Tommy pop-pop

It's hard for me to get too unkempt over The Mustache of Understanding's latest shite because, while it is filled with the usual pig-ignorant twaddle about the desperate Hole in the Middle of American politics, he actually ends it by stumping for an instant-runoff voting system, an easy common-sense reform I also support. Now, Friedman may not be aware of this, if a taxi driver from Bangalore hasn't told him, but IRV advocacy is usually the territory of the independent left, not the center, precisely because progressives will no longer be forced to cave to ConservaDem demands under threat of ZOMGRepublicans! If Tommycakes thinks the Democratic Party is in the throes of the Radical Left now, what will he think when the party's right wing minority is no longer able to bar the exit doors because what's beyond them is the vacuum of space?

All else is commentary

Lawyers, Guns, and Money:

A great progressive moment.

I am largely ambivalent about the passage of the health care bill. It seems likely that, whether the bill passed or failed, the window for passing serious health reform will be closed for a generation. Had it failed, of course, the ruling class would have declared the subject closed and decided. With the apparent passage, the establishment--both Serious Liberals and Beltway status-quo-ites--will now claim victory and retire to the sidelines. Earnest progressive boosters of the bill who hope it is some kind of first step are headed for disappointment. The bill does nothing to cure the real disease of American health care, in fact, it enshrines the maximum profitability of health inscos and pharmaceuticals into law. I can't see how you plan to build on that.

With that in mind, it's hard to see how online liberals can hail this as any kind of progressive "victory." That's hardly how I would characterize squandering considerable popular political will for reform by watering it down first in a futile attempt at the unattainable holy grail of "bipartisanship" and later buying off the support of industry-owned conservative Democrats. It was not a progressive victory to allow a small cadre of far right nutters to drive the public debate while whipping the left into line. Backers have sent out the old standby of reformists everywhere, that it provides short-term relief to the uninsured; in this case with the same junk for-profit insurance which already leaves many millions of citizens under-insured.

No, this hardly seems like a victory. While the supposed wild unpopularity cited by opponents is a fiction, the modest new institutions aren't likely to be popular enough to survive the next Republican government. What we have here is evidence for the vacuity of the Serious Liberal admonition to "work within the system." Fellow workers, if this is the best you can do within the system, then it is the best you will ever do within the system. It is time to change the system.

Maple Leaf Dawn

Fellow Workers!

After careful analysis of all rhetoric* on the issue here at Mel-Anon Labs, I believe I have solved the health care crisis once and for all!

All we need to do is the following:

1.) Convince Canada to invade.
2.) As mounting any kind of civil defense would be too expensive and We Just Can't Afford That Right Now, said invasion should be a walkover.
3.) Hello, United States of Canuckistan!

This seems like a foolproof plan to me, so call your Member of Parliament today!

*Okay, mostly just television ads during the basketball.

Hammer time!

The Raw Story:

"There is an argument to be made that these extensions, the unemployment benefits, keep people from going and finding jobs," he told CNN's Candy Crowley Sunday.

"In fact there are some studies that have been done that show people stay on unemployment compensation and they don't look for a job until two or three weeks before they know the benefits are going to run out," he argued.

"People are unemployed because they want to be? " asked Crowley.

"Well, it is the truth. And people in the real world know it," said DeLay.

Supposing DeLay is right, the question which immediately arises is why anyone would choose to barely subsist on unemployment benefits rather than earn a meager wage being overworked at menial labor by tyrannical bosses. Oh, but I've answered my own question, haven't I? The Hammer, of course, prefers an entirely non-coercive free market where the choice between starvation and slavery is left up to you!

Vainglorious bastards

Two very worthwhile reads sizing up the Tea Party movements can be found at Americana and the New York Review of Books.

Trying to nail down a taxonomy of tea partiers is difficult because of the great potpourri of programs bandied about, ranging from Paulian escapists to local Republican parties hoping for a re-branding. There are upper-middle class suburbanites afraid for the first time that popular movements from below might reshuffle the tax burden (they have nothing to fear, of course, but the fear itself is helpful to someone.) And there are working-class people angry at the elite power structure who are looking to throw their weight behind anyone who will give them some answers.

This confusion is encapsulated by the media's response to it.

The tea party is an interesting movement because it is a combination of people that can be shit on without repercussion and powerful interests looking to exploit the movement for political gain. The media is in a sort of holding pattern, some coverage is hyper-critical and other hews to the standards of covering the powerful.

Case in point is this David Brooks column in the New York Times. Brooks, the quintessential establishment conservative, dismisses the Tea Partiers with a series of thrown-together superficial similarities between them and the New Left of the 1960s. Brooks not only re-assures the establishment that he is not on board, but also reminds everyone that Non-Serious people, regardless of their particular proclivity, are distinguished first and foremost by their Non-Seriousness and exist in a kind of solidarity likewise.

However, there is this:

I see the rank and file as working class people, generally. I don’t fault people for not having enough time to research the world because that time and energy is a luxury that many people cannot afford. I don’t fault them for being ignorant about that which has not, until recently, been relevant to their lives. They as much as tell you that they are angry, violent and afraid of the future, that is

I would sympathize with this if I felt it were descriptive of much of Tea Party Nation. But I'm not sure it is. Here is Jonathon Rabun at the Tea Party Nation in Nashville.

Few of us would see much change from the $1,500–$2,000 we'd spent on travel to Nashville, the $558.95 convention fee with service charge, a room at the hotel, and a couple of drinks at the hotel bars, where a glass of the cheapest wine or whisky cost $12. Seen as a group, we were, I thought, a shade too prosperous, too amiably chatty and mild-mannered, to pass as the voice of the enraged grassroots.

I asked one woman whether she'd been part of "9/12," as tea partiers call the great taxpayer march on Washington, D.C., last September. No, she'd missed it, she said, and "felt really guilty" about doing so, but she and her husband had been on vacation.

"Where did you go?"

"We spent a week in Amalfi, then we toured Tuscany, then we spent a week in Rome."

I can believe that many of these people really did have a "political awakening" of sorts leading them to tea-partydom, but it was not likely born out of a lack of leisure time to consume political news, but instead--as I hinted above--from a realization that sudden upheavals and class unrest could be in serious jeopardy for the first time in their lives. Tea partying served as a kind of pre-emptive strike; using the standard right-populist framework of mimicking a working-class, salt-of-the-earth ethos.

Give me syrupy or give me death

Here's a conclusion I didn't think I would ever reach.

Of the following, I much prefer the saccharine naifs with their huggy puppy romance to the self-righteous pietists who, like the puritans who need to constantly remind you they don't own a television, must constantly assure themselves and you how above it they are. Of course, they are lying to themselves and the rest of us. Join a monastery or convent if you want to prove your chaste bona fides. Otherwise, stuff it. I don't believe you.

Crass warfare, part II

Found on the internet:

...it’s more accurate to say all white Americans are implicated in a racist system, because we all benefit from it. Even those of us who are not racist in any way... are still inheritors of the system.

Nothing will ensure the continued prevalence of racism quite like reminding working-class white people of how much they benefit from it. Perhaps it can only be topped by assuring them that, yes, their economically-precarious position does in fact come from previously marginalized minorities taking away their jobs. It used to be you had to rely on the ruling class and white-supremacist reactionaries like Pat Buchanan to make these arguments; now you can get it from zealous, self-flagellating liberals.