One-party State

So, ZOMG!, Arlen Specter totally transformed into a Democrat which means he now supports Employee Free Choice, right? No? You mean he didn't actually change any of his positions; just changed parties because he's likely to lose the Republican primary next year, and the Democrats have already promised they'll clear the road for him if he switches?

The mainstream pundit class is, of course, ecstatic with the news. Specter is just the kind of Democrat they like; a Republican. He'll continue to support Sensible Economics and unrestrained imperialism abroad, and he's pro-choice and not a complete social reactionary. The biggest threat to having the Democrats in power is the threat of the scary, scary hippies bringing their patchouli reek into the wrong cocktail parties. Fortunately there are heroes like Specter willing to make sacrifices to ensure that, if the public is going to insist on overwhelmingly voting Democratic, at least we'll get the right sort of Democrat.

Elections

Iceland's left-leaning caretaker government that came to power after that country's financial collapse has won a full term.

In which Jesus Christ weighs in on progressive taxation

"From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded."

-Luke 12:48b NRSV

Quoteable III

When Giuliani filed his suit, I wanted to help the TDU [Teamsters Democratic Union] as best I could. So I called up a big law firm in New York and asked if they'd come into it, pro bono, for TDU. I talked to a friend of mine there and told him how TDU wanted to argue in favor of rank-and-file elections.

He was excited. He told me he'd talk to some other lawyers and call me back.

But when he did call back a few weeks later he said, "Sorry, we can't help."

He said that the older lawyers who were liberals like him wanted to do it, but the younger lawyers did not. The younger lawyers didn't want to be involved with Teamsters at all.

"But we're the good guys," I said.

"That's not it. They don't like any Teamsters."

"Why?"

"They don't like the fact that they make $40,000 a year...you know...just for driving a truck."

I was unhappy with the decision, but I also felt a secret thrill...the idea that 28-year old lawyers, driving BMW's, making only $100,000 a year, could resent these rank-and-file Teamsters, could resent people like Bill and Diane, and even now, at the end of the Reagan era, when every other union had been run off the road, young lawyers could still loook out, could still see, pulling up in their rearview mirrors, riding their bumpers...the Teamsters, coming after them, breathing down their necks making $40,000 a year.

-Tom Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? pp 159-160.

Working

Saw this in a comment section today, not to single out the particular commenter because this is a frequently expressed sentiment.

I feel like the rich are being demonized and punished for working hard and earning money. They should have the freedom to spend that money as they like rather than have it taken from them by the government for social programs they may or may not support.*

This is a prominent feature of vulgar Calvinism present in the United States; a person's station in life is the public manifestation of their private righteousness. The rich must work hard, otherwise they would not be rich, while the poor are lazy and shiftless. It's should be surprising that this is as widely accepted as it is, given the existence of people who work for a living, sometimes at multiple jobs, yet are far from wealthy because their work has been deemed of little value by the invisible hand of the marketplace. We call these people, strangely enough, the "working" "class." You may have learned about them in your high school history class. In mine, I learned that America was the world's first classless society, so your mileage may vary.

However, I wonder something about the people who claim wealth is a direct correlation of work. Specifically, I wonder whether these folks ever invest any of that money they earn, and if so, where? Surely, they can't claim that money made from invested was really "earned" by them. Even if they claim that their wealth is a direct expression of their personhood--as some do--they still don't directly control that money. Or did all the people who lost their retirement savings during the financial collapse suddenly have a fit of laziness beforehand?

Similarly, I'm not sure I accept the oft-asserted notion that a safety net that's too strong will encourage people to simply stay unemployed rather than find a job. This may be true in limited cases, and that can't really be helped, but I doubt its as widespread as claimed. This boils down to what the meaning of "work" is. Having a job to identify with is essential to a person's identity, and I suspect the great majority of people would feel incomplete without one, even if they could survive well enough without one. People need to feel they are producing something, even if they aren't being paid for it. If nothing else, the social stigma on is, and would be likely to remain, astronomically large. I've read a number of items during the recession of people feeling ashamed of being newly-unemployed. I doubt that is solely the result of financial concerns.

*It's interesting that this commenter in particular only seems concerned about the rich having a say in how their tax dollars are spent. Does he think voting power should be concentrated in the hands of people who contribute the most tax revenue? If so, I can't see how he could be too upset with the present arrangement.

Teabaggers in paradise

God, aren't the connies cute? Why, it was just a few years ago they were fantasizing about running over hippie protesters with their SUV's and now they have an itty bitty protest of their own. I'm so proud of them. Hey, if you folks want to change the world so much, why don't you get a real job! Oh, man, that was.... funny.....tears.....

There was even a mini-teabag going on a few blocks from where I volunteer, sponsored in part by the un-self-consciously named Restoring our Heritage. Mr. Paxton, please pick up the white courtesy phone. Apparently a reverend was in attendence as well, so I missed his surely-enlightening interpretation of the Bible's position on government spending.

Of course, one must go in expecting disappointment when looking for consistency out of our right-wing colleagues. As Glennzilla writes today, all of the right's leading lights are in full lather over a Homeland Security report about the terrorist threat from right-wing extremist groups. (Why they'd be upset at a report clearly delineating "extremists" is unknown but, hey, if the shoe fits.) Totally lacking any sense of irony, the righties have completely reversed their embrace of surveillance expansion during the Bush years. Did they really believe Republicans would stay in power forever, and that the policies they cheered on would never be used against them? Do they think the policies of one administraton are completely reset to zero when the next president assumes power? This is so brazenly, obviously, apparent that I'm really dumbstruck how any logical human could possibly pull such a rhetorical whiplash.

Perhaps they're just as shocked as I am that the government actually spent some time looking at far-right nutters. I've always assumed if you were a lefty and didn't have an FBI file, its because you weren't working hard enough. The world sure is upside down.

Spank'ems!

A batch of right-wing congresspeople have dug up and dusted off an old, old chestnut among zany religious conservatives: fear that U.N. Gummit Boots will come into your home and prevent parents from wantonly beating their children. In this case, they're proposing a constitutional amendment of "Parent's Rights" to block the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by every member nation except the United States and Somalia. We keep such wonderful company on these matters.

There are various other items in this amendment, but they are mostly there to fill up space and give the illusion of this thing having some more meat to it. The real fear percolating on the right for years is that corporal punishment will somehow be forbidden, as a great many people still have forlorn faith in the magical disciplinary powers of spanking. Just a few weeks ago someone told me that the problem with "my generation" was that we weren't spanked enough as children. I don't expect there is any evidence to support this claim, but then again, academic inquiries are for homosexuals.

Anyway, I have personal experience to disprove their case. I was spanked occasionally as a child, and generally the only thing it did was give me a healthy disdain for arbitrary, ill-gotten and poorly-wielded authority. This being exactly the opposite of its intended effect, I reckon that worked out not at all.

When a new teacher would come into a frontier schoolhouse in the 19th century, he would commonly find the biggest kid in school and beat the shit out of him to establish his will. If the student won the fight, the teacher had to go looking for another place of employment. Parents, unfortunately, can't go looking for other kids once they've lost the ability to enforce moral authority by physically overpowering them. Ironically, then, spanking hardliners are at risk for the same kind of ensnarement they warn against--parents powerless to discipline their kids.

The need to establish a proper hierarchy based on might, of course, isn't something that ends in childhood for the right-wing imagination. A person's ability to destroy you is always a marker of his God-given authority and, consequently, his moral rectitude. It goes from cradle to grave. American military might proves the righteousness of its interventions. Don't join a union; instead, accept your boss's divinely-ordained wisdom. Slaves, be obedient to your masters. Oops, bit of a shame about that one, eh?

I haven't mentioned violence yet, which is the primary reason I'm opposed to corporal punishment and, even if all else were neutral, is reason enough to abstain. Interestingly, the concern about instilling proper Christian values in your children seldom extends to non-violence. But then, why would I think it should?

The meaning of life

1. Make money
2. Kiss the right asses
3. Bite the right backs
4. Pass on to be with Jeebus

If Rasmussen says it, you know it's true

Just 53% Say Capitalism Better Than Socialism

Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better.

Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided. Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.

Rasmussen, of course, can find a silver lining.

It is interesting to compare the new results to an earlier survey in which 70% of Americans prefer a free-market economy. The fact that a “free-market economy” attracts substantially more support than “capitalism” may suggest some skepticism about whether capitalism in the United States today relies on free markets.

Actually, what it likely suggests is that Americans are trained to respond favorably to anything with the word "free" in the vicinity. But it's a nice effort at libertarian spinning anyway.

(h/t Lenin's Tomb)

Geez

People read this thing? Why on earth for?

"I'm done take me off the air!  TAKE ME OFF THE AIR!"

Cattle call

Continuing the diversion from matters of life and death:

For the past couple of years I've kept a profile at the free online dating site OKCupid.com. Mostly it's been sitting there unattended (and sucking pretty badly) but a few weeks ago I decided to dress it up a bit and see what the site was all about.  I don't expect anything to come of it, of course--there are many other factors precluding that--but I can't temper my curiosity about what makes other people moved.  

What I found was interesting and rather disappointing.  While the site seems fairly progressive, and I think many of the people with profiles there are non-traditonal, general etiquette on the site seems to go along the same strictly defined gender roles as the meatspace dating world.  Men are expected to do all the seeking and competing for the women's attention, while she waits and selects the best candidate from the available suitors. 

Reading a few forum posts giving messaging tips to men, it occured to me how much this process felt like applying for a job.  Indeed, much of the advice I found sounds exactly like the recycled checklist of platitudes you get from employment counselors.  That's largely what has soured me on the site; I've had enough trouble with that sort of thing; I don't have any interest in applying for a girlfriend as well. 

Granted I'm not the best guinea pig for this experiment, being generally ugly, unaccomplished, lazy, and a bore among many other things, but after studiously personalizing messages to several people as suggested and being ignored, I've decided to back-burner the project for now. 

Finally, although women may be more inclined to accept their traditional gender role in this matter (it does give them considerably more power than usual), it still has the same genesis as other roles and therefore shouldn't be dismissed too easily.  The man is still in the role of the sexual conquerer, vanquishing foes to win his desired prize.  Women, meanwhile, are to wait passively until their conquerer comes along, then putting him through the wringer before finally conceding.  Because, of course, sex isn't something women should enjoy; it's merely something to be given away to a man.  And you want to make him earn it.  

It's time for an intervention

I don't know what happened in the late 1980's to make baby names go off the rails, but at this point, that train is now rushing out of control through the forest burning the skin right off thousands of little furry animals. Girls certainly have this far, far worse. Heaven help you if you're a girl born after 1988 with a common name that you have to spell for everyone because your parents went through the Scrabble set looking for every possible phonetic alteration they could make to it.

Clearly, we need to lay out some ground rules here:

• There is a limit of one 'y' for every two syllables.
• As a general rule, spell nothing with a 'k' that can't be spelled with a 'c'
• Back-to-back 'e's are forbidden.
• Vowels are not interchangeable; pronunciations have meaning.
• No matter how clever you think you are, you aren't going to invent a new name that suddenly everyone else will want to use.
• Giving your kid a name from a dramatically different culture can be cool, but only if you know its background and meaning, not because it has a lot of 'y''s, 'k''s, or 'h''s.
  
• Your child's name belongs to then, not to you. It is not an outlet for your creativity. What you think sounds cute when they are five years old will not be when they are twenty.

My own suspicion is that most bad baby names tend to be foisted on kids whose parents are in their early 20's from strictly patriarchal backgrounds, where the mother has been taught to obsess about parenthood from birth and the father would just like you to pass him another fuckin' beer please.

I can't think of any more post titles...

Gracchus on the Obama-Notre Dame kerfuffle.

Why is the Church now more and more consistently putting sociocon, Christian right issues ahead of its own declared progressivism on matters of economics and social democracy?

Why is it in this way doing exactly what the Republican Party has been urging working class whites to do since Richard Nixon and Billy Graham became such soul-mates?

I admit, I'm not going to agree with the Catholics even if they were to start acting more in accordance with what they claim to believe, but at this point, I'm really starting to feel sorry for them. C'mon guys, have a little dignity. Show that you aren't actually completely beholden to right-wing political interests. No institution which has been around as long as you have, however checkered that past may be, deserves to go out like this. Does it?

Guns. Lots of guns

Apparently the nutter who knocked off three police officers in Pittsburgh Saturday had his nudgules in a twitch because he thought the Obama administration was preparing to ban guns.

I'll have to confer with the rest of my Commieliberofascist colleagues here, but I can't understand how the paranoia over some impending seizure of the nation's firearms continues to perpetuate itself. As best as I can tell, no one on our side has expended much energy on gun control for years.

Of course, even if they weren't paranoid, I'd have a hard time sympathizing with the gun nutters. I suppose they fancy themselves as Second Amendment warriors, standing in to turn back the tide of the inevitable showdown with Big Gummit, but look, kids, I'm gonna help you out here. This ain't the 18th century anymore, and you're gonna need more than farmers with muskets to beat the Gummit's army these days. Why these folks think guns are so essential to their survival is beyond me. Perhaps they really do think of their weapon as a part of their, un, anatomy.

Down on the farm

There seems to be an unusually high volume of talk about the drug war lately, or, as Avedon Carol and the gentlemen of LGM more precisely term it, the War on Some Classes of People Who Use Some Drugs. This has apparently been brought about by the alarming casualty rate of the battle between the Mexican government and the well-armed drug cartels.

Prohibitionism has long been one of those sacred arguments in American politics that, no matter how absurd it may get, no one in either party is going to step over the line. It's commonly assumed by the pundit class that breaking lockstep on this issue would result in instant electrocution. Perhaps it would. The American Calvinist ethic is usually a-OK with locking up the Bad People indefinitely and indiscrimintely.

But prohibition also has some tangible benefits to the ruling class that will keep them clinging to it as long as possible. As its distant cousin in political untouchables, Israel, does in the Middle East, the drug war a persistent excuse for the United States to stick its nose into Latin American affairs. What business would the US have in Bolivia, for example, if we couldn't pretend to be concerned about Evo and his coca farmers? Domestically, prohibition keeps the lucrative prison industry filled to overflowing with all manner of undesirables, largely poor and minority, permanantly disenfranchising them from civic participation.

Many liberals and libertarians have opposed the drug war for years, but what's surprsing about the latest outburst is the number of reliably mainstream voices who have started to doubt the wisdom of outright prohibition and recognize the damage it causes at home and abroad. But, as it does with Israel, the two-party monopoly will continue to prevent democratic debate on the issue.

Finally

What do you suppose our chances are of getting it anywhere near the DC? Yeah, not much.

Not necessarily news

I'm amused at how the "community events" section of the local newspaper seems to contain only two varieties of said events: religious gatherings and drug or alcohol rehab meetings.

I think I have a pretty good idea why this is, but I'll let you rub a few neurons together and see if you can figure it out.