty anti-union legislation this fall. One hopes that Democrats will not fall for it. One hopes that Mr. Obama will even, maybe, perhaps, take note of what taking a stand looks like. It's obvious, it's been obvious. Republicans have no interest at all in simply achieving policy results that they allegedly believe in. If they did, they would already have achieved what they say they want. Obama says in his current stump speech that he gives Michelle 90% of what she wants. It's a mind-mannered domestic joke in the speech of course. But the Speaker of the House gloats that he got 98% of what he wanted in the just past negotiations, and he's not joking. And at the same time, the Republicans toil on. Mr. Perry is in the wings, ready to crush all entitlements and all environmental regulations, while (no doubt) willing to do battle with Iran and at the same time, return to the Gold Standard. If Bush could run wars off budget, so can Perry.

First Reagan. Now Steve Cochran. In my own family I had a wonderful aunt who lived to be 86. A member of the first graduating class of Duke University, She always drove a red car and favored a Duke baseball cap on a sparkling fall day when she was out raking leaves in her yard. She idolized FDR. She also idolized John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, to the point of hanging framed pictures of them on her living room wall. She voted in every election, and taught school until well past 65. She left little piles of peanuts on her porch for the squirrels to find. She took care of her invalid sister until her sister died in her '70s, after caring for her mother till she died. When she got so aged that she could not care for herself, my aunt refused to eat until she died. And that's the damn truth, about her, and about the voting public upon which this gigantic engine we've built floats, a feather in a monsoon.

Brick Laying

2011-08-17T09:22:00.000-04:00

there was never a more romantic moment

A few decades ago, probably about the same moment that Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights bill, people in the shadows started building a step by step agenda to somehow return America to a fantasy golden past where everything was, in some vague way, perfect. You can view this past in any number of Hollywood movies. I'd suggest, for starters, Picnic. And William Holden? He's the future, and the embodiment of all that the shadowy right wingers wanted to hold back, or turn back, or destroy.

Flash forward to today. Here's a link:

http://whbl.com/news/articles/2011/aug/15/wis-largest-teachers-union-plans-on-laying-off-40-of-staff-members/

[A lot of my links you have to copy and paste into your browser, sorry.]

It's a small bit of news, just a little local story. Teacher union in Wisconsin lays off staff. It's just one more brick in the wall. For all of the bad press, for all of the recalls, for all of the outraged public turnout in Wisconsin, the attack on unions there is working. This little event, the layoffs, is a victory for the Kochs, for Governor Walker, for all those once shadowy people who started work on this way back when. (And by the way, in North Carolina we were way way ahead of this particular curve, passing a "right to work" law way back in the '50s which has kept union strength at a minimum in NC ever since. There's talk of union boycotts of next years Democratic Convention because it's meeting in Charlotte. Nice move, Mr. Obama.

It's sad that too many progressive minded folks just think they need to engage with the political every now and then, such as when a promising black candidate happens to be running against a doddering senator and his crazy-lady veep candidate. All these little bricks add up. Before you know it, you get a bridge all the way to President Rick Perry, and his landslide Congress supporters. My guess is, there are still way more than a majority of American voters who do not want a return to the world of the '30s. Only in the movies were hobos as romantic as a young William Holden. And there was never anything romantic about bringing out the tanks against strikers. Nor, for that matter, about strikes themselves--a gutwrenching last resort response to working conditions which the owner elite thought were merely what was needed to make a profit. Complain about working conditions? No problem, somebody else will take your job. Mr. Perry has called for an end to all regulations, on the grounds that they are job-killers, one and all. Get out the peach crate, lil sis needs it to stand on so's she can reach the levers on the machine.

I read the other day that Mississippi is now being touted as an alternative labor market to China, that workers in Mississippi will now go to work for a wage only 30% above wages in China. That's one plan for bringing jobs back to America. It's Rick Perry's plan, long term. It's the Koch plan, long term. It's the iron will of owners who see their labor component as just one lump of coal, interchangeable with any other, a part of the process to be combusted towards the result: shiny products that pop out the other end of the building, one after the other. For a good long time American government has held that vision at bay, because unions were strong enough to gain the ear of government, and because strikes and even bloodshed were too wrenching to the community to remain the solution to impossible working conditions.

The people in the shadows did not agree, never agreed, toiled night and day to find new solutions to their problem, and today are succeeding. That's what's happening.

The Balance Thing

2011-08-15T06:49:00.001-04:00

from Digby

David Gregory: You know, Perry talked about potentially seceding from the union. You think that's extreme. Well people on the other side think that introducing health care reform for the whole country is akin to European Socialism.

The quote comes from Digby, and was made on Meet the Press yesterday. It illustrates pretty well why Americans who simply watch the occasional Sunday opinion show to find out what's going on remain in a state of confusion or even decide they'd better go to the next Tea Party rally to make their voice heard. What Mr. Gregory did in that quote was to suggest that secession and a flawed but needed reform of the American health care system are pretty much equivalent, because there are people who think that's so. In the same way, the idea that in the recent Republican created debt ceiling crisis it was actually both parties who were causing the crisis and endangering the economy and the well-being of millions of Americans is pretty much what Americans now think--because that's how it was reported, pretty much.

The American tragedy is that essential to a working democracy is an informed voting public. A vibrant journalism is essential for an informed public. But weaknesses in our system have now allowed a Lord Haw Haw media to develop and blossom over the past thirty so years, unchecked, and even in less doctrine driven media outlets (such as David Gregory's), the balance muddle in fact distorts the truth of our political situation.

As someone pointed out over the weekend, the best President we could elect in 2008 was an Eisenhower Republican. All the Republican candidates running against him next year assert that Mr. Obama is a radical socialist, and some even hint that he isn't even an American. This state of affairs is extremely dangerous to the future of America. As Digby also pointed out recently, some people saw Governor Rick Perry's execution of an innocent man as a positive character trait. "It takes balls to execute an innocent man," a constituent is reported to have remarked at the time. (And Bill Clinton, let us recall, pretty much made his chops the same way in 1992, as did George W. Bush in 2000.) Meanwhile, the practical result of our more and more militarized foreign policy is permanent war, and in that regard both our major parties can be called simply "The War Party." You doubt? Mr. Gates. QED.

Tuesday morning update:
It's not like the Ayn Rand Cult has utterly eaten the brains of all our "job creators." Warren Buffet offered this in the New York Times recently. It's worth a read, if only for the statistics about jobs created in more taxing eras.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html?src=me&ref=general

LOW-EL LOW-EL as the kids say

2011-08-13T19:49:00.001-04:00

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2011/08/13/corndog-libel/

Maybe they'll just leave Tina Brown alone now. It's the least they can do.

Update: of course the Rude Pundit would have even more on this significant story which as usual has been left mostly uncovered by the main stream media. And heck, might as well have some fun, since we're heading for President Rick Perry, who is going to make America and the world totally forget the Worst President, George W. Bush.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2011/08/giving-people-what-they-want-ten-things.html

The Seals

2011-08-11T07:08:00.001-04:00

chinook-helicopter.com

Riding to work Monday I learned that to become a member of Seal Team 6 requires at least 5 years of training over and above all the training a person has already received to become a capable member of the military, and that even people who have already become Seals frequently wash out of the program which leads to Team 6 qualification. There were also stories available everywhere concerning the remarkable individuals who made up the group killed in the Chinook crash--people who knew them told of their leadership qualities, their focus and desire. Some wanted to be Seals from early childhood. All seemed to be exemplary Americans.

I have to wonder why in the world anyone thought it was a good idea to pack twenty-two of these highly skilled "resources" into a closely packed target and run them into enemy territory? This seem like a fundamental mistake of all combat--never bunch up, because a group is a bigger and better target. Read Captain Dick Winters' story in Holland, in World War II. He killed some fifty German soldiers with a rifle because they huddled together in a small group. Isn't this simply basic in our high-tech modern military? And worse, is this a symptom of the too many terribly long years our people have been at this Afganistan War? A question for later on I guess, and another feature of our Presidential inertia, which may in historical terms be the overarching feature of the Obama years.

And as a minor footnote--and because I've given Brad Keslowski a hard time for appropriating the American flag in his post race celebrations--cudos to his guts last weekend, and a tip of the hat to his obvious sincerity concerning the loss of the Seals. Maybe we should all see his flag-waving as a genuine salute to the young soldiers who labor on, and thank him for reminding us that their labor continues, even in obscurity. As in all war, it seems like the gruesome absurdity is always ignored at the start, but becomes more and more apparent as time passes. I do not understand why we (and the rest of humankind) do not learn this age-old lesson, which is written in blood across the sky. Mr. Bush's shocking amnesia was one of his most remarkable features to me, back when he cranked up these two wars, a gigantic and open-ended commitment in response to Mr. bin Laden's audacious political theatre of blood. Historical perspective vanished on September 12, 2001. Vietnam was no more, not to mention Inchon, Iwo Jima, Gallipoli, Paschendale. Oh, I forgot. Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg.

The deal is, courage and valor and bravery are tragically honorable human qualities, and perhaps the more so for being so frequently enlisted in the dimmest of larger causes. Reckon we'll ever manage to elect politicians who get this? It seems more and more doubtful, doesn't it. Even after eight years of the obvious, the current crop trudge on and on, in the same bloody footsteps. Like my old fiddling buddy says, "we're just primates muddling through." There's way too much wasted in our American adventure.

Contradictions

2011-08-07T09:39:00.005-04:00

image © mishka henner

In an article in the New York Post, Linda Chavez reports and muses on the big interview Eric Cantor did recently with Peggy Noonan:

‘‘It’s almost as if the president and his party really are bent on promoting a welfare state and then thinking about . . . our free enterprise system second,” Cantor said. “And their emphasis . . . has been in trying to promote programs of economic redistribution. And if you hear them speak, it’s always about ‘everybody should pay their fair share.’ And I think the difference is, we believe everyone should have a fair shot.” That succinctly describes the different worldviews of liberals and conservatives.

Liberals are always trying to come up with programs and policies that even out the differences between individuals. Liberals want to take a bigger chunk of money from those who earn more because they’re harder workers, are brighter or more skilled, have invested more in education or just happen to have been born into a wealthy family. And they want to use that money to create programs to help the less fortunate. Our federal income-tax system is based on this principle.
Conservatives aren’t as concerned about evening out inequalities between individuals and would rather encourage individuals to pursue their own interests, for better or worse. Most conservatives believe that government shouldn’t penalize hard work, risk-taking and success by insisting that government take a larger share of the fruits of those efforts.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/clash_of_visions_WBzl06IUoSOZ3h6IPulHwJ#ixzz1ULRDHi9A

Kinda funny coming from a man who talked himself into a government job that includes premium health care support in perpetuitity, and a life-time pension--all on the taxpayer's Roosevelt dime. But this is the weird and fundamental contradiction at the foundation of the "modern" Republican Party and its powerful supporting cast of rightwing pundits and a whole television network, Fox. These alleged representatives get into office riding the stale cant of boilerplate such as "government shouldn't penalize hard work." It sure doesn't apply to them though, now does it. What "hard work"? Mr. Cantor's on vacation again, after an grueling summer of sitting in air conditioned rooms with his elite peers and refusing any compromise with reality until a contrived but real deadline forced the Administration to accede to a "Satan Sandwich" of a bill which didn't even stop S&P from pronouncing the US credit status to be less than AAA. He toils on, night and day, vacation or not, upholding the right of every American to be an "entrepreneur." Even in his sleep, Mr. Cantor toils on, for all of us.

Does the typical voter even think about this "entrepreneur citizen" idea, or does this voter just register some below consciousness tickle of warmth at the mention of the phrase. I've done construction work--masonry mostly--for 25 years or so. It has been nice, a perk even, to have been working for myself, an entrepreneur citizen. That meant I could keep my own schedule, and in particular, keep my hand in the music world, where gigs come along as they do, and to be able to play professionally you really do need to be able to play--both available and with your physical skills intact. Masonry too--particularly when it was accomplished using stones--was its own reward as well for me, the reward of being able, for hire, to fashion beautiful objects out of stones, the reward of being in some small sense in contact with the ethos that gave us all the Lion Gate at Mycenea, for just one example. Not that any of the stones I worked with weighted 12 tons.

So maybe the folks up in Richmond who voted Mr. Cantor his lifetime health care and pension did it because the artist in them is soothed by his support of entrepreneurship. But there's another side to this entrepreneurship. When I entered the building trades nearly everyone was becoming an "independent contractor," which is another term for entrepreneur. And what this nice term meant and means is that working people do not get any benefits, are not officially "hired" by anyone except on a day or job basis, usually pay for their own health insurance (if they have any), and can depend at best on the good will of a network of independent general contractors (most of them with no or very few employees) for a continuing supply of work (or, as us musicians might call this supply, gigs--since construction has become exactly like the music biz, which is possibly why I found transitioning back and forth in the two worlds a reasonably confortable experience). The advantage of this world of entrepreneurs, aside from how nice it feels sitting on a horse, on the open range, sun casting purple shadows on the Sierras in the far distance, dogies nursing, the murmur of the herd as it beds down, the smell of wood smoke and beans as cookie sets up the campsite, the...

Well as I was saying, the advantage in this dreamy work of entrepreneurs is that employers save quite a lot of money. When times are good they can stash more money away, or buy an SUV or a beach house or a boat, go on vacations just like Mr. Cantor. When times are really good and they've been really lucky (or worked so goldarn hard they have had to manufacture more hours in the day and more days in the year to even manage to get the job done) some of these entrepreneurs can even give money to Mr. Cantor to assure his commitment to a nation of entrepreneurs. And conversely, when times are bad (as they are these days), these entrepreneurs can simply hunker down, with no concern for employees with nothing to do, or retired employee pensions, or any of that stuff. Because there were no employees, just subcontractors, other entrepreneurs. And at a more abstract level of talking, the savings come with and are part and parcel of a removal of any responsibility to the folks who are making the employers the big bucks. Everyone's an entrepreneur, after all. Instead of official layoffs and accompanying unemployment benefits, it's just "sorry boys, ain't no droving today, we'll give you a holler in the spring."

Back in the good years, the Clinton '90s, quite a few subcontractors I knew expanded, "hiring" their own crews of sub-subcontractors. When this area began to see a sizeable influx of Mexicans and Central Americans, primarily due to big chicken processing plants coming to the area and advertising for the cheapest labor available, some of these people got the hell out of chicken processing and into better jobs, such as sheet-rock installing, and plumbing, and house painting, and masonry. Often they were "hired" (or even actually hired in some cases--this story is not monolithic) by established subcontractors, who then in some cases became managers of a labor force, made more money, bought SUVs and beach homes. And so forth.

Meanwhile, in the bigger picture, millions of American jobs went far, far away. Construction has to happen pretty much where the objects being constructed reside. Meat processing has to happen, pretty much, in places where the meat can arrive alive, blinking its eyes at the wonder of a world on wheels. Shirts and televisions and microwaves and computers, on the other hand, can originate far far away, where people work for pennies a day. As a guy (an American no less) in a PBS documentary about the textile industry in Guatemala said with a straight face back in the late 1980s, the workers down here don't get brown lung. The workers down there mostly don't get older either. Passing strange, that.

I know a couple of "entrepreneurs" who spend every working day driving around my county in an elderly small pickup hunting for scrap metal, which they sell for about $65.50 average cash money. Some days, if school isn't in session, their kids ride around with them all day. That way the kids learn the entrepreneurial spirit I reckon. What with the disciplining S&P has just administered to President Obama, Congress, and our economy generally, could well be the price of metal is going to rocket down to where it was two years ago, and these folks will be "earning" half or less what they're making this summer. If the damage is severe enough it'll drive gas prices down again. If not, not. Hey, it's the cowboy life, and S&P might end up looking a lot like Clevon Little in a cowboy hat.

But the fundamental question is, why do people like Mr. Cantor, people who believe so deeply in the spirit of American entrepreneurship, strive for careers in the government they hate and want to destroy? Mr. Cantor is a success--but not at entrepreneurship. Unless what he does can be translated, with a deeper analysis, an MRI so to speak, into one of the world's oldest "trades." We all know what that is. Like Hazel used to sing, "Don't put her down, you helped put her there." Yep.

Note: the photograph is from Mishka Henner's collection of google map photos, a controversial ebook called "No Man's Land" about which much can be discovered by operating the google:
http://mishka.lockandhenner.com/blog/?cat=37

Working People, Remember Them?

2011-08-05T07:13:00.000-04:00


Nimrod Workman

Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler) has gone back on its own, away from Firedoglake. Here's a recent post:

http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/08/03/buffalo-hangs-its-head-in-shame-as-lil-luke-laughs-at-slaves-and-dead-workers/

I'm not lobbying for sitting it out next year, please understand. But how much disgust can a person stand? The answer is unclear, but remains a psy-ops issue, doesn't it. On the moral plane the question will remain what it is, like gravity. D or R.

Go back and watch Harlan County, USA once a month. It's worth it just to hear Hazel, Dave Morris, and Nimrod again, but it's not just a history lesson, it's the same battle going on right now in Wisconsin.

[photo is from
http://www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/sfc/index.php/category/collections/southern-folk-cultural-revival-project-collection/ ]

Next Year, Pamplona

2011-08-02T06:56:00.000-04:00

australiantimes.co.uk

Hey, first thing today I get an email from some Obama functionary which has in it a video of the President explaining the situation re the Great Compromise just past. Delete. Whew, that wasn't so hard. As to the general situation, as it stands. Well, personally, McCain would still have been even worse, and on top of that, Mrs. Palin would have had a national office instead of a tour bus.

On the other hand. Mr. Obama has proven to be profoundly naive when it comes to dealing with the Republican Party and long-time professional politicians. This was actually one of the criticisms of him going in--it came in the form of, "he has no experience." We saw this same problem in the protracted Health Care Bill negotiations. Yes, eventually something called a Health Care Bill got passed. In the mean time, the whole process came to look anything but transparent, and millions of voters were galvanized to put in power the raging no-nothings who have just been the engine of yet another piece of murky legislation posing as a solution to something or other that might have been a crisis or not. Even Lawrence O'Donnell, who was Mr. Obama's biggest supporter, said last night that "the President blinked."

Continuing to make every effort to look at the world as we find it realistically, I have to say that at the very least, Mr. Obama lost sight of the forest while studying certain particular leaves with the intensity only a 5th year botanist grad student can bring to a leaf. And a body of elected Congresspersons have successfully held our economy hostage, and are even as we speak making plans for the next heist. As to the Presidential choice which looms next year, it's looking more and more like a sunny day in Pamplona. No one on the GOP side should ever be elected to anything, since they all believe in the destruction of the government and all its functions save possibly running aspects of a military industrial complex that prove structurally resistant to all out privatization. That is--how can anyone seriously run to destroy the office they seek?

But on the other hand. Four more years of this kind of "leadership?" What a tragedy that is. Mr. Obama was probably suited to lead a body of people will true common interests who in fact all wished to achieve good outcomes. He can give a good speech, and without a teleprompter. He would probably be the greatest Secretary of State ever, under the command of a leader with a vision. But Mr. Obama has now proven to be unable to lead against forces of malevolence and ill will. And that capability is what America desperately needs today. Mr. Obama is Polonious. (That he didn't dither with regard to the bin Laden assassination or the Somali Pirates rescue says precious little about his skills at statecraft--a decent county sheriff could have made those two calls, let's face it.)

These facts do not change another fact--in the United States we have a two-party system, and in the end we have to choose a Democrat or a Republican. The so called third party option is in reality a fantasy vote, soothing the psychological discord which comes with internal conflict while masking the fact that voting for the third guy usually gives aid to the guy you would never vote for. In other words, Nader not Gore = Bush.

Next year, Pamplona.

Out of the Past

2011-08-01T06:31:00.000-04:00

From Franklin Roosevelt's speech at Madison Square Garden, October 31, 1936:

We have not come this far without a struggle and I assure you we cannot go further without a struggle.

For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

The American people know from a four-year record that today there is only one entrance to the White House—by the front door. Since March 4, 1933, there has been only one pass-key to the White House. I have carried that key in my pocket. It is there tonight. So long as I am President, it will remain in my pocket.

Those who used to have pass-keys are not happy. Some of them are desperate. Only desperate men with their backs to the wall would descend so far below the level of decent citizenship as to foster the current pay-envelope campaign against America's working people. Only reckless men, heedless of consequences, would risk the disruption of the hope for a new peace between worker and employer by returning to the tactics of the labor spy.

Here is an amazing paradox! The very employers and politicians and publishers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system by this attempt to coerce the votes of the wage earners of this country. It is the 1936 version of the old threat to close down the factory or the office if a particular candidate does not win. It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them.

Every message in a pay envelope, even if it is the truth, is a command to vote according to the will of the employer. But this propaganda is worse—it is deceit.

They tell the worker his wage will be reduced by a contribution to some vague form of old-age insurance. They carefully conceal from him the fact that for every dollar of premium he pays for that insurance, the employer pays another dollar. That omission is deceit.

They carefully conceal from him the fact that under the federal law, he receives another insurance policy to help him if he loses his job, and that the premium of that policy is paid 100 percent by the employer and not one cent by the worker. They do not tell him that the insurance policy that is bought for him is far more favorable to him than any policy that any private insurance company could afford to issue. That omission is deceit.

They imply to him that he pays all the cost of both forms of insurance. They carefully conceal from him the fact that for every dollar put up by him his employer puts up three dollars three for one. And that omission is deceit.

But they are guilty of more than deceit. When they imply that the reserves thus created against both these policies will be stolen by some future Congress, diverted to some wholly foreign purpose, they attack the integrity and honor of American Government itself. Those who suggest that, are already aliens to the spirit of American democracy. Let them emigrate and try their lot under some foreign flag in which they have more confidence.

The fraudulent nature of this attempt is well shown by the record of votes on the passage of the Social Security Act. In addition to an overwhelming majority of Democrats in both Houses, seventy-seven Republican Representatives voted for it and only eighteen against it and fifteen Republican Senators voted for it and only five against it. Where does this last-minute drive of the Republican leadership leave these Republican Representatives and Senators who helped enact this law?

I am sure the vast majority of law-abiding businessmen who are not parties to this propaganda fully appreciate the extent of the threat to honest business contained in this coercion.

I have expressed indignation at this form of campaigning and I am confident that the overwhelming majority of employers, workers and the general public share that indignation and will show it at the polls on Tuesday next.

Aside from this phase of it, I prefer to remember this campaign not as bitter but only as hard-fought. There should be no bitterness or hate where the sole thought is the welfare of the United States of America. No man can occupy the office of President without realizing that he is President of all the people.

It is because I have sought to think in terms of the whole Nation that I am confident that today, just as four years ago, the people want more than promises.

Our vision for the future contains more than promises.

This is our answer to those who, silent about their own plans, ask us to state our objectives.

Of course we will continue to seek to improve working conditions for the workers of America—to reduce hours over-long, to increase wages that spell starvation, to end the labor of children, to wipe out sweatshops. Of course we will continue every effort to end monopoly in business, to support collective bargaining, to stop unfair competition, to abolish dishonorable trade practices. For all these we have only just begun to fight.

Of course we will continue to work for cheaper electricity in the homes and on the farms of America, for better and cheaper transportation, for low interest rates, for sounder home financing, for better banking, for the regulation of security issues, for reciprocal trade among nations, for the wiping out of slums. For all these we have only just begun to fight.

Of course we will continue our efforts in behalf of the farmers of America. With their continued cooperation we will do all in our power to end the piling up of huge surpluses which spelled ruinous prices for their crops. We will persist in successful action for better land use, for reforestation, for the conservation of water all the way from its source to the sea, for drought and flood control, for better marketing facilities for farm commodities, for a definite reduction of farm tenancy, for encouragement of farmer cooperatives, for crop insurance and a stable food supply. For all these we have only just begun to fight.

Of course we will provide useful work for the needy unemployed; we prefer useful work to the pauperism of a dole.

Here and now I want to make myself clear about those who disparage their fellow citizens on the relief rolls. They say that those on relief are not merely jobless—that they are worthless. Their solution for the relief problem is to end relief—to purge the rolls by starvation. To use the language of the stock broker, our needy unemployed would be cared for when, as, and if some fairy godmother should happen on the scene.

You and I will continue to refuse to accept that estimate of our unemployed fellow Americans. Your Government is still on the same side of the street with the Good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side.

Again—what of our objectives?

Of course we will continue our efforts for young men and women so that they may obtain an education and an opportunity to put it to use. Of course we will continue our help for the crippled, for the blind, for the mothers, our insurance for the unemployed, our security for the aged. Of course we will continue to protect the consumer against unnecessary price spreads, against the costs that are added by monopoly and speculation. We will continue our successful efforts to increase his purchasing power and to keep it constant.

For these things, too, and for a multitude of others like them, we have only just begun to fight.

All this—all these objectives—spell peace at home. All our actions, all our ideals, spell also peace with other nations.

Today there is war and rumor of war. We want none of it. But while we guard our shores against threats of war, we will continue to remove the causes of unrest and antagonism at home which might make our people easier victims to those for whom foreign war is profitable. You know well that those who stand to profit by war are not on our side in this campaign.

"Peace on earth, good will toward men"—democracy must cling to that message. For it is my deep conviction that democracy cannot live without that true religion which gives a nation a sense of justice and of moral purpose. Above our political forums, above our market places stand the altars of our faith—altars on which burn the fires of devotion that maintain all that is best in us and all that is best in our Nation.

We have need of that devotion today. It is that which makes it possible for government to persuade those who are mentally prepared to fight each other to go on instead, to work for and to sacrifice for each other. That is why we need to say with the Prophet: "What doth the Lord require of thee—but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God." That is why the recovery we seek, the recovery we are winning, is more than economic. In it are included justice and love and humility, not for ourselves as individuals alone, but for our Nation.

That is the road to peace.

Thanks to Digby for the link.

The Actual Conversation Going On

2011-07-31T08:19:00.002-04:00

Brooylyn Bridge Baby's Photosteam

Watched a good deal of C-span yesterday, the various speeches concerning whether to pass the Reid Compromise. Now and then some interesting things got said. Interesting in the sense that they revealed some truth. Mr. Coburn (R, OK), for example, was nearly in tears over the fact of waste in government programs. He cataloged program or agency after program or agency where millions were in fact (assuming he wasn't flat out lying) wasted. Stuff didn't work like it was supposed to. Stuff was redundant with other stuff. Funded studies were just plain silly, pointless, ill-conceived or ill-executed. It all adds up to a spending deficit. Another group of Republicans got up to say that all cuts to military programs are dangerous in these dangerous times, and the Democrats wanted to cut defense spending. Speaker after speaker resorted to the good old "family metaphor." Congress can't police it's own spending, therefore Congress has to simply cut up it's "credit card" in advance and just live with the consequences, whatever ever they happen to be. This metaphor is delightful and can be developed into a full length movie by the way--can't pay for your gas with your paper route, son? Well I guess you'll have to walk to school, or drop out and get a job at the gas station pumping gas. Sounds perfect.

On the Democratic side, Nancy Pelosi gave the best speech. "They are trying to destroy the entire public sector," she said. She's right. I'm hoping this whole weekend will conclude in a stalemate, and that President Obama will have no choice but to evoke the Fourteenth Amendment and raise the debt ceiling as a simple edict. That would be, at this point, the very best the United States could hope for. I wish he could then adjourn Congress entirely until after the 2012 Election, and spend the next months educating the nation on why it needs to elect competent congress-persons who understand what the US government they're running is, why it exists. I wish he could simply rule out of order any parties that claim to run on the proposition that if elected, they will destroy their office and the government they were elected to serve. There ought to be some kind of standards of logic at work in our political life.

But there aren't. Mr. Coburn's angst concerning waste is of course sensible in itself. No one wants waste. But the fact that no one wants waste should be an obvious spur to ongoing efforts to eliminate waste. It's not like that job is simply done at some point. Waste is part and parcel of effort. Waste happens in all industry, private and public. So does fraud, thievery, various kinds of blatant misuse of power. Let's see Congress eliminate power. I don't think they'll have that conversation. What's going on now is the on-going effort to privatize all government functions, today tied to a debt and deficit which the privatizers for the eight years of the Bush Administration created in significant part by their privatizing efforts. It's indeed crazy circular thinking. What the Republicans are arguing for, fundamentally, is abdication of all Congressional responsibility. Instead of dealing with these examples of waste and fraud which Mr. Coburn cataloged yesterday during this past Congressional session, these people did everything but. They spent their time primarily attacking their own offices and closing essential government agencies and services such as the FAA.

If government is so reduced, power will not therefore vanish. Instead, power will be unaccountable. And all the slow agony of making power accountable, which is one story of America starting with the War of Independence and moving down the long march of struggles--expanding suffrage, ending human slavery, improving working conditions, ending legal segregation, Labor struggle, etc. All these things except possibly direct human slavery are mitigations of naked power, primarily leveraged by economic forces. (Indeed, even slavery is probably in theory on the table, since slavery can be masked so as not to be unpalatably obvious. Quite a few slaves will tell you they love their masters, for example. In some sense they do.) Moreover, the list of public goods which Mrs. Pelosi catalogued will not be served in the privatization process, except coincidentally. She mentioned clean air and water several times as an example. The best we can hope from privatization is somewhat clean air and water, in some places. Corporations are duty bound to provide dividends to their stockholders. They are not duty bound to provide them with clean air and water.

I'd recommend watching some C-span as this debate continues. There's a good bit of reality slipping out around the rhetoric.

Meanwhile, there are also other things to think about. I direct your attention to this post:

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2011/07/18/a-bit-of-lighthearted-fun/

Can even one member of Congress comprehend the rightness not to mention brilliance of this argument? I doubt it. Not when Kansas can actually outlaw all abortion clinics via the absurd lever of arbitrary building code standards designed specifically with all existing clinic buildings in mind, and Congress doesn't bother to stop its infernal angels on the head of a pin argument to send in the New York National Guard. Not when North Carolina's Legislature can actually write and pass a law (over our Governor's veto) requiring that women thinking of abortion must be "counseled" for at least 24 hours by people who by definition have utterly zero comprehension of the argument linked to above.

And the President doesn't act either. On this front Mr. Obama lags behind General Eisenhower fer gawd's sake! The "Markets," the Congress, the States, the President, the Countries of the Developed World--they all deserve a US default on Wednesday morning next. The only people who don't deserve it are the people who just struggle to survive, here and elsewhere. And they are the people not being represented in our Congress right now, even though they're supposed to be.

Remember "Isolationism"?

2011-07-30T08:32:00.000-04:00

Stalin

Back in the day, when I was taking a history class, there was a ribbon of a concept marbling the message called "isolationism." The isolationists, it was said, were folks who were on the "wrong side" of history, who didn't understand how the world worked. Coming out of the Second World War, isolationists were pretty much viewed as proven by history, that is the War, to have been utterly wrong. And their wrongness was grounded in their mistaken idea that America could be an isolated country, that we could somehow remain apart from the rest of the world's roiling. Isolationists were also in a fairly vague way (probably vague because to really cash all this in is impossible in one measly American History class--what is required is at least a PhD worth of study, including of course reading much thinking that had not, in the early '60s (when my class was taking place), even been written. Alternatively, one reads as the years roll by, as one can--and eventually things may become clearer. But I digress.)

In short, while it was clear that to be an isolationist was to be something of a potato-head of an American, we never delved into an analysis of just what being an isolationist is all about. As life ticked by, I did notice from time to time a new mention of the term, particularly as it related to economic matters. Mr. Clinton was a "globalist," not an isolationist. Thus, the US signed economic contracts with other countries, and our overall economy was more and more officially tied into the world economy--an officiality which let us stress because it's true, simply recognized the boots on the ground, as it were. There is a global economy, stupid. If you acknowledge and work with it, money gets made (by a lot of people). The Democratic Primary of 1992 included a conversation on the American relationship to the global economy. Mr. Harkin lost. Mr. Clinton won. During the general election the conversation continued, with Mr. Perot taking the "isolationist" position. Mr. Clinton again won.   Mr. Harkin and Mr. Perot both raised the issue of the wholesale export of American jobs--this issue was not addressed except to simply say that a global economy is a fact of life. ( This "fact" has never been analysed at the political level, in any detail--no efforts have been made to mitigate the terrific negative effect on the American economy and the American people of wholesale job export to the world labor market.)

But I think the idea that "isolationism" is just a stand-offish economic position very much misidentifies what isolationism is really all about, at its core. Isolationism is more deeply to be understood as a kind of egocentrism, the idea that Americans stand in some very special place and hold a special perspective.   Understood more deeply, isolationism can actually be the underpinning of acts which on the surface seem to engage with the world. Examples would include our war of choice in Iraq, not to mention our horrific meddling in the Reagan era in Central America, in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.

In Congress right now, isolationists are seizing the day. The most radical of them seem to believe that Americans are so special that we can actually change the laws of mathematics, for this is exactly what a "Balanced Budget Amendment" actually is. And anyone who continues to brush aside the danger to the country of people who believe a law requiring a balanced budget is possible ignores the obvious fact that many such believers are already now in power. It will only take the capture of the Senate and we will find our country hell bent on changing the laws of mathematics, as these same people have already tried by mere legal means to change the laws of physics and the realities of medicine (particularly when it comes to women's medicine).

There was a sad time when people who started out trying to fundamentally alter the deeply terrible conditions in Russia ended up writing false sciences and histories, and imagining that they could simply erase knowledge and thus obliterate their deeper and deeper crimes. Their world was tangential with that of Hitler's--two great iron wheels grinding against each other and lubricated with the flesh and blood of millions of innocent Europeans trapped in their orbits. These days our Congress is trying to blot out scientific inquiry on a number of fronts by simply defunding agencies dedicated to such fields. This is an isolationist bent.

At its core, isolationism is authoritarian. It is the Daddy, putting a stop to this foolishness, snipping the credit card in two, spanking the recalcitrant child. It is the edict that people who do not "produce" shouldn't vote anyway. And since authoritarians actually admire authority, it is the bizarre notion that only the wonderfully rich people can create jobs. When the jobs don't appear, the authoritarian simply grovels and presents yet another offering. More subtle concepts, such as "demand," simply evaporate from the mind's eye.

Fundamentally, isolationism is arbitrary.   It is a presumed singularity. We are special. And the "we" tends to be tribal--one feature of the campaign of fear that began with the election of a black man to the Presidency in 2008. We all have a tribal gene, which can be massaged and appealed to. Many of us, perhaps particularly those of us who yearn for an authoritarian solution to life, can find that tribal evocation seductive. And thus a body of foot soldiers, Tea Partiers, arises.

And so we are here, on the cusp of a possible isolationist revolution in our political dimension. One House to go. And don't be surprised if these isolationists don't decide that attacking Iran makes sense too, down the road, or even Pakistan. Economies before ours have been militarized as a presumed solution to chronic unemployment. Since the isolationist believes that we are singular and special, we therefore have a "right" to deal with countries around the world who prove to be irritants, rocks in our sandals, argumentative.

For further reading and better, see James Fallows:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/07/five-reasons-the-house-gop-is-to-blame/242673/

Barking the Squirrel Down

2011-07-27T09:18:00.001-04:00

bssda.webs.com

Once upon a time I saw a squirrel get barked out of a tree by a pack of dogs. The squirrel was entirely safe. The dogs couldn't climb the tree. This is pretty much what is going on now with this deficit and debt panic. President Obama is already nearly out of the tree too. Meanwhile--the news media coverage notwithstanding--the facts remain. The tree is solid and safe. The dogs can't climb. Here's a link, from last Sunday's New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24editorial_graph2.html?ref=sunday

You may also recall that Republicans very much wanted the Bush Tax Cuts not to expire--for some reason in December, 2010, there was no debt or deficit crisis. Meanwhile, last Friday Congress shut down the FAA, a little-noted event given all the coverage devoted to the "debt crisis." Some 1200 post offices are also going to be closed down due to budget issues.

Most pundits I've read still predict a last minute resolution of some kind. Wall Street, it is opined, will simply not "allow" the country to teeter on default, or actually go over that precipice. But Wall Street seems to be entirely unable to explain to the people it helped elect last year that the Federal Government cannot be understood as simply a big family, where dad cuts the credit card up when sis buys too many pairs of tight jeans without his permission. Indeed, as Obama did point out in one of his attempts to direct the American people towards reality, the debt ceiling "issue" is about paying for stuff we've already bought, not about new spending. Even in the false Iowa Family metaphor Mrs. Bachmann's shrill voice invokes hourly (snipping with her most articulate fingers an imaginary credit card, for all to visualize), Dad is going to have to pay for those jeans, because sis has worn them twice, they've been washed, and there's a catsup stain on one knee.

Or maybe, in Bachmann world, the jeans go back anyways. Not to any store I know about. As most people know, reality is a stern teacher. Much of the government's efforts go into softening the blows that reality will be happy to met out, all things being equal. If the debt limit isn't raised, it might be better for the country as a whole to pay treasury bond interest, than to pay social security recipients. At that point, perhaps the rank and file tea party people--not finding their needed check in the mailbox--may begin to wonder what they actually have signed up for. Ain't no doubt a passle of tea party members do get those checks, and use Medicare. You can see the demographics in the photos.

While I certainly don't want to see such an eventuality, I have to wonder what the hell is really going on these days. Shutting down the FAA is not even making the news.

Thursday morning update: NPR yesterday was musing that wasn't it amazing that America could ever get even so close as it is to a default, being as how we're so amazingly sophisticated about these things, not to mention rich. Seems like NPR forgets that the nation that brought us the most sophisticated music, physics, philosophy, and theology in the western world blossomed in the late 1920s into systematic extermination of their own citizens and a military conflagration that killed some 50 million people and left their own country utterly flattened. Obviously we do not have a vaccine against crazy. OBVIOUSLY. The procession of events in one of our most sensible, educated states, Wisconsin, should give all pause. Even NPR. Michele Bachmann is an elected representative from another of our most sensible, educated states, Minnesota--a state which also put a professional wrestler in as Governor. And of course I'm not living in some glass house around these parts--my benighted state gave the world Jesse Helms, and more recently, Rep. Virginia Fox, who sits squarely in the hen house now, on the Finance Committee. (The NPR musing was going on on the Diane Rehm show, by the way, where Alice Rivlin, who used to be sharper, evoked the "both of 'em do it" meme on the grounds that the Simpson-Bowles Commission Report, of which she was a signatory, was pretty much ignored back in January.)

In the larger perspective the public continues to be played. While everything focuses on a phony crisis that at best will be ended by Presidential Invocation of the 14th Amendment, our voting rights are being dismembered at the state level via i.d. laws which are going to change voting demographics significantly. Meanwhile the Supreme Court considers whether the Civil Rights Voting Laws are now irrelevant. Ha. The only people who can seriously deny that racism still flourishes in the United States are themselves racists, and people who seem capable of living in denial on many fronts these days. Voter ID laws are the new strategy in the age old game of stopping all but the privileged from getting to vote.

Amy Winehouse--'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky

2011-07-24T10:46:00.000-04:00

I got this link from Edroso:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2011/07/amy_winehouse_obituary.php

Nice youtube clips of her performances, and a sensitive comment on her life.

"Barbarians"

2011-07-20T07:03:00.004-04:00

Jerry Lee, from sweetlyrics.com

From selfstyledsiren's wonderful blog:

The Siren hasn’t been able to track down exactly how The Rains Came made it past the Production Code’s miscegenation clause. This grimly simple statement (“Miscegenation (sex relationship between the black and white races) is forbidden”) was long interpreted as barring interracial love affairs whether they came via script or casting. (The rule cost Anna May Wong the lead in The Good Earth, scuttled Lena Horne’s chances for Show Boat, and was no doubt a big reason for Merle Oberon’s silence on her own Indian roots.)

Recognize the underlying attitude in this film code from America's recent past? It's exactly the same tone taken by Mrs. Bachmann's husband in his comments on dealing with teens who might think they're gay. It's the good old, tried and true solution, stretching back to when power was the only law. Since those pre-historic days humans have struggled to find better solutions--at least some of them have struggled. There have always been others who never see anything at all wrong with the old answers, and strive to employ them whenever they feel the need, using whatever "justifications" might be easily at hand. Some talk about saving "marriage." Others about saving "civilization." It ain't nothing but Jerry Lee Lewis chunking a shot glass at the head of a Roger Miller sideman who asks him to play a song he's fuckin' tired of playing. (Read the book, "King of the Road," for the details, and by the way, I love Jerry Lee Lewis.) Everyone is susceptable to attacks of lizard brain, given the right circumstances. After all, if anybody was a barbarian, it was Jerry Lee.

But when politicians start down this road, it's a red light for voters, or should be. Not that Bachmann is anything more than bits of tinfoil fluttering down behind the B-24 fleet. The real election questions are more subtle. It's becoming obvious. Mr. Obama is indeed going to give in to serious alterations in the structure of both social security and medicare, even in the face of the mathematical fact that a simple end to the cap on social security taxes at $100K would end the long-term problems the program now faces--a solution favored by large majorities of Americans. What, I have to wonder, are the implications of that for folks who otherwise might re-elect him next year. It really is quite possible that disillusion will become a major player in 2012, even given that allowing the dangerous fanatics who are now the Republican Party to gain full power will lead to certain disaster for the Republic. Depression is a powerful force. Depressed people kill themselves. And that's another rise of the lizard brain I think one could say.

Friday Update. Virginia's right-wing Governor's abrupt about-face on the debt ceiling issue, coming mere seconds after Moody's threatens to degrade Virginia's credit rating, is hilarious, and another example of the shot-glass method. It all goes back in the end to the voters gaining more judgement--and not falling for impossible promises. Running a competent government without appropriate tax revenues is utterly impossible. Only people who want an incompetent government want such a situation to obtain--these would be right-wing oligarchs and their syncophants--people who are cunning like Norquist and Rove, or simply stupid but articulate, Hannity and Limbaugh being the latter examples. Ever tried to have a real conversation with a used-car salesman? They might have some sales skills and know how to "close" (which is what successful browbeating is called in the trade). They don't necessarily know shit. Anyways, the Va Gov's pirouette is the first evidence I've seen that the debt ceiling will be allowed to rise. Too bad Moody's didn't act six months ago. Wonder if there's an internal memo somewheres in the Moody's offices titled "Whole Lotta Shakin'". None of these people should be paid a dime for wasting all this time on nothing. They're supposed to be at work for "the people." And I sure would like to hear the conversation between Rep. Cantor and the Va Guv. One of 'em is now twisting slowly in the wind.

Sorry Mr. Chairman

2011-07-18T06:47:00.003-04:00

Bolton, Watt, Murdoch statue--not the same guys you think

I'll just pass along this fine grab from Fox News, hard hitting journalism division, courtesy of Ataturk:

http://rising-hegemon.blogspot.com/2011/07/hard-hitting-journalism-foxnews-style.html

The other pretty hilarious quote I happened to catch on the coverage of Fox News's hall of mirrors was that highly intellectual discussion of how "we" have a hacking problem generally, that it's not particularly important whether we're talking about Fox or Murdoch's various other facets of empire, or your friendly corner bank, or that nice nuclear plant down the road. Except, strangely (not), no mention in this sweeping upwards arc into the metasphere of the fact that in the Murdoch empire case, it was the empire that was DOING the hacking.

I won't be a bit surprised to hear the various radio stooges repeating this blatant distraction posing as argument either. If I'm stupid enough to turn them on I mean. I'm trying to resist that stupidity, since the entire point of doing that (turning them on) is just to find out what new lie is coming round the bend. Mr. Edroso and Mr. Riley actually do a good job of sending out the alerts, not to mention Driftglass.

In that regard--the alerts I mean--check out alicublog's piece on the sludge of racist comment which swamped the Village Voice comments section devoted to Edroso's column last week:

http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2011_07_01_archive.html#6543097610104557780

I guess it's been decided that it's time to amp all that stuff up again--what Edroso calls the "ooga-booga". Maybe they're hoping that'll distract from the erosion of Murdoch's pedestal, or possibly even the debt ceiling thing, which ought by now to be a ten ton anchor around the GOP's leg.

Update for Tuesday morning. I did listen a bit to Hannity yesterday on the drive home. He was "conversing" with Sen. McCain. McCain, who keeps one foot attached to reality (probably due to his war experiences), kept saying the GOP had to find a way out of the debt ceiling issue. Hannity, talking as though he had any responsibility at all (which he doesn't), said he was against any compromise not tied to a balanced budget amendment. McCain, proving once again why he should never have been elected to anything much, didn't walk of the show in disgust. Later on, after I got home, I watched Matthews "converse" with Norquist, who evaded all responsibility for the debt ceiling crisis even though he's cooked up this "pledge" which apparently serves to shackle the few Republicans who have any common sense into the same corner.

In spite of much optimism on the left that the debt ceiling will be raised, I personally think it's not that likely. Too many Republicans have lost their minds. If it all plays out in this negative and foolish way, one would hope that the paymasters who bought this band of authoritarian fantasists will themselves find some unhappiness. It's probably more likely that they're all simply selling short, and see more tidy profits from the various worldwide miseries that will ensue should we suffer a national bankruptcy. That's what "too big to fail" really means.

Well Good

2011-07-17T08:48:00.002-04:00


Roger and wife, natnotes.com

Bravo:

http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/extras/extra_bases/2011/07/clemens_defense.html

I was never much of a Roger Clemens fan, although he was certainly an interesting figure in baseball. However, the idea that a man who spent almost his whole life (so far) focused on mastering the art of pitching should end up in his late forties facing the possibility of actually going to jail because he equivocated to Congress, well that's just amazingly absurd. To Congress? How is lying to liars any kind of crime? Not that one shouldn't tell the truth under oath and all, but really, there ought to be some perspective, somewheres, otherwise the whole public show of law and trials and all just becomes so entirely kabuki that order is utterly molecularized, which anyways may be more the case than we hate to think. So, as the curtain comes down on this, it is actually a wonderful, optimistic conclusion we are delivered. Read the article cited at the start. The prosecutor got the trial quashed by introducing evidence he was already ordered not to introduce, in his opening statement no less. It's over. Clemens will probably never get into the Hall of Fame--none of the steroids guys will apparently, even though Ty Cobb is in there. That's just a Hall of Fame for ya. And I'd think Clemens is probably out of the advertising bidness pert much. So what. If he wants to work with young pitchers, I'll bet he'll land a job one some club or other. Maybe the Dodgers could use him. He's in reasonably decent shape. Better than O.J., another case of some justice being delivered albeit out of left field and probably more Roy Bean than William O. Brennan. As Charles Pierce points out, the steroid scandal is not the Black Sox scandal: the men who took steroids were, after all, trying to win.

Meanwhile, Kyle won his 100th Nascar race at the age of 26. Personally, I liked the big 100 flag he paraded around the track with better than Kez's attempt to bogart the stars and stripes. The other Kyle grumbles about this, but Mr. Busch isn't saying he's Kyle Petty's daddy. And since these guys race till they're past 50, Mr. Busch might well hit some of those bigger milestones before he's done. I thought Mr. Harvick, yesterday, was rather pathetic, whining about how he wasn't allowed to wreck Mr. Busch as Mr. Busch drove past him to victory, never touching his car, not doing anything but out-racing him. Maybe Mr. Harvick ought to just give it a rest, or go home and watch that moment last year when he wrecked Busch at Homestead, gratuitously as he said later, and savor Mr. Busch somewhat desperately departing his flaming car before he got incinerated. The film is forever. "He raced me like a clown," Harvick smiled later, to the reporters. Well, yesterday in NH, it was Busch who was racing the crying clown I guess. Busch knew it too. "It wasn't passing Stenhouse that won it," he said. "It was passing Harvick." Yep.

What If It's All Private

2011-07-15T06:24:00.001-04:00

I was watching one of those ads that are on constantly, about how we all need some private security system installed for mere pennies a day, to keep the bad guys from breaking into our homes while we're out working to pay for them and the stuff they contain. It's a pretty good ad. Features a frightened child being comforted by a visually perfect mom. And I sort of vaguely realized that this was the privatization of the police. You subscribe, you get protection. Otherwise, not so much, particularly as the police are more and more starved of funds and equipment. It's just like with schools, health care, etc. The notion of "common good" is shrinking to the size of a pin.

That's the plan:
http://www.truth-out.org/publicopoly-exposed/1310660473

Hopefully people will recall, before it's too late, that private security forces have been well tested in places far more dangerous--so far at least--than the U.S. The test results were not particularly comforting.
*
Meanwhile, a relative moderate writing in the New Republic of all places offers some perspective on the people who are trying to hold our economy hostage via the debt ceiling issue:

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/91886/the-republican-crazy-not-act

From all the evidence, they really do think it's just like when a bread-winner gets laid off (something they saw in the movies, and mostly in black and white--and they never saw "Make Way for Tomorrow" of course). You just prioritize. You pay off these bills, and you make those bills wait. Natch. Meanwhile, in the real world, real laid off bread-winners, the sharp ones, are climbing telephone poles and cutting the third wire, the neutral, for the copper that's up to $3.25 a pound. For example I mean. The stupid ones cut the wrong wire. Kinda like how we went into Iraq to get the oil, dontcha know.

Way Back When

2011-07-14T07:06:00.000-04:00

Pete Maravich, 1970

Hey, remember when those awful SEIU goons beat up that nice black man who was giving away American flags at a Tea Party rally in St. Louis, back a couple of years. Vaguely, right? Well, he had his day in court, and Tbogg reports the results here:

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2011/07/12/beat-me-in-st-louis/

I don't think the results are too surprising, and Mr. Tbogg also points to the lameness of various rejoinders offered. But the problem for people trying to keep a realistic eye on life is, this stuff is an endless onslaught, a daily flood of lies. And look how long it takes for even one of these lies to get quashed by reality. In this case, two years and counting. Meanwhile, the folks who think they can invent a right wing reality by just snapping their fingers together and believing continue on. Yesterday on the news I heard both Michelle Bachmann and Rep. Steven King say that the debt ceiling is not really an issue--that default cannot happen, and that anyway, it's just like balancing a family's checkbook, this international web of financial transactions that we live in and that orders our economic life. There's also intense lobbying on the Right for a balanced budget amendment--one of the stupidest ideas ever, but of course that's just like the family check book.

Maybe legislators need a degree in economics as a qualification for office? Oh right--too late for that too, because the Right has built its own universities now, with their own "degrees." It all goes back to the time, probably around 1970, when "Oral Roberts University" actually fielded an NCAA men's basketball team which made it to the big Tourney. That moment probably mattered even more than Watergate.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1084347/index.htm

The So-Called Green House Effect

2011-07-13T06:45:00.001-04:00

worldwatts.com

A fairly short fellow down at the Texaco used to tell me that CO-2 was not a "green house gas" because it only "operated" close to the ground. He was right too. If you go up in an air plane, even a few thousand feet, it'll be a lot colder. My dad used to fly biplanes, which had open cockpits of course. He nearly froze one day when he went up without a heavy coat because it was hot on the ground. And this was back in 1920 or so, well before anyone but a British scientist had even thought of the problem of global warming. Anyways, "Shortie" might get a kick out of this article:

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/35266.html

(You have to click the link in the article I have linked to get to the article claiming that toxic emissions will "cure" the green house problem. Of course this might be a true argument, such as it is. Unless the emissions are themselves greenhousey and do their own reflecting of heat. As this experiment is being conducted on the real planet, no doubt our kids will probably find out.)
*
Meanwhile, "gmta" as the kids say on the internet tubes. Libby and I had many of the same thoughts last night as we watched the cited footage. Quell droll. Sacre Bleu, Sgt. Preston:

http://www.ginandtacos.com/2011/07/13/closets-getting-full/

(We were more in the psychological mode on this, wondering if there wasn't quite a bit of projection in an ostentatious effort to "pray away the gay.") However you slice it, something's definitely up. Further evidence is our local right wing morning talk extravaganza, which was already yesterday morning making heated efforts to distinguish between the gotcha "journalism" of Mr. O'Keefe and company and the ABC undercover piece on the Bachmann clinic. I wondered why they were devoting so much time to it. It's called a fire line.

Half Moon

2011-07-11T07:00:00.001-04:00

Bahman Ghobadi

I watched a beautiful, tragic movie yesterday called "Half Moon," directed by the Persian director Bahman Ghobadi (who has also done the wonderful "No One Knows about Persian Cats.") Half Moon is a story that morphs subtly into an allegory about the tragedy of the kurdish people, divided perhaps forever by three different national borders, all of which house non-kurdish majorities who find these people difficult and generally a problem--so much so that now and again one country or another (Iran, Iraq, Turkey) decides to wipe a few thousand of them from the face of the planet. It's the story of cultural minorities everywhere of course. If you are different, some people find that annoying, or incomprehensible, or frightening. And of course politicians have always found scapegoats handy levers to power. The list of examples is endless.

In Half Moon the "plot" involves a venerated Kurdish composer, Mano, who gathers many of his sons together along with one wonderful woman singer to perform a concert in newly freed Iraqi Kurdistan. They travel by bus through this remarkable, ancient, rocky mountain wilderness, reaching at one point a mountain top with a sign pointing to all three national states--an area otherwise totally barren and without any mark of civilization. On their trip they come upon many remarkable sights--one of the most remarkable being a city of stone houses where thousands of women singers have been exiled. Mano has to bribe a guard to even enter the place--but there he finds his singer and takes her on the trip to the concert. All this, too, is a metaphor for the tragedy of women in this area of the world. Mano tells us that 1334 women have been exiled in this place, and all sing with one voice.

So the trip progresses. It does not end with a wonderful concert, but in a nightmare vision of failed efforts to reach Iraq. Indeed, this part of the movie is such a nightmare that I had nightmares of a similar sort, concerning such activities as appearing on stage in concert only to discover that I had no memory of the words to a song I was about to start singing. We all understand this kind of anxiety dream of course. It's the "Oh fuck, I don't have any pants on" dream. But I think we all should try to see these films from places in the world (such as Iran) where at the moment we have only the anxieties conferred on us by our political leaders, and the implications we draw, right or wrong, from events like the 9/11 attack.

An American director would not make a film like this, I don't think. Not, at least, about Americans as a people. This is a film about a beautiful dream which is in the end thwarted by larger forces, and in the face of many indications that the dream will be fulfilled. Mano's "muse," a beautiful young woman named "Half Moon" who was born in the border region, does not manage to get him to the concert, though the film ends in some ambiguity, which amounts to hope. There are strains of "I have seen the promised land--I may not be there with you." The kurds are a people for whom hope is mostly a necessary delusion. While certainly Americans have experienced this existential reality in specific circumstances, it is only American minorities who have known the bite of this qua their identities. ( Oh, and of course American women know it, and are seeing once again their dreams of equal status being dashed by political and religious forces that for various reasons object to the idea that a woman has the fundamental right to own her own body. But that's something of another story.)

Half Moon is a beautiful movie about the Kurdish dream, filmed in the kurdish landscape. It should give any viewer much insight into another part of the planet--a place different from here, but not ultimately foreign. It's the politicians who trade in the "foreign," and who see places like this as primarily about the mineral content of the terrain, the people inhabiting it being distractions or impediments to be brushed aside. This journey starts with the elimination of Saddam. During the trip, Americans shoot at the travellers. So it goes.

Keep an eye out for the next Ghobadi film. He's simply wonderful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahman_Ghobadi

So Tax is Theft?

2011-07-08T07:11:00.004-04:00


Rand Paul, R, Kentucky

I'm probably going to write about this at some length, but for now here's just a little starter. I've heard quite a number of "conservatives" assert that "tax is theft." If so, what is it when some guys kick down your door and steal all your stuff? And are you just calling more thieves when you call the cops to report the crime? When we get done with this tax is theft policy the GOP is putting into practice, there won't be any more cops to call. Meanwhile, the fact will remain--people will make every effort to survive, and for some, kicking down your door is exactly what that effort entails.

*
It's Saturday now, and getting towards 95 outside, with more or less 100% humidity, plus a veritable bloom of midsummer ticks, both the big'uns and the teenincy ones. Might as well carry on with this here in the kitchen, with a cup of coffee and a doughnut.

What worries me, and particularly about the future as the generation now in its 20s and 30s faces it, is that this destructive ignorance which seems to be carrying the day with regard to our shared social world--our life as Americans if you like--is demolishing important and subtle features of life which it took many decades to create, and at a time when most people did believe in the "common good." Today, on every hand, are examples of this ignorace knighted with power that simply boggle the mind. Just this morning I read a transcript of some congressional conversation concerning cuts in Social Security which used, as an example, the wonderful, shoulder-shrugging idea that "if you can't afford a Mercedes, well, just by an Acura this time around." Hey, great idea. Where's my head-slap key. In fact, real people are choosing between getting that hurting tooth fixed and getting enough food in the house to last till the next month's red letter day--the day that next little social security check arrives. People talk about gramps moving in with the kids as though even that is at least an option--might be, but only if you have kids and if they aren't going to be sent over their own edge by such an eventuality.

Then, over at another place in this squeezed balloon, we're now fine with totally messing up a child's life just because their parents came here when they were an infant looking for work (and maybe they were in that boat because some rich people in America decided the NAFTA law was a great idea?) Just sayin'. I saw a moment the other day where a sweet little 9 year old girl was having to translate her parents through a complicated situation because neither of them could speak enough English to get what was happening. Let's think about that, shall we. First, this little kid sure does have a lot of responsibility on her--how'd that affecting her childhood? Second, she's speaking English just like a "native," and that's because she is one to all intents and purposes. So what happens to her if her mom and dad get arrested for not having documents?

And why is that the current state of affairs in America, that we would ever think blowing up a child's family was ok, and particularly in pursuit of some abstract concept defined as "well, they shouldn't have walked across the desert with their baby 8 years ago just to get a job they desperately needed to survive. They should have jumped through all the hoops, period." If they didn't, well it's just too bad for this little earnest child who deserves a medal for bravery and courage, and might well grow up to be as fine an American as we could ever imagine. Where are these selfish people coming from? (And why do so many of them claim in the most strident of voices to be Christian, of all things?)

It's a great concern to me that our Democratic President is apparently willing to collaborate with these champions of selfishness and self-concern. Who's going to make a stand if not Mr. Obama? Certainly no one in the Republican Presidential Hopeful ranks. All they offer, every one, is arguments justifying cruelty, selfishness, self-servingness, and the general attitude that each person fending for himself is the true American Way. There are so many arguments to this awful conclusion that I think millions of our fellow citizens--worried as I am about the future--just memorize this stuff as an aid to better digestion and sleep.

If it's all torn down, this already tattered social fabric, does any one think it will be reparable? This isn't like a bridge in Minneapolis, or a tornado ravaged town in Missouri. And there are other symptoms--symptoms which indicate to me that the big money already owns the whole game. Consider that last week gas taxes went up about $.02 on the dollar. I don't know what happened where you live, but here in central NC, gas prices immediately went up about a dime. What's that, if not a clear message to government--Do not mess with us, we will hurt you back, and instantly. Seems like the oil companies might see it another way--that our oil-dependent world is their cash cow, that in a way they owe us for their success. Exxon keeps setting profit records, year after year. And they probably also chip in a few million to people who can articulately sneer at any idea which might mitigate our oil dependence. The result? It's physics: try taxing them and they'll cube the tax right back at the consumer, and give Mrs. Soccer Mom a nice free pamphlet with her fill up suggesting that her gas price might go down if she votes for folks who want to drill the continental shelf. And it's all codified now, via Citizens United.

It's going to be an interesting month, August. We haven't even started watching the hurricane map around here, and I'm still heating with the trees that Fran knocked down in '96. Here's something you can do at this very moment. It might matter:

http://www.credoaction.com/campaign/obama_debt_ceiling/?rc=homepage

The Endless Manipulation

2011-07-03T09:45:00.001-04:00

from topleftpixel.com

Just read this piece, from Edroso:

http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2011_07_01_archive.html#2368099410783931700

Maybe we're really geezer nation--a land of short-term memory loss, where the problems are all about finding the dang grocery store where we left it yesterday, on some street that has changed over night, trees in different places, new parking lots, a freeway over pass that definitely was NOT there yesterday. Who can remember anymore anything so abstract as how to think about firefighters. And anyways, you have to be careful to stay out of the way of their speeding trucks, with those awful sirens. What's my phone number? Where are my keys?

A Patriotic Post

2011-07-02T07:38:00.003-04:00


Fireball Roberts, 1961

I'm sure this isn't my original idea. Why doesn't Congress close out its fantastic health care insurance program and come join the rest of us in the real medical system of the U.S. of A. It seems to me that, at the moment, far too many in Congress think they are among the "elite" in America, and are legislating in that vein, "from above" as it were. But there is no "elite" in America, not officially, and certainly not endowed by vote. The people who represent us should be "of us," that way they'll have a much better idea of how we as a people live. The folks who think they are "above," mostly by virtue of their bank accounts, are in fact flat wrong. While these folks will probably always encourage legislators to think they are also "elite," it's actually pretty sad when legislators fall for that. (Not to mention a whole dang party.)

That's it for today. The Firecracker 400 ought to be pretty good--check it out tonight.

[photo from www.floridastockcars.com]

Update: just read this post:

http://www.slate.com/id/2298195/pagenum/all/#p2

The thing about people with money is, they have the leverage to create faux realities, such as fake think tanks or even fake news networks. After a while, nobody in the real world knows what's going on. I'll bet Ms Lohan didn't even get paid to further the cause either, poor dear--and as a celebrity, her "tweets" have value. Surely she deserved at least a case of single malt, for the cold winter days ahead. Ain't rite.

Update--the Firecracker 400 (I emphasize "cracker") was excellent. Jeff Gordon pushed Kyle Busch (my main man) to 5th place. A really good shew.

Benton Flippen

2011-06-29T17:32:00.004-04:00

From Music Maker Relief Foundation

The great Mt. Airy fiddler Benton Flippen died yesterday. He was one of the last of the generation of musicians who influenced me and my friends, as we strove to learn old-time fiddling at the various fiddlers conventions and front porches we visited in the "upland South" of the late '60s and early '70s. Benton replaced Fred Cockerham in the Smokey Valley Boys. Some act that! From the email today:

"In 1990, Flippen received the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award, an annual award that was presented by the NC Arts Council to recognize traditional NC artists. He was an innovator of a distinctive style of old-time string music, utilizing double-stops (playing two notes at once), slides and a strong rhythmic bowing technique. Some of the best old-time string bands have adopted several of his tunes. Flippen is also renowned for his original compositions which include "Benton's Dream," "Fiddler's Reel," "Sally in the Turnip Patch," and "Smokey Valley Breakdown."

"Flippen was raised on a farm in Surry County, North Carolina, where he first played the banjo during his childhood. His father was an accomplished old time banjo picker, as were his uncles and brothers. As a youth, he visited his fiddling uncle John Flippen and quickly turned to playing the fiddle. Soon after, he started playing with the area's noted bands and musicians, among them the Green Valley Boys led by Glenn McPeak, and Esker Hutchins and Leak Caudill. Hutchins became an important influence on Flippen's fiddling style, which includes a heavy bow shuffle and bluesy notation.

"In the late 1960s, Flippen was invited to fiddle in the Camp Creek Boys after Fred Cockerham's departure. From the 1970s on, Flippen belonged to the Smokey Valley Boys, an outfit that has preserved Flippen's unique musical abilities on recordings. The band also earned awards at numerous fiddling competitions before disbanding in 1985. In the late 1990s Flippen reorganized his Smokey Valley Boys with new and previous members. The current lineup of his band often includes Frank Bode singing and playing guitar, William Flippen (Benton's grandson) on guitar, Kevin Fore playing banjo, Verlin Clifton on mandolin, and Andy Edmonds playing banjo and guitar.

"Flippen was a celebrated fiddler in his own right, earning first place in numerous fiddle and band contests, including the Old Fiddlers' Convention in Galax, Virginia; Union Grove/Fiddler's Grove, where he won Fiddler of the Festival three times; the Mount Airy Fiddlers Convention, and many others. He also played at the Newport Folk Festival; the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee; the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes; the Smithsonian Institution; the Library of Congress; the Appalachian String Band Music Festival in Clifftop, Fayette County, West Virginia; and many other highly esteemed venues. He headlined the Berkeley Old Time Music Convention in California just three years ago at the age of 88!

"His CD Fiddlers' Dream is available on CD Baby; he had six CDs to his credit, starting with 1972's The Smokey Valley Boys on the Heritage label. He also had Benton Flippen: Old Time, New Times with Rounder Records. Fiddler's Dream, his last studio album, was produced by Music Maker. He and the Smokey Mountain Boys gathered at the historic mountain music radio station WPAQ in Mount Airy, NC to do some recording, a night captured on the CD Benton Flippen & the Smokey Mountain Boys: An Evening at WPAQ, 1984."

David Holt interviews Benton Flippen, & Flippen plays "Cripple Creek" on the banjo

Benton Flippen plays "Benton's Dream"

Music Maker Announcement of Flippen's death

I wrote the liner notes to one of Benton's albums back in the '70s. He had a tremendously economical bowing style considering he was playing very rhythmic, Round Peak music. He owned the Galax Fiddlers Convention for decades it seemed like. And why the hell not--he replaced Fred Cockerham fer gawd's sake! Certainly a great tree has fallen.

Hannity--A Pointless Exercise

2011-06-28T07:05:00.000-04:00

Ok, it was totally my responsibility to turn on the damn car radio on the way home and then not change the channel when Hannity's show arrived from the aether. They were talking about the excellent decision in New York last week--"they" being some guy from the so-called "family research council," a group that would be fine with gassing teh gay one and all on grounds of "improving the race," Mr. Hannity as "moderator", meaning a person who jumps in and mangles the affirmative side's sensible rejoinders, and then the other side herself, a very articulate woman named Sally, a lawyer no less, and a member of a same-sex relationship with children. I went to Hannity's websites this morning to try to find her name, as Sally did a bang up job under the circumstances--no luck. Mr. Hannity's website is just as fucked up as his phony talk show--that is, what Mr. Hannity produces daily is the illusion of conversation masking pure right-wing masturbation, period, end of story.

In this particular instance Mr. Hannity had nothing to stand on at all--as the whole anti-same-sex marriage thing has never had anything going for it other than to stimulate lizard-brain hate for homosexuals. Since a very big state has now ratified the obvious--that the right to marry should be applied equally--Hannity and the so-called Christian representative were changing tacks--yesterday the question was, is this really all right for "the children." When Sally objected that she had children, she was chided: "let's not personalize this." Yeah.

The thing is, people who still live in a sane, human universe should just stop going on Mr. Hannity's phony conversations. Sally should have said "fuck you" and walked off the show, after Hannity had patronized her the first time. Instead, like a person who makes every effort to engage with the "other side" in the hopes of finding common ground, she ignored, again and again, Hannity's no-holds-barred diminution of her personally and kept soldiering on, focused on the alleged subject of the show.

All this did, in the end, was allow Hannity to produce yet another faux conversation, as "fair and balanced" as a 2-ton anchor around your ankle. It is simply not worth the breath. Right wing radio is all propaganda, 24-7. As highly trained salespersons, they are, one and all, capable of demolishing most people of good will--because they have no good will at all. And that's the Mussolini rejoinder.

Meanwhile--more cudos to New York State. What the right says about same-sex marriage may become moot.

Remarkable

2011-06-26T08:32:00.001-04:00

http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2009/11/winter-apples.html

According to a detailed report at FireDogLake, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Prosser physically assaulted a fellow justice (and a woman at that) prior to his upholding the "budget" law designed this past spring by Governor Walker and passed under dubiously legal circumstances by the Wisconsin Legislature. Here's a link to the story at firedog:

http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/06/25/wisconsin-supreme-court-justice-prosser-choked-colleague-before-anti-union-decision/

As you can read in the piece, much has yet to be fact-checked. On the other hand, no clear denials are forthcoming from Justice Prosser, and one has to wonder if one is simply a reasonable person. And once again, I have to note that this sort of exchange is basically a hallmark of authoritarianism--fascism if you will. We're seeing a lot of this these days, in a lot of contexts. Too many seem to think that if things aren't going their way, it's time to choke, punch, and even shoot. As Mussolini said to the reporter when asked what his first act would be upon becoming the Supreme Leader of Italy--"Why, to kill you." I've quoted that before. I just think it's a striking illustration of the moment when dialog becomes something else--something not about ideas any more.

I hope someone somewhere is working on a book about how all these right-wing governors and legislatures cooked up this state-by-state mini-revolution that's now underway. I find it very hard to imagine that it was just "in the air," although perhaps the ground-swell of Tea Party activism which preceded last fall's elections really lifted all these people to at least temporary power. Certainly plenty of people at the Tea Party rallies were capable of living in immediate inconsistency: there was more than one quote along the lines of "get government out of health care, but hands off my Medicare." Humans are more than capable of living in profound inconsistency.

Indeed, just yesterday I was reading a shocking article in the New Yorker* concerning a woman who refused ever to admit she was mentally ill and who eventually was discharged from an institution in New Hampshire and subsequently starved to death living in an empty house, enthralled and distracted by her fantasies. She wrote a journal describing her life to the bitter end, and survived for months only on apples until they finally ran out. This true story reflects a general trend in the ongoing "contest," if you like, between a law of absolutes and a psychiatry which deals with what we actually find here in the world--complexity and shadows. The woman's sister is suing the hospital for discharging her without any word to anyone in her family. The hospital, grounded in many legal decisions handed down since the '70s, believed they were simply following the woman's wishes and decisions: the woman, "Linda," refused all treatment, asserted that she had no mental illness, believed her sister was controlling, stood firmly on her right to "liberty" as she walked out the door with pocket change and no plan of survival. The question--perhaps forever an open one--is where "decisions" can be judged by others to be so misguided as to be overruled--even at peril to some absolute "freedom" that we also all support here in the USofA. It's a conundrum, that's for sure, and it exists not only at the personal level, but at the level of the body politic. Let us not forget: Hitler was elected. Thus, in a real sense the rubble that was Germany in the fall of 1945 was a result of the will of the people of Germany.

I mentioned the fine conversation with Billy Wilder I happened to watch the other day on Turner Classics. Mr. Wilder had escaped Germany in 1933. He made a movie about the concentration camps in 1945. Germans walked out of it--until he tied their food ration card access to sitting through the film. His hope was that they would see--admit to themselves in other words--what had "really" happened. This was not an easy task. People would much rather deny painful truths. And frequently people actually succeed in denying--until some harsher reality simply asserts itself in its complete undeniability. The apples ran out and Linda starved to death. And right now, Congress withholds funding the EPA. Just sayin'.

*God Knows Where I Am, Annals of Mental Health, Rachel Aviv, New Yorker, May 30, 2011. [I've been told in conversations down at the Texaco that any reference to the New Yorker is suspect, because the New Yorker is a "liberal" source not to be trusted. I offer this footnotal anecdote as an example of the methodology of denial, living and breathing--indeed puffing on a cigaret--even here in Chatham County.]

Update: Ann Althouse has obliquely confirmed the news that Justice Prosser assaulted Justice Bradley last weekend. Here's the link:
http://firedoglake.com/2011/06/28/legal-scholar/
I take quibbling about who's "bigger" implies that the event is a fact and not some leftist smear.

Milestones

2011-06-25T08:19:00.001-04:00

Maryland Match Company

Libby woke me up in the night to tell me about New York's vote to make it legal for two people to marry. Here's Tbogg's take on this very significant moment:

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2011/06/24/our-hearts-were-young-and-gay/

There's a general principle hidden in there too, in a week in which the "other side," meaning those folks Tbogg mentions in his piece, have basically outlawed all abortion clinics in Kansas by virtue of the mischievous application of building codes. Odd that the very people who seem to relish this utter fantasy of Sharia Law being imposed on the US are themselves actually bringing Sharia Law to various of our states.

And at the national level, Mr. Cantor walks out on negotiations concerning the debt limit. I think Digby's probably exactly right on this--it's a kabuki dance, period. That's sad. It means Mr. Obama is thoroughly entangled, when he should be standing up for America and explaining clearly, every day, that the Republicans are bent on destroying the entire fabric of social programs which have been put in place since the '30s. At the very least, this really ought to be said: if the Debt Limit is not raised, it is Republicans who are blowing up a fragile economy, and their smarmy, misleading ads about Obama's record don't change that fact a bit. The rightwingers like to complain about Mr. Obama "apologizing" to world leaders (something he didn't do, by the way). But it's the rightwing that he's reticent about standing up to at the moment. Are they going to say, sometime towards next November, that it's Obama's fault because he didn't stop them from playing with matches? Answer: of course they will, and you heard it here first.

Teevee News

2011-06-23T06:36:00.001-04:00

Billy Wilder at work

Not the news "on" the teevee. Last night I happened to watch some of Thom Hartmann's show, waaaaay over on the Dish dial at 9415. (Bet you didn't even know there were four digit channels!) Thom, who blogs and has a radio show I believe, and is generally a thoughtful kinda guy, was trying to talk to two Gen X rightwingers about our collective future--which was immediately difficult since those two didn't recognize even the concept of "collective" or "community," or the idea that they were part of a conversation. Instead, it was the usual stuff--riding the talking points of the moment. Somehow, for example, corporations and the wealthy needed to be taxed less. I was embarassed for them, for a moment. There aren't any economists asserting the voodoo any more, and it's simply proven that you cannot fill up a vessel with a hole in the bottom. Factually speaking, if cutting taxes led to low unemployment and that shining city on the hill, we'd be there. Because all we've done is cut taxes. No one really believes the gigantic economic catastrophe that concluded the Bush II years was all the doing of one chubby gay Congressman.

(On the other hand, and reverting to a quick blog reference in a piece about the teevee, if you doubt the utter fantasy world American conservatives live in 24/7, read this short piece at Gin and Tacos:

http://www.ginandtacos.com/2011/06/23/thanks-for-the-oasis/

And now back to our commentary.)

I simply couldn't stand listening to this conversation for more than fifteen minutes or so. It's too depressing. Over on the Turner Classic channel I ran the schedule ahead a bit to see what was coming up. I'd already had the good fortune to catch the wonderful conversation with Billy Wilder which they ran earlier. If you can find that somehow, it's as good as it gets. Who else worked with the best talent of the '40s, '50s, and '60s, and made the best films of that era--or at least some of the best. Well, John Huston of course, and John Ford. Too bad they weren't there too. Anyways, running the Turner Classic schedule, I found that this weekend they're showing "Out of the Past," one of the best movies ever made, as well as an assortment of other Jane Greer vehicles. Hope you have time to at least watch "Out of the Past."

Oh, one of the interesting things in the Wilder interview was the reminder that Otto Preminger was the original Col. Klink. Wilder said many of the smaller players had been directed by Preminger in other films, and that apparently he was as dictatorial on set as in his role. When he wasn't looking they aped him constantly. The other interesting thing apropos "Stalag 17" was that Paramount suggested to Wilder that he make the spy (played by Peter Graves) Polish so as not to offend Germany, where Paramount expected the film to do very well. Wilder resigned over this issue, leaving the studio he'd made countless hit films for over some 18 years of work. It was refreshing to listen to a true realist.

http://thefedorachronicles.com/hollywood/Directors/BillyWilder.html

St. Anselm Would Be Proud

2011-06-22T06:52:00.000-04:00

http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2011/06/its-okay-fred-thompson-haley-barbour.html

The question is--why isn't our ordinary mainstream media making this point? The incoherence is so gigantic that it cannot be perceived from a human perspective is a possible answer. But then there's the equally enormous effort, made almost constantly and without ceasing by all of talk radio and Fox News, to obscure the obvious. And in this regard, big cudos to Jon Stewart, who actually put his finger right on the problem when he managed to cause Chris Wallace to leap visibly between the two meanings of "balanced", which are normally left to be part of the obscuring apparatus in their ambiguity:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/19/jon-stewart-fox-news-sunday-video_n_879964.html

(I note that already Stewart is being counter-attacked for suggesting that Fox viewers are more misinformed than, what, the "typical" viewer of news I suppose. While as a statistic this might be hard to rigorously defend, this rejoinder is a little beside the point given the exposed "balance ambiguity" and the obvious fact that we are all subject to constant misinformation by our media, mainstream and otherwise.)

ICE and the Dream Act

2011-06-19T08:54:00.002-04:00

after the flood of poultry jobs receded

Coupla years back our former county commissioners passed a resolution stating that our local constabulary would not be dragooned into enforcing federal immigration laws, with regard to our large and probably mostly undocumented Latino labor force. These folks--the undocumented labor force and their families I mean--had come to our rural county because poultry husbandry and processing had become big industries here, and there was a need for, um, very cheap labor. It is said that many of the processors advertised in Mexico for labor. Over a couple of decades our Hispanic population grew to many thousands, and this included thousands of children in our public school system--kids who'd come here as infants or very young children, who'd never really lived in Mexico or Latin America, who speak English as their mother tongue, who succeed in our schools, who aim for higher education and American life.

It grew politically convenient for Republicans to sturm und drang about this "illegal" menace. The resolution by our commissioners became a hot political issue. I recall vividly discussing the simple fact that thousands of these undocumented people--and their familes--were now established here, and that some mass effort to deport them would be obviously cruel and worse. I recall using the word "empathy" when having such discussions--and I recall my shock when the basic concept of "empathy" was derided as nothing more than an example of "bleeding heart liberalism." We have to put aside these mere feelings, I was lectured. We have to deal with this menace. You are for us or you're against us.

As there was going to be a second vote on the commissioners' resolution to stay out of federal enforcement, the Republicans whipped up a crowd to go down to the court house and make their feelings known. People who supported the resolution showed up too--and soundly defeated the Republicans in public comment before the resolution was reaffirmed. It was actually a rather glorious night for Chatham County democracy, and I was proud to have attended. But since that night the Court House burned down, and the Tea Party was drummed up, and our late commissioners have been defeated by a Republican reaction that has led to many distressing results both here in our county, and around the country (see, e.g., Wisconsin, Tennessee, Florida, Michigan, and our own NC Legislature's current budget). In particular, our new commissioners have voted to bring on ICE. Whether this will have many practical results it's hard to say. The chicken processing industry seems to be leaving the county these days, marooning thousands of folks who came here to work in those plants. The whole "issue" might be in the process of fading away.

But I find Ms Bachmann's remarkable assertion that President Obama does not possess empathy the most flabbergastingly idiotic comment of the past week. The Dream Act was an effort to deal with the problem of these thousands of children of undocumented workers in a fair and kind manner. After all, these kids by and large want only to contribute to the common good, to be good citizens capable of achieving, of holding good jobs, of military service, of paying taxes (including social security). They didn't come here by choice, and using children to punish adults is almost the example par excellence of totalitarian brutality. When brutal force determines to crush opposition, it either wounds children in front of parents, or vice versa. That is to say, brutality brushes all empathy aside, and has no thought to any long term consequence (since there remains the other side of the equation, obscured but not altered, that brutality is how in the end a terrorist is created--terrorism being to a significant degree another term for resistance, which is a fundamental human quality which even the muddled "tea party" salutes in its very nomenclature.)

And so. Did Ms. Bachmann vote for or against the Dream Act, and what is her current view of this legislation? My suspicion is, she was unalterably opposed to the Dream Act, just like the rest of the Republican Party. In which case, the word "empathy" should be ashes in her lying mouth*.

*Ahh, a one second session with the google reveals this, from a Minneapolis newspaper of the moment:

"The DREAM Act — the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act — passed the House by a 216-198 margin Wednesday. CNN reports the vote was mostly along partisan lines. In Minnesota that was true, except in one case: Blue Dog Democrat Collin Peterson sided with Republicans Michele Bachmann, John Kline and Erik Paulsen in opposing the bill. Eight Republicans voted for the bill."

For more analysis of Republican lying, see Mr. Riley's current post on Peggy Noonan's analysis of the Republican Presidential Debate in New Hampshire this past week. As usual, Mr. Riley is right on the money.
Meanwhile, in the dusky corridors of power, far from the hubbub of television and poor Mr. Weiner's weiner:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/us/politics/19thomas.html?pagewanted=1&ref=general&src=me

'Scuse me while I throw up just a little.

Sunday Reading

2011-06-12T10:59:00.001-04:00

A soviet poster--no brainwashing in the USA

From Lance Mannion:
http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2011/06/a-life-in-the-theater.html

I suggest you read this because as is typical of Lance, he makes a very elegant detailed case of a point which is already pretty obvious to anyone who still has a realistic perspective, and some sense of empathy--but who in most cases cannot stand up to professional harangue-ists such as Hannity or Limbaugh. The point simply boils down to no man is an island. The people who think they did it all themselves drive to work on roads paved with the work of men fooling with asphalt when it's 120 in the shade--or when it's zero and blowing 50, and there's a fine slick you can't see till you're riding it to glory. These people, who are convinced that they did it all themselves, sadly include a majority of our elected representatives, and 99.9% of the Republican Party apparently. Mr. Mannion writes excellent essays not only on political subjects, but on many other subjects. I suggest after you read this piece you send him a little green. He certainly deserves it.

After the collection offering, if you have the stomach for it, go check out this link as well:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201106110002

Racism is like an electrode sticking out of the racist's head, for them what's infected (which plainly includes millions of Americans). It's a sickness, a disease. The Right Wing might even agree that it's a societal disease, when they're at the Club or watching Belmont in the slop. But in the public world, oh no. They see those electrodes glinting in the sun, and they know all they need to do is touch the hot wire to them and they have millions of votes for whatever it is they need votes for. And so they do, again and again. Now and again, the Right finds a black guy who gets that it can be lucrative to be a black racist. Or who simply falls into the one-man-is-an-island intellectual mistake. Possibly Mr. Cain is of the latter variety--he thinks, from his lofty perch, that he made all them damn pizzas himself, toiling without rest, day after day, no breaks, no time off, till his bootstraps got him to the moon, to a place where he could even in fantasy run for President and not be laughed at as a joke. Possibly Mr. Clarence Thomas, Supreme Justice for Life, is of the former variety--a very smart black man who understood early on that conservative black men were a scarce commodity, and who was willing to participate in President George H.W. Bush's racist joke on America. Speculating about individual motivations is a fool's game in any case. Maybe Mr. Murdoch just wants to make more and more money.

Whatever the reasons, in this Media Matters highlight of one little Fox News moment, already passed, already evaporated, we see the spark of the electrode skillfully applied. How tragic for our country. This procedure occurs daily, possibly hour by hour, even minute by minute, if you consider all the right wing talk radio shows. Around these parts, we even have local lobotomists to augment the various network varieties. It's an endless flood, reinforcing unconsidered beliefs, reminding people that they needn't change anything, ever. As time has progressed, so new strategies have developed--strategies which successfully obscure the obvious with further, more sophisticated lies. How can there be racism in America when we have a black President? How can Clarence Thomas, a black man, be a racist? Voila. Meanwhile, let's all celebrate Martin Luther King Day and then move on, nothing to see, back to work.

I happened to watch the film "A Family Thing" last week. Here's a link to a review:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Family_Thing_%28film%29

It's a very simple premise, and quite likely happens more than people care to admit. And the question is, so what. I don't know what happened when the movie came out 15 years ago. We were already so splintered as a country that it wasn't a deal like "Look Who's Coming to Dinner," which is still remembered as some sort of milestone. This is a movie about good people who let love conquer hate. It is possible. The sad fact is that we have whole television networks and radio networks devoted to the premise that love will not ain't no way conquer hate.

Here in America we don't use advertising science

A Coupla Boys and Their Dog

2011-06-11T08:05:00.000-04:00

the dearly departed Beckham, c/Tbogg

Driving out of Siler yesterday on the main drag, I overtook two teens walking down one side of the road, and on the other side, apparently their pet dog, a very happy beagle-sized mutt who was keeping an eye on their progress and considering whether it was safe to cross the road to be on their side. There was of course 5 PM traffic going both ways, pretty much at a speed of about 40 mph. As I got close to this assembly I slowed down so as not to hit the dog if he made his decision right at that moment. He was a smart dog, saw me coming, and did not cross. The boys continued on their path, one holding a skateboard, neither particularly noticing what was going on. I got past. Other cars were slowing. Other cars were not slowing. Eventually in my rear-view mirror I saw the dog actually make it across. All was well. I thought it's no wonder we're electing nit-wits to run the country, and to command an Army with the most frightening weapons ever invented as it marches ever onwards to the next wracked third-world hell-hole. I wondered if the two boys would have cared if the dog had been hit. My guess is probably so, but that's just a guess.

You know the Elizabeth Bishop poem, "One Art." I'm not sure it's legal to quote it in entirety, but apparently there are any number of posted copies as I found them instantly by googling the poem. So here it is, and I hope it sells some of Ms. Bishop's collected poetry volumes, as she's as good as it gets in my book.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Ms Bishop lived with a woman in Santos, Brazil, for some years. Eventually they broke up. The woman in Brazil died. Ms Bishop returned to the United States and continued to write absolutely perfect poems, including this one, about love, grief, aging, persevering. Some say Ms Bishop was a "difficult" person. She was friends with Robert Lowell. He was certainly a "difficult" person. But neither Mr. Lowell nor Ms Bishop would think to say that a marriage between two people of the same sex, who loved each other as much as Ms Bishop loved her friend, should never be allowed, because such a marriage might somehow magically "damage" the "institution of marriage." (Indeed, the breakup of the "marriage" between Ms Bishop and the woman in Brazil implies nothing about their love for each other. Again, see the poem.) People who take that latter view actually spit on love. Oddly, they are mostly the same people who think that even a child brought to this country at an early age by parents who entered "illegally" in order to find work should be given no measure of help and mercy even if they make heroic efforts to get an education and become a productive member of "our" society. For these people, who oddly enough people our churches in droves every Sunday, empathy and mercy are left in the front of the pew, with the hymn book. For the most part they don't even know that one of the first casualties in Iraq was such a kid--a kid who got his citizenship posthumously.

Ms Bishop was born in 1911, same year as it happens as my mother. Here's a link to her wiki biography:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Bishop

We're idiots, babe, it's a wonder that we still know how to breathe.

Ok, one more Weiner Comment

2011-06-10T06:41:00.000-04:00

http://www.juancole.com/2011/06/top-things-anthony-weiner-has-said-that-are-worse-than-sexting.html

Actually, it's Juan Cole's. Compare his piece (like it or not) with the news coverage of Weiner for the past week and one half. Then ask youself whether the US is really capable of governing itself.

Meanwhile, Limbaugh

2011-06-09T06:20:00.000-04:00

I'm not spending more time on Weiner, although I seem to have hit pretty much Ed Schultz's position. However, the following link very much nails the utter lack of principles evidenced by Mr. Limbaugh on the subject of Weiner-gate:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/look-whos-talking-somebody-forgot-about.html

You would think that Limbaugh would have learned something during his enforced rehabilitation from Oxycontin addiction.