Real Seriousness

Glennzilla sums it up in a paragraph.

There very well may be some small number of individuals who are so blinded by religious extremism that they will be devoted to random violence against civilians no matter what we do, but we are constantly maximizing the pool of recruits and sympathy among the population on which they depend. In other words, what we do constantly bolsters their efforts, and when we do, we always seem to move more in the direction of helping them even further. Ultimately, we should ask ourselves: if we drop more bombs on more Muslim countries, will there be fewer or more Muslims who want to blow up our airplanes and are willing to end their lives to do so? That question really answers itself.

This reality has been evident to me for some time now. Yet there are apparently reams and reams of Serious Foreign Policy Analysts carrying unassailable validation of their rationality from America's finest universities who are nonetheless dedicated to the simplistic proposition "America good! You bad!" Of course it's possible to acknowledge, as Glennzilla does, that there are a handful of fanatics who would "hate the West" or whatever the hawks are saying today regardless of our actions and still realize that our actions have had the undeniable effect of making those fanatics look right to a great many of their fellow believers. And yet, the torch-bearers of cold realism and careful, reasoned judgment have, in their pursuit of denying any negative consequences of their actions, reached the same moral capacity of a four-year old: It's awesome, because I did it!

Help me out here

Creating/expanding government-operated health plans to cover the uninsured = totally unacceptable to Serious Centrists.

Paying predatory private companies a premium to do the same thing and hoping that, golly, they just play nice and don't use their lobbying power to strip out whatever useful controls are in the deal = just fine and dandy.

Politics sure are weird.

The trouble with Taibbi

The latest front in the long war between Hippies and Sensible Liberals is threatening to go nuclear over the half-assed Big Pharma handout posing as health care reform as well as the Afghanistan escalation, but the biggest shot so far has been fired by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone documenting Obama's wholehearted embrace of neoliberals in his economic policy team.

The debate is pretty much the usual for this sort of thing. The Sensible types accuse us of naive, puritannical immaturity who are interfering with Obama's 32-Dimensional Ninja Chess Mastery. Alternatively, we're putting undue pressure on Obama to do more than what apparent political realities allow. (This varies depending on which Sensible you ask.) Of the numerous things written on this topic, Taibbi himself has the most succinct reply:

First of all, we should get one thing out of the way — it’s not any citizen’s job to give a politician credit for his political calculations. In fact, that should rightly be part of the calculus of any political calculation; a politician should have to weigh the benefits of making, say, an unsavory insider alliance against the negative of public criticism for that move. If a leader doesn’t have to earn the admiration you give him, then a) that admiration doesn’t mean anything, and b) he will surely spend all his political capital on the people who do make him earn it.

Progressive activists should be fanatical puritans. That is the role they play in the political system; that is, insofar as Sensible Liberals share the goal of moving the range of what's attainable to the left. It seems to me that the Sensible folks are the naive ones. On the health care bill, for example, they happily followed the lead of moderate Democrats in declaring the most progressive solutions off the table by the outset. Then they are apparently surprised when Republicans and Blue Dogs cut out all of the remaining progressive elements of the bill during the inevitable bargaining phase. Why can't they see that our original bill was so rational and Sensible?

Ideally, Democrats and liberal apologists could use progressives to give them a left flank to use as a hammer in policy negotiations. They won't. Democrats won't care about alienating their base because they care more about losing corporate money than losing elections. And Sensible Liberal pundits want to be on the teevee next to Bob Schieffer, angling for a future campaign job with one of said Democrats by burnishing their anti-hippie bona fides.

Shorter Barack Obama

Full text of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech.

• Hey guys, I've got to justify having this big hammer, so I'm going to keep whacking at everything vaguely nail-shaped, because that's working out brilliantly so far.
  

Didn't really fit into the previous post, but it was screaming out for a "shorter" treatment.

Don't make me do this again

Behold, I have uncovered the secret of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech and it is...that the first draft was written by a high school freshman who has learned just enough from world history class to make himself dangerous on the internet. Or so it seems. This may just be the level at which the American foreign policy establishment operates. Witness these gems:

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

I have seen this sort of thing on bulletin boards before; wankers who muse with barely-concealed ruefulness what good fortune Gandhi's independence movement had by not meeting up with Imperial Japan. Not that they wish that would have happened, of course. Not at all.

Semi-related note on this passage: Glennzilla points out that Obama botches this section by saying he is sworn to defend and protect "his nation" when, in fact, he is only sworn to defend and protect the Constitution. (Huh, I could've sworn I read this in Greenwald's post, and it seems like the kind of thing he'd say, but now I can't find it.) This may as well be deliberate; if so, Obama should get some credit for dropping the pretext that American military adventurism has some relation to pie-in-the-sky ideas of American "values" or altruism, and is merely about perpetuating the empire in itself.

the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.

Well, it's finally happened. An American leader has gone before all the world and made a prettied-up version of the dick-slapping "if it weren't for us you'd all be speaking German-Russian-Japanese now" argument. Most of our arms at present are doing very little to "underwrite security," whether they are used by us or someone else.

I -- like any head of state -- reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.

I'll leave this to Jonathon Schwarz, who, in his unique way, notices that all Obama apparently sees of the past six decades is that he'd prefer to undo them.

This machine kills corporate Democrats

People who follow my Facebook feed know I've been on a Woody Guthrie kick lately. You can probably guess why I'm trying to keep Woody alive, but to reiterate, here's a story I ran across on Truthout today.

here are at least eight million daily followers of Glenn Beck in America, and a good chunk of them are people like my grandmother and my uncle Billy - well-intentioned people that care about their country, their families and their communities, otherwise they wouldn't watch a show about politics. However, to label all these Glenn Beck followers as unreachable, bigoted racists is an extraordinary dangerous and misleading move for the progressive movement, which aims to include all people.

My grandmother's own vocal protest for gay rights in her church disproved that Glenn Beck followers tend to vote Republican merely because of gods, gays and guns. Sure, this wins over a large portion of them, but it doesn't explain how the Republican Party is able to win over people like my grandmother, who were once hardcore Democrats and never fell prey to such hate-baiting tactics in the past.

The divide-and-conquer tactic of keeping the working class divided on superficial grounds of racial or cultural identities is as old as time itself, yet liberals will gladly play along by marginalizing the white working class as an irredeemable mash of ignorant, bigoted rednecks who can only be reached by surrendering progressive stances on racial justice or women's rights. Witness the recent outrage over Stupak-Pitts, where liberals raised a great moan over conservative Democrats selling out abortion rights in an attempt to hold onto their supposedly conservative rural districts. The response in the libosphere was a great finger-wagging "this is what you get for 'reaching out' to working-class white voters." Well, no. That is what you get for allowing Democrats whose commitment to neoliberalism is non-negotiable to do the reaching. The liberal wing of the business party knows who butters its bread, and it isn't the great social causes favored by campus liberals.

On a related note, here's Taibbi on Sarah Palin and the media.

It’s much easier to figure out who’s “left” and who isn’t using cultural litmus tests than it is using position papers. What’s the left position on monetary policy? I have no idea. What’s the left’s position on American Idol? Easy: it rolls its eyes.

This is the crux to the perversion of populism unleashed by Palin, Beck and like. You should have solidarity with your boss rather than fellow workers from the city because neither you or your boss can figure out what the hell Un Chien Andalou is about. This stuff is catnip for liberals, of course, who cannot in their smugness resist the delightful idea that there are countless rubes out there who hate them just because they are so gul-durned smart. That they may actually be doing their alleged enemy's work for him probably doesn't cause them to lose much sleep.

Praise him whose wars we love to fight

A couple of days ago, I posted to my Facebook status:

Veterans Day: It's the least your boss could to do thank you for fighting his wars for him.

This could probably stand to be fleshed out a little more.

Today, Rooney contended, Veteran's Day is little more than a celebration of militarism and war. He wants to re-brand Veteran's Day as "No War Day," and Collins supports that view.

And not just because he believes Veteran's Day celebrates militarism. He also believes that its celebration is an insubstantial bone thrown to veterans by a government that could not care less about them the other 364 days a year.

In his commentary, he detailed the treatment of vets after each of America's wars. Soldiers in the Colonial Army were swindled out of land grants promised to them by some of the Founding Fathers. Collins says homeless and mentally ill Civil War vets were common sights in the streets of Reconstruction America. Many of them suffered from PTSD, which back then went by a name that somehow manages to be both quaint and disturbing, sort of like a Stephen King title: "soldier's nostalgia." And then there was the Bonus Army of World War I vets, whose Washington Mall encampment was smashed by a Douglas MacArthur- and George Patton-led cavalry charge in the darkest days of the Great Depression.

I don't quite understand the notion that we antiwar hippies are somehow to blame for the abject condition of 'veteran's affairs" in this country. Our quarrel isn't with the largely working-class rank-and-file who are de facto conscripted into military service by a lack of alternate economic opportunity. We are after the ruling class whose bloodlust creates the wars that they are forced to fight. Of course, our rulers are well aware of this, hence their noise machine does its best to herd all debate over war policy into empty sloganeering about "supporting the troops," as if the pom-pom act absolves them of any and all future responsibility. Well, we know what the ruling class thinks of its cannon fodder as individuals, and it's certainly much less than any tofu-eating Berkleyite.

The man comes around

LA Times:

President Barack Obama, lamenting "a horrific outburst of violence" in the killings today of at least a dozen soldiers and the wounding of more than 30 other people " at Fort Hood Army Base in Texas, promised to "stay on this."

Well, this is good news. Now that the president is suitably 'horrified" by such "outbursts of violence," this must mean he will view the exponentially greater "outbursts of violence" unleashed by his military on Afghani and Pakistani civilians in a new light.

Oh, wait, this was not a wedding party? Bombs away, then!

Shorter Washington Post editorial page

A Critical Question

• We would've cared about people dying from lack of health care if only they were killed by Muslims instead
  

There's poo in there

I seem to be awash in crankism lately (truthfully I've become pretty fascinated by it after reading Pope Brock's book on John R. Brinkley). I've been digging into the famous New Madrid earthquake prediction of Iben Browning for the museum, and now I've stumbled upon the weird world of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, who have apparently become re-energized with the availability of the H1N1 flu vaccine.

While the anti-vaccine people are wrong, it's worth nothing that, as far as I can tell, their instincts aren't necessarily incorrect.* As long as we maintain a for-profit health care industry which can control and manipulate government regulatory agencies, people ought to be skeptical about the appearance of "wonder drugs" which coincidentally give pharmaceutical companies a license to print money. Capital can and will attempt to purchase scientific credibility to suit its interests; global warming denialism being the most ready example.

As with many conspiracy theorists, vaccine cranks end up doing their own side a disservice by making actual muckrakers of corporate malfeasance look crankish by association. They should be dealt with according to their ineptitude, but not without reminding the public that they are the natural byproduct of an inhumane system.

*Okay, there are also your bog-standard nihilists who think the world is doomed to be run forever by a cabal of Jews and Masons, but there's no saving those folks.

Bipartisanship

When did it become unconstitutional to pass a bill with no votes from the opposition party? I was previously under the impression that the makeup of the legislature was decided during elections, not by Very Concerned pundits who must have Balance at all costs even if it means overturning the unfortunate decisions of the voting public.

My sweet Nobel

So, Barack Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize. As best as I can figure, this can only mean one of two things:

1) The previous administration set such a low bar that anyone else looks like Jesus and Buddha put together by comparison.

Or

2) The rest of the world has basically said to America, "Look, we'll give you whatever trinket you want, just please stop blowing stuff up."

The Nobel Peace Prize, of course, doesn't mean a whole heck of a lot. The committee is apparently obligated to award it to someone every year, and there sadly aren't enough people who actually deserve it. Hell, they awarded one to this guy, so you know this isn't the worst choice they've ever made.

Conservatives are naturally unsure of what to make of this given their hate-hate relationship with the rest of the planet. It was just last week, after all, that they crowed about the international smackdown delivered to Obama by the Olympics. The result is also interesting in light of this poll showing the United States is apparently the most-admired nation in the world once again in the post-Bush era. Righties, and many Sensible Liberals, believe as an article of faith that many global surveys, like the infamous World Health Organization rankings or Reporters without Borders' press freedom survey, are skewed because of the rest of the planet's irreversible 'Murica-hatin' syndrome. As it turns out, the rest of the world apparently likes many Americans, it merely shares a mutual hate society with American conservatives.

From the archives of Republican Jesus, vol XVIII

This may be the best thing ever.

…and then a Samaritan passed by the man, and saw that he was grievously wounded, and would surely die, so the Samaritan said, “let us offer this man a tax cut so that he can afford a high-deductible catastrophic care policy, combined with a tax-advantaged health savings account to defray his expenses. Furthermore, let us mandate that all must purchase such policies from the insurance companies, so that they may increase their wealth, and raise rates for all policyholders, lest the increased burden of covering unfortunate wretches like this one before me who…appears to be dead…(kicks body to be sure)…yup, dead! Oh, well, he would only have been a burden to his insurance provider anyway, and would have caused my rates to go up too.”

Right to Life

Didn't know there was going to be an anti-war march here. How about that?

"Conservatives want live babies so they can grow up to be dead soldiers." -George Carlin.

Silver lining

The silly and embarrassing Congressional hatchet-job on ACORN might be worth it if we can do this.

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.

In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.

In their haste to grandstand for news cameras, legislators had to write a particularly broad bill in order to get it done without an independent investigation. Glennzilla explains.

The irony of all of this is that the Congress is attempting to accomplish an unconstitutional act: singling out and punishing ACORN, which is clearly a "bill of attainder" that the Constitution explicitly prohibits -- i.e., an act aimed at punishing a single party without a trial. The only way to overcome that problem is by pretending that the de-funding of ACORN is really about a general policy judgment (that no corrupt organizations should receive federal funding). But the broader they make the law in order to avoid the Constitutional problem, the more it encompasses the large corrupt corporations that own the Congress (and whom they obviously don't want to de-fund). The narrower they make it in order to include only ACORN, the more blatantly unconstitutional it is.

Rep. Alan Grayson is compiling a list. Vroom vroom!

The Two Bums

The bum on the rod is hunted down
As the enemy of mankind;
The other is driven around to his club
And feted, wined and dined.

And they who curse the bum on the rods
As the essence of all that is bad
Will greet the other with a winning smile
And extend him the hand so glad.

The bum on the rods is a social flea
Who gets an occasional bite;
The bum on the plush is a social leech,
Blood-sucking day and night.

The bum on the rods is a load so light
That his weight we scarcely feel,
But it takes the labor of dozens of men
To furnish the other a meal.

As long as you sanction the bum on the plush,
The other will always be there,
But rid yourself of the bum on the plush
And the other will disappear.

Then make an intelligent, organized kick,
Get rid of the weights that crush;
Don't worry about the bum on the rods,
Get rid of the bum on the plush!

-George Millburn, The Hobo's Hornbook

It's good to be a corporation

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Citizens United v. FEC, which began life as a censorship case but has metastasized into a potential ruling which could grant corporations nearly unlimited access to the government in the form of campaign donations.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas are already on record wanting to overturn these cases. Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts have been inclined to wait. The question today is whether we wait no more.

See also last week's podcast of This is Hell.

Needless to say, if this succeeds the final barrier to a complete, unabashed oligarchy will be broken. Though perhaps it's just a matter of time, anyway, as we've apparently already established that money = speech. So presumably, if you have more money, you have more speech, and I kinda thought eliminating those people with "more speech" was the point of democracy. Oh well.

Meanwhile, the Beckites are getting their jollies over an apparent sting operation on the community group ACORN, which has become the white whale* of the right. Congress is on the ball, though, voting to cut federal benefits to ACORN with the benefit only of evidence from a fratty right-wing filmmaker whose previous "expose" involved promising donations to Planned Parenthood only if the money was used to abort black fetuses.

Greenwald:

ACORN has received a grand total of $53 million in federal funds over the last 15 years -- an average of $3.5 million per year. Meanwhile, not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars of public funds have been, in the last year alone, transferred to or otherwise used for the benefit of Wall Street. Billions of dollars in American taxpayer money vanished into thin air, eaten by private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, led by Halliburton subsidiary KBR. All of those corporate interests employ armies of lobbyists and bottomless donor activities that ensure they dominate our legislative and regulatory processes, and to be extra certain, the revolving door between industry and government is more prolific than ever, with key corporate officials constantly ending up occupying the government positions with the most influence over those industries.

That's some real brave corruption-fightin' right there. Obviously, ACORN's real mistake was not dumping 1.3 million PCB's into the Hudson River.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Let Freedom Ka-Ching
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

*Color of whale may vary, if you know what I mean.

A teabag in every pot

Vastly underrated comic performance artist Glenn Beck sent his millions thousands of teabaggers Saturday to the nation's capital to protest...well, something or other. If you're curious about the choice of the date, Beck would like to see the country return to its post-9/11 willingness to bomb and torture Muslims and hand over their money to the wealthy without asking any questions. Uniting the Nation in shared hatred of a dastardly Enemy is pretty much in the clinical definition of fascism, but I said Beck was funny, not intelligent.

The theme of the meeting, or lack thereof, is summed up pretty well by this photo and its bizarre, abstract Pelosi sign. (And you thought lefty protesters couldn't say on message.) This is the third such Teabag Protest Day, and while the message I guess is supposed to be anti-Gummit, but the actual turnout seems to be an excuse for any and every conservative cause to come out and get its picture on the teevee.

Mostly they seem to be pissed off about losing the election. Alas, as this is not a parliamentary system, they can't have Congress call a new one. Though if they'd like to start that petition, I'll sign up. But I doubt it, parliamentary government is something Communist countries have. I gather this because they seem to be shaking and trembling over the notion that the Democrats might be faintly pursuing policy they campaigned on during the last election. Perhaps they overslept that day.

This, of course, only makes the Democrats' capitulation even more pathetic to contemplate. Give in to the right's every whine and folly, like removing end-of-life counseling from the healthcare bill because morons think it's a "death panel," and conservatives still wail and moan about the president being terribly, terribly divisive. These are spoiled children; they will have it all or go to their room and pout. There's nothing you can do to bargain with them. The Democrats will, though, because caving to the right is what Democrats do, even if no one is asking for it.

Ben Franklin

Letter to Robert Morris, 1783:

All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.

But....freedom!

A fairy tale mashup

You and I live in the same town. You're the biggest tycoon in the neighborhood, loved and feared by all. I live in a dinky shack on the wrong side of the tracks. But one day I happen upon a goose that lays golden eggs. I've struck it rich, but as it turns out the elves who make your widgets can only subsist on golden eggs. So instead of negotiating a fair price for my eggs, you decide to start stealing them. I can never catch you in the act, as it happens, because you have a magical cloak which makes you invisible.

Now everyone in the town knows it's you, because you make a big show of proudly giving me useless things I'll never need as supposed compensation for stealing my eggs, like a blender that turns rocks into boll weevils. And you've got the police and the judges in your back pocket, so there's no hope of going to the authorities. So one day after months and months of you stealing my golden eggs while I still live in poverty, I finally lose it. I take a machete, go to your house, and brutally hack up your spouse and children.

Of course, I've overreacted. Worse, my retaliation is worthless because I've punished innocent people who had nothing to do with you stealing my eggs.

On the other hand, you still stole my eggs.

QOTD

Doug Henwood, liveblogging Wednesday night's presidential address.

“I want to speak to seniors”: Medicare is pretty great, isn’t it? But we can’t let the rest of the population have it, because that would be Canadian or something.

This is the million-dollar question, isn't it? Why aren't all these old farts sputtering around town hall meetings screaming OMG GUMMIT TAKEOVER spending more energy complaining about te network of crate warehouses they are housed in as a result of being on Medicare.

(Full disclosure: As I'm legally blind I'm covered by Medicare. And it's quite useful, though I've never had any health problems to speak of. Perhaps this will be the in the Democrats' final compromise bill; all the uninsured can just put their eyes out.)

Money money money money!

But, but, but," the teabaggers whine "healthcare costs mooooooney!" Yes, all upon fall, there's no such thing as a free lunch. If we're going to decide that lacking cash is not a good reason to let people rot in the gutter, then someone's going to have to pay for it.

So.

What we've got here is a fundamental question of whether or not those people who are Not Me are actual human beings or a collection of ideas that we sometimes have to pay attention to because they seem to be existing in the same universe as I do.

Boo hoo, we can't paaaaaaaay for it!

The people who face financial and/or physical ruin from our delightful Free Market health insurance industry are already paying for it. It's not a matter of whether health care will be paid for, but who will be doing the paying. Cold cash ain't the only kind of capital.

But I am my own man! I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps! I wear bootstraps! Whatever pantywaist commie said you should love your neighbor as yourself obviously didn't believe in the American Dream. Freedom! Freedom means I can punch someone else's nose and laugh because they can't afford to pay for it!

Sane countries admit that they are nations of communities as well as individuals, and so every individual acknowledges hir responsibility to pay a little extra so individuals aren't destroyed by events out of their control. This is not a sane country. This is a country of cruel, savage individuals driven to sociopathic lengths to annihilate everyone save our own bloodline. I am surprised we manage to keep the polite veneer.

I am a little sad that I was not around to hear the teabaggers debate the introduction of socialized fire departments. "Forsooth," our hypothetical teabagger must have said, "we just don't have enough water to put out a house that can't afford a proper central heating system." It is to chuckle.

Are you being served?

Van Jones is a longtime activist for environmental and prison reform causes, and, up until yesterday, was brought in to be Obama's "green jobs" czar. The trouble with having activists near the White House, though, is that they often say true things which are Not Serious. Jones apparently signed in a petition in 2004 which may have had a loose connection to 9/11 Trooferism. Given Jones long history in activism, this seems like a marginal offense, and he has denied ever being a Troofer. Nonetheless, he's been purged, because liberals are disposable.

Soon after the election, the Administration began corralling the big liberal DC interest groups into a variety of organizations and communication networks through which they telegraphed their wishes -- into a virtual veal pen. The 8:45 am morning call co-hosted by the "liberal" Center for American Progress, Unity 09, and Common Purpose are just a few of the overt ways that the White House controls its left flank and maintains discipline.

My own experience with the Veal Pen came indirectly, when some of them had the temerity to launch a campaign against Blue Dogs. They were rebuked and humiliated in front of their peers as a lesson to them all at a Common Purpose meeting, which is run by lobbyist Erik Smith. White House communications director Ellen Moran attends. It isn't an arms-length relationship between these groups and the administration.

A few weeks ago, Rahm Emanuel showed up at a Common Purpose meeting and called these liberal groups "fucking stupid" for going after Blue Dogs on health care and ordered them not to do so any more. Since that time, to the best of my knowledge, none of them have.

Ah, I knew Rahm Emanuel would be delightful to have around. And to think, some people believed he might occasionally turn that hard-assedness on Republicans!

LMAO

School speech backlash builds

OK, I admit, I can see a situation where people might have been exercised if Bush had given a similar address. If he didn't; it seems like such a banal thing for the president to do that I can't imagine each of them hasn't done similar. And American party politics has a ridiculous my-team-versus-your-team streak where no one actually cares if what you're screaming about now matches what you were saying five years ago. So now Republicans think it's trendy and cool to be out on the street protestin' against the man and tyranny by the Gummit.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Fox News: The New Liberals
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

The key difference in any kind of equivalency formula, though, is that one can readily find the stupid emanating from the official channels of the Republican Party. Here's Florida Republican chairman Jim Greer.

As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power

Greer may be a little confused because he doesn't mention where Obama's socialist ideology will put the means of production in the hands of workers. But no matter. Can you imagine any official Democrat issuing a statement about "President Bush's fascist ideology?" S/he wouldn't remain in the party much longer.

Once again, we have conservatives allegedly outraged that their chillens' is gonna be indoctrinated upon leaving the immediate supervision of an Approved Authority. Righties must be terribly afraid of being lousy parents, given how little faith they seem to have in their children resisting any and all ideas they might randomly encounter.

UPDATE: Found this great bit of business in the LGM comments. It's worth it to post the whole thing.

Here's part of my imaginary Obama speech to the little ones:

First, don’t pay attention in class. Daydream instead. The way this country is going, those dreams are the only things you’re ever going to have.

Second, don’t listen to your parents and teachers -- you should know why not by now. Geez, just look at ‘em.

They voted for George W. Bush twice! They think Sarah Palin is smart! They still believe Saddam Hussein destroyed the Twin Towers! They all refinanced into interest-only option ARMs 6 months before the real estate market crashed! They didn’t diversify their 401k’s!

Sorry, kids, those are grown-up concerns. Got off target there.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. When you’re old enough, quit school. Really, there’s no reason to stay beyond age 15 or 16 because you’ll be able to hook and to cook by then, and that’s pretty much all the skilz you’ll be needing in 21st- century America.

Just don’t come crying to me when your meth-rotted teeth fall out during some domestic dispute. I tried to get you some healthcare but your parents and your teachers… well, Christ, go ask them. They still think Marx, Lenin, and Stalin are hiding under their bunk beds.

Look, I only have a few minutes so I have to wrap this up fast.

First, evolution is real. Don’t go believing all that creationism crap.

Second, abstinence doesn’t work. Use a condom. Each… and… every… time.

Third, if the hooking and cooking don’t work out, try to marry a Canadian.

Remember, if your parents and teachers ask, we talked about studying hard and making the honor roll and Japanese crap like that.

The Preacher and the Slave

IWW songwriters like Joe Hill and T-Bone Slim would often steal the tunes of Christian hymns and rewrite the lyrics. This was done for two reasons. 1) The tune would already be familiar to many in the intended audience who could then sing along which was particularly useful for 2) disrupting Salvation Army rallies (the Wobblies called it "Starvation Army,") by singing along with..rather different lyrics. This song--written by Hill to the tune of "In the Sweet By and By"--also introduced the saying "pie in the sky" into popular parlance.

Ho-hum

This may slide under the radar, but it's quite important to point it out. The NYT today reports that Tom Ridge is claiming in a tell-all book that the Bushies pressured him to raise the turr'st Threat-O-Meter in the days immediately preceding the 2004 election. This basically establishes what most Unserious people already suspected; the color-coded nonsense was little more than a political tool which could be raised and lowered whenever the GOP needed a boost.

Yup

Again, it's difficult to disagree with anything Glennzilla sez.

The attempt to attract GOP support was the pretext which Democrats used to compromise continuously and water down the bill. But -- given the impossibility of achieving that goal -- isn't it fairly obvious that a desire for GOP support wasn't really the reason the Democrats were constantly watering down their own bill? Given the White House's central role in negotiating a secret deal with the pharmaceutical industry, its betrayal of Obama's clear promise to conduct negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN no less), Rahm's protection of Blue Dogs and accompanying attacks on progressives, and the complete lack of any pressure exerted on allegedly obstructionists "centrists," it seems rather clear that the bill has been watered down, and the "public option" jettisoned, because that's the bill they want -- this was the plan all along.

Much has been made of the wide berth given by Democrats to the screaming, occasionally armed, town hall nutters when Bush and Co. would have anyone with a disagreeable t-shirt sent to the penalty box. Because, quite unintentionally, the crazies are doing the White House a favor by acting as a determined if deranged popular opposition--much out of proportion to the general public, of course--to any kind of public plan. "This is why they started from "public option" rather than "single payer;" they knew when the inevitable Broderist demands for bipartisanship came and they were forced to make concessions, they would already be much closer to the right.

By getting a bill that includes mandatory handouts to the insurance industry, Obama and Emmanuel get the best of all possible worlds. They please their Big Bidness sponsors and, in 2010, Democrats can go home claiming to have passed the promised Health Care Reform, and that will be the end of that for the next 20 years.

Hold on to the water

Just saw this Tweet from Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher.

Baseball fans: Wash Nats just hours away from NOT signing top pick Strasburg. MLB's lack of economic parity pitiful.

"Economic parity" in sports sounds nice and socialistic on the surface, but in practice inevitably means artificially reduced salaries and resultant increased profits for management. Which is likely why so many people who would run screaming at any mention of socialism support the idea so uncritically. There's no reason to cry any tears for the Nationals who may be making the smartest move in franchise history so far--given the track record of previous "can't miss" pitchers in the draft--by not succumbing to Boras' ridiculous demands. On the other hand, they knew the risk when they drafted him, so as ever the Nationals can only lose by winning.

How I know there is a common ancestor

Why do primates have the irresistible urge to throw things?

As part of a promotional night to debut the new "Reggie Bar", a candy bar named after Reggie Jackson, fans at Yankee Stadium received free samples. The marketing scheme backfired though as fans threw hundreds of them back onto the field forcing the game to be halted until the ground crew was able to clear them away.

The only reason humans no longer throw our own dung is that no one will conveniently hand it to us.

Naked shilling for the rich

I have to admit I was wrong. I felt the political shit-storm of 2009 would be over Employee Free Choice, but that bill has already undergone a mercy killing by corporate Democrats. But it doesn't matter; the same fundamental dispute is at the heart of the health-care fracas namely, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, the right of the fortunate to not be restrained in exercising tyranny over the unfortunate.

In fact, it may be a blessing that the ruling class has chosen this particular battlefield given the absolute ridiculousness of their position is visible to anyone halfway conscious. Claiming ostrich-like that the 'Murican health care system is da best in the world while Europe and Canada keep the elderly in pens fed with gruel is now roughly the equivalent of saying that Jesus is green unicorn cheese. Yet they push on, feeding their paranoid authoritarian followers with even more absurd hysterics: "Obama gon' kill yo' granny!" Now, apparently, the Gummit is going to going to control all of your bank accounts! This is 9/11 Trooferism elevated to the status of essential debate.

Ah, the Gummit, the Gummit. I've noticed the Gummit started being the bad guy again on or about January 20, 2009. Which is odd, because Obama has never really stopped doing any of the things right-wingers want the Gummit to do; kill Muslims, spend on "defense," eavesdrop wantonly, and erect a wall around information in the name of national security. Suggest that the Gummit could serve the interest of someone other than American business and wealthy straight white men and suddenly you've got a bona fide leeee-getimiate revolution on your hands. Let freedom ring! And such. What is it about the Gummit that makes it so much more ominous and malicious, even when private industry is already doing the very things that hysterics believe are imminent with Gummitcare?

Of course, freedom isn't working out so well for the 50 million citizens without health insurance. But no matter, they deserve it for being poor. And if Jesusamerica decided they deserved to have health insurance, then they would. They certainly shouldn't use their voting rights to elect a government to give them healthcare; that would be voting themselves money they didn't earn. After all, the moneyed classes never vote in their own economic interest; that would just be class warfare, comrade.

Not only that, why, those longsuffering Americans would rather die than have Gummit interference in their health care! What patriots! Now, it's true that their house is burned down, the mail hasn't come in years, and they can't drive on a public highway or take public transit, so it's not likely they've got much of a life left. But they died free, and with their hands off of my money, so we should salute them.

Today in teh stooopid

As far as I care to tell, the Investor's Business Daily is a Serious, well-respected informant for the nation's ruling classes. As such, you'd expect them to be impeccably honest and accurate and those other things our moneyed classes demand of their news sources. Ahem.

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Stephen Hawking is British, and was living in the UK, under the iron-toed boot of the NHS, when his disease was diagnosed.

Belief

Continuing the new bizaro-world right-wing embrace of protesting, the teabaggers have taken to taken to healthcare town hall meetings across the country to read aloud from their inbox and talk-radio script. In a not-quite-revelatory discovery, I've noticed that these self-styled glibertarians who squeal on and on about the Constitution tend to have the same predilections that befall another group of people who claim to take their scriptures literally.

Both Biblical and Constitutional literalists have a fun way of ignoring or creatively interpreting sectoins of the holy book which don't reinforce their prefabricated worldview.

Which is irrelevant because the reason people appeal to scriptures in the first place is to obfuscate the fact that their beliefs--in the case of the teabaggers, opposition to universal health care--can't be defended by appeals to common reason.

(This is especially peculiar for Constitutional literalists, since the document was never meant to be permanently inerrant. So who knows why they cling to the idea.)

Can't imagine why

So apparently the sterling, seminal argument being pushed by right-wingers, including preeminent "Christian" toolbag Tony Perkins, is that government-run health care will lead to a grimy dystopia where the elderly are euthanized to save money, which is borne out by the horror stories of gulag hospitals in Great Britain and Canida. Because, you know, the government doesn't already pay for the health care of citiznes over 65, and 29 other countries--most with national health care--don't have longer life expectancies than the United States.

I'm beginning to think people are kind of gullible.

A long way between horizons

Paul Krugman wonders:

When I saw that Michelle Malkin will be on the Stephanopoulos panel this week, my first thought was that nobody as far to the left as she is to the right would ever appear on such a panel. But then I started to wonder (a) what I mean by that (b) if it’s true.

Well of course it's true. Regardless of whether one finds him agreeable, Noam Chomsky is one of the country's great academics and extremely popular, yet will never appear on a Sunday talk show panel. Partially because the people who would read a Gnome Chomsky book aren't going to watch This Week with George Whoever. Conservatives, for all of their obstinate kvetching about lib'rul media, will gladly flock to whatever corporate outlet genuflects to them. Generally, the only place on television one can find actual lefty or anti-imperialist libertarian voices are on Bill Maher's show or occasionally the Stewart/Colbert hour (such as whenever Lewis Black is on The Daily Show). Turns out not only do you get better news from comedy, but a wider range of opinions, too.

Government

Matt Taibbi:

The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. There is insufficient political will to get it done. It doesn’t matter that it’s an urgent national calamity, that it is plainly obvious to anyone with an IQ over 8 that our system could not possibly be worse and needs to be fixed very soon, and that, moreover, the only people opposing a real reform bill are a pitifully small number of executives in the insurance industry who stand to lose the chance for a fifth summer house if this thing passes.

It won’t get done, because that’s not the way our government works. Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something. And that’s what they’re doing.

Indeed. Greenwald specifically points to the first poll on that sheet, but really all of them show solid support for guaranteed health coverage. 55 percent believe guaranteeing coverage for everyone is more important than containing cost. Yes, the number has been slipping, thanks to the one-sided propaganda war waged by Serious People and their corporate media lackeys, but it remains positive. That's not nothing.

Liberals, of course, are barely much help. Smoky, backroom debating among intellectual philosopher-kings is just how they imagine government working; it's only a matter of finding that elusive combination. They paid for that education. Surely it ought to give them some special clout. Populism? Let's not be uncivilized here!

The first epistle of Apostle Milton to the Suckers

Yes, we are near the blessed end of the Sarah Palin era in American politics, but one more before we go.

She also attacked Hollywood, which enlists "delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets" in their "anti-Second Amendment causes," against which "patriots will protect our individual guaranteed right to bear arms." She warned against "enslavement to big central government," because "it can't make you happy or healthy or wealthy or wise," which comes instead from "God's grace helping those who help themselves."

I am curious as to where this theological tradition comes from. It seems to have become part of the canon of Free Market Christianity. Apparently, when John the Baptist said "The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same," he forgot to add "but only when he is satisfied that the man with none has worked hard enough to earn one."

Resolve

Statement A: Government-run enterprises are bulkier and more inefficient than privately-owned business.

Statement B: Government cannot be allowed to run a health care program because it will compete out the more-efficient private insurance in the "free market."

Hypothesis: People who reflexively claim Statement A don't actually believe it.

Uniquely American

An email from my esteemed representative.

There are many parts of our health care system that are the envy of the world, but the parts that aren’t working threaten to bankrupt families, businesses and government alike. We literally cannot afford to not address this challenge head-on. As we move forward, our goal should be protecting what works and fixing what doesn’t.

Only a uniquely American solution will fix the weaknesses in the current system, and any solution must first start with an honest and open conversation. I’ve always said we will never achieve real health care reform without giving all of the stakeholders in this debate a seat at the table. That includes you.

I've figured it out. The United States is like the aging hipster of the world community; the kind of person who won't listen to a band if their entire fanbase can't fit in his closet. Why can't we learn anything from other industrialized democracies who have faced similar challenges and...really don't envy all that much about our health care system? Because we're just that special, that's why.

Things I remember happening

The National League winning the All-Star Game.

Class warfare

And a final word to you arrogant rich: Take some lessons in lament. You'll need buckets for the tears when the crash comes upon you. Your money is corrupt and your fine clothes stink. Your greedy luxuries are a cancer in your gut, destroying your life from within. You thought you were piling up wealth. What you've piled up is judgment.

All the workers you've exploited and cheated cry out for judgment. The groans of the workers you used and abused are a roar in the ears of the Master Avenger. You've looted the earth and lived it up. But all you'll have to show for it is a fatter than usual corpse. In fact, what you've done is condemn and murder perfectly good persons, who stand there and take it.

James 5, The Message

Pope speak, you listen!

Pope calls for a new financial order.

In a key passage, the encyclical says: "The conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from 'influences' of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way. In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom, and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise."

Then in an unequivocal critique of unbridled markets, the pope writes that "grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution."

This is not especially new; popes have been issuing similar encyclicals on economics for a hundred years. Of course, they are always careful to spend a great deal of effort to distance themselves from socialists, which is as cute as that little hat on the pope's head, but whatever gets the job done.

There's nothing in it about abortion, though, so no one in the American press, whether mainstream or the important "liberal" outlets, will pay much attention.

Accidental reporting

Living where I do, the drooling of Bircherites and other righty tinfoil-hatters eventually trickles down and gets me wet. Here a couple of whoppers I've come across lately:

1) The Radical Muslim Black Christian Nazi Communist Preznit is somehow going to commandeer 2010 Census data as some kind of evil plot to steal your children or somesuch. The Census bureau is even taking this seriously enough that it has dispatched representatives to town council meetings urging them to reassure residents that turning in their census forms won't get them sent to a gulag in Montana.

2) Digital TV converter boxes are equipped with audio/video recording equipment so Big Brother can watch you. I suppose this one was inevitable, since any new piece of equipment or identification which everyone has to buy--except, you know, those who don't--will become a Lindseyan mark of the beast. Bur really, consider the utter absurdity of this for a moment.

It's not that I'm completely unsympathetic to people who are skeptical of government intrusiveness, rather that I'm highly doubtful most of the people pushing these new conspiracies had the same skepticism seven months ago. That's the trouble with conspiracy theories, though, and perhaps it's not just a right-wing thing. Americans seem to be fascinated by conspiracies in inverse proportion to how believable they are. Iran-Contra? WMD's? Extraordinary rendition? Pfft, no one cares. The Masons had JFK killed? Gimme some of that action!

(Yes, I am reading Charlie Pierce's book.)

Ebert

I never thought anything concerning Michael Bay, even a post ridiculing Michael Bay, could contain such pearls of wisdom.

What I believe is that all clear-minded people should remain two things throughout their lifetimes: Curious and teachable. If someone I respect tells me I must take a closer look at the films of Abbas Kiarostami, I will take that seriously. If someone says the kung-fu movies of the 1970s, which I used for our old Dog of the Week segments, deserve serious consideration, I will listen. I will try to do what Pauline Kael said she did: Take everything you are, and all the films you've seen, into the theater. See the film, and decide if anything has changed. The older you are and the more films you've seen, the more you take into the theater. When I had been a film critic for ten minutes, I treated Doris Day as a target for cheap shots. I have learned enough to say today that the woman was rarely gifted.

One good turn

I've been cynical about the trendy outpouring of enthusiasm from American desk jockeys supporting the Iranian opposition by making their Twitter icon green. But I've also noticed that public interest in the Honduran coup has been unusually high, and I wonder how much of it is a byproduct of Americans' sudden interest in foreign struggles.

If there is a causal relationship, I suspect it's largely unintended. The American ruling class is quite happy to fan popular outrage at the Official Enemy in Tehran but would probably wish for fewer prying eyes looking at the history of military coups in Latin America.

A patriotic song

The only one worth a damn.

Can't...look...away.....

Palin is clearly not setting up a run at the presidency; otherwise she would have simply not sought re-election. As it stands, she now has the mark of someone who couldn't manage to finish one term as a governor.

It's more likely that she's become bored with the day-to-day minutiae of governing the Alaskan wasteland and can't wait to become a full-time member of the right-wing media circuit which she has been essentially since the end of the campaign. If the ink isn't already dry on the Fox News contract, I'd be surprised.

If only I could say I love you

Mark Wesbrot wonders how sincere Washington's opposition to the Honduran coup really is.

The coup leaders have no international support, but they could still succeed by running out the clock – Zelaya has less than six months left in his term. Will the Obama administration support sanctions against the coup government in order to prevent this? The neighbouring governments of Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador have already fired a warning shot by announcing a 48-hour cut-off of trade.

By contrast, one reason for Clinton's reluctance to call the coup a coup is because the US Foreign Assistance Act prohibits funds going to governments where the head of state has been deposed by a military coup.

Unconditional is also a key word here: the Obama administration may want to extract concessions from Zelaya as part of a deal for his return to office. But this is not how democracy works. If Zelaya wants to negotiate a settlement with his political opponents after he returns, that is another story. But nobody has the right to extract political concession from him in exile, over the barrel of a gun.

Indeed, rumors have been circulating that a deal may be in the works for Zelaya to return to power if he gives up his calls for constitutional reform.

In the Honduran coup, the Obama administration claims that it tried to discourage the Honduran military from taking this action. It would be interesting to know what these discussions were like. Did administration officials say, "You know that we will have to say that we are against such a move if you do it, because everyone else will?" Or was it more like, "Don't do it, because we will do everything in our power to reverse any such coup"? The administration's actions since the coup indicate something more like the former, if not worse.

There are always pretty good reasons to suspect U.S. complicity in any coup in Latin America; we have a long history of such things (even preceding the Cold War) and, in Honduras particularly, the military has been heavily subsidized for years by Washington. It is difficult to believe--though theoretically not impossible--that it would have taken such a drastic action without first getting American approval. Because of this, the administration won't be able to credibly claim ambivalence; it will have to come out against the coup to avoid looking guilty.

Things which are surprising but should not be

In the wake of Al Franken at long last being confirmed as a Senator, it's important to remind your Republican colleagues blowing on about liberal celebrities in politics that their very own Most High and Exalted Saint Ronnie Raygun himself came to public prominence first as...an actor.

Unless they believe Saint Ronnie was really a cowboy, which I admit is possible.

Oh, and some pop star died

There's been a military coup in Honduras (is there any other kind?). Bernard Chazelle analyzes the New York Times' coverage.

From the byline alone, you know this is going to be good: Elizabeth Malkin, in Mexico City, with reporting by Simon Romero from Caracas. Which makes perfect sense since, as we all know, Mexico City and Caracas are the two major cities in Honduras. (Too bad they had no reporter in Bangkok. I hope the Pulitzer committee doesn't notice.)

The driving point behind the coup appears to have been a non-binding straw poll set for Sunday gauging public support for convening a new constitutional convention. Some people have itchy trigger fingers.

MOAR

...apparently too itchy, as the State Department has issued a condemnation. Somebody somewhere got their wires crossed in this deal.

The loathing of Fehr

Via Lemieux, I'm also behind this Joe Sheehan piece on the retiring Donald Fehr.

There are jobs that demand of the person filling them that they be able to forgo popularity to do them well. No one likes public defenders. No one likes tax auditors. And no one likes the men who have chosen to represent baseball players as if they were a group of laborers in an industry long dominated by a paternalistic management and covered by an unquestioning press largely bought and paid for by the same.

Don Fehr took on this task and did it very well for a quarter-century. He did it as his peers in the NFL, NBA, and NHL all lost major labor battles and saw their unions weakened, or in the NFL's case completely broken and turned into a house union. The relative popularity of Fehr and his NFL counterpart, the late Gene Upshaw, ran in inverse proportion to how good each man was at his job of representing the athletes in their charge. Since 1983, when Fehr took over following the brief, unlamented stint of Ken Moffatt, the MLBPA has established itself as the most powerful players' association in sports, and one of the few successful unions in American labor. They won three grievances over collusion at a time when free agency was still in relative infancy. They beat management in the courts when necessary. Under Fehr's watch, we're into the longest stretch of labor peace since the players were serfs.

There's a worthwhile question over whether a professional athletes' union should be considered a part of "labor." The answer, I think, is a qualified yes. There's no question pro athletes make exponentially more than their value to society, and management has used this to great effect in turning public opinion in its favor while no one takes a second glance at what the owners are making. However, one can see from the reaction to Fehr's career that the Divine Right of Bosses is still in effect regardless of how much money labor's piece of the pie represents.

Labor should look to the MLBPA as an example of what's attainable rather than holding it in contempt. Of course, this is precisely the reason the press is so intent on stamping out the union's legacy and fostering resentment. The contrast with the beatification of Upshaw, who oversaw the complete submission of the NFLPA to the league, is a good one; the media's ideal portrait of a Good Union Boss as opposed to a Bad One. It shouldn't be overestimated how much the relative power of labor has influenced the bourgeouis media's love affair with pro football.

Mean Green

I think Jonathon Schwarz explains well why I remain somewhat unable to get too excited about the ongoing demonstrations in Iran even though I'm naturally sympathetic.

2. I'm amused by all the attention this is getting from some of the best U.S. liberal bluggers, such as Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings. Even when they're at their best, American liberals essentially follow in lockstep the agenda of the governing classes. Would they care anywhere near as much if Iran weren't an Official Enemy? Obviously not. Thus even when "opposing" William Kristol, they're ratifying the right's power by giving them the ability to decide what gets talked about.

Quite. There are any number of rigged elections going on around the world at any given time; it's blindingly obvious that the only reason this one is getting the celebrity treatment from the American media is that the Iranian regime is not a US client state. I can hardly remember a similar reaction to the street demonstrations after the 2006 elections in Mexico. In fact, those protesters were dismissed the same way our right-wing Serious media handles demonstrators in the United States; i.e. as unemployed leeches who should get a real job and let the ruling class worry about ruling. Now suddenly conservatives are holding "tea parties" and cheering on foreign demonstrators as gallant and courageous. The world is turned inside out.

Maybe it's because there aren't any giant paper-mache heads. Perhaps that does it.

Men are desperate

If someone can explain the social forces behind "pay-per-view" events, please let me know.

It can't be a coincidence that the only sporting (or "sports entertainment") events that are at least modestly successful as pay-per-view franchises involve men beating the tar out of each other.

Really, what sporting event would you pay $50 to see on television? The 2008 Wimbledon final? Not even that would make the cut for me.

But apparently men will dole out any amount of cash to see blood or sex.

Though there are boxing fans who will say that moving all major fights to pay-per-view, while perhaps a financial windfall for the sport's benefactors, has been one of the many reasons for the decline in popular interest.

Persian snooker

Can anyone figure out what happened in the Iranian presidential election between conservative favorite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and would-be reformist Mir-Hossain Mousavi.

In these presidential elections, Iranians have a 'candidate of change' (yes, literally the same slogan) in the person of Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Now, this is very interesting, since Mir-Hossein Mousavi, currently a member of the 'reformist' camp, was the prime minister (when the post existed) from 1981 to 1989. Back then he was a member of the 'left wing' due to his advocacy for a state-run economy. Nowadays, he has changed indeed and supports all manner of privatization (as do all 'reformers').

Mousavi's premiership coincided with the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), during which his economic management carried the country through very rough times. Among other innovations, he introduced the coupon system that made sure everybody received the minimum ration of needed nutrients during those hard times.

Mossavi has been widely touted in the Western media, which views Iranian politics--like American politics--solely through the lens of liberalizing the socially-repressive theocracy, ignoring the fact that poor people tend to be concerned initially with not starving, with clothing options coming second. Most were led to believe that Mossavi would be ride in easily in another color-coded revolution (this one green). So they were stunned when voting results claimed to show Ahmadinejad winning in a landslide.

Immediately, many began accusing Ahmadinejad of colluding with the theocratic clerics to either steal the election or launch a pre-emptive coup (covered well here). While this seems possible, if not likely, one shouldn't discount the third possibility; that the Big A actually won the election. The Western press appears to have grossly overestimated Mousavi's support because it rarely leaves the upper-crust bubble in Tehran.

Perhaps from the start Mousavi was destined to fail as he hoped to combine the articulate energies of the liberal upper class with the business interests of the bazaar merchants. The Facebook campaigns and text-messaging were perfectly irrelevant for the rural and working classes who struggle to make a day's ends meet, much less have the time to review the week's blogs in an internet cafe. Although Mousavi tried to appeal to such classes by addressing the problems of inflation and poverty, they voted otherwise.

As if on cue, here's a New Yorker correspondent claiming to know the electon was stolen because everyone she knows with Blackberries in the Grand Hyatt ballroom voted for Mousavi.

Of course, Iran's quasi-democracy should be viewed with some skepticism, given that potential candidates have to be pre-approved by the clerical administration before they are allowed to participate. Americans should find this system very familiar, although we mostly prefer our gatekeepers to be business leaders rather than clerics.

It's all very difficult to unravel, which doesn't mean that the American media won't find a way to strip all the nuance away when it wakes up tomorrow morning. I expect a simplistic outporing of finger-wagging, condemnation, and condescention toward anyone who wonders about the "done stole it!" narrative. Needless to say it'll be boom times for the "bomb bomb Iran" chorus line, who'll eat this shit like candy. Some were even forthrightly rooting for The Big A to win, because a moderate could lull us into forgetting his Brown Muslimness.

Really, I'm skeptical here because of my unwritten rule of rigging elections: If you're going to steal it with any concern for subtlety, you have to produce a result that people could believe. Ahmadinejad giving himself 67 percent of an election he was expected to lose doesn't make sense unless a)he's ragingly obtuse (possible) or b)that's roughly what he got.

The times, they are unchanging

June 7 [1890] the Farmers Mutual Benefit Association and The Knights of Labor held a joint convention at Washington Daviess county and nominated a full county ticket The candidates were about equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. At Fort Wayne on September 11 the Farmers Alliance and various labor organizations decided to put forth an independent county ticket The Democrats were said to be making efforts to prevent this action.

"The People's Party in Inidana," Indiana Magazine of History December 1918.

About that...

Obama's "address to the Muslim world" last week contained this bit of surprising Unseriousness.

"In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government," Obama said in a keynote speech to the Muslim world in Cairo.

It was the first time a serving US president had publicly admitted American involvement in the coup.

The US Central Intelligence Agency, with British backing, masterminded the coup after Mossadegh nationalised the oil industry, run until then by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

For many Iranians, the coup demonstrated duplicity by the United States, which presented itself as a defender of freedom but did not hesitate to use underhand methods to get rid of a democratically elected government to suit its own economic and strategic interests.

Washington went on to become the major backer of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown in the Islamic revolution of 1979.

Yes but WHY DO THEY HATE AMERICA BLARGITY BLARGH!!!!!

Things you didn't know were in the Bible, part I

You have wearied the LORD with your words.
"How have we wearied him?" you ask.
By saying, "All who do evil are good in the eyes of the LORD, and he is pleased with them" or "Where is the God of justice?"

See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come," says the LORD Almighty. But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner's fire or a launderer's soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the LORD will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the LORD, as in days gone by, as in former years.

"So I will come near to you for judgment. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice, but do not fear me," says the LORD Almighty.

-Malachi 2-3

Damned lies and statistics

Approximate number of German divisions on the Eastern Front in June 1941: 190

Number of Soviet military deaths during the Eastern Front: Roughly 10 million

Total number of deaths, civilian and otherwise, caused by the Eastern Front: Roughly 30 million

Relation to the total number of deaths worldwide in World War II: Over one-third

Rank among all historical world conflicts of the Eastern Front if considered by itself: First

Relation, in multiples, of the size of the Eastern Front to the Western Front which began June 6, 1944: Four

Remember kids, if it t'weren't for 'Murica, you, not to mention everyone in Europe, would be speaking German today!

Four minutes of heaven

Presented in glorious grainy mono.

In the year 2000

This seems as good an explanation as any for the extreme over-representation of libertarians in geekdom.

It goes like this: nerds spend their formative years being turned into surly loners by the taunts and abuse of their intellectual inferiors. Since they've essentially been rejected by society, they reject society right back, embracing a political philosophy which raises "the individual" (read: them) above all else. Nobody ever cared about them, after all, so why should they care about anyone else? The nerd may grow beyond this feeling in adulthood, but the sense of being outside society is likely to linger.

Then, once these newly minted teenage libertarians get older and discover the wonderful world of Technology, they start believing that the path to Utopia will come not from humanity learning to live together but through a genius scientist who will invent the cyborg body allowing us to live forever. Therefore, it's imperative that this potential genius not be encumbered by concerns about who's starving where.

You may wonder why libertarianism, which appears to be so prevalent on the internet, has been such a flameout in the real world. Partially, it is a function of this strange phenomenon. I mean, did you ever meet a Ron Paul voter in the flesh? Primarily, though, it's that many people who call themselves "libertarians" are Republicans who just want lower taxes and are a little embarrassed to be associated with social conservatives. Oh, and they might like pot to be legal. Not that anyone in their income bracket is ever getting busted.

Yup

I'm nowhere near being able to determine whether Sotomayor's opinion's have "intellectual depth" or not. She seems to have qualifications consistent with the SCOTUS. But I can tell that the argument has pretty much played out the way I expected. Conservatives are racists, and liberals argue that Sotomayor should be confirmed because conservatives are racists.

Apparently she's a Serious Intellectual Centrist. Oh happy days. Of course, Obama could have picked a qualified Hispanic woman who's more progressive. Right-wingers are going to have the same fit about far-left judicial activists regardless. But why should he? Everyone knows the liberal pressure groups go starry-eyed whenever there's race or gender in play, but do they know or care what her actual judicial history or past opinions have been?

I'm not opposed to "affirmative action hires" if one wants to use that epithet. In fact, let's have more of them. But, as expected, Obama seems to go for the most milquetoast moderate he can find. At least Clarence Thomas was already taken.

And another thing

Dave Noon wonders why US presidents continue the tradition of sending a wreath to commemorate Confederate war dead. There's an interesting back-and-forth in the comments about Memorial Day being a generic holiday to honor the dead without making moral judgments on the righteousness of the conflict they were involved in. Which, as I note below, would exclude most conflicts in American history.

This would be palatable. It is not, however, anywhere near the way Memorial Day is actually celebrated. There can be no consideration of a war in which America was not on the side of Good and Right and Freedom. A cause is just when we decide to take it up. To think otherwise is to give in to the coldest kind of Unseriousness. From the Mexican War, the Indian Wars and the Spanish-American War, through Korea, Vietnam and the Great 21st Century MidEastern Clusterfuck, America was nothing else if not selflessly dedicated to Defending Your Freedom. How? God only knows. But I'm sure somebody somewhere has an explanation, right?

Here's what it's good for

Which military holiday is it again? They all seem alike to me.

.....

I'm a little confused. Apparently the United States has only fought one war in its history. At least, that's what I gather from the endless paeans to soldiers "dying for our freedom." It occurs to me that if Adolf Hitler didn't exist, America would have to invent him.

There was the Civil War, of course, but if you'll recall about half the country was actively fighting against human freedom in that one. Curiously it's the same part of the country most actively involved in canonizing the military now.

Perhaps when I hear that I'm just managing to miss the last clause. You know, "fighting for the freedom of American business to exploit whatever it wants." Yes, I'm sure that's what they mean to say.

.....

Of course, the deification of the military has some rather alarming consequences. The "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy largely persists because he-men in the armed forces apparently believe having to serve with out gay people will cause their penis to shrink. The proper response, as Stephen Suh pronounces in so many words, is to tell these folks that they will eat their veggies and like it, or kindly sod off. This doesn't happen, because the alleged civilian control is exceedingly deferential to whatever the sainted military man demands.

Then there is the increasing Christianization of the military, covered by the wonderful Jeff Sharlet in the May issue of Harper's. This was probably a smarter choice for right-wing Christians all along; rather than try to break through in the political arena, where you'll have to face criticism and dissent, it's better to take over the only unassailable institution in American public life.

A few weeks ago I was musing about the improbability of civilian resistance against the government's army. I was, at the time, referring to crazy righties who dislike paying taxes so much they're going to abandon civilization and fight a guerilla war through the mountains. But it's important for lefties as well. Because of the above fact, our democracy survives only insofar as the military accedes to the new government taking power. If, by some stroke, we were ever able to elect a genuinely left-wing government, we would have to aware of the possibility that the military, egged on by business interests, would move in to overturn it. Yes, it is a longshot, but it's a possibility that everyone, even moderate liberals, should consider when analyzing the out-of-control leverage granted to the military.

This nightmare scenario becomes more likely should the American right as a whole continue to lose popular political power and turn as a refuge to the one place where they'll always be welcome.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

According to a recent survey, the most generous givers to charity by percentage of income are those making less than $20,000 a year. They are nearly 2% more generous than everyone else except those making over $100,000 per year, whom they still beat by 1.5%.

Surveys of charitable giving have always been a little suspect, so I'm not sure how much to make of this. Conservatives, for example, have long crowed over polls showing right-wing voters are more generous, as proof apparently that "ZOMG who needs taxes!!!" However, it's not quite clear how much of those donations are going to religious institutions, which are not always, or even often, the model of selfless charity. Likewise, the supposed generosity of the rich is often touted based on the total amount of money given but that, to no one's great surprise, appears to be overstated.

Threelio

I suspected this year's Indianapolis 500 would play out very similarly to last year's race and, rather unfortunately, that's the way it turned out. Helio Castroneves ended up on the top of the pile at the end of the day largely as a result of having the cleanest day on pit road and pulled away in the final 15 laps to secure his third victory.

In a carbon copy of last year's race, there were a number of accidents, each spaced perfectly to coincide with a normal pit window. As such, there was very little strategy shuffling at play which combined with conditions making it very difficult to pass on the race track led to a very static and stultifying experience. Limited overtaking can be overlooked in road racing, but it makes for a rather dull oval race, especially when combined with a high number of caution periods.

The problem seems to derive from the current tire compound used by Firestone, which has the double jeopardy combination of not being very raceable and causing a large buildup of marbles out of the groove; the latter has been the primary cause of most accidents in the past three races.

The remainder of a quite surprising top five was rounded out by Dan Wheldon, Danica Patrick, Townsend Bell and Will Power, all of whom, like Castroneves, got there primarily by having a trouble-free day in the pits. Two cars who did not were the teammates of Chip Ganassi Racing, who ran one-two for most of the race but slipped back over the final two stops.

"I love it when he plays the Bush covers!"

Something sounds familiar.

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