No more a rake and no more a bachelor

This one goes out to the Donkeyman...

People get ready

The battle for the Employee Free Choice Act is coming....

In the lead-up to the election, the co-founder of Home Depot, Bernie Marcus, called Employee Free Choice "the demise of civilization." Wal-Mart summoned store managers into mandatory meetings to warn them against it. Industrial launderer Cintas launched a website to oppose it. The retail industry associations paid blue-chip lobbying firms to block it. The Chamber of Commerce hired Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao's chief of staff to run its opposition campaign, which trashed the bill as antidemocratic because it allows workers to bypass a formal election. Business groups spent tens of millions on ads attacking Democrats in tight Senate races, including $5 million targeting challenger Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a supporter of the bill who was smeared with a mailer accusing him of doing the bidding of corrupt labor leaders and trailed at every campaign appearance by a grim reaper claiming "Merkley kills democracy." "I've never seen anything like it," says Merkley's campaign manager, John Isaac, "where a group spent so much money to insert their issue into a campaign."

Even corporations dining at the bailout trough haven't noticed the contradictions between begging the American taxpayers for a lifeline while trying to keep a boot to their throats.  

 Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

This spectre of this fight has been looming over much of the posturing surrounding the varous bailout and stimulus packages before Congress.  But that is just the skirmishing before the battle. This thing is going to be Armageddon. The Republicans, backed by an alliance of the most powerful corporations in the country, have been gearing up for months to fight it.  Will Obama and the Democrats stand and fight, or will they embrace their role as the new Party of Business?

A description the likes of which are seldom seen

Charlie Pierce.

This happens a lot in football. The game is afflicted by announcers who spend an awful lot of time wrapping football in the Great American Family Values comforter. They festoon it with jingoistic baubles and cheap patriotic gewgaws. And all of this is to place the game's fundamental destruction and brutality on some higher plane than that occupied by people who simply beat the crap out of one another in bars on a Friday night. This is how we end up with Thom Brennaman treating the national collegiate football championship game as though he were the Chad and Jeremy correspondent for Tiger Beat back in the day. This is also how we are going to be inundated with mendacious swill over the next two weeks on the subject of what a great story the Arizona Cardinals are.

Unfortunately, Pierce is slayed by the undying need of every Boston sportswriter to weigh the merits of every earthly entity against the Home Team, so the lone example he cites as proof of Arizona's mediocrity is one game against the Pats.  

This does remind me of a great quote by George Will, of all people, who, despite being a patrician right-wing tosser, at least picked the right sport. 

Football combines the two worst things about America; violence punctuated by committee meetings. 

Famile picnic

Before they were famous

I'm That Guy

There's always one person everyone remembers from his or her high school class who, despite possessing reasonable intelligence and at least one or two notable skills, has nonetheless managed to fail at life rather spectacularly.

Yeah, that's me. I own it.

But having to be reminded of it, implicitly or explicitly, is still not my idea of a good time.

Inauguration polka

In case you missed it, or more likely, just want to see it again, here's the best highlight of Tuesday's inauguration ceremony, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery's benediction. 

If you're wondering, as I was; the rhyme at the end is an extended riff on a song by mid-century blues artist Big Bill Broonzy

BSG: The final countdown

Though I know it's futile to get anyone I know to watch this show--for reasons I can't really explain--but the stretch run of "Battlestar Galactica" kicked off Friday night (episode available for viewing on scifi.com or Hulu.)

While I am one of those people who think the overall quality of BSG has declined somewhat from the stupendous high of the first two seasons, I'm not going to jump in the backlash pool with people claiming the writers have lost control and the show has gone careening off into the abyss. Trying to unravel the various mysteries may be a fun game for fans to play, but those plot elements have always been a distraction from the show's main project of holding up a mirror to human civilization and how people react to various shocking situations. It was a brilliant stroke for the writers to play the two most-discussed reveals ("who's the final Cylon?" and "what happens when they get to Earth?") in the span of a couple of episodes. Friday night's episode is hard, but it should be. In fact, given the predicament the characters are presently in, a feeling of the show losing its bearings is entirely appropriate.

I've made peace with the reality that the writers aren't going to tie up the myriad continuity threads in a way that will satisfy people before the show ends. Yes, they were making much of it up as they went along, and they've probably written themselves into too many corners to escape from. But that's the nature of an episodic television show. You have to keep produing adventurous, risk-taking material indefinitely, then suddenly wrap it up in a set period of time. It's nearly impossible to do this perfectly. Ron Moore could've made "Battlestar" a Star Trek-esque Wagon Train to the Stars, a long series of standalone episodes that never advances the overall situation of the characters, but that would have become very dull, very quickly. And Moore, a longtime Trek writer himself, often mentions his dogged attempts to excise all of the bad influence of that show from BSG.

So let's tip our cap to what Moore has managed to achieve here. Remake a campy artifact of the late '70s, put it on a network known for reruns and D-grade productions, and turn it into one of the most iconic shows of this decade. Whatever he does next--and while I hope it's a Star Trek reboot, I know that's not going to happen--he's going to be well-compensated for it. And it won't be on basic cable.

"I was driving up from Tampa when the radiator burst...."

Where have you gone, Leni Riefenstahl? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you

Much fun has been had at the expense of a new right-wing site called "Big Hollywood:" apparently the latest in a long line of attempts to win the film industry over to conservativism.  

The creeping evil of "liberal Hollywood" has, of course, been a longstanding hobbyhorse for right-wingers, but their new approach is, if not more coherent, at least more novel.  It mixes the usual bawling about "blacklisted" Hollywood righties and the liberal agenda with triumphalist crowing about the box-office failures of a recent spread of anti-war movies and claims that blockbusters like "The Dark Knight" secretly contain a right-wing message which explains their massive success.  

John Rogers wrote the definitive post on this subject a few years ago, but it bears going over again.  The great majority of the output from the megastudios is designed to be as inoffensive as possible, because the studio's goal is to reach the largest audience possible.  Insofar as most blockbusters promote any values at all, they're the kind of back-of-the-cereal-box Aesops that no one would find troubling ("love conquers all!" etc.).  They are nothing if not "conservative."  Which would seem to make the right-wing objections to movie world perplexing.  There are a lot of films that could be said to have generally "conservative" values; the Pixar catalogue comes to mind.  

But it's important to remember this about our contemporary American right-wingers; they aren't really that "conservative."  Indeed, the primary complaint from right-wing Hollywood critics is the insufficient amount of jingoistic war propaganda, and, to a lesser extent, too little respect for the virtues of savage capitalism.  It's odd to see conservatives embrace "The Dark Knight" so readily, given that the main debate over the film is how much it endorses Batman's vigilante fascism (following the Hollywood truism above, I couldn't make heads or tails of that movie's attempt at political commentary, which was probably intentional).  If judging right-wing film commentary is any indication, modern conservatism can be boiled down to this;  support for the great American war machine, and worship of right-wing authoritarian heroes.  All else is auxillary.  

This is a one-way street

Glennzilla has another salient observation:

There sure is a lot of agreeing going on -- one might describe it as "absolute." The degree of mandated orthodoxy on the Israel question among America's political elites is so great that if one took the statements on Gaza from George Bush, Pelosi, Hoyer, Berman, Ros-Lehtinen, and randomly chosen Bill Kristol-acolytes and redacted their names, it would be impossible to know which statements came from whom. They're all identical: what Israel does is absolutely right. The U.S. must fully and unconditionally support Israel. Israel does not merit an iota of criticism for what it is doing. It bears none of the blame for this conflict. No questioning even of the wisdom of its decisions -- let alone the justifiability -- is uttered. No deviation from that script takes place.

This is striking and bizarre, but I think the answer to this riddle is a relatively easy one. The existence of Israel as a friendly but embattled client state in the Middle East serves the ambition of the United States in that region nicely. Any and all American intervention in the Middle East can be justified within the all-encompassing umbrella of the need to "protect Israel." Any would-be rogue Arab state with a couple of Molotov cocktails can't be reasonably claimed as a security threat to the United States, but enough evidence can be ginned up to show they're a "threat to Israel," so taking care of them becomes a humanitarian necessity. This complete melding of U.S. and Israeli interest is pitched to the American public with appeals to varying combinations of anti-Arab racism, sympathy with historical oppresion of the Jews, and wooing American Christians to view Israel as a kind of proxy Crusader state. The second is the most popular tactic among the neocon charlatans who dominate the conversation in this country, though it's lost much of its power in the rest of the world as Israeli militarism becomes increasingly beligerrent. And, as Glenn points out in another post, it may be losing traction inside the United States as well, though you'll never see anyone in the political elite acknowledge it.

Is there any other significant issue in American political life, besides Israel, where (a) citizens split almost evenly in their views, yet (b) the leaders of both parties adopt identical lockstep positions which leave half of the citizenry with no real voice? More notably still, is there any other position, besides Israel, where (a) a party's voters overwhelmingly embrace one position (Israel should not have attacked Gaza) but (b) that party's leadership unanimously embraces the exact opposite position (Israel was absolutely right to attack Gaza and the U.S. must support Israel unequivocally)? Does that happen with any other issue?

It's times like these when the two-party monopoly must come together to defend the American empire from American democracy. Issues like these are too important for the voting public to have any choice. The Democratic leadership may know that most of their constituents want a more nuanced approach to the Israel/Palestine question, but they also know that they can continue to adopt the same far-right position as the Republicans, because those voters have nowhere else to go. I suspect this happens more frequently than Glenn may think. The two-party monopoly works by sweeping a great mass of political issues off the table of discussion; the Israel/Palestine question is just a particularly high-profile demonstration of this procedure in action.