Swan's politics blog

Empower the rich to fight the rich? Sounds like a perverted attempt at a joke

2009-03-06T02:37:00.004-05:00

When you are a liberal or progressive activist, you keep having the same few conversations with your friends-- about some aspect of the movement, politics, society, and your own lives-- over and over again. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me when I was a young activist in college. One of those conversations that seemed to come up again and again was the participation of the affluent in the movement.

One matter on which Aristotle was right I think is that human societies really are in one or two respects like a bee-hive or an ant-colony. Insect communities like those of ants or bees contain several types of individuals possessing different behaviors, which coincide with different types of work necessary to the survival of the community. Similarly, it’s just plain wrong to think that any one or two individuals alone can stand as a sufficient biological example of the human race that can be expected to survive and thrive in the species’ habitat. Humans, like bees and ants, have survived because our diverse heritable instincts and diverse heritable psychological characteristics are necessary for survival. Among humans, it is easy to see that an individual who becomes effective at the occupation of a righteous, fair judge is simply not interchangeable with one who becomes effective in the occupation of, say, a vice cop in a violent neighborhood, or an elementary school teacher-- they are not interchangeable not only in terms of their training, but also in terms of their inclinations and attitudes. To give some more basic examples, throughout pre-history and history, it’s certainly sometimes been a shy person whose personality left him prone to make the right decision in a perilous situation, and other times the availability of a bold yet stupid person was what allowed a community to test an option that ultimately proved to be the avenue they needed for survival. Without a multitude of personality characteristics that are not all possessed by one single individual, communities would have been wiped out. There is no such thing, among humans, as a super-individual who by him- or herself alone posseses all the traits that can best promote that individual’s survival in diverse situations. This differentiation of behavior exists not just across the lines of profession, but also across class lines.

With this background it is easy to see how in terms of politics, certain stratas of our society can hurt the society as a whole, or just hurt the left-wing movement. For example, over the course of the history of the left-wing, it has probably been all too natural for people from upper-class backgrounds to assume or hold leadership positions. This mirrors the fact that in the society as a whole, rich people hold powerful positions, and do not “fall far from the tree”-- if a person’s parents are rich and privileged, an individual is likely to remain rich or privileged throughout the person’s lifetime. And this persistence in leadership and privilege may come about due to certain heritable personality characteristics which will not necessarily promote the movement to be large, strong, or even ideologically healthy or pure as time goes on. For examples, perhaps the genetic reason rich people accrue more benefits than others is that they just are more pushy than other people, feel more entitled than other people, or care less about other people. While it is easy to see that these characteristics may certainly help you build a big company, they do not at all by the same token make you more likely to be vigilant against, for examples, the left-wing movement becoming corrupt, activism being conducted in a stupid or inefficient way, ideology not being developed well or fully (so that policy will properly protect people, or so that the movement will attract a lot of supporters), thw wicked and the conservative being opposed boldly, vigorously, thoughtfully, and constantly enough, and so on. So investigating the question of whether an upperclass person is the best person to hold a leadership position in the left wing is more likely to show us, I think, that in a variety of situations and contexts, this kind of individual as a left-wing leader is more likely to turn out to be a mixed bag in a lot of contexts than they are a clear benefit. Obviously, being from a certain certain class, in and of itself, does not make any individual a better person than anyone else, nor does it of course make them some kind of ideal person. The specific problems an upper-class person may have as a leader of any kind of left-wing endeavor might be classism, a lack of a background in lower-class lifestyle, attitude, or expectations, an inability to effectively communicate with or judge individuals from a lower-class background, and so on. Of course, like anyone else, upper-class people tend to see themselves favorably as individuals and thus are not as likely to see that they have these kinds of deficiencies than other people might be. So, largely, it is not for upper-class people to tell us whether they are qualified to be leaders or not-- it is up to left-wing activists from more humble backgrounds to be on the alert to make sure these people do not gain too much control, and to work actively to exclude them from gatheirng too much leadership power.

It is easy to see how all of this has played out in the history of the left wing. While it should have been obvious to left-wingers that people who come from a background that is raised or genetically desigend to despise other people and oppress them would not be the best to write the story of the movement and to give the speeches, over the course of history these people have pushed their way into leadership positions in the left-wing (basically just as another hobby of the idle rich, like fox-hunting, yachting, and golf; or perhaps as a form of adolescent rebellion against their parents). As could be expected and should have been expected, these people brought the same inherited personality characteristics to running the left-wing as they would have brought to running their parents’ corporations mercilessly and unethically, and what we have gotten as results from this are (for example) things like the USSR-- a horribly corrupt, criminal and oppressive state that actually openly ran both a gulag (Siberian political prisons), and a huge terror-organization (the KGB) that oppressed people within the USSR (and abroad) at least as horribly as, say, the Nazi Gestapo did in WWII-era Europe. As a further example, even though the record of the USSR as anything but a good example of the values and goals of the left-wing continued to mount over the course of decades to the point that it became at least as ridiculous to defend the USSR as it was to defend O.J. Simpson against the charges that he was involved in his wife’s murder, many First-World liberal activists with personality characteristics that should have completely disqualified them from holding important leadership and spokesperson positions in our movement continued to defend and champion terror-states like the USSR. Clearly this discredited our movement and contributed to stunting our proper ideological development/growth, since young people who were interested in left-wing politics often must have assumed that a large ostensibly left-wing effort like the USSR must have gotten policy and ideology figured out pretty well, and that all that was left was for the individual activist to do was to shut up, accept the authority of the super-power socialist state, or at least to mimic its ideology- and policy-preferences-- and especially when the USSR got the endorsement of older, more experienced liberals in the First World. Very ironically, this implicit opposition to critical thought on policy and ideology that the fascist, cruel upper-class created in our movement looks just like the senseless form of orthodoxy that any smart left-winger very naturally and rightly begins to feel opposed to in his or her own nation or community at (often) an early age.

Conclusion: The participation and especially leadership of upper-class individuals is a positive threat to the welfare of our movement, and activists have to be very vigilant about how these upper-class people participate in the movement. They have to do this despite any superficial admiration or feelings of friendship they may have developed for specific individuals, and they have to try to do it without absolutely excluding the rich or discouraging their labor or participation too much.

Postscript

Any liberal who thinks that Soviet totalitarianism/communism was something to aspire to or even merely ok is a problem. This should be obvious from, say, reading about the horrible political prisons and repression/repression of public opinion in the GDR/East Germany, and reading about the Soviet/KGB cooperation (or should I say control) involved in all of that.

Many liberals who support states like the USSR are simply ridiculous. Treating the notion that the USSR was ok as aphoristic or unquestionable for a liberal certainly is a ridiculous idea, at least. Liberals who hold that idea are often not much different from kids who fill the detention halls in a high school, or drop out of high school-- just too lazy to educate themselves.

I know that for a lot of liberals, the unthinking answer to what I wrote above about states like the Soviet Union and Cuba is some version of "Well, if the only danger that threatens a liberal society from being able to exist is opposition, then oppression may be necessary."

In a movement that has become too often unwilling or unable to give the simple answer dumb concerns like these call for, I give the simple answer required:
For a society to be really free or really worthwhile, it has to be capable of withstanding freedom of speech. The only contexts when true repression of speech on political issues is necessary or adviseable are very specific, transitory wartime contexts (such as perhaps anti-war speech, made during a war that is necessary for the state’s safety, in a specific province that is likely to erupt in a rebellion that could cause terrible harm to the nation if the speech is allowed). For this reason, no liberal movement should subscribe or sign its support to policy or practices that invalidate political speech based on the speech’s having some specific political content, and support of freedom of speech should always be the default liberal policy. This does not mean, of course, that individuals should be allowed to dirupt our political meetings so that they cannot function, or anything like that-- instead it’s just a stance on a public policy issue.

Another worthless dodge is the idea that if only the USSR or other states like it had been successful enough to conquer more capitalist nations, they would have somehow inevitably grown adequately benign in their policies to be free, worthwhile states, and that this justifies their oppression of private civilians during those states’ times of weakness and vulnerability. The fallacy of this idea is shown by the example of China, which is a rich nation that still has a vast, miserable, oppressed population, as well as the typical illicit grossly rich population typical of modern communist nations and other totalitarian or facist states. What really accounts for how the civilians are treated are the characteristics of the leadership, and the characteristics of the leadership of China and the USSR have basically been that they are or were a bunch of opportunists or people who don’t care about the masses, who are posing under a socialist rationale in order to support their authority. These characteristics do not simply dissappear because the predator becomes more successful at victimizing people (e.g., conquers more relatively free states that they can enslave the populations of).

Reparations

2009-03-06T02:34:00.000-05:00

Now that America has proved itself willing to elect a (very worthy) African American to its highest public office, the fighters for social justice must look to what can be done with this political capital we possess. Although President Obama is in office, the prisons of this nation are still filled with African Americans and other racial minorities, African Americans are still very poor-off compared to white Americans, and African Americans generally live and socialize in racially segregated communities and cliques. That this is a harm, and the cause of it, are obvious, and they must end. Just as obvious is that the cause of the harm was a wrong that deserves to be righted. Some people may make racist arguments, and show statistics from testing, and claim that a lot of what African Americans are suffering is inherent to the race. But what should be obvious to everybody in this nation is that whether or not it is true that African Americans can achieve everything in equal measures as members of any other race can, African American at least certainly should not be livin gin the grossly disparate conditions I have described, and the cause of the fact that they do must not be any characteristic of their race, but instead the incredible historical hurdles that that one race-- but not the others-- have been hampered with for many generations in this country.

There should be reparations for slavery of something like $40,000 to every African American person who is over the age of 18 (as of the effective date of the enacting legislation), regardless of when and how they became a citizen, so long as they do not make over a certain amount or have a certain amount of assets that indicates affluence. The $40,000 could be paid out over the course of 8 monthly payments of $5,000 so it has a little bit of the protection of a spendthrift trust, and the payees should be able to apply to have the money directly deposited in a bank account so that stealing of these much-publicized checks out of mailboxes will be minimized.

How will we determine who is black for the purposes of making reparations? People will get in line in designated public places at a specific date and time to be judged by a few public employees on the basis of appearance. Congress, or some appropriate body charged by them to administer the project, should vote on sample photographs to be used by the panels of judges as guidelines to decide who is and is not black (this will provide a degree of uniformity to the initial decisions that will eliminate some embarrassing inconsistencies from location to location). If people want to challenge a decision that they are not black, then they will be able to make such an appeal to a committee that will judge them according to guidelines to-be developed (that will probably involve proof of what relatives looked like, documentation of ancestors having been slaves, DNA tests, etc.). Although "blackness" is not an absolutely objective concept, it will do a lot more good to get reparations out to the vast majority of black people and have some uncertainty about a few people than it will be to just forget about the whole thing just because there may not be one answer that is acceptable to every single person to the question of who is black.

There are about 40 million black people in America, so counting the costs of administration, these reparations should not cost too much over $100 billion, which is significantly less than what we are spending on the economic bailout (not to mention a lot of stuff we'll probably never need, like a lot of our high-tech weapons development has proved to be over the course of recent decades-- I'm sure I probably don't need to remind anyone here of the Pentagon's terrible rep for shelling out $$$ for development of weapons that never go into production, are developed very inefficiently (so that after many years, the latest plan or prototype version is basically totally unacceptable), or are quickly obsoleted by newer technology).

Barack is the President now, so he should get this rolling! It may be unpopular in some circles, but reparations is more the type of thing that will heal the wounds of racial prejudice in the long run than affirmative action alone. The great wrong of slavery should not go unredressed.

Speculation on the results of reparations:

One the positive side, more black people will be getting married because more black people will have sufficient money saved up to get a home and start a family. More black people will stay out of prison because they will have a lot more incentive and means to stay out of trouble. A lot more black guys will have girlfriends. All the women out there will know that any black guy they see who is over 18 has $40,000 in the bank. More black people will start small business or take gambles on other dreams (e.g., producing a demo tape). It will provide a lot of satisfaction to African Americans and psychological healing to the nation, although arguments could always be made that reparations should be a bigger sum than $40,000 a piece or in a different form (i.e., some kind of mixed bag of investments and benefits). Not to mention many black families will just be a little better provided for, have an easier time staying out of trouble economically, and be happier. For a lot of people, it will be more toys and better clothes for their kids, etc.

On the negative side, a few people will probably try to invest their money to start up illegal little drug-dealing businesses. This kind of thing probably won't be widespread, and shouldn't be used as an excuse not to adopt the legislation. Instead, we should rely on normal law enforcement to stop any new drug dealing activity and communities should make appropriate efforts to discourage recipients of reparations from taking this rash gamble with their new wad of loot.

Is $40,000 paid in monthly $5,000 payments to every black person who is over 18 as of a certain date enough? I certainly am not against reparations being bigger than this, but my suggestion shoots for a number that might be politically doable in the foreseeable future instead of towards satisfying some over-idealistic activist's pipe-dream. I also want to make clear that my plan isn’t that as of a certain date, we start giving $5,000 payments out to people just for being black as soon as they turn 18. Rather, my idea is that everybody who is not 18 as of the effective date of the legislation will be considered not to be entitled to reparations without further legislation. If congress finds at some point that the initial round of reparations wasn’t enough and the country is willing to provide more, there can be successive rounds of reparations (crafted perhaps in different amounts) awarded to newer generations.

In the absence of federal legislation, states that can afford it should craft programs to issue some sort of reparations to their residents with state money. Perhaps the legislation could stipulate that the reparations are only made in place of reparations by the federal government, which should more appropriately be taking the lead, and that in order to receive the reparations, any recipient has to agree to give back to the state an amount equal to what they received from it out of any federal money that is eventually awarded to them as reparations. I think there may be some good arguments against this policy, but it’s just an idea to help get reparations rolling in the states-- to accommodate everybody in case people start objecting that the states shouldn’t do it, because it would be unnecessarily duplicative of any eventual federal program (e.g., people might complain that if their state steps forward to pay reparations and others don’t, then that state’s taxpayers will have unfairly shouldered too much of the burden of reparations; having state reparations simply take the place of future federally-sponsored reparations helps to allay this concern).

One really racist argument you sometimes hear against reparations is that African Americans are better off because they ended up in America, despite the racism and bad situation that is the legacy of slavery. This argument is wrong for at least a couple of very good reasons. The most basic one is that the black people who were put into slavery were different people than the ones who are alive in America now. The ones who were put into slavery were not better off, because being a slave in America was by-an-large not better than being free in Africa. And the ones who are alive now are not better off than white Americans are now, simply because of the color of their skin: they unfairly suffer disadvantages that are the after-effects of a racist institution of slavery that was supposed to be abolished over 100 years ago.

If we are successful in getting reparations discussed more publicly in the months and years ahead, another way to answer this argument is to say that if there hadn't been slavery, America still would have needed labor and African aborigines certainly might have been brought over to work for pay. Without racism and slavery, African Americans who would have come to America certainly would have suffered a lot less. How Africans in Africa fared has nothing to do with that. The standard of whether blacks deserve reparations is how white people in America have been doing relative to them, not how any people living in horrible circumstances across the world today are living. We certainly don't ask if a white man or woman should just be happy to live in America when deciding whether they have a right to sue somebody who wronged them, and the reparations issue is the same. Whether some black man somewhere else is poorer than a black man in America has nothing to do with whether disadvantages that African Americans suffer here are wrong.

In other words, (1) slavery was a wrong when it existed (2) whether the descendants of Africans who remained in Africa are worse off than the descendants of Africans who were brought to America does not mean that it is not a wrong for modern African Americans to suffer from racial discrimination today, or from racial discrimination against their ancestors (3) since it was the evil institution of slavery that in great part led to the situation of African Americans of today suffering these ill-effects, and since Africans could have easily emigrated here without there having ever been any slavery, the nation owes modern African Americans compensation for the great harm done to them by having allowed slavery.

Some people may make a totally inappropriate comparison between the Holocaust and slavery to argue against reparations, because Jews are doing well nowadays. To answer this kind of objection, here is such an argument and the response I wrote to it a while ago:
---------------------------------
a court in France ruled that the Jewish victims of the Holocast in France had been compensated enough
mimi B.Eng.(Mech) P.Eng.M. Eng | 02.17.09 - 9:17 am |

Really? What was the issue? Like, what were they trying to get from the court?

Anyway, I hope this wasn't posted as a counterpoint to what I wrote about reparations. The situation of Jews in Europe who were affected by the Holocaust was a lot different than that of African Americans effected by slavery both before and after the relevant events (slavery and the Holocaust) so I don't think you can compare the two. I don't think you can say that when Jews don't need any more reparations for the Holocaust, that says a lot about when blacks should no longer need reparations on account of slavery.

Petition Demanding That Senator John McCain Sell 12 Of His 13 Homes

2008-09-12T17:55:00.013-04:00

To John McCain, to the American people, to our federal elected government officials, and to members of the press:

Recently, it has come to the attention of the public through the press that John McCain and /or his wife privately own expensive residential properties far in excess of their own needs, and that he refused to acknowledge how many houses exactly he owns when asked. In fact, the news media claimed that it was confused as to how many houses John McCain owns (because of issues as to how one should count toward the total multiple houses standing on a single piece of land they own for their own use) but the highest number reported was often 13 (instead of just one house, like Barack and Michelle Obama own). Unfortunately, even Sen. Joe Biden, the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, reported the low-estimated-number, claiming John McCain owns 7 houses. But no matter what the title is or where the land is located, facts are facts: John McCain and his wife own 13 houses together, and he wants to add the White House to his list of homes, and that is-- in this world of unfulfilled needs-- far too much.

On top of all this, John McCain has claimed in an interview that anyone who makes less than $5 million a year isn’t rich. Someone should tell John McCain that even $1 million is enough to save thousands of doomed lives in the Third World because the people there can’t afford even basic medical treatments and cheap food.

These facts about John McCain are not being given enough attention by the media, and he has not done anything to allay people’s concerns about what they say about him and the appropriateness of his seeking to hold a public office in America. When this country started, political action didn’t come from corporate news outlets or rich newspapers-- it came from the people holding meetings, speaking in the streets, and producing pamphlets and petitions. We, the undersigned, in that spirit, write to remind people of what America is really about, contrary to John McCain’s false ideas of what America should be. We state in unity that:

-13 houses is far too much for any American couple or individual to own for his/her/their own use;
-and that it certainly is true (contrary to what John McCain erringly said) that people who make under $5 million a year certainly are often very rich;
-and we ask that to show that he is acting in solidarity with the American people and not against their best interests, that if John McCain still wants to become the President of the United States of America, he should sell 12 of his 13 houses regardless of any other considerations (like whether his name or his wife’s name appears on the title) and that he give the proceeds to actual poor people living in America who do not have health insurance, distributed fairly evenly to people from various geographic areas and various ethnic and political backgrounds.

Furthermore, since the ownership of multiple “homes away from home” by a single person or married couple is a waste of space, and drives up the price of housing when many poor people are forced to live in over-crowded or inadequate housing, and since the ownership of multiple homes necessarily restrains interstate commerce, we ask that John McCain agree to support or sponsor legislation banning the ownership or renting of more than one house, condominium, apartment or other housing by any single individual or married couple in America for their own use. The legislation should compel people to sell excess homes over time, so long as the sellers can obtain fair prices for them. This legislation will contribute to making it easier for poor families without health insurance, or for sick veterans without homes, to find a decent place to live.

If you agree with the above, please sign your handle/nickname in the comments box below (click on the blue letters that say “comments” and leave any identifying information you are comfortable with, such as website, real name, e-mail address, town/state/other real address, or phone number. If the number of signees gets large enough, I’ll send it over to the press and to the Senate, Obama and McCain.

Important: Please e-mail this post to your friends and acquaintances!!

Just Another Conservative Henchman

2008-09-12T13:51:00.005-04:00

For anyone who spent yesterday in a cave, Palin is extremely nuts. Just letting you know.

If any feminists out there were starting to get hypnotized by the Republican propaganda, and starting to identify with Palin because she has a vagina, I hope this has snapped you out of it.

One has to ask what the possible motivations were for Palin to want to charge rape victims $300-$1,200 to get the evidence to prove they were raped. Whatever it was, it had to be something that proves that Palin is a true Republican:

(1) Wanted to save her town money so it could do other things with it, or so her or her town would look better

(2) Wanted to make her town look better by improving the crime statistics by discouraging poor women from reporting rapes (Palin may have imagined the victims' forgoing the investigations because they couldn't afford to prove the charges)

(3) Weird conservative ideological shit-- just wanting to reinforce a norm of women not being able to fight against oppression by men, and trying to make women feel like they have to submit to men (lest they be raped, and be unable to do anything about it).

UPDATE: When I wrote about this on another blog's comments, some Internet-crazy-Republican wrote:

Look, the whole rape it thing is a bit of a dodgy attack on our part. Technically, they charged the victim's insurance company, not the victim directly. So, it was a budget cutting measure.

The question is whether they would still charge the victim even if they didn't have health insurance.

Who knows?

But if there wasn't an express procedure in place for not charging those without health insurance, then the policy was to charge them. So that commenter was sticking up for Palin by giving her and her administration an unreasonable benefit of the doubt.

Also, what about those non-denial denials from the Palin camp about her knowledge and approval of the rape-kit policy?

That speaks a volume: Palin probably knew what was up, and wanted it, and it probably specifically had to do with keeping poor women who don't have health insurance (probably the demographic that most commonly reports rapes) from reporting them. Anyway, Palin probably legally couldn't keep the charges from being handled by the health insurance provider. So it's not as if the motivation to stifle poor woman victims is at all unrealistic, especially since we know it's in line with über-conservative patriarchal dogma.

So, since there wasn't any policy in place for women without health insurance to have the rape kits paid for by the town, we can assume the policy was to charge even them for the rape kits. But, of course, Palin and her administration had to have foreseen that the situation of a health insurance provider not being billed for a rape-kit would come up when they crafted the policy, since Palin knows as well as anybody that not everybody has health insurance. Therefore, it's a pretty good chance that part of the point of the policy was to discourage reporting of rapes or to try to coeerce women into fearing men who they'd learn they couldn't really prosecute for rape effectively.

I'm Not A Bigot Against Anyone's Religion, But I'm Not An Idiot, Either

2008-09-12T12:31:00.014-04:00

Here's Steve Benen today on the WaPo's false reports that liberals have been bashing Sarah Palin's religion.

For what it's worth, I think there is a difference between bigotry and criticizing a religion (you'll see Steve wrote something about "bigotry" that makes it sound like he thinks any criticism of Palin's religion is inappropriate-- a pretty odd claim, coming from him, a man who has repeatedly demonstrated that he is very proud of his past as an activist for separation of church and state). First of all, if they agree with Gerson's column that Steve wrote about, I think a whole host of Republicans should take a look in the mirror and ask themselves whether and to what extent their myriad criticisms of Islam are bigoted, or are merely valid and fair criticism. Second, I think whether something is religious bigotry or not can depend a lot on the context. Here, Palin isn't walking down the street, just trying to live, and facing harassment from people just for being a member of a certain religion and daring to go around doing the things one normally expects any person to be able to do to live-- to walk around town, to buy groceries, to work, to get a driver's license, to send kids to school, etc. Rather, she's vying to obtain a privilege, and probably one of the most valuable privileges in our society-- the (arguably) second-highest public office in America, something that can affect everybody. I think in those circumstances, it's everyone's right to examine her religion and to talk about it, as long the criticism is not to an extent that is unjustified or irrational considering the known facts about Sarah Palin's religion (Pentecostalism) and her practice of it.

So, I hope Steve's line about so-called "bigotry" and Gerson's column won't discourage anybody from saying what they want about Sarah Palin's religion, and I'm sure that at least 99% of the things we politically-savvy liberals would think of to say about it wouldn't amount to bigotry.

Shorter version of what I just said: If someone's trying to become the VP or President, it's just not so that their religion can't be a relevant thing to take into account when you're trying to predict how they'll perform. And Sarah Palin's religion-- a particularly fervent and strange one-- is a perfect example of that. It's probably one of the closest religions we have in America to radical Islam. And, Sarah Palin has been doing things like forcing women to pay for a $300-$1,200 forensic investigation when they would show up at her municipal police department claiming to have been raped.

There is just something odd about the idea that the concept of religious bigotry means that no religion can be criticized under any circumstances, with the exception of radical Muslims using their religion to justify killing Western, non-combatant civilians. If that's what's up, then I could invent any religion, call it something like New Satanism, and claim that the beliefs of the religion are reasons for government to allow its adherents all sorts of privileges and new rights. That doesn't seem right at all.

When liberals have fought against religious bigotry, the fight has been largely been against things like people trying to subject students in public schools to Bible- study meetings or to daily Christian prayer; when these approaches to promoting religion were explicitly outlawed, the fight became one over things like schools subjecting everyone who attends a high school football game to a spoken prayer over a loudspeaker, or to daily moments of silence in school-- both typically with obvious Christian overtones, especially since most of the establishment and students attending the school were well-known to be fervent, conservative Protestant Christians (and therefore all the non-Protestants of course couldn't help but feel like they were being forced to participate in a Protestant prayer). Another context is where a member of a religion that subjects its members to a modest requirement that they wear a certain unremarkable article of clothing daily (like a hat) finds that a school or a prison bans the religious clothing just to enforce uniformity.

In those contexts, liberals have fought against institutions using their might to subject individuals to religious conformity, either by mandating public praying or taking away a nonobtrusive religious symbol from an individual. These situations are a far cry from saying, "X wants to become President-- is X's church nuts?" and I think all the liberals involved in those previous fights knew that and were never trying to say something like that religion should just never be talked about, or that a religion couldn't motivate people to bad behavior. I mean, let's get real about Palin's religion-- in her church, people "speak in tongues." To anyone who doesn't come from that tradition, speaking in tongues is pretty obviously volitional and non-typical human behavior. It's pretty simple for a person to look at that behavior, and to conclude that the people engaging in it are frauds, are self-deluded attention-seekers, or something in between the two (especially since these people are not primitives, but come from our relatively superstition-free, science-filled society). So Sarah Palin's religion goes above and beyond being the typical religion we don't believe in-- one that believes in something we find implausible-- to being one where fraud is, at least from many people's points of view, obviously practiced and accepted.

I mean, a lot of things the conservatives' activists fight for today are rationalized around the Protestant religion, and liberals criticize those claims all the time because they deny a lot of science.

Trying to make liberals look like hypocrites by using across-the-board, platitudinous statements and characterizations (when everyone intelligent knows the real world doesn't work according to a few across-the-board, black-and-white rules and characterizations, and therefore it's really unfair to assign beliefs and arguments to people based on stuff like that, or to predict people's beliefs and arguments based on stuff like that) is the type of thing Republicans do to try to turn us against one another and gum up the works, so always watch out and be thoughtful when you encounter stuff like that.

Believing politics and governance (or other people's beliefs about them) are easily reducible to a few single-sentence slogans is something for five-year-old kids, not for thoughtful, concerned adults.

Pig Remark

2008-09-10T12:57:00.003-04:00

I heard about Obama's weird "lipstick on a pig" remark today from the front-pages of local newspapers, although it oddly didn't appear on any of the three or four major blogs I check daily (Washington Monthly, Matt Yglesias, Atrios' Eschaton, at least). Anyway, although in general I think Democrats (and even Obama) should be less civil and more confrontational, since the Republicans practice such abusive politics, and the Republicans and the media lie to the people so much, I thought this remark was weird for Obama to make, was way out of line, and was not the type of thing I expect Obama to say publicly without someone coercing him by some means to do so. The specific problem with the remark was that it sounds misogynistic, by seeming to incidentally attack Palin's appearance (using the word "pig" to say that her policy is no godd, when women in this messed-up society are raised to be inordinately focused on their weight and appearances). Another funny thing about the remark is that it seems to play perfectly into the Republicans' and media's strategy for Palin-- that is, to attract women to supporting her by protraying her as persecuted for being a woman (think-- are all these reported "attacks" on Palin for, for example, not taking more time to raise her kids really coming from any specific journalists, Democratic politicians, or well-known figures on the left? Or are they just media lies?). So I think the remark is another piece of evidence which tends to show that I am correct in my suspicion that someone is bringing some sort of illegitimate, nasty pressure tot bear against Obama.

What Is Up With The British?

2008-09-03T12:52:00.002-04:00

Now, there is plenty wrong with how things are done in America and how the American government is behaving nowadays. And there is plenty that the British do better than us. But I still have to ask, in 2008, when so many other European nations have long since abandoned the official character of royalty (or at least have given up on furnishing their nobles with huge piles of treasure) why are the British bowing down and worshipping a royal family who hold coined British surnames and are actually something like 7/8ths German at this point? I would have to roll my eyes a little at any conservative British person who called Americans yobs (hooligans)- the British, after all, are in one respect still living in the 13th century. And what's worse, they're in denial about it, telling themselves that what's really a crass symbol of plutocracy and arbitrary authority is instead about nation and race, going so far as to change the names and the details to help them believe the story.

It would be more than merciful to let these people just keep the house and the jewels, but let them figure out how they're going to continue to pay to maintain their real estate and other valuable property, and how they're going to pay the other taxes on them. Government employees who have been paid to serve and defend the "royal" family could be turned to serving and defending people who earn it through merit or as a right of being a British citizen, instead of by some meaningless distinction. But I think the British have already made the logical conclusion of making the structures and a lot of other historic property associated with their royal family legally state treasures (i.e., the "Windsors" and "Mountbatten-Windsors" can't sell them). If the British can see the logic in taking that step, it's certainly time to follow the logic a little further and withdraw the anachronistic insult to humanity of monarchy a little further from the public's view.

What The Republicans Have Turned Politcs Into

2008-09-02T11:59:00.004-04:00

I'm a little surprised that Steve Benen can act so surprised here at the news that John McCain hired a former enemy who his underlings once denounced by name at a press conference. The guy was, according to McCain, responsible for criticisms of him in 2000. How is any of what astonishes Steve about this situation new? When someone criticizes you, you say that he is terrible and wrong, for doing that, but when you are trying to obtain something, you say that your opponent is terrible and wrong, and you hire the people who can find the best way to say that and who won't flinch at thinking it up. It's elementary politics for the Republicans, and we've seen every week for years (it seems like) that they're smearing the smearers (and even their legitimate critics) when they think it helps them, and doing the smearing themselves when they think it helps them.

Energy And Oil

2008-08-31T15:54:00.003-04:00

I just want to write here to re-hash something I've mentioned a few times before: our country (and the modern world) has to do something about our finite energy supply (coal, which is the biggest source of energy for our power plants, is due to run out in 95 or so years, and oil is due to run out much sooner). Remember, almost no one lives off the land, or even near a farm, anymore. The way we get our food is from refrigerated trucks and trains that depend on our energy supply. If a substitute for gasoline (that is, a way to power vehicles that is about as efficient and costly as gasoline) isn't devised, most of the world's people will starve, and if we come up with or implement a substitute for our vehicles a year or even a few months or weeks too late, it will almost certainly lead to widespread destruction and havoc and wreak a terrible disaster on the economy (because, again, a large portion of the people will end up without any food).

The keys to solving these problems are, in my opinion, (1) nuclear power plants and (2) putting about as many non-gasoline cars on our roads and highways as we have gasoline-powered cars currently.

-Why can't we replace cars with pedestrianism and mass transit? Why can't we just become more fuel-efficient? Nobody lives near a farm anymore, because family farms are almost gone, most having been taken over and consolidated into large mega-farms by huge corporations. Almost no matter who you are and almost no matter where you live, most of your food probably comes from hundreds or even thousands of miles away from where it is produced and packaged to you, and a lot of electricity and gasoline is spent getting it to you and to the many, many, many other people like you.

There are several dependencies created by this that perhaps cannot be broken. Not only might totally re-organizing every single person's life so that everyone lives with walking or mass transit of their jobs not work because it would be too massive and effort to organize-- such a thorough reorganization would be too big a drain on the economy as a very large portion of people have to figure out a new place to live-- but our societies might already have grown to such a degree that such an attempt at re-organization would destroy them. Some habitations (cities, towns, and whole counties or states) that cannot be put within cost-effective distance of farms have to be completely abandoned. We just don't know if the economy of an America where almost everyone has to be located is going to be able to be successful at all. And we might have so many people already that such a reorganization of our food production and distribution system just might not work (economies of scale would be totally lost, and we would have to go back to local production of food that has not been seen in America since our economy was much, much smaller). Naturally, the local farms that used to exist across America 90 years ago and more than 100 years ago are no longer there. Because economies of scale will be lost, it will put more pressure on where people will be able to live and still have it be cost-effective to transport food to them. And all this will have to be done presumably without petroleum-based fertilizers (i.e., most modern commercially-used fertilizers) since petroleum is becoming more and more scarce.

So, in order for post-petroleum America to be anything like America is now in terms of how safe and rich it is, what we really need is a 1-to-1 replacement for how many automobiles we have currently making the system work.

-Why can't we just replace all the gasoline with coal? Why can't we just use plug-in cars powered by electricity from coal-fired power-plants? Coal itself is due to run out in 95 years. Once gasoline becomes too expensive and we all have to start relying on electric-powered cars, this will create such a great new demand for electricity from coal that coal will run out even sooner than in 95 years. And we will be left with nothing-- and some of us will probably live to see that disaster. Certainly, our children and grandchildren will, and if we don't give them a solution, many of them will experience literally fighting for their lives and livelihoods.

Coal can, by a complicated process, be transformed into gasoline. But because this is complicated, it is necessarily more expensive. And it leads us to the same problem as before-- coal running out sooner than in 95 years. If you live in the US, your being able to watch Wheel of Fortune on TV and eat ice-cream out of your own refrigerator is probably because of electricity from a coal-powered power-plant. When coal ends, if there is no replacement, all that ends, too.

Turning coal into gasoline can probably be a part of the solution, like keeping gasoline-powered planes and boats moving longer as gasoline runs out. But it's nothing like a long-term solution.

-Why can't we use gasoline created from germs? That process has not yet been shown to produce a commercially-useable product, but even if it ends up working, it's not going to be efficient enough to produce all the gasoline the country needs-- by a longshot.

-What about the air-car? The air-powered car is actually less efficient than other "green" cars, and anyway electricity is used to run the device that compresses the air to power the car! Refilling an air car is a mechanical process that requires several hours of a machine working to compress the air. You can imagine how much electricity must be used to refill a car every day or two. If you've ever owned a portable CD player, you're probably familiar with the fact that just because the device has to use some of the power to physically spin a CD around, the batteries run out very fast, and much faster than if the power was only used for electronic, rather than mechanical, processes.

The point is, air-cars aren't likely to ever prove to be more efficient than other "green" cars could be because of the machanical process that is necessarily involved in compressing air to "re-fuel" the car, and in any event, air-cars will still require a lot of electricity to get them to go (electricity that will have to come from somewhere).

-What about other "green" energy like wind, solar, and hydroelectric? Those are great, and we might end up in a real bad position no matter what, at least in the long run, if they're not developed more and more. But for now, the only feasible alternative to gasoline and coal is nuclear power, which currently provides the vast majority (about 80%) of the electricity used in homes and businesses in the very large country of France. Nuclear energy isn't ideal, and nuclear fuel will run out eventually, but it's cheap.

-How big is this problem really? Think about this-- in addition to everything else I've mentioned, all our plastics and many of our other synthetic materials come from petroleum. When petroluem is gone, we'll be stuck re-cycling old plastic and resorting to alternative materials! We may encounter problems with scarcity if the quality of certain plastic degrade (to the point of unsuitability) after a lot of recycling. And the alternatives to using plastic-- such as wood, which is funny since our forests are running out and a new greater demand for wood could itself be a problem-- may not be entirely suitable or practicable. And many of our weapons of war are powered by petroleum.

=What Can You Do About It?=

-The first thing to do I think is to make sure people know that the coal and oil are running out. You could pick a day of the week on which you'll tell people you happen to meet or already know that coal and oil are running out. You may be surprised even at which people you already know who don't know that oil and coal are running out, and who think that electric cars are just about reducing vehicle emissions to stop global warming.

-Talk about the problem of a post-oil, post-coal world. If you can write an e-mail to a responsible person, a letter to a newspaper, or can give a speech, it won't hurt to mention this problem. You can sum up some of the points I mentioned in my post. You can even try to create T-shirts, posters, a zine or a website about coal and oil running out and about post-oil, post-coal energy alternatives.

-Another thing you can do is buy or construct an electric, hybrid, or other "green" car. When people know that you have a "green" vehicle, it will create a buzz, and when the car companies experience enough of a demand for "green" cars, they may start to get the message that this is the future, and big businesses might consequently spend more money and time trying to create a post-oil world that is worth living in for us.

Remember, it may take activism and speaking out to solve this problem. You just can't count on the most rich and the most powerful people to take this seriously. So long as they feel like they will have enough money to keep them safe and happy no matter what happens, a lot of the richest people in our society may even like it if a lot of people in America become relatively more powerless (because they'll be impoversihed) compared to them.

The McCains And Their Entourage In A Starbucks???

2008-08-30T11:33:00.005-04:00

Did anybody else notice the story that McCain goes to Starbucks?

So are the media trying to abandon their stereotyping of liberals to some degree, or to make it OK for Republicans to go to Starbucks again, or what?

That bit about saying that liberals are into Starbucks was a pretty active little Republican policy for quite a while.

My bet is the myth about Starbucks became too cumbersome (conservatives will have a much harder time getting people to like them and cooperate with them if they won't go into a Starbucks because of some ridiculous quibbling complaint), so the conservatives decided to defuse it a bit.

On funny thing about this whole thing is back before 9/11, in the days of the anti-globalization movement's big protests, all those people hated Starbucks almost more than anything. Way before the conservatives pretended that all liberals love Starbucks, the most radical liberals in America were constantly deriding, filching from, and shunning the place. I think there were some bad business practices of Starbucks' that people didn't like (in terms of globalization/capitalism) and people just didn't like the idea of this big corporation pushing little locally-owned businesses out. Also, they actually of course hated the yuppie image of the place, but this is something the Republicans would never, ever, ever tell you.

One More Hack On The Pile Of Hacks

2008-08-30T02:54:00.004-04:00

Here's John Cole running interference for the Republicans: It seems so transparently cynical, so deeply poll-driven and focus-grouped, and so manifestly just a bone to the wingnut pro-life base and the 8 PUMA holdouts, that I really can't treat this pick seriously.
Riiiiiiighhht. Sarah Palin is a bone to the wingnut base. You know, the wingnut base of the Republican party, who have to be won over every election because they hate voting for Republicans, as opposed to the swing voters, who are in the bag.

Palin is more like a mixed bag than she is a "bone" tossed to the base, in my humble opinion.

And Cole's "maverick" routine is just like McCain's-- it always was, and it still is, just a schtick.

Final Thoughts On Palin

2008-08-30T00:06:00.002-04:00

Here's Hillary Clinton on Palin. Needless to say, I think her too-diplomatic response is totally wrong. Palin isn't much of anything for women (or anyone else) to be happy about, because she's just a henchman for the conservatives to work against women's interests and the interests of other under-protected groups in our country. People like Palin help make the conservatives even more dangerous than if the public face of conservative politics consisted of white men alone, because people like Palin help fool people into thinking that conservative policies help women. So not only is Palin a particularly dangerous addition, she's also a particularly obnoxious traitor (because the work she's doing as his VP pick is to help the conservatives secure a whole bunch of political power all-at-once).

I for one am pretty sick of people having mixed feelings about things like highly visible conservative women and highly visible conservative racial minorities. Sarah Palin, Condaleeza Rice and the like are just enemies, at least almost-as-much as guys like McCain are our enemies. The only sense in which they're less culpable than McCain is by way of the possibility that a person like McCain may have a better idea of what conservatism is really all about, but (for instance) a black conservative TV news-magazine personality may be fooled into believing a lot of the lies he's been hired by McCain's ilk to tell.

It's pretty easy to figure out: If an ignorant woman sees another woman running as a conservative politician, she may conclude, "She's a woman, like me. We have the same interests that all women do. She must know more than I do about governing, because she's actually a politician, so if she thinks conservatives' politics are ok, I suppose they've got to be ok. At least, I think she looks honest." That's how conservatives manipulate people. They know that populism isn't their strong suit, so they try to disguise themselves as in some way populist. They used to try to publicly live up to their belief that only men should lead and work. But it became too unpopular idea, so they've got to disguise it a little-- and people like Palin help a lot. If it wasn't for a few people like her-- the Condaleeza Rices-- the conservatives would be doing much worse in this country.

Condaleeza Rice used to sleep with conservative, dicky, white jocks when she was in college. The only reason she does what she does is because she knew that a lot of white people looked down on black people, so being black made her feel small and powerless. She then realized that there was someone conservatives (supposedly) disliked more than black people-- the Russians or communists. If she could help white people fight their white enemies, she thought, they might like her and value her. So she became a Russia expert so she could stop being a black person. Condoleeza Rice is no role model for any black person or freedom fighter at all-- neither is Palin.

Here's Another Angle...

2008-08-29T21:22:00.002-04:00

...People may not be telling you: I bet McCain's people thought the story about McCain calling Cindy McCain a "cunt" really hurts them. But if he chooses Palin as VP, that will nullify he effect of the story for a lot of people who hear about it.

It may be a totally dishonest gimmick, but if you think about it, people fall for stuff like that all the time, and that is why women date and deal with men who even trusted friends have told them horrible things about-- because the guy employs some little bit of camouflage, and some people don't want to think that people they meet are that bad.

Some More Thoughts On Palin

2008-08-29T15:16:00.004-04:00

One way to look at Palin is, the McCainiacs were planning to choose her for a while, but held out on the announcement for just the right moment or for "just in case," and choosing her reflects the over-all terrain of the campaign as one in which there is really pressure on the Repubs (as in 2000) to win by making themselves look liberal (even as they try to change the race into one about conservativism).

The competing theory is that McCain's staff have been trying and trying to win with the Rovian, "Move extremely in the direction of your base's interests even if it goes against expectations, and sometimes it will surprisingly work" tactic, but this has been leaving them empty-handed in light of the polls, so they have finally turned towards a real dyed-in-the-wool, move-towards-the-center gambit to try to start things up for them. We can debate whether it's the right choice, but no matter what, it's still a pretty natural conclusion for them to come to.

The thing about this particular way to move to the center-- a Republican choosing a woman running-mate-- is it's so novel and different that it's really hard to make predictions about. Will Republicans go for a man-and-woman ticket? Who knows at this point? Presumably McCain's team have done some polling that indicates this can work, but you never know. They always might have skipped the polling.

If the logic behind choosing Palin was correct, then (for speculation's sake) maybe an African American Palin would have been even better (although there certainly would have been a lot of Republicans who would have been offended at putting a person like that so close to the Presidency, a lot of those same Republicans would have understood the politics of it (pandering to bring in new voters) and still would have pulled the lever for what they would see as "the greater good").

Finally, I don't know about this suggestion that Romney and Pawlenty were "screwed" and that Palin had it in the bag all along. I don't have any idea how long they were thinking of using her, but something about that sounds fishy to me. For one thing, Romney was a genuinely strong option, and for another, they seemed to wait until Barack chose his VP, to see who they could effectively counter him with. Even if you believe my point of view that Republican operatives might be intimidating even guys like Barack (and putting words in their mouths), they still could be leaving decisions like who Barack's VP choice will be up to the responsible (genuine) Democrats, since guys like Barack might find it a lot harder to go along with the dictates of Republican propagandists if they feel like the Republicans are deciding things like who the Democratic Presidential candidate picks for his VP. If things like that don't happen, Barack can sort of half-way rationalize that all the intimidation and suggestions really do have to do with something like fighting terrorism (my bet is, he's been told something like that) and not with just plain old sinking the liberal ship.

Palin

2008-08-29T14:48:00.004-04:00

My first thought was that she is a good choice to help them win, based on her interesting, appealing and not-strictly conservative history. However, I think she is going to fail to excite a great portion of the most conservative-of-conservative voters.

Whatever the case, I expect she will become a media darling, will receive much softer treatment from the media than either Barack or Hillary have, and will be seen to "win over" male media characters (like Chris Matthews) whose anti-Hillary bits had a misogynistic tinge to them (and this will be orchestrated, not spontaneous, of course).

What I can say with more certainty than all of the above is that this pick is a great object lesson for Democrats on how to play politics, how the Republicans operate, and how seriously they take what they're doing (the important premise to understanding the salience of these points is that a non-smart person can beat a smart person by taking what they're doing more seriously and working harder). The Republicans know that the biggest point of importance of the VP slot-- since it is unlikely a VP will get a chance to replace the President-- is what the VP does to make the ticket look more appealing in an election. Palin was chosen for how she will make people feel about the ticket. She provides a strong distraction from a lot of McCain's weaknesses, and she hits with the "sweet spot" against the weakness we created by dropping Hillary. Now the Republicans will get to see how a woman can stir up female conservative support.

Remember, women are 50% of the population, and they are a big part of swing voters! And people always like to help or hire someone they can identify with more than someone they can't! They've already got a white male on their ticket-- another white male might not add as much to their voting bloc as this woman can.

To fully appreciate whether Palin is a good choice for them, you have to look at the bullshit/showbiz aspect of it. You can't just say, "Who is this person professionally and what has she done in politics?" There is a low-brow aspect to American presidential elections that you can never forget totally if you want to always be able to appreciate what's going on. Think about it this way: Palin seems like who America would wish McCain was married to, doesn't she?

I'm not sure Mitt Romney wouldn't have been a more effective choice for them. But Palin is definitely a well-thought-over choice.

In the end, maybe it was Romney's family's connection to civil rights that rubbed them the wrong way (even though the commitment to civil rights might not have in actuality run that deep).

A final point: I doubt that her moderate stances are sincere ones, and feel her true stances on the issues will turn out to be much more conservative in the future.

August 29

2008-08-29T13:29:00.003-04:00

August 29, 1632, John Locke, philosopher and writer against religious justifications for government / state sovereignty and in favor of the right of a state's subjects to revolt against oppressive and unjust rule, was born in Wrington, England.

August 29, 1975, Éamon de Valera, the Irish independence fighter / activist, who became the third President and first Taoiseach of Ireland, died in Dublin, Ireland.

Keeping Up With Current Events

2008-08-28T13:28:00.013-04:00

I haven't been writing too much lately, even though I probably have a couple of worthwhile things to write that I've just neglected to get to, I suppose because I've been busy with things in the non-cyberspace world. I've also had a lot of tiny observations, mostly just "I told you so's" regarding things I've noticed going on, and little confirmations like that, that I just haven't been motivated to post (although maybe they would be a good idea to post, even though to me they seem trfling, since a little more thorough commentary from me might help more people see the light and get on the ball).

But along those lines, I thought I'd just "check in" today. I'm getting the sense that a lot of things that are going on may be effectively confirming stuff out there that I pointed out (for example, about how corrupt the media is and how one-sided our politics are)-- that is, that it's getting to the point that without my narration, a lot of other people are noticing this stuff more than they used to. I myself haven't actually been watching the convention. What should I watch it for? To get confirmation of things I am already totally aware of, like how corrupt the media is and how compromised the Dems are? I am already very familiar with this, and with the kinds of events and behavior these conditions will create. As long as other people are starting to "get it" on their own, that's good. But anyway, Steve Benen writes today that supposed "divisions within the Democratic Party" have "for most of the convention [] been the media's favorite topic of conversation" and this is just what I would expect. You may also recall that yesterday I speculated that Steve Benen is a propagandist, and Steve's writing this is totally consistent with what I wrote-- it's just that he can't avoid making observations like this if he is going to retain his credibility in the eyes of a lot of people.

Steve also writes posts like this one today which really victimizes his more ignorant readers. If you just read Steve's post, and if you are unfamiliar with whether poor people "already get all their health care for free" you may be really fooled about the facts of the situation because of the way he describes it. You really have to click on and read his comments to get a clearer picture.

Steve's post makes it sound as if the current system doesn't really leave people untreated, and that the issue is all about efficiency-- which isn't the case. While it may theoretically be true that everybody can go and get emergency-room treatment if they want to go and ask for it, not having nationally-provided health care in practice probably discourages a lot of uninsured people from getting treatment at all, or from seeking treatment before their condition degrades to a point where treatment is worth a lot less to them. So the problem is not just about efficiency: (1) It's about people not getting treated before the problem becomes bad at all, (2) it's about efficency, and (3) it's about people getting financially ruined (because not having insurance and not paying their medical bills ruins their credit and saddles them with a large debt for a long time) over something that shouldn't be denied to anybody.

The real general answer to most of America's problems, not limited to health care, is that the rich should pay taxes. No person needs more than the mansion/Mercedes/summer home lifestyle. The idea that individuals need be able to own lots of properties (like John McCain), lots of cars, or to have hundreds of millions of dollars is absolutely absurd. People should be thankful just that this country gives them the opportunity to get a huge house, an expensive car, and a time-share or summer home. The excess money should be the small price they have to pay to take advantage of the opportunities this country affords to allow a person to obtain that totally sufficient lifestyle. If we were properly taxing the rich and huge corporations, it would be very easy to see that problems like how to provide health care are not big problems for an extremely rich nation like ours at all, and things like proper medical care are "peanuts," cheap investments that we should feel totally happy and not burdened in the least to provide as a matter of course for free to all our citizens.

I'm not saying, of course, that taxes should pay for all sorts of cosmetic and unnecessary care. Nor am I saying that our system should be 100% public (in the sense that we shouldn't consider whether nationally-provided health care would work is we also allowed people to become "high class," non-public doctors who the rich could pay for supposedly "better" treatment if they wanted to opt out of the system in some particular case of illness or injury). But if we were working everything out right, our system would even be able to afford to pay for cosmetic surgery for people-- like a young woman who has almost no breasts, and is consequently very depressed about it, or a person who is not quite disfigured, but is very unhandsome, and is very depressed about it-- who we all might agree need the procedure if we had to be the ones to walk a mile in their shoes. It would just require a recommendation from a treating psychologist / psychiatrist.

Fight The Power

2008-08-27T11:53:00.005-04:00

Today Matt Yglesias unfortunately wrote: I’ve generally liked Chuck Todd’s emergence as a TV talking head,
Chuck Todd is and was a snivelling little hack who they coached and dressed up a little better so that he would give a more serious impression. Check out some of his greatest hits. Chuck Todd’s profession is being a propagandist.

Russert was the same thing. Everyone knew his presentation was garbage, but then after he died, the Machine closed ranks to make sure he was eulogized non-stop for a week or two. Now Media Matters has oddly taken his name off their list of big-offender media personalities, even though he was one of the worst ones, and since he was a conscienceless soldier for the Machine, it’s entirely appropriate to keep his name up there so people can easily check out the examples of his disgusting corruption and better understand the reach and quality of conservative media corruption.

Commenting on the media running McCain's ads for him for free on major networks and times that would require big bucks to advertise during, Steve Benen meekly writes: But why would major news outlets repeatedly fall for the same trick, even when they realize the ads are created for the sole purpose of free media attention? There are competing explanations, but my hunch is a lot of outlets are just lazy, and video press releases make their jobs easier.
Considering all the other biased stuff that comes out of the mainstream media, it's well-passed the point of being certain by now that they're in cahoots.

This is a real problem, so we've got to think of a way to solve it.

All the times you see stuff from the mainstream media that looks liberal, it's just a red herring. The conservative reach is far in the mainstream media, and they can influence any story or headline in any mainstream media news report they want, even if they haven't actually bought off or intimidated every single mainstream media employee yet. The point of this is so the public won't realize they have a controlled mainstream media yet, since the public isn't so uniformly conservative to support that yet.

I doubt the public ever will be that conservative, but we still suffer from the results of having all these lies infiltrate our mainstream media news. So we've got to deal with the problem frankly and seriously.

Matt Yglesias, Steve Benen, and Kevin Drum have all taken a sharp turn for the worse in their writing over the past year or so. I have no doubt that they are all real liberals (and their past writing was very sane), but I do very much doubt that they have gone untouched by conservative coercion, and in my opinion, they are all now basically Republican propagandists.

When Steve Benen, Kevin Drum, or Matt Yglesias write something critical of the mainstream media, what they are doing is no different from the mainstream media's not acting overtly and uniformly like a conservative loud-speaker. It helps cover up when they write other things that are very wrong or inappropriate or otherwise propaganda. The blogs allow people who notice the mainstream media is corrupt to have a "pressure release valve" that keeps them from getting too fed up with the system, because they show that at least someone else notices the problems (but isn't even taking them that seriously, even though they amount to a controlled news media system, a symptom of fascism). But the blogs do the same thing as the mainstream media, and mix reality in with conservative propaganda, even though they give a slightly higher dose of reality for the (minority) slice of the population that is not dumb enough to un-critically accept the mainstream media.

August 27

2008-08-27T11:27:00.002-04:00

On August 27, 1963, W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American civil rights activist and co-founder of the NAACP, died in Accra, Ghana.

Another Lil Something . . .

2008-08-27T01:51:00.003-04:00

. . . I'm going to talk about because people in the media say it's important (or they at least used to):

If for years it's been the received wisdom that politicians should always wear dark suits-- and (even better) red ties-- and that there is even something psychological behind it, why are both Barack and Biden now sporting light-colored suits every once in a while?

I thought Hillary's pink suit during her convention appearance seemed a little bit odd, too. Something about it being her first big public appearance after losing the nomination + not being picked for VP, I guess, and pink being "the girl color."

Is some fascist dictating the wardrobe selection now?

Things You Don't Hear Very Often

2008-08-25T15:04:00.004-04:00

UPDATE: Here is another interesting thing about cowboys you don't hear very often: while most of the modern world, and probably guys like Hitler and George W. Bush, have thought of cowboys as being an almost uniformly-white class of people, that actually wasn't the case at all of the actual Old West. Being a cowboy in the Old West was a very working-class profession, and cowboys were often immigrants. Around 30% of cowboys actually weren't even white, but were African American, Native American, or Hispanic. The idea of cowboys as an all-white thing isn't something that came from the cowboys themselves-- rather it's something that came from writers of fiction novels back east, or from the sons of settlers in Western towns and cities who profited from the place that the original cowboys and settlers tamed (think of them as the west's original conservative, suburban, middle-class pansies-- the original George W. Bush's). They wanted to take the cowboy legend of the place they were living in and turn it into their own thing that pleased them the most, including an all-white cast of characters that was completely at odds with the real Old West. The real Old West-- at least as far as the cowboys-- was a lot more like The Lone Ranger and Tonto, or Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman in Unforgiven.

* * * * *

Here is an interesting parallel between our President, George Bush, and Adolf Hitler that you don't hear very often.

George Bush lives on a fake ranch (really a pig farm converted into a home) in Texas when he isn't in Washington, and he likes to talk like a cowboy and pretend that he's a cowboy even though he's really from the Northeast.

And what do you think Adolf Hitler most liked to read in his spare time? It wasn't books about political theory, books praising the culture or history of Germany, books about warfare, or even racist propaganda books. Little Adolf liked to read cheapo cowboy novels by the writer Karl May. These were the type of thing that didn't reflect the Old West accurately at all, but rather turned cowboys into super-hero type figures. A lot of men read them like boys read comic books, or like men read Tom Clancy novels today.

This, of course, doesn't mean that cowboy = Nazi, or that everyone who dresses like a cowboy or likes some aspect of country-western culture is bad or racist. And it's also not the type of thing I usually spend my time pointing out on this blog. But since the media has acquiesced over the past few years in the face of a propaganda assault making cowboys and NASCAR fans out to be something like the Nazi German idea of a German Volk (if not a racial übermensch), I just thought I'd point out a parallel that is very clear, and based on well-known facts, but that no one bothers to mention (perhaps because it's a little more direct and clear than is comfortable for the Republicans).

Barack Obama

2008-08-24T12:56:00.006-04:00

Someone was just telling me that before anybody tells him "all the criticism of Barack" they should show evidence that people were "flipping out" about John Edwards in 2004. Exactly. If Barack is inexperienced now, why wasn't it so obvious to all the media types that John Edwards, with similar credentials in 2004, was "inexperienced"? Calling Barack Obama too inexperienced is nothing more than a euphemism to say that Barack is black and that there is something wrong with all black people.

Therefore, if you hear anybody say this euphemism, or see anybody write it, your appropriate response is to immediately retort the charge with the facts that demonstrate that Barack is experienced compared to other people who are running for or who have run for the Presidency.

Biden-- Wish He Was Hillary

2008-08-24T01:05:00.019-04:00

This is my basic feeling, which I'll elaborate more below: I still don't understand it, and I think it's kind of a slap in the face for a guy who bills himself on change to reject bringing the first woman VP into the White House with him. At the same time, he's also sinking her chances to eventually run for Pres again. It would have sent a lot better message if Barack had kept her included: that the individual components of the liberal coalition-- for example, working class women and working class racial minorities-- are not divided, and if one part is down, the others can be counted on to reach over to help them up.

In my honest opinion, we should not see Hillary just as an individual because that is not simply what she is, and that is not the context. This is about the history of the whole nation, and what message we send. If Hillary is good enough (and by all measures, she was-- remember, she was the other power-slugger in the primary, as far as popularity and money-raising ability, besides Obama) then she should have been picked. Biden is by comparison a second-stringer. And on top of all that, arguably, the field of candidates running against her shouldn't have even demonstrated so much whole-hearted competition (including from Obama) because Hillary was "next in line" out of all of our people who wanted to be President.

Now Obama is leaving her stuck in the mud more or less apparently just because of some things she said or the media said about her. The stuff about paying her debts doesn't count as sticking up for her (it's a token move, not meaningful political support), and Hillary's trying to trade off the convention to get some money to pay her debts actually just makes her look bad (it doesn't do anything positive for her political career).

The case for Hillary being "next in line," in case it wasn't obvious enough to you, was this: she had comparable popularity to Obama, and she was older and more experienced (especially having been much closer to the White House for eight years, which the media chauvinistically ignored (abetted by the bloggers) simply because she was the First Lady-- but she was an educated, invloved, insider First Lady, not just a celebrity or a mantlepiece). Skipping her for Obama possibly ruins her chance to run and therefore leaves our long-term field of Presidential candidates with less total talent for the future.

Even I don't think that argument necessarily wins. For one thing (which is the most important thing you can say in Obama's favor), Obama has turned out to be significantly more popular than Hillary, including (and most crucially) as compared to John McCain-- at least so far. But I'm worried by what I see as signs that the Republicans wanted us to pick Obama (the corrupt mainstream media just didn't go after him hard like they went after Hillary during the primary). That support for Hillary from Rush Limbaugh? A red herring. You really think that guy is dumb enough to tell us who he actually wants us to pick? Remember, Rush Limbaugh is the guy who has been excoriating Hillary constantly-- until she became a Democratic Presidential candidate.

Magnifying all this is the fact that we should have had other Presidential and Vice President prospects (that were arguably very superior to either Barack or Hillary) available now and for future campaigns, but we lost them due to chance or to weird circumstances. Kennedy's son, who could have been a sure-shot for us to win the Presidency a couple of times (once he grew up a little more and hopefully was persuaded to turn to politics), was killed in a mysterious plane crash. And Eliot Spitzer was exposed in an affair, just when it looked like only Republicans were getting caught doing that (again and again) since after Bill Clinton. But, now we don't have these people, so the loss of Hillary hits harder. If John McCain squeaks by Obama, all we're going to be left with is regret over what our powerhouse ticket (Obama and Hillary) could have been like, and the cold consolation that a bunch of sleazy mainstream media writers or TV talking heads had speculated that the White House wasn't big enough for Hill, Bill, and Obama.

As for all the bad things people say about Hillary: the absolute limit of what you can realistically say bad about Hillary (that is, what you can attribute to her and not to her staff) is that she played a little rough while she was campaigning-- and that is hardly an unprecedented, or even an unusual, practice.

A lot of things we're doing now just seem to fly in the face of what should be basic smarts, basic considerations, and standard methods of doing things for us.

I really feel like we're the geeks in high school who are getting directed to the non-existant pool on the roof by the Republicans.

Incidentally, another thing that's funny about the life of JFK, Jr., is that there are stories out there that make it sound like something happened to his wife that made her go kind of nuts after he married her or sometime before they died. You hear a lot of things about her that make it sound real natural that he was impressed with her class and wanted to marry her. But there was some story about them in Rolling Stone (I think) after they died that claimed that she would get into screaming fights with him in which she would call him a "faggot" and that she would do things like make them late going places because she would change her mind three times about what color she wanted her toenails to be after the beautician had already put the nailpolish on.

The Future Of Our Country

2008-08-21T16:26:00.008-04:00

What I’d really like to see from this business about McCain’s homes is more people talking about how it fits into all of our ideas, instead of just using it as an insult against McCain personally.

Specifically,

Why does a person need anything like 7 or 12 homes when other people are poor and live in crowded, miserable places?

Why is it that a person can own 7 or even 12 homes (McCain owns several house-shaped, house-sized structures on one of his seven properties– structures that families could be living in– therefore he or his wife actually own something like 12 homes) in this country? How does the system let them get and keep so much wealth they don’t need– even enough to leave fortunes to their kids?

Why do we allow people to own as many as 7 or 12 homes in this country?

We can even start looking forward to the future: since it’s so obvious that no one actually needs as many as 7 homes, and in the future of dwindling resources it’s going to become harder and harder for everyone to get by, we can start talking about changing the laws to do things like prevent people from owning as much extraneous property for their own use (for instance, making a law that specifically prohibits owning 7 or more homes, any of which you don't rent out or don't actually live in for more than one month out of each year).

It’s time for the common people to start talking about things like this and to start fighting for things like this. We can’t expect the rich people to do it. No rich person, when push comes to shove, really cares about any of you or their country. Why else would we have a rich class? When they have all that money and property and the security that comes from it, the security and comfort it provides to them is too attractive, and you can expect that no rich person over the age of 18 who knowingly owns 7 houses really cares what happens to any of us so long as they have their property and security. We just have to conclude from that that it has to be us who fights for the interest of the country and its people, and these people who have to have their excess taken from them.

Rich people may say that they care about other people, and may even donate to Obama and try to change things, but in the final analysis, it is all superficial because when the chips are down and the decisions really count, they wil side against you and side in favor of their money and security. That is why things don’t change in this country–- because the common people don’t realize this, and rich people aren’t motivated to change things for us. So it has to be the common people who pick up this work.

We have big corporations in this country that more or less monopolize huge industries, and they pay no taxes back into the system. Instead, the rich get more and more taxes removed from them: the individuals who work for these corporations at the highest levels of authority, and the people who stand to gain the most from the financial success of these corporations.

People like John McCain, Geoge Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld all come from this class.

Meanwhile we have poor people in this country who can't get enough to eat, don't get a decent education, or live in squalid, miserable conditions. When people who could grow up into happy, law-abiding citizens are so weakened by this evironment that they become criminals, we send them to abusive prisons where even today prisoner-on-prisoner or guard-on-prisoner rape is an epidemic, and we tell ourselves that it's all okay because we give them television, or because the government and the media lie to us and tell us all that the conditions of our country and the people who get locked up are much different than they actually are.

What we should be talking about is allowing the government to confiscate, or confiscate huge portions of, the largest industries. The government can oversee the management of these indutries, and we will still have a capitalist system, but instead of all the profit from the biggest businesses going into the piggy banks of a few people who were born into the upper-class, it would be used and distributed more equitably to make our world and our country better for us all to live in.

These are the people who have been ruining our environment so that people get skin cancer and all other kinds of cancers, and selling us cigarettes even though they knew they are poison. We have been letting them get away with it. We should not let these people do us the insult of waving their 12 houses in all of our faces and not start talking in a really serious way about fixing things.

Another thing I think the public's finding out McCain owns 10 or 11 or 12 houses is a good occasion for is noting that our society is living off the backs of de facto slave labor.

If you go and take a look on any consumer product in your home, you're almost bound to find the words "Made in China" or "Made in Malaysia" or "Made in [some other Third World country]" printed on it somewhere. These people get paid virtually subsistence wages-- and a total rip-off for a First World worker-- to work under absolutely horrible conditions, live in a hovel in East Asia, and die of treatable diseases. Their bosses treat them like rats and dominate their personal lives. Basic protections in America, like pregnancy leave, are forbidden in those places. Any time you read about an ancient civilization like the Romans and how they profited from their slaves, you might as well walk up to a mirror and take a good look in it, because you are the exact same thing. These industries keep the rich rich, and we regular people get all our stuff perhaps at a slightly cheaper price-- or maybe not (maybe the rich just tell us that's how it works out so that we won't complain so readily about the oppression of the factory workers). We take our bribe and we keep our mouths shut. If we ever complain or ask about it, we're told some absurd answer like that the Third World people deserve it or that it has to be this way. Or we're absurdly told that the workers in those factories are lucky because they have jobs and other people in those countries don't! Imagine that idea-- being lucky to work like a slave!

The people who most insist on these lies to us, or most insist on believing them, are a bunch of middle-aged Republican white guys who wear suits and work in air-conditioned offices for tens of thousands of dollars a year, and convince themselves that they're tough, working-class people while they check up on their stocks in The Wall Street Journal and on their Fantasy Baseball teams each day. Well the facts are, maybe if some more money could come into the countries (like through higher wages) where real working-class people are working to produce your T-shirts, appliances and furniture, it would spur more development, and all the people there who are unemployed now would be able to work at jobs like selling retail stuff to their countrymen.

It's time for real American working people to speak, think, vote and act in solidarity with working people all across the globe instead of continuing to let McCain's people divide and conquer us like we're a bunch of stupid rats.

Of course, right now Americans don't have realistic options besides buying things that are made in sweatshops-- and we don't even want to relocate all these industries to America, either (what would be better is if we just made it a condition of selling consumer products in the U.S. or of having any offices or investments in the U.S. for these kinds of corporations to pay their foreign workers some kind of a U.S.-mandated minimum wage). But we definitely can stop talking and acting as if we like and accept this McCain-like plutocracy, and we can start looking for home-grown alternatives to giving money to the rich. We can do things like start backyard vegetable gardens (or buying plots of land specifically for crops) instead of paying so much for corporate food, and we can start DVD-sharing co-ops with our social networks (Think how many friends you and your friends have, including on MySpace or on Friendster! Of you have a few hundred or even a thousand people in your extended social network, you can get them all in on it. Just put a limit on how many DVDs each person can borrow a month (not returning a DVD on time gets you kicked out), get a geek to set up a privacy-protected website to manage it, and you can save money from at least down-grading your NetFlix membership to a cheaper version of the membership.). The answers are out there, and we just have to reach for them-- and if we don't, we're culpable. But if we do, then triumph is inevitable.

What's The Bottom Line On McCain?

2008-08-18T17:49:00.007-04:00

Kevin today writes:

Is John McCain an unrepentant warmonger who wants to cut taxes so his beer heiress wife can take home a few more dollars per year? Beats me. But as a campaign attack tactic, it ain't gonna work. Instead, why not concentrate on character critiques that have some real grounding in reality? Just to give a few examples:

McCain is old and gets confused occasionally.

McCain is running an ugly, smear-based campaign.

McCain has a legendarily short fuse.

McCain is annoyingly self-righteous.

McCain's straight talk has evaporated in the face of his need to win evangelical votes.

A more believeable way of putting it than "unrepentant warmonger who wants to cut taxes so his beer heiress wife can take home a few more dollars per year" is to say that he's a racist who believes in the plutocratic system. He's public-spirited in a psychotic sort of way, and he likes the security, acclaim and sense of achievement he gets from fighting effectively for his little cause. And he probably doesn't mind if becoming President ups his chances of becoming hugely rich and influential, either.

And I disagree much that "as a campaign attack tactic" this "ain't gonna work." Note that the main thrust of the Republicans' propaganda is to convince people that they are "of the people" and we're not. Since we're the populist party, and ultimately populism is always a winning argument in a democracy, they try to deceive people about it as much as possible. I think we can be more persuasive and substantive by using my description of McCain above instead of solely by using Kevin's suggested lines.

I think Kevin's suggested points about McCain are alright, but the most devastating critique of him is the one Kevin seems to be trying to kick under the rug so we won't see it-- that McCain doesn't really care about regular people. I think it's important not to come across as if all we have to say against him are that he has a few character foibles. If we overdo that, then we may make ourselves look real bad in the eyes of ignorant people who will for no other reason start wondering if McCain's policies are really better than ours. Actually, over-focusing on Kevin's points, escpeically to the avsolute exclusion of others, sounds like it could be a formula to get elderly (core-voter-demographic), racist Evangelicals (i.e., the conservative base) caring about this campaign again, and up off of their tuckasses to work against us.

August 18

2008-08-18T11:11:00.002-04:00

On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was ratified and adopted.

On August 16, (I missed this one the other day!) 1845, the anti-slavery writer and activist Fredrick Douglass left America for England and Ireland where he travelled and gave many highly-attended lectures for 2 years.

The Rick Warren Debate

2008-08-17T21:32:00.004-04:00

Of the Rick Warren debate, Kevin writes:

The CNN talking heads all thought the big difference between the two was that McCain came across as direct and forceful while Obama came across as thoughtful and nuanced, but that's not quite how it struck me.

For better or worse, Obama seems to have chosen to treat this event as sort of an intimate evening with Rick Warren — that just happened to be nationally televised. McCain, by contrast, treated it as a straight campaign event: he had his stump speech talking points ready, and he was eager to cram as many of them into his 50 minutes as possible.

I don't know if this was a good decision on Obama's part, but I don't have any doubt that he'll choose a much more direct speaking style at his three face-to-face debates with McCain.

First of all, let me say that I think the whole idea of a nationally televised, ostensibly non-partisan campaign event held before a character like this (Rick Warren) as the moderator is ridiculous, and it is more of the same-- it's just like all the staged, biased, anti-liberal debates the Democrats willingly took part in, one after another, during the primary campaign. And there wouldn't have been an event like this moderated by a Catholic bishop or a Jewish rabbi, I'm sure.

Responding more directly to Kevin's and to CNN's comments, perhaps Obama felt it was important for him not to be seen as being overly confrontational with this person, and that's where Obama's style was coming from. I don't know if our side can profit from a lot of our politicians playing it the other way-- being overtly more critical of the religious right while everybody is paying attention-- but if a lot of conservative Christians aren't motivated to come out and vote on their issues this year, it seems like a reasonable conclusion to make that Obama wouldn't profit by poking the hornets' nest.

I've written before that I think Obama might be getting pushed around by the Republicans (that is, that they might be intimidating him into making some bad moves or spreading their propaganda here and there-- I thought perhaps the same thing was happening to Hillary during the primary). I didn't watch much at all of this event, so I don't know if Obama hit any icebergs I didn't see, but from what I watched he presented himself very well according to his normal style. If there was any pro-Republican or pro-conservative stuff in what I did see, I think it was very subtle, along the lines of being a little too careful about stepping on religious conservatives' toes (and thus giving the impression that everybody in our country quietly tip-toes around the Evangelicals).

The Bandwagon Effect

2008-08-16T15:49:00.015-04:00

I expect you may hear a lot of stories like these-- basically, the press claiming that John McCain is more popular than the numbers show he is, or otherwise minimizing the importance or size of Barack's lead-- and to some of you it might not be obvious why those stories are out there.

I think the reason the distortions are being made is because of a well-known psychological characteristic of humans called "the bandwagon effect" that the Republican propagandists are aware of and are intentionally trying to exploit. You may recall that when you were in grade school, children in your class often ganged up to behave in a bad way, or to express belief in some answer to a question, when they should have known better (that is, that the behavior or answer was bad or wrong). You may even have been surprised at which particular children ultimately jumped on the bandwagon from time to time. It turns out that it's natural for people to want to do what "everyone else is doing"-- our psychology as a species tends to compel individuals more or less to follow the group. But figuring out when the unpopular answer is the better one takes rare discernment and personal psychological strength. So if it doesn't look like John McCain is at least kind of popular, it makes it unattractive in a very basic way for more people to decide to become McCain supporters. The press simply can't report frankly on McCain's unpopularity or on Obama's popularity (as long as a distortion won't be obvious to most of the audience) because otherwise McCain can't extend his support-- a lot of people won't want to become McCain supporters if they don't think a lot of other people support him, too.

August 15

2008-08-15T12:03:00.004-04:00

On August 15, 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair began on some excess land of a farm in Woodstock in upstate New York and lasted until August 18th. The event featured some of the most popular rock and roll performers of the time and drew a huge crowd of hippies, who camped out on the festival grounds to attend the entire three-day event.

Media Finally Notices McCain's Affairs Again, But Only As Little As Possible

2008-08-14T20:07:00.007-04:00

The Carpetbagger Report writes:

After Sean Hannity argued on the air that those who are unfaithful to their spouses don’t deserve the public’s trust, Alan Colmes mentioned that John McCain is an admitted adulterer. First, this caused Hannity to go completely berserk. Second, good for Alan Colmes.

I might think it made sense for a person reading this to say, "Wow! Alan Colmes is great!" and perhaps even look him up on Wikipedia (if you didn't know he was the co-host of the show-- which is on Fox-- anyway). But if you consider that this is probably the only mention McCain's affairs are getting out of all the mainstream media coverage of Edwards' affair-- and thus (1) isn't going to make any real difference (2) except as an item to be passed around on liberal blogs, thus making Fox and Colmes look a little more fair (and thus making Dems who hear about the reamrks perhaps less motivated to oppose the Republicans)-- Colmes' remarks appear a lot different.

So this remark looks like nothing more than just another fig leaf, providing an opportunity for a lot of political-minded liberals to rationalize things and simply look the other way when the media ignores McCain's affairs.

Has the threat that our entire nation will be destroyed passed yet?

2008-08-14T14:21:00.010-04:00

Someone like John McCain would probably tell you "No."

Atrios today notes the statistic that "41,059 people were killed in highway crashes" last year.

On the one hand, it's 41,059 each year. But on the other hand, how many people in America ride in cars each year? 299 million?

Also, I'd like to see the number after it is corrected for certain risk factors, like driving after 10 o'clock on a Friday or Saturday night (when a lot of intoxicated drivers are out), driving for 8-10 hours without a break, driving while intoxicated yourself, etc. My guess is that the number of people who die in car accidents that don't involve any risky driving, but instead only morning and afternoon work commutes, weekend trips to the mall, and picking kids up from or driving kids to sports practice and to see friends, is much, much smaller.

Anyway, it certainly puts into perspective those less-than 3,000 deaths due to a small gang of thugs that the Republicans, as a sound bite, began to say showed that our whole country was at threat of being destroyed by Al Qaeda.

Yeah, Al Qaeda could have threatened the future of our society-- if we responded to 9/11 by (1) disbanding the FBI, all our national security and intelligence agencies, all our military intelligence units, all our airport security and border security, (2) armed Al Qaeda, and (3) then invited Al Qaeda to recruit a bunch of Muslims and come over here and invade our country. Then Al Qaeda would have been a threat to our existence. But considering Al Qaeda's actual characteristics and capabilities in 2001 (and considering ours), Al Qaeda wasn't such a threat-- Al Qaeda was just a bunch of terrorists we had to pick up and put in prisons. It's not as if we're a nation like Israel, that is something like 30% or 40% Arab, and has Palestinian rebels bombing people sometimes every week or two for months.

But let's get back to what that number means for us besides what it says about Republican lies. Consider that a lot of people in America used to die from diseases that are now treatable, like childbed fever. A lot of women used to get burned to death because cooking was done at big hearths/fireplaces, and women were forced by societal conventions to wear big, flammable dresses with long trailing skirts that covered their whole bodies and were made of a lot of material. A lot of factory workers used to die because of accidents before liberals and unions won laws that protected the workers better.

But none of the things that caused all those deaths were as necessary as transporting yourself in a car is nowadays. Dying or being injured is actually a fact of life. Deaths that are the bigger tragedy than these autmobile deaths are those that come from something like a war that was chosen by a specific President and that could have been easily avoided.

All that said and done, if you can squeeze in riding a bike or walking into your routine somehow when you would otherwise have taken a car, it may be a good thing for you, for our country, and for our planet-- but unless you were typically making that trip by car under the influence of some risk factors like those I mentioned above, doing this is probably not going to save your life.

Elizabeth Edwards

2008-08-14T11:51:00.016-04:00

JFK's son, considering his glamorous image and life-story, probably could have gone on to be a very successful, Obama-like political candidate for our side. And Eliot Spitzer certainly set an example of how a man in public service can take on the rich and fight big, immoral corporations who cheat on their taxes and are ungrateful for the fact that they get to be so big and rich because they got their start in our country. Certainly, if his marital infidelity hadn't been revealed, Eliot Spitzer could have been an almost Obama-like political figure and probably a Presidential or Vice-Presidential candidate. And Bill Clinton would have been remembered better if the Republicans didn't spend millions of dollars of public money in a ridiculous, protracted investigation to publicly prove that he had an affair. And it can be argued that John Edwards' political career was over before any of the stories of Edwards' cheating came out, but one thing certainly wasn't over until then-- Elizabeth Edwards' ability to effectively fight for Obama to be elected President.

This is an angle to the whole cheating incident (and revelation) I didn't even think of until a little while ago. Since Obama asked Elizabeth Edwards to work on his healthcare policy for him, he de facto asked her to campaign for him. And there is a lot Elizabeth Edwards could have brought to the campaign. As a woman, she would have brought a demographic balance to the image of the campaign. As a brave person afflicted with a terminal illness, she was a more sympathetic figure than hard-nosed political battler Hillary Clinton (at least in terms of how a lot of the public has come to see Hillary). As a graceful person, she could have brought some of what Laura Bush brings to George W. Bush's public image, giving him a better association in the eyes of much of the public. And as the wife of John Edwards-- who before the stories of his cheating came out looked like a knight in shining armor-- she would have been a consolation-prize to many people who used to really like John Edwards, whether they ended up voting for him in the primary campaign in the end or not. But this was all before the revelations about the affair instantly turned her into a touchy figure to bring out in public, since she would remind people of what happened and lead a lot of people to associate Democratic politicians with marital infidelity as things get down to the wire in Barack's camapaign. If this hadn't happened, some public appearances and nice public speeches by Elizabeth Edwards could have consolidated a lot of Barack's support quite nicely.

As often is the end result when something horrible and unfortunate happens (and especially after the press gets to make a circus out of it), in the case of Elizabeth Edwards a Democrat's public misfortune has become a great political boon to the conservative Republicans.

Dishonest McCain

2008-08-14T11:26:00.004-04:00

People who support McCain-- and the media-- have a lot of claims to make about his Vietnam War actions and treatment in captivity. But in his political life, McCain constantly says one thing and then does another. In other words, he now lives his life like a dishonest person, and this is easy to show. The media, however, is quick to help create an image of honesty and integrity for McCain, always rushing to call him a maverick-- even though the media should know that McCain's actual voting record as a maverick is very sparse, and that what he actually does is says he is going to go his own way in statements to the media, and then he follows the very conservative Republican path in his actual (media-ignored) voting in the Senate. This calling him honest and a maverick is, also, the perfect cover for someone who lives dishonestly-- if you create the widespread impression that everybody thinks you're honest, then people will simply take it for granted that it's true unless perhaps they actually read with their own two eyes (an underreported account of) how you actually behave.

So if McCain is very dishonest now, why should we believe that everything that's said about what he did during the war in Vietnam is true?

Specifically, does anyone else find it unusual that a man who signed a statement against America because he was "broken" (by his own admission) by torture would then turn around and refuse to leave captivity as some kind of defiant protest? Do people who are scared and intimidated by physical torture usually turn around-- somehow get a lot of guts back-- and basically ask for more imminent torture just to make a token protest? Sure, there is the line that McCain didn't want better treatment because he claims the Vietnamese were trying to demoralize low-ranking prisoners by making them believe that more-important prisoners were cooperating with their captors-- but during wars, it's normal for some prisoners to be released before others for a variety of reasons (rather than everyone all at once). There was no reason for the lower-ranking men to think that John McCain was betraying them if he got to go home because he was famous or important. Surely, any one of those men would have liked to have been in McCain's shoes, and to get to go home early. So the story seems really unlikely to me, and I think it's more likely that McCain didn't try to get out because he thought it was futile and thought the person who was telling him he had a chance to get out was wrong. Or, maybe he made a stupid gamble, believing that there must be some pressure on the Vietnamese if they wanted to release him, and that consequently he could get all of his fellow prisoners out (and look like a hotshot) if he insisted (that is, he thought that he was going to be imminently released at that time anyway, even if he said "No" at first). Or perhaps this whole story was fashioned almost out of the air after-the-fact.

August 14

2008-08-14T11:23:00.001-04:00

On August 14, 1935, the Social Security Act was passed, creating America's state-run old-age retirement system.

Suburbs And Gasoline: Disagreeing With Kevin Again

2008-08-13T09:20:00.009-04:00

Kevin writes:

THE BURBS....Matt points us today to a discussion on the Freakonomics blog about the future of suburbia in the face of increasing gasoline prices. The consensus view is fairly grim, but it reminds me of a few random points about urban land use that have been on my mind for a while. There's no big overarching point here, and nothing especially original, just a few thoughts that don't seem to get much attention in blogospheric discussions of the burbs.

First: Will rising gas prices inevitably push people into the cities as they become desperate to cut down their commutes? Maybe, but it's worth keeping in mind that commutes go in both directions these days. There are plenty of jobs in the exurbs (Joel Garreau's "edge cities"), and although individual circumstances vary widely, this means that an awful lot of commutes today are entirely voluntary. As gas prices go up, workers will start taking jobs closer to home (wherever that may be) or will move to be closer to work (wherever that may be), and commuting will be reduced substantially without any change in infrastructure or land use planning at all.

Second: A focus on increased density is going to mean a funny political switcheroo for a lot of liberals. We're mostly accustomed to fighting evil corporations on behalf of the little guy, but it turns out that most suburban (and many urban) zoning regulations have been put in place by exactly the little guys we're used to teaming up with. Developers, on the other hand, would happily build out every last acre to the maximum possible density and maximum possible profit if only they were allowed to. So if we're in favor of higher density, we're frequently going to find ourselves siding with big developers and very much against local public opinion — and believe me, you haven't really taken on the task of changing public opinion until you've sat through a planning commission meeting trying to out-talk an angry mob of homeowners who are dead set against a proposed zoning change that might affect their property values by 1%. Strange bedfellows indeed, but those are the bedfellows we're going to have to get used to.

First, I have to say I really disagree with Kevin's second point. I'll get back to that in a bit.

Here is my opinion of what this will do to the country vis-a-vis demographic shifts. White people who work or want to work at big offices / places of employment (like big corporate offices, hospitals, universities, and law firms) in cities (all kinds of cities, including little ones) or big, developed, almost-city-like suburbs will want to live closer to where their work is located. That means a lot of (mostly white) middle-class people moving closer to these cities (but not necessarily into them). The result is that around these cetral locations, population becomes denser. Demand and prices for the housing these people want will go up a little, so long as it doesn't outstrip what they save on gas by changning location.

This will lead to a lot of freed-up properties in the places the exodus comes from. Real estate prices in these areas will corresponding go down. Once all the dust settles there (once unsellable properties there are torn down and redeveloped, or are bought up by people there who want to move into them from more modest housing) who will want to live there? I think it will be workers who are going to work in the same towns as the office workers who moved, except they are of much more modest means than the office-workers-- i.e., foreign-born working-class people. These people are needy enough to be willing to make long mass-transit commutes to work instead of driving, or to even ride a bicycle a very long distance to work.

Racially, this means that a lot of cities (or suburbs near to cities) will become a lot more white, and a lot of suburbs will become more non-white.

I'm not confident on what this alone does to politics. Doubtless, and especially in the 2000 and 2004 "red" states, some conservative whites will end up becoming less racist or closed-minded once economics forces them to move out of white areas they've lived in their whole lives and towards more diverse and cosmopolitan areas. But there will probably also be whites who are so racist that they'll cling to their suburbs even though it hurts. They'll be shooting themselves in the foot, but will be so fixated on their prejudiced feelings that they won't notice it, and as gas prices (often) make them poorer and poorer (for the lower middle classes), they'll get angrier and angrier. It won't help that minorities (who ride bikes and take trains) will keep moving into their communities. I'm not talking about a resurgence of the Klan or anything like that, though. I actually doubt that the net effect of racial population shifts is going to be a lot of political fuel for the conservatives.

Next: I disagree with Kevin's observation about the political switcheroo, and I think it's a really weird, bad point to make.

Why would we ever side against the little guy? We are, by definition, on the side of the weak and common.

If more humble people want to live closer to work because they need more fuel-efficient living, then it's those people whose interests are going to do a switcheroo (regardless of whether those people are very liberal or not)-- it's not just insane ultra-liberals who are going to want something (more urban-centered housing) that nobody needs or wants. It's going to be people who would have been much more likely to be in favor of parks and open spaces in the '80s, '90s and '00s who someday are going to be saying that the government needs to allow more building of apartments in large suburbs to accomodate them finding a job that makes sense economically for them.

A final point: As people move out of their less-dense suburbs, and cities and dense suburbs become more developed, there is still going to be a demand for open spaces and relaxation in parks. So perhaps the thin suburbs of today will be redeveloped as parks, open-space amusement and the like by public decrees as well as by private entrepreneurs. Maybe the greening of America will happen, just by different means-- instead of by flower power, by necessity and capitalism.

Kevin Finally Speaks Decisively, But Seems To Give Bad Counsel

2008-08-11T20:42:00.008-04:00

Kevin wrote this post to respond to a Barack Obama campaign ad, and he seems to be encouraging behavior the Republicans would like to see in us (like refusing to consider political tactics because of an emotional response).

I'll respond to this sentence from Kevin's post:

The main reason the ad is dumb is because it's so painfully juvenile: you called us a celebrity, so we're going to call you a celebrity! Nyah nyah nyah.

I don't think it's necessarily juvenile or that there is necessarily anything wrong with it. Politics between the Democrats and the Republicans isn't a cocktail party discussion between two old, sincerely fond friends in front of some of their other friends. It's a battle over power. When McCain uses these kinds of techniques on Barack, he opens himself up to having these techniques that Dems are reluctant to use in the first place turned back on him-- and these are techniques that have proven to make a big difference for the Republicans, even when their substantive policies are terrible. By absolutely refusing to use these tactics, we are abandoning our voice with a large segment of the population that those kinds of statements actually appeal to. That's just dumb. You may not personally like the behavior, but Barack's battle isn't a battle to behave in a way that would be impeccable in any context, it's a battle to win over a political enemy to gain power.

Anyway, even though the Republicans go overboard with those kinds of attacks, it's also going overboard in the opposite direction if we pretend that there is nothing at all to the voters' concerns that a Presidential candidate is too egotistical or spends too much money on things like shoes. They are, after all, running for the most powerful officially/publicly recognized political position in the world. The trick I think is not to go overboard in how we answer those kinds of concerns (for instance, not to become dishonest and pretentious), or to turn our politics into a politics of hoopla and bluster, where the best liar will win and policy will be forgotten-- that does not serve freedom (because likely the Republicans have a lot more chance of winning elections if that is what the norm of the political discourse of the country becomes).

It's kind of hard to see how saying something that responds very directly to the kind of attacks that gain the most traction for the Republicans is a bad idea (especially when we don't say "I'm not a celebrity, you are" but rather "I'm not a celebrity, you are, and here's why: X, Y, and Z"). But Kevin doesn't even say it's a bad idea, he just says that it's "juvenile," and of course, none of us have ever even heard that a lot of voters tend to side against a candidate because they perceive him or her to have made a juvenile attack or statement once. It's more like just a Republican mind-f*ck: "Hey, don't put out messages that work for your side-- you don't want to be juvenile, RIGHT???"

August 11

2008-08-11T20:26:00.002-04:00

On August 11, 1917, Inge Scholl, the anti-Nazi activist and member of the White Rose group, was born.

A Reminder

2008-08-11T10:53:00.001-04:00

Since my last post was kind of depressing, I just want to remind everybody that things can change in this country, and Barack's persistent popularity is an indication of this. It's just going to take time.

Latest Mainstream Media Corruption And Hypocrisy

2008-08-11T09:10:00.005-04:00

One of my readers wrote the following in the comments, so I want to post my response to it to make sure it gets noticed by readers who don't check out comments:

I feel sorry for Elizabeth Edwards. . . This whole Edwards scandal will probably make the media dig up McCain's affair with Cindy McCain and ask why McCain left his first wife.

Actually, that isn't happening.

I feel sorry for Elizabeth Edwards because the slimeball corrupt media and the Republicans are publishing this stuff about her private life (here is what I have to say about the media reporting on politician's sex-lives in general). But it's pretty natural that a lot of relationships fall apart, even though we often wouldn't like them to. John Edwards just isn't the best person for her, apparently, and you can't make an unsuitable person become a suitable one just by the happenstance of marrying them.

Here's what Joe Klein wrote-- here's how he opens up his blog post yesterday: "I never much liked John Edwards as a politician...and I guess we now know that he's a heel as a human being, too. But that doesn't mean his tawdry personal life is any of my concern."

(the ellipsis is in the original, apparently included just to give Joe's post a propaganda-conducive "tone of voice")

Way to sound like you're being paid by the Republicans, Joe. Objective and non-partisan media: Goodbye.

Elizabeth Edwards' misfortunes besides what people like Joe Klein are doing to her for the idiot corrupt Republicans may be bad, but at least they're normal. But with how the media is blowing up over her husband's affair, she's getting outrageous treatment-- being singled out to be put up in the stocks in front of the American people over an event in her life that's about as typical as getting into a traffic accident (in scientific polls, about 40% or 50% of people claim to have cheated on someone they were in a relationship with).

And the reason she's being singled out is because her husband's a Democrat!

And if you're one of those Democrats who is inclined to bend over for the Republicans whenever they give a spoiled-brat excuse, instead of seeing the truth that is standing plainly in front of your face-- i.e., if you think I'm just acting like a conspiracy theorist because you've heard of Republican affairs through the media-- ask yourself why the media isn't using this as a chance to remind people about the McCain affairs! Answer: it's because the corrupt, pro-McCain media wants to pretend that the McCain affairs don't exist at this point. They could point out the Giuliani affairs too.

If the ever get around to doing it, they'll probably have only one piece on one national network's stations (or only some of them) and they'll write it and present it in such a way that all the Democrats' affairs are listed first, and then there is a pause to make you think the list is over (in the hopes that at that point you'll stop paying attention and start talking to one of your kids), and then the news-reader goes on in a droning and unnoticeable way to mention a few (but not all) of the Republican affairs and sexual encounters. Count on it.

With everything else the Republicans do, I also wouldn't be surprised if they do "stings" on Democratic politicians to try to get their wives to become dissatisfied and bitchy with them, and then to get the politician to have an affair (which can later be revealed). What happened to Eliot Spitzer stinks of revenge, after all the justice he wrought. I'm not saying that that Democratic men are immune from having affairs, but they are a different breed than slimeball Republican men and I think they makes them less naturally prone to this kind of thing. What I am saying is that this is the kind of hardball, slimy game the Republicans are playing in every way, so even this is the kind of thing one should almost expect from them.

Vacationing In Hawaii Elitist: Since When?

2008-08-10T10:15:00.016-04:00

It's annoying that our side has to respond to ridiculous attacks like this one, but I'd like to put in my two cents this time.

I was born in 1979 and have almost always lived in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in NJ. My mom had a well-paying public job (around $40K-$80K depending on how experienced she was). My dad worked in the private sector, and frequently in contract positions, and jobs in his field had a similar (but sometimes slightly higher) pay range. However, my dad was never much of a go-getter and can be really abrasive, so he had about 29 different jobs over a 30-year period or so, and was between jobs for almost as much as half of my childhood, if I recall correctly. So he made about half as much as he could have. Nobody else in our neighborhood had so much that our dad felt like he couldn't tell us kids we couldn't get toys or do all other sorts of things we wanted to do that cost money all the time when we were growing up. There were lots of things we didn't have, but that other families in our neighborhood had, and that we didn't get until years (sometimes many years) after other people first got them (things like a microwave oven, a cordless phone, and so on). Us kids never had TVs in each of our rooms (one or two of us eventually got little ancient black-and-white ones that had an antennae rather than cable, and that could only get about three stations, from some relative), and we weren't bought cars by our parents when we were teenagers (which seems to be common practice in a lot of middle-class families nowadays) except for my big brother (After high school, my parents bought him a very cheap, ugly, and old surplus Ford Pinto from the Post Office, which was getting rid of them. It quickly terminally broke down, and my parents didn't replace it.). So that's how much money we had in our household of four children, and that was our perspective. Other parents in the neighborhood had a lot of less-than-white collar jobs, or more unprestigious white collar jobs like my parents had. I can't remember ever knowing a kid from my elementary school whose parents were doctors or lawyers or anything like that (One dad was a cop, another was a garbage-man who became a cop after many years, at least one mom was a nurse, at least one dad was a carpenter, one dad owned a little Chinese restaurant located in a strip mall, one etc. The most preppy were a couple who were both college professors (but they were not hob-nobbing with amazing scholars or anything like that, though- their subject was library science or something like that), but they were the ones who didn't fit in with the neighborhood, and actually originally were from some place out of state.). And the bar that used to be located a few blocks from my house always had its pretty fair share of fistfights.

That may seem like a lot by way of explanation, but I just want to show where I'm coming from, in case points of view from another area of the country (but a similar demographic) just happen to be different. Now on to discussing vacation:

By the time I was a young teenager, going to Hawaii for vacation seemed like it had become a cliche: everyone wanted to go there, as far as I had ever heard. That's hardly elitist. Elitist, as far as I've ever heard, is going to places like Martha's Vineyard, to all the little vacations spots where only the rich go. In between elitist and middle class are maybe things like going abroad and going to ski resorts. People who don't have a lot of money go to Hawaii, but they only go for 1-3 days, or they go for a week at most. If you want to say Obama is elitist for not going to national parks (a little boring for a grown man with a sophisticated mind, if you ask me) I think you at least have to take into account that people tend to go to national parks instead of Hawaii when they don't want to go through the hassle of getting on a plane because they have young kids, or bear the extra expense of going on a plane because of the cost of raising kids. Obama is hardly in a position where planes are a hassle to him or money is still tight for him. The Republicans are picking on him for going after the American dream. To me, this criticism really seems to have a lot more to do with jealousy or with trying to take advantage of jealousy than it is legitimate.

The only thing you can say clearly about social class and going to Hawaii I think is that you can't be absolutely poor and go to Hawaii. You could probably just about pay for at least a few days in Hawaii by clipping coupons all year long, or getting a grocery store's club card and trying to buy things that are on sale and stock up a lot, or picking up a little second job, like a paper route or a seasonal job, for a month or two.

Despite all this, one thing I will say is that going on vacation at all is probably not the best PR for Obama, and that Americans would probably like to see their candidates fight tooth-and-nail every step of the way instead of taking a break in the middle of a campaign. Remember, the Republicans want you to see Obama as the stereotypical dumb, lazy black guy, so it makes it very hard for them to do that-- especially in light of all Bush's and McCain's partying and vacationing-- if Barack never takes a break during the whole campaign.

But if you really want to know what's elitist, it's sending a bunch of working-class and middle-class people off to die in Iraq for some bullshit reason and acting like you don't even care-- not going to Hawaii on a vacation once.

Let's Not Talk About The Edwards Affair

2008-08-09T18:02:00.007-04:00

I'm sad to see prominent bloggers Kevin Drum and Steve Benen basically not sticking to their guns over what's okay for the media to talk about with regard to politicians. I'm pretty sure I've seen Kevin or Steve write before that the media shouldn't talk about politicians' affairs at all-- they seem like that kind of liberal, of which their are many among the more politically-aware type-- yet now they are basically participating and encouraging that kind of talk.

This isn't to say that they, I, and liberals in general haven't talked and written a lot when a Republican is discovered to have had an affair. But that is totally different. But when the Republicans have affairs, they show themselves to be politically hypocrites, so that is worthwhile news. Otherwise, whether someone had an affair or not is a person's personal, private life, and no one's business. Strangely, Kevin and Steve are now leaving out their usual, "I don't think we should talk about the affair, but since everyone else is already doing it anyway..." clauses this time. This is basically encouraging the talk.

It is the Republicans who turn their own family matters into public business by putting themselves up on a pedestal, claiming to be so unblemished that they can tell everyone else how Americans should live moral lives in every detail. It is they who elevate all sorts of aspects of sexual morality into bigger issues than whether a massive, deadly war is a wise choice for America to make or whether the war is run correctly or not. So it is a Republican's affair that is news, not a Democrat's, just like it wouldn't be news if a pro-gun Republican was discovered to own a gun and to hunt. So what? He thinks hunting and individual ownership of firearms among private citizens is moral and appropriate. Debate his stance on the issue and the reason he gives for it, and don't make an ass out of yourself by gossipping over what he does in his spare time. Similarly, Dem politicians don't think a private person's sex life is an appropriate issue for the public to take an interest in or to legislate control over through their elected legislators-- and they're right.

Good politicians should not be published for choosing the career they did by having every mistake they might have made in their personal life dragged out into public discussion.

David Gregory, Faithful Republican Servant

2008-08-09T13:44:00.001-04:00

Here is the latest gem from David Gregory. I can't remember if I've ever written anything saying so, but I've felt for a long time that he was no good. Like everyone else, I used to think he was cool when he was just a reporter asking questions at the White House. But as soon as he started to give his own opinions, it became pretty clear that he is not on our team at all. Just chalk him up as another dishonest person among many of that type.

August 9

2008-08-09T11:12:00.001-04:00

On August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned as President of the United States of America.

Global Warming

2008-08-08T09:42:00.007-04:00

UPDATE: Some people may think it actually adds more confusion to talk about the ozone layer in discussions of global warming, but I don't think it has to. All you basically have to say is, "There are two problems with our atmosphere: depletion of the ozone layer, and global warming. One, depletion of the ozone layer, is getting better. The other, global warming, is getting worse, and is the one we are all concerned about now." If any more explanation is needed or asked for, you can just add what I suggest below-- especially since some of the confusion may remain without specifically explaining the difference about what each problem does.

***

Here is something I think about every once in a while: global warming and depletion of the ozone layer may, to non-scientists, sometimes sound like they're the same problem. They're not, but when people talk about global warming, they don't usually explain this, which may confuse a lot of people. This is especially a cause for concern since we've been hearing that the ozone problem has been getting better for a long while now, but in the press people talk about global warming more than ever before nowadays.

This used to confuse me, because whenever I would hear some environmental advocate give a sound-bitey speech about these issues years ago, they would often say "depletion of the ozone layer and global warming," one right after the other like that, which to some may make it sound as if the person is talking about the two effects of a single problem that will be solved (or not solved) together (and certainly to me, before I understood the issues better, is sounded like this). This chance for confusion is probably especially likely when the audience has a little bit of an understanding of what each of these problems are supposed to be, but not enough of an understanding. A person may-- like I did when I first started hearing a revival of talk about global warming a few years ago-- think "Hey, I thought we fixed the ozone layer years ago!" and wonder whether the people who are worrying about global warming are getting their facts straight.

Depletion of the ozone layer and global warming are not the same problem, of course. Global warming is when "greenhouse gases" (which don't have anything to do with plants, but actually come from toxic chemical fumes like car exhaust) end up forming sort of an invisible cloud high up in the atmosphere that traps too much heat in our atmosphere, and slowly gets more and more impenetrable and causes our planet to hold more and more heat. This makes the planet slowly get warmer, which can mess up the environment, cause unusual weather events to happen more frequently (some think increases in storms like tornadoes and hurricanes anre caused by global warming), make the differences between seasons lessen, raise sea levels as arctic ice melts (which will eventually put coastlines and coastal cities underwater), and so on. Depletion of the ozone layer is when a different cloud-sort-of-thing high up in the atmosphere that keeps too much ultra-violet radiation from entering our atmosphere gets torn down by different man-made chemicals (ones that used to be in air-conditioners and aerosol spray cans) from those which are the culprit in the global warming problem. This is a problem because it messes with the environment by causing species of plants, animals and other lifeforms to go extinct, and it increases the risk of skin cancer for humans.

These layman's explanations are perhaps not 100% scientifically the best, but they are a little better for a layman audience than those we sometimes hear. And any less confusion there is about what should be a big issue for us-- like global warming-- is really important. So it is important to say stuff like this every once in a while. It may seem to you like people should just realize that the two issues are not the same, but not everybody pays a lot of attention to environmental news, yet they still vote (or maybe would vote if they understood the environmental problems a little better!).

Also, here is something kind of related I saw in a comment on the Internet last night that I thought was worth passing on, at least for stirring up a little more urgency about fixing this problem:

“Dimming Sun,” a Nova episode was first aired in April of 2006, and was repeated Tuesday night. It’s a must see, even though global warming seems to have gone off the radar screen during the campaign, and certainly in the media. Tire gauges have gotten more minutes of coverage in a week than global warming in months. I don’t think anyone even remembers anymore why we need alternatives - we just need to drill for more oil according to most of the American people, because, well, importing oil is bad, although we import everything else and nobody seems concerned about that.

Anyway, the dimming sun is a very simple theory: there’s a cooling effect from smog, because the tiny particles in the air become surrounded by moisture, which reflects sunlight back into space. The thesis of the hour special is that the effects, which have been recently measured, are much greater than previously suspected. The other side of that coin is that therefore, the opposite phenomenon, global warming, is greater than we thought. So as we clean up smog around the world, which is much easier than combating global warming, and in fact the advanced nations have been pretty successful in their endeavors, global warming will accelerate. Models so far haven’t taken this into account.

It could be much worse than we thought.

The Speer Family

2008-08-07T17:52:00.007-04:00

Of this story, Kevin writes:

I wonder if NBC will treat us to a nice retrospective on the Speer family?

And why did Obama go and give that speech in Berlin to a bunch of Germans, anyway?

I'm just joking at the Republicans' expense, of course.

Anyway, I hope NBC and sources like it can give us more frank coverage of fascist tendencies that are actually being acted out by our own government or governments that are close to us today, like those of the Bush administration, or of Republicans to repress African American voting districts. Instead of picking on the fact that this guy is the son of Albert Speer (a Nazi who expressed remorse for at least some of his crimes-- use of slave labor-- and who willingly helped the Allied occupation government, and then served a long a long sentence), NBC might have done better to report on Beijing's habitual control of the media-- but I guess that would have hit too close to home.

UPDATE: For all I know, Albert Speer may have imparted some fascist or racist lessons to his son that the son actually believes in or adheres to, but that hardly seems like the assumption we should make until we each individually have experienced some proof of it.

UPDATE II: Maybe Beijing actually chose Speer's son for propaganda purposes, as a reminder of the fact that-- even in terms of human rights abuses-- the past can be the past (although I doubt it of the communist Chinese).

If that's the case, though, I think the better way to turn the tables on Chinese propaganda is to retell Speer's story and to point out how little choice an artist/craftsman like Speer had in a totalitarian regime like China's, even if he had wanted to differ from Hitler / the regime.

But, that would also be a criticism of Republican fascist acts, which may explain why NBC didn't want to do it.

Note

2008-08-07T12:05:00.001-04:00

I am going to try to write a post today, but it might not be for a while, like until late in the afternoon at the earliest.

August 6

2008-08-06T10:21:00.002-04:00

On August 6, 1965, the Voting Rights Act of 1965-- meant to protect against informal Southern efforts to rig elections to nullify the votes of African Americans-- was enacted.

Another Something For The Weird-File

2008-08-05T21:57:00.006-04:00

UPDATE: Pointing out that somebody said slavery is okay isn't "going after them" just because their parent is a politician. "Going after" somebody is doing something like criticizing something about them through mass-media that is nobody's business and that is totally unjustified to criticize (like their physical appearance or mundane, normal details about their sex-life). People who believe in slavery are an affront to our whole society, and it's definitely newsworthy when a would-be Senator raises a child to adulthood who believes in something like that.

I have noticed so many bad things on Kevin Drum's blog and the Carpetbagger Report lately that I feel like doing a run-down post listing them all. But for now, here's this: check out this Carpetbagger Report post criticizing a Republican politician's son for endorsing slavery on a website and the comments written below it criticizing the Carpetbagger Report for "going after someone's 19 year old son," etc. Sorry folks, but slavery is wrong, and any 19-year-old should know it, just like any 19-year-old should know that murder is wrong and that making fun of something like the Colorado school shootings from a few years back on the Internet is wrong. And especially a 19-year-old son or daughter of a politician should know it. A person who is not legally a minor and who does something like posts pro-slavery comments on the Internet should expect things to happen like other people-- even possibly people with widely viewed websites-- to criticize him or her for it. This is nothing like criticizing a politician's relative for his or her allged sex life or for his or her physical appearance.

Anyway, my honest opinion is 100% certainty that these comments were written by Republcican trolls pretending to be liberals. No real liberal would do something like attack someone for criticizing an adult for writing pro-slavery comments on the Internet, and it's actually amazing that liberals would write that several times in a row. Sorry, jerks, but there is no "You get to be a racist until you're 24 or 28 years old" rule.

The White House And Forgery

2008-08-05T12:01:00.003-04:00

A long time ago I wrote a couple times perhaps here but more likely on another blog about my belief that it's actually more likely that the CIA was on-board with Bush's wanting the Iraq war and lying to the nation and the world to get into it, contrary to what some news stories may have made it sound like. This seems like a good time to kind of re-hash those kinds of concerns here.

First of all, check out this short post on Washington Monthly about an incident of the White House allegedly pressuring the CIA to lie for them, and another incident of the White House allegedly pressuring the FBI to lie for them. The important thing to notice here is that the stories make it sound like the White House had to push these guys into cooperating with them.

Then here are my comments in response:

Kevin wrote: Maybe it's coincidence. Maybe all these sources are full of shit.

Here's a theory that is a little more appropriate to people like the Republicans: maybe some of 'em are true and some are false. Let's say your wife caught you cheating three times. You've already been caught cheating-- three allegations made against you have turned out to be true-- and the world didn't end, but what you really want her to believe is that you're leaving certain property in your will to her and not your son. So you let her find out you were cheating again, but you get the detail about the property included in the story. She's inclined to believe stories about you cheating now, because they turned out to be true three times before. So when you candidly admit, "Well, Candy came in the room, just about as I was changing my will to leave the vintage VW to you instead of Michael..." it adds an air of truth (in her eyes) to the detail you really want to get her to believe in what ostensibly is a statement you are making to admit guilt about cheating. The country is already ready to believe the Bush administration lied to get us into this war. That's a news story worth reporting. But maybe there is something else they want to get us to believe, too (things like that the CIA and FBI aren't helping them lie to us, or that the media isn't corrupt in favor of the Republicans). They are wily enough to do it that way.

I'm not saying that this is what is happening this time, just that this is the level of "game" on which they operate-- this is the kind of media manipulation they do and are capable of. They are people who have been lying their whole lives and put some craft into it.

Let's say someone wants to get you to believe a lie about a specific person. They may first on a few ocassions report to the target of the lie that they saw the specific person engaging in certain activity that the target of the lie knows the specific person is capable of. From these reports, the target of the lie comes to believe that the liar supplies accurate information on the person. But then on the 10th ocassion, the liar reports the same behavior again plus something a little bit worse-- but it's an untrue allegation. The target of the lie is more likely to believe it, though, because of how they've been set up, and especially if the behavior lied about isn't so extreme that they could picture the person lied about engaging in it (sometimes that old saw about "the big lie" really doesn't hold water). Similarly, if the liars lie too big at first and can't get people to believe it, they may recognize their mistake and try again, accusing the target of more realistic (but still objectionable and still untrue) behavior.

Consider that the Republicans have an incentive to make it look like the FBI and the CIA are nonpartisan. The Republicans' ultimate goal is one-party rule. But people distrust and dislike their government when they feel like political orthodoxy is being enforced on them-- like they are being oppressed. That makes it hard to have one-party rule.

We hear a lot about the CIA and the FBI resisting pushy partisan behavior by the White House, but that doesn't mean that's really the way it happened. And the most persuasive lie is the one that is as close to the truth as possible, except for the point you really need to lie about. Lie about whether Bush would lie about the Iraq war? Maybe. Lie about it if the CIA and FBI are almost in absolute lockstep with the White House on issues like torture and lying to start an Iraq war? Absolutely.

Some people might say that the idea that "the most persuasive lie is the one that is as close to the truth as possible, except for the point you really need to lie about" flies in the face of what has become conventional (I would call it banal) "wisdom" about "the big lie," but my answer is that if a little lie is something that sounds plausible to people who are ignorant enough to believe it, and something that people want to believe-- like that the CIA, NSA, FBI or the Air Force isn't about as ideological as Jesus Camp-- then the lie is a believeable one.

The Republicans-- people whose goal is one-party rule (basically destroying or outlawing opposing parties like the Democratic party, not just beating them in a lot of elections)-- also have an incentive to intentionally leak details about the WH forging documents or otherwise lying to get into the Iraq war, when the time is right (that is, when they don't think the President or the party will get into trouble because of it). This is because they want to build a movement characterized by beliefs like the belief that it was ok to lie to the nation to go to war in Iraq. If you always hide it, you can never start that movement. I guess you could have some measly pundit make the case, but it's a lot more persuasive and dramatic if someone like a Republican President just leads by example.

August 5

2008-08-05T08:57:00.002-04:00

On August 5, 1962, Nelson Mandela was arrested. In 1974, an audio-tape revealing that then-President Nixon gave hush-money to one of the Watergate burglars was made public.

Another Perspective On The Anthrax Case

2008-08-04T14:14:00.017-04:00

UPDATE: I've got to admit, this is one of my more speculative posts, but it's pretty odd that in such a high-profile case, they would have pretty much wrapped it up but never told us about it. For all any members of the public knew for a long time now, this guy could have still been out there, about to start attacking people with anthrax again and more successfully. The FBI knew otherwise but kept us totally in the dark.

When we first heard about the new developments in the anthrax attacks case a few days ago, I wondered why we hadn't heard about it before and why we were hearing about it now. I only came up with a partial answer (I didn't have a theory as to why we are finding out about it now). As you may know, since the media is so corrupt and so pro-Republican, I am always looking for ways news stories may fit in with the Republicans' messages about what is going on at any given time. But today, I saw a newspaper story about the anthrax attacks, and it got my mind rolling to an answer.

The story in the paper said that DNA linked the guy who they are now saying committed the attacks to the attacks. So, in the eyes of the public (who don't know anything about how accurate DNA tests are and consider them more or less fool-proof) it's now been proven that this guy was responsible. As far as how that could help Republican propaganda spin, one thing liberals have often retorted with when Republicans claimed there hadn't been a terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11 (implicitly giving Bush and his decisions the credit for this) was the anthrax attacks. So, (1) being known to have solved the case makes the Republicans and the national security agencies look less inept leading up to a Presidential election and (2) having it turn out not to be Al Qaeda or any Muslim terrorists at all also probably tends to make whatever complaints the public may have with the prior lack of success in the case seem to carry less import. As for why it wasn't released earlier-- see my earlier post on the subject. The FBI or the administration maybe just didn't want it to look like some scuzzy, high-profile terrorist could escape American justice in the new, Republican, almost-perfect post-9/11 world. But, now they feel pressed to get McCain some kind of advantage, so they're changing their minds about how it would make Republicans look-- they're basically pulling out all the stops to find something that might budge the public relations situation around a bit. It's a close call as to whether it helps or hurts the Republicans' image, but you don't have to agree with their judgment (that is, their judgment that it might be a smart move for them to let this detail come out now) in order to be convinced that the Republicans manipulate a lot of the media. And we already have a lot of proof that the Republicans actively influence many parts of the government to get them to withhold certain information from the public, or to release information in a certain edited form. It may just be that the Republicans are more successful at getting the FBI to obey these orders than they are with some of the other federal agencies.

All I argue about the corruption of the mainstream media is that it's real, and that if you think Republicans aren't smart enough to think up trying something like that, you're wrong. I don't argue that their judgment as to what helps them is always the best, and indeed I occasionally identify things that I think come from them but are sort of stupid moves for them. For instance I think they pretty frequently try to encourage infighting among liberals or to make us look like fools (for instance, leaving a "bait" story to try to get us all to start breathing fire, but planning to release an additional detail about the story a few days later that will prove any of us who did so to have jumped the gun-- these instances aren't that memorable, because liberals do not in fact jump to the crazy conclusions and start a firestorm of denunciations on the scale the Republicans are hoping for-- instead they just kind of speculate a little bit), but that those attempts don't usually work because the Republicans don't understand quite well enough how we think. This may all sound like a lot to believe in, but all these conclusions in particular cases are based on the same kind of reasoning and details I've relied on to reach my conclusions in my recent posts. So, if you think those posts are convincing, you'd probably think these other instances were convincing if I'd explained them to you as well.

Some liberals have a hard time accepting stuff like this, and I think it's because it's hard to accept that the Republicans have "gotten" us so bad (by taking over so many important institutions) and that the Republicans, who tend to be a little stupider than us (but certainly only a little) could be fooling us like this. My best answer to that is that the Republicans had a very long time to see that things they didn't like, like desegregation and gay marriage, were on the way. They could see that the demographics were changing and that the country would inevitably not be majority-white anymore. So to think that they would just sit on their hands is like calling them Thag the Caveman, and that is not what they are at all. They are dumb enough to have bad morality, but not dumb enough to not be able to think of a lot of clever ways to protect their bigoted interests. So they started planning things and working on things. This is the same as the plutocrats have done. If liberals were so smart that they could easily defeat the plutocrats, we'd have figured out a way that organized labor could be a lot stronger in this country by now. But it just isn't so. Instead, the situation is the reverse-- organized labor has become very weak. This is because the conservatives, while not being as smart as us, are smart enough to be able to use what they have to effectively fight for their interests against us. Liberals, on the other hand, from a failure to assess all aspects of the situation (i.e., where they stand politically and in terms of power and in terms of strength of motivation relative to the conservatives) correctly, have in turn failed to use their superior minds in a way that allowed them to gain an advantage.

UPDATE: I'm not claiming, by the way, that DNA tests aren't usually very informative when performed correctly or that the test was a fake. For all I know, the test could have conclusively linked the guy to the attacks, or the connection between the guy and the attack could be a 100% Republican hoax. My only point to make with the above post was to point out how the Republicans could be timing the release of the information to try to help their interests. Anybody has got to agree with me, since this case has gone on forever, it's kind of odd that we didn't hear about this suspect much earlier! That's why it's natural to speculate about this kind of thing.

What Else Could He Be Lying About?

2008-08-02T13:32:00.002-04:00

If McCain is such a great guy, then why is he acting like such a douchebag?

Note

2008-08-01T18:26:00.003-04:00

I am going to take a two-day break from this blog to catch up on other things I have to do. In the meantime, I might write one or two posts here. I will be blogging regularly again on Monday, August 4.

Until then, I wouldn't mind if you stop by to e-mail your favorite posts from this blog (I took out some unfortunate typos from a couple posts from a few days ago, by the way) to your friends, since I'd always like new readers!

The Mystery Of The Anthrax Suspect

2008-08-01T13:00:00.002-04:00

Kevin Drum has a little piece up about a new development in the anthrax murders, and here are my thoughts in response:

As to why the suspect may have been warned about the impending criminal charges-- warning the defendant is not unheard of. For some reason the FBI or prosecutor's office probably didn't consider him someone who they had to worry about trying to flee prosecution. Or maybe the evidence wasn't quite as strong as the prosecutor would have liked to indict, but they thought that letting him know that he was a target in the investigation might provoke him into making some kind of a mistake that turned up more evidence- especially if they already had enough evidence to justify putting him under some kind of surveillance.

Anyway-- why haven't we heard about this yet? Just because he was the right guy and the FBI didn't manage to get him? Bad PR? That's lame. We need to be able to make things like the FBI better, not just be led around by the nose by them. Guys like the FBI aren't the smartest guys in the world, and they shouldn't be able to hold themselves above public scrutiny. They're the only thing we've got to protect us against a lot of dangers.

I'd bet that the prosecutor had enough evidence to indict, but he wanted more stuff to confront the suspect with during an interrogation and / or to make the case more air-tight for trial.

They made a decision that if they told the guy they were after him, it would be more likely that he would do things that confirmed or dispelled their suspicions about him than that he would successfully conceal or destroy evidence before they were aware of it, or that he would successfully flee.

Or maybe this cover-up came from politically-minded conservatives within the FBI or the Bush administration, and maybe they just wanted to let the public think that maybe Saddam was responsible until it didn't matter anymore.

The ISI: The New Soviet Union

2008-08-01T12:31:00.005-04:00

This story about the ISI (Pakistan's national intelligence agency) and how terrible they are is getting spread around all over the place, including here and here. (Last night Kevin Drum wrote "If World War III ever breaks out, I will not be surprised to learn that it was somehow started by the ISI"-- sounds a little bit over-the-top to me.) But we in the public, of course, usually aren't privy to all the dirty doings of foreign intelligence agencies, until years after-the-fact when regime-ending events like the fall of the Berlin wall prompt secrets to come out and, in turn, people to write books about them.

So what might be the reason this detail is coming out? To put pressure on Pakistan?

To me it all seems like a distraction from Osama. I have no doubt that the ISI is bad, doesn't like us, and isn't on our side, but they're not the ones who sent people over here to do a terrorist attack on us.

I'd like to hear more about how we're hunting and catching Osama, but of course, most of us having been waiting to hear that for going-on seven years.

Sops Of All Sorts II

2008-08-01T11:22:00.006-04:00

Gas Prices Decline: A Reason To Feel Better Or...?

I've noticed that around where I live, gas prices at the pump have (after reaching over $4.00 a gallon at just about every place) declined a little to around $3.75-$3.90 or thereabouts at most places. This is not necessarily a reason to feel like the price is going to continue to go down or that everything is going to be hunky dory.

First of all, increased prices at the pump were something we liberals were thinking about for a long time-- in the form of a gas tax. We wanted to reduce consumption and thereby protect the environment and spur the creation of alternative energy sources so we wouldn't have to worry so much about what to do when the oil supplies finally run out, which they are due to within decades from now (although no one knows exactly when it will happen). And the skyrocketing gas prices have indeed reduced consumption. But the thing about the liberal proposal for a gas tax was that the money from the tax was supposed to go back into communities in the form of programs like national healthcare, so the gas tax didn't hit the least-well-off among us as bad-- but rather just got us all to drive less. With the privately-rigged, artificially high oil industry / gas prices we're experiencing now (that I think are the product of monopolization and not of natural market causes), all that extra money made from high prices is going back into the pockets of the oil industry and holders of oil industry stocks. And those industries may claim that they are using some of their profits to develop alternative energy, but they have every selfish reason to hold off releasing alternative energy to the last minute, and may not be the best best judges of how to research alternative energy or of what to do with it. So, to sum up, if prices have gone down a little, it makes consumers less nervous and angry, but all that extra profit is still going only to the oil industry and not to programs to help communities.

Second of all, Democratic popularity right now is riding on a wave of discontent with the Republicans, and part of that is associating the rising gas prices (and a refusal to do anything about them) with the Republicans. I have speculated before that the oil and gasoline industries raised prices completely on their own, and not due to any necessity, either because they realize the oil is running out and want to get the last dimes they can out of the industry for their kids and grandkids (in other words, rich racist white people who are going to want to control the country for their own narrowly selfish benefit, just like we have now), or because the oil industry is secretly starting to acknowledge the reality of problems like global warming and the oil supply running out, and rather than contradict themselves by going back on their previous anti-alternative energy and global-warming-denier stances too overtly, they want the political support for changing things to come from the public-- they want the public to begin to worry that rising gas prices might have something to do with oil running out, so the public will get the government to spend its own money working on alternative energy and fuel efficiency. So if this speculation is all true, the oil industry changing their tune (really their strategy) all of a sudden is a little weird, and may indicate something-- like, for instance, politics. A big election is coming up, and people who are even more conservative ideologues than the people who run the oil industry may have decided to put some behind-closed-doors pressure on the oil industry to ease up the prices a little bit, because they are worried that discontent over prices may hurt John McCain in the upcoming election. In other words, the oil industry may care about profits or about solving the energy problem more than about conservative politics, but there are some conservatives who are so nutso conservative that they only see the country's problems in terms of things like getting another conservative elected at every Presidential election, and they may be people who are able to lean enough on the oil industry to make them sweat. When you look at how corrupt the media and politics are, it's hardly an impossible thing to imagine as being the case.

So the outlook is not necessarily very rosy. As always, we just have to wait a while longer to see more of what happens before we can get a clearer picture.

August 1

2008-08-01T11:18:00.001-04:00

On August 1, 1834, slavery was abolished in the British Empire. In 1944, Anne Frank made the last entry in her diary. In 1960, rapper Chuck D (from Public Enemy) was born in Brooklyn, New York.

Ludacris And Obama

2008-07-31T15:58:00.002-04:00

Echidne writes this about the Ludacris song and here is my response:

I'm not sure how harmful the Ludacris song is. For the liberal/Democratic movement in general, I think it sows disunity, which is bad, but what's a bigger harm probably is Obama not picking Clinton for Veep. Clinton is a real obvious, simple choice, and the length of the Veep search is a bad sign that something is wrong. For the feminist movement, I think Ludacris' choice of words was just an off-the-cuff, informal, working-class kind of thing, and not even a message that definitely equals "Hillary is a woman, so the hell with her" or "I hate Hillary" although I could certainly see that people would be jumping to that conclusion. While some people might vehemently disagree with me, I think that while sometimes the word "bitch" is used in a really harmful misogynistic way, other times it's used it's a lot less harmful. I think we have to be able to take hearing the word "bitch" in the less-harmful sense every once in a while, and be able to focus on other things that are a lot more important than a word that even a very committed feminist man or woman might use every once in a while without even meaning it in a sexist way. Not every time the word "bitch" is used is something that is really worthwhile or praiseworthy for feminists to fight over. There are issues like rape in the military that are the real problems more than every somewhat questionable use of language is. All that said, it sounds to me like maybe the Ludacris song isn't a really great example of rap, despite his pleasing interest in liberal politics and in promoting Obama, although I haven't heard the song for myself yet.

Just from your summary descriptions, I think the orc book is probably worse from a feminist point of view. It sounds to me like it was written by a sexist or to promote sexism among the minds of people who read those kinds of books, since orcs are usually bad guys in the Dungeons and Dragons / LOTR world.

I guess the argument on the other side is that a lot of young women are going to hear Ludacris call Hillary (a model of a successful, modern woman) a bitch, and maybe take something bad away from that. Not a lot of people are going to read the orc book.

Here is something on rap in general and here is a follow-up to it.

Here is something on the "apology."

Sops Of All Sorts

2008-07-31T13:14:00.005-04:00

House "Apologizes" For Slavery and Segregation -- But Does This Help?

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives issued an apology to African Americans for slavery and segregation, and no one among them asked that individual members be required to state their individual vote for the record (a "roll call" vote).

Personally, I doubt that any Representative would have refused to sign on to the apology by name, but maybe I'm wrong. Considering what else they do, one could easily see a Republican claiming that the House shouldn't issue the apology based on the argument that slavery and segregation weren't the federal government's fault. And yes, I do think it helps the Republicans to not have to submit to a voice-vote: The Republicans' politics is a difficult double-game that requires them to send periodic subtle messages to their base that they are indeed racist (Remember how politicians like John McCain, Dick Cheney and Strom Thurmond resisted reforms like measures designed to discourage South African apartheid, making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday, keeping mostly-black Washington D.C. from being represented in Congress, and ending segregation? Remember how many other Republicans kept using sleazy campaign tactics to keep black voters away from the polls?) while at the same time trying to look populist enough so that ignorant voters who don't really follow the news and want to believe that the Republicans really aren't that racist will be able to fool themselves into believing they aren't, and thereby will not oppose the Republicans too vocally (won't call them racists / Nazis, etc.), or will even vote for the Republicans. Examples of things Republicans do to make themselves or their ideology look populist to the point of being racially / ethinically inclusive are things like falsely claiming that communist Martin Luther King Jr. was actually a Republican, Karl Rove rapping, and drawing attention to the fact-- which is meaningless today, since times have changed and the parties have switched a lot of their beliefs around-- that over 100 years ago the Republican party was the party of Abraham Lincoln. Not being forced to vote individually and overtly for this allows the individual Republicans to still look racist in the eyes of their core constituents who might become confused by it if they heard their Representative voted in favor of it.

In these times when one has to look skeptically at everything, one has to ask about the timing of this, too-- of course one should ask why this "apology" didn't come sooner. And then there is the question of whether it might help or hurt the Democrats in the coming Presidential election. One amazing thing about Obama's appeal is that it has demonstrated that, contrary to a lot of even committed liberal Democrats' expectations, there are things that can get all our black supporters out there a lot more interested in politics and in giving donations to campaign funds like never before (namely, a black presidential candidate like Barack Obama). Obviously, all the blacks who are actively supporting Obama feel there is a need for them to participate in this way (which is what you want of your constituents and supporters whenever you're trying to win an election). And from the point of view of someone who opposes racism of all kinds, it would definitely be disturbing to contemplate that we are about to possibly elect the first black American President, yet Congress has never formerly apologized for slavery and segregation. So if you were black and thought that there were still a lot of things that need to be set right in our country, namely perhaps by a black President, wouldn't it tend to cast some doubt on that, to take some fuel out of your fire, if the House easily agrees to "apologize" for slavery and segregation? It makes you less likely to feel you have to contribute and go out and vote-- it makes you feel like maybe there isn't a real problem.

And then you have to consider what, beyond affecting the image of Congress and how racist the country and government appear, the "apology" really does: certainly, it might be satisfactory if you're one of those black people who can believe that all the nation really owes black people is an apology! To the rest of us, it's a bunch of words, possibly as meaningless as those words from the playground that weren't quite "sticks and stones," and like most sweet or nasty words-- that are meaningful mostly in terms of their affect on the audience only-- it has to be looked at dispassionately and carefully examined to determine the speaker's motives. After all, lots over people who supposedly took part in that "apology" will tell you any other day of the week that they don't believe in affirmative action at all!! Yet many racial minorities are still encountering a glass ceiling in the workplace and vote disfranchisement by illegal means, or live in high-crime ghetto-slums.

One could interpret not-apologizing as an oversight that called for clearing up, since it would be embarrassing if we elected Barack but didn't do it, but all I'm saying is (1) In these times when so much in the media and the government is obviously extremely corrupt, and Democrats are maneuvered into making themselves look bad or somehow often only giving token resistance to Republican moves in our federal government, and with a President who is about to be elected on an unprecedented wave of black support (and especially at a time when this candidate's popular support is holding fast, and the McCain campaign is probably feeling desperate to try something that will make him lose a little steam), it's easy to see how this could have been a conservative-born measure, and (2) as always, these merely for-show actions are completely inadequate when minorities and African Americans in particular still face so many problems that need to be solved by and are appropriate to be solved by legislation not apologies. Blacks should have got some kind of reparations, and this apology should re-focus the discussion on that, not dissuade us from it.

July 31

2008-07-31T13:13:00.000-04:00

On July 31, 1945, Pierre Laval, the fugitive former leader of Vichy France, surrendered to Allied soldiers in Austria. In 2007, Operation Banner, the presence of the British Army in Northern Ireland, and longest-running British Army operation ever, came to an end.

Weird Stuff In the Media: Speeding In New Jersey

2008-07-30T16:47:00.010-04:00

A few days ago in one of our local papers here in the great Garden State, an article was printed that was headlined something like "The GSP's Speeding Problem" and its subtitle wailed something like "Try to go 68 miles-per-hour on the Parkway, and you may find it's just not possible." Well, talk about a talent for stating the obvious!

It seems that there are a few people in this country who hold the heady intellectual belief that all laws should be absolutely obeyed and enforced. Why? Just 'cuz. These people think even speeding is a grave sin, and that those who dare to speed are moral hypocrites who deserve what they get. Among the real goons of the conservatives-- not the evil nerds-- this is a great way to brainwash people: find really anal personalities, and then tell them that their obsession with things like strictly obeying every law (except the ones that protect against hurting people for their political beliefs) is what proves that they are better than everyone else and entitled to make judgments about and hurt other people. It's my belief that it's from the authoritarian personality types that these anti-speeding articles, which I've seen a few of, have their impetus or origin.

After all, if you look at an article like that, it makes it sound as if the reason you can't go within a few miles of the posted speed limit on some stretches of the Turnpike or Parkway is that there are a few jerks who every once in a while come zooming by at 87 mph. That is hardly the case. But in fact, the reason you can't go within 3 mph of the speed limit on some places on the GSP or the Turnpike is that everybody goes 10 mph over the limit. The State Troopers never crack down on it! In a place like that, if you tried to go just 3 mph over the posted limit, you're the one who has a problem and is screwing up traffic.

Despite the posted limit on these stretches, and despite the fact that if you get into an accident at a higher speed you're more likely to suffer worse injuries, people handle their cars fine at speeds of 10 or 15 mph over the limit in those areas every day-- and everybody who know anything about NJ knows this! It's logical to think that if somehow we all magically went under the presently posted limits all the time with perfect obedience, a few more people in NJ wouldn't die or be maimed every year. But that would probably mostly be due to intoxicated drivers and stoned drivers who drive over the speed limit, who drive worse than the non-stoned, non-drunk, vast majority of drivers (in other words, almost everybody) who break the speed limit. And, if we didn't go over the limit in these stretches, it certainly would end up in a lot less getting done in NJ. In light of how much thick automobile traffic there is in New Jersey, I think it's realistic even to predict that it might hurt our economy badly, that NJ wouldn't even "work" without this cheating on the speed limit. The law enforcement authorities seem to know it. This is why I think articles like the one I am complaining about are written mostly for some kind of propaganda effect-- to promote these people's belief in authoritarianism.

Many people who promote the zero-tolerance anti-speeding view might argue that allowing any laws to be broken encourages general disrespect for the law. But since when is the law my lord and master? Lots of people who have been law-makers have been wicked, and history has been fraught with wicked laws. Understanding that the law isn't an absolute and that it is as good as its effects and no better is wisdom. In this way, the non-enforcement of posted speed limits that are practically non-accurate serves a training purpose in society, just like the myth of Santa Claus seems to train kids to not take everything people say so seriously-- it shows us that laws are not an end in themselves, but only as good as how useful they are, and are appropriate subject matter to be discussed, critically thought about, and occasionally changed.

Maureen Dowd

2008-07-30T13:56:00.004-04:00

UPDATE: And another thing-- "his journalism posse"??? Can't we leave all gangsta-rap references off the table when it comes to Obama, at least until after he wins?

Via Hullabaloo, I saw Maureen Dowd wrote this: The senator left his briefing books behind for a rare instance of mingling with his journalism posse at a Berlin restaurant as he sipped a rare “very dry” martini with olives. (This was either because he wanted to charm the press, which, contrary to popular imagination, is not universally enchanted with him, or because he could not get ESPN in his hotel room.)

The Obamanauts were so elated that they didn’t even seem to mind the caricature of Obama, ears sticking out, that had been drawn on the round We-Are-The-World Obama logo in the press section. The cartoon candidate demanded: “Worship me.”

After he got out of the Middle East unscathed and filled up the park in Berlin, Obama seemed to relax.

I asked him what presents he takes home to his daughters. “Anytime I make a stop, Sasha gets snow globes and Malia gets key chains,” he said. “Somebody is assigned to that.”

“You have a snow globe aide?” I marveled.
People should just write her and say "You know it's probably someone who is already assigned to do 100 other things, right?" Anyway, since Obama is so busy, it hardly makes sense for him to personally go searching for snowglobes and keychains-- after all, he is working on becoming the President of the United States, not on selling insurance. So this was a really thoughtless cheap-shot by Dowd that shouldn't have happened, and it really sounded like a conservative line.

However, Maureen Dowd has been writing so much dumb stuff over the past few months or even a year that is too dumb, even for Dowd, so I think she may be getting pushed around by the conservatives, like so many others in politics and in the media seem to be, to be honest.

Race Riots

2008-07-30T13:07:00.008-04:00

Here is one thing I definitely think should be a part of rank-and-file Democrats re-thinking how they look at our country: the 1960s race riots.

Here's my thesis: the race riots, that were in response to a number of African American civil rights issues, in the context of the times basically made sense and were justified. Faced with the problems they faced and the resistance they faced, in the rare circumstances African Americans encountered at the time, those few riots were reasonable attempts at provoking solutions, and were perhaps even a necessary part of fixing the problem. Far from looking on them with shame or feeling they should be swept under the rug, we should just matter-of-factly accept that the problems we faced as a nation were pretty big, and that the riots (which didn't exactly result in rich people having their land taken away from them, or mass beheadings, like riots during the French Revolution or other historical riots did) were a pretty natural thing to happen and even a logical thing for people to do.

Some people would resist this idea. First of all, I have to say that although someone might show up and claim, "Oh yeah? Well in such-and-such a place a white woman got raped in a riot in the '60s!" or "An old man got shot in the back by a kid during one of those riots!" (I've never heard that either of these things happened, but even if they in fact didn't, that wouldn't stop people from claiming they had) as if one or two events totally change the worth or quality of huge-scale historical events such as these, my point is not meant to justify every individual event that may have happened during those riots, but just the riots themselves. And I've got to say, if you want to judge the '60s riots by the standard of whether they were wanton or sadistic destruction of a city, you won't find evidence of such cruelty from the 1960s riots, which were really a last-ditch response to needless cruelty-- remember, this was back when instead of racial profiling that was to any extent legitimate, cops would commonly just nab some lone black guy and harass him or even beat him up.

I think that a lot of law-and-order types, including the FBI, see / saw the riots a lot differently than I do, and even saw (or even still see) them and African American people as actually a national security threat to the United States. This is sort of a dumb response, when you consider all the suffering and unfairness African American people used to face. But these law-and-order people who think this are just racist (if you start to see their actions that way, it really helps explain a lot of how the FBI treated African Americans during the 1960s, and a lot of phenomena, like our corrupt national news media, that you see today) and can barely help putting stupid conclusions on everything. They probably thought hippie peace rallies were big threats to the country too, instead of just gathering to speak, since their rich masters (who were just intentionally trying to manipulate the cops) told them that that was what the weird-looking long-haired people were up to. Unfortunately, there are many conservatives in this country (Tony Blankly, probably, for one) who think that a bunch of people who gather to chant slogans and peacefully hold up signs constitutes a "mob" that should have tear-gas fired into it by police (this is the kind of education they get from their fathers, fathers' acuqaintances and relatives at the country club, and peers in the private schools, so they just don't know better) and this is something we just have to acknowledge to ourselves. So anyway, the point is, many people are smarter than a cop, and just because a cop says some opinion on something, doesn't mean that what's going on is what the cop says it is, especially when what the cop is talking about is something far beyond his ken.

Some people I think are just horrified and ashamed by the riots. For them, the answer is always peace and talk. But that is not always satisfactory when you watch the generations pass as you grow older, having fought and fought to get into law school and having been beaten up by the cops for no crime, and slurred by them and others. People may look at India, and resort to their view of Indians as intelligent people that is prejudicedly-overbroad, and say "The Indians did this with non-violence. So why couldn't we have done this with non-violence?" as if all the Indians are so smart that the answer they reach to a problem should work, by magic, at all times and in all places. But the fact is that in the Indian colonies of Britain, the Indians were a majority of the population (certainly a lot more than the number of British soldiers present), and the Empire really needed their cooperation to get any work done and make the colony worthwhile. The Indians could do a lot of persuading just by the threat of refusing to cooperate with the British. But in the United States, the African Americans were in a totally different situation because they made up a minority of the population. Also, they were not through their labor holding up some huge portion of the economy, like some valuable import trade, that put lots of money into the hands of rich, white capitalists. Instead, lots of white Americans probably would have been completely happy to eradicate all the blacks in America.

I think there are also a lot of people who realize that, while a lot was done on the non-violent and protest front in the civil rights movement in 1960s America, probably a big part of the reason we got the gains we got then was because the United States was scared of African American unrest. I think that is the case, too, and probably is the strongest reason to stop looking so harshly on the riots: they were justified by necessity because too many white people were too callous or too ignorant to listen otherwise. If this is all the case, then people should stop feeling ashamed of the riots, and stop using them as a reason to look down on African Americans as a race, and start looking at them as a necessary and even praise-worthy part of the civil rights movement, a logical decision made by people who exercised the right amount of spine the situation they were in actually called for.

Afghanistan

2008-07-30T12:27:00.006-04:00

I'm not an expert on Afghanistan. But it seems that judging from all I've read about Afghanistan, we're really asking for trouble, and putting impossible or undesirable goals before them and us-- really just the same thing we do with the "War on Drugs"-- if we're really going to insist on those goals, which are: (1) end warlordism and (2) end growing of opium poppies for profit. Growing the poppies is so prolific and hard to stamp out, that I feel like in this poverty-ridden country, we can't produce a good economy and end gangsterism if we insist on eradicating it. It's like one of those boardwalk games of whack-a-mole.

What is seems we need to do to solve the problem without totally pissing on Afghanistan is to provide something like an equal replacement for the poppy cultivation. After all, what's an easier way to get someone to stop doing something you think you need to get them to stop, and that they feel they need and they insist on doing, than giving them something instead of it that satisfies all the need they were having satisfied by the thing you want them to give up? What this is in this case is, I think, a marijuana market.

I have felt for a long time that legalization of at least some recreational drug use should be a priority for the U.S. So this will be killing two birds with one stone, since it can help our problems with Afghanistan as well. First, I'll tell how it will help the U.S. The war on drugs is a joke-- it's poorly fought, it never gains any ground in stamping out drug use or the drug trade no matter how many busts there are, and the people who suffer for it are working-class people who could end up doing good things with their lives and being good Democrats, as well as violent crime victims who the police could protect instead of wasting their time hunting marijuana peddlers. Marijuana is the least harmful of the illegal drugs-- really harmless-- so it makes the most sense to legalize. Finally, the people who are busted for marijuana are from demographics that skew more Democrat than Republican, so taking away the effect on them and their communities of the arrests and imprisonment by legalizing marijuana would have a great effect on our politics (not in the least, because the states often take away a person's right to vote for being convicted of a felony).

How could this help Afghanistan? Well, we make marijuana legal in the U.S., but only from special shops that sell only marijuana that is grown in Afghanistan. There will be a huge market since there is already a lot of demand for marijuana in the U.S.-- a few years ago, the number all American adults who had used marijuana at least once in their lives was something like 50%. This will provide an incentive to the Afghanis to actually give up poppy cultivation, which may make Afghanistan safer. Since the marijuana trade will be a legitimate trade, Afghanis will sell their crops to non-criminal middlemen or to the U.S. government, and American troops won't have to fight with warlords who are being propped up by the poppies and who throw their weight around to protect their revenue from the crops. In other words, it will take away incentive both from gangsters to be gangsters, and from farmers to deal with gansters. This will all of course help the Afghani economy.

One more benefit to America: even if buying non-Afghani marijuana is kept illegal (to buffer the market for Afghani marijuana), the legal Afghani marijuana will create a huge new incentive for people in America to stay away from crime and the crime-culture: Who wants to risk getting locked up to get some marijuana when you can easily walk a few blocks to a store and get it legally?

What's standing in the way of all this is, as usual, politics. The Republicans don't like to go back on something they've been insisting on forever. Contrary to facts, they've had preachers insisting to people that marijuana is from the devil and that it ruins lives. Well, maybe it ruins your life if a bunch of cops come knocking on your door. Otherwise it's about the same as drinking a glass of liquor.

July 30

2008-07-30T09:52:00.001-04:00

On July 30, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa, the influential labor leader, disappeared. He was last seen in Bloomfield, MI.

One More Word About Rap

2008-07-29T16:20:00.004-04:00

UPDATE: I made a few slight changes and additions to this post and to the earlier post about rap since I first posted them. Also, for another example of very good rap, check out All That I Got Is You by Ghostface Killa (lyrics here- I think they may have gotten one or two words wrong, but I'm not 100% sure), which sort of reminds me of Langston Hughes, and almost anything by Method Man.

If you look at rap, it's cool because it's what the punk-rock subculture calls DIY (do it yourself)-- a thing that's totally created by just some regular people making art out of nothing, who didn't have to go to some university or some patron to get funding or approval.

And if you look at an example like Triumph by Wu-Tang Clan, it's interesting how it can shift between being sort of a narrative, and a verbal collage that is mostly about the way the words sound, or about onomatopoeia, and secondly about the words that are chosen to convey it. If when I was a high school student in an Honors level English class, a teacher had a student read the class the lyrics from Triumph out of a textbook, I would have been really astonished by it, and felt like I just witnessed new boundaries being successfully set down in poetry. That's an achievement in art. But it's not recognized, and this type of thing often isn't until some spoiled-brat rich kid with no morals sees a poor guy doing something neat and copies it-- then the rich parents or teachers think it's an amazing innovation and praise the kid for his "genius." Unfortunately, that's how a lot of things change in art. Some spoiled obnoxious rich kid shouldn't get the credit for a new kind of poetry that does a lot more with the way the words chosen sound together and onomatopoeia when Wu-Tang Clan, rappers in general and freestyle rappers had already been doing it for years.

Then think about Steve Miller. In his song The Joker, Steve Miller sings about "the pompitous of love." And in and earlier song, he sings about "whispering sweet words of epistemology in your ear." Turns out, instead of being examples of brilliant-white-guy-hippie inspiration that have some kind of meaning Miller thought up and artistically keeps off the table, Miller ripped off both of these lines from R & B songs by a black singer. In the original R & B songs, the lines featured coined words. While these words might look like just crazy jive talk to a white person who jumps to unnecessary conclusions, these words actually had specific meanings for the singer who coined them-- not too different from a writer like William Blake's creating his own mythology that he wrote around. Yet William Blake is considered praise-worthy and an artist, while someone like a rapper from the 1990s or an R & B singer from the '60s is considered just some ignorant, babbling kid from the ghetto. Why? Classism and racism. But if you are not so classist and racist, then there is a lot more fun art out there you can enjoy.

Will Your Town Become A Ghost Town?

2008-07-29T14:13:00.004-04:00

Via Atrios (he writes, "Recession could bring a lot of these."):

Bennigan's and Steak-and-Ale restaurant chains, owned by Metromedia Restaurant Group, sought permission to liquidate in bankruptcy court protection, without citing a reason.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Metromedia Restaurant Group prepared a bankruptcy filing after allegedly violating several terms of a lending agreement with GE Capital Solutions.

I hope our country won't turn into a ghost town.

On the brighter side, maybe as our economy eventually recovers, a lot of those real estate properties forsaken by the big corporations will be snatched up by interesting new small businesses.

And it probably closed (instead of another restaurant) because it’s so corny to sit in a restaurant that pretends to be a local, family-owned dive (by hanging fake souvenirs all over the walls) eating reheated, pre-made frozen meals. The ambiance is nice until you realize you’re being suckered by a big corporation while there are still plenty of small-business restaurateurs out there who would appreciate your business.

Black Culture And Mainstream American Culture

2008-07-29T13:20:00.005-04:00

Over the course of my education, I've had the chance to read plenty of textbooks, or collections or anthologies-- for example, of writings by feminists or by American political philosophers-- that have turned out to be pleasingly comprehensive and up-to-date in their scope, recognizing that the discipline they covered was still being practiced and breaking new ground. It's always nice to see acknowledgement of the accomplishments of the present-day or recent years-- acknowledgement, perhaps, from an older generation that more recent generations, and not just people remembered in a musty old book, have had something to add or say.

When I was in college or high school, I was given a great anthology of American literature. It contains whole works or excerpts from prose writers, dramatists and poets. I guess it's a testament to the breadth of the blindness that a society's racism can cause, but up until now I've never really considered the odd fact that this recently-published book (late '90s) doesn't contain any works from rappers in it. After all, what is rap, but poetry? I'm not talking about rappers who only rap about having sex with women and being a gangster-- I'm talking about rappers like Talib Kweli who rap about things like the influence 9/11 has had on our world (although one should consider that some gangster rappers can certainly put a whole lot of art into rapping about their way of life, and very influential styles of art certainly can and have originated from individuals documenting their non-typical lifestyles). We all have to admit that, and I've noticed it myself for years. I definitely appreciate writing and poetry, and as someone who has listened to rap his whole life, I can testify that there is rap out there that is very clever and creative. In fact, perhaps the most compelling aspect of a rap-piece to me is how clever or creative it is. Clever rappers are often so good that they even can use rap to tell a story or to impart a message instead of just "spitting" a more avant garde, impromptu type of work that is more of an image, more visceral, and more a pure demonstration of creative thinking and verbal skill. In my opinion, it's really weird to see art in Franz Josef Kafka, or ancient Chinese, ancient Celtic, or ancient Muslim abstract art, yet not see art in things like Wu-Tang Clan rap or the best graffiti murals (I'm sure there are a lot of theories about Kafka's writing, but I'm not so sure that any interpretation is more convincing than that maybe he was just winging it-- yet Kafka is famous and immortal, while rich white people look at rappers as if they're just winging, it and as if their can't be an apex in achievment in that kind of art when a black person from a poor background is doing it).

I've always recognized that there is rap that can achieve these heights of art, and also a lot of rap that is not as impressive. But the public's taste very often coincides with the rap that is clever or creative (Notoriuous B.I.G. and Wu-Tang Clan are just a couple of examples)-- this reinforces my opinion that it's part of good rap to be well done from a poet's point of view. So I really wonder why some of these better rap pieces have not started to make it into the literary anthologies that are given to students as textbooks. I know that rappers are not usually considered part of the literary "scene," and that other people, sometimes African Americans, write types of poetry that are similar to rap for the poetry scene-audience. But the foremost of rappers are rewarded by success in the rap scene and world fame-- this seems to back up my opinion that these cleverest of rappers are much better poets than many of these unknown poets who inhabit the poetry scene.

It seems like a very big oversight that rap does not accomplish more academic recognition; and after all, a lot of yesteryear's poetry and drama that we now give a permanent place in literary anthologies was like the rap-- the pop culture-- of its day. It just seems like a glaring omission of a big part of modern American artistic culture, an omission that I suppose might be based on (intentional or unintentional) classism and racism.

This is a pretty big loss, until it gets fixed. After all, how many aspects of our modern American culture come from African American culture? From music (like jazz music, to gospel, R & B and rock 'n' roll) to style of dress, cooking, slang, and the fist-jab, European Americans are (to an extent largely ignored by racist white Americans) a breed of people of European descent that are uniquely influenced in their culture by people of African descent. I once argued with a liberal African American professor about this-- I think I had the better part of the argument, and that his assessment that African Americans don't have much of an influence on the mainstream culture was a little too pessimistic and cynical-- but I think it is certainly true that (1) there is a whole African American aesthetic that is oppressed, dismissed and under-recognized in America, that applies to all kinds of culture and is easily seen in rap; what is really an African-American aesthetic approach to say, poetry, that is often too quickly dismissed as just meaningless babble instead of the slang and the alternative aesthetic that it is, and (2) this alternative aesthetic is a different style, but it is no less praiseworthy for that than are other styles. I don't have to like every piece of jazz or every rap song or every painting, but there are plenty of styles that include examples we don't like. Americans shouldn't look at a piece of rap or black fashion they don't like and think "this is junky, lower-class, ghetto stuff"; instead they should recognize that like any other style, some of the artists in that style are great and others are just not going to appeal to you because they are lesser artists.

July 29

2008-07-29T12:17:00.004-04:00

On July 29, 1899, the First Hague Convention was signed. This was a step forward not only in international cooperation (and thereby in increasingly seeing a human species beyond national and cultural boundaries) but also in the development of humanistic, human-rights values and an attempt at an increasing application of ethics.

It's my belief that these are the kinds of efforts that change the world-- not pie-in-the-sky dreams of heroes or revolutions-- and even though the work is long and arduous, to change the world for the better we all have to keep working persistently for new legislation, treaties, and reforms.

The Media And The Campaign: Blackmailers And Liars

2008-07-28T15:45:00.001-04:00

Here is an excerpt from the article Matt Yglesias linked to on this post on his blog:

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

But-- there are also a lot more nasty things about McCain to report on: his flip-flops, his signing of a statement against America for the North Vietnamese, his calling his wife a cunt in public, his calling a kid who asked him a legitimate question at a public event a little jerk-- and on and on and on.

So what is going on is that McCain has a lot more mistakes and dirt out there about him, but the media covers him more favorably than they cover Obama-- and they say a few bad things about McCain to make it look like they're not prejudiced in his favor to people who don't look at a lot of news.

So the mainstream media's campaign coverage a whole can definitely be called, pro-McCain dishonesty-- it's just at least minimally well-done and sophisticated pro-McCain dishonesty.

Someone whose agenda for the day seemed to be to try to demoralize liberals cynically wrote of pro-McCain prejudice in the media:

Bottom line: McCain wins, Obama loses.

This is the plan and they're sticking to it.

I wrote:

It's more like they're going to try to get McCain to win, but only if they can do so without any really obvious and really outrageous rule-breaking.

If they have to do something that people are going to notice and get pissed at Republicans about to win, then they won't, and Obama may win just based on popularity and advertising.

Obama is so much more appealing, popular and less gaffetastic than McCain that this is not an easy road for the Republicans. But I think that they're intimidating Obama and telling him what to say (something I speculate happens to a lot of prominent Democrats), so they may get him to produce a few bad gaffes before the election.

Who would push around a powerful Democrat? Someone the Democrat thinks that they can't expose or strike back at, and have it be worth it-- in other words, someone the victim thinks perhaps can and will do some damage to the victim's reputation (or other interest) that the victim thinks is not worth the risk of trying to stand up against. That's what would explain no one speaking out, and us not hearing about it. It would be a very well-thought-out job, perhaps by people who have built up a lot of know-how, perhaps with a psychologist's input, on blackmail, and have a very tight scheme orchestrated to use on personalities they are confident will submit to it.

The commenter then wrote something about Obama's not dropping out of the race. It might seem superficially like if someone wanted Obama to lose, they would just try to get him to drop out, but consider my response to that:

While they might like Obama to drop out, if the alternative was Hillary, they wouldn't like it (their first goal was to keep her from winning the nomination, and now they're the primary reason Obama isn't going to pick her to be his VP). Also, they might feel that if they push too hard, which is what openly asking Obama to drop out might be, he might not go along with it, and might push back, and then it might ruin their whole plan to mess with him. If, on the other hand, they just claim that there is some kind of national security interest served by Obama wearing different colored suits than he normally would, or talking about how bad black fathers are on Fathers Day, or giving a much more evasive-sounding, ambiguous and hesitating response to a question than he normally would, Obama might just submit to their demands while trying to fool himself that the rationale he is being fed is true, and that he's not being steered into making subtle gaffes or trumpeting propaganda.

The Republicans In A Nutshell

2008-07-28T11:38:00.001-04:00

Here is one more thing I take for granted, but I want to make sure that others have heard:

The Republicans' political machine is like an internal, covert rebellion against this country conducted by a gang of people who are totally unqualified to govern a country like the United States in this day and age. They might be qualified to govern a country with much simpler problems (although that's probably too big an assumption, considering that they are so greedy and corrupt, and content themselves with doing whatever they feel confident that they can get away with) but they are totally unsuited to govern this one, and their using the methods they use to gain power (like the US attorney purge, misleading robo-calls, taking over the media, etc.) certainly should be considered a wrong.

McCain's Not-So-Valuable Dignity

2008-07-28T11:13:00.004-04:00

Next up from me are a couple of things that may seem obvious to a lot of people-- and I know I take them for granted-- but they are opinions that are not voiced in the mainstream media outlets much or even in the blogs, so if people are visiting this site to hear this kind of thing that doesn't get said most anywhere else, then these two things are things I want to make sure you've gotten to hear.

First, Kevin Drum writes this about John McCain (Kevin never used to write things quite this bad years ago-- I'm not one of those who considers his past support for the IRaq war to be an unforgiveable sin-- but more recently comments like this have become typical of him):

Not only will he lose the election, but he's going to wake up one morning and realize that he abandoned his dignity in the process. That's obviously something that's important to him,

I don't think so. He seems to know just what he's doing, and this kind of crap is just the standard operating procedure for guys on his side. Sure, it is undignified, but people like him grow up not caring about stuff like that. The only indignities people like him care about are things like being sent to prison, not being caught in a lie by people (the nation's liberals) who don't have a lot of power over them.

Then there is this:

I've never been a big John McCain fan. Even in the 2001-2004 era, when he was flirting with the left and opposing the most neanderthal elements in his own party, I didn't really warm to him.

To me, he mostly seemed like a standard issue conservative who had discovered a good schtick during the 2000 campaign and was milking it for all it was worth,

I think treating the Republicans' politicians at the national level (including John McCain) as if bipartisanship is something that can be for real with them is all wrong. People who believe otherwise are just not wise to the reality of politics in this country nowadays, and to what's going on. Kevin just sounds like he's by turns polishing John McCain (maybe there are some people out there whe will vote for a white guy over a black guy if they can just be made to believe of the white guy that "dignity is very important to him"-- how lovely!-- even if he has, in noble political combat, sometimes fallen short of his own expectations) and making excuses for him.

A Revolution In Liberal Self-Image

2008-07-28T10:15:00.004-04:00

I read this comment on the Eschaton blog last night. I just stopped by to mention my blog and that I had new posts up, so I didn't see all of the conversation it was part of. But there was a comment in it I wanted to respond to.

Yes, I have argued that point here and elsewhere since 2002. By and large, however, people didn't want to hear that achieving the level of change that we need, is going to require doing what the Republicans did.

That means, action (think Brooks Brothers Rebellion in Florida). That means organizing, think Religious Right, starting in the 1980's. And on, and on.

The fact that that direct action, which is what NTodd is advocating needs to be coupled with grassroots, behind the scenes organizing. It will take time, and it will take effort.

The difference between the Right and the Left in this regard, however, is that there is no money machine for the left.

It always seems to me like there are things about the way the liberal community conducts itself that keep us from having as much influence as we might, both in terms of endearing people to us more and providing a better infrastructure for our movement. I chose to respond to this part:

The difference between the Right and the Left in this regard, however, is that there is no money machine for the left.

What I think it that left-wing parents need to raise their kids to be more public-spirited and to realize that the political fight is not over. People have to stop pretending that messing around in an organic garden once a week or coming out to a protest every once in a while is somehow being connected with the community or helping the community-- people often have all this rhetoric about doing things in the community, but then the only involvement and activism they have in their community besides talking to a small group of like-minded liberals (who aren't even originally from the community and who are similarly focused on organic gardening and protests) is very little talking to anybody else, and certainly isn't anything like becoming part of the infrastructure of their community. We can't all just run away to the forests and hills and cool cities to become poets, or what have you. Kids have to be encouraged to get more involved in their communities, like by becoming teachers, doctors, public officials (judges, cops, and mayors) and lawyers. Real liberals who become things like lawyers shouldn't be made to feel like they're alone out there because so many of the lawyers, bailiffs, judges and other court personnel they meet are relatively conservative. I know we do this type of thing to a large degree already, but even an increase of a few percentage points of young liberals getting career-minded sooner and realistic sooner, without losing their values-- just practicing them in a more realistic way-- will help.

Besides just getting more influence in communities, that will also provide a lot more money, because more people will be making a salary sooner, instead of just the tips from a tip jar plus $8 per hour that they make at a cafe while supporting their hobby of reading poetry, playing the bongos or being in a punk-rock band.

I'm not saying liberal children should be brow-beaten into becoming teachers and doctors, but I'm just saying they should hear the the suggestion a little more instead of "Do whatever you want! I'm so open-minded that whatever it is, I'm fine by it!" People need to know how cool it is to get involved in ways that then to help us more in just the ways we need.

We need to change our whole culture as a movement.

Another thing we need to start looking at is cultivating and recruiting a few more black candidates. Again, I'm not saying we should run people who really aren't good enough or who don't want to be in public office-- but we should look around. It seems like at least part of the Barack phenomenon is that black people have become excited about politics like they never have before and are donating money. If we can keep that up, it will definitely help, and again, it can help in more ways than just with money.

July 28

2008-07-28T09:42:00.001-04:00

On July 28, 2005, The Provisional Irish Republican Army (The PIRA) call an end to their thirty year long armed campaign in Northern Ireland.

The Internet: Terrible Scourge Of Our Country???

2008-07-27T13:30:00.004-04:00

UPDATE: In the comments of The Washington Monthly post I link to below and comment on, someone wrote that verbal test scores haven't declined in the decade since the internet caught on, except for the past two years-- and the commenter attributed that to problems with the No Child Left Behind legislation. So if that's correct, that adds all the more reason behind my criticism of the NYT article's anti-Internet angle, and it makes that article look all that much weirder.

I was just complaining the other day about the closed-off nature of news media in our country, and the media has today produced another dramatic assault against the Internet. You know, the Internet, that gave you e-mail, blogs, books from Amazon.com, online newspapers, downloadable music, NetFlicks, Wikipedia, Google, and so on.

Here's my response, from my comments on Washington Monthly and in response both to the NYT article and Kevin Drum's characteristic rich-milquetoast-lib chirping in support:

I don't know if I agree with you. I think a lot of books I read are fine. The details tend to supply valuable trivia, insight or clarity, and if what you're looking for is a dumbed-down or summary version, and the book or article you're reading seems too long, it's probably just because you're reading the wrong book / piece to suit your needs. I think the ocassional piece that does indeed have too many words / sentences just indicates that the writer is stupid and that his / her being published is kind of a fluke. Somebody else out there who could write something better has been passed over to publish this person's book.

As far as these anti-Internet articles that come out every once in a while, I view them with suspicion. I think the right-wing would love an anti-Internet movement, because if they could restrict Internet use it could end up shutting down liberal politics in a big way. I think it's a really vain cause, though, because the advantages of the Internet are just too obvious. Americans are just not dumb enough to call for our nation to become Nazi Germany, in light of all we know and have experienced. There are only a few Americans who are that dumb. Anyway, since the source of these articles is the mainstream media, we have every reason to be distrustful.

Young people suffer from the same problems they always have as far as wanting to sound cool and not always taking grammar, appearances and studies seriously enough. If the Internet age has coincided with a tiny bit of increase in that, it's hardly something that merits a lot of concern or attention.

Someone like Sy Hersh, who writes for those magazines that print longish articles, is often a little melodramatic, but that's a particular problem that's particular to somewhat pretentious magazines. It's not a symptom of a wide-ranging plague of overlength.

Nor is what Sy Hersh and the like do with their magazine articles related to the Internet-- it's related to people who buy the NYT magazine, Harper's, The New Yorker, etc., wanting to feel like they're getting bang for their buck (that is, the writers have something profound to say that takes a lot of description).

And in defense of it, sometimes those long articles in relatively highbrow popular magazines are really called for, and the depth / context is nice to have, although the article certainly could have been done in a much shorter form. Again, if you feel like you waste a lot of time on that, better to find blogs that excerpt and comment on those specific sources.

July 27

2008-07-27T13:17:00.000-04:00

On July 27, 1953 an armistice was entered into that effectively ended the Korean War.

The White Rose and German "Punks"

2008-07-26T12:39:00.010-04:00

It's interesting that the more one reads history, the more one encounters analogs from some distant past period to things one perhaps used to think were the types of things only a person from one of the generations of the past 30 or 40 years or so would have thought up.

I've been reading a book called Sophie Scholl and The White Rose for a few days now. If you want to learn about the anti-Nazi resistance group The White Rose, I recommend reading the book The White Rose, Munich: 1942-1943 by Sophie Scholl's sister, Inge, instead (for reasons I'll write about another time) or even watching the German movie Sophie Scholl (the DVD features subtitles in English). But Sophie Scholl and The White Rose does have a lot of history and facts in it. Take this for instance:

[I]n 1936, when membership in the Hitler Youth had become compulsory, gangs of hostile young men began to appear in the cities of Germany and especially in industrial districts. Among them were the children of workers with some degree of class consciousness; Communists were to remain the firmest opponents of the regime, suffering extreme torture in the hands of the Gestapo and in the concentration camps. But most of the young people seem to have been consciously "unpolitical."

Sharing a contempt for playing soldier, these groups would gather in pubs to drink alcohol, smoke, and play cards with their elders. Or they would behave like the "punks" of a later era, dressing in simple, almost ragged clothes to express their rejection of the stifling hypocrisy around them: they wore long hair, checkered shirts, old hats, and signet rings with skull and crossbones. Calling themselves the Navajos, the Black Gang, or the Edelweiss Pirates, they listened to so-called degenerate swing music, and jeered at the smug obedience of Hitler Youth stalwarts.

Some of these groups did more than jitterbug and look dangerous. Having been forced into the Hitler Youth, these youngsters played double roles: after-hours they gathered occasionally with criminal elements and tried to disrupt Hitler Youth meetings. In Munich a band calling itself the Red Anchor was said to have appeared in Haidhausen, the same working-class district from which Hitler had launched his beer-hall putsch. Their targets were not people in elegant furs and top-hats, but anyone alone and wearing a Hitler Youth uniform. In Leipzig in 1937, the police carried out a major action against a group that had spread to Berlin and Cologne as well. According to the Gestapo, 1,500 boys had banded together in 1936 to attack youth leaders at night; their explicit goal was to recruit more members in Leipzig than were in the Hitler Youth. Their two seventeen-year-old leaders were eventually caught and sentenced to three years' hard labor.

Now this is really interesting. I think I may have heard of this group once before at most, but that's it. From the impression I'd always gotten of the time, I wouldn't have thought such a thing could exist in Germany during the '30s. But that's the way history surprises you. And the stereotypes we have about Germany and Germany during the Nazi era are not quite right.

It's hardly inconceivable, anyway, that such a thing could exist, because in places like New Jersey and Baltimore in recent years, 19-year-olds who are members of gangs like the Bloods have been indicted for heading criminal empires encompassing hundreds of members and generating millions of dollars in illegal revenue.

Unfortunately, although this book contains a bibliography, it doesn't have footnotes or endnotes. I'd really like to see the research myself, and find out a little more about the extent to which these young men were really "hostile" rather than just non-conformist, and were a bunch of "punks" rather than thinkers who were intentionally politically-minded (that is, maybe at least many of the leaders and originators of these groups were young guys who were a little bit more educated about politics than just completely idle and spontaneously rebellious youths whose motivation was thinking that the Hitler Youth were square). A group calling itself the Red Anchor sounds to me like the pissed-off sons of a bunch of communists who were dragged away to camps, and messing around with the Hitler Youth does not seem to me like an entirely natural activity for guys who saw themselves as nothing more than non-conformist roughs to undertake-- because everyone had to know that there was much at stake with, and little reward in, messing with the Nazis.

Another interesting point from the same book:

Between 1940 and 1945, 1,807 inmates were executed in Brandenburg prison alone for political reasons, some after years of forced labor. Of these, 75 were under twenty years of age; 22 were high-school pupils or university students. In Hamburg between 1933 and 1945, of all those sentenced for political "crimes," 11 percent were youths.

One has to wonder whether these numbers would have been higher, except for the young people's ability to run a little faster than the cops and soldiers.

In any event, it's really astounding to me that I perhaps haven't even heard of this group before. You'd think that something like an uprising of 1,500 boys that had banded together in 1936 to attack Nazi youth leaders one night would be one of the most-famous events of Nazi Germany. Yet is seems like the protectors of the status quo and our mainstream media don't see any value in educating us about it, but instead prefer to keep showing documentaries that are almost 100% composed of footage from the propaganda "documentaries" that Hitler ordered his film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, to compose for him.

Libertarians and Liberals: One More Update

2008-07-26T12:29:00.003-04:00

UPDATE III: If you really want to know why there are so many Obama-supporters among those right-leaning Libertarians, maybe it's this: maybe whether they support Obama isn't such a good gauge of a Libertarian's ideology, and maybe a lot of otherwise-right-leaning Libertarians are favoring him because they disagree with the Republicans' Iraq policy, feel that the Iraq war is a very grave mistake for the nation, and feel like Obama is more likely to change the policy than McCain. In that case, they would prefer Obama to win the White House to chasten the Republicans until the Republicans become a little more public-spirited. Otherwise, those people may be just as right-wing as any Charlton Heston / Clint Eastwood Libertarian.

July 26

2008-07-26T12:17:00.003-04:00

On July 26, 1856, George Bernard Shaw, an Irish writer and Nobel Laureate (d. 1950) was born. Shaw actually met and befriended a lot of left-wing and intellectual figures of his day, including famed Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin.

On July 26, 1875, Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist (d. 1961), was born. Carl Jung was Freud's principal disciple.

On July 26, 1894, Aldous Huxley, author (d. 1963) was born in England. Aldous Huxley wrote against totalitarianism and state-enforced indoctrination in A Brave New World.

On July 26, 1948, U.S. President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 desegregating the military of the United States. Patton felt that the African American soldiers had been effective fighters during WWII, and the Axis didn't like fighting them, either.

Update: Libertarians and Liberals

2008-07-25T23:10:00.021-04:00

I guess one easy response to my previous post and to my concerns about Libertarians is that (according to a poll) more of them like Obama than like McCain, and that is interesting. But I don't think it's as easy as that.

I think making someone sympathetic to, or into, a Libertarian gets them closer to being a conservative. Remember, this has just been quantified for you: probably close to 100% of Democrats are voting for Obama, but 38% of Libertarians, according to a Rasmussen poll, prefer McCain. I think that advertising the fact that Libertarians support Obama as if the amount of support is noteworthy, or means that they almost all do (like titling a blog post "Libertarian Support for Barack Obama") tends to make liberals become more interested in Libertarianism. Besides the results of that poll, from what I have heard about Libertarians and from what I have heard Libertarians who hold themselves out as voices for their movement say, Libertarianism doesn't sound to me like it's just about decriminalizing a few vices. It sounds like there is a lot of distaste among these Libertarians for core-- core-- liberal policies. It really seems as if this movement can peel off liberals who like a few of our issues-- but who in the end kind of don't like black people, and really just want to hold onto more of their fortunes, instead of paying it over to help people and to help the country we live in.

And just because Libertarians say they support decriminalization of recreational use of marijuana does not mean that by building bridges with Libertarians, marijuana is going to be decriminalized. Whether decriminalization happens or not is something that is in the future. But what is a lot more certain is that Libertarians are a lot closer to being conservatives than liberals are, and making friends with them or having them around is therefore a conservative influence.

More fundamentally, the Libertarian movement is wrong on issues that affect blacks and the lower classes-- issues like taxes, health care and public assistance-- because the kinds of positions Libertarians have on those issues are the kinds that produce more crime in our country, and make the lives of millions of Americans measurably worse and harder to live in a healthy way (thereby making those millions of Americans less likely to be productive people who are great to have around in our country). But also, if the Libertarian way of looking at things begins to catch on, it tends to break our liberal coalition. Liberals should not be seen to be looking at blacks and the lower classes and saying "Screw you-- we've written you off now. You should have been working harder all along, and the fact that I got a much nicer upbringing than you did in a much nicer neighborhood has nothing to do with it," tends to break our coalition, which makes all our goals harder to accomplish. If the mainstream liberal position wasn't right on these issues, the matter of political expedience would carry a lot less force, but since we are right of those issues, consideration of political expedience adds a decisive weight against allowing these so-called Libertarians too much of a foothold in our movement and thought. This isn't to say that among the public policies that Libertarians talk about as if they were expendable there can't be specific aspects that are worth criticizing or changing. I'm just saying that advocating dispensing with those entire policies wholesale, according to an Ayn Rand type of tradition, is definitely out.

UPDATE II: Foreseeing that some people may take issue with my pointing out that Libertarians are often in some ways like conservatives, and are often a lot conservative than liberals (if you use support for McCain or Obama as the measure of who is conservative and who is liberal), I just want to point out that while some Libertarians may think of themselves as liberals, and the term "Libertarian" used in a broad, technical sense can include liberal-anarchists or anarchist-communists, I think that conservative Libertarians have basically taken over the Libertarian movement in America that is centered around the Libertarian Party, and that tries to get politicians elected to public office in America. I think that these people are a lot different than your average liberal-anarchist who used to go out on the street to protest globalization because of the impact it can have on poor people's quality of living in Third World countries. I think if the liberal-anarchist type people had some very frank conversations with the conservative-type Libertarians, they would find that the "Libertarian" movement is something they have very little in common with, and that to identify themselves in terms of how they fit in the contemporary American political spectrum, they are a lot better off just calling themselves anarchists and not lumping themselves in with these other, 38%-pro-McCain Libertarians. Doing otherwise just gets people confused.

UPDATE III: If you really want to know why there are so many Obama-supporters among these right-leaning Libertarians, maybe it's this: maybe whether they support Obama isn't such a good gauge of their ideology, and maybe a lot of otherwise-right-leaning Libertarians are favoring him because they disagree with the Republicans' Iraq policy, feel that the Iraq war is a very grave mistake for the nation, and feel like Obama is more likely to change the policy than McCain. In that case, they would prefer Obama to win the White House to chasten the Republicans until the Republicans become a little more public-spirited. Otherwise, those people may be just as right-wing as any Charlton Heston / Clint Eastwood Libertarian.

Weird Stuff From The Blogosphere

2008-07-25T22:22:00.003-04:00

A post from The Carpetbagger Report today: "Libertarian Support for Barack Obama."

Who cares? Libertarians-- especially the politically active ones-- are by and large nuts.

Why bother giving these people the publicity by talking about them?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the Libertarian movement in America looks like it was designed to wedge individuals away from the liberal / left wing movement in America by providing an ideology that fights for freedom to indulge in taboos upper-middle-class and upper-class white people want to break (sexual, controlled substances, freedom of ideology / beliefs about religion, etc.) but abandons liberals' / the left's defense of black people and class struggle. I'm not saying that this is definitely what it is, but it is a very scuzzy movement.

Individual Libertarian positions on some issues may be alright-- we certainly should consider making recreational use of marijuana legal-- but the movement as a total ideology is really not kosher.

McCain Comes Out In Favor Of Withdrawal From Iraq

2008-07-25T22:12:00.003-04:00

Providing more support to my long-held belief that the conservatives' leaders may have quietly decided amongst themselves that we need to get out of Iraq, comes this via The Carpetbagger Report:

After stating that setting a timetable was a “strategy for defeat,” McCain has decided he likes Maliki’s sixteen month timetable.

My guess is that we'll be seeing the conservatives come out more and more against the Iraq war now, although perhaps very gradually (so people don't notice too much). The rationales will be that the Iraqis want us out and that the surge has "accomplished its mission" (which will be implied to have been to make it possible for us to remove most of our presence by at least not-too-long after Barack would do it if he is elected). Today, McCain was saying that the surge has worked and accomplished its mission.

We'll know for sure whether the conservatives are really doing what I think they are doing-- changing their minds behind our backs and waiting to figure out when is the best time and way to change their side's position publicly-- after a while. My guess is that if you keep your eyes on the news for a couple of months, you'll see at least a couple of more indications of it, and perhaps sooner rather than later. I know I was surprised to hear this stuff from McCain today.

The cycle of history

2008-07-25T17:09:00.004-04:00

In the eighties, the Republicans replaced a senile President with a dumb one.

We responded by providing a quasi-black President.

The Republicans then gave the country an even dumber version of the previous Republican President.

We have responded with an even blacker President than last time.

The lesson of history: if the Republicans continue the current trend of their actions (Rush Limbaugh?), then the next Democratic President will probably be Vince Carter.

Republicans, you have been warned.

We're not going to war with Iran

2008-07-25T11:48:00.004-04:00

Something people have been saying for a looong time is that we're going to go to war with Iran under George W. Bush. For almost as long, I've been writing on other blogs and probably on my own blogs as well that we're probably not. It turns out, I've been right, and as time passes, no matter how many rumors surface that are supposed to indicate that the war is imminent, we haven't attacked Iran. It seems like there have been at least five different happenings (but many more articles and blog posts analyzing them, mind you) over the course of Bush's presidency that were supposed to indicate that war was imminent.

To some extent, it's kind of common-sense that we weren't going to go to war with them. Our military is already over-stretched, and doing the kind of stuff people thought the neocons wanted to do with Iran (regime change) sounds like a bigger job than just a handful of bomber and fighter jets can handle on their own. Iran is not a match for us militarily, but it's an organized state with a modern standing army-- a lot bigger deal than the Taliban in Afghanistan were. And of course, if the kind of occupation we are doing in Iraq was necessary in Iran, we don't have the people to do that without pulling out of Iraq, Iran being a similarly-sized country to Iraq and the number of potential trouble-makers in Iran (elite military personnel and so forth) probably large.

But how far does this point go? Clearly (it seems to me, anyway) the neocons and the conservatives want to attack Iran. It's just that attacking Iran is not a costless move we can do without worry whenever we want, in light of what we're already committed to in Iraq.

Here's my deeper analysis: the conservatives want to attack Iran, but they feel like they can't / shouldn't do it until the Iranians make a "first move"-- something bigger than just supporting terrorism in Iraq (if that's really going on). And all those stories we've been hearing in the media, all those rumors? Simply saber-rattling, fabricated, leaked and promoted by the conservatives to catch the Iranians' attention. I think this could be a two-fold game: this administration really wants part of their legacy to be taming Iran. So, if Iran gets scared, on the one hand maybe they'll make a lot of concessions to Washington, which for the neocons and Bush isn't bad. On the other hand, maybe they'll get so scared that they'll pull off some kind of an unprovoked attack to try to intimidate us, or just out of frustration, which for the conservatives is probably the preferred outcome-- they get to "prove" to the American public that all the stuff they've been saying since 9/11 really is true, and that our country faces a rogue's gallery full of super-villains who can't help trying to attack us and our interests at every bend in the road. The public (not perceiving that Washington worked diligently to provoke the attack on whatever innocent victims unfortunately get hit) will cheer the Republicans as they swoop in to drop some bombs on the Iranians, and vote for more of the same in upcoming elections. Maybe the cost in innocent lives after a "regime change" and Iraq-like turmoil won't be less than whatever oppression Iran would have done on its own if we hadn't messed with them, but the Republican strategy is not about what's best for people in the long-run-- it's about immediate, short-term boosts to Republican popularity that will infuse their party organizations with cash and hand them victories in immediately upcoming American elections.

This reminds me of another big saber-rattling thing we got ourselves involved in. During the Cold War, the conservatives talked a lot about the evils of communism. But they never really meant the oppression (at least, the conservatives' leaders didn't) which the conservatives think is totally alright, as long as they're the ones who are guiding the policy. They meant rich corporations and businessmen being robbed of their property. So, when the nations of eastern Europe got gobbled up bit by bit by the Soviets after WWII, we stood by and let it happen even though our military was superior, and even though back in those days the Soviets probably couldn't count on doing a lot to us with their atomic or nuclear weapons (and even if you read in books that the Soviets had plans to use their weapons in a war, that doesn't mean that they were really going to do it-- for one thing, it could mean that they wanted to have a plan to use their weapons just in case they decided to use them, and for another, it could mean that they wanted their plans to include use of the weapons, even if they thought they weren't worth it to use, just so it would make Western leaders more intimidated, and thereby deterred from starting a war, if they intercepted the plans through espionage). It didn't matter that all those people were going to be subjected to East Germany-style and Soviet-style oppression.

The people of almost all those countries hated Soviet rule-- Poland, East Germany, Hungary. But despite America's being a bunch of super-heroes, we stood by and let most of it happen for decades.

Then, when the war was over communism in Vietnam, and a lot of the people there wanted communism, and were willing to fight very hard and determinedly for it, we stepped in and fought because we knew the Russians and the Chinese weren't going to bother to get deeply involved! And when we pulled out, the conservatives got upset because they called it a "psychological" victory for the Soviet communists. Some "psychological" victory-- we made ourselves look bad and untrustworthy the world over by insisting on that war, and we were willing to fight when the fight was for oppression in Vietnam. When the fight was against oppression in eastern Europe, we mostly cooled our heels in America and the most we did were intelligence operations based from Germany- which may seem cool or impressive to some people, but if you look at the big picture, it was chump-change.

This isn't to say that things didn't turn out for the best because we avoided open conflict in Europe. I'm not convinced one way or the other about it. After a few decades, authoritarian communism fell in a lot of countries, and we didn't fight a potentially hugely hazardous open war over it. On the other hand, maybe if we'd shown a little more spine, we could have kicked them out of some of those countries sooner. But the real point is that despite our rhetoric, when the oppression is real it doesn't spur us to fight-- there are rich people's, politicians' and crazy ideologues' concerns that determine whether we get involved or not. And you can see the effect of it in how we go to war today, too-- that Iraq war was never planned or executed with the best interest of the people there in mind, to insure that they were safe and that their country got rebuilt and secured in the safest and most expeditious way for them. Hell, a lot of consideration for the safety of our own troops didn't even go into it. Instead the conservative civilian leaders acted as if they thought going to war in Iraq was a decision to make in a board game.

July 25

2008-07-25T10:29:00.002-04:00

On July 25, 1940, General Guisan ordered the Swiss Army to resist German invasion and to make surrender illegal.

On July 25, 1943, Benito Mussolini was forced out of office by his own Italian Grand Council and replaced by Pietro Badoglio.

Veep blues

2008-07-24T18:34:00.002-04:00

Terry McAuliffe, at least, might agree with my speculation that Clinton is not going to be Veep and that Barack has counted her out already, at least if you want to interpret this statement from him that way.

Getting pushed around a little?

2008-07-24T18:04:00.005-04:00

Here are two blaring problems I noticed with The Carpetbagger Report:

* For a while now, the sidebar ads have featured an ad stating "Pamela Anderson's Extreme Video" with a picture of the model standing nude, covering her breasts with her hand, and her pelvis covered by a sign. Below this picture is written:

See what all the controversy surrounding Pamela Anderson's new video is about.

Watch as this sexy icon lays it all out in this very graphic video.

Viewers beware: This material may not be suitable for everyone!
Read more...

When The Carpetbagger Report keeps attracting more and more visitors every month, isn't it a bad idea to have a kinky link that belongs on a porn site, not a political site, on the sidebar? The best thing for us is to get liberal politics attracting a more and more populist audience, including people from the "red" states-- places where people are more likely to be sensitive about things like this, no matter their political affiliation. Isn't it a bad idea and likely to alienate those people and to reinforce Republican-born misconceptions about liberals if Steve leaves this ad up on his site? He should talk to the people who supply the ads and tell them that he doesn't want it to appear there-- otherwise, he's making us all look bad.

* Today's final post reports in a one-sentence blurb: Attorney General Michael Mukasey thinks the Vice President is part of the executive branch. Will wonders never cease. But there is no sentence in the post to explain what the controversy has been as far as Cheney claiming to belong to two branches at once, or none at all. Without an explanation like that, the blurb is too likely to be confusing to new readers who may not know politics that well.

Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report shouldn't be making these mistakes. He is a big-time blogger who worked on a political campaign as a consultant / strategist. He should know better than this what is good for our politics. What is okay for a tiny blog barely anyone visits is not okay for Steve to do-- through his site, he represents our politics to (what is for the blogosphere) almost-as-close-as-one-can-get to a mass, mainstream audience.

Obama says...

2008-07-24T15:04:00.007-04:00

From his Berlin speech:

But I also know how much I love America. I know that for more than two centuries, we have strived – at great cost and great sacrifice – to form a more perfect union; to seek, with other nations, a more hopeful world. Our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom – indeed, every language is spoken in our country; every culture has left its imprint on ours; every point of view is expressed in our public squares.

As poetic as it sounds, I think the bit about views being expressed in "public squares" that politicians often plug into speeches, and others often use, is less and less worth it for how pretty it sounds when balanced against how inaccurate it is.

America is no longer a place where people stand on soap boxes in town squares and give speeches about politics to people who can't help but overhear, since all the citizens have to walk through the town square in order to take care of their personal business. Instead, people ride through the town square in vehicles with closed windows. The places where political views are most vocalized are on cable TV stations, which are cost-prohibitive megaphones except for large corporations (yet a few stations alone get to speak about news and politics to the 300 million + citizens in the country), and on the Internet, where the average citizen can speak anonymously or pseudononymously to sometimes just a few people, who may be scattered across the country and similarly unknown. These limited forums aren't really the best means for encouraging trust and faith in a common endeavor, and are nothing like being subjected to a political speech by a neighbor possibly at any time you walk into town. Instead we're cut off from our neighbors and given a version of news and opinion that originates from a very narrow slice of the national community. Probably the closest thing we have to what people had back in the days when politicians first began rhapsodizing the importance of town square are hard-copy pamphlets and newsletters-- but hardly anyone tries to print up a bunch of pamphlets and leave them under the windshield-wipers of people's parked cars in their community, which would be a lot closer to what Tom Paine was doing.

Also there was this conservative comment on the Internet (in response to Obama making some metaphorical remarks to the Germans about tearing down walls between people):

When Obama was in Baghdad he did not demand that the obscene walls that divide the city be torn down. When Obama was in Israel he did not demand that the obscene partitions erected by Israel in the West Bank be torn down. Obama is a hypocrite supreme.

Those other walls probably are not totally good, like the Berlin Wall wasn't. But to be against ugly uses of walls, a person doesn't have to talk about them in a way that's unlikely to cause change or is likely to stir up opposition against what you're doing. Obama can certainly speak against barriers between peoples-- and probably do a better job of bringing about change-- without trying to force that precise message on people where perhaps many are not ready to hear it. To every thing, there is a season, and perhaps the wall in Baghdad is doing more good than harm right now. And maybe in Israel, speaking against their wall would do more to alienate people than it would to stir up useful opposition there against it.

So this right-wing talking-point, if you see it, should be shot down.

July 24

2008-07-24T12:27:00.004-04:00

On July 24, 1997, William J. Brennan, Jr., a liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice, died in Washington, DC. A Newark, New Jersey native, Brennan's father had been active in the organized labor movement, and before becoming a Justice, Brennan was a lawyer for organized labor. Brennan served on the 1960s' liberal Warren court alongside Justice Marshall, the first African American Justice on the Supreme Court, a former NAACP lawyer, and also a staunch liberal. Brennan then served on the increasingly conservative Burger and Rehnquist courts, during which he valiantly represented the liberal position in dissenting opinions for many years. These dissenting opinions could help pave the way for judicial approaches to individual rights in the state courts, to govern individual rights matters in which state constitutions are allowed to give better protection against the actions of a state government than federal law requires. Brennan served as a Justice for about 34 years, from October 16, 1956 – July 20, 1990, and died at the age of 91.

The McCain Poster

2008-07-24T03:21:00.006-04:00

Everyone's taking turns making fun of McCain's new poster, so I think I should report what I think. I think this is an example of a time when I have to choose not to be "on message" for us and say something that's calculated to whip people up to go out to vote against the Republicans, and instead play devil's advocate a little- mostly I want to do this to help people develop what I think is better judgment on things, like how to play politics better. And that's why I have to say I think the poster is not that bad. Here are comments I wrote on two other blogs (slightly edited to make them better here):

I don't think the poster is that bad for them-- its message just seems to be "Our guy knows that we have to fight to achieve peace in the long-run, and the liberals aren't willing to do that." It keeps them well-settled in their over-all frames/message, makes John McCain sound less like a war-monger without putting him in a position of having to say or promise something he's not going to actually follow up on (i.e., any kind of genuine peacenik moves like getting us out of Iraq or not leaving permanent bases), and it keeps the actual debating (but not the advertisements) in the campaign focused on things like whether or not we need to be fighting now, whether the fights the Republicans will start will make us safer, etc., instead of on some kind of precarious ideological battle between whether you like the idea of us being in wars or whether you put a premium on peace when we can have it (the poster just chooses peace, genuinely or not, as the lowest common denominator and therefore the appeal to be made). So when it comes to debates and printed material, McCain and his campaign will be free to make arguments based on uncertain, unknowable future events, and facts the average voter is ignorant about (nitty-gritty historical details and facts about Iraq policy and military policy)-- comfortable stuff for a politician trying to get elected.

The poster doesn't even have any offensive content, which is less and less common for the Republicans when they open their mouths nowadays.

* * *

I really think the poster is fine. It's his arguments about when we should be at peace and when we should be at war I feel like challenging, not this facially benign poster. Aesthetically, it's a little too lush for what I would want, but as Kevin points out, that's probably because the poster is designed to most directly target a demographic that grew up when posters in this style were more with-it.

You can't even really call the poster corny on its own terms, I think (that is, without consideration of the fact that McCain the man is about as heroic and noble and wise as the Sheriff of Nottingham, and therefore the poster-- for portraying him as if he were otherwise-- is absurd). But as just a poster of a guy who is running for President, it seems like a perfectly fine poster to me- if you put Hillary or Edwards or Barack on it, but kept it the same otherwise, I don't see what the problem would be.

We are not Iraq's nursemaids

2008-07-23T16:05:00.004-04:00

I saw this comment from a conservative on a blog today, My question is, what is now best for the Iraqi people, and I like my response so much, I decided to post it as a blog-post here:

We should help people when we can, but that does not mean that we have to try to help people we can't actually help.

We've got no more a moral obligation to fix Iraq than we do to transform the Moon or Mars into habitable environments for future generations to escape to if earth gets too messed up- it's too big a task. There are other people we can help a lot more and a lot more easily (like people in America, or people abroad who are impoverished but live in less violent areas than Iraq) and if we were truly acting humanistically, those are the peole we would be helping, not squandering lives and resources in Iraq.

Iraq might benefit from a far more limited presence (that is dedicated solely to getting bad guys when they get violent) but our massive presence there is perhaps even provoking more violence than it is preventing. In any event, even if our presence makes some areas of their country safer, it is a real waste (in terms of how much good it does and how lasting that good is likely to be) compared to the good the money and manpower could be doing somewhere else.

What we should do is prevent Iraq from descending into anarchy if we can and if it's worth the price. We can do that if all it takes is sending out some forces to kick the butts of gangs that get too violent and militant. But if the whole country wants to kill each other, then what it takes at the least to prevent anarchy is to occupy the whole country. If you look at it in terms of what all the money and manpower could be doing elsewhere, it's not worth the cost. That may sound hard at first, but it's not-- it's really benevolent towards people we could be doing a much better job of helping, but we're not since the conservatives are pulling (almost) all the strings, and it's benevolent to all the U.S. troops who are going to get hurt and killed in Iraq, and it's benevolent to those troops' families.

Al-Maliki, Conservatives, and the Iraq War

2008-07-23T10:54:00.012-04:00

UPDATE: One thing that makes me think the conservatives (at a high level of leadership) want to get out of the Iraq war is that current and former military commanders have been admitting (and the news has been getting out that they have been admitting) that they want to get out of the Iraq war, and on to Afghanistan, or that they think the Iraq war is a bust.

If you check out this story, you'll discover the White House was sending out an e-mail to its rank-and-file supporters (ordinary people who signed up to their mailing list) stating that Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki favors Barack Obama's withdrawal plan and wants our military forces to leave Iraq. The more I've thought about this, the more I've come to believe that this was really unlikely a blunder, and to believe that it was done intentionally. I'm now convinced that something you may have seen me speculate on-- that the Republicans could have changed their position on Iraq (on whether the occupation can work out or not-- whether things can change lastingly for the better) sometime over the last year or so, and are just now more and more taking actions to dissolve the political support for occupation among their base (by doing things like advertising the fact that the Iraqis want us to leave) so that the environment will be made comfortable for the leading Republican voices to openly change their minds about it and the policy to be changed. It's very tiresome, even revolting, when the Republicans have up til this point pretended that staying in was the only possible answer and the idea of leaving was close to treasonous. So it makes sense that they would pull this cowardly move, and try to obliquely convince all their friends we should leave before they openly say we should leave. It's a hard "We were wrong" to state to the parents, friends and relatives of all those troops who got hurt and died-- people who the Republicans swore up and down to that we absolutely needed to be in Iraq, and that the liberals were all being a bunch of idiots for saying we shouldn't be.

Something that convinced me more of this was the fact that I'd already concluded that Al-Maliki was a conservative stooge, but he was starting to say that we should leave. It could look out of place at first- why would a conservative stooge say he wanted us to leave if the conservatives wanted us to stay, like they kept saying? But that reminded me of other things I'd seen earlier that make me suspicious that the conservatives at many levels of personnel were becoming very doubtful of the Iraq war, which indeed was not improving (couldn't they see it?). If I had been right about the conservatives changing course on the Iraq war, it would make sense that Al-Maliki would say that we should get out if he was a conservative stooge, because it gives the conservatives the perfect, face-saving excuse to get out: the Iraqis don't want us there, and even the leader of the country is saying it.

It's a similar observation to mine about the global warming debate- conservative/fundamentalist TV pastors, who go up on the soap-box for conservative politics all the time, were suddenly changing "their" positions on global warming. If it really was so clear that global warming was a real problem by this point, wouldn't responsible conservatives come around eventually and want to take that position back? And wouldn't the most obvious, most two-faced shills for the conservatives have a hand in clearing the way for that? I wouldn't necessarily say that every conservative preacher who has been in the news for publicly changing his stance on global warming has to be doing so at the behest of a conservative, political master. But I expect that at least one or some were.

On Monday, the Carpetbagger Report blog featured this sentence:

The right now has a new idea on how to deal with the debate over Iraq policy: go after Maliki as an Iranian stooge. Didn’t conservatives love this guy as recently as last week?

But they linked it up to this link. If you go and follow the link, it's to an article about just one guy (and no one particularly famous) calling Maliki an Iranian stooge. So it's not even some new conservative policy to do this-- rather it's just one guy (who presumably can't by-himself counteract weeks and months of conservative messaging about how they love Maliki).

So that sounds a lot more like a red herring thrown to liberals to throw them off the course of realizing Maliki is a conservative stooge than it sounds like a piece of evidence that contradicts my theory.

This theory still makes sense if the guys who want to change the conservative stance on the Iraq war can't bring McCain into the fold, because he is headstrong and dumb. If that's the case, then they may feel the need to change the rank-and-file conservatives first, so Weathervane John can discern the need to change his position. Or, he may already be in on it, but is just waiting for the voters to change their minds on Iraq before he publicly changes his position.

July 23

2008-07-23T10:11:00.002-04:00

On this date in 1944, Soviet forces made the first liberation of a Holocaust concentration camp (Majdanek). The Soviets would go on to make the second liberation (of Auschwitz, the most notorious camp) as well sometime later, and other camps were liberated after that by other Allied forces. The last two camps to be dissolved were actually destroyed by the Nazis, not liberated by Allied forces, close to the Nazis' surrender.

Obama, Clinton, and the Public

2008-07-23T10:06:00.002-04:00

It's funny that people bought up this whole media line (not to mention, Obama campaign line) than Barack is so different from the Clintons and "politics as usual." Barack talks about change over and over again, and people eat it up, but wasn't Bill elected in his first term on promises of change and not playing the old political game in the same old way?

I feel like even discerning people preferred him over Hillary based mostly just on this talking point. But that was the same exact thing Bill Clinton was saying 16 years ago. So how is that different?

Clinton Won't Be Veep

2008-07-20T20:15:00.003-04:00

This sounds like something I was thinking today.

I guess it's safe to bet by now that Clinton won't be picked by Obama to be his Veep. If he wanted to do it, there is no reason why he wouldn't have done it promptly (i.e., by now), since she's such an obvious choice, and has so many supporters. Hillary and her husband probably are starting to realize this and to feel burned, since it probably seemed like she was a pretty logical choice for Barack, and it probably seemed not a bad bet that he would pick her-- so, they might have been inclined to just keep assuming it would likely-as-not happen, even though a formal decision / announcement might take a long time for whatever reasons (like Barack wanting to appear like he was making a considered decision, and not reflexively bowing to so-called "powerful" or "obvious" choices).

Some people might challenge my premise that Hillary is such an obvious choice. They may look at what the media has to say about it, and contend that because the media says so, that there are actually a lot of reasons not to want Hillary. But I would answer that that is what the media says-- the Republican, taken-over, media. In fact, Hillary Clinton is a great choice, and brings a lot of loyal followers, fund-raising potential and wonky, public-spirited experience to the fold. People may say that Barack wouldn't want to be smothered or out-shone by Hillary-- that the town isn't big enough for the both of them. But Barack has already beaten Hillary in the battle for the nomination, and people already commonly acknowledge that he is a better speaker than her (another piece of evidence about this is the fact that his speaking events have always attracted a much larger number of attendees than hers). How is she going to outshine him? And Bill Clinton is a disgraced, tired old man. Instead of worrying he could be outshone by them, Barack could be getting a power-trip off of outshining the Clintons himself.

Other people may say that a rejection of Hillary is a rejection of "the system" or "the way things are done in Washington." But Hillary was never that "plugged in" or powerful. Those were things just what the Republicans tried to demonize her as. Hillary and Bill were pro-black, pro-working class upstarts. The media is not nearly as hard on George W. Bush, one of the worst and dumbest Presidents in U.S. history, as it has been on Hillary. And someone who is truly "plugged in" and "powerful" in more than a transitory sense does not get regularly ridiculed by a corrupt news media, and does not have her innocent daughter preyed on by them, and does not have them and the government work as hard as possible through very corrupt means to expose her husband's affair. No, Hillary Clinton is not American royalty, and she is not anything like it.

In turn, Barack's refusal to make the easy choice of picking Hillary to be veep is further evidence for my theory that he has been compromised (bullied or threatened by Republicans into following their orders), which I now feel pretty convinced of. Hillary and Bill seem to be out-of-the-loop of the VP selection process, too-- so if Barack was for real on this, why would he keep stringing them and Hillary supporters along for so long? Why wouldn't he be a little more overtly definite about what he's doing? Probably whoever he picks out to be his veep will be someone who secretly harbors Republican loyalties.

Global Warming

2008-07-20T11:16:00.003-04:00

Here's something weird I noticed a little while ago:

I was out at my local supermarket and noticed Complete Idiot's Guide to Global Warming on the magazine rack by the checkout. It wasn't a single copy-- not a random copy that had been left there from another part of the store-- but a bunch of copies, set up for sale at a number of the checkout lines.

This was weird for two reasons:

(1) They don't usually sell Complete Idiot's guides in the magazine racks of the checkouts in that grocery store, on in any grocery store I go to

(2) Although there may be a bigger, book-bound edition of Complete Idiot's Guide to Global Warming, this was a little pamphlet-bound book, like a Reader's Digest.

Conclusion: I think it's propaganda. I didn't check it out to see which side it was propaganda for, for I can't say for sure. But my guess would be that it's written to convince people that global warming is real. Global warming and the Iraq war are two things I think the conservatives have, at a high level of leadership, decided to reverse course about, but are not coming out overtly about the change yet (it's a hard change to overtly make- they've been pushing so hard in the other direction for so long, so they have to be changing their minds out of a belief in the absolute necessity of it- for poor personalities like the Republicans', just biting the bullet and changing their stance in the most definite and assertive way possible must be very tough). The conservatives just want liberals and cities to be the ones to start agitating for work on global warming first, and to adopt trends of using reusable shopping bags at food stores first, so red state hicks can play the role of not being the type who are overly concerned about things like that, but more concerned with competitive sports and being tough-looking SUV drivers.

Circumstantial evidence of this is the fact that conservative pastors / ministers (shameless hacks who work as conservative propaganda pieces, rather than sincerely being concerned with religion, just as much as journalists do) have changed their tune on global warming recently, deciding that their God-given expertise on global warming now requires them to proselytize from the pulpit in the other direction about that issue.

Since all mass-marketed media in America (not just TV news and newspapers, but book publishers) seem to be heavily infiltrated by conservative activists and propagandists, it seems possible that this could be what happened. The biggest shame is that we don't get more done on our own to agitate for change on emissions standards, etc., until the situation is so far gone that the Republicans (i.e., the dumb people) realize that it's a necessity to change our country's practices.

In sum, the pamphlet is the latest evidence that the Republicans are working to undermine the results they already obtained by way of their own misinformation campaign.

The Stalins And Maos Are The Republicans

2008-07-18T19:36:00.007-04:00

Kevin Drums excerpts some words of stupidity from David Brooks, and I respond:

Brooks is probably just trying to get people scared that if it's the Democrats who are responsible for all this broad legislation, they are going to end up implementing some kind of ridiculous, socialist authoritarian command-economy bullshit.

People don't need to worry- that's not how policy is made in America at the federal level nowadays (at least, it's not how Democrats make honest efforts to solve real problems). Instead, federal law-makers can get help from all kinds of think tanks, experts, and academics who can make specific policy suggestions or who can even be retained in teams to study a problem for months and years and come up with the whole diagnosis of a problem and comprehensive suggestions for legislation themselves. It isn't like a bunch of idiots fiddling around with trying to control everything about the country.

If conservatives and underinformed types want to vex about what wen wrong in the Soviet Union, they shold consider that the Soviet Union's leaders were a bunch of idiots, bullies, and bumpkins, a lot more like putting Bush, Rove, and the like in charge of a command economy than like putting modern democrats and the academics they form policy with in absolute control of a nation. The USSR was a bunch of hostile, amateurish people trying to make decisions they weren't qualified to make, but got to make because they were politically loyal. That's 8- or 9/10 of why their country failed so badly, not their communal ideology. The Republicans are trying to do the same thing- award decision-making authority based on political loyalty, not professional qualification. In countries like the USSR, it was the scum and the bullies who rose to the top in everything, not the smart people- the only difference between the USSR then and the USA today being, now it's the scum and the bullies who are rising to the top of a capitalist, not a command, system.

A better analog to look to to see who is more like the communist leaders, Republicans or Democrats, is Iraq. Iraq is a place where the Republicans have had a chance to rebuild a country almost from the ground-up. Even not counting the problems related to violence there, the Republicans have failed miserably (and done a USSR-worthy job). Same with the Katrina rebuilding.

In many ways, too, the Republicans are making our country more and more like a command system all the time, which (at least with this kind of leaders) will produce results more and more like the USSR did over time.

UPDATE: If you want to know the reasons the USSR failed, these are them (and these aren't some kind of subtle, esoteric reasons that somehow caused a gigantic failure of a huge nation, and that you need some kind of special degree to be able to discern; rather all it takes is some knowledge):

1) The USSR was a country that underwent generations' worth of ideological purges (people being sent away from the regular economy and community to slave-labor camps or political prisons, often for political reasons, but most definitely often only on political pretenses but in actuality for arbitrary reasons- like personal dislike, or they stodd in the way of an official's ambitions) of thousands at a time. This means that lots and lots of people who thought for themselves, were capable, and just weren't powerful, selfish or savvy enough to protect themselves from the KGB and the like were basically done away with-- or, they were smart enough to successfully flee these dangers for the west. This is why Russia today is a cesspool of crime where 13 year old girls whore themselves on the streets on Moscow. Smart and capable people do things like discover technologies, solve problems, start cool projects and initiatives, and make things nice. When you take them away, the people you have left by themselves (the ones who can't read) pick up guns and start shooting each other in the head. The easiest modern example of this is Iraq. All the worthwhile people high-tailed it out of there or were assassinated. This is not to say Russia lost all its good, smart people. But the ones who were leftover were far more likely to be less-smart nerds (and therefore less offending, or less capable of fleeing) or evil nerds (less ideologically rebellious, but also less public-spirited in actuality, and therefore poorer contributors to the community).

(2) A somewhat-relate point to the first one: The procedures and norms governing advancement in various party/state organization in the USSR were such that people were able to advance in their jobs more easily by attacking their peers instead of by doing their jobs well.

(3) The USSR was oppressive (and this ruined people's morale as workers and turned them, at least in some respects, against their nation and countrymen).

(4) Oppression motivated capable and intelligent people to flee the USSR just like the ideological purges did.

(5) A command economy does not meet consumer demand as effectively and efficiently as does a limited capitalist economy.

(6) A command economy does not provide as much of a spur to innovation in technology (nor to other kinds of achievement) as does a limited capitalist economy.

(7) Organized labor was not really powerful in the Soviet Union as it was in the Soviets’ promises to their people and to the world; it was more rhetoric than reality. The democratic balance organized labor could have played to the state and communist party leadership organizations did not really exist.

(8) The rest of the world was not so interested in spending money on going to the USSR as tourists, perhaps partly because of Soviet rule. Also, there was no hugely popular USSR-export, like something on the scale of Hollywood movies.

(9) The USSR faced opposition from the West. This is the usual hard-lefty's excuse for why many things suck / sucked in the communist nations, but it's just not a realistic explanation by itself for all the problems those countries had.

The conservatives usually focus on (3) and (4) and talk as if these were the only reasons communism failed (they might throw in (2) to give themselves some credibility in a liberal's eyes, but they really do not refer to it to much, and the reason is that they are not per se against oppression, and would like to do it to the extent they can get away with it themselves) however, as you can see, there are plenty of other reasons why that nation came apart.

An inspiring story

2008-07-15T21:26:00.002-04:00

The following is an excerpt from an interesting book I am reading, Stasi, by John O. Koehler, about how the communist government of East Germany politically-policed and otherwise oppressed the people of that country.

As you read it, please keep in mind that the people of these Eastern Block communist countries knew that their political beliefs were being strictly monitored and controlled by the communist governments that were then in power, that they were constantly spied on by secret police forces and by their own neighbors, friends, and relatives, and that they were often spirited away to be interrogated (and ultimately even to be sent to hard-labor camps and prisons) on the merest suspicion of being critical of the government or desiring to flee the country (also the people of these countries were oppressed in many other ways):

[O]n May 5, [1953,] the SED [the communist organization that then ruled East Germany] celebrated the 135th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx by increasing work quotas for industrial plants. The city of Chemnitz was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt and the Order of Karl Marx was created as [East Germany’s] highest award. The party seemed to be enjoying a period of unity and political tranquility. It lasted [only two weeks]. Mielke [a high-ranking leader of the Stasi-- East Germany’s Gestapo-like secret political police force] had been reporting secretly that a group of [communist] party officials were plotting against the leadership. This resulted in more expulsions from [high-ranking leadership organizations].

Discontent among the [industrial] workers over increased work norms without corresponding wage hikes reached the breaking point June 16, 1953, at Stalinallee in Berlin. Probably encouraged by Stalin’s death [a few months earlier], nearly a hundred workers gathered for a protest meeting before starting work. Word spread rapidly to other nearby construction sites, and soon several hundred men and women marched to the House of Ministries, the government [building] that once housed Hermann Göring’s Nazi aviation [department]. They chanted in protest for five hours until [an official] decided to speak to them. His cajoling was met with jeers, and he retreated into the heavily guarded building. People’s police riot units were called out of their barracks but made no move to break up the demonstrations. The protesters returned to Stalinallee, and a general strike [that is, a strike of all workers no matter what industry they belonged to] was called. the following day, some 100,000 protesters marched through East Berlin; about 400,000 took to the streets in other towns. Their demands were everywhere the same: free and secret elections.

The American radio station in West Berlin (RIAS) and several West German stations reported the protest marches and the plans for a general strike. These broadcasts were picked up throughout the Soviet zone, and 267,000 workers of major state-owned plants in 304 cities and towns spontaneously went on strike. In 24 towns, [enraged townspeople] stormed prisons and freed between 2,000 and 3,000 inmates [the communist governments imprisoned a lot of people for alleged political disloyalty, so perhaps these townspeople were trying to free friends and relatives they felt were basically kidnapped, rather than just trying to free ordinary criminals].

Mielke was nowhere to be seen in public, but his secret police agents and the Vopo [another communist police force in East Germany] were out en masse, and bloody street battles erupted. Hundreds of policemen defected to the side of the workers, police stations were overrun, and government offices were sacked. The leadership had already retreated to its residences in the heavily guarded compound in the Pankow district of East Berlin. At 1 P.M. the Soviet commandant for Berlin, Major P. K. Dibrova, a sixty-year-old [secret political policeman] who had never seen wartime combat, declared martial law. Stasi agents and people’s policemen opened fire. Drumhead courts handed down death sentences that were carried out on the spot. The rioting continued, and by late afternoon Soviet tanks accompanied by infantry and MVD troops had rolled into East Berlin and other major cities in the Soviet zone. This made the people even angrier. At Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, which bordered the American sector, [angry] protesters ignored machine gun fire and the menacing barrels of tank guns. They ripped cobblestones from the streets and hurled them at the tanks.

The [] use of Soviet power—two armored divisions—against the protesters in 121 major cities and small towns broke the back of the revolt within twenty-four hours. By nightfall June 18, relative calm had been restored in the Soviet zone, and Stasi flying squads swept through the cities. Provisional prison camps were set up to hold the thousands of Stasi victims. Nearly 1,500 persons were sentenced in secret trials to long prison terms.

On June 24, Mielke issued a terse announcement that one Stasi officer, nineteen demonstrators, and two bystanders had been killed during the uprising. He did not say how many were victims of official lynching. The numbers of wounded were given as 191 policemen, 126 demonstrators, and 61 bystanders. [But it is conceivable that the officially-released number of dead and wounded inflated the numbers of killed and wounded bystanders and demonstrators, and under-reported the numbers of killed and wounded Stasi agents and police officers in order to persuade the demonstrators to believe they had not accomplished much damage by their uprising.]”

The edits in brackets were made by me primarily because the author used a little too much scholarly-sounding language for the passage to be easy for most people to read as an excerpt.

This passage is very inspiring to me (as I hope it is to all of you) especially as to what kind of courage people can show and what people can accomplish even when very elaborate and far-reaching methods have been employed to control their opinions and behavior. When people have learned the lessons of people-power, it is very hard for any kind of fascists- even those disguised as populists- to totally oppress the people without more or less having a rough ride of it. And we don’t have to wait for people to set up camps to house political prisoners or to make thinking for yourself a crime in order to start exercising our people-power and to show that we want real freedom, and not just an impostor of it, in this country. It doesn’t take tearing up paving-stones and demonstrating in the street to do it, although I’d say those are definitely the right things to do in certain situations. There is an infinite array of actions that can effectively fight the kind of oppression we don’t want to see in our country and must always be on guard against.

Solidarity!

A Final Word on MK ULTRA

2008-07-15T04:25:00.002-04:00

Referring to my earlier post:

Since the CIA in the '50s, '60s and '70s must have known about science, their actions in MK ULTRA are, if we give them the benefit of the doubt, puzzling. Why didn't they just rely solely on reputable scientists in relevant fields who were vetted, sworn to secrecy, and left to research the drugs in a manner they determined would be best and most efficient, with CIA approval and oversight?

When we think about it, there can only be a couple of explanations for the CIA's scuzzy conduct in MK ULTRA, and they are fairly straightforward:

(1) The CIA was disdainful of science, and was hesitant to consult scientists;

(2) The CIA agents wanted to go through a fantasy over and over again (maybe inspired by spy movies and TV shows) of picking people out, lowering their guard, surreptitiously slipping them a disabling drug like James Bond does, and then messing with them. Basically they were playing spy and picking on people. Certainly the motives of the shoddy, strange scientists the CIA did eventually pick out to help them seem about as bad.

Keep on rockin' in the free world

2008-07-15T02:27:00.005-04:00

(This is something I wrote in a comment on something else, but I'm going to put it here as its own post because it's important to say on its own):

If you follow mainstream media and politics (like, for example, if you read the Media Matters website) then you'll be familiar with the fact that we are turning into a nation with a controlled media. Plenty of news stories don't make it to the biggest news outlets, hosts who interview guests on TV talk shows are on a mission to illegitimately discredit the liberal/Democratic guests, the nationally televised presidential debates are rigged (so that the questions that get asked are stupid and focus on personal trivia about candidates that give people petty reasons to vote against Democrats instead of focusing on policy questions that will inform the public and let them see that voting for Democrats is in their best interest), talk show panels regularly get stacked with conservative guests instead of liberals and Democrats, etc. These are all standard practices of almost every nationally syndicated TV program with some news content (Keith Olbermann, 60 Minutes, and the Comedy Central comedies are the exceptions, but I believe they are all somewhat effected by the problem as well). So the mainstream media has very clearly been blackmailed, intimidated, bought off, or infiltrated (my guess if that there is a lot of conservative infiltration, and that the other factors (especially intimidation) are present to a smaller extent), and in that case it's not unlikely or unreasonable at all to think that The New Yorker printed a racist cover intending to hurt Barack.

Of course, the mainstream media does not report on the fact that its content (especially its news content) is currently right on the brink of the most prejudiced and biased that content can possibly be towards the right-wing point of view without everyone in the public openly realizing that we have a controlled media.