Every year, folks make predictions or resolutions
for the New Year. Have you made any yet?
for the New Year. Have you made any yet?
(Next year, I plan to switch from
soccer games to hedge funds.)
soccer games to hedge funds.)
Friday, December 31, 2010
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
If this be Treason. . .
The Republicans like to use the word Tyrant a lot. Perhaps it's the same sort of tendency you find in liars and cheats and thieves of other types who use those words to describe those who threaten to expose them. Perhaps not, but I've noticed of late that there have been a lot of calls for summary and extra-legal executions coming from Right wing writers and hate shouters like good ol' love thy neighbor Mike Huckabee or Foxboy Tucker Carlson who "personally" would like to have had Michael Vick put up against a wall and shot even though dear justice loving Tucker professes to be -- you guessed it -- a Christian. Pardon me, but I'm confused.
If you find it hard to reconcile what you think you know about Jesus and non-judgmentalism and forgiveness with summary executions for animal cruelty, perhaps you're unaware of the overriding moral imperative of the Values Party: anything we do to undermine Obama and the Democrats is patriotic and is justified through patriotism because our word is law, not your damned Constitution. Barack Obama praised the NFL's Eagles for giving quarterback Michael Vick a second chance and of course Barack Obama is the Tyrant Prince of Darkness so if he does anything, it's a bad thing. Vick must die, even if those animal rights people are bleeding heart liberals and even if you don't give a damn about dogs.
Last Wednesday in my local paper, I suffered through a tortuous justification of summary execution for treason of the fellow who leaked those diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, the essence of which was that: had he leaked different information under different circumstances at a different time, some terrible thing might have happened. That's the basis of Mike Huckabee's equally loathsome demand for twisting the treason definition to allow the Republicans to kill their critics for the crime of informing the public that our allies aren't our allies and the government doesn't know what it's doing.
Of course if someone were lying about the failures of our government, that would be different. They'd get a regular show on Fox like Huckabee and Beck, make the big bucks and none would dare call it treason. The truth is what makes it bad, you see.
Never mind that something is exposed that would cause us to hang a foreigner the way we did an Nuremberg for, if we do it, it's not a crime. A bit like saying that if your aunt had had wheels instead of legs she'd have been a bus and so she can be sued for not picking you up at the bus stop this morning even if you don't ride the bus and she has legs anyway -- and you'd see the logic of that if you weren't a damned Libtard lover of tyranny.
Pfc. Bradley Manning, the fellow who embarrassed the military with his Afghanistan videos of course should be put up against the same wall for revealing the incompetence of Government, the lies, cover ups and perhaps the slaughter of innocents because after all, anything that doesn't cover up our misdeeds is treason unless the deeds have political importance for Republicans -- then anything is fair game and lawbreakers are heroes and patriots. Are you starting to get it? Criticizing the government is treason because it helps the enemy and there's always an enemy, don't you know -- except when the elite does it, of course, and you know who they are.
Yes, the government is corrupt, incompetent and can't do anything and so we're against it as long as that's actually false. If it's true and you prove it, you're a traitor and should be shot without due process. That's not tyranny -- a middle class tax cut is tyranny, ending insurance company abuse is tyranny, taking deadly contaminated meat off the shelves is tyranny, ending bigotry against law abiding citizens is tyranny, addressing schoolchildren on TV is Tyranny as bad as anything Pol Pot ever did. Making BP pay for their incompetence is tyranny and if you don't agree, the unelected leaders at Fox want you dead and aren't embarrassed to suggest that you be killed. Sic semper tyrannis.
If you find it hard to reconcile what you think you know about Jesus and non-judgmentalism and forgiveness with summary executions for animal cruelty, perhaps you're unaware of the overriding moral imperative of the Values Party: anything we do to undermine Obama and the Democrats is patriotic and is justified through patriotism because our word is law, not your damned Constitution. Barack Obama praised the NFL's Eagles for giving quarterback Michael Vick a second chance and of course Barack Obama is the Tyrant Prince of Darkness so if he does anything, it's a bad thing. Vick must die, even if those animal rights people are bleeding heart liberals and even if you don't give a damn about dogs.
Last Wednesday in my local paper, I suffered through a tortuous justification of summary execution for treason of the fellow who leaked those diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, the essence of which was that: had he leaked different information under different circumstances at a different time, some terrible thing might have happened. That's the basis of Mike Huckabee's equally loathsome demand for twisting the treason definition to allow the Republicans to kill their critics for the crime of informing the public that our allies aren't our allies and the government doesn't know what it's doing.
Of course if someone were lying about the failures of our government, that would be different. They'd get a regular show on Fox like Huckabee and Beck, make the big bucks and none would dare call it treason. The truth is what makes it bad, you see.
Never mind that something is exposed that would cause us to hang a foreigner the way we did an Nuremberg for, if we do it, it's not a crime. A bit like saying that if your aunt had had wheels instead of legs she'd have been a bus and so she can be sued for not picking you up at the bus stop this morning even if you don't ride the bus and she has legs anyway -- and you'd see the logic of that if you weren't a damned Libtard lover of tyranny.
Pfc. Bradley Manning, the fellow who embarrassed the military with his Afghanistan videos of course should be put up against the same wall for revealing the incompetence of Government, the lies, cover ups and perhaps the slaughter of innocents because after all, anything that doesn't cover up our misdeeds is treason unless the deeds have political importance for Republicans -- then anything is fair game and lawbreakers are heroes and patriots. Are you starting to get it? Criticizing the government is treason because it helps the enemy and there's always an enemy, don't you know -- except when the elite does it, of course, and you know who they are.
Yes, the government is corrupt, incompetent and can't do anything and so we're against it as long as that's actually false. If it's true and you prove it, you're a traitor and should be shot without due process. That's not tyranny -- a middle class tax cut is tyranny, ending insurance company abuse is tyranny, taking deadly contaminated meat off the shelves is tyranny, ending bigotry against law abiding citizens is tyranny, addressing schoolchildren on TV is Tyranny as bad as anything Pol Pot ever did. Making BP pay for their incompetence is tyranny and if you don't agree, the unelected leaders at Fox want you dead and aren't embarrassed to suggest that you be killed. Sic semper tyrannis.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Friday, December 24, 2010
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
THE CONGRESS EVERYONE LOVES TO HATE
Remarkable! Moments after I left a comment under tnlib’s latest post, I found this story at the NBC News website, The Do-Something Congress:
This Congress … accomplished more, legislatively, than any other Congress since the 1960s (the Great Society) or the 1930s (the New Deal). In the past two years, it has:To repeat what I said earlier under tnlib’s post:
And in its final piece of business, the Senate is currently working on one of the White House's top foreign-policy goals: ratification of the New START treaty with Russia. Then throw in all of the other legislation enacted this Congress, like credit-card reform and the Lilly Ledbetter anti-pay-discrimination act.
- expanded the safety net with the health-care law;
- invested billions in the nation's roadways, airports, schools, and green technologies with the stimulus;
- reformed the nation's financial system with financial reform;
- passed billions in tax cuts for Americans with the stimulus and the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts
- expanded civil rights with the repeal of "Don’t Ask, Don't Tell."
(…)
Yet as we -- and others -- have pointed out before, political power in Congress comes and goes. What truly matters is what you do with it when you have it.
If Jane Hamsher had her way, Congressional Democrats and Republicans would be locked in mortal combat, and none of this would have happened.So Jane, how is that hopey changey thing working out for you? It works quite well, IMHO.
There is much to be admired in the patient and pragmatic approach – in contrast to being dogmatic and self-sabotaging. I will say this of folks who allow themselves to get angry in any debate: If you feel you must trade on anger to win an argument, then you have defaulted on any claim to win by persuasion.
Monday, December 20, 2010
How the Far-Left Mirrors the Far-Right
The left, including this writer, has made a career out of denouncing right-wing extremism, mainly the Tea Party and those Republicans more interested in destroying a president – and in the process, the country – than they are in working to solve the very serious problems facing our country.
Liberals justifiably mock the right’s ignorance of basic civics, the country’s history and the Constitution; after all, part of being a responsible citizen is in knowing these things. Signs with misspelled words advocating “English Only” are met with derision; posters with the swastika are met with outrage. The right’s lies, distortions and hypocrisy are greeted with a mixture of ridicule and outrage and held under the microscope by non-partisan fact-checking organizations – along with those from the left.
Harsh criticism is leveled at the racism implicit in signs at Tea Party rallies and on billboards, on edited photographs, in emails and snail mail, and on social networks. Nowhere is this more exemplified than in their tasteless personal attacks on the current President and First Family; even the children are subjected to racist insults. These character defects should and do attract scorn from most decent Americans, regardless of political persuasion.
But do I detect an echo? Can it be said that the far-left is sounding like the extremists on the right and adopting some of those very same character flaws we so vigorously reject and condemn?
The Bloggerhood: Free Speech and Hypocrisy
Very early on in my blogging career I read about how Pam, a conservative over at The Oracular Opinion, stepped in to help her friend Shaw at Progressive Eruptions who had to have surgery and needed help to keep her blog running. Liberal bloggers applauded her acts of kindness; right wingers all but tarred, feathered and ran Pam out of Blogger Town on a rail. Her crime? Aiding and abetting the enemy.
A liberal who used the name Blackwaterdog was hounded off Daily Kos by a loud, noisy chorus of ugly rhetoric. She started her own blog appropriately named The Only Adult in the Room. But the “purists” weren’t satisfied; they wanted to annihilate her. This dehumanizing effort was led by none other than Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, a good buddy of Jane Hamsher’s at FireDogLake. Her crime? Posting positive picture diaries of the President and First Family’s activities.
Not everyone may be drawn to the content on The Only Adult but does this give her critics the right to compare her to Nazi propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl? Sound familiar?
The blatant hypocrisy and the total disregard for a person’s right to free expression because their speech is not agreeable with another’s is deplorable and unacceptable. But sadly, I see many comment zones turning into war zones with the far-left resorting to personal insults when disagreeing with more pragmatic liberals who in most cases share the same ideals but not the approach.
Sentamental History
I would have been surprised had the main street media not started attacking President Obama the moment he opened his eyes on the morning after the inauguration. But I was dumbfounded at the attacks from the so-called professional progressive blogs. They began mildly enough but very quickly their rhetoric turned into a cacophony of ugly vitriol not unlike that heard from the far-right. Even worse, professional and non-professional far-left bloggers resort to the same kinds of tasteless personally degrading labels that they criticize the right for using.
“Obama should be like LBJ was” or “Obama needs to do what FDR did” is not too far removed from “I want my country back.” The glaring but simple reality is that we can’t go back in time; our country is facing a different set of problems with a different cast of characters. More obviously, Obama is not like LBJ, just as LBJ wasn’t like JFK, and JFK wasn’t like HST, and HST wasn’t like FDR, and so on.
We get our kicks out of mocking the extreme right for its ignorance of history but the far-left can be just as ignorant of and blind to documented historical facts.
FACT: When legislation for Social Security was introduced, Franklin D. Roosevelt dropped the national health care provision that was originally included. Why did he – gasp! – compromise/sell-out/cave? Because at that time and place in our history, he wisely understood that the Republicans would say NO to health care reform and in the process kill Social Security as well.
I wonder if anyone on the far-left during those gloomy dark days of the Great Depression accused FDR of being corrupt, a puppet, inept or a snake oil salesman.
FACT: The Social Security Act, signed by FDR in 1935, only covered workers in commerce and industry. In 1937 the Federal Insurance Contribution Act (FICA) was passed; it required workers to pay taxes to support the Social Security system. In 1939 Social Security was expanded to include dependents and survivors. Not until nearly 25 years later in 1950 was it expanded to cover dependents and survivors. In 1956 Disability Insurance was created and has been expanded over the years.
FACT: LBJ never would have succeeded in getting civil rights legislation passed had it not been for Republican support. The Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmond, did everything in and out of the book to block it. Obama is not only burdened with the yellow Blue Dogs, he is faced with an unprecedented concrete wall of well-organized obstruction from the opposition – and now he has the far-left participating in the drive to bring his presidency – and thus the country – to its knees.
The lessons here should be obvious. Not every president can get everything he may have promised during a campaign; a foolish attempt to win no doubt but no more foolish than voters who take such promises at face value. Politics has never been a “take all or nothing” kind of game. Passing legislation is in fact the “art of compromise.” The “all or nothing” school of thought is not only unrealistic, the end result is nothing.
Bloggers Get Down and Dirty
The extremes on both sides of the political spectrum have a penchant for chanting infantile slogans: “I have a right to free speech” from the right translates into “I have a right to disagree with the president” or “I have a right to criticize the president” from the left. Yes and yes, but that is not the issue.The issue is not in the message but in the way it is delivered, the language.
Vicious epithets directed at the President of our United States are limited only by their crude imaginations. One side is just as repugnant, tasteless and vile as the other. Epithets from the right include: Spoiled Brat, Obama Bin Lyin, Half-breed Muslim, Barack Hussein Obama, No Clue Balls Obama, Robbing Hood, Nazi, Terrorist, Barack the Magic Negro.
What’s the difference between that kind of toilet tank talk and this used by far-left bloggers? Barack Bush, Nel, HomophObama, Pootie Tang, the Black Mr. Rogers, House Negro.
I can’t help but wonder if there is a connection between the use of such invectives and the fact that Obama is the first black president.
Headlines such as “Barack Obama the Anatomical Wonder. We’re Looking for Organ and Skeletal Donors for Barack Obama” (from one of my favorite blogs no less) and crude – as in content and production videos such as this one.
Other Mirror Images
Who cares what the majority thinks?
It’s all about “me”, not about “we”.
My preferences are more important than yours.
The president is ignoring our side.
I only listen to Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann.
What party of NO? What obstructionism?
Our country is on the verge of collapse. It’s the eve of destruction.
If I can’t have it all and NOW, I’m staying home.
I’m not paranoid. What denial?
Who? Me Whine?
. . . I know we liberals like to say that we don't march lock-step with our leaders as do the GOPers, but where does it say we have to destroy them with the same sort of dehumanizing invective and emasculating and emotional strafing that the far right uses on Obama? I have seen over my lifetime a radicalization of our politics and the extremes in both parties by true believers will keep us in a constant state of combat instead of making some sort of arrangement to get done the very important work that this country needs to get done.
I wish I had said this but I didn’t. It was included in an email from Shaw at Progressive Eruptions. I owe her a debt of gratitude for her insight and willingness to guide me and keep me on track.
There are several reasons I don’t visit right-wing sights: the epithets, the hysterics, the distortion of facts, the sniping, and the doomsday mentality. Maybe I’m just uncomfortable with extremes because I find myself visiting fewer and fewer far-left sites these days. I truly feel both extremes have a humanitarian problem and that if they don’t become more realistic and less pugnacious - more willing to give and take – it will not be because of Obama that this country collapses.
Liberals justifiably mock the right’s ignorance of basic civics, the country’s history and the Constitution; after all, part of being a responsible citizen is in knowing these things. Signs with misspelled words advocating “English Only” are met with derision; posters with the swastika are met with outrage. The right’s lies, distortions and hypocrisy are greeted with a mixture of ridicule and outrage and held under the microscope by non-partisan fact-checking organizations – along with those from the left.
Harsh criticism is leveled at the racism implicit in signs at Tea Party rallies and on billboards, on edited photographs, in emails and snail mail, and on social networks. Nowhere is this more exemplified than in their tasteless personal attacks on the current President and First Family; even the children are subjected to racist insults. These character defects should and do attract scorn from most decent Americans, regardless of political persuasion.
But do I detect an echo? Can it be said that the far-left is sounding like the extremists on the right and adopting some of those very same character flaws we so vigorously reject and condemn?
The Bloggerhood: Free Speech and Hypocrisy
Very early on in my blogging career I read about how Pam, a conservative over at The Oracular Opinion, stepped in to help her friend Shaw at Progressive Eruptions who had to have surgery and needed help to keep her blog running. Liberal bloggers applauded her acts of kindness; right wingers all but tarred, feathered and ran Pam out of Blogger Town on a rail. Her crime? Aiding and abetting the enemy.
A liberal who used the name Blackwaterdog was hounded off Daily Kos by a loud, noisy chorus of ugly rhetoric. She started her own blog appropriately named The Only Adult in the Room. But the “purists” weren’t satisfied; they wanted to annihilate her. This dehumanizing effort was led by none other than Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, a good buddy of Jane Hamsher’s at FireDogLake. Her crime? Posting positive picture diaries of the President and First Family’s activities.
Not everyone may be drawn to the content on The Only Adult but does this give her critics the right to compare her to Nazi propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl? Sound familiar?
The blatant hypocrisy and the total disregard for a person’s right to free expression because their speech is not agreeable with another’s is deplorable and unacceptable. But sadly, I see many comment zones turning into war zones with the far-left resorting to personal insults when disagreeing with more pragmatic liberals who in most cases share the same ideals but not the approach.
Sentamental History
I would have been surprised had the main street media not started attacking President Obama the moment he opened his eyes on the morning after the inauguration. But I was dumbfounded at the attacks from the so-called professional progressive blogs. They began mildly enough but very quickly their rhetoric turned into a cacophony of ugly vitriol not unlike that heard from the far-right. Even worse, professional and non-professional far-left bloggers resort to the same kinds of tasteless personally degrading labels that they criticize the right for using.
“Obama should be like LBJ was” or “Obama needs to do what FDR did” is not too far removed from “I want my country back.” The glaring but simple reality is that we can’t go back in time; our country is facing a different set of problems with a different cast of characters. More obviously, Obama is not like LBJ, just as LBJ wasn’t like JFK, and JFK wasn’t like HST, and HST wasn’t like FDR, and so on.
We get our kicks out of mocking the extreme right for its ignorance of history but the far-left can be just as ignorant of and blind to documented historical facts.
FACT: When legislation for Social Security was introduced, Franklin D. Roosevelt dropped the national health care provision that was originally included. Why did he – gasp! – compromise/sell-out/cave? Because at that time and place in our history, he wisely understood that the Republicans would say NO to health care reform and in the process kill Social Security as well.
I wonder if anyone on the far-left during those gloomy dark days of the Great Depression accused FDR of being corrupt, a puppet, inept or a snake oil salesman.
FACT: The Social Security Act, signed by FDR in 1935, only covered workers in commerce and industry. In 1937 the Federal Insurance Contribution Act (FICA) was passed; it required workers to pay taxes to support the Social Security system. In 1939 Social Security was expanded to include dependents and survivors. Not until nearly 25 years later in 1950 was it expanded to cover dependents and survivors. In 1956 Disability Insurance was created and has been expanded over the years.
FACT: LBJ never would have succeeded in getting civil rights legislation passed had it not been for Republican support. The Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmond, did everything in and out of the book to block it. Obama is not only burdened with the yellow Blue Dogs, he is faced with an unprecedented concrete wall of well-organized obstruction from the opposition – and now he has the far-left participating in the drive to bring his presidency – and thus the country – to its knees.
The lessons here should be obvious. Not every president can get everything he may have promised during a campaign; a foolish attempt to win no doubt but no more foolish than voters who take such promises at face value. Politics has never been a “take all or nothing” kind of game. Passing legislation is in fact the “art of compromise.” The “all or nothing” school of thought is not only unrealistic, the end result is nothing.
Bloggers Get Down and Dirty
The extremes on both sides of the political spectrum have a penchant for chanting infantile slogans: “I have a right to free speech” from the right translates into “I have a right to disagree with the president” or “I have a right to criticize the president” from the left. Yes and yes, but that is not the issue.The issue is not in the message but in the way it is delivered, the language.
Vicious epithets directed at the President of our United States are limited only by their crude imaginations. One side is just as repugnant, tasteless and vile as the other. Epithets from the right include: Spoiled Brat, Obama Bin Lyin, Half-breed Muslim, Barack Hussein Obama, No Clue Balls Obama, Robbing Hood, Nazi, Terrorist, Barack the Magic Negro.
What’s the difference between that kind of toilet tank talk and this used by far-left bloggers? Barack Bush, Nel, HomophObama, Pootie Tang, the Black Mr. Rogers, House Negro.
I can’t help but wonder if there is a connection between the use of such invectives and the fact that Obama is the first black president.
Headlines such as “Barack Obama the Anatomical Wonder. We’re Looking for Organ and Skeletal Donors for Barack Obama” (from one of my favorite blogs no less) and crude – as in content and production videos such as this one.
Other Mirror Images
Who cares what the majority thinks?
It’s all about “me”, not about “we”.
My preferences are more important than yours.
The president is ignoring our side.
I only listen to Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann.
What party of NO? What obstructionism?
Our country is on the verge of collapse. It’s the eve of destruction.
If I can’t have it all and NOW, I’m staying home.
I’m not paranoid. What denial?
Who? Me Whine?
. . . I know we liberals like to say that we don't march lock-step with our leaders as do the GOPers, but where does it say we have to destroy them with the same sort of dehumanizing invective and emasculating and emotional strafing that the far right uses on Obama? I have seen over my lifetime a radicalization of our politics and the extremes in both parties by true believers will keep us in a constant state of combat instead of making some sort of arrangement to get done the very important work that this country needs to get done.
I wish I had said this but I didn’t. It was included in an email from Shaw at Progressive Eruptions. I owe her a debt of gratitude for her insight and willingness to guide me and keep me on track.
There are several reasons I don’t visit right-wing sights: the epithets, the hysterics, the distortion of facts, the sniping, and the doomsday mentality. Maybe I’m just uncomfortable with extremes because I find myself visiting fewer and fewer far-left sites these days. I truly feel both extremes have a humanitarian problem and that if they don’t become more realistic and less pugnacious - more willing to give and take – it will not be because of Obama that this country collapses.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
"I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance." (Reuben Blades)
The modern human fascination with mindless entertainment has served to make stars out of a number of people with no apparent ability or talent. In many cases, it seems like Andy Warhol was hopelessly optimistic when he limited the fame of these non-stars to only fifteen minutes.
For example, why is it that I can go to Google News, and right there on the front page, I can find out that Bristol Palin "has to be happy" about Levi Johnston's new girlfriend? I mean, COME ON!!! This story doesn't answer any burning questions in my life; it only raises other questions!! Questions like "Why does "E! Online" come up on a Google News search? Wouldn't that be more appropriate for a Google Crap search?
I mean, really? Levi has been dating Sunny Oglesby, a day-care instructor, for two months? And Bristol is happy because "it sounds like his new girlfriend is influencing him to want to actually spend time with Tripp"?
And this is news how, exactly? Because a woman named after a British town is cheerful about a pair of jeans getting involved with an adjective for "not cloudy," who makes him want to visit his son Stumble?
Or to put it another way, sometimes you have to ask yourself why the fuck Bristol Palin is still in the news. Or really, why was she ever in the news at all?
(Please note that I fully understand the irony of going on at length, as I'm about to do, about a woman who's getting too much press. That would be part of my charm, if I had any.)
As an example, here's a report from another internet gossip rag calling itself Pop Eater, which asks the question of the ages: Is Bristol Palin a Bigger Star Than Her Mom Now?
Yes, you read that right. And this guy's reasoning is a fascinating exercise in logical fallacies.
1. Without any doubt - completely unsupported statement.
2. The biggest star in the Palin household - Funny thing. Since only 1 in 4 adults think Sarah Palin, a political figure, is qualified to be president, it's actually difficult to tell how low that bar actually is.
3. an A-list Hollywood publicist tells me - Funny how this guy is anonymous, isn't it?
4. At the moment I would argue - "Don't ask me what I'd say in another five minutes, though."
5. she's one of the biggest stars out there - Undefined term. Are we talking "name recognition"? Sure, she's got some of that. What about "actual accomplishments," though?
But I digress.
In 2004, John Edwards was John Kerry's VP candidate. Prior to his wife dying two weeks ago, had you heard anything about his kids? I just looked it up - there's four of them, ranging in age from 31 to 10. (Wow...)
But there's Bristol, right out there in the public eye. She doesn't have any discernible talent, she doesn't act, she doesn't sing, and, let's be honest, she really doesn't dance.
It's widely known that Bristol should have been bumped from Dancing With the "Stars." After all, the person consistently scoring as the worst dancer is normally voted off of a contest that isn't rigged, right? But the zombie-like followers of her mother gamed the system; they kept her in by cheating. Openly.
Now, admittedly, despite Sarah's insistence that the press needed to leave her family alone, she was the first one to push them into the spotlight. And since Sarah's kind of a media whore herself, her kids are still getting light reflected off of her. But Bristol seems to be pushing herself to the front of the Palin crowd as much as she can. And our media is doing everything it can to help her.
The whole thing gets ridiculous fast. The media, starved for any actual content, has decided to promote every response she makes to anyone, positive or negative, as evidence of a "feud." They've decided that she's feuding with Keith Olbermann because he made fun of her making a commercial for abstinence.
Now, note the caption: "(Not really) World's Worst." Even Olbermann knew this wasn't really a bad thing, but it was somebody being stupid, and he could call them out on it.
Bristol, part of a thin-skinned family, fired off a response on Facebook (the only way the Palins communicate any more), talking about Olbermann's "insincere incredulity," and apologizing for "not being absolutely faultless like he undoubtedly must be."
Then there's her "feud" with Margaret Cho, probably the least feud-like of all. Cho blogged the following:
To this, Bristol replied (again, on Facebook) with a long post, where she showed insincere incredulity about Margaret Cho's opinion, and ending with:
OK, let's contrast two parts of that statement. "if you understood that commonsense conservative values supports the right of individuals like you" - You think the GOP is pro-gay, Bristol? I've never thought you were stupid before. Just naive.
I mean, you obviously know that Cho is gay. Look at the last bit there: "you would embrace us faster than KD Lang at an Indigo Girls concert." - have you ever actually talked to any gay people? Do you think that they go around making out with every other gay person they meet?
OK, maybe "stupid" is unfair. After all, look at the poisonous gene pool she sprang from. When your mother makes a career out of openly dishonest statements, the cognitive dissonance is probably built into your personality.
But that leads us to the one truly mean-spirited one: Kathy Griffin, who is actually less newsworthy than Bristol Palin. Let me start out by saying that I've never thought that Kathy Griffin was particularly funny - she's a shock jock, saying outrageous things in an effort to get publicity.
But when Griffin called Bristol fat, that was a little over the top. After all, Kathy, just because Bristol isn't as cadaverously thin as you are, you probably don't need to call her "fat." (Hey, at least Bristol has breasts - why do you even bother wearing a bra?)
(And by the way, wasn't it you who talked about nearly dying due to a botched liposuction a few years ago? Are you seeing the irony here, Kathy?)
However, Griffin does manage to give us the best example I can think of to highlight the dangers of the American mania for meaningless minutia.
It’s actually not the man so outraged by Dancing With the Stars that he shot his television - although that is an excellent example of why the Second Amendment should possibly not be a universal right.
It would be the fact that both Kathy Griffin and Bristol Palin are receiving death threats.
Because of a woman barely out of her teens. Dancing.
For example, why is it that I can go to Google News, and right there on the front page, I can find out that Bristol Palin "has to be happy" about Levi Johnston's new girlfriend? I mean, COME ON!!! This story doesn't answer any burning questions in my life; it only raises other questions!! Questions like "Why does "E! Online" come up on a Google News search? Wouldn't that be more appropriate for a Google Crap search?
I mean, really? Levi has been dating Sunny Oglesby, a day-care instructor, for two months? And Bristol is happy because "it sounds like his new girlfriend is influencing him to want to actually spend time with Tripp"?
And this is news how, exactly? Because a woman named after a British town is cheerful about a pair of jeans getting involved with an adjective for "not cloudy," who makes him want to visit his son Stumble?
Or to put it another way, sometimes you have to ask yourself why the fuck Bristol Palin is still in the news. Or really, why was she ever in the news at all?
(Please note that I fully understand the irony of going on at length, as I'm about to do, about a woman who's getting too much press. That would be part of my charm, if I had any.)
As an example, here's a report from another internet gossip rag calling itself Pop Eater, which asks the question of the ages: Is Bristol Palin a Bigger Star Than Her Mom Now?
Yes, you read that right. And this guy's reasoning is a fascinating exercise in logical fallacies.
"Without any doubt Bristol is now the biggest star in the Palin household," an A-list Hollywood publicist tells me. "At the moment I would argue she's one of the biggest stars out there."Quick breakdown of that paragraph.
1. Without any doubt - completely unsupported statement.
2. The biggest star in the Palin household - Funny thing. Since only 1 in 4 adults think Sarah Palin, a political figure, is qualified to be president, it's actually difficult to tell how low that bar actually is.
3. an A-list Hollywood publicist tells me - Funny how this guy is anonymous, isn't it?
4. At the moment I would argue - "Don't ask me what I'd say in another five minutes, though."
5. she's one of the biggest stars out there - Undefined term. Are we talking "name recognition"? Sure, she's got some of that. What about "actual accomplishments," though?
But I digress.
Easy, now. It's true that Bristol is finally finding her voice (with the help of a speechwriter, as Billy Bush opined this week on 'Access Hollywood') and this added attention along with her success on 'Dancing' has led to a whole host of offers and opportunities for the young mom. Books, reality shows, product endorsements... you name it, she's been offered it.Kim Kardashian. Ooh, there's something to aspire to.
One weekly celeb magazine editor tells me Bristol is "the new Kim Kardashian" on the scene.
"She's beautiful and real and not another one of those skinny Hollywood types. Add that she was a teen mom, which is very in right now with the MTV show and all, and you couldn't have written a better or more dramatic personal story. Sarah is yesterday's news. Bristol is today."So, what makes Bristol so fascinating? She's the daughter of a failed vice-presidential candidate.
In 2004, John Edwards was John Kerry's VP candidate. Prior to his wife dying two weeks ago, had you heard anything about his kids? I just looked it up - there's four of them, ranging in age from 31 to 10. (Wow...)
But there's Bristol, right out there in the public eye. She doesn't have any discernible talent, she doesn't act, she doesn't sing, and, let's be honest, she really doesn't dance.
It's widely known that Bristol should have been bumped from Dancing With the "Stars." After all, the person consistently scoring as the worst dancer is normally voted off of a contest that isn't rigged, right? But the zombie-like followers of her mother gamed the system; they kept her in by cheating. Openly.
Now, admittedly, despite Sarah's insistence that the press needed to leave her family alone, she was the first one to push them into the spotlight. And since Sarah's kind of a media whore herself, her kids are still getting light reflected off of her. But Bristol seems to be pushing herself to the front of the Palin crowd as much as she can. And our media is doing everything it can to help her.
The whole thing gets ridiculous fast. The media, starved for any actual content, has decided to promote every response she makes to anyone, positive or negative, as evidence of a "feud." They've decided that she's feuding with Keith Olbermann because he made fun of her making a commercial for abstinence.
Now, note the caption: "(Not really) World's Worst." Even Olbermann knew this wasn't really a bad thing, but it was somebody being stupid, and he could call them out on it.
Bristol, part of a thin-skinned family, fired off a response on Facebook (the only way the Palins communicate any more), talking about Olbermann's "insincere incredulity," and apologizing for "not being absolutely faultless like he undoubtedly must be."
Then there's her "feud" with Margaret Cho, probably the least feud-like of all. Cho blogged the following:
Why did Bristol do Dancing with the Stars? I heard from someone who really should know (really should seriously know the dirt really really) that the only reason Bristol was on the show was because Sarah Palin forced her to do it. Sarah supposedly blames Bristol harshly and openly (in the circles that I heard it from) for not winning the election, and so she told Bristol she “owed” it to her to do DWTS so that "America would fall in love with her again" and make it possible for Sarah Palin to run in 2012 with America behind her all the way. Instead of being supposedly "handicapped" by the presence of her teen mom daughter, now Bristol is going to be an "asset" – a celebrity beloved for her dancing. I am sure the show wasn’t in on this (but who knows anything really)But Cho spent the majority of the post asking why people talked about Bristol's weight, and pointing out that she wasn't really fat.
To this, Bristol replied (again, on Facebook) with a long post, where she showed insincere incredulity about Margaret Cho's opinion, and ending with:
To my friend Margaret Cho, if you ever have a question, call me girlfriend. Don't ever rely on "sources" who claim to know me or my family. You will be taken every time. And we need to talk. You say you "don't agree with the family's politics at all" but I say, if you understood that commonsense conservative values supports the right of individuals like you, like all of us, to live our lives with less government interference and more independence, you would embrace us faster than KD Lang at an Indigo Girls concert.("If you ever have a question, call me girlfriend." Did Bristol just come out? Did Levi put her off men entirely?)
OK, let's contrast two parts of that statement. "if you understood that commonsense conservative values supports the right of individuals like you" - You think the GOP is pro-gay, Bristol? I've never thought you were stupid before. Just naive.
I mean, you obviously know that Cho is gay. Look at the last bit there: "you would embrace us faster than KD Lang at an Indigo Girls concert." - have you ever actually talked to any gay people? Do you think that they go around making out with every other gay person they meet?
OK, maybe "stupid" is unfair. After all, look at the poisonous gene pool she sprang from. When your mother makes a career out of openly dishonest statements, the cognitive dissonance is probably built into your personality.
But that leads us to the one truly mean-spirited one: Kathy Griffin, who is actually less newsworthy than Bristol Palin. Let me start out by saying that I've never thought that Kathy Griffin was particularly funny - she's a shock jock, saying outrageous things in an effort to get publicity.
But when Griffin called Bristol fat, that was a little over the top. After all, Kathy, just because Bristol isn't as cadaverously thin as you are, you probably don't need to call her "fat." (Hey, at least Bristol has breasts - why do you even bother wearing a bra?)(And by the way, wasn't it you who talked about nearly dying due to a botched liposuction a few years ago? Are you seeing the irony here, Kathy?)
However, Griffin does manage to give us the best example I can think of to highlight the dangers of the American mania for meaningless minutia.
It’s actually not the man so outraged by Dancing With the Stars that he shot his television - although that is an excellent example of why the Second Amendment should possibly not be a universal right.
It would be the fact that both Kathy Griffin and Bristol Palin are receiving death threats.
Because of a woman barely out of her teens. Dancing.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Leaking on the leaker
Sex by surprise? OK, sex with two Swedish girls a third of my age would indeed be a surprise for this old man; for sure and maybe a fatal one, but it's not about me or likely to be, sad to say. It's about politics and money and power and that's no surprise at all.
So no matter what your feelings about Julian Assenge might be (mine are solidly into the Who Cares territory) you have to smile when information as to the actual charges against him are leaked to the public. That's if you love irony.
Was he sat up in a "honey trap?" I don't really care, he went into this with his eyes open and he is sort of an adult, but then his chief accuser did go on sleeping with him in her apartment for weeks and never asked him to leave. One has to wonder just where the "Surprise" was for her unless it was in E-mails leaked to Assenge's lawyer suggesting the quest for money was behind it, but then she may only have wanted the man to be tested for STDs, says The Guardian. Who knows, who cares? We're looking for scandal and a prop for our prejudices. The truth is boring.
Now can we get back to the war on Christmas?
So no matter what your feelings about Julian Assenge might be (mine are solidly into the Who Cares territory) you have to smile when information as to the actual charges against him are leaked to the public. That's if you love irony.
Was he sat up in a "honey trap?" I don't really care, he went into this with his eyes open and he is sort of an adult, but then his chief accuser did go on sleeping with him in her apartment for weeks and never asked him to leave. One has to wonder just where the "Surprise" was for her unless it was in E-mails leaked to Assenge's lawyer suggesting the quest for money was behind it, but then she may only have wanted the man to be tested for STDs, says The Guardian. Who knows, who cares? We're looking for scandal and a prop for our prejudices. The truth is boring.
Now can we get back to the war on Christmas?
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Relief is just a leak away
There's nothing like a good leak. No, I'm not talking about beer drinking or kidneys. Yes, it may still be all about indecent exposure, but exposure of a different kind of naughty bits. God bless the leaker.
Remember "Climate gate;" that clumsy journo-speak title for some e-mails between British Climatologists that after a bit of redaction seemed to be saying that the evidence for Global warming was fabricated by a great worldwide network of rogue paleoclimatologists plotting to be characters from a James Bond movie? Well the hoax may be on the other foot now, so to speak, but you won't hear it from the folks at Fox who spread it around the planet. You won't find the Fox admitting or mentioning that NASA data confirmed a rise in temperature quite independently and in irrefutable scientific rigor.
You won't find Fox admitting to error of any kind much less to deliberately lying, whether its hoaxing us about scientific data or showing the fake and fraudulent video that ruined ACORN. I admit, those e-mails had me going for a while but that was before the new data and the new revelations. Even Andrew Breitbart publicly washed the egg off his face, but Fox? Well, you decide.
It was all too easy to call Julian Assenge a "terrorist" or call for his summary execution, but I'm curious to see the outcome of some recent leaks showing just how Fox slants the news.
Like anything Fox gets paid to misrepresent, conflicting data must always be impugned by the " some say" or "people say" trick as though those "critics" weren't simply Roger Ailes or Bill Sammon or a Fox sponsor or most of all the Republican party. When the data conflicts with the politics, always mention "the critics." That's unslanted journalism, Fox style.
And when something you don't like sounds good, change the name. Take the "Public Option," for instance. According to Republican pollster and Fox man Frank Lutz,
Let's also claim that the "government option" would be "sponsored by the government, although in fact, the proposed public option would have funded the program with the premiums paid by enrolees - just like private insurance. So we need even stronger language - let's call it the "Government run option" and drape it in the Soviet flag. Never mind that we're lying, whatever serves the Party, that's what we'll say. That's journalism, Fox style.
Remember "Climate gate;" that clumsy journo-speak title for some e-mails between British Climatologists that after a bit of redaction seemed to be saying that the evidence for Global warming was fabricated by a great worldwide network of rogue paleoclimatologists plotting to be characters from a James Bond movie? Well the hoax may be on the other foot now, so to speak, but you won't hear it from the folks at Fox who spread it around the planet. You won't find the Fox admitting or mentioning that NASA data confirmed a rise in temperature quite independently and in irrefutable scientific rigor.
You won't find Fox admitting to error of any kind much less to deliberately lying, whether its hoaxing us about scientific data or showing the fake and fraudulent video that ruined ACORN. I admit, those e-mails had me going for a while but that was before the new data and the new revelations. Even Andrew Breitbart publicly washed the egg off his face, but Fox? Well, you decide.
It was all too easy to call Julian Assenge a "terrorist" or call for his summary execution, but I'm curious to see the outcome of some recent leaks showing just how Fox slants the news.
"Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data... we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question,"said Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon in a leaked e-mail in response to correspondent Wendell Goler's report that that the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization data again confirmed that the 2000 - 2009 decade has been the warmest worldwide on record, not just warmer than the previous one.
Like anything Fox gets paid to misrepresent, conflicting data must always be impugned by the " some say" or "people say" trick as though those "critics" weren't simply Roger Ailes or Bill Sammon or a Fox sponsor or most of all the Republican party. When the data conflicts with the politics, always mention "the critics." That's unslanted journalism, Fox style.
And when something you don't like sounds good, change the name. Take the "Public Option," for instance. According to Republican pollster and Fox man Frank Lutz,
"if you call it a 'public option,' the American people are split, if you call it the 'government option,' the public is overwhelmingly against it."Public sounds popular; sounds democratic; sounds like the people want it and polls show that they do, so let's call it "the Government option" said Sammon to Sean Hannity in another leaked e-mail. "Great idea" said Sean.
Let's also claim that the "government option" would be "sponsored by the government, although in fact, the proposed public option would have funded the program with the premiums paid by enrolees - just like private insurance. So we need even stronger language - let's call it the "Government run option" and drape it in the Soviet flag. Never mind that we're lying, whatever serves the Party, that's what we'll say. That's journalism, Fox style.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Waiter, there's a terrorist in my tea.
"In a free society we're supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it."
What is it about Florida? Is it as Frank Lloyd Wright once said, that since it's the lowest point on the map of the US, everything loose wound up down here?
We may be no more fatuous than the Rest of the country in blabbering about our "freedom" and how everyone in the world is jealous of it and how every military exploit is about freedom and every casualty is a sacrifice for freedom and that this freedom is the result of our foreign wars rather than our constitutional law, but we sure look strange to that supposedly jealous planet when we agitate that more and more of it be taken away from us -- in the name of freedom.
Speaking of loose things floating around in the bilges of America, Florida Representative elect Allen West, soon to represent the 22nd district, who identifies with that nebulous assemblage of misfits and nitwits called the Tea Party, seems to be all in favor of censoring the press despite all his tea soaked and treacly rhetoric about constitutional restraints on government power.
Yes, it's been all too hard for most of us to tell exactly what message the Tea Party people are bringing to the party, and this message of government for government's sake; government by, for and of the Executive branch and military authority and damn the constitution, smells more like plain old exaggerated nationalism and authoritarianism than tea.
One of the ways "the terrorists" won, is that domestic authoritarians posing as libertarians can simply identify anything that threatens them: things like the truth, for instance, as "Terrorism" and make it a crime. Things like identifying high crimes and high criminals and the kind of lies and manipulations of truth that get people killed and bankrupt economies. Revealing a crime; a politically motivated burglary, for example, becomes, by the logic of Tea, "aiding and abetting a serious crime" and "terrorism" while actually aiding and abetting by hiding it or obstructing justice becomes. . . what, freedom?
Is West a moderate compared to Uncle Mike Huckabee who demands summary execution for Assenge? Palin, Gingrich, Mitch McConnell and even CNN are calling him a "terrorist" and telling us not only that we can't handle the truth - we don't deserve it and the government doesn't owe it to us. It's all about freedom of course - and all of this from people calling Obama a "tyrant." So whatever the Tea party is selling, I think we can dispense with the idea that it has anything to do with less powerful government, a government restrained by law; anything to do with a government of the people, responsible to the people and most of all, anything to do with freedom other than to garble it's meaning.
-Ron Paul-
What is it about Florida? Is it as Frank Lloyd Wright once said, that since it's the lowest point on the map of the US, everything loose wound up down here?
We may be no more fatuous than the Rest of the country in blabbering about our "freedom" and how everyone in the world is jealous of it and how every military exploit is about freedom and every casualty is a sacrifice for freedom and that this freedom is the result of our foreign wars rather than our constitutional law, but we sure look strange to that supposedly jealous planet when we agitate that more and more of it be taken away from us -- in the name of freedom.
Speaking of loose things floating around in the bilges of America, Florida Representative elect Allen West, soon to represent the 22nd district, who identifies with that nebulous assemblage of misfits and nitwits called the Tea Party, seems to be all in favor of censoring the press despite all his tea soaked and treacly rhetoric about constitutional restraints on government power.
" . . . I think that we also should be censoring the American news agencies which enabled him to do this and also supported him and applauding him [Julian Assenge] for the efforts. So that's kind of aiding and abetting of a serious crime."No, he's not talking about reporting troop positions or exposing covert agents, he's talking about embarrassing the administration as "a serious crime." That's the same administration Tea Party folks have been waving guns at and making threats at and calling tyrannical, Marxist and illegal.
Yes, it's been all too hard for most of us to tell exactly what message the Tea Party people are bringing to the party, and this message of government for government's sake; government by, for and of the Executive branch and military authority and damn the constitution, smells more like plain old exaggerated nationalism and authoritarianism than tea.
One of the ways "the terrorists" won, is that domestic authoritarians posing as libertarians can simply identify anything that threatens them: things like the truth, for instance, as "Terrorism" and make it a crime. Things like identifying high crimes and high criminals and the kind of lies and manipulations of truth that get people killed and bankrupt economies. Revealing a crime; a politically motivated burglary, for example, becomes, by the logic of Tea, "aiding and abetting a serious crime" and "terrorism" while actually aiding and abetting by hiding it or obstructing justice becomes. . . what, freedom?
Is West a moderate compared to Uncle Mike Huckabee who demands summary execution for Assenge? Palin, Gingrich, Mitch McConnell and even CNN are calling him a "terrorist" and telling us not only that we can't handle the truth - we don't deserve it and the government doesn't owe it to us. It's all about freedom of course - and all of this from people calling Obama a "tyrant." So whatever the Tea party is selling, I think we can dispense with the idea that it has anything to do with less powerful government, a government restrained by law; anything to do with a government of the people, responsible to the people and most of all, anything to do with freedom other than to garble it's meaning.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Free to die
Am I joking? Well of course that dent in my cheek is from my tongue being there for so long. I'm nearly always joking, but sometimes the joke is serious. Sometimes the joke is much more laughable than anything I can make up.
You know, when I pay money to Blue Cross, unless I'm sick, all that money goes to pay other people's bills. They can decide whether to pay mine or not, so to an extent they decide whether I'm free to live or die and the deciding factor has much to do with how much money they want to make. I don't sit on the board of directors I can't influence the decision even if my medical condition gives me time to try. Call my congressman who depends on the largess of some HMO? Yes, I'm joking there too. No, under our great system we call freedom, I either cough up the cash or I'm free to die and thanks to the Bush family values, I probably can't file for bankruptcy protection against corporate leg breakers.
Why the holy hell is America so in love with that, that they won't consider a better safer and cheaper alternative? The answer is the real joke here -- because of corporate mind control and political lobbying that we also pay for with our insurance premiums: because we're trained to bark like Pavlov's dogs when Glenn Beck says "Socialism" when some bumper sticker mocks "Obamacare."
I get taxed big time to educate other people's children. If there's a benefit to me, it's not a direct, immediate one, but it's a benefit because the country's survival depends on it. ( note to self - they're trying to get rid of public education too) If I get taxed to pay for other people's medical expenses, there's a more direct benefit to me because although I'm not going back to first grade, I am going to die sooner or later and I'd prefer it to be later if you don't mind too much.
The cheapest and most efficient way of providing health care is through single payer government administered insurance like our VA system provides. Anything else is something less.
But OK, I'm joking, sure -- but you know, the real joke is that we hate the concept of government so much we'll ignore that a healthy nation is in the public interest as much as a literate nation and an invasion-proof nation. The joke is that we hate the reality of civilization so much we'll spend more to stay alive even as our civilization fades, our competitiveness wanes and even if we, our countrymen and their children die unnecessarily and prematurely in the process.
And seriously, the attitude that every man is for himself and what's mine is mine is what freedom is about, is a sick and malignant joke and an idea with no history of success. The idea that I benefit from civilization but owe nothing for its upkeep is a tragic joke well worthy of being an epitaph.
That we worry more about company profits for others than about giving our children a chance to grow up means something ugly about America and about Americans, and the older I get, the more of a sick, mean spirited, ugly old whore my country seems.
The constitution disallows it? The constitution declares itself to be there to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Is being on your own, helpless and hapless in an uncaring wilderness and at the greedy whim of some businessman really liberty? Is it civilization? So the libertarians and corporate fascists insist. That's a joke. Laugh if you can.
We justify a massive military to protect us from something less certain than disease and we won't justify spending less money than we spend now to protect us against what the army can't because spending less is spending too much? That's a better joke than I can make. That's a joke worthy of Mr. Beck who now is telling us that if the government can take poison of grocery shelves, they can control our lives. Are you laughing yet?
Who is the joker when we hear that your kid has to die in the interests of my "financial liberty" to spend every damned penny I make for my own benefit alone and maximize my corporate dividends without any thought to the responsibilities of civilization and its maintenance?
Who is perverting the concept of liberty by telling us a sick and helpless man is "free" because he can't afford medicine - that he can't work because he's sick and can't get well because he can't work? Well, I guess it's me if you listen to the Libertarian flim-flam about "Obamacare."
Yeah, it's all a joke and the punch line is some kid with leukemia condemned to die because his dad lost his job to India so that some corporation could make more money. Somehow, I'm not laughing. Somehow I'm angry as hell. I don't know about you.
You know, when I pay money to Blue Cross, unless I'm sick, all that money goes to pay other people's bills. They can decide whether to pay mine or not, so to an extent they decide whether I'm free to live or die and the deciding factor has much to do with how much money they want to make. I don't sit on the board of directors I can't influence the decision even if my medical condition gives me time to try. Call my congressman who depends on the largess of some HMO? Yes, I'm joking there too. No, under our great system we call freedom, I either cough up the cash or I'm free to die and thanks to the Bush family values, I probably can't file for bankruptcy protection against corporate leg breakers.
Why the holy hell is America so in love with that, that they won't consider a better safer and cheaper alternative? The answer is the real joke here -- because of corporate mind control and political lobbying that we also pay for with our insurance premiums: because we're trained to bark like Pavlov's dogs when Glenn Beck says "Socialism" when some bumper sticker mocks "Obamacare."
I get taxed big time to educate other people's children. If there's a benefit to me, it's not a direct, immediate one, but it's a benefit because the country's survival depends on it. ( note to self - they're trying to get rid of public education too) If I get taxed to pay for other people's medical expenses, there's a more direct benefit to me because although I'm not going back to first grade, I am going to die sooner or later and I'd prefer it to be later if you don't mind too much.
The cheapest and most efficient way of providing health care is through single payer government administered insurance like our VA system provides. Anything else is something less.
But OK, I'm joking, sure -- but you know, the real joke is that we hate the concept of government so much we'll ignore that a healthy nation is in the public interest as much as a literate nation and an invasion-proof nation. The joke is that we hate the reality of civilization so much we'll spend more to stay alive even as our civilization fades, our competitiveness wanes and even if we, our countrymen and their children die unnecessarily and prematurely in the process.
And seriously, the attitude that every man is for himself and what's mine is mine is what freedom is about, is a sick and malignant joke and an idea with no history of success. The idea that I benefit from civilization but owe nothing for its upkeep is a tragic joke well worthy of being an epitaph.
That we worry more about company profits for others than about giving our children a chance to grow up means something ugly about America and about Americans, and the older I get, the more of a sick, mean spirited, ugly old whore my country seems.
The constitution disallows it? The constitution declares itself to be there to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Is being on your own, helpless and hapless in an uncaring wilderness and at the greedy whim of some businessman really liberty? Is it civilization? So the libertarians and corporate fascists insist. That's a joke. Laugh if you can.
We justify a massive military to protect us from something less certain than disease and we won't justify spending less money than we spend now to protect us against what the army can't because spending less is spending too much? That's a better joke than I can make. That's a joke worthy of Mr. Beck who now is telling us that if the government can take poison of grocery shelves, they can control our lives. Are you laughing yet?
Who is the joker when we hear that your kid has to die in the interests of my "financial liberty" to spend every damned penny I make for my own benefit alone and maximize my corporate dividends without any thought to the responsibilities of civilization and its maintenance?
Who is perverting the concept of liberty by telling us a sick and helpless man is "free" because he can't afford medicine - that he can't work because he's sick and can't get well because he can't work? Well, I guess it's me if you listen to the Libertarian flim-flam about "Obamacare."
Yeah, it's all a joke and the punch line is some kid with leukemia condemned to die because his dad lost his job to India so that some corporation could make more money. Somehow, I'm not laughing. Somehow I'm angry as hell. I don't know about you.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Pro-Life, but Anti-Logic
You know, sometimes, your junkmail can provide hours of fun. Or at least brief moments of humor.
For example, I get emails from a group calling themselves "Americans for Life," a particularly humorless bunch of irony-deprived pedants (or at least one pedant – I have no evidence that there’s anybody in this group except for Jonathan Ball, the purported author of all these emails).
Anyway, today’s message from Mr Ball is a fascinating note entitled
And to be honest, in the end, that's exactly what they believe. Why do you think that so many fundie families involve eight or ten kids?
“And I declared that the dead, who had already died,
are happier than the living, who are still alive.
But better than both is the one who has never been born,
who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 4:2-3)
Oh, sorry, was that rude?
Ball goes on for a while after that, yammering about the sanctity of life (something rarely found in nature, but we’ll move on), and then to his main point (and again, it’s underlined, just because he can).
And then, of course, he begs a lot; there are three separate links to donate money to this fine organization scattered through the last four paragraphs. Really nothing new - these guys are rarely known for their imagination.
Now, as far as I can tell, Jonathan Ball's Americans for Life is entirely different from this Americans for Life - both were founded in 1996, but have different leadership, And neither one of them seems to have any connection to the older Americans United for Life. However, it's probably important to note that Black Americans for Life is entirely unrelated to any of these previous groups - they're part of the National Right to Life Coalition
I'm assuming this is some sort of "People's Front of Judea" type of situation.
(I also think I may have stumbled on to one reason why Roe v Wade is still around.)
For example, I get emails from a group calling themselves "Americans for Life," a particularly humorless bunch of irony-deprived pedants (or at least one pedant – I have no evidence that there’s anybody in this group except for Jonathan Ball, the purported author of all these emails).
Anyway, today’s message from Mr Ball is a fascinating note entitled
The Depravity of Planned ParenthoodNow, think about that statement for just a second. Apparently, family planning is depraved; you should never take control of your own life or responsibility for your breeding habits – God wants you to breed like dogs in heat, dropping a litter of puppies every year.
And to be honest, in the end, that's exactly what they believe. Why do you think that so many fundie families involve eight or ten kids?
Dear Bill,He always starts off friendly, but it invariably goes downhill quickly.
As Christmas approaches, I find myself full of joy and appreciation of the many blessings God has bestowed upon me and my family.
But an email I received recently has greatly upset me.Well, it’s a cute marketing campaign. Why does this upset you? Because their PR people are better than yours? (And yes, the semi-random use of underlining is entirely a stylistic choice on his part. It’s like “Underscore Tourette’s” or something.)
An Americans for Life supporter informed me recently of Planned Parenthood’s Christmas campaign, “Choice on Earth.”
You see, this Christianity-mocking campaign hopes to spread their message of "choice" by seeking donations to make abortion more available in 2011.Aw, Jonny, I think you’re giving entirely too much credit to this email - I'm thinking you were disturbed wa-a-ay before this.
In years past, Planned Parenthood even sold “Choice on Earth” Christmas cards and t-shirts as a fundraising gimmick.
This has left me deeply disturbed.
The Abortion Lobby would have you and I believe that the best choice for poor, unwed teenage mothers is to end the life of their child rather than facing hardship.Well... yes, actually. Don’t you want people to live by the words of the Bible?
That it is better for these unborn children to be killed than face a rough childhood.
“And I declared that the dead, who had already died,
are happier than the living, who are still alive.
But better than both is the one who has never been born,
who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 4:2-3)
Oh, sorry, was that rude?
However, you and I have to look no further than the birth of Christ, the very reason for the celebration of Christmas, to see why every child, no matter the parent’s situation, deserves a chance at life.It’s a fascinating argument. Of course, one counter position might be that in April of 1889, a child was born to Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl. But that might be considered an unreasonable attitude. Plus, it's in direct violation of Godwin’s Law, and I'm already in trouble with the Internet Police. So we’ll just terminate that thought; let it die a’borning, so to speak.
You see, Mary was young and unwed at the time of her pregnancy. She was forced to give birth to Jesus in a stable and use a feeding trough as a cradle. This was far from ideal.
How could a child born into such a situation ever grow up to be anything worthwhile?
Ball goes on for a while after that, yammering about the sanctity of life (something rarely found in nature, but we’ll move on), and then to his main point (and again, it’s underlined, just because he can).
Planned Parenthood must be defunded to force the closure of as many abortion clinics as possible.Which openly ignores the fact that only three percent of Planned Parenthood’s annual budget covers abortion; the other 97% goes toward other health and reproductive needs for poor and underserved citizens. But that might be too much honesty for Mr Ball to handle.
And then, of course, he begs a lot; there are three separate links to donate money to this fine organization scattered through the last four paragraphs. Really nothing new - these guys are rarely known for their imagination.
Now, as far as I can tell, Jonathan Ball's Americans for Life is entirely different from this Americans for Life - both were founded in 1996, but have different leadership, And neither one of them seems to have any connection to the older Americans United for Life. However, it's probably important to note that Black Americans for Life is entirely unrelated to any of these previous groups - they're part of the National Right to Life Coalition
I'm assuming this is some sort of "People's Front of Judea" type of situation.
(I also think I may have stumbled on to one reason why Roe v Wade is still around.)
The Book of the Jurassic: a Dino-lectical Perspective on the Recent Discussion of Obama and Race
Maybe it would be useful for a simple being from a whole 'nother epoch to write something general at this point. You can get mad at me if you like -- I'm extinct anyway. Still, I write with over 100 million years of collective experience in my bones, and the voices of many long-gone species traverse my tiny walnut brain. Your choice, humans and other SWASH creatures.
Let me start by honoring Flying Junior's contribution. Too often, we ignore our commenters. FJ, I like the point you make beneath Sheria's post about President Obama not really having a base in the strictest sense -- there isn't a 1984-style percentage of doubleplusgood duckspeakers for Obama who are going to agree with everything he does just because it's him doing it. That's more of a GOP phenomenon -- of some of Bush's most ardent supporters, one could say with Shakespeare's Casca, "if Caesar had / stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less."
This fact of life makes it difficult for any Democratic president -- whoever said dealing with Dems is like herding cats had it right. Meow, meow, meow! We are all cats, like it or not. The point that I've been trying to make, at least indirectly, is not dissimilar to FJ's about supporting Obama: that is, it's fine to criticize the man's actions, but we might try to do it in a constructive way that doesn't make him and us look foolish and marginalized.
I keep using the term DIALECTICAL and I'm not sure it's been getting through. One doesn't need to be a Hegelian or a Marxist or a deconstructionist or a flibbertygibbetist to get the force of that word: it can be understood generally to mean that one should try to speak in light of relevant historical and social factors. When we hear policy statements, assess rhetoric, and so forth, we should, to the best of our abilities, try to imagine the discursive and material universe within which they have been generated. What forces or pressures or experiences might have generated such remarks, stances, or actions? What pressures are likely to push against them in return? When we don't do this -- and it's unavoidable to fail in this regard sometimes -- we end up producing impoverished, unidimensional analyses and screeds. We end up generating thought that proceeds only along a single inadequate thread, at once sowing discord and blocking consideration of other vital lines of thought. "Historicize, historicize, historicize," said the Jurassic Dino Master, until you hear the sound of one tail thrashing. A poverty in our own philosophy, I mean, enables the philosophy of poverty supported by our real opponents.
I believe Sheria's initial post was generated by dialectical insight -- wasn't her point that the strain of criticism she dislikes is being put out there without the necessary historical and cultural insight? The idea isn't that white libs should all shut up and support the President blindly or else be content to be called "racists." If the criticizers had the necessary insight, they might still be offering criticisms, but their remarks would be more likely to lead to good results instead of sowing division that helps only the Right. They would aim their remarks at the real source of trouble: an intransigent and unpatriotic Right that makes doing anything even remotely constructive in this country a Herculean labor. The aim is to make it more possible for President Obama to get something done, not weaken and isolate him so that he cannot. Again, meow! So in my view, if we read such commentaries as Sheria's at this broad dialectical level instead of responding to them as if we were being personally labeled Grand Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, good discussions will flow thereof. If we don't, it's just a waste of time.
Healthcare Bill Under Scrutiny
Our beleaguered President has been dealt a setback of sorts on a legal challenge to the healthcare bill but it isn’t all bad news. Article HERE
US District Court Judge Henry E Hudson (a Bush appointee) ruled from his Virginia court today that Congress could not compel all citizens to purchase health insurance. He noted that:
"Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market. In doing so, enactment of the [individual mandate] exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I [of the Constitution.]”
Maybe the judge has a valid point; since Congress failed to enact nationwide, single payer health care, should they be able to compel individuals to buy private health insurance?
But then, how come states can compel individuals to buy private car insurance?
I don’t know the answer to these questions but I do know at least a couple of exemplary legal minds that hang out at the beach so I’m hoping they will put forth opinions based on their knowledge of the law of which I am woefully bereft.
Hudson did say that portions of the law that do not rest on this provision are legal and can proceed. To his credit he refused to enjoin the law and halt its implementation since it does not go into effect until 2014.
There are 25 legal challenges currently making their way through various courts. No doubt this will all end up before the SCOTUS at some point. Hudson wants to circumvent further appeals and requested it go to the Supreme Court now. He wants the White House to sign on his request saying it would benefit them to get a ruling.
I say – Not so fast…
So far four of the twenty five challenges have been ruled on or are pending. Hudson is the first to make a negative ruling on any portion of the new bill. Two other rulings in Lynchburg, VA and Michigan have ruled in favor of the provision. Florida has a case they are considering.
Seems to me the White House might fare better waiting for more rulings to bolster their argument when they do come before the Supreme Court.
What do YOU think?
US District Court Judge Henry E Hudson (a Bush appointee) ruled from his Virginia court today that Congress could not compel all citizens to purchase health insurance. He noted that:
"Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market. In doing so, enactment of the [individual mandate] exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article I [of the Constitution.]”
Maybe the judge has a valid point; since Congress failed to enact nationwide, single payer health care, should they be able to compel individuals to buy private health insurance?
But then, how come states can compel individuals to buy private car insurance?
I don’t know the answer to these questions but I do know at least a couple of exemplary legal minds that hang out at the beach so I’m hoping they will put forth opinions based on their knowledge of the law of which I am woefully bereft.
Hudson did say that portions of the law that do not rest on this provision are legal and can proceed. To his credit he refused to enjoin the law and halt its implementation since it does not go into effect until 2014.
There are 25 legal challenges currently making their way through various courts. No doubt this will all end up before the SCOTUS at some point. Hudson wants to circumvent further appeals and requested it go to the Supreme Court now. He wants the White House to sign on his request saying it would benefit them to get a ruling.
I say – Not so fast…
So far four of the twenty five challenges have been ruled on or are pending. Hudson is the first to make a negative ruling on any portion of the new bill. Two other rulings in Lynchburg, VA and Michigan have ruled in favor of the provision. Florida has a case they are considering.
Seems to me the White House might fare better waiting for more rulings to bolster their argument when they do come before the Supreme Court.
What do YOU think?
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Murdering Christmas
Make no mistake about it, what the insurgents are calling the War on Christmas is nothing but an assault on our religious freedom and like a dog with a bone, or a teenager on the telephone, they will not stop of their own accord.
I'm not in a position to say that we ever had an educational system that didn't serve as political indoctrination. I do remember being 'taught' that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, which institution was, as it was related, moribund already -- and of course General Custer was still being presented as a hero in my youth in the segregation era, but a long standing tradition of doing wrong is hardly an argument for continuing it, to anything but a reactionary mind.
Yes, some people are rewriting history, making up stories about Christmas being made illegal, Christians being persecuted; about big-box home improvement stores ignoring Christmas and acknowledging holidays of nefarious, un-American religions. They're good enough at the game and we're gleefully gullible enough that we can stand in the middle of an acre of Christmas trees in the Home Depot parking lot, arms laden with the Christmas junk just purchased inside, and believe that the undoubtedly MuslimJewishAtheist owners thereof are trying to take away your right to worship trees and reindeer and a jolly fat saint. Merry Christmas -- say it often - say it ugly.
And they're not going to stop. They're not going to go away. They're not going to shut up until enough of us shout them down and make what used to be a happy season into the war they, in their sinister, apocalyptic insanity, so devoutly wish for.
"There are people out there who are rewriting history and people who are buying into it because they never learned history:"said the fellow next to me at the bar, a former teacher whose wife is a Glenn Beck devotee. We nodded together like bobble head dolls although I knew full well we were envisioning the same people on the opposite side of the game. He wasn't talking about the Fox people, the Fundamentalists, the sinister bastards rearranging the sets and props and actors on the stage of history to further their lust for power. The TV Christianists doing it under the pretext of educating the public that real history is fake history -- and at this time of year, although there are many distractions, their tawdry tableau is arranged to display the fiction of the Christian Fathers who intended that this country, the United States of America, be a "Christian nation" in the same fashion as medieval Europe.
I'm not in a position to say that we ever had an educational system that didn't serve as political indoctrination. I do remember being 'taught' that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, which institution was, as it was related, moribund already -- and of course General Custer was still being presented as a hero in my youth in the segregation era, but a long standing tradition of doing wrong is hardly an argument for continuing it, to anything but a reactionary mind.
"Can you imagine it? Some people are actually offended when I say Merry Christmas!"said the man on TV. I turned on my new battery operated portable flat screen that I just bought as part of my home hurricane preparedness kit this morning and was reminded of the fact that if one can only get broadcast TV in this area, at least half of what you can receive are Jesus channels. Note that I didn't say Christian. There's a difference. Frankly, I've never encountered offense at these words, although I have seen the Pavlovian reaction: "well you can't say that any more." Yes you can.
"Can you imagine it, some schools are having 'Winter festivals!' What do they say? Merry cold weather? I don't like cold weather, I like CHRISSSSSSSSSTMAS!"Indeed some people look carefully in your face to gauge any hidden reaction when they say the formula. Merry Christmas, for the next week is a test, a shibboleth, not a wish. "Are you one of us?"
Yes, some people are rewriting history, making up stories about Christmas being made illegal, Christians being persecuted; about big-box home improvement stores ignoring Christmas and acknowledging holidays of nefarious, un-American religions. They're good enough at the game and we're gleefully gullible enough that we can stand in the middle of an acre of Christmas trees in the Home Depot parking lot, arms laden with the Christmas junk just purchased inside, and believe that the undoubtedly MuslimJewishAtheist owners thereof are trying to take away your right to worship trees and reindeer and a jolly fat saint. Merry Christmas -- say it often - say it ugly.
And they're not going to stop. They're not going to go away. They're not going to shut up until enough of us shout them down and make what used to be a happy season into the war they, in their sinister, apocalyptic insanity, so devoutly wish for.
Can You Handle the Truth?
Just read an op-ed piece in the New York Times by writer Ishmael Reed entitled What Progressives Don't Understand About Obama. It was an amen article, a piece with which I nodded continuously in agreement as I read it and murmured amen under my breath. To appreciate Reed's piece, read it, no summary can do it justice. He takes on the ad nauseum criticism that Present Obama is weak, ineffectual, ball less, and not tough enough to be president. A smart guy, but too nice and too concerned about keeping the peace. Too afraid to give the Republicans the ass whipping that they deserve.
I've been accused of being "nice" as in I don't want people to dislike me. Not true. I'm going to tell you up front that some of you aren't going to understand the truth that this article speaks and you may not like my attitude. See, as a black person I'm so sick and tired of white liberals who have still enjoyed the privilege of being white trying to tell a black man how to navigate in a white world.
You don't get it and you lack the humility to simply accept that you do not. Instead you attack the President as being weak, without balls, a sellout and any other demeaning, emasculating terminology that you can devise. You don't understand what it is to be black and walk in his shoes and you're too damned arrogant to listen to those of us who try and tell you.
By now, you're all upset because I've offended you. Hey, don't you want us to show our anger? Don't you have problems with me being so nice and reasonable all the time?
Don't get hung up on the mistaken notice that I'm taking the position that the president is off limits for criticism. I don't think he's perfect and I certainly have problems with some of his decisions. He and I part company when it comes to the continuation of either of our wars.
Read carefully and understand me, I'm talking about the continued hammering at his character. I'm talking about the insulting and demeaning allegations that he is less than a man, some namby- pamby smart guy who doesn't know how to be tough. What colossal ignorance and arrogance to believe that any black person could achieve what President Obama has achieved and be weak. Until you have walked in our shoes, until you have been marginalized based on the color of your skin in a culture that continues to not only openly express racism but defend its right to do so under cockeyed readings of the 1st amendment, then don't talk to me about how you think that any black person should behave.
By now, you're all upset because I've offended you. Hey, don't you want us to show our anger? Don't you have problems with me being so nice and reasonable all the time?
Don't get hung up on the mistaken notice that I'm taking the position that the president is off limits for criticism. I don't think he's perfect and I certainly have problems with some of his decisions. He and I part company when it comes to the continuation of either of our wars.
Read carefully and understand me, I'm talking about the continued hammering at his character. I'm talking about the insulting and demeaning allegations that he is less than a man, some namby- pamby smart guy who doesn't know how to be tough. What colossal ignorance and arrogance to believe that any black person could achieve what President Obama has achieved and be weak. Until you have walked in our shoes, until you have been marginalized based on the color of your skin in a culture that continues to not only openly express racism but defend its right to do so under cockeyed readings of the 1st amendment, then don't talk to me about how you think that any black person should behave.
Now, I'm going to go back to being nice. It's survival mode because if I dwell on this crap I can't leave my house. Every day that I go out I run into racism in this "colorblind" society of ours. Some days it's just the fools with the confederate flags plastered on their pickup trucks, or the monuments to the confederate dead that litter the South, but it's always something. So I'm tough and I work hard to not lose my cool because I don't have time to waste in being angry and out of control, and neither does the President.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Just say Noh
When is a journalist not a journalist? It's a simple question with a very complicated answer and that answer has little to do with credentials or degrees. It can have nothing to do with whether the reporter reports the news or creates it from air like balloon animals at some kids' birthday party.
Welcome to quantum politics, where things that are said and things that are appear and disappear like virtual particles in a vacuum; where things are sometimes their opposites and truth is relative and ephemeral.
So when political actor Glenn Beck gets teary eyed and hysterical about the proposed ability of the FDA to take poisonous, contaminated food off the shelves because if they can control what you eat, they can control your lives: so when worn out beauty queen and political actress Gretchen Carlson can pose as a news anchor and get her botoxed and painted face twisted around her rehearsed outrage that a year ago, Tulsa exercised our American freedom of religion and started calling its annual December parade a "holiday" parade, just what the hell is this journalism that it could include this foolishness but be contaminated by a hatred of secrecy and the objective of exposing a government that has villainously smiled and smiled and smiled at one lie after another while millions died in consequence.
So truth, as we can know it, is political since the concept resides in the heads of humans and not in the stones and gas and vacuum of the universe and no one can see the truth but through the filter of his mind. Just who then can we call a real journalist and why not then just make it up as we go along and accept it all as improvisational theater.
Too many people have compared it all to Kabuki, with it's exaggerated expressions and dramatizations, but it's really Bunraku, where puppets are manipulated about a darkling stage by shadowy figures dressed in black. Figures that the audience is trained not to notice.
"Mr. Assange obviously has a particular political objective behind his activities, and I think that, among other things, disqualifies him as being considered a journalist."said assistant Press Secretary Philip J. Crowley to assembled reporters at a December 2nd press conference. You'd expect gasps and guffaws and whispered comments like "what about Fox?" but I didn't hear any. Perhaps the disturbing idea of objective reporting was a touchy and disturbing subject for the assembled employees of corporate entertainment interests whose jobs depend on the proper slant and the ability to make headlines out of flimsy and innocuous or even non-existent words and deeds. No, says the political actor, the presidential mouthpiece, under US law, he's to be considered a "political actor."
Welcome to quantum politics, where things that are said and things that are appear and disappear like virtual particles in a vacuum; where things are sometimes their opposites and truth is relative and ephemeral.
So when political actor Glenn Beck gets teary eyed and hysterical about the proposed ability of the FDA to take poisonous, contaminated food off the shelves because if they can control what you eat, they can control your lives: so when worn out beauty queen and political actress Gretchen Carlson can pose as a news anchor and get her botoxed and painted face twisted around her rehearsed outrage that a year ago, Tulsa exercised our American freedom of religion and started calling its annual December parade a "holiday" parade, just what the hell is this journalism that it could include this foolishness but be contaminated by a hatred of secrecy and the objective of exposing a government that has villainously smiled and smiled and smiled at one lie after another while millions died in consequence.
So truth, as we can know it, is political since the concept resides in the heads of humans and not in the stones and gas and vacuum of the universe and no one can see the truth but through the filter of his mind. Just who then can we call a real journalist and why not then just make it up as we go along and accept it all as improvisational theater.
Too many people have compared it all to Kabuki, with it's exaggerated expressions and dramatizations, but it's really Bunraku, where puppets are manipulated about a darkling stage by shadowy figures dressed in black. Figures that the audience is trained not to notice.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Progressivism and Obama
James K. Galbraith is an economist and a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. His, father, John Kenneth Galbraith, served in the administrations of FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. This is the text of of a speech, which was delivered at the Americans for Democratic Action Education Fund’s Post-election Conference last month, originally appeared at new deal 2.0:
I want to raise a hard question -- a question on which Americans are divided. It seems to me, though, we will get nowhere unless we realize where we are, what has actually happened, and what the future most likely holds.
Recovery begins with realism and there is nothing to be gained by kidding ourselves. On the topics that I know most about, the administration is beyond being a disappointment. It's beyond inept, unprepared, weak, and ineffective. Four and again two years ago, the people demanded change. As a candidate, the President promised change. In foreign policy and the core economic policies, he delivered continuity instead. That was true on Afghanistan and it was and is true in economic policy, especially in respect to the banks. What we got was George W. Bush's policies without Bush's toughness, without his in-your-face refusal to compromise prematurely. Without what he himself calls his understanding that you do not negotiate with yourself.
It's a measure of where we are, I think, that at a meeting of Americans for Democratic Action, you find me comparing President Obama unfavorably to President George W. Bush.
In economic policy it was said earlier we have a lack of narrative. This afternoon, Gregory King asked why the people didn't know that the Republican Party is uniformly and massively opposed to job programs, to state and local assistance, and to every legislative measure that might aid and promote economic recovery from the worst crisis and recession in modern times. Why is that that they didn't know? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the White House didn't tell them?
And why was that?
The president deprived himself of any chance to develop a narrative from the beginning by surrounding himself with holdover appointments from the Bush and even the Clinton administrations: Secretary Geithner, Chairman Bernanke, and, since we're here at Harvard, I'll call him by his highest title, President Summers. These men have no commitment to the base, no commitment to the Democratic Party as a whole, no particular commitment to Barack Obama, and none to the broad objective of national economic recovery that can be detected from their actions.
With this team the president also chose to cover up economic crime. Not only has the greatest wave of financial fraud in our history gone largely uninvestigated and unpunished, the government and this administration with its stress tests (which were fakes), its relaxation of accounting standards, which permitted banks to hold toxic assets on their books at far higher prices than any investor would pay, with its failure to make criminal referrals where these were clearly warranted, with its continuation in office -- sometimes in acting capacities -- of some of the leading non-regulators of the earlier era, has continued an ongoing active complicity in financial fraud. And the perpetrators, of course, prospered as never before: reporting profits that they would not have been able to report under honest accounting standards and converting taxpayer support into bonuses; while at the same time cutting back savagely on loans to businesses and individuals, and ramping up foreclosures, much of that accomplished with forged documents and perjured affidavits.
Could the president and his administration have done something? Yes, they could have. Where was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation? Why did they choose not to implement the law -- the Prompt Corrective Action law -- which requires the federal government to take into receivership financial institutions when there is a significant risk of large taxpayer losses to the insurance fund? Where were the FBI and the Department of Justice? Did the President do anything? No. Is he doing anything now? No. Why not? The most likely answer is that he did not want to. My understanding, in fact, is that there was one meeting where this issue was raised, and the president stated that his economic team had assured him they had the situation under control.
On the larger economic policy front, the White House gave away the game from the beginning. How? First by guessing at the scale of the disaster. When leading economic advisers (I believe, in fact, it was President Summers) announced that the unemployment rate would peak at 8%, they not only guessed wrong, but gave away the right to assign responsibility to the previous administration when things got worse. This was either elementary bad politics or deliberate self-sabotage. But it gets worse. The optimistic forecast helped to justify a weak program. Useful things were done, but not nearly enough to convey the impression of a forceful policy to the broader public. Then once the banks were taken care of and the stock market took off again, it seems clear that the team at the White House didn't care anymore.
Again, could they have done differently? Of course. The president could have told the truth, which is that we faced a historic meltdown, a collapse of the core financial institutions of our economy, and that we had really no way of knowing how bad economic conditions might get or how long this would endure and that therefore the situation would require a full mobilization: all resources, all hands on deck, major departures of policy, no holding back, and the responsibility for trouble and failure falling plainly on those who would obstruct the course. None of the people he chose to advise him on economic policy was remotely capable of thinking in those terms.
We've learned from Vic Fingerhut and Mike Lux that the administration went down in public esteem when people realized it was working for the banks and not for them. Why did they think this? Why did they go from "blaming Bush and Wall Street to blaming Obama and Wall Street"? Because plainly they could see what was in front of their faces. Except in manner, President Bush never really pretended to be a President for ordinary folks; President Obama did. Bush was who he was; Obama held out, fostered, and promoted vast hopes, mobilizing the American population behind his leadership on that basis. And he disappointed those hopes -- to use a very harsh word, one could say he has betrayed those hopes. How can one therefore blame the voters for acting as they have acted?
What happens next? Let's again not kid ourselves, we have lost a great many seats in the House of Representatives and the House of Representatives isn't coming back into a Democratic majority in the near future. Simply because of the balance of exposures -- the larger numbers of Democratic Senators exposed to reelection in the next cycle, the greatest likelihood is that the Senate will also go Republican in two years time. President Obama has set his course. He has surrounded himself with the advisers of his choice and as he moves to replace President Summers we hear from the press that the priority is to "repair the rift with his investors on Wall Street." What does that tell you? It tells me that he does not have President Clinton's fighting and survival instincts. I've not heard one good reason all day to believe that we are going to see from this White House the fight that we want, that he could win in two years, or any reason we should be backing him now.
The Democratic Party has become too associated with Wall Street. This is a fact. It is a structural problem. It seems to me that we as progressives need -- this is my personal position -- we need to draw a line and decide that we would be better off with an under-funded, fighting progressive minority party than a party marked by obvious duplicity and constant losses on every policy front as a result of the reversals in our own leadership.
What is at stake in the long run? Two things, mainly, in my view. First, it seems to me that we as progressives need to make an honorable defense of the great legacies of the New Deal and Great Society -- programs and institutions that brought America out of the Great Depression and bought us through the Second World War, brought us to our period of greatest prosperity, and the greatest advances in social justice. Social Security, Medicare, housing finance -- the front-line right now is the foreclosure crisis, the crisis, I should say, of foreclosure fraud -- the progressive tax code, anti-poverty policy, public investment, public safety, and human and civil rights. We are going to lose these battles– get used to it. But we need to make an honorable fight, to state clearly what our principles are and to lay down a record which is trustworthy for the future.
Beyond this, bold proposals are what we should be advancing now; even when they lose, they have their value. We can talk about job programs; we can talk about an infrastructure bank; we can talk about Juliet Schor's idea of a four-day work week; we can talk about my idea of expanding Social Security and creating an early retirement option so that people who are older and unemployed or anxious to get out of the labor force can leave on comfortable terms, and so create job openings for younger people who, as we've heard today, are facing very long periods of extremely aggravating and frustrating unemployment; we can talk about establishing a systematic program of general revenue sharing to support state and local governments, we can talk about the financial restructuring we so desperately need and that we'll have to have if we are going to have a country which has a viable private credit system and in which large financial power is not constantly dictating the terms of every political maneuver.
We are not going to get these things, but we should have a clearly defined program so that people know what they are. And then, frankly, as was said earlier today, said most elegantly by Jeff Madrick, in the long run we need to recognize that the fate of the entire country is at stake. Its governance can't be entrusted indefinitely to incompetents, hacks, and lobbyists. Large countries can and do fail, they have done so in our own time. And the consequences are very grave: drastic declines in services, in living standards, in life expectancies, huge increases in social tension, in repression, and in violence. These are the consequences of following through with crackpot ideas such as those embodied in the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission, as Jeff Madrick again outlined, such notions as putting arbitrary limits on the scale of government, or arbitrary limits on the top tax rate affecting the wealthiest Americans.
This isn't a parlor game. The outcome isn't destined to be alright. It will not necessarily end in progress whatever happens. What we do, how we proceed, and how we effectively resist what is plainly about to happen, matters very greatly for the future of our country, of our children, and of another generation to come. We need to lose our fear, our hesitation, and our unwillingness to face the facts. If we thereby lose some of our hopes, let's remember the dictum of William of Orange that "it is not necessary to hope in order to persevere."
The president should know that, as Lincoln said to the Congress in the dark winter of 1862, he "cannot escape history." And we are heading now into a very dark time, so let's face it with eyes open. And if we must, let's seek leadership that shares our values, fights for our principles, and deserves our trust.
I want to raise a hard question -- a question on which Americans are divided. It seems to me, though, we will get nowhere unless we realize where we are, what has actually happened, and what the future most likely holds.
Recovery begins with realism and there is nothing to be gained by kidding ourselves. On the topics that I know most about, the administration is beyond being a disappointment. It's beyond inept, unprepared, weak, and ineffective. Four and again two years ago, the people demanded change. As a candidate, the President promised change. In foreign policy and the core economic policies, he delivered continuity instead. That was true on Afghanistan and it was and is true in economic policy, especially in respect to the banks. What we got was George W. Bush's policies without Bush's toughness, without his in-your-face refusal to compromise prematurely. Without what he himself calls his understanding that you do not negotiate with yourself.
It's a measure of where we are, I think, that at a meeting of Americans for Democratic Action, you find me comparing President Obama unfavorably to President George W. Bush.
In economic policy it was said earlier we have a lack of narrative. This afternoon, Gregory King asked why the people didn't know that the Republican Party is uniformly and massively opposed to job programs, to state and local assistance, and to every legislative measure that might aid and promote economic recovery from the worst crisis and recession in modern times. Why is that that they didn't know? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the White House didn't tell them?
And why was that?
The president deprived himself of any chance to develop a narrative from the beginning by surrounding himself with holdover appointments from the Bush and even the Clinton administrations: Secretary Geithner, Chairman Bernanke, and, since we're here at Harvard, I'll call him by his highest title, President Summers. These men have no commitment to the base, no commitment to the Democratic Party as a whole, no particular commitment to Barack Obama, and none to the broad objective of national economic recovery that can be detected from their actions.
With this team the president also chose to cover up economic crime. Not only has the greatest wave of financial fraud in our history gone largely uninvestigated and unpunished, the government and this administration with its stress tests (which were fakes), its relaxation of accounting standards, which permitted banks to hold toxic assets on their books at far higher prices than any investor would pay, with its failure to make criminal referrals where these were clearly warranted, with its continuation in office -- sometimes in acting capacities -- of some of the leading non-regulators of the earlier era, has continued an ongoing active complicity in financial fraud. And the perpetrators, of course, prospered as never before: reporting profits that they would not have been able to report under honest accounting standards and converting taxpayer support into bonuses; while at the same time cutting back savagely on loans to businesses and individuals, and ramping up foreclosures, much of that accomplished with forged documents and perjured affidavits.
Could the president and his administration have done something? Yes, they could have. Where was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation? Why did they choose not to implement the law -- the Prompt Corrective Action law -- which requires the federal government to take into receivership financial institutions when there is a significant risk of large taxpayer losses to the insurance fund? Where were the FBI and the Department of Justice? Did the President do anything? No. Is he doing anything now? No. Why not? The most likely answer is that he did not want to. My understanding, in fact, is that there was one meeting where this issue was raised, and the president stated that his economic team had assured him they had the situation under control.
On the larger economic policy front, the White House gave away the game from the beginning. How? First by guessing at the scale of the disaster. When leading economic advisers (I believe, in fact, it was President Summers) announced that the unemployment rate would peak at 8%, they not only guessed wrong, but gave away the right to assign responsibility to the previous administration when things got worse. This was either elementary bad politics or deliberate self-sabotage. But it gets worse. The optimistic forecast helped to justify a weak program. Useful things were done, but not nearly enough to convey the impression of a forceful policy to the broader public. Then once the banks were taken care of and the stock market took off again, it seems clear that the team at the White House didn't care anymore.
Again, could they have done differently? Of course. The president could have told the truth, which is that we faced a historic meltdown, a collapse of the core financial institutions of our economy, and that we had really no way of knowing how bad economic conditions might get or how long this would endure and that therefore the situation would require a full mobilization: all resources, all hands on deck, major departures of policy, no holding back, and the responsibility for trouble and failure falling plainly on those who would obstruct the course. None of the people he chose to advise him on economic policy was remotely capable of thinking in those terms.
We've learned from Vic Fingerhut and Mike Lux that the administration went down in public esteem when people realized it was working for the banks and not for them. Why did they think this? Why did they go from "blaming Bush and Wall Street to blaming Obama and Wall Street"? Because plainly they could see what was in front of their faces. Except in manner, President Bush never really pretended to be a President for ordinary folks; President Obama did. Bush was who he was; Obama held out, fostered, and promoted vast hopes, mobilizing the American population behind his leadership on that basis. And he disappointed those hopes -- to use a very harsh word, one could say he has betrayed those hopes. How can one therefore blame the voters for acting as they have acted?
What happens next? Let's again not kid ourselves, we have lost a great many seats in the House of Representatives and the House of Representatives isn't coming back into a Democratic majority in the near future. Simply because of the balance of exposures -- the larger numbers of Democratic Senators exposed to reelection in the next cycle, the greatest likelihood is that the Senate will also go Republican in two years time. President Obama has set his course. He has surrounded himself with the advisers of his choice and as he moves to replace President Summers we hear from the press that the priority is to "repair the rift with his investors on Wall Street." What does that tell you? It tells me that he does not have President Clinton's fighting and survival instincts. I've not heard one good reason all day to believe that we are going to see from this White House the fight that we want, that he could win in two years, or any reason we should be backing him now.
The Democratic Party has become too associated with Wall Street. This is a fact. It is a structural problem. It seems to me that we as progressives need -- this is my personal position -- we need to draw a line and decide that we would be better off with an under-funded, fighting progressive minority party than a party marked by obvious duplicity and constant losses on every policy front as a result of the reversals in our own leadership.
What is at stake in the long run? Two things, mainly, in my view. First, it seems to me that we as progressives need to make an honorable defense of the great legacies of the New Deal and Great Society -- programs and institutions that brought America out of the Great Depression and bought us through the Second World War, brought us to our period of greatest prosperity, and the greatest advances in social justice. Social Security, Medicare, housing finance -- the front-line right now is the foreclosure crisis, the crisis, I should say, of foreclosure fraud -- the progressive tax code, anti-poverty policy, public investment, public safety, and human and civil rights. We are going to lose these battles– get used to it. But we need to make an honorable fight, to state clearly what our principles are and to lay down a record which is trustworthy for the future.
Beyond this, bold proposals are what we should be advancing now; even when they lose, they have their value. We can talk about job programs; we can talk about an infrastructure bank; we can talk about Juliet Schor's idea of a four-day work week; we can talk about my idea of expanding Social Security and creating an early retirement option so that people who are older and unemployed or anxious to get out of the labor force can leave on comfortable terms, and so create job openings for younger people who, as we've heard today, are facing very long periods of extremely aggravating and frustrating unemployment; we can talk about establishing a systematic program of general revenue sharing to support state and local governments, we can talk about the financial restructuring we so desperately need and that we'll have to have if we are going to have a country which has a viable private credit system and in which large financial power is not constantly dictating the terms of every political maneuver.
We are not going to get these things, but we should have a clearly defined program so that people know what they are. And then, frankly, as was said earlier today, said most elegantly by Jeff Madrick, in the long run we need to recognize that the fate of the entire country is at stake. Its governance can't be entrusted indefinitely to incompetents, hacks, and lobbyists. Large countries can and do fail, they have done so in our own time. And the consequences are very grave: drastic declines in services, in living standards, in life expectancies, huge increases in social tension, in repression, and in violence. These are the consequences of following through with crackpot ideas such as those embodied in the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission, as Jeff Madrick again outlined, such notions as putting arbitrary limits on the scale of government, or arbitrary limits on the top tax rate affecting the wealthiest Americans.
This isn't a parlor game. The outcome isn't destined to be alright. It will not necessarily end in progress whatever happens. What we do, how we proceed, and how we effectively resist what is plainly about to happen, matters very greatly for the future of our country, of our children, and of another generation to come. We need to lose our fear, our hesitation, and our unwillingness to face the facts. If we thereby lose some of our hopes, let's remember the dictum of William of Orange that "it is not necessary to hope in order to persevere."
The president should know that, as Lincoln said to the Congress in the dark winter of 1862, he "cannot escape history." And we are heading now into a very dark time, so let's face it with eyes open. And if we must, let's seek leadership that shares our values, fights for our principles, and deserves our trust.
Amazon death watch
It's 10:57 Eastern Standard Time and I'm looking at the Amazon.com web page waiting for another salvo in what's being called a "Cyber War" by the media. Yes, them Wikileak bogey men are going to bring down Amazon, for some reason I can't imagine.
Three minutes until it's supposed to crash and I'm reading the news. Cyber Wars, bizarre sex crimes, intimidation of the public who might happen to read Wikileaks or express insufficient hate for Julian Assenge - and who is reading about the Citicorp bailout being paid back at interest to the substantial profit of the country? Who is reading about improvement in the job market?
11:00 and all is well at Amazon - and wow, that's a great price on that hand held GPS! Is it too late to update my Christmas wish list?
11:08 I hate to wait and I'm getting bored.
11:10 Hey listen, I know this is a Cyberwar and all that, but if I don't see some Shock 'n Awe I've got some other things to do.
11:13 You know what? Why don't I check back later. . .
Three minutes until it's supposed to crash and I'm reading the news. Cyber Wars, bizarre sex crimes, intimidation of the public who might happen to read Wikileaks or express insufficient hate for Julian Assenge - and who is reading about the Citicorp bailout being paid back at interest to the substantial profit of the country? Who is reading about improvement in the job market?
11:00 and all is well at Amazon - and wow, that's a great price on that hand held GPS! Is it too late to update my Christmas wish list?
11:08 I hate to wait and I'm getting bored.
11:10 Hey listen, I know this is a Cyberwar and all that, but if I don't see some Shock 'n Awe I've got some other things to do.
11:13 You know what? Why don't I check back later. . .
I Agree With What She Says (Extending the Tax Cuts)
I really feared that my Aunt Dorothy's dire prediction was going to come true tonight--my head was going to explode! Aunt Dorothy has been concerned about my love of learning for some time and when I decided to got to law school back in 1994 at the ripe old age of 39, she confided in my mother of my imminent demise from an exploding head.
The extreme pressure in my brain today was a result from the rabidly foaming at the mouth Democrats and liberals who have pronounced that President Obama's proposed compromise on the retiring tax cuts extension is an indicator of that he is weak willed and desperately wants to be liked by the Republicans. As I struggled to determine how to say with civility and intelligence that such opinions were just plain f**k**g stupid, I came across a post by a blogging friend, Beth Riches.
Beth blogs at Nutwood Junction and I've been reading her blog for four years. She always makes me think and often makes me laugh. She's got a razor sharp wit! Her recent post, "Shades of Grey," says everything that was rolling around in my head! It brilliantly sums up why the President is neither a wimp nor the devil for promoting a compromise on the tax cuts extensions. No matter what you think that you know or believe on this topic, please follow the link and read Beth's blog post. Leave her a comment and please stop back by and tell me what you think. I copied the chart below from Beth's post.
The extreme pressure in my brain today was a result from the rabidly foaming at the mouth Democrats and liberals who have pronounced that President Obama's proposed compromise on the retiring tax cuts extension is an indicator of that he is weak willed and desperately wants to be liked by the Republicans. As I struggled to determine how to say with civility and intelligence that such opinions were just plain f**k**g stupid, I came across a post by a blogging friend, Beth Riches.
Beth blogs at Nutwood Junction and I've been reading her blog for four years. She always makes me think and often makes me laugh. She's got a razor sharp wit! Her recent post, "Shades of Grey," says everything that was rolling around in my head! It brilliantly sums up why the President is neither a wimp nor the devil for promoting a compromise on the tax cuts extensions. No matter what you think that you know or believe on this topic, please follow the link and read Beth's blog post. Leave her a comment and please stop back by and tell me what you think. I copied the chart below from Beth's post.
The bubble chart you see ... is a representation of the numbers in the tax deal currently being negotiated in Washington right now. The blue is what the Democrats got, and the lone red one is what the Republicans got.--Beth RichesFor her brilliant analysis, you have to visit her blog.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
If the condom breaks, it's gotta be rape.
Sitting in a doctor's waiting room for three hours yesterday morning, I had to listen to "Liberal" CNN chewing endlessly on the two stories of the morning: the terminal illness of Elizabeth Edwards and the sex crimes of Julian Assange. Whatever your opinion of the man and of Wikileaks; whether it's black and white or very mixed, as mine is, I think we have to disassociate the propriety of publishing government communications with what just might be another US government inspired crime of equivocation and slander.
CNN used the word rape, more times than I could count yesterday and true to their unjournalistic habits never once proposed to delve into exactly what acts, according to Swedish Law, the alleged rape of two " consenting" women consisted of, although they did establish the need to do so by repeating that both women had willingly had sex with the man from Wiki. A disturbing dissonance at least. It appears that in Sweden, it's rape, or more accurately even if more peculiar: "sex by surprise" not to use a condom, or even if the condom breaks, according to Swedish prosecutors. That's it and that means there are a hell of a lot of rapists out there, many of whom are gloating over the imprisonment of Mr. Assange for something that's a crime nowhere but Sweden. Even in that feminist paradise, it's only a $750. fine. So why is theUS so hell bent on extraditing him for something on the order of a speeding ticket and why are the media so intent on calling him a rapist?
So I'm going to suggest, in full expectation of the customary response, a conspiracy. It's not just that CNN and others are crying rape when it isn't, but CNN and others would have us completely oblivious to the identities of the willing but uncondomized women as though it didn't matter that they both may have ties to the US government, the CIA and organizations supported by them.
Is this another of the seemingly endless appeals to the end sanctifying the means and if so, can we call ourselves a free country when the laws are bent, spindled, folded and mutilated to create the crime? With all the synthetic furor in some conservative states, about applying foreign laws in the US, are the same conservatives gleefully doing just that in order to more readily conceal shady dealings? Can we call that rape too?
No, I'm not sure that Assenge was doing anyone a favor by revealing sensitive targets for terrorists, and if he was guilty of that, he's certainly no friend to the US, but the practice of trumping up charges and paying witnesses to make them is not new here and certainly not a foreign practice to political parties trying to cripple an opposing president, but there's a certain foul odor pervading the news reports and it's not just the smell of spilled beans. If one thing is sure, it's that we need some fresh air here and some real information before we can conclude that our "free" press is worth saving.
CNN used the word rape, more times than I could count yesterday and true to their unjournalistic habits never once proposed to delve into exactly what acts, according to Swedish Law, the alleged rape of two " consenting" women consisted of, although they did establish the need to do so by repeating that both women had willingly had sex with the man from Wiki. A disturbing dissonance at least. It appears that in Sweden, it's rape, or more accurately even if more peculiar: "sex by surprise" not to use a condom, or even if the condom breaks, according to Swedish prosecutors. That's it and that means there are a hell of a lot of rapists out there, many of whom are gloating over the imprisonment of Mr. Assange for something that's a crime nowhere but Sweden. Even in that feminist paradise, it's only a $750. fine. So why is theUS so hell bent on extraditing him for something on the order of a speeding ticket and why are the media so intent on calling him a rapist?
So I'm going to suggest, in full expectation of the customary response, a conspiracy. It's not just that CNN and others are crying rape when it isn't, but CNN and others would have us completely oblivious to the identities of the willing but uncondomized women as though it didn't matter that they both may have ties to the US government, the CIA and organizations supported by them.
Is this another of the seemingly endless appeals to the end sanctifying the means and if so, can we call ourselves a free country when the laws are bent, spindled, folded and mutilated to create the crime? With all the synthetic furor in some conservative states, about applying foreign laws in the US, are the same conservatives gleefully doing just that in order to more readily conceal shady dealings? Can we call that rape too?
No, I'm not sure that Assenge was doing anyone a favor by revealing sensitive targets for terrorists, and if he was guilty of that, he's certainly no friend to the US, but the practice of trumping up charges and paying witnesses to make them is not new here and certainly not a foreign practice to political parties trying to cripple an opposing president, but there's a certain foul odor pervading the news reports and it's not just the smell of spilled beans. If one thing is sure, it's that we need some fresh air here and some real information before we can conclude that our "free" press is worth saving.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Goodbye Elizabeth Edwards
Elizabeth Edwards, the beleaguered wife of former Senator John Edwards has died of cancer today in North Carolina at the age of 61. She has been dealing with recurring cancer which started with breast cancer in 2004. She has not only had to endure chemo, radiation and chronic illness and the heartbreak of losing her 16 year old son, Wade in a car accident in 1996, but also her idiot husband's very public and very humiliating infidelity. But Elizabeth was not one to wallow in self pity or engage in spiteful retribution. She bore all in quiet dignity, working diligently on projects she was passionate about. She was an attorney and acted as an advisor on her husband’s campaigns.
She also became an advisor to Barack Obama on healthcare issues. She was an outspoken advocate for healthcare reform and worried about women with cancer that did not have the monetary resources she did.
She was a supporter of gay marriage, “I don't know why someone else’s marriage has anything to do with me. I'm completely comfortable with gay marriage."She wrote several popular inspirational books that detailed her life, her losses and her illness. She legally separated from John Edwards in January, intending to divorce him after the mandatory one year separation. She ran out of time.
Her last facebook message:
"You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces – my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope. These graces have carried me through difficult times and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined. The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that. And, yes, there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human.
But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful. It isn't possible to put into words the love and gratitude I feel to everyone who has and continues to support and inspire me every day. To you I simply say: you know.”
I always thought the wrong Edwards ran for office and that Elizabeth Edwards would have been much better at it. I would have voted for her.
She died as she lived, surrounded by friends and family giving and receiving support and inspiration.
She did not want to be remembered as having battled cancer and lost but rather as having lived well every day. And that she did.
"Handful of Senators Don't Pass Legislation": Tax Cuts, Unemployment Benefits, and the Post-2010 Dispensation
I gather that President Obama is opting for a compromise in which long-term unemployment benefits will continue, but so will the entire spectrum of Bush-era tax cuts. I won't criticize the president harshly for this compromise; I will instead do some simple-dino thinking out loud, set (if you like) to the background music from "Eve of Destruction." I opine that there are two ways to look at the matter -- which seems best?
1. Thanks to our predictably dim-witted, memory-free electorate, the GOP now has a much stronger hand and is essentially blackmailing the entire country to benefit its own prospects for 2012 and the tiny sliver of ultra-wealthy citizens that is the party's main purpose for existing at present. Faced with such prospects, the president might be viewed as having acted appropriately and compassionately. Sure, it adds to the deficit/debt problem to the tune or almost a trillion dollars and will eventually give the conservatives an even stronger hand when it comes time to ELIMINATE all those annoying social programs ordinary people need. But it's still what I called in an earlier post "keeping a declining republic going with baling wire and chewing gum." It's either that, one might say, or run with the prospect of letting the country fall apart right in front of the current generation's eyes.
In this view, all those brilliant so-called liberal or independent voters who stayed home last November "to send a strong message" have nobody to blame but themselves, the Blinking Idiots of America. If you're amongst that honorable assembly, I've got your message right here, channeled (as near as this dino can attune its liberal sensibilities to the appropriate frequency) straight from the Grand Old Party: "If you don't have a net worth of at least eight figures, we don't care what happens to you, now or at any other time. Go straight to hell, you twenty-first-century peons, and don't bother sending us the bill for the trip."
2. President Obama might have done best to let the cuts expire, then strongly and continually advocate the proposal and reinstatement of working-class and middle-class tax cuts and an unemployment benefits extension, all the while excoriating congressional Republicans when they resolutely refuse to help millions of people whose well-being is of no interest to them. This is a difficult and painful path, especially since, if I understand the process correctly, come January House Democrats will no longer be able to drive the legislative agenda. In that body, the Republicans will have the main say in what gets proposed and voted on. The most likely scenario is two years' worth of gridlock. The up side of this strategy would be, of course, that at least the GOP would come under intense pressure not to do the worst it is clearly meditating to do. What I'm describing is something like Bill Clinton's gambit against the shutters-down of government back in the 1990's. It worked pretty well for him, I recall -- the conservatives backed down because people rightly blamed them for their juvenile temper tantrums and stalling tactics while people suffered. The president's hand might be very strong in such a case: "Do something! Stop arguing about what did or didn’t happen last month or last year! Do something, you mean-spirited rotters!" It's exactly the sort of blinkered-historical-vision, short-term, bark-it-up strategy that Republicans themselves are so good at (as when they call liberals "whiners" for reminding us that Bush 43's mistakes are partly the cause of our current troubles) -- why not turn it against them for a change to do the people a good turn?
1. Thanks to our predictably dim-witted, memory-free electorate, the GOP now has a much stronger hand and is essentially blackmailing the entire country to benefit its own prospects for 2012 and the tiny sliver of ultra-wealthy citizens that is the party's main purpose for existing at present. Faced with such prospects, the president might be viewed as having acted appropriately and compassionately. Sure, it adds to the deficit/debt problem to the tune or almost a trillion dollars and will eventually give the conservatives an even stronger hand when it comes time to ELIMINATE all those annoying social programs ordinary people need. But it's still what I called in an earlier post "keeping a declining republic going with baling wire and chewing gum." It's either that, one might say, or run with the prospect of letting the country fall apart right in front of the current generation's eyes.
In this view, all those brilliant so-called liberal or independent voters who stayed home last November "to send a strong message" have nobody to blame but themselves, the Blinking Idiots of America. If you're amongst that honorable assembly, I've got your message right here, channeled (as near as this dino can attune its liberal sensibilities to the appropriate frequency) straight from the Grand Old Party: "If you don't have a net worth of at least eight figures, we don't care what happens to you, now or at any other time. Go straight to hell, you twenty-first-century peons, and don't bother sending us the bill for the trip."
2. President Obama might have done best to let the cuts expire, then strongly and continually advocate the proposal and reinstatement of working-class and middle-class tax cuts and an unemployment benefits extension, all the while excoriating congressional Republicans when they resolutely refuse to help millions of people whose well-being is of no interest to them. This is a difficult and painful path, especially since, if I understand the process correctly, come January House Democrats will no longer be able to drive the legislative agenda. In that body, the Republicans will have the main say in what gets proposed and voted on. The most likely scenario is two years' worth of gridlock. The up side of this strategy would be, of course, that at least the GOP would come under intense pressure not to do the worst it is clearly meditating to do. What I'm describing is something like Bill Clinton's gambit against the shutters-down of government back in the 1990's. It worked pretty well for him, I recall -- the conservatives backed down because people rightly blamed them for their juvenile temper tantrums and stalling tactics while people suffered. The president's hand might be very strong in such a case: "Do something! Stop arguing about what did or didn’t happen last month or last year! Do something, you mean-spirited rotters!" It's exactly the sort of blinkered-historical-vision, short-term, bark-it-up strategy that Republicans themselves are so good at (as when they call liberals "whiners" for reminding us that Bush 43's mistakes are partly the cause of our current troubles) -- why not turn it against them for a change to do the people a good turn?
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