Media Grouch

Aftermath

2010-11-05T07:55:00.001-07:00

I am not really depressed. I am not really angry. At least, not at the election--with the white noise on the right, sure, but.... I don't know.... Maybe it's becuase the candidates *I* voted for were elected, and maybe it's because the candidates in Cali whom I sent money to were elected. Those are the only ones I was invested in. Maybe it's becuase I think the the president dserved to get thumped for being such a piss-poor leader.

Mostly it's because THE GIANTS WON THE WORLD SERIES!!!!!!!!!!!!

ELECTION DAY

2010-11-02T05:17:00.001-07:00

Well, it looks like the democrats are lining up for a good old ass whipping. It's like a long line of donkeys bending over on Folsom Street ready to take it.

I went to John Stewart's rally and then got into a huge argument over it with my friend Hugh on Facebook. He saw it as a clever ploy to blunt liberal losses at the polls by suing for peace. I mentioned this was out of Sun Tsu and he agreed, so I was gleeful when Stewart refernced Sun Tsu on his show last night.

Stewart's rally was actually a continuation of his normal critique of the media. His message was, basically, stop watching cable news. He presented both FOX and MSNBC as spreading fear and therefore making it harder to work out our problems. No surprise that FOX and MSNBC both hated it. Olberman went batsh*t on his twitter feed. He didn't like being lumped in with Bill O'Reily. I love MSNBC and watch it all the time, but I do so because it is stridently liberal. It is never lost on me that when Olberman criticizes O'Reily for how he uses the media as opposed to the content of what he is saying it is the pot calling the kettle black. MSNBC promotes a specific liberal agenda. They stake out a narrative that is nearly always incomplete. Olberman in particular treats the opposition as a bunch of raving idiots (the reason I prefer Maddow is that she's a thinker and, while she is a liberal, she actually discusses and debates people as opposed to just ranting about them). Olberman is the Glen Beck of the left, and he should get used to it. It's why I watch him.

But I'm writing because today is election day. Hugh and I have been having long arguments on Facebook over conservatism versus liberalism, and it has been helpful in that it has clarified much of my thinking and, sorry Hugh, strengthened my resolve. When you look at all this president and this congress has accomplished--I say for the good--it amazes me that they are in any kind of trouble. largest tax cut in history, lowered the deficit, health care reform, equal pay, veterans benefits, children's health care, and oh yeah staving off depression. The list is long and no matter how much the republicans lie about it the truth is that the country is better of with Democrats in charge.

Cali debate

2010-09-02T06:43:00.000-07:00

I've been saying all along that Carly Fiorina can't win election during a recession. She is in a double blind. She runs as a pragmatic pro-business candidate who can bring jobs to California as a US Senator due to her strong business background. But as the head of HP she outsourced thousands of jobs to Asia and then got fired for poor stock performance, making her neither good for workers nor good at business.

No surprise then that Senator Boxer, whose name is descriptive, came at her with both fists in their only scheduled debate last night, hitting her on both jobs and her own job performance at HP. Fiorina painted Boxer as a typical job killing liberal, but Boxer had Fiorina on the ropes. Womens groups, gay rights groups, and unions should mobilize for Boxer, but with unemployment at 12% it is unlikely voters will send to Washingotn someone who sent so many of their jobs to China and India.

On BP, Tea Parties, and the Obnoxious Right

2010-07-23T20:02:00.000-07:00

The right is obnoxious. We all know this. If the left is annoying in its whiny self righteousness (and let's admit it, sometimes we are), the right is just f*ing obnoxious. And I'm not talking about the talking heads who get paid to be obnoxious. I'm talking about the base.

Take the Tea Party for example. Here's a group of people that really don't know what they want other than lower taxes. They're part of an old American tradition of "I've got mine, now screw you" ethics. The big thing they are currently railing against is the extension of unemployment benefits that President Obama signed into law today. To them helping people continue to make their truck payments so they can keep looking for work makes people lazy. They believe in the boot-strap theory of economics. They think that people on unemployment stop looking for work. In fact, while the average time spent on unemployment is the highest it's been since 1948 at 19.7 months, that still means that most people do not fall under the category of "long-term unemployed." In other words it's a lie that people on unemployment stop looking for work, in fact they are so desperate for work that statistics show that they take jobs at lower pay than the jobs they lost.

In other words, the stuff the conservatives say about unemployment is a lie.

The Tea Baggers also like to complain about the so-called Wall Street Bailout, or TARP funding. They like to frame it as a big tax-payer gift to a bunch of rich fat-cats, one which propped up failing businesses at the expense of regular folks. They don't like to be reminded that a collapse of the financial system, which TARP prevented, would have led to total financial melt-down and plunged us into a second great depression. They really don't like to be reminded that unemployment would likely have topped 20% without the TARP money. But what they most conveniently forget is that most of the TARP money has been paid back already.

The list of things they are either ignorant of or just plain lie about goes on and on. They dispute global warming because science is so, well, theoretical. They don't like spending on things like roads and infrastructure because who needs roads? They think states should be free make all their own rules, including one supposes rules about slavery, if you follow their logic. Of their standard bearers, Rand Paul thinks the Civil Rights Act was bad legislation and Sarah Palin thinks you can simply wish your way to economic growth. They don't believe in universal health care because, apparently, the sick should heal themselves (boot-strap health care). And they all swear by the failed supply side economic ideas that caused the mess we are now in. What it all comes down to is they don't want to pay for anything. Or rather, they don't want to pay for anything for anyone else. God forbid you should try to touch their Medicare or social security.

What they are is greedy. There's no news in this. They are proud of it. They trumpet self interest as a virtue. They essentially echo Boesky (from whom Gekko stole it) that greed is good. It should be no surprise that they don't want to pay for anything for anybody but they want services to come to them. They want to pursue the policies of Ronald Regan and the Bushes, whom you will recall wracked up record deficits and de-regulated business to the point that it was able to run wild until collapsing and dragging the rest of us down with it. They want to repeat every terrible mistake of the last thirty years in the name of some selfish ideology designed solely to make rich people richer and poor people poorer and destroy the middle class (a creation, lets not forget, of the liberal policies of FDR). Many of them like to point to the 1870s as the last era of freedom in the United States, but do we really want to return to an era of horrible poverty, tenements, unchecked disease and hunger, rancid foods, environmental destruction, child labor, and robber barons running the world? That is their dream. In fact, that is what 25 years of reganomics eventually gave us: Enron, BP, Goldman Sachs, AIG, and Katrina. And that is what they want for our country. They are crying foul now because we are actually trying to correct the mistakes of that era, rein in business and heal the environment. And they want it stopped. They want to take the country back (from whom is an interesting question).

So anytime you see a candidate who is supported by the tea party, remember: down that path lies ruin, so vote for the other guy.

Walt Kelley Wept

2010-06-29T08:56:00.001-07:00

Well, Byrd is dead, and we will no longer be subjected to the undignified—or heroic, depending upon your perspective—spectacle of him be wheeled out onto the floor whenever the Democrats needed 60 votes. Like Thurmond and Kennedy, Byrd was what we picture a senator to be. We could easily see byrd in a toga (a long, tasteful one) speaking in the senate in Rome: an old man who appears wise, tackling with severity the problems facing the republic. That he was once a member of the Klan is usually brushed under the table, as was his participation in the filibuster against the Civil Rights Act. In the end he endorsed Barak Obama for president, and much had been forgiven. He was the picture of the gentleman statesman, and Hollywood should mourn his loss more than any. Well, except maybe the coal industry.

No one is surprised that MacDonald beat the City of Chicago. I’m a bit disappointed that it was a typical 5-4 decision, as much as I am that Bryer is suddenly a champion of states’ rights. But enough storage capacity has been devoted to the 2nd amendment for the time being for me to write about something that was a fait accompli, and which I wrote about when Helller was decided.

At the time of his death last week my dad was running for a seat on the Sacramento City District school board. I don’t know if he had filed yet, but he had a “friends of” account with $418 in it. I have no clue what to do about that. It’s a small matter, but campaign finance laws are tricky at any level.

A thought

2010-06-26T07:48:00.000-07:00

Due to the passing of my father I have been more quiet than usual on this blog. I still don't have much to say, except this:

For a long while now I've been comparing President Obama to President Carter, as someone who is very competent but who does not appear presidential enough in a crisis. Honestly, I'd rather have him at the helm right now than McCain with everything going on. Or either Bush. I've compared the oil spill to the Iran Hostage Crisis. I was interested to note that the New York Post picked up on that theme, though not in the way that I did. They see it as demonstrating the President's incompetence as the Hostage Crisis did Carters. I don't agree that Carter acted incompetently in the hostage crisis. I think he acted deliberately and thoughtfully, with the right amount of diplomacy, and that if the helicopters hadn't crashed in the desert that Regan never would have been president and we might not have this insane Conservative movement. No, as I've said before, to me the spill is like the hostage crisis because it dominates the news cycle by going on so long, and threatens to undermine anything else the president does.

But with the firing of General McChrystal, it is safe right now to compare Obama to Truman. He appeared completely Presidential in a surprising way. He exerted his authority over the military. He also deflected the news coverage away from the oil spill for awhile.

Now, perhaps he should nationalize BP and send the Navy in to stop the leak....

The Curse of Competency

2010-06-10T05:25:00.000-07:00

It's not really a condemnation, more of a sad truth, but Barak Obam looks more and more like Jimmy Carter every day. Carter may have been the best president we had in terms of actually running the country and doing stuff in the last forty years. He was engaged, competent, intelligent, thoughtful, and he got things done. He was dealt a terrible hand and he never connected with the American People, so they kicked him out in favor of a cowboy who was disengaged, not particularly competent, but was great on camera and looked good in a crisis. Carter was destroyed by the Iran hostage crisis. I often tell my students that they have no idea what the hostage crisis was like. It was on TV every night for 444 days. It dominated the news. There was no other story. The people wanted action--action movie James Bond type of action. They wanted a president who was a hero, and instead they got a president who was a thinker. It was actually probably better to have Carter in that situation than Ford or Regan, but when he deliberated all most people saw was a weak-willed liberal who couldn't get anything done. If they had sent more helicopters to the desert,or if the Navy hadn't washed the Army helicopters with sea-water, Regan might never have been president. But the rescue failed and we have been in this mess ever since.

And now we have Barak Obama. I think he's a great president. He has advanced the most far reaching progressive agenda since LBJ. He has enacted health care reform, new financial regulations, and launched a stimulus package that helped save the economy. Thank God he is our president right now. And honestly, I don't think he can do any more about the BP oil rig than he is already doing. But it is going on forever, and he is not connecting with the people, and that could spell his doom.

I think the democrats will do better in the mid-terms than people think they will. The republicans have been nominating some total whackos in the Sarah Palin mold, and I still say all the Democrats have to do is show those tapes of the republicans chanting "Drill, baby drill!" over and over again and they will do just fine. Add to that that they have found an effective formula for attacking, linking them to outsourcing of jobs, and I think the Dems will do fine.

But Obama is looking more and more like a one-term president. If Sarah Palin gets the nomination he will win, but if it's someone in the Mitt Romeny mold he is probably headed for the lecture circuit.

Thank You, Texas Board of Ed...

2010-05-22T10:21:00.001-07:00

For demonstrating so clearly why tenure is so important.

The Texas Board of Ed has voted to turn social studies textbooks into conservative propaganda fliers. Under the new guidelines, students will be required to learn about the conservative revolution of the 80s but not about the counter-culture revolution of the 60s. Ronald Regan will be elevated to near God-like status but Ted Kennedy will be more or less absent from the discussion. Joseph McCarthy is to be rehabilitated. Studetns are to learn, basically, that conservativism is great and liberals are a bunch of terrorist loving whiners.

Not only is it bad policy. Not only does it border on fascism. It is also the best argument in favor tenure we could have. This is why tenure is important--because politicians, sometimes on the right and let's face it sometimes on the left, are constantly trying to politicize education.And teachers are in their cross-hairs.

I would not want to be a teacher in Texas right now, required to teach things which are of such dubious educational value, ideas that are so biased and (in some cases) "facts" that are just flat out wrong. Hell, I'm not talking about being a liberal teacher in Texas, I'm talking about being a moderate or even a conservative and being told by a bunch of politicians with an obvious agenda what I should and should not be teaching students. Woe unto she who decides to tell her students the truth about Joe McCarthy, or that Regan violated international law and established the small government and de-regulation movements that led to the current financial crisis, the reaction to Hurricane Katrina, and the Gulf oil spill. Armed with nothing but the truth in the face of the Texas School Board, I'd be afraid for my job.

The fascists under Mussolini, the Nazis under Hitler, the Soviets under Stalin, the Cubans under Castro, and the Red Chinese under Chairman Mao all re-wrote textbooks so that they would conform to their narrow political ideology, turning education into indoctrination. Now the Texas Board of Education has done the same.

For shame!

(cross posted to Livejournal)

People Are Crazy

2010-05-04T16:22:00.000-07:00

Here's a truth about the internet: it allows people to interact with the news. Here's another truth: those who do so are crazy. More than 90% of the comments on any news story will be from people who complain about it. The internet is a big license to whine. It fuels a culture of complainers. I used to fall into the trap of trying to post an intelligent comment on a news story, but not any more. It's impossible, because no matter what your political persuasion, a lot of people will read your comment and decide that you are the anti-Christ, flame you, and on occasion threaten you. This is true if you are liberal, conservative, or moderate. It doesn't matter if your posting about politics, crime, or sports. The people who respond to a news story, or to comments about a news story, will nearly always be certified nut jobs with an ax to grind. This not true, incidentally, of most blogs. Amateur blogs, and even some professional blogs, tend to be read by people who already agree with the opinions of the blogger.

Or they get read by their mothers.

But not news blogs: so what's got me riled up today is this story from my favorite news site, www.sfgate.com, the website of the San Francisco Chronicle. Now, right away I can here my Jersey friends starting to grumble, and in this case they are right. While San Francisco is still home to me, and while I fit in politically there better than almost anywhere else (I happily voted for Nancy Pelosi every election she ran in and would do so again if I still lived there), there is one issue--animal rights--where I am not in sync with my liberal brethren around the bay. Apparently, cops in Oakland cornered a button buck that was roaming through an East Oakland neighborhood and, after animal control officers said they couldn't do anything about it, shot the deer seven times, killing it. Naturally, the whack jobs in Oakland are treating this deer like he was Amadou Diallo or something. They are talking about excessive force, out of control cops, etc. The big question is "couldn't the cops have done something else?" And this isn't just the PETA nazis. This is regular people who probably eat at McDonalds and wouldn't think twice about serving ribs at a back yard barbecue.

Ok. Shooting a deer in a suburban neighborhood in front of children, not really a good idea. If they had had more experience with this type of thing they might have trnaqued it and taken it away (the Oakland Zoo was right near by, and even if Animal Control couldn't handle it very likely the zoo had a dart gun and someone who knew how to use it). But they don't have that kind of experience. The cops saw a public safety hazard and they did something about it. End of story.

The real problem here, as with most issues involving animals and people, is Disney. People think animals are people. People think animals are rational. People think deer behave just like Bambi does. The headline on the story was "Oaklan Police Shase and Gun Down Bambi." What more proof do you need that Disney is responsible for this stupid attitude? Sure the children were traumatized, but whose fault is that? Is it the fault of the cops who shot down a poor defenseless animal? Or is it the fault of parents who have never taught their children about nature--that all life ends in death, that all nature can be summed up in the verb "to eat", and that animals are not people.

Had this happened in Fallon Nevada, or the U.P., or West Texas, nobody would have thought twice. If this had happened in 1960 instead of 2010, nobody would have blinked. But people today are crazy. They think animals are people.

One of the most memorable lines ever!

2010-04-27T11:27:00.001-07:00

Military commanders have provided us with among the most memorable quotes ever, from "Vini, vidi, vici" to "Nuts." Add to that a statment by General Stanley McCrystal, commander of the US and NATO forces in Afganistan. As reported by the New York Times, General McCrystal was presented with an amazingly busy powerpoint slide meant to demonstrate the complexity of our Afgan strategy. Upon seeing it he is reported to have said "when we can understand that slide we will have won the war."

A brief word about Football

2010-04-22T08:39:00.001-07:00

Ben Rothlesberger will be playing for the Oakland Raiders next season. No, it's not a scoop, just a prediction, but you heard it here first. Pittsburgh has traded to get Byron Leftwich back because Rothlesberger will be sitting for six games this season (at the moment). But, really Rothlesberger is toxic. The two rings are great, but now they've got them and can move on. Rothlesberger is unlikely to reform. He might end up in jail soon for his rather neolithic way of interacting with women. Most football teams need great chemistry, they need character--especially from their quarterback. I mean, you expect this type of thing from a linebacker once in awhile, but not your general. No, the steelers are much better of without Rothlesberger at the helm. He will be traded.

Which brings us to the Raiders. The Raiders need a type of chemistry too, but theirs is more the motorcycle gang kind. They are hoodlums and always have been. Al Davis won three Superbowls using other teams castoffs and screwups. Rothlesberger, with an uncontrollable image and possible jail time, is a perfect fit for Davis' philosophy. They have the 8th pick in the first round and the 7th pick in the second, (though they might trade up), and they can probably deal those two picks to Pittsburgh and Big Ben will be heading to the Bay Area. Where he will win another Superbowl in three years, providing he stays out of jail.

Either that or the Raiders will take Tebow.

The Radical Gun Nut Speaks

2010-04-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

Ok: off comes the liberal intellectual hat, on goes the radical gun nut hat. Just for a moment of two.

I love Maddow. I do. I think that having a real intellectual, and an entertaining one at that (entertaining Ph.D.s are few and far between, and I’m speaking as an actor with a Ph.D.) on TV is one of the great accomplishments of the 21st Century—almost as great as having a real intellectual in the White House. Not only that, but she has a queer sensibility that I have always loved living as close as I do to Chelsea and Park Slope, and coming from San Francisco and Santa Cruz back in the day.

But when Maddow and my other liberal colleagues start going after the 2nd Amendment it always bothers me. I mean, really: how can they be so strident in their defense of the 1st amendment and so dismissive—even hostile—to the 2nd? Both are essential to liberty—or, if you wish, both of them are enshrined in the same document, the Bill of Rights, and get their soul authority from the same source, the Constitution. As is often pointed out, the founding fathers believed that guns were essential to liberty (though most of the quotes on the subject attributed to them that are floating around on the internet are bogus).

Maddow is raising the alarm about militia units and anti-government extremism, and perhaps rightly so. There are certainly anti-government extremists out there, often forming into so-called “militias”, whether out of racism directed at our president, or else a populist mistrust of government and banking institutions, or simply out of fear that their rights will be taken away by a zealous government out to protect itself from its citizens or its citizens from themselves. These movements absolutely represent a threat to the Union and to the rule of law. The example of Timothy McVeigh, which she is always citing, is a frightening warning to be sure.

But in raising these alarms Maddow and others are doing several things. First of all they are doing what they often justly excoriate Fox News for: trying to motivate people through fear (this is also, by the way, the philosophy behind terrorism). She goes on screaming about the dangers of “anti-government extremists” as though they were breathing down our collective neck, as alarmist as Chicken Little (though, let’s admit, she could be Cassandra, who after all was right—but then so could Glen Beck). Secondly, she is totally dismissive of the simple fact that the militia movement has a legal basis in the constitution, and that the free exercise of the right to keep and bear arms, the right to association, and other rights protect militia activities as much as the 1st amendment protects free speech. But most importantly, and worse, in a way she proves the militias correct. By sounding the alarms against the militias she is proving to them that liberal intellectuals like her (and like me) want to enslave them, take away their guns, and perhaps even declare martial law and make President Obama a dictator. And it goes further. Tongith she once again mocked gun owners who wear their guns in public to political rallies, the "open carry movement". By mocking the open carry movement she is proving not only to those already in it but to moderates who might not have cared much, that the movement is indeed necessary. As often as people talk about limiting gun rights it becomes more necessary to exercise them.

I wonder if she has thought through the implications of her position. I suspect that she would say that these groups are dangerous and need to be investigated as possible threats to the government and citizens of the United States of America. But would she also condemn, as many liberals often do, the investigation and infiltration of the anti-war movement during the sixties and seventies? I suspect that the FBI is investigating and even infiltrating the Tea Party movement, and perhaps they should. But what is the difference, really, between investigating the strident anti-government Tea Party movement and the strident anti-government Students for a Democratic Society? Or the Black Panthers? How about the terrorist Weather Underground?

Really, there’s no difference where the Tea Partiers and the SDS are concerned (the original SDS from the 60s, not the new one). Both represent or represented a philosophical and perhaps even a physical danger to the government of the United States by challenging the government’s legitimacy and by fomenting unrest. Both run in the same circles as extremely violent terrorist groups, can help to foster them, or at least represent recruiting opportunities for them—the various militias in the case of the Tea Party, the Weather Underground and (later) SLA in the case of SDS and the anti-war movement. There is, in fact, little difference between the radicalism of the sixties and early seventies and the reactionism of today.

And, as a long time admirer of Huey Newton’s—at least on the subject of gun rights—I have to ask, what is really the difference between the open carry movement coming armed to the edge of Washington D.C. and the Black Panther’s showing up armed at the California State Capital, an action which led to many of the Golden State’s current gun laws? (Don’t want to go there? Raise to many racial flags? Don’t want to admit that the sight of a black man with a gun might be as frightening as, or even more frightening than, the sight of a white man with a gun? Ok, we can let that one pass). But really, what’s the difference? Not a damn thing, that’s what. Yet the left romanticizes the Panthers and mocks and vilifies the open carry movement. Hypocrisy, anyone?

So should the FBI be infiltrating the Tea Party? The militias? And if so was it wrong for the FBI to infiltrate the Black Panthers or the Weather Underground in the sixties and seventies? How about the SDS or other anti-war groups?

Goose and gander and all that.

Liz Cheney, Fascist

2010-03-06T12:54:00.000-08:00

Nope, at this point I have no qualms about calling LIz Cheney a fascist. Nor do I worry that I am being to strident and bringing down the tone of the conversation. No, at times we have to speak truth to power and the truth is that some of the leaders of the conservative movement are clearly fascists and that Liz Cheney is one of them. I'm not speaking in the general way that Hunter Thompson did when he labeled anything politically conservative as either fascist or Nazi (which was just a German brand of fascism after all). I am speaking in the specific: a political ideology that is extremely nationalistic and authoritarian and which seeks to organize the government on corporatist grounds, one which bullies the opposition and governs through intimidation and fear. Fascism is the absurd extreme of conservativism (just as communism is the absurd extreme of liberalsim). And Liz Cheney is a fascist.

In case there was any doubt, read how she has labeled lawyers who helped to represent terrorism suspects and who now work for the justice department as "The Al Queda Seven" and has suggested that they are terrorist sympathizers. She asks if they share our values (she certainly does not share mine--that is my values on justice and the constitution, which she seems not to value at all). In this nation everyone has a right to legal representation. Condemning a lawyer solely because of his or her client list is wrong. It has a chilling effect on our legal system. Liz Cheney is so far off on this that several conservative pundits and lawyers are condemning her statements. One even compared her to McCarthy and said that Cheney might be worse. There is little difference between McCarthy trying to intimidate people into giving up their communist associates and Liz Cheney trying to intimidate people because they had the temerity to offer counsel to someone who needed it. WHen it comes right down to it what we are talking about is guilt by association, being guilty simply because you have associated with communists or with terrorists or with gays or with jews. Hell, in this case we are not even talking about a friendly or a political association. We are talking about lawyers representing clients!!

People have got to stand up to these people and say that, yes, while you have the right to express your opinion, what you have said is fascistic. It is vile and evil and un-American. It could have come right off the pen of Josef Goebles. It is nationalist bullying in an attempt to intimidate political opposition from a reactionary right winger who advocates an authoritarian domestic policy and a belligerent foreign policy.

And that makes you, Liz Cheney, a fascist.

An old article from Slate

2010-03-04T13:06:00.000-08:00

I wrote about this at the time of the election, but I didn't see a lot of coverage of it then. It was too much of a kumbaya moment, I guess. But I somehow missed this article in Slate, demonstrating not only that Obama won while losing a majority of the white vote, but also noting that, since Johnson--and the passage of the Civil Rights Act--NO democrat has won a majority of the White vote.

Can it really be that simple? Can the real reason the republicans have stayed in power all these years and dominated politics in America for so long have been that the Republicans are the party of white people and the Democrats are the party of black people? Maybe: after all, from the civil war onward, wasn't exactly the opposite true?

But then what does it say about us as a people? Is it that whites live in the suburbs and blacks in the cities? Is it that democrats have bought off the black vote with Welfare and affirmative action? Is it that Republicans have alientated blacks and atracted whites through racist policies or subtle racist statements? Does it really just come down to the fact that the progressive agenda favors black people and not whites (when you boost one group of people up you must out of necessity take things away from another). Is it that white America really is racist? It's not an easy question to ask, let alone answer. I don't think, for instance, that the tea party movement is racist per se, but these statistics make me wonder. When they say they want to take back their country, fro whom do they wish to take it back? Demographics show that whether or not it is their intent to say it, they would be taking it back from black people, and I don't just mean the president. I mean the 96%of the black electorate that voted for him.

More on Health Care

2010-03-02T17:41:00.000-08:00

Last week I sparked a bit of a debate on Facebook when I said I was proud of my president for the way he acted at the health care summit. My conservative friends got pretty irate in their comments to me. I still feel that way. After thinking about it for a week I came up with this as the true reason:

He finally showed some balls.

He was cordial and he made a true effort at bi-partisanship, but he did not back down on his central premise. It is a premise, by the way, with which I agree: that government and not the market must regulate health care. Non-regulation means that decisons will be made primaily based on a profit motive and not on the best interests of patients. This is unacceptable. Republicans, always weary of any government involvement in anything but the military, adamentaly oppose government regulation of health care. This, not death panals or abortion or even cost, is the real issue because it is fundamental. It is an example of incompatible world views. It is paradigmatic. (indeed, it is the true litmus test of conservativism: if you distrust big government then you are a conservative, it's really that simple).

The obvious response is to ask how can you believe that the government is capable of running the military, the biggest government program in the world, but incapable of running anything else? but I digress.

Our president--my president--held firm. He acknowledged that this was a tripping point but one from which he would not back down. Furthermore, noting that the democrattic plan owuld cover and additional 30 million people but the Republican plan would cover only an additional 3 million, said for the first time that covering everybody was the end goal of reform. I've been waiting for him to say that for a year now!

And the Republicans? Well, when the president offered to include four of their ideas in his revised plan today, they rebuffed him again--showing themselves to be nothing more than nay-sayers, whose only solution is to block wahtever the preisdent does in an effort to make him look bad.

Statemen one and all.

The Health Care Posturing

2010-02-25T17:03:00.003-08:00

Right now I am very proud of my president, perhaps for the first time since he took office.

Sports on Christopher Hitchens

2010-02-14T17:23:00.000-08:00

So my good friend Ken Nahigian, renowned Atheist and rabble rouser with whom I usually agree, sent me a copy of a Newsweek article by Christopher Hitchens slamming sports. (Link)

My response is below:
**********

Yo, Ken!

What bullshit! I've always considered Christopher Hitchens to be an asshole, a petty little whiner, and a rabid ideologue with nothing at all worth listening to to say, and he has proved it yet again.

Of course, and I don't expect atheists like you and Hitchens to value this, but one of my drama professors used to say that watching Jerry Rice catch a pass, like looking at a Michaelangello sculpture, was so sublime that if it didn't show you the face of God it pointed you in that direction. Ok, heavy handed. So how's this instead: from a humanist point of view, just like a Michaelangello sculpture, watching Jerry Rice catch a pass is so sublime that it shows how close man can come to perfection and pure beauty.

Me, I know exactly the etymology of the word "fan" and am proud to call myself one. For every stupid thing in this article I can point to good things about sports--not the least of which is the fact that it is directly responsible for my good life, because without it my dad would never have gone to Idaho on a football scholarship, never become a high school teacher and principal positively affecting thousands of lives, and never have been able to raise me in a nice house in Sacramento and send *me* to college and instill in me the idea that education is valuable. Thank you, college football!

And Christopher Hitchens can kiss my ass.

California Gets it Right

2010-02-01T06:06:00.001-08:00

I've often argued that the biggest problem with getting same-sex marriage legalized is the issue of religious freedom. The state has no business forcing churches to solemnize or recognize marriages that violate the tenants of their faith. I've argued that legal and religious marriage should be completely separate, that religious marriage should have no legal standing and that civil marriage should require no recognition in church, as it is in France (my cousin got married twice on the same day, first by the Bishop and then by the mayor, when he married his lovely French bride).

Proposed legislation in California would go a different but equally sane route. It would specifically allow priests to refuse to perform a marriage ceremony on religious grounds and would guarantee that the tax exempt status of churches would not be affected by not recognizing same-sex marriage. The theory behind the California law is that there are two types of marriage that are usually combined, civil and religious. The marriage license, which makes a marriage legal, is a civil document, no matter who performs the ceremony and signs it.

A lot of church groups, including many of those who supported Proposition 8, which made gay marriage illegal in California, support the new legislation. It could go a long way toward solving the problem. In normally politically insane California they are actually getting something right!

Anti-sprot hype

2010-01-31T14:40:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's probowl day and nobody seems to notice, which is a a good thing. I think exhibition games are a waste no matter what the sport. Well, except NASCAR.

But a strange thing is happening. America is suddenly pretending that it cares about winter sports. There's alpine skiing on Universal, figure skating on NBC, bobsledding on Speed Chanel, and moguls on Versus. It can only mean one thing: the Olympics are two weeks away.

Every two years. I love this. :)

Retreat

2010-01-29T03:21:00.000-08:00

Although Schumer (whom I like) and Mayor Bloomberg (who at this point I don't like) both support moving the trial of 9/11 conspirators out of lower Manhattan, I think it's a terrible idea. To do so would be a cowardly retreat both from justice and from the terrorists. To borrow language from the Bush administration, to move the trial now would be letting the terrorists win.

Pot meet kettle

2010-01-27T03:05:00.000-08:00

On Outside the Lines yesterday, ESPN, investigating the Gilbert Arenas/Javaris Crittenton fight, took a serious look at the culture of gambling in the NBA, and whether or not gambling should be banned on team facilities (the fight in question, which lead to guns being drawn, was over a gambling debt from a poker game on the team plane). Bob Ley, the host, at one point asked "is gambling a part of the NBA culture?"

Well, duh! Gambling is a part of American culture. Look at our love affair with Las Vegas, the proliferation of Indian casinos, of how states use lotteries to prop up their budgets. We are a gambling obsessed nation.

And ESPN already knows this. In fact, they are so entwined with gambling that they really have no place investigating it. They are too big a part of it. The popularity of poker in America is driven primarily by ESPN's coverage of the World Series of Poker, to which they devote several hours of programing a week. They also cover fantasy sports, another form of gambling, make picks on games, and even discuss the spread in the NFL. If sports and gambling are inseparably linked in the United States then ESPN is a big reason why. And for them to question that, or to investigate gambling in the NBA, is hypocritical. They are too big a part of the issue to be objective. I have used the following line dozens of times before, but never was it more apropos:

I am shocked! Shocked! To discover there is gambling going on in this establishment!

* * *

According to David Gibson in Politics Daily, Catholic Bishops have sent an open letter saying that passing health care reform is a moral imperative and that quality health care is a basic human right. They urged that politics be put aside and that health care reform be passed immediately. The language used by the bishops was castigating. Although they would be happy to see the current legislation pass, they go far beyond it. They advocate universal coverage, not the swiss-cheese coverage proposed in the House and Senate bills, as well as coverage for immigrants regardless of legal status, and while they don't want to see abortion covered they would be ready to compromise on that to get reform passed.

Their position is significant because the Church has long been one of the staunchest of allies for the republican party. The fact that Nancy Pelosi, John Keary, Chris Dodd and the late Ted Kennedy are or were all practicing Catholics aside, the Church has become the place in the conservative movement where intellect and spirituality meet. The Church has been the leader of of the pro-life movement since Roe v Wade was decided. Many prominent conservatives have converted to Catholicism in recent years, including Newt Gingrich, Laura Ingram, Robert Novak, Sam Brownback, Jeb Bush, Tony Snow, Lawrence Kudlow, and Robert Bork. The Supreme Court has been packed with Catholics, mostly in the hope of overturning Roe v. Wade. The Bishops have had a great deal of influence in American politics, more than is comfortable for many moderate Catholics or for Jeffersonian secularists. While their influence should not be overstated--they also oppose the death penalty, but have made no headway in persuading conservative politicians or justices to oppose it along with them--it is significant that the most prominent conservative intellectual body in America has come out strongly in favor of health care reform. If it swings just one or two votes in the senate it could be a game changer.

Though Maddow is probably right and the hope of republican votes is just a unicorn and farries fantasy.

* * *

Last Thursday's Word segment on Colbert was the best ever!

The final tragic death of Ted Kennedy

2010-01-19T19:26:00.000-08:00

Ok, here goes:

You will here this a lot tonight: it will be the ultimate irony if to see the senator occupying Ted Kennedy’s seat cast the vote that defeats health care reform.

Democrats are getting a wakeup call. Unfortunately it might be from Leon from “Blade Runner.”

John Dean is wrong—the only way to get health care reform is not to start over. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have had a plan in place for this contingency for days now. I don’t know what it is yet. It might be as simple as not seating Scott Brown until after they vote. It might be simply passing the Senate version unaltered. But they cannot not pass something. If they do they will lose both houses and probably the White House. And the Republicans know it.

Hey, dummies! You can’t take any state, any vote, for granted!

Dean is also wrong about the cause of this defeat. It is not because the health bill is not strong enough. But Dean is right about the other half of this. This is because the democrats are not strong. They are weak. They are sand in your ace pushovers. They are the geeky weak kid who gets bullied by the frat boys. Frat boys are nearly always republicans.

Obama needs to be more Reganesque and less Carteresque. Really.

Hubris brought low: Obama campaigned for Coakley. He campaigned for Corzine. He campaigned for Chicago to get the Olympics. He failed on all fronts. The president has no coattails.

Let’s face it, people are mad. That is why Barbra Coakley lost. And for some reason they are blaming the people brought in to fix this mess, not the yahoos who caused it in the first place. I mean, how can you support the Republicans to fix anything, let alone their two wars, their economic crisis, their national debt, their mess?

Dean is right. Democrats need to get tough. They need unleash Rahm Emanuel and start attacking. They need to redefine the debate. They need to shift to the left. The problem with the Democrats is that they are more decent than Republicans. President Obama wants to treat republicans with respect, to work with him, and the Republicans want to burn the nation around down his Alfred E. Newman ears.

The conservative movement is on a roll. They have seized the country and they control the debate. Sarah Palin will be the next Republican nominee. The democrats may well loose the house this fall. They could even lose the senate. If they don’t wake up they will be as dead as they pronounced the Republicans just a year ago. Remember that? Remember how the republicans were going to be wandering through the wilderness for the next twenty years after they got so soundly trounced just fifteen months ago? Guess what: political cycles are shortened in the internet age. The years the Republicans spent searching for Ronald Regan have been reduced to basically a summer. That’s all it took to seize control of the debate again. Yes, they do it with lies and deception and unadulterated bullshit—but that stuff works.

So Democrats, in the words of a great philosopher, nut up or shut up.

On Bullshit

2010-01-07T07:55:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I've figured out what it is about the Republicans that is so infuriating. It's not just their do-nothing obstructionism, or the latent racism of some of their propaganda. It's not even the fact that they caused this whole mess we are in with their de-regulation of the finance industry, the way they ignored global warming, their senseless war in Iraq..... you know.

No, I just realized that I am tired of their bullshit. They are so full of it--full of bullshit. It's probably because the line between politics and entertainment has become so blurred these days. Whatever the reason, they are just so full of bullshit. And I'm tired of it. And I'm tired that some people still believe their bullshit. I believe that some of them are indeed operating from a sincere philosophical political position--that they believe in small government, traditional family values, etc.--but for the most part they are just full of bullshit.

For instance, take this birther bullshit, the idea that President Obama might not have been born in Hawaii and therefor isn't eligible to be President. But he's got all the documentation Hawaii requires, Hawaii says he was born there, the courst threw out the case long ago, and yet they still insist on this bullshit--bullshit so blatant that even Glen Beck -- GLEN BECK -- has called it bullshit.

And speaking of Beck, his bullshit about the president appointing Communists to the government. What is this, the 1950s? We aren't at war with the communists anymore, dummy. We are at war with the Taliban and with al Queda, which are decidedly not communist (and which, by the way, only exist because we propped them up when we were at war with the Communists). It's bullshit. Of course, so is his definition of communists and socialists. What Glen Beck calls a "communist" is really just anyone to the left of Hillary Clinton. And apparently anybody can be a socialist in Beck's world. He pilloried Teddy Roosevelt as a socialist (maybe he just got his Roosevelts wrong). His bullshit over the iconography of Rockefeller Center was even more stupid, because it demonstrated his total ignorance of iconography, of art, of the Rockefellers (can you imagine? calling Nelson Rockefeller a socialist?) and the history of the building: One of the most famous incidents in the history of art occured when Rockefeller objected to a mural Diego Rivera had painted for Rock Center and ordered it destroyed, because it was what Beck is claiming the art there still is, too socialist. In other words, this is a place where socialist art was specifically excluded and destroyed, and Beck insists that it is decorated with socialist art. Because he's full of bullshit.

You've heard all this bullshit: Obama is a socialist (bullshit: if he were a socialist he'd be pushing for socialized medicine); Obama is weak on defense (bullshit: just because he thinks before going off half cocked), Obama wants to kill grandma (bullshit: pure unadulterated bullshit).

I'm not saying liberals aren't full of bullshit too. Keith Olberman's bullshit often annoys me, and Bill Maher makes me scream sometimes, but their bullshit seems less onerous. Maybe it's my own bias, but liberal bullshit doesn't seem to be as outrageous, nor does it seem to be pervasive. I don't think the liberals actually believe their bullshit, nor do they believe others will believe their bullshit, and their bullshit is nowhere near as deep as the Republicans bullshit is.

No, the Republicans, following the example of Limbaugh and Gingrich and Reagan, have turned bullshit into an art--a shameless art. Nobody bullshits better than a Republican.

(apologies to Howard Beale)

Parker Griffith Can't Lose

2009-12-24T06:55:00.000-08:00

Democratic congressman Parker Griffith of Alabama has switched parties, becoming a Republican. He said he was uncomfortable with the direction his party was taking. Well, ok: since the Democrats nabbed a much bigger plum last year in Senator Arlen Specter, I guess they can do without this guy. Like Specter, Griffith is an opportunist who can see the way the wind is blowing, and figures he stands a much better chance at reelection next year in the GOP. It's not like Specter's situation, wherein the senator saw he would probably lose the primary to a more conservative republican. In this case Griffith saw that a democrat doesn't stand a chance in his part of Alabama in the aftermath of the tea-baggers protests. Republicans are giddy, going after a Pennsylvania congressman in the same way, and insisting that momentum has swung their way. Maybe. But how does wooing former democrats, who obviously are moderates, square off against efforts on the right to make the party more conservative. Will moderate pragmatists win out or will the tea-baggers continue their purge of moderate republicans in an effort to repeat the success of the Regan revolution, when the party won by getting more conservative? There is big opportunity here for the Republicans. Can any moderate republican, anyone who doesn't pass the far-right litmus test, be be able to survive the Wrath of Sarah?

Right Wing Whack Jobs

2009-12-21T14:10:00.001-08:00

So it should come as no surprise that I read Field & Stream magazine. In an article on heroes and villains (in which President Obama made both lists) Rush Limbaugh was declared the biggest villain in America for his support of the Humane Society of the United States, which is an animal rights and anti-hunting group much on the same lines as PETA. The point of the article was that Rush is a conservative icon, and normally supports gun rights, but whether out of ignorance or not, he supports one of the most strident anti-hunting organtizations in America, and Field & Stream sees this as a betrayal. Makes sense to me.

The reaction was typical. Several readers wrote in to declare they were cancelling their subscriptions because of the "biased" story. F&S has faced this sort of thing before. Being located in New York, they are often criticized by their readers. One person posting a comment said that only stupid people spend any amount of time in New York City. Another said that F&S's location dictated their politics. None of this is surprising. Normally the only people who post to the comments section of a website are those that have an ax to grind--which is why no matter what the subject of the story, the comments on any AOL News item will always be 70% opposed.

But it does reveal a few things. One is that Conservatives have their own sacred cows and, just as many on the left have a knee jerk reasciont to any one who criticizes Barack Obama, so too on the right there is a knee jerk reaction toward anyone who criticizes Rush. It also shows that the level of discourse among Limbaugh's fans resides somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. Most of the comments simply extolled Rush's genius and hurled insubstantive insults at Field & Stream. Rush may only employ half his brain (just to make things fair) but most of his supporters seem to be willing to give theirs up entirely (one fellow said as much: complaining that he didn't read Field & Stream for Politics, he said he prefers not to think or argue about that stuff, leaving it to the NRA to argue his position for him).

Mostly, it made Limbaugh's supporters look stupid.

Check out the new book

2009-12-15T21:27:00.000-08:00

It's not about politics, and it's not about media studies, but it is a minor media event: my new book has gone to press and is available for pre-order from Amazon.com.

Some ideas

2009-12-14T09:21:00.001-08:00

President Obama on Oprah gave himself a B+ in grading his first year in office. I read this on Sphere and, of course, they had the typical poll "what grade would you give the president?" and, as usual, since the only people who comment on the internet tend to be complainers and malcontents, it was 41% F, 29% D, the rest scattered in C-A. It so happens that I am grading right today, it being the day before Finals week when I grade the last of my students' homework. Since I teach public speaking, I'd have to give Obama an A. As for being president, I give him an A+ for not being George W. Bush and a B- over all. I think that's fair. He inherited the biggest mess since the great depression--arguably bigger, since FDR didn't inherit any wars. I think he has handled the economy well given the state it was in when he was elected. His two failings lie in how willing he has been to water down health care reform and the escalation of the war in Afganistan--but to be fair, as with gay rights, I knew when I voted for him that he was farther to the right than I on either of those issues. I am also, naturally, bothered by the number of anti-hunters in his administration, but that's to be expected too. Makes me long for Bill Richardson even more.

To me the biggest problems with Obama lies in his inability to get his judicial appointments in. Yes he got Sotomayor on the supreme court, but that's no big deal. He replaced one liberal justice with another and besides, Supreme Court appointments are by publicity moments. Nobody but wonks pays attention to run of the mill federal judge appointments, but these are the ones who make the day to day decisions, and the pool from which the justices will normally be drawn. He needs to get those names over to the senate at a faster rate.

And it's only Wednesday

2009-12-09T18:14:00.001-08:00

In a week that has seen the escalating Tiger Woods side show threatening to derail not only debate on Health Care and an escalating war in Afghanistan, but also now the rather stunning developments at the climate conference in Copenhagen, and a week in which President Obama is set to collect a Nobel Peace Prize for doing basically nothing other than not being George W. Bush, and a week in which President Bush, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, and Bill O'Reily are all still out there doing their things, the award for biggest asshole of the week has been determined and, and it is still only Wednesday.

No, make that asshole of the year. The year is almost over and I doubt we are going to find that Sadaam Hussein or Roy Cohn are still alive.

The prestigious Asshole of the Year award goes to none other than Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington Think Tank, for his response to Tuvala's demand at the Copenhagen conference that industrial and developing nations be required to cut green house emissions more than is being discussed.

According to an article in the AP, Low lying Tuvalu, which is already seeing its nation literally being swept away, defiantly, and fruitlessly, declared that stopping global warming was a moral imperative. They were seconded by several other island nations including Kiribati, which is already seeing its wells turn brackish and is losing land and roads to high tides every two weeks. They are hoping to evacuate all of their citizens to three of their larger islands, IF the developed world helps to pay for building those islands up. These are nations, entire nations, that are disappearing off the face of the earth (so far the only plan most people seem to be able to get behind is one where the mass of foreseeable environmental refugees immigrate to Australia). The island nations, seeing their homelands being literally washed off the face of the earth are begging, pleading, and demanding--with the nobility that can only come from pursuing survival in a righteous but hopeless gesture of defiance--that the industrial nations agree to a global warming target of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Setting aside for a moment the fact that man-made global warming is not the only kind, and that a greater rise is already probably inevitable, this was a bold statement. The island nations have set themselves up as the true face of global warming, the people who if nothing is done will be left truly nation-less, a new Diaspora for which China, India, Europe, the United States, and Saudi Arabia are primarily responsible. Like the Palestinians today and the Hebrews ov the last two thousand years, they will be perpetual refugees, outcast with no place left to go home to.

And so what does Fred Smith have to say to all of this? Simply that curbs on fossil fuels would be too economically damaging, and that the real answer is "Wealth Creation." If the island nations become richer, in his twisted little world, then they can build sea-walls to protect themselves from rising sea levels (something that will have to be done here in Lower New Amsterdam, and is already done in Old Amsterdam). His answer is supply side, trickle down economics.

That's right: Fred Smith's answer to global warming is the same de-regulation, Ayn Rand inspired, Voo Doo economics that helped cause the problem in the first place, that is responsible for last year's Global economic melt down, and that has been completely discredited over the last fifteen months. Reaganomics. It's like a broken record with these people. Let me tell you, just as all of President Bush's de-regulation and supply side voo doo did nothing to lift the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans out of poverty, so to it will do nothing to lift Tuvalu or Kiribati or any of the other island states. The money won't trickle down that far. It never does. In fact, more often than not it trickles up. Just as the rich got richer and poor got poorer and the middle got squeezed out during the supply-side era of the last thiry years, so too the rich nations will get richer and the poor nations will get poorer and Tuvalu will disappear if the solution we adopt is global supply side economics. The rising tide in this case will swamp the island nations as surely as it did New Orleans. But don't tell that to Fred Smith. His panacea, the answer to everything, is still deregulation, no taxes, and wealth wealth wealth building. And during the Christmas season too.

Fred Smith: the biggest asshole of the year.

Bowl Mania

2009-12-07T13:52:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again, the time when I make a bunch of bold predictions about football teams I have never seen play and don't even have stats on. I just like to pick by name, mostly. Or mascot. As long time readers know, I support the bowl system, think the BCS was a stupid mistake, and don't think we actually need a national champion in college football. I'm still pissed the Rose Bowl joined the BCS. Anyway, here are my picks for the thirty two teams that will end their seasons with a win:

Dec. 19 New Mexico Bowl Mountain West vs. WAC Wyoming vs. Fresno State: FRESNO ST

Dec. 19 St. Petersburg Bowl Big East vs. C-USA, Rutgers vs. UCF: RUTGERS

Dec. 20 R&L Carriers New Orleans Bowl, C-USA vs. Sun Belt No. 1, Southern Miss vs. Middle Tennessee: SOUTHERN MISS

Dec. 22 MAACO Las Vegas Bowl, Mountain West No. 1 vs. Pac-10 No. 4, BYU vs. Oregon State: OREGON ST.

Dec. 23 Poinsettia Bowl, Mountain West vs. Pac-10, Utah vs. California, Dec. 24: CAL

Sheraton Hawaii Bowl, C-USA vs. WAC, SMU vs. Nevada: NEVADA

Dec. 26 Emerald Bowl, ACC No. 7 vs. Pac-10 No. 5, Boston College vs. USC: USC

Dec. 26 Meineke Car Care Bowl, ACC No. 6 vs. Big East, North Carolina vs. Pitt: PITT

Dec. 26, Little Caesars Pizza Bowl, Big Ten No. 7 vs. MAC, Ohio vs. Marshall: MARSHALL

Dec. 27 Music City Bowl, ACC vs. SEC Clemson vs. Kentucky: CLEMSON

Dec. 28 Independence Bowl, Big 12 No. 7 vs. SEC No. 8, Texas A&M vs. Georgia: GEORGIA

Dec. 29, Champs Sports Bowl, ACC No. 4 vs. Big Ten No. 4 or 5 Miami vs. Wisconsin: WISCONSIN

Dec. 30, EagleBank Bowl, ACC No. 8 vs. Army or C-USA, Temple vs. Army or UCLA*: (damn Army/Navy game! since there's no way Army beats Navy, I'll say UCLA).

Dec. 30, Pacific Life Holiday Bowl, Big 12 No. 3 vs. Pac-10 No. 2, Nebraska vs. Arizona: NEBRASKA

Dec. 30, Roady's Humanitarian Bowl Mountain West vs. WAC, Idaho vs. Bowling Green Dec. 30: IDAHO (this pick is for dad--he played at Idaho).

Texas Bowl, Big 12 vs. Navy or C-USA Missouri vs. Navy: NAVY

Dec. 31, Armed Forces Bowl, Mountain West vs. C-USA, Air Force vs. Houston: HOUSTON

Dec. 31, Brut Sun Bowl Pac-10 No. 3 vs. Big East/Big 12/Notre Dame, Stanford vs. Oklahoma: STANFORD

Dec. 31, Insight Bowl, Big Ten No. 6 vs. Big 12 No. 6 Minnesota vs. Iowa State: MINNESOTA

Dec. 31, Chick-fil-A Bowl, ACC No. 2 vs. SEC, Virginia Tech vs. Tennessee: VA TECH

Jan. 1, Outback Bowl, Big Ten No. 3 vs. SEC Northwestern vs. Auburn: AUBURN

Jan. 1, Capital One Bowl, Big Ten No. 2 vs. SEC No. 2, Penn State vs. LSU: (possibly the best game of the Bowl season: PENN STATE)

Jan. 1, Gator Bowl, ACC No. 3 vs. Big East/Big 12/Notre Dame Florida State vs. West Virginia: WEST VIRGINIA

Jan. 2, AutoZone Liberty Bowl, C-USA No. 1 vs. SEC No. 6, East Carolina vs. Arkansas: EAST CAROLINA

Jan. 2, International Bowl, Big East vs. MAC No. 4 or 5, South Florida vs. Northern Illinois: SOUTH FLORIDA

Jan. 2, AT&T Cotton Bowl, Big 12 No. 2 vs. SEC, Oklahoma State vs. Mississippi: OKLAHOMA STATE

Jan. 2, Papajohns.com Bowl, Big East vs. SEC UConn vs. South Carolina: UCONN

Jan. 2, Valero Alamo Bowl, Big Ten No. 4 or 5 vs. Big 12 No. 4, Michigan State vs. Texas Tech: MICHIGAN STATE

Jan. 6, GMAC Bowl, ACC vs. MAC, Central Michigan vs. Troy: TROY

Jan. 1, Rose Bowl, BCS - Big Ten vs. Pac-10 champion, Ohio State vs. Oregon: (though it pains me to say so) OHIO STATE

Jan. 1, Sugar Bowl, BCS - SEC champion** Cincinnati vs. Florida (The other great game of the season): Cincinnati.

Jan. 4, Fiesta Bowl, BCS - Big 12 champion** Boise State vs. TCU: (This is the BCS buster game. The winner of this will claim to be the national champion, probably get National Championship rings, and will become a huge threat to the continuation of the bowl tradition. and it will be a good game. tough to call. really tough). BOISE STATE

Jan. 5, Orange Bowl, BCS - ACC champion** Iowa vs. Georgia Tech: GEORGIA TECH

Jan. 7, BCS National Championship, BCS No. 1 vs. BCS No. 2, Alabama vs. Texas: (there are so many teams in the post season that are better teams than Texas: TCU, Boise State, Cincinati, Florida, and arguably Nebraaska. They don't stand a chance): ALABAMA

Life Imitates Art imitate Life

2009-12-04T09:46:00.001-08:00

It's going to be all over the airwaves the next few days. Maybe it will give Tiger Woods a respite.

A seventeen year old Indiana boy strangled his ten year old brother and then told police that "he felt just like Dexter." Dexter is the attractive serial killer of the Shwotime original series of the same name. In the show, Dexter works as a blood analyst for the Miami P.D. and satisfies his intense need to kill people by killing murderers on whose case he has been working. In this case, the seventeen year old, Andrew Connoly, was wrestling with his brother Connor, put him in a head lock, and then didn't let go. It escalated from there. After his brother passed out Andrew behaved just like someone on TV. He put on gloves, choked him, put a bag over his head and secured it with electrical wire, and dragged the body to the trunk of his car. Then he drove to his girlfriend's house and gave her a sweetheart ring. The girlfriend said he looked happier than she'd ever seen him.

This will of course raise arguments about violence in the media prompting violent behavior in children and, int his case, teens. (my students are having a debate on that topic in two weeks). But this is a very slipper slope. Aside from the moral dimension of Dexter--that his victims are themselves murderers--there is the question of obsession. Like Dexter, all appearances are that Andrew has been psychopathic his whole life. He says he's fantasized about killing someone since he was eighteen. He has no remorse whatsoever about killing his brother. That morning he considered killing his father but decided not to. His brother was a target of opportunity. And, like Dexter, he is psychologically compelled to kill.

So it is reasonable to suspect that without Dexter, or even without other violent programing on TV, Andrew would have eventually been compelled to kill someone. Dexter gave him a framework in which to describe his compulsion to police. Perhaps you can argue that in Dexter, he saw himself on TV. But to argue that Dexter prompted Andrew to be come a killer would be wrong. It's more accurate to say that Dexter is a reflection of Andrew, not the other way round.

None of which is to say that Andrew should not go to jail for the rest of his natural life. If indeed Andrew is a compulsive killer, then there's no way to allow him back into society (and as a teenager in Indiana he's not elligible for the death penalty).

I don't care

2009-12-02T08:13:00.001-08:00

Tiger Woods? I don't care!

Meredith Baxter? I don't care!

John and Kate and Brad and Angelina and Reese and Jake and the rest? I don't care!

Last night the president threw us into a new Vietnam. He is escalating the war in Afghanistan. He is sending us headlong into what the Daily Show accurately called "the gold standard of Quagmires", the place that drowned the British, the Soviets, and Alexander the Great. And all people seem to care about is whether or not Tiger Woods had an affair.

Wake up people! That's his business. Afghanistan is all of our business!

2009-11-22T09:01:00.000-08:00

Beetle Bailey is a comic strip about the banality of military life in peacetime. With that in mind, isn't it wrong to be running Beetle Bailey when we are involved in two wars? Or even,a s Cheney would have it, one war on two fronts?

The Report From Ground Zero

2009-11-18T15:55:00.000-08:00

Outside my window as I type this I can see ground zero. It is two blocks away. Three weeks ago I couldn't see it, but that was before they finally, after eight years of delays deciding what to do with it, tore down Fritterman Hall, our campus building here at BMCC that was damaged when most of World Trade Center #7 fell upon it. I was teaching in Fritterman that semester (though not that day) and so in a minor way claim to have been a victim of 9/11. My classroom was destroyed as a result. My job came within a day of disapearing too, but they managed to bring us back in time to finish out the semester.

So I've got a minor amount of skin in this game from that, and from the fact that I still cry sometimes when I see a firetruck go by.

So I get to throw in my two cents and say I think bringing the accused terrorists here to New York to stand trial is not only the right thing to do, it was the only thing we could do.

But that is not what I want to say in this post. What I want to talk about is all these people, both int he media and on the street, who are saying that the trial shouldn't take place at all. I'm talking tot he Glen Becks and Sean Hannities of the world, I'm talking to Mayor Giuliani and the editors of the New York Post--everyone who says that becasue these accused terrorists are not US Citizens they don't deserve the protection of the constitution (the post went so far as to say they should have been lined up against the wall and shot years ago).

Bullshit.

The concept of "rights," born of the enlightenment, is that all people deserve them, no matter where they are from, simply by virtue of being born. The Declaration of Independence (which has no weight of law, I know) said it best when it said that tehy are "inalienable" and are endowed to all men by their creator. The declaration recognized three rights--life, liberty, and the pursuit of hapiness. The constitution recognized several more. Theya re not gifts granted to the citizenry, they are restriction placed upon the government. The fact that there are more than the ones listed is recognized by the ninth amendment, which says that just becasue a right is not listed in the constitution doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The idea that non-citizens are not protected by the constitution is simply wrong.

And those people who say that the accused terrorists don't deserve those rights, that they should be imprisoned forever without trial, that they should be lined up against the wall and shot-- they are as bad as Osama Bin Ladden himself. Bin Laden, mind you, didn't fly the planes into the towers himself, he simply told people it was ok to do so--just like the post is telling people it would be ok to line these men up against a wall and shoot them, with no respect for justice, no respect for the rule of law, no respect for human rights. So Sean Hanity, Mayor Giuliani, editors of the New York Post and all the rest: you are no better than the terrorists. Shame on you!

Liberal Blogger Strays From The Path

2009-11-13T08:47:00.000-08:00

Far be it from me to ever agree with Sean Hannity or Ollie North, but the question of whether or not Nidal Hassan should be considered a terrorist is a valid one. And it has nothing to do with whether or not he was in "operational contact" with radical Islam. It has only to do with his motivations.

There is a lot of speculation about what drove Hassan to attack the processing center at Fort Hood. There has been so much stress and violence surrounding Fort Hood, which Hsssan was deeply involved with as a psychiatrist, that it is very easy to believe that this had to do with his future deployment. If so, if his motivation for the shooting was that he just didn't want to go or was afraid of combat, then this is not terrorism. But as more and more information comes out about his radical views, it seems more likely that this was politically motivated, and if so then it might have been terrorism. I say might because there is a third element to terrorism that is not discussed.

Take the case of an assassin shooting an abortion provider. He may have been motivated to do so by Bill O'Reiley or by Operation Rescue, but he has no operation contact with him. Yet he is considered a terrorist. His terrorist act was politically motivated. But if it was just anger would it still be considered terrorism? The act of killing an abortion doctor is more than just politically motivated, it also has a purpose: to frighten other doctors away from performing abortions. Terrorism, despite how it is described in the news, is *never* "senseless". It is always part of a plan. It is a form of communication meant to terrorize people into submission, to get them to stop doing something the terrorist feels is wrong.

If Hassan, even though politically motivated, was simply lashing out in anger was it still terrorism?

I don't know, but if they want to call him a terrorist on Fox that's ok by me. I don't feel inclined to cut this guy any slack. This much I do know: when I read today that Hassan is paralyzed from the waist down as a result of being shot, my response was "good." After all, it was his job to counsel people with just that type of issue. Now maybe he can counsel himself.

2009-11-09T16:00:00.000-08:00

Chris Guefroy is a name that is not well known in the United States. But it should be. He did get a mention in Newsweek last week, and in yesterday's Florida Times Union, and in the Washington Examiner. But the Washington Post? New York Times? Anybody else?

Chris Gueffroy is very well known in Germany. At twenty years old, on February 6 2009, Gueffroy became what turned out to be the last victim murdered by East German forces for trying to cross over the Berlin Wall. He was shot ten times in the chest and died immediately. The soldiers who shot him were given medals (and later tried for murder). The saddest thing about his story is not his young age but the fact that if he had waited just a few months he would have been able to walk through the Brandenberg Gate. That's because twenty years ago today the Berlin Wall fell. But there was no way he could have known.

The fall of the Berlin Wall remains the most important historical moment of my lifetime, the most important event since the end of World War Two. It was not just the day that freedom won out over tyranny, nor the day that the 136 confirmed martyrs murdered while trying to escape East Germany were finally redeemed. It is also the day that everything in the world changed. I never believed, as some ridiculous talking heads put it, that the fall of the Berlin Wall meant "the end of history", as though nothing would happen afterward, but it did mean that my life and the lives of everyone in the world who had grown up in the shadow of the cold war had been changed forever. It meant we were all, finally, free.

Ten years later, when I finally got there, I remember that nothing in Berlin moved me the way standing at Checkpoint Charlie did, looking at the remains of the wall, thinking about all the people who had died trying to cross it, all the people who had died in the cold war: I cried. Soon after the wall came down we had normal relations with Russia. Soon there were no longer nuclear missiles pointed at me. Sure, I was always more likely to die in a car accident, but the prospect of total global annihilation was much more frightening. All that because they finally did tear down that wall (yes, even I have to admit it redeemed Regan a bit too).

Once the Brandenburg Gate opened, everything changed. Life became somehow lighter, somehow more free, and the 90s became the decade when anything was possible. Remembering the fall of the Berlin Wall is a time to celebrate the greatest single moment for America, for the World, of the past sixty-five years. Sure, I know that the anniversary of Tienanmen Square, where the youth of China failed attempting what the youth of Berlin had accomplished, is coming up in a few weeks. But the Berlin Wall, that was special. That was something I will never ever forget.

And in remembering the Berlin Wall, we have to remember Chris Gueffroy, the last martyr to the freedom of East Berlin. Rest in peace.

Five Questions for Mayor Bloomberg

2009-10-14T12:51:00.000-07:00

I don't know if I'll get a chance between now and election day, but here are some questions I would like to ask our mayor before I vote.

1.) The residents of the city voted for term limits twice, yet you got the city council to overturn them so you could run again. Isn't your campaign thwarting the will of the voters, and what does this say about your respect for democracy?

2.) You are the richest man in New York: how can you understand the needs of average Joes like the bus-driver from Brooklyn or the carpenter from Queens.

3.) You made your fortune servicing Wall Street, and you hold your business acumen up as an asset, but given Wall Street's culpability in the current financial crisis, are you part of the problem?

4) On Meet the Press you said you did not want to take away people's legally obtained guns, but then you voiced support for an assault weapons ban, which would do exactly that. You said you were only interested in stopping the trafficking of illegal guns, yet then voiced opposition for the Thune Amendment, which had nothing to do with illegal guns. Given the inconsistencies and the obvious contradictions in your statement, why should we trust you on this issue?

5.) A blogger quoted in AM New York said that what scares him about you is your need to control everything, including people: what is your understanding of the term "nanny state", and given your stated positions on trans-fats, smoking, and sodas, aren't you trying to control people, telling them how to live their lives and how to raise their children? And how is this not elitist?

They are certainly answerable questions, but I'd like to hear him do so.

Say what?

2009-10-09T06:12:00.000-07:00

Ok, I'm a supporter of the president. I believe int he change he is trying to bring about. But I've got to say: the Nobel Peace Prize? Now? He's not even been in office a year? I get it: we are actually being good members of the international community, we are using diplomacy and talking to people again. The UN has some status once more. But come on, what has he actually done? What has he accomplished? Nada. That SNL sit was right. I agree that the hand he was dealt was bad, and that he is moving in the right direction, but he hasn't actually *done* anything! He couldn't even get the Olympics.

In a way this proves the conservatives right once again. The Nobel Peace Prize is just a shill for globalist liberal politics. They gave Obama the prize for the same reason they gave Gore the prize: as a slap at Bush. There can be no other reason.

But at least our president now has something to brag about. It's not peace in the Middle East or a strong economy or nuclear disarmament, but it is a fancy award that everybody can talk about. He needed a win.

And therein lies the problem. I don't think Obama is the anti-Christ. The religous nut-bags who are saying that are, well, nut-bags. But I do fear that in the end he may prove to be all flash and no substance. So he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Big fat harry deal. Gays are still oppressed, we are still at war, the economy still sucks, Iran is still getting a bomb, Gitmo is still open, and my girlfriend still doesn't have health care. I wasn't one of those idiots who thought Obama was going to ride in and fix the world, but I did expect him to do SOMETHING by now. Yes, I know, it's Congress that actually does things and the President just enacts the policy that Congress sets--at least that's how it's supposed to work. But that wasn't how it worked for Bush. Obama has control of both houses of congress and so far all we have to show for it is Cash for Clunkers.

What if that's it? What is all he really is is a gifted orator, a charming man with a great story, and none of the skills necessary to get anything done. Like Kennedy. Two presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize while still in office: Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Both actually accomplished something to win it. Right now we need Roosevelt. We need the guy who loved to pick fights with corporations, who negotiated the end to a major war, who broke up Standard Oil and instituted mine safety regulations and at least tried to institute national health care and, oh yes, started the American conservation movement. We don't need an intellectual who basically did nothing but send troops into war overseas and flood Hetch Hetchy.

Put the prize on your mantle, Mr. President, and spend the honorarium buying Christmas gifts for your daughters, and get back to work, because so far you are a bust and if it keeps up you well could lose the house in next years elections.

In other words you have done nothing for me lately. Or at all, for that matter.

Congratulations on winning the Nobel Prize.

Dog bites man

2009-10-04T05:13:00.000-07:00

Tell me how exactl it's news that "Judge Empowers Jackson Executors to Handle Debts"? That was the first headline I saw when I logeged on this morning. Not the one about nuclear regulators seeing a turning point with Iran, mind you: the one about the dead King of Pop. And it's not even news: the Judge gave the executors permission to do their one and only job: distribute the estate, debtors first. In other words this IS IN NO WAY NEWS!!!!

Finally! Something worth fighting about!!!

2009-09-25T19:24:00.000-07:00

Berkeley has been crazy for years. I've lived there, and I know. It is a fun, kooky sort of crazy, an aging hippie crazy. It once believed it could change the world. It did--kind of, and mostly (mostly) for the better. But once the big cause of the Viet Nam war was taken away, and admittedly once corporate America found ways to profit off of the counter culture--it got confused. Berkeley, both the campus and even more so the town, has flopped around for the last forty years searching for causes that it can support because, obviously, the revolution wasn't won when the US pulled out of Viet Nam. So they've looked and looked, poked under every rock and corporate scandal, searching for a wrong to right. Sometimes, as in Apartheid, they found a good cause. Other times, like trying to save the redwood trees around the stadium, they've just looked stupid.

But now they've got a real cause: tuition hikes! Not only that, but tuition hikes coupled to budget cuts and staffing reductions. This is a cause everbody onc ampus can believe in, because it affects them personally. It affects their pocket books. Not since the war time draft has their been a cause that effected so many of the student body at the same time. And unless you think they are just being selfish, mark this: UC was originally free. Not only that, but the people who will be most affected by the tuition hikes are middle class students who dont' qualify for anything but student loans (and I have first hand experience with how bad those can be). But perhaps the most salient point is this: UC, the most prestigious public university system in the world, exists as a public trust, and that trust is being betrayed. Some see this as a crass conservative attempt to do away with public higher education entirely, and I am sure that is indeed the motivation of some people in power. But even if they are sincere in their attempts to save the university during a time of fiscal crisis, they should all be fired. From the governor on down.

This should not be allowed to happen!

So now the entire UC system has erupted in protest. Good! Shut it down! Shut the whole thing down! Who knows, perhaps shutting the system is what the governor wants, but at least it will go out with a fight!

Take to the streets and man the barricades! This is a cause worth fighting for!

Count me out

2009-09-16T19:33:00.000-07:00

Max Bachus' health care reform bill came out of the finance committee today. This is the bill that most experts agree represents what health care reform is most likely to look like, because although he didn't admit it Obama basically quoted the Bachus bill right down the line in his address to congress. According to the Washington Post, the Bachus bill appears to have everyone angry, but drug companies, hospitals and insurance companies are less angry than others. This is said to be a good thing.

Count me as one of those liberals who is opting out. I said all along that I would not support a bill that doesn't have a robust public option, and this bill doesn't have one. Bachus' bill amounts to nothing more and nothing less than a huge giveaway to the insurance companies--the very people we should be reigning in. We should certainly not be pouring money into, or worse yet forcing people who can't afford it to pour money into, their corporate pig trough. The insurance companies are not opposing this bill because the reduction in costs they will receive is offset by the 30 million new customers they will receive. That's right, they are being bought off in the worst possible way--because the government is going to force us to give them money. In the case of my family, money we cannot afford to give them.

I object. I strenuously object.

Just as Bush sold us out to the oil companies, Obama is selling us out to the insurance companies. Great. Perhaps the worst thing about all this is that it proves that slime Glen Beck right. He said in his otherwise horrible book that the job of both parties seems to be to take your money and give it away to some corporation or other. Sure looks that way to me.

In his speech to congress last week, President Obama wagged his finger at liberals like me (and Rush Limbaugh *still* thinks he's Obama is a liberal!) and told us that we should not hold the public option as the end all and be all of health care reform; reminding us like a parsimonious school marm that the driving force behind health care reform has always been to cut waste and fraud. Excuse me, Mr. President, but I call bullshit. The driving force behind health care reform, since Teddy Roosevelt first proposed it, has been universal health care. That is what Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Clinton all were fighting for. All of them failed. That is certainly what I was campaigning for when I worked as a campaign worker on the single payer ballot initiative in California, which also failed. Not once in your speech Mr. President did you mention universal health care, sir: not once. Nor have you said it since. This is the best shot we've ever had, and this time we cannot fail. But this bill represents a colossal failure. This bill does not cover everyone, and without an affordable public option it cannot help to do so. My congress person and at least one of my senators has said they strongly support a public option, and have indicated they will not support a bill without it. I hope they stick to that. I hope the House sticks to its plan to pass a public option. If Obama's plan is to get the bill to a conference committee and then make sure it comes out with a public option inserted into it then fine, their strategy is ok. But there is no way to tell, so at this point I have to say that anyone who supports this bill in its current form is abandoning the public trust.

So count me out.

EMERGENCY!

2009-09-14T12:21:00.001-07:00

Perhaps the biggest, most startling news I've seen this year. Far scarier than anything Glen Beck or Sarah Palin have come up with: Philadelphia is shutting down it's libraries. Permanently. You think the battle is health care? This is the most shocking sign yet that the progressive agenda is failing. Libraries!? How can you have a society without libraries? I know that people don't read anymore. I know that everyone (erroneously) believes that everything you might need to read is on the internet--or else you can buy it at Barnes and Nobles. But what kind of society is a society without free public libraries? One wherein only those who can afford to purchase books can read them? I'll tell you what kind: a kind wherein only the rich have any sort of real power. Because knowledge is power, and Wikipedia and Google combined don't make up the amount of knowledge available to you through the public library, and until every book every printed is available online for free, they never will. A public library is an indispensable part of a free society. This is a tragedy of truly epic proportions. And those responsible should be run out of town on rails.

A brife detour into the world of sports

2009-09-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

I used to write about sports n this blog a lot more. Now I do most of that elsewhere, concentrating on politics and the media. But with Sarena Williams I'm going to make an exception. The open is, after all, one of the great New York events, and I've seen both Williams and Kim Clijsters play there in the past.

It's tempting to see the reaction to Sarena Williams' meltdown at the U.S. Open as being tinged with racism, and perhaps, in some instances, it is. Williams, down a set and facing elimination to eventual champion Clijsters, went on an angry tirade after a line judge called her for a foot fault. Earlier in the match she had broken a racket in anger and received a warning. Her explosion over the foot fault, in which she said she would "f*ing shove this ball down your f*ing throat," cost her another point, but as a result of the foot fault, it happened to be match point. She lost. She received a $10,000 fine. She was unrepentant in her press conference but later apologized. She could receive a much larger fine of up to 1.6 million dollars (the rules on a major infraction say "up to $250,000 or the amount of prize money for the tournament, whichever is greater" but that is mostly for people who are found to have cheated and then won). She could also be permanently banned from Majors. Nobody thinks either of those will happen (though a larger fine is likely). She and her sister are playing today in the doubles final, which many people felt she should have been disqualified for. She finally apologized to the line judge today.

All fair and good. But some of the reaction has been very nasty. I have read on various internet sites that she was a fraud and a coward, that the outburst was calculated because she new she was going to loose to Clijsters and didn't want to loose on the court. She has been called a bully and a thug and far worse. I think there is definitely a racist undertone to some of these comments. It is pointed out in several of the articles that the Williams sisters are from Compton (though, to be fair, Ms. Williams pointed that out herself at her press conference). The stupidest comments are those that claimed she was a coward and simply didn't want to face being beaten by Clijsters. Williams has fought back from the brink of defeat before. It's as if the people writing this garbage don't recall that she is one of the greatest tennis players of all time and was at that moment the defending U.S. Open champion. Beyond a doubt, some of the people writing this stuff are painting her with a racist brush, making her out to be some kind of black gang banger from South Central who has somehow crashed the gates of the all white, genteel party that is big time tennis. It's as if these folks have never even heard of Arthur Ashe (and no, Ashe would never have melted down the way Williams did, but the same language was used against Ashe that is now, once again, being thrown at Williams).

But just as such demeaning language should not be thrown at Williams, so too not everyone who is criticizing her, not even the ones saying she is a bully and a thug, should automatically be considered racists. Tennis *is* a genteel party, and there are strict rules of conduct which Williams broke. She did threaten the line judge. She did lose it.

Some have pointed to John McEnroe and the way he is looked at as evidence that Willimas is getting a raw deal. After all, Johnny Mac is a hero in this town. He is celebrated as a "lovable bad boy" for his famous "You cannot be serious!" explosions (McEnroe, while condemning how far she went, defended Williams, saying that he couldn't see the fault and anyway it shouldn't have been called at that critical instant--consistent with his long time criticism of umpiring in tennis). But people forget that McEnroe was not always celebrated for his outbursts. At the time much of the same language, Bully, Thug, etc., was leveled at him. Condemnation was near universal in the sporting press and general community--except in New York City, where such outbursts are part of the fabric of daily life, and are seen as a constitutional right. So if the white guy from New York can be called a bully and a thug for yelling at the umpires, it's not really racist--in and of itself--to say the same thing about the black woman from Compton.

Me, I'm disappointed whenever the Williams Sisters lose.

But I sure do love the U.S. Open!

Trial By Fire

2009-09-09T06:19:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's in the New Yorker, the ultimate bastion of New York elitism; the temple of town house culture. But the article "Trial by Fire" is frightening and must be read.

For years I've been one of those people who have insisted that the biggest problem with the death penalty is that you can't switch somebody back on once they are dead. If the state makes a mistake and executes and innocent person there is no way to reverse the error. (apparently I am not alone in this: according to the article it is the one thing that shakes people's faith in the death penalty). A lot of death penalty proponents like to say that no innocent person has ever been executed since the re-institution of the death penalty, with all its procedural safeguards and appeals, in the 1970s. This is bull. We know deep down that it is impossible for any science as inexact as criminology, which relies on such things as intuition and inspiration, that often involves conflicting evidence, and that involves the outrage and anger of the public and a jury, to be 100 percent failsafe. It is a fact that over 400 death row inmates have been exonerated in the last twenty years, some of them coming within hours of their execution before being granted a stay. It is logically inconceivable that there would be no one who had not received that stay, that no one had slipped through the cracks, ever. Beyond a doubt, beyond a reasonable doubt, the state has executed innocent people. The argument therefore has always been that nobody has ever proven to have been innocent after they were executed. "Factually and legally" is the term. In spite of the fact that so many people have been exonerated right before they could be executed, this is the basis of the "it's never happened" argument. But that ignores a simple fact. Once someone is dead they cannot receive a new trial. They are dead. The appeals process ends. They are dead. The state does not have a mechanism to prove that a dead person might be innocent. Perhaps a civil trial could do so. Perhaps. But it is unlikely that it would ever be proven legally that someone was erroneously executed, because there is no legal method for doing so.

But this case comes close. And if it gets the attention it deserves, the legs may have been knocked out from under the pro-death penalty argument for good.

The Dark Places of Our Youth

2009-09-03T06:57:00.000-07:00

It is time to revisit, for a moment, some of the dark places of our youth, those places we prefer to ignore or pretend didn’t happen. It is important to face them from time to time. I learned long ago that, while the idealism of the 60s and 70s was not a lie, it masked things, and even nurtured things, that are frightening.
Too melodramatic. Let’s start again:

Squeaky Fromme is out of prison.

That’s better. Direct, to the point. Squeaky is out of prison.

Squeaky Fromme was one of Charlie Manson’s Girls. That’s how they were always described. Charlie’s girls. She was one of the first. They were young women who worshiped the ground that he walked on, were seduced into believing that he was some sort of divine spirit. They would do anything for him—including murdering Sharon Tate and eight other people in one of the grizzliest mass murders of all time.
But Squeaky wasn’t involved. She’s sixty years old. To the best of anybody’s knowledge she didn’t kill anybody. When she pointed a .45 caliber pistol at President Ford in 1975, the gun wasn’t even loaded, though at the time there was some debate as to whether or not she knew that. Personally, I think she did know, and she was just doing it for attention. She is not actually a murderer. She deserves her parole. So why do I feel nervous?

Probably it’s because I have seen Squeaky Fromme in the flesh and she was scary. I’d been raised around real hippies in Norhtern California and I liked them. They were interesting and cool and fun. They weren’t square. They were also idealists who believed in a better world than the one we lived in, one in which the old strictures and hierarchies of society could be replaced by a new equality, where greed and materialism could be replaced with love and equality. A nice thought. At the time I also didn’t know the difference between hippies, who wanted to drop out of the world and be left alone, and radicals, who wanted to change the world, often through violence. And I didn’t really know about Charlie.

The idealism of Woodstock gave way to the seventies, with cocaine and AIDS and the Black Panthers and the SLA and the Weather Underground and Jim Jones and Disco. It wasn’t that the sixties were a lie, it’s that the people who believed in love and freedom didn’t foresee that it could lead to violence, overindulgence, death, and disco.

Charlie wasn’t really a product of the sixties, but he was a part of it. He took advantage of the idealism of the Woodstock generation, of their naiveté, and convinced a few of them that they could start a violent revolution if they murdered a bunch of rich people and made it look like black radicals did it. He was, in a way, playing Black Nationalism, Hollywood liberalism, and entrenched American racism off against each other. In the end he was just a crazy man with some whacked out followers hopped up on LSD going on a killing spree (which Manson himself didn’t even take part in). I never met Charlie Manson. My step father encountered him once though, and that is a good family story. I think my step-mother met him once too, when she was a prison psychiatrist. But not me. And I’m glad.

But I did see Squeaky. I grew up in Sacramento and lived there when she pulled the unloaded gun on President Ford. My mom took me out of school and down to the courthouse to attend Squeaky’s trial. Mom thought it would be good for me to see the justice system up close, and probably thought that I’d remember being that close to history for the rest of my life. If so, she was right. I clearly remember Squeaky coming into the courtroom, her head wrapped in a shawl, a blank look on her face. The judge informed her that she had a right to be present during the proceedings. I don’t think she even looked at him. She didn’t say anything. She just paused, then walked back toward her cell. It was as if she was wandering through a dream, barely even taking it in. There was no evidence presented that day. They were arguing over the admissibility of a tape recording of what Squeaky said at the time of her arrest (the trial turned on whether or not she had said “What does it matter, the gun was empty” or “What does it matter, the gun didn’t go off.” There were rounds in the clip but not in the chamber, and whether or not she knew that indicated whether or not she intended to shoot the president.)

And that was it. We left the courthouse when they broke for lunch and went and had Mexican food at Los Aztecas. I went back to school the next day and told all my classmates. But I never forgot it. I never forgot that spooky woman in the head shawl. I seem to recall she had carved a cross in her forehead like Charlie. I think she did. Whatever, she was scary. She was the dark side of sixties idealism, the evil that can so easily take over good intentions. She never really recanted. She remained a loyal follower of Manson’s. And now she’s out. And it’s more than a bit scary.

Huh?!?

2009-09-02T17:35:00.000-07:00

Ok, Now I'm am confused.

Apparently, some conservatives, who just a month ago were complaining that President Obama is a god-less secularist, are now sounding the alarm that he is a theocrat. That's right, that he is using invoking God to support his health-care policy. Now this is the ultimate hypocrisy. We just had eight years of a conservative president who invoked God at every turn, who said God guided his decisions, who flaunted his faith at every turn, and who (worst of all in the long run) painted the conflict with Al Queda as a holy crusade. Now we have a president who has said that his faith leads him to believe that it is his duty to care for the sick (read universal health care) and this is somehow out of bounds.

THE NERVE!!!!

First of all this "my faith is the only faith" has led to more misery than any other single cause on the planet. Including oil. Secondly, they don't get to have it both ways. And third, what have they got against healing the sick??? Are they caying Christ WOULDN'T heal the sick? That it not the duty of every christian tolook after his fellow man?

Once again this proves it is not about faith with these people or even ideology. It is certainly not about what is best for America. It is about money and power, just like always.

Guns and Protest

2009-08-17T22:12:00.000-07:00

As a liberal New Yorker I'm often somewhere between frustrated and amused by New Yorkers' attitudes toward guns. I understand where they are coming from: New York *would* be safer if there were no guns in the city. New Yorkers are more cosmopolitan (read more European-like) than any other people in the USA, and guns are not part of their culture. The police are never more than three blocks away in New York, and most New Yorkers would rather trust their safety to the NYPD than take their defense upon themselves, and, quite frankly, this makes sense--so long as you trust the police to be there when you need them (not so much, even with the number of cops in this town) and you trust the government not to turn tyrannical, which frankly most New Yorkers cannot fathom. Gun violence is the single biggest cause of death among young African American men. A simple truth that the NRA simply cannot deny is this: more guns lead to more gun deaths. To the vast majority of New Yorkers Mayor Bloomberg is a hero for his position on guns.

But, of course, I understand the pro-gun position better, as that is more or less the position I hold.

No, this is not yet another observation on how New Yorkers really do not understand guns (and really don't want to).

I am a rabid fan of The Daily Show with John Stewart. He is one of the two best news sources on TV (the other being Maddow), but more than that he is the most insightful analyst of media working out there today, and I include Noam Chomsky in that statement. Tonight he was doing a riff on how MSNBC and Fox News polls almost always fun in the 90% bracket on any topic they poll, because the audiences are skewed and they more or less just vote for the opinion just expressed by the host (he showed how a Fox poll shows that 97% of the people don't want to raise taxes to pay for health care, and how an MSNBC poll showed that 95% of the people want to raise taxes to pay for health care). Then he had on David Cross, one of my favorite comedians.

But Stewart and Cross had a very funny exchange, with cheers from the audience, about people showing up to Town Hall meetings with guns. Stewart suggested that in a strange way, among some people, the 1st and 2nd amendments are being conflated, as though carrying a gun is not only a right in itself but is also a means of expression, a protected form of speech. Cross followed that with the idea that the gun, a second amendment thing, actually has its own 1st amendment rights.

Well, yeah.

Wearing a gun is making a political statement. Whether or not it is protected speech is irrelevant, because it is protected in and of itself. But it absolutely is a form of communication, and a form of political speech--which is the most highly protected form of speech. Cross and Stewart were mocking the idea, but I think Jefferson might have agreed whole-heartedly that wearing a gun to a town hall meeting is indeed protected speech. I am absolutely sure Andrew Jackson would.

Stewart and Cross were also expressing a very real fear that somebody might pull out a gun and shoot the president. I'll be honest. That frightens me too. Unfortunately, it is part of our bill of rights that the people are guaranteed the means to resist tyranny with force. It's one of those dangerous risks we take in return for our freedom (Freedom is always risky, and as soon as you start hedging that risk you make society less free--it's the contradiction inherent in the "reasonable regulation" part of DC v. Miller). In fact there is a great deal of unofficial precedent for the idea that the final check on government is the guns owned by the people. Cultural if not legal precedent, that is. There is an interesting little science fiction story by H. Beam Piper with the unfortunate title of "Lone Star Planet" built upon this very theme: on the planet New Texas it is legal to kill any elected official at any time. That way they don't actually do anything for fear they will be shot, and they basically stay out of people's way.

There is a lot of philosophy on this subject as well, and much of it comes from the left. In Major Barbara, Bernard Shaw has Undershaft say "The ballot paper that really governs is the ballot paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it!" And, of course, Mao said "Power comes from the barrel of a gun." Mind you, I don't endorse this position. I believe the brilliance of our democracy is that we have a minor revolution every two years and a major one every four, and that if we believe one party has gone too far we can kick them out, as we did in 2006, and elect a new guy as we did in 2008. (joyously, from my perspective). The idea that we have the right to mount an armed resistance to our leaders if they become tyrants is really the basis of the Civil War (which in some ways rendered the 2nd amendment moot). The trouble is, the founding fathers would not agree with me, as too a man they believed (even Adams and Hamilton) that the people had the right to kill the tyrant who was oppressing them. It's in that big long doccument most of them signed, the one that begins "When in the course of Human events" and includes the phrase:

"whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

"Abolish." "Throw Off." The 2nd amendment is there to guarantee us the means to do so (Scalia, in DC v. Miller, acknowledged this explicitly). The militiamen know that. John Stewart does not. As I said, I agree with Stewart, I just understand that the whole idea does indeed come from the founding fathers. The constitution was not designed to prevent revolution, only to make it less likely. And armed citizenry as the final check on government is part of that system, in that the government that faces a heavily armed populace is less likely to become tyrannical for fear of it's own safety. No, in the end that doesn't work, since we have been tyrannical in the past ourselves, with institutionalized slavery and genocide, the examples of Iraq and Somalia show that a heavily armed country is not a more peaceful one, and the examples of Deadwood, Tombstone, and Dodge City show us that an armed society is not really a more polite society. And, I suppose, if the Government suddenly started executing Jews or Blacks or Gays, I'd likely change my tune and take up arms.

Now to the point. The image that came to mind when listening to David Cross and John Stewart joke about this stuff--as Stewart put it "Two nebishy Jews mining holding guns badly"--was not Jefferson or Washington or even Robert E. Lee. No, I thought of another leftist philosopher Huey P. Newton. Newton, founder of the Black Panther party, understood the second amendment and gun control better than almost anybody else in American society during the 60s. He once said:

"Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it's off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with. One of the democratic rights of the United States, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, gives the people the right to bear arms. However, there is a greater right; the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves."

Huey was protesting one of the first gun control initiatives in the US, the Mulford Act, which was designed specifically to disarm the Black Panthers and was signhed into law by that strict gun control advocate Ronald Regan. The Omnibus Crime Bill of 1968 followed, moving gun restrictions to federal law, in theory in response to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Dr. King, but also in response to all those rioting African Americans. Huey understood one of the great truths about Gun Control: that the result of Gun Control in the end is to keep guns out of the hands of common people and in the hands of the rich an powerful. The British understood this when they tried to take the colonists guns away, and the colonists understood this when they stood on the green at Lexington and refused to allow them to do so. To protest the Mulford Act Newton, Bobby Seale, and 24 other Black Panthers armed themselves and went to the the State Campital building in California. They wanted both to intimidate the legislature and to as Newton put it "get the story out" about the proposed bill. In other words, they were doing just what those people are doing who are showing up with guns to those health care town halls. They are making a point to exercise their 2nd amendment rights, and doing so in an intimidating fashion. Newton's protest created one of the most iconic images of the sixties, the picture of the Black Panthers, armed to the teeth, standing in a hallway in the state capital, exercising their second amendment rights.

So it's not just those crazies on the right. That's all I'm saying.

F#ing Republican Morrons

2009-07-27T15:49:00.000-07:00

I don't mind the fact that conservatives are opposing Sonya Sotomayor's appointment to the Supreme Court. That's what they are supposed to do. I hae a few problems with their infusion of political ideology into what should, ideally, be a non-ideological discussion. But that's a minor quibble. The senate gets to confirm appointees to the bench, and its the right of every senator to vote yay or nay for whatever reason (barring selling their vote) they see fit. And it's not like the democrats never played politics with Supreme Court appointments.

No, here is what I have a problem with: they are morons.

Ok, maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe the Republicans are not morons. Maybe they are just bald-faced lying to the American people in order to score political points with their rabid base.

An article in the AP today proves my point. It's full of stupid blather by republicans on the judiciary like Jeff Sessions. Stupid blather like the following:

Sotomayor's speeches represent a "dramatic expressions of an activist view of judging." (Jim Sessions)

Chuck Grassly says he's not sure she understands the rights Americans have under the constitution, and that some of her rulings sidestepped constitutional issues and ignored bedrock principles.

Mike Johanns says he's troubled by Sotomayor's stance on gun rights. Well, ok: so am I. But that not enough to prompt me to oppose her.

Sessions is an ass. Nobody who reads Sotomayor's famous "Wise Latina" comment could take it as activist. Sessions is also a racist himself: his own confirmation hearings were torpedoed by racist statements he admitted to and did not retract. And he's a hypocrite, since after he was denied a seat on the bench he criticized exactly the type of partisanship in judicial appointments that he is now engaging in. And if Sessions is so concerned about activism on the bench, why isn't he up in arms over Antonin Scalia, the most activist justice we've had in my lifetime? Might it be because he agrees with Scalia's politics? Judicial Activism is just code for "I don't like their politics?"

As for Grassly's comments would that be principles such as "Stare Decis," the principle that past rulings should be left to stand? Grassly seems to be worried that she'll ignore precedent in regards to DC v. Heller (to name one example) but he desperately wants the court to ignore and overturn Roe v. Wade. Hyporcite. And what about the bedrock principle that we have a supreme court in the first place. We have nine justices precisely because legal issues are open to interpretation and based upon legal principles that are constantly in flux--and yes, these principles are occasionally linked to politics. If that were not the case Scalia would not vote as he does and Ginsburg as she does. Both are performing their roles as justices, and as much as I can't stand Scalia (and on occasion can't stand Ginsburg) both of them are part of one of those bedrock principles that Grassly seems not to understnad himself: that the court has a variety of opinion because none of this is rote. If it were we wouldn't need nine justices. One would do. But Grassly can't seem to get it through his head (though I'm sure that if the one was Scalia Grassly would go for it).

The simple fact is that they lost the election and they don't like it. They honestly believed that if they could have won this one they could have gotten rid of Roe v. Wade. They've already eviscerated civil rights and environmental protections, so Roe v. Wade is really the whole ball of wax. But these damn hypocrites can't handle the fact that politics informs justice, it always has, and it always will--and our constitution acknowledges that. That's one of our bedrock principles. And either Grassly and Sessions know this, but they doesn't want to admit that their votes against Sotomayor are politically motivated, in which case they are deceiving the American people, or or they are just a couple of morons.

Not Just Any Black Guy

2009-07-21T05:15:00.000-07:00

Henry Louis Gates is the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard and, with the possible exception of Cornell West, is the preeminent African American Studies scholar in the world. No one is more qualified to discuss the issues race and racial profiling in America today. Gates was arrested last Thursday afternoon after breaking into his own home, according to a story in the AP. He had returned from a trip to China. The door to his house had been jammed so he entered through the back and then went onto the porch and forced the front door open. Somebody had called the cops saying there were two black men (Gates and his driver) breaking into a house. Gates was inside his own home. He showed the officers his identification. They arrested him anyway.

Of course race had something to do with his arrest. Anybody who suggest otherwise has never lived in a city where suspicion for most crimes falls first on black people. Every black adult in America has been profiled as a possible criminal, and every white adult in America has looked at a black person and and worried that he might mug him. It is the way we live. Is it right? No. Is it excusable? No. The fact is that blacks are more likely to commit crimes than whites. Of course, blacks are also more likely to be the victim of crime than whites. According to the justice department, in 2007, of the 7.4 million people arrested in the United States more that 3.3 million were black. This doesn't in itself prove that blacks commit more crime, only that they are arrested more often. Of course, on TV, closer to 90% of crimes are committed by blacks. We are programed to be scared. And apparently, the police in Cambridge MA are programmed to be suspicious.

Of course, 57% of the bozos responding to the stupid AOL poll on the story believed race had nothing to do with the arrest, but the people who take those polls are notorious for having an ax to grind.

Regardless, I would not want to be the arresting officer, who for the next fifty years is going to be branded a racist in African American studies textbooks all over the country.

Media Roundup

2009-07-18T04:33:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the kid who bombed the Starbucks in NYC was inspired by Fight Club. It's obviously more meat for the violence in the media debate, but it is not like a child killing another with a wrestling move. The ideas this kid got from Fight Club were not simply violent but also political. Bombing the Starbucks was an act of terrorism, and thus was a political act. That doesn't excuse it, that simply means that he didn't have to go to Fight Club to get the ideas that prompted him to bomb the star bucks. He could have gotten them from Che Guevara or Trotsky or any number of political theorists. So to blame Fight Club would be extremely naive.

Kronkite is dead and we will never see his like again. Not because he was so unique, but because the internet, cable, and the fragmentation of information have rendered it impossible for anyone to control that much attention. Never again will one man represent the voice and view of middle America (nor one woman. Sorry, Ms. Palin).

It was refreshing to see an editorial asking if, in venerating Michael Jackson, we are worshiping a monster. I don't know. The guy was acquitted. I got swept up in Michael's death a bit too, and I stand by what I've written, but it is good to see that not everyone was taken in by the mourning.

Michael, Farah Fawcet, Carl Maldin, Kronkite, and that Billy Mays guy. Tough summer so far. But did anybody notice (besides the Times) when MacNamara died a couple weeks ago? That's at least as big a deal in the non-celebrity world.

Lawers Guns and Money

2009-07-13T18:22:00.000-07:00

Principle IV of the Nuremberg Principles, which we put in place during the military tribunals at Nuremberg, which *we* insisted in 1946 carry the force of law, states:

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

So what is this crap Obama and Holder are saying that if somebody acted on orders and didn't exceed the guidelines given them in torturing terrorist detainees that they won't be prosecuted. At Nuremberg we didn't settle for that. "I was only following orders" became THE symbolic phrase for Nazi culpability. In fact, we even convicted the lawyers who wrote the legal justification for Nazi war crimes, as well as anybody whom we could prove ordered those war crimes or carried out those orders, whether or not they had been given "legal justification." This was US, by the way, not the United Nations, not the allies, but US. We supplied the judges, the staff, and the prosecutors. We held the tribunals in our zone of control, stating that we had the authority to do so by virtue of the fact that we were the de facto government there, and we did it without any help from the British, French, or Russians (or, of course, the Germans). These were OUR rules, OUR principles, OUR laws.

But not President Obama's laws, and not AG Holder's laws.

The Nurmemberg principles were later adopted by the UN and ratified as an element of international law. I know that we ignore IL all the time, but these were OUR OWN RULES. Shouldn't we be upholding them now? What meaning do our laws have if the president can chose to ignore them whenever it is politically or militarily inconvenient to enforce them? We asked the same question about Bush and were told that the presidents authority in war time is absolute. Mr. Obama promised change. I don't see it.

If I may...

2009-07-13T18:15:00.000-07:00

If I may take a moment to say something in Sarah Palin's favor:

When the snot nosed little punk who knocked up your daughter goes onto the today show and bad mouths you on national TV, you should have every right to horse whip the little punk and then stake him out on a rock out on Kodiak island, stripped naked and speared with honey. Ok, maybe not that. But the horsewhipping, that's what woodsheds are really for.

Oh, and while you are at it....

2009-07-11T15:16:00.000-07:00

Here is the stupidest headline I've ever seen on AOL:

"Obama asks Africa to end tyranny, corruption." It makes you wonder if he added "Pretty Please?"

The actual headline to the AP story was a bit more forceful. AOL of course always looks for a stupid way to get get people to click on a news item, like saying "Harry Potter Star Busted For Drugs," without saying who, and then when you click on it you find out it was one of Draco's pals, whose character you couldnt' name, let alone the actor who plays him.

Oh, speaking of Obama, did anyone but me notice the nice little conservative swipe taken at Obama by Michae Bay in Transformers? The duplicitous Defense Department guy from the Obama administration who is given presidential authority to negotiate with the Aliens who are trying to explode the sun and wipe out all life on the planet while President Obama hides in an undisclosed bunker? Yes, it's standard fare in adventure movies to have some part of the government, usually the whitehosue but sometimes congress, as hapless morons or occasionally traitors. Setting Obama up as the obstructionist political hack is just giving equal time. It's hard to say. He was highly critical of GW Bush, but Pearl Harbor, Armegedon, and both Transformers movies are very right-wing.

Video Terror

2009-07-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

Vox Pop, the cafe and bookstore where I used to work, has been getting some good press lately. Having re-opened a few weeks ago after remodeling, restructuring, and a hefty dose of investment from the local community, VP has once again captured the media spotlight. But the biggest publicity, and the most sympathy, has come from the theft of their Statue of Liberty replica. A rally was held and a reward offered after the seven foot statue was taken in June, and it made the local Brooklyn papers and a lot of blogs.

Well now the fate of the statue has been learned. As covered in the Daily News, the statue was decapitated in a "Death to America" video now on You Tube. Tonight at eight VP will be covered on CNN.

They say no publicity is bad publicity, and this actually helps Vox Pop, which had a not entirely deserved anti-American revolutionary image under founder Sander Hicks. Suddenly Vox Pop, which has always stood for a very lefty, almost Marxist brand of liberty, is now seen as a victim of anti-American protest and terror. I mean, lets face it: from a Marxist point of view the message of the video "We don't want your freedom" "Death to America" is pretty standard. And if, indeed, private property=theft, as many Marxists proclaim, then stealing the statue wasn't theft at all, because Vox Pop's ownership of it was part of a capitalistic structure designed to oppress the masses--or something like that. Anyway, the destruction of bourgeois symbols in an effort to tear the mask off of the hipocracy of the state certainly furthers the cause of revolution and should be embraced by the proletariat.

Shouldn't it?

Well, VP is a corporation. It is liberal but not really leftist. They believe in social justice but not really in revolution. It tries to be a business with a conscience, but it is still a business. And it's always a bit different when its your property being vandalized in the name of the people.

Vox Pop, while it's long struggled and while I've had my own issues with them, is a great place. Although seen as being part of the gentrification of Cortelyou Road, VP was on the early edge of that movement, and they are now an integral part of the community. Although some locals resent them, they are in fact one of the most community conscious business in the city, and also one of the coolest cafes in the world. And they deserve a break. And they deserve not to have their stuff messed with.

Just sayin'.

The Jacksons Knwo How to Throw a Funeral

2009-07-07T12:50:00.000-07:00

Michael Jackson's funeral was a slickly produced event, with music and video, dancing and singing, and moving tributes. Brooke Shields talked of being a friend, Magic Johnson talked of being a fan, and Paris Jackson broke everyone's heart. It was for all intents and purposes an Black church service, and that should have been expected. I lost count of the numbers of preachers who spoke, but Sharpton was one, and Sharpton as always brought the house down.

It was also an exercise in myth making, and there it was truly revealing, because it failed. It fell short. Watching it I came to realize that nothing they could do could capture how great, how talented, how important Michale Jackson was. Did MJ make it so Barak Obama could be elected? Maybe no more than Jackie Robinson, but Robinson and maybe Ali are the only people before Jackson who could compare to his impact on race in America, and because Michael could write about it and sing about it and not just play his way into people's lives and hearts, I'd say his influence was possibly greater. Of his music there is no question: Thriller is the number one selling album of all time, and he is the most popular entertainer of all time, and that alone entitles him tot he title "greatest." But what I learned from his memorial service is that no tribute can do justice to how big he was, how important, how great. And I wasn't particularly a fan. I just recognize that he truly was the King of Pop.

You can't build a myth around that. It is already there, and your attempt will fall short.

The Footnote From Alaska

2009-07-06T03:38:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin is on facebook. Who knew. Apparently she announced on her facebook page that she quit her job as governor of Alaska because of a "Higher Calling." Well, unless she is entering a nunnery I think we all know what that higher calling will be. Sure, it might simple be to "whip the democrats," but I'll bet it more likely has to do with the black guy in the white house. Question is, did Mitt Romney write this script? Jindal gets on TV and looks like an ineffectual boob. Sanford goes down to Argentina and comes back a has-been. Sarah Palin will forever be painted as the woman who couldn't handle the high-pressure position of chief executive of Alaska. The economy continues to worry people and so does the president's plan and Romney, a former auto executive with ties to both Michigan and Massachusetts, is suddenly the Repubblican front runner -- which might just make him the next domino to fall.

Music Musings

2009-07-01T08:00:00.001-07:00

Hmmm. Sarah Palin likes Van Halen. Hey! That Rhymes!

Stuart Saves America

2009-06-30T19:04:00.000-07:00

The Minnesota Supreme Court has spoken and the former head writer of Saturday Night live, the man who invented self-help guru Stuart Smalley, the man who famously called Rush Limbaugh a Big Fat Idiot, is now a US Senator.

Could politics get any more surreal?

I've been a Franken fan since the first season of SNL. I lvoe his books. I also think he will make a very good senator. But he will not, my liberal brethren, save America. Because Franken represents the magic 60th vote in the Senate, giving the Democrats a supposedly filibuster=proof majority, the liberal base of the party now thinks that they will no longer have to compromise, that they will be able to ram-rod through legislation the way the Republicans managed to without a ten vote majority during President Bush's administration (the Republicans didn't need a super-majority because they had terrorists). The rabid base, having been kicked around by the elephants with their big feet during the no compromise, scorched earth Bush years smell blood and want revenge. They are no interested in bi=partisanship any more than Bush was, and they now believe the road is wide open for them to push through truly progressive and far-reaching legislation on Universal Health Care, tough environmental standards, education reform, and a total re-structuring of the American economy into a democratic-socialist state with very high taxes, a huge welfare state, government regulation of industry, gay marriage, euthanasia, atheism, paganism, satanism, and legalized prostitution, drugs, and man-boy love. For forty years the liberals in the United States have been looking wistfully at the Netherlands and saying "why can't that be us?"

Am I sounding to much like Fat Rush? I don't intend to. Not really. But the extreme edge of our party is just as extreme in many ways as the extreme edge of Bush's party, and which governed Bush's policy for most of his tenure as President. I know: I'm one of them (ok, I've mellowed a bit). I am hoping and praying that we get real health care reform, not the watered down version Obama is proposing now; that we get rid of Don't Ask Don't Tell right now; that we have a more progressive tax code; and that we continue to strengthen the social services net. I do. I'm also deathly afraid of what a truly liberal majority could do to gun rights, property rights, and individual liberty in general.

But it's not going to happen.

The last time the democrats had 60 seats in the Senate was during the Carter administration, and look what good that did. They fought constantly amongst themselves, they didn't get anything meaningful done, and they laid the groundwork for the Reagan revolution. The Democratic majority in congress relies heavily on pro-gun, pro-business Senators who are fiercely independent and don't mind bucking the President or the liberal base. And the President, much to the frustration of gays and environmentalists and just about everyone else in the party, is a pragmatist who believes that, even if he's not being bi-partisan with the Republicans, that he has to be bi-partisan with independents if he wants to secure a second term and keep that democratic majority.

Republicans can govern from the right but Democrats must always govern from the center. There is no real left in American politics these days--in spite of what blow hards like O'Reily and Hannity and Fat Rush try to put over on us.

So sorry, my liberal kin, Stuart is not riding in to save America.

Musings on

2009-06-30T05:44:00.000-07:00

Last night John Stewart began his show by saying "anybody who ever meant anything to anybody died over the weekend." It sure seems like the seventies are dead and over now. But our obsession with celebrity is a cancer (one that I suffer from as well as the rest of you). It makes us think people we've never met before are somehow family. It makes us mourn people we've never met. It raises in some persons feelings of affection or even rejection toward stars they obsess over, and this can lead to the Mark David Chapmans of the world. What makes thousands of people stand outside the courthouse of Michael Jackson's trial and voice their support? Guilty or not (not, officially) what do they know about this guy other than how his music makes them feel?

That is, of course, the issue: he makes them feel something special. Hell, he made them feel something at all. He was the brightest musical genius of his (my) generation, give him his due, and that means something in this world (and why couldn't I have had Pete Townsend instead? Pete was singing about my father's generation, and that always bothered me).

I'd say the worst part of it is how people are complaining that he upstaged Farah Fawcet. And what about Billy Mays and Ed McMahon? Don't they deserve their moment of mass mourning?

And look at how it distracts us from real news: no, not the South Carolina thing. That's just as bad. Michael Jackson knocked Iran right off the front page. Did anybody notice there was a coup in Honduras over the weekend? Or that we pulled out of Baghdad? (the Iraquis noticed: they declared a national holiday)

I know: it's useless trying to tell people what they should care about. What makes your (our) tastes in news or in anything else so superior?

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL

2009-06-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

What's the bigger news? Seriously: Mark Sanford's political career imploding, or the USA beating Spain in the Confederation Cup? I'll give you a hint: I learned about the soccer win on Colbert.

The Sanford drama has been playing itself out all over the news and internet today. I came home tonight to find it on every channel and, like witnesses to train wrecks everywhere, I just couldn't look away. I watched the coverage on Colbert's, Maddow's, Olberman's, Stewart's, and Chris Mathews' shows. Maddow, Olberman, and Mathews, MSNBC drones all (meaning they are *my* drones) each devoted as much as half their air time to the Sanford story. As usual Maddow was the most thorough, while also being the most biting and acerbic. Mathews was the most sober. Hell, his guests were Howard Feinman and Dan Rather: how much more sobering can you get? He called it "an affair of the heart", distinguishing it from the normal shenanigans with interns or hookers or undercover detectives in mens rooms, and treated it with dignity--probably far more than it deserved. Olberman, of course, mocked and gesticulated and feigned outrage.

So what is it about Sanford? Is it newsworthy? I've always said that a person's personal life is just that--personal. Where the governor of South Carolina dips his penis is between him, his god, his wife, and whomever he is dipping it into. And nobody else. This is really only news because he disappeared for five days and started a mini-national panic, and because it seems to make him out to be a hypocrite. But really, while his going "out of pocket" is certainly the business of the South Carolina voters, his affair is none of our business at all.

And yet I couldn't look away.

Only John Stewart on the Daily Show, who can never be accused of having dignity, treated the story as it deserved. He pulled out popcorn and a soda, made a bad joke about the governor being a bottom (via selective editing) and then played the clip where the governor said he'd been unfaithful to his wife. And Stewart said "that's it? You're human?" and moved on to talk to a little animated Kim Jong Ill, and then about Iran. In other words, he gave the story less than two minutes, which is about how much time was warranted, land went on to REAL fake news.

Oh, did I mention that the USA beat Spain?

Sports Thursday

2009-06-11T09:42:00.000-07:00

It's time for us to take one of our occasional forays into the world of sports. Because Politics can be so depressing....

But not as depressing as seven losses in a row to the Red Sox.

TEXTBOOKS? Are you freaking kidding me? When the story of Alabama having to vacate 22 victories from 2005 through 2007, I was sure it had something to do with recruiting violations. Team supplied testosterone. Hooker parties after games. But no. Alabama is accused of "improperly distributing textbooks to students." I am a college professor, and I can attest to this simple fact: textbooks are insanely overpriced. My students have to pay over $100 for their speech text. The reason there is a new eddition of a textbook every one or two years is so the old ones will become obsolete and the students will have to keep buying new ones. It's a racket. I try to keep it less expensive by tellng them they can use any used edition later than the seventh. So, yes, distributing textbooks to athletes amounts to remuneration. But if you won't let them have an f*ing job, how in the hell do you expect them to buy textbooks??? This is insane! The problem here is not that Alabama distributed textbooks to its students, the problem is that textbooks are like popcorn in a movie theater: an artificial monopoly. With only one supplier of the text a student is require REQUIRED to use, and no real competition to control prices, textbooks are priced insanely high. I realize the other side of that argument is that since only students buy textbooks not a lot of them are sod, so if they didn't have a high price nobody would be able to stay in business. But that's belied by the fact that the most popular textbooks are also the most expensive textbooks. I teach Public Speaking, for instance. We use the most popular text, The Art of Public Speaking by Stephen E. Lucas. It sells in our bookstore for $100 with all the doodads like an interactive CD ROM and a pamphlet they call a "topic generator". It's $85 at most stores without that stuff. Other, perfectly reasonable texts, tend to cost around $50. I know some teachers who use O'Hair and Stweart's Pocket Guide to Public Speaking, which costs twenty bucks. But we have a contract with the publishers of Lucas, and that means the students who take public speaking, which has the highest enrollment of any class at school, use Lucas. This is why textbook reps employ the very hard sell, and why I keep getting my mailbox crammed with free samples. It is one of the biggest rackets in publishing. Now, Lucas is a great text, and school is expensive, I'm not saying none of this should be happening. I am saying that if the athletics dept at Alabama is trying to help out its students by distributing textbooks to them, more power to them! The crime here is the way the NCAA refuses to allow student athletes to be compensated at their full value to the university. But that is for another blog.

The Times is noted for particularly poor sports reporting. How poor? Last Friday they reported that the Redwings looked old and tired and that this was looking like the Penguins' year; and that Tiger's return was marked by inconsistency. The Redwings then went out and beat the Penguins 5-0, and Tiger hit 14 of 14 fairways on Sunday, and birdied 17 and 18, to win the Memorial by one stroke. Insightful.

Kyle Bush smashed a guitar. He is a punk. Not for smashing the guitar (I'm a big time Who fan: guitars are made to be smashed). He's just a punk in general. A punk who wins more races than anybody else. I now understand how older NASCAR fans must have felt about Jeff Gordon.

Lakers in 5.

My favorite player on my favorite Soccer team (inasmuch as I care about soccer), Christiano Renaldo, is moving from Man-U to Real Madrid. He'll make a lot of money for the move. But so will Man-U. they are getting a $131,000,000 transfer fee from Real Madrid. That's $131,000,000 that goes to Man-U, which Renaldo will never see. On top fo that he's likely to make $200M. That's a lot of money for one guy in a sport where you are lucky to see three goals in a game.

What is it?

2009-06-11T04:17:00.000-07:00

So what is it that makes governments dysfunctional?

I live in New York. Before that I lived in California. I love New York--the whole state, and I do look on California as the Promised land. But if you look at their governments right now you have to say they are both a mess. In New York, a one seat majority for the democrats on Monday turned into a one seat majority for the republicans, with turn-coat democrats taking part in a coup. In California, voters continue to pass initiatives that demand services without passing the taxes necessary to pay for them, bankrupting the state. This has been going on since Proposition 13. I guess the New York problem occurs whenever the party in power has a razor thin majority. I remember when Willie Brown was speaker of the house and the Republicans thought they were going to oust him, until, in the vote for a new speaker, one republican voted for Brown, taking everyone but Willie by surprise. When the tallys are close horse trading can occur that can shift power from one party to another.

I really don't want to talk about Cali.

Could it in fact be that every system, every form of government, every political party, just like every economic theory, eventually collapses in on itself, as fresh ideas become dogmatic and reforms create new avenues of excess? This is certainly what happened (rather quickly) to communism.

I don't know.

I believe in liberal democracy. Don't I? I mean, I believe in the state as an engine for positive change. I believe that "We The People" means exactly that, that the government is the people. I believe in majority rule. And I believe in the Bill of Rights (all ten amendments, not just nine like some people). But look at what democracy has wrought in New York and California. One is a circus and the other about to become a post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Of course, Churchill was right. Look at the alternatives.

2009-06-08T16:03:00.000-07:00

Do you think Shelby Steele believes what he writes?

Mom sent me a link to a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece by Shelby Steele, a black intellectual who is a fellow at the Hoover Institute. She sent it to me (I presume) because she sees it as bolstering the anti-Sotomayor rhetoric of the right. Or perhaps she wanted to open my eyes to some sort of “truth.” She also begged me for a balanced response, as she has been quite offended by my “squeal little piggies” attitude of late.

Fair enough. We don’t want to upset mother.

I think all the Steele op-ed shows is that the Hoover Institution is still a bastion of conservative ideology. The only truth I can find in it is the truth that conservative intellectuals, even black ones, are still willing to promote racism in the guise of a merit system, but one which is biased in favor of whites. But I don’t want to sound guilt ridden over the actions of my ancestors, nor do I want to sound like some politically correct drone, so I’ll just look at Steele’s words for a moment.

First, he seems to suppose, as do many, that Obama is supposed to be a “post-racialist” president. First of all he is using the term “post-racialist” incorrectly. Racialism means the assigning of characteristics or traits to a group of people based upon their ancestry. Steele is using it to refer to the use of race as a basis for identity politics. By the actual definition of the word, the Obama presidency absolutely is post-racialist. In mainstream American media and politics it was argued and believed, right through the 1970s and even, in some quarters, to this very day, that Blacks lack the intellectual capabilities to lead. African American leaders from Frederick Douglas onward have struggled against this racial identification. Obama’s presidency proves that a majority of Americans do not agree. In that sense he is a “post-racialist” president.

What Steele is trying to say is that Obama’s mixed race background, removed from the identity struggles of the civil rights movement and the counter-culture revolution, was supposed to move us beyond race based identity politics. Indeed, he is correct insofar as Mr. Obama declared himself to represent a generation after the baby boom and therefore ready to move beyond the so-called struggles of the sixties (Obama and I are both technically baby-boomers, but so late that we are more akin to Generation X). But the idea that his campaign was not on some level about race ignores the fact that a majority of whites voted against him. It also ignores the celebrations that occurred after his election, both among African Americans and among liberal whites who saw this as a step to that post-racialist world Steele seems to think Obama represents. Those celebrations in Chicago and Atlanta on election night, the number of African Americans on the mall at his inauguration, the almost tearful editorials about how impossible it would have been to believe, just two years ago, that America would have a black president, in fact show the opposite: they show that the Obama candidacy was all about race. My African American students up in Harlem never had any illusions about that: they supported Obama because he was black. End of statement. And, I guarantee, some white people voted for Obama, if not because of his race, then gleeful that he might somehow give them absolution for the oppression of blacks, the benefits of which they have reaped (my own vote for him was certainly racially tinged: I would have voted for any of the democrats over McCain, but with Obama was the added satisfaction that it would piss off David Duke and Rush Limbaugh). Far from indicating that we have some how moved into a “post-racialist” society, the Obama presidency has proved that race still matters.

Steele shows that race, or at least racial struggle, also matters, because apparently, in Steele’s world, anybody who recognizes, admits, or struggles to amend the injustices of the past is playing identity politics and therefore should be dismissed. Fine. He’s made his career out of being one of the few black voices who agrees with the right, kind of like Clarence Thomas or Clyde on Doonesbury. Of the nomination of Judge Sotomayor he says “The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics: It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit.” First of all, he is an idiot if he doesn’t think that politics play a part in Supreme Court nominations. If they didn’t we would not have five Catholics on the bench, and the 2000 election would not have been decided by the 5-4 majority of conservative vs. liberal justices (as Dershowitz noted speaking of Bush v. Gore “[T]he decision in the Florida election case may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history, because it is the only one that I know of where the majority justices decided as they did because of the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants. This was cheating, and a violation of the judicial oath.”) But this isn’t an “everyone does it” defense.

That Obama nominated someone who will help with the Latino vote is true, but he also nominated someone who is unassailable by anyone who wants to attract the Latino vote. Knowing that the Republicans were primed to play politics with the nomination and try to block it no matter whom he nominated, Obama trumped them by nominating someone they could not oppose, a moderate jurist with seventeen years of experience who is also Latina, meaning any attack on her would alienate what is being touted as the most important voting block in the next several election cycles. In a way Steele doesn’t want to admit, the idea behind Sotomayor’s nomination has far less to do with identity politics than it does with politics.

And Politics obviously plays a part in Steele’s opinion too. Like all of the righty talking heads he was going to oppose whomever Obama nominated.

Steele implies two things throughout his article in addition to the direct statement that Obama is somehow expected to be “post-racialist”. The first is that Sotomayor is unfit for the bench because she plays racial politics with her decisions. The second is the implication that her promotion has nothing to do with merit. Both of these are incorrect, and since it is obvious that they are incorrect to those who have studied her career, the only conclusion I can come to is that Steele is deliberately obfuscating the truth.

Later, steel writes “Throughout her career Judge Sotomayor has demonstrated a Hispanic chauvinism so extreme that it sometimes crosses into outright claims of racial supremacy, as in 2001 when she said in a lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, ‘a wise Latina woman . . . would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male.’” This is a carefully constructed sentence on Steele’s part, one that shows an Orwellian mastery of doublespeak. The “wise Latina woman” statement has been hashed and parsed again and again. I don’t find it particularly racist, and taken in context it doesn’t’ offend this old white guy in the least. It was simply a statement of pride in herself. We hypocritically call America tells people that they should be proud of their heritage, and then when they express pride in their heritage we condemn them as racists. But that can sound racist to many people, especially people already suspicious of ethnic pride and see it as a form of identity politics, so Steele uses it to bolster the first part of his statement: “Throughout her career Judge Sotomayor has demonstrated a Hispanic chauvinism so extreme…” Remove the word “so” from here, and say instead that ‘throuhout her career Judge Sotomayor has demonstrated extreme Hispanic chauvinism.” This is what Steele is saying, and this is a bald-faced lie. There is nothing in her career, at least not as a judge (I haven’t studied her career as a prosecutor) which indicates any form of chauvinism, so Steele uses the now infamous Berkeley quote, taken out of context, to imply that there is. But the quote has little if anything to do with her career.

It was from a speech she made to a symposium in Berkeley called “Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation.” Steele leaves off the last part of the sentence, “who hasn’t lived that life.” She was actually commenting on a statement often attributed to Sandra Day O’Connor. Here is the whole quote: “Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.” It is worth pointing out that O’Connor often broke with her conservative colleagues on gender issues, even voting to uphold Roe v. Wade, even though she was otherwise reliably conservative. This tends to be true of most women on the bench.

The speech obviously provides a lot of ammo for the conservatives who think there is no such thing as ethnic experience in this country (something only the majority can believe). Sotomayor was treading dangerous ground from the beginning, when she said “I intend tonight to touch upon the themes that this conference will be discussing this weekend and to talk to you about my Latina identity, where it came from, and the influence I perceive it has on my presence on the bench.” Since conservatives believe that that personal identity should have no influence on judicial decisions (our greatest jurist, Thurgood Marshal argued exactly the opposite) I’m surprised this statement hasn’t made the rounds of the nattering class. Sotomayor’s point is that everybody brings their experiences to the table, and that diversity is a good thing. Even Scalia noted this in an oblique way when he acknowledged the power with which Marshal spoke of race, and how heavily his words were weighed, when cases involving discrimination came before the court.

Sotomayor even addressed the tension between personal identity and politics in the speech, discussing the conflict between the “melting pot vs the salad bowl”: “America has a deeply confused image of itself that is in perpetual tension. We are a nation that takes pride in our ethnic diversity, recognizing its importance in shaping our society and in adding richness to its existence. Yet, we simultaneously insist that we can and must function and live in a race and color-blind way that ignore these very differences that in other contexts we laud.” There is so much fodder for the right’s argument against Sotomayor that I’m surprised more from the speech hasn’t been published outside the rabid tabloids and the reactionary blogs, because she says outright that her experiences do affect her decisions. Perhaps it’s because what the Berkeley speech amounts to is not only a compelling argument as to why that should be so, but also demonstrates concrete examples as to how white male often let their own politics, identity, gender and experiences, color their decisions. Or it might be that they’d have to acknowledge that Sotomayor said this:

“Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.”

In other words, we must be thoughtful jurists. This is the rhetorical petard on which they hope to hoist judge Sotomayor.

Now, perhaps I don’t find this bothersome because I believe that every judge brings his or her own experiences and biases to the table, and that’s why we have nine of them instead of just one. But maybe I’m too cynical. But I think that the tempest over this quote is in a very small teapot. Steele probably doesn’t like it because it was made at Berkeley and he works at Stanford.

Steels is a liar. As the New York Times noted in a graph on Saturday’s Op-Ed page, in 96 cases pertaining to race, Judge Sotomayor rejected the claims of discrimination 78 times, agreed with it only ten times (eight cases involved other types of claims). Furthermore, of the ten decisions that found discrimination, nine of them were unanimous according to the Daily Dish. In other words, Sotomayor’s record does not indicate that she decides cases based on identity politics or upon her own racial experience. In the Ricci case, which is the one that the republicans are hanging their hat on (it is before the Supreme Court right now, and will probably be overturned), she was part of a unanimous summary judgment. She didn’t even write an opinion. The full court upheld her. Where is the radical racial politics she is supposed to be foisting upon us? I will tell you: nowhere. This whole op-ed is a pile of lies designed to slander a well qualified jurist.

In Shelby Steele’s world a person who has 17 years on the bench (more than any of the current justices had when they were appointed) who is rarely overturned on appeal, who has no record of trying to impose racial politics on her decisions, and who often votes in agreement with republican appointees, is radical, racist, and unqualified.

Maybe the opposition from Steele exists because he knows that she is right—that every judge decides cases based on their own experiences to some extent, and that she represents a threat to the white hegemonic power structure. Maybe its because, unlike her record on race, she’s got a very strong pro-environment record. Often the objections on social issues are used to mask an economic argument.

Whatever the case why don’t we call this what it is: an attempt by a black conservative intellectual to torpedo the nomination of a supremely qualified Latina jurist, by any means necessary.

.

Barack on Facebook

2009-06-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

Here's one of the funniest things I've seen in awhile:

http://www.slate.com/id/2219266/

Newt Gingrich, Medievalist

2009-06-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

Over on Politics Daily (a site I am just now bookmarking as something I have to read, well, daily), there is a great article on how Obama is reviving progressive Catholicism. It is fascinating for a Unitarian who is a medievalist and a wannabe catholic (which I'm sure means I'll end up an Episcopalian eventually).

A couple of points it brings up are worth noting. I already knew that Sonia Sotomayor will be the sixth catholic sitting on the Supreme Court. That is primarily a result of the abortion issue, as conservative catholic justices who can supposedly be counted on to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. But Sotomayor is a Catholic in the old (though not too old) school, a progressive catholic.

Another point I found fascinating is the number of conservatives, Gingrich among them, who have converted to Catholicism as as the conservative wing of the church has come to dominate church hierarchy, and that seems to have increased witht he election of the Grand Inquisitor as pope.

But the main point of the article is how Obama, an African American protestant, is stirring up a debate among Catholics and giving voice to the Church's progressive wing.

To me it is odd. My primary attraction to Catholicism (as is Gingrich's) comes from the fact that I am a medievalist. Studying the middle ages I have to immerse myself in Catholicism, and so it's rituals have become a part of me, even as I cling to my secular faith as a Unitarian (nice thing about Unitarianism: you can believe just about anything you want to believe). But the medieval church is not the Catholic church I came to respect when I was young. That is the church that has been largely silenced since the election of John Paul II, the church of the Kennedy's, of Romero, of Moynihan and McCarthy. The church that was radicalized in the 30s and continued their progressive agenda through the 70s, and who still have a few standard bearers like Pelosi and Cuomo and Keary, and all those working-class Irish and Hispanic Catholics who believe in sticking up for those who haven't got a voice.

What I see happening right now, as the Conservative Bishops begin to lose their grip on the Church, is the same thing that is happening to the Republicans. Conservatism has been so fully discredited that conservatives are becoming marginalized themselves, both in politics and in the church. And that is an interesting development.

Please Just Shut Up!

2009-06-02T08:29:00.000-07:00

Here’s a list of people who should just shut up.

1.) Republicans who are “upset” about President Obama taking his wife on a date to New York, complaining that it was on the tax-payer’s dime, and condemning him for going to see a godless play on godless Broadway. SHUT UP!!! Where were you when G.W. Bush was flying to Crawford Texas? Where were you when he was spending weeks at a time on his ranch instead of in Washington tending to running the country? And when Vice President Cheney was off shooting people in the face, or fishing with his old buddy Justice Scalia, where were you then? All those vacations also cost taxpayer dollars. This all proves that you GOPers care nothing about reality, and nothing about governing, all you care about is power, trying (lamely in this case) to make the Preisdent look bad in the hopes that you can win back the Whithouse and congress (and have you seen his numbers? You are failing miserably) Are you seriously suggesting that the president should not take his wife to dinner and a show? Are you seriously suggesting that he should be a prisoner in the Whitehouse for the next eight years? (and at the rate you guys are going eight years is pretty much a given) Good God! You people are such assholes!!

2.) Anybody who mentions or even thinks about the “Octomom.” SHUT UP!

3.) Everyone at Fox News who is complicit in the murder of Dr. George Tiller, but especially Bill O’Reily. These people, who spent years calling Dr. Tiller a mass murder, Nazi, “Tiller the Killer” etc., now insist that their rhetoric had nothing to do with Dr. Tiller’s death. Bull. O’Reily has blood on his hands and is complicit in terrorism. Can we do anything legally to stop him? No. Will he stop? No: he has no conscience, he’s proven that. All I can say is he just needs to shut the f* up!

4.) Whiny racists in the GOP who are flinging the charge of racism at Sonia Sotomayor. These people are hypocrites. They championed Samuel Alito when he said that this Italian American immigrant heritage helped him to make wise judgments, but call Judge Sotomayor a racist when she says her Hispanic heritage and gender experience help *her* to make wise judgments! Hypocrites!

5.) Equivocators in the ACLU, an organization I normally support, who are afraid at leveling the charge of “terrorism” against Dr. Tiller’s murderer because of the way the term was abused by the Bush administration and used to justify the erosion of civil rights. Just because Bush abused the term doesn’t mean we can’t call a terrorist a terrorist. In fact it makes it all the more necessary, since that is how people will know what terrorism really is. Scott Roeder is a terrorist and is part of a terrorist movement in this country, one which seeks to end the practice of abortion by terrorizing providers into quitting. And they are succeeding, as many doctors and nurses, justifiably fearful for their lives, are ceasing to offer abortion services. That is terrorism. The F.B.I. knows it, the terrorists themselves know it. The ACLU should just admit it too.

6.) Religious Zealots preaching jihad (or crusade) against any person or group for any reason, be they Islamic zealots promoting anti-Western terrorism, or Christian zealots promoting anti-abortion terrorism, or protestant zealots promoting anti-Catholic terrorism, or vice versa. You, all of you, and I’m pointing the finger at you Ulster Defense Association, Sinn Fein, Al Queda, PETA and Operation Rescue. All of you SHUT UP!!

7.) Dick Cheney.

I could come up with more, but I’m too pissed off and too tired to care any more.

Really, itg's all the same story

2009-05-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

A typical day in soccer, as a Man U fan was stabbed in Rome, where the red shirts will be playing Barcelona in the Champions League final this week.

Pao Gasol wants the ball more in the low post. Big surprise. The Lakers are not in big trouble as their series is even and games 5, 6, and 7 almost always go to the home team.

The Cavaliers are done, and were it not for a miracle shot in Game that series would be over. In spite of the conventional wisdom that the Cavaliers were the best team in Basketball and a shoe-in for the title, the result is typical as well: the team with the great player can't win because he takes too many shots. In the three games that LaBron as over 40 points in this series the Cavaliers have lost. Typical.

But can you imagine the networks tearing their hair out, and the suits at NBA headquarters crying themselves to sleep, thinking about the possibility of a Denver vs. Orlando final? This was supposed to be Kobe vs. Labron, the games two biggest stars, Olympic teammates now rivals. Not Carmello Anthony and Dwight Howard. But that is typical too.

But most typical of all is the Republican talking heads bashing Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's choice for Supreme Court. While Rachel Maddow paints Sotomayor as not liberal enough, Limbaugh and his crowd have her taking tea with Castro. From a media and confirmation standpoint the pick was near perfect. Sotomayor is Hispanic, a woman, and has a great rags to riches Horatio Alger story. If the Republicans attack her the risk alienating Hispanics for the next two election cycles, and possible blue collar workers and women as well. The PACs on both sides of the aisle are gearing up to use this as a fund raising tool, but the buzz is that Republicans don't ahve a stomach for this fight. Not only that, but she would be one liberal justice replacing another. The real fight doesn't start until Kennedy retires (which could still come this year). But Limbaugh and Hannity and all the bubble heads at Fox are running their mouths off proclaiming here to be proof that Obama is the most liberal president ever and is trying to sell us down the road to godless socialism. Typical.

Maddow's point, by the way, is an interesting one. She says that it is a mistake to ask whether or not Sotomayor is, as the White House is trying to paint her, "conservative enough". Why, she asks, should we want a conservative or even a moderate on a court that already skews so far to the right. Why not appoint a real liberal, someone who is truly radical in their judicial thinking, to the court and try to restore some sort of balance to a court that has been curtailing abortion rights, siding consistently with business and polluters, and recently overturned eighty years of jurisprudence regarding gun laws in favor of an individual as opposed to collective right to keep and bear arms? Why not, say Maddow, fight now, when Obama's political capital is at its peak, have a real liberal on the court? Also typical.

Thankfully, she wasn't making the pick.

63 37 to confirm. Maybe even more.

More "Change we can believe in"

2009-05-26T12:17:00.001-07:00

Meet the new boss and all that....

A great article from the LA Times on how the US has been holding an Iraqi journalist who works for Reuters since September, in spite of an Iraqi court order to release him and in spite of not charging him with any crime.

Exactly where is that change we were supposed to believe in?

Hate Mongers Win

2009-05-26T10:35:00.000-07:00

There was little doubt that the California Supreme Court would uphold Proposition 8 when it ruled earlier today. The same court that last May 15 held that gays had a constitutional right to marry this morning ruled that the constitutional amendment that passed last November (helped in part by Latino and African American church goers who turned out to back President Obama). Precedent and the justices own questioning seemed to indicate the way it would go: the constitutional amendment was not illegal, nor did it take away an inalienable right as Jerry argued. (I thought Jerry's argument was extremely creative and cogent, but it didn't stand much of a chance). Now it will go to the ballot box again, and hopefully equality will win out over bigotry this time.

However, a key provision of the law, one that is extremely far reaching, remains intact: sexual orientation is now treated like race and gender and afforded "the highest protection" in discrimination cases. This was part of the California Supreme Court's original ruling allowing gay marriage, and Prop 8 did nothing to overturn it. So some small blow for justice has indeed been struck.

Mr. President, no!

2009-05-25T07:02:00.000-07:00

It is time for me to write about President Obama’s decision to keep some GITMO inmates in indefinite detention, and to try some others in military tribunals—tweaking but essentially maintaining a policy that he promised to abolish. What do I think of that?

It’s criminal.

Not the promising to abolish and then reneging. That’s not criminal. Politicians do that all the time. No, I mean the war crimes part. I mean the part for which Dick Cheney and possibly George W. Bush should and actually might stand trial in an international court. That’s the part that is criminal, as in it is a crime.

Do I feel let down or disillusioned? Not really. I didn’t have any illusions that Obama would change the world. Disappointed? Yes. I’m disappointed because the thing I voted for most of all in Obama was a return to the rule of law, to the constitution, away from the illegal big-brother dictatorship of Bush 43. I knew I was getting an intellectual who was also a pragmatic politician, someone who wasn’t particularly liberal but who leaned a bit to the left of center, but I did believe him when he said he was going to close GITMO and return our country to the rule of law. I honestly think he wanted to. I honestly think the JAG convinced him that if we actually tried some people we would lose and have to release men that we knew were terrorists—possibly because we had tortured them and therefore under American law all the evidence we had gotten from them was tainted. And he didn’t want to be responsible for releasing terrorists. Ignore for a moment the fact that holding these men without trial proves us to be hypocrites who have no right to call ourselves a nation of laws, any kind of example to the rest of the world, or any of that garbage. How can we claim to be the leader of the free world when we are not ourselves free, when we refuse to uphold the freedoms we scold others for not upholding?

We can’t.

I’m still not sorry I voted for Obama. I still think he’s the finest and best qualified person to hold the office since Roosevelt. I still believe in him. But I pray he will come to his senses.

I want my OTV

2009-05-22T08:28:00.000-07:00

Here's a flash for you: politicians like to spin the news.

This is the lesson of a recent report that when President Obama shot hoops with the national champion UConn Women's B-ball team that pool reporters were not permitted to film it and, instead, the White House produced a video on the event themselves and gave it to the news outlets. The White House press corps cried foul. "They're not letting us play" seemed to be the refrain. They whined about how they weren't being allowed to do their jobs and fretted that if all news was filtered through the White House there's be no actual news anymore. Well, maybe they have a point, but the White House Press Corps already gets filtered news from the White House. That's what the press secretary does: filter the news and spin it for the press corps. They can accept it or challenge it but they are not getting unadulterated news by any stretch of the imagination. Nonetheless I understand their frustration. They are supposed to be the ones taking the photos of these events--at least that's how its always been. I'm not too upset about this because it was just a basket ball game, and all of this stuff is carefully staged and choreographed to put the president in a good light. My suspicion is that they just didn't want any camera's around to see him get beat by a bunch of girls.

But here is what strikes me of the coverage on ABC's web site: every time I read one of these stories and then read the comments from people on them I despair for the future of America. These people are insane. I know they are not a random sampling, that the people who read these stories are usually biased, and the people who b other to write about them are ignorant morons and conspiracy freaks. But still it amazes me that people beleive this shit:

This is the first step of Obama's dictatorial take over of America.

It's a little trick he learned from his comrade Hugo Chavez.

How can the White House want to spin the news when they've already got a love fest from every news source but Fox?

Next stop concentration camps for Christians.

And on and on and on. My God! How can people believe this drivel? I suppose it's the same as the nuts (my apologies to Mr. Hicks) who believe that Bush and Cheney were responsible for 9/11.

I get it, I guess. The right is panicking because it is suddenly irrelevant. The American people have left them and they, firm in their belief that they are patriots and they are right, have to point out to every body what is REALLY GOING ON!!! Like many on the left, who have been in the wilderness since 1980, they have to believe that their is some sinister cabal of forces deceiving the world that is behind all of this because the alternative--that the American People have moved on and left them behind--is just too unfathomable. But the polls show that all this so called socialism is what the people want, and history as shown that Reganomics was a failure and is a failure. But they can't deal with that, so they have to say that Obama is in league with either the communists or Al Queda. In fact, most of them believe he is in league with both, demonstrating their complete ignorance (one is fundamentally atheist, the other religiously fundamentalist, they cannot be allied). I felt this way most of my life. I came of voting age two years after Regan was elected, and America had definitely left me and mine behind.

But they are hypocrites. The right, I mean. They chastised the left for not supporting President Bush and called us traitors for protesting against him, and now they are being far worse. I know there are good people on the right, but the voices I hear are a bunch of hypocritical, bigoted, loud mouthed bullies who don't care a damn about America, just about being in power. And now they are out of power.

I've got a message for them: get used to it.

Democracy in action

2009-05-21T15:35:00.000-07:00

George Stephanopolus once famously said "Let me make one small vote for the NRA. They're good citizens. They call their Congressmen. They write. They vote. They contribute. And they get what they want over time." So when the NRA wins something in congress, and my people start whining about how the NRA is setting the agenda now, maybe they (we) should take a long hard look at why.

Most people in American support gun ownership.

In order to win back the House and Senate the democratci party was forced to open up the big tent.

Obama is too busy wrestling with the economy to take on social issues.

And eh's really not a liberal (he just plas one--or just plays to a base--on TV).

Let's face it: to beat the republicans we had to welcmoe back those who had been ostracized by the zealots in our ranks: hunters, anglers, gun enthusiasts, small business people, property rights advocates, libertarians and even, unfortunately, some pro life activists. Those who are now crying about that would probably rather ahve a pure party with about 20% of the house. They are the leftie equivilents of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hanity who advocate orthodoxy over results. People like Carolyn McCarthy, who this week quoted as saying "The NRA is taking over the House and Senate." (She is mostly laying the groundwork for her campaing to unseat Kirsten Gilliland in next year's New York Sentae special elelction).

The cause of all this hoopla is a measure attached tot he Credit Card Bill of Rights that allows people to carry loaded guns in nationl parks. This measure was sponsored and heavilly pushed by the NRA, and so the NRA is once again the boogey man. My liberal compatriots are rending their garments that this measure could pass in a democratically controlled congress. But it's not just democratically controlled. It is America controlled, and this is the type of measure most people in America want. That doesn't mean shut up and like it. This is America: fight it, protest, if that's what you think you should do. But be honest about it and admit that at the moment you, the anti gun forces, are in the minority.

And, in fact, the real answer to this is "big deal." If a person can carry a gun up to the national park legally, making him unload it at the gate is silly. I do have a concernt hat some yahoo might pop a cap in a brown bear in Yosemite Valley after this. Brown Bears in Yosemite are about as dangerous as pekinese in Central Park, but tell that to some idiot who catches one crawling into his tent with him because said idiot was dumb enough to take a bag of Doritos to bed.

But I digress. This measure is not a big deal. But it is a big symbollic deal. It shows that in a Democratic controlled congress witha Democratic president the anti-gun loby has lost its power. It does not bode well for Diane's plans to reinstate the assault weapons ban.

I'm a long time supporter of Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer. I've voted for all of them in the past and if I still lived in San Francisco I would do so again. On most issues, and many that are important to me, they are the politicians I believe in and trust to fight for what is right. But I plan to volunteer for Kirsten Gilliland's cmpaing next year, becasue she is the future of the Democratic Party. And the assault weapons ban is as good as dead already.

Sanity in sports

2009-05-19T11:43:00.001-07:00

My mom sent me a link to the Fox Sports column On The Mark. Today it has the best thing I've read so far about Michael Vick. Check it out.

Yay us!

2009-05-18T21:17:00.000-07:00

A student from our department at CCNY has won a student Oscar for narrative film! The story is in Indiewire.

California Leads Again

2009-05-18T21:07:00.000-07:00

There was a book called "Promised Land" a few years back that posited that California because of its population and huge economy, leads the way on most social revolutions in the US by about twenty years (though sadly not so on Gay Marriage, where New England is leading us out of the Dark Ages strangely enough). So I find it interesting that Jerry Brown has just sent out an email blast noting that President Obama, California, and the car companies have reached a deal whereby the federal government will adopt California's tougher emissions standards as national. Go Cal.

Citizenship and Statesmanship

2009-05-17T08:06:00.000-07:00

Proof that the republicans are completely morally bankrupt comes from the fact that, before President Obama has even nominated anyone to the Supreme Court, they are already mounting attacks against his choice. Is this any different than what the Democrats have done in the past? I don’t know. It seems like, when they challenged an appointee, they did so once we knew who the appointee was. And there is the cynicism angle: the Republicans are not doing this to advance any policy, they are not doing it because they actually think they can get someone one the court who will overturn Roe v. Wade; they are doing this for completely political purposes, to energize their base. Obama is going to get the nominee that he wants. The Republicans, as the Democrats did before them, will try to filibuster in hope of forcing the president to back down and pick a second nominee and therefore look bad. Some of them might actually think they will get from Obama what they couldn’t get from the Bushes or Regan—the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but that’s not going to happen and the smart ones know it. In fact, they probably won’t be able to filibuster. The democrats will stick together, Specter will stick with the democrats, and if it comes down to it Al Franken will join the court at some time in June before and there will be no filibuster. For eight years Republicans have been screaming and whining that a president’s court choices deserve a straight up and down vote and that filibusters of judicial appointees are wrong. But, as they say, the shoe is on the other glove now and many of them will prove to be hypocrites: many, but not all. Republican senators facing tough re-election campaigns have a hard choice to face. Those whose political futures depend upon attracting moderates would be ill advised to take part in a filibuster. Those who are running for reelection in safe districts and who would be safe in a primary as well can vote their conscience. Some of them might be inclined to stick to principle and oppose a filibuster. Boss Limbaugh and the pachyderm bully brigade may try to intimidate Senators with primary challenges as they did to drive Specter out of the Senate, and that will scare some of the more cowardly republicans into joining the hypocrisy. But it won’t do anything to actually derail the nomination.

I am such a wonk. This morning I got up and was channel surfing, and instead of watching morning sports I stopped on C-Span, where Mario Cuomo was being interviewed about the separation of church and state. Cuomo, whom many democrats like myself wanted to run for president in 92 and wanted to see on the Supreme Court in 95: Cuomo who is the greatest statesman the Democratic Party has. When discussing this issue Cuomo gave a concise history of the Supreme Court and noted that the court was intended to be apolitical. He used the analogy of an umpire who can’t make a call on a pitch that hasn’t been thrown to make the point that a justice can’t come in with an opinion on a case he or she hasn’t heard yet. But that, he said, is only an ideal.

It is now a political battle and he predicted that in a political battle Obama will win. The republicans are just being cynical partisan hacks. They are an embarrassment to democracy.

So to, by the way, are those at Notre Dame and Arizona State who would deny the president an honorary degree. In Arizona, the state that resisted a Martin Luther King holiday until it was the last one without one, it just looks bad. Their argument that he had not yet accomplished enough is absurd. They didn’t give him the (totally useless, by the way) degree when he spoke there this week. Notre Dame will give him a degree, but under a cloud of pro-life protests. It is clear they don’t’ teach citizenship at Notre Dame. Let me say that I was opposed to President Bush and his policies. I wrote a book about it. I protested the 2004 convention in New York. But I would have been honored to have him speak at my graduation and to shake his hand, because he is the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES and though we may oppose his policies and his actions as chief executive we must support the office and his position as head of state. It is as head of state the president acts in ceremonial functions and it is our duty as citizens to support and honor him in that function, whether we are protesting.

So shut up about it and stop embarrassing us. Thankfully the administration t Notre Dame understands citizenship.

You may be shocked

2009-05-11T08:00:00.001-07:00

A lot of my readers know that, in spite of my second amendment stance, I am a big supporter of Nancy Pelosi. One of the things I hated most about changing my registration to New York City was that the Big Three Women of California, Nancy, Diane Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer, would no longer be representing me. I like all three of them and even if I don't agree with them on a lot of things I do on a lot of others. Plus they are all from the Bay Area so they are my peeps. Barbara lived three blocks form me in the City, and I saw on the street often. Nancy was my congress person for several years. Boxer, from Marin County, has always fought hard for causes I believe in. I was immensely proud when Nancy became speaker of the house.

So you might be surprised to hear that I don't think David Feherty should be fired. It's up to a federal prosecutor to decide if he should be arrested (I don't think that either, but the niceties of such things are not in my bailiwick), but he shouldn't be fired.

If you haven't heard Feherty, a golf analyst for CBS is also a long time supporter of President Bush's and of the war in Iraq, is in hot water. In an interview for a local Dallas magazine, which was interviewing him about Bush moving to Dallas, Feherty said "If you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, there's a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death."

Is that reprehensible? Yes. Is it detestable? Yes. Is it criminal, I don't think so. But it is not a firing offense. This isn't really a freedom of speech issue. Feherty's freedom of speech, like mine, only protects him from government interference. His employers have a right to fire him at any time. A lot of people are complaining that he should be fired because if they don't take action then CBS is endorsing his comments. If these were comments he had made on the air then absolutely. But these are comments that he made in an interview, where he was asked to express his personal (albeit reprehensible) opinion. Don't get me wrong: I would love to see this boob get canned. But it would not be the right thing to do.

But more than that, CBS shouldn't fire this guy because I don't think his asinine opinion will hurt their golf ratings one little bit. Most of the people who play and watch golf are relatively conservative to begin with. There is very little love for the democrats on the golf circuit. I remember the Ryder cup team refusing to meet with President Clinton one year. One of them said "I didn't vote for him." In other words, golfers and their fans are the kind who will make disgusting jokes about Nancy Pelosi. He'll probably get a two and a half point bump out of this, and more if the controversy keeps going, and CBS is unlikely to fire anybody for boosting their ratings.

OMG The Post!

2009-05-10T09:19:00.000-07:00

So I read that article on dogs and birdwatchers by googling it after mom had told me about it. The article was not even handed (it's the post, after all) but it was mostly written from the birdwatchers point of view. At the least they had the largest voice. It wasn't until I got to the bodega later that I saw the cover. While the bird watchers had the first and last word in the article itself, the front page refer, with it sensationalist headline and it's pathetic picture of a sad eyed beagle, definitely sided with the dogs. I burst out laughing when I saw it.

Who let the dogs out?

2009-05-10T08:15:00.000-07:00

Apparently, there is a little war brewing in my backyard and I was unaware of it. According to the New York Post. A conflict, which as occasionally erupted into violence, is going on between bird watchers and dog owners in Prospect Park. It's a problem typical of New York, the most arrogant, entitled city in the world. Most of the people involved live in their own little isolated world and woe unto anything or anyone who should disturb it. I don't know the economic status of the people interviewed in the article, but I live around here and I can guarantee that most of them come from Park Slop, Fort Green, or Windsor Terrace, three of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn. They are well off yuppies and old school New York complainers who feel that the world revolves around them and either their dogs or their boids. (Dirty... disgusting... filthy... lice-ridden boids. You used to be able to sit out on the stoop like a person. Not anymore! No, sir! Boids!). But as it is happening here (I live two blocks from Prospect Park: it really is my back yard) I suppose I should take notice.

I don't have any proposed solutions, because neither side would listen to reason anyway. This is New York. We have eight million people crammed together, each of us with our own opinions and none of us willing to give an inch. We are obstinate. It is in our nature. This is one of those wonderful New York stories, complete with snooty yuppies and a crazy Brooklynite stirring up trouble for everyone (Look at him: he is right out of Central Casting). So far the violence has been limited to pepper spray directed at dogs and a few threats, but make no mistake: more is on the way. Either somebody is going to sick their dog on a bird watcher, or some bird watcher is going to shoot a dog owner, and then this whole thing will end up on Law and Order (it probably is headed there already). All because, in the natural order of things, dogs chase birds.

100 Days

2009-04-29T18:02:00.001-07:00

As I write this President Obama is holding a news conference to discuss his first 100 days in office. I think it’s significant that on his 100th day Arlen Specter switched parties and congress passed a budget blueprint. That we measure the president on what he does in the first 100 days is kind of silly. What makes this day, other than it being a power of ten, more important than the 93rd day, or the 117th? Some people (on the West Wing, for instance) say that it is in the first 100 days that an administration gets the most done, that the honeymoon is the best time to push your agenda. But Obama, in spite of 69% approval ratings, hasn’t had a honeymoon. He’s had to face three huge crisis—the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the conflicts in Pakistan, a swine flu pandemic, and the worst economic crisis since the great depression. The economic crisis has really defined the Obama presidency so far, as well it should. He has had to react. He hasn’t had the luxury of b being able to force an agenda.

So far, like it or not, it seems obvious that President Obama has brought significant change to Washington. We are opening dialogue with Venezuela and Cuba—can there be a more profound change than backing away from a corner stone of our foreign policy that has been in place for forty years? We are engaging in diplomatic, multi party approaches to international issues in Iran and North Korea. He has been eager to tackle big issues with big ideas, but through cooperation and inquiry, not through belligerence. There are wholesale changes going on in the economy, which will indeed move us to more state influence on the economy and a wider safety net, which can indeed be termed “socialism” if you really wanted to. Those are big changes.

I had no illusions when Obama was elected. I knew that he was not going to be everything I wanted in a president. I knew that I would strongly disagree with a lot of his policies. He does not support gay marriage. He does support an assault weapons ban. His health care policy is exactly the one I didn’t want to see, essentially a give away to the insurance companies that will not solve most of the big problems with healthcare. But on the big issues, on the direction he wants to take America, on the ways that he has approached the job, he is exactly what this country needed.

The Ghosts of Socialism Yet to Be

2009-04-27T13:08:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart is a socialist. I don't know if he's a communist, but he's certainly a socialist and he makes little attempt to hide it. So is Bill Maher, though I doubt he'd admit it: Bill rarely owns up to anything. Both of them are pretty up front that they really do want what all those tea-baggers are most afraid of: they want to turn America into Europe.

Last week The Daily Show did a great twp part bit where they sent one of their correspondents to Sweden for a piece called "The Stockholm Syndrome," which included a hilarious spoof of MTV Cribs:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

The Stockholm Syndrome

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

(Part two)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

The Stockholm Syndrome Pt. 2

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

It's an ironic look at the fears the talking heads at Fox are trying propagate that Obama wants to turn America into Sweden. The whole point of the piece is that life in Sweden is not only not so bad, it's better than life in America. By contrasting MTV cribs with a Swedish pop-star's apartment and 50 Cent with ABBA, and by the hilarious "blonds as currency" bit, the obvious point they are making is that Sweden is a better place to live than America: it's got free health care, a stronger economy, a high standard of living, a longer life expectancy, and more equitable distribution of wealth. Of course, they only joke about Sweden's high suicide rate (which is as attributable to seasonal affective disorder as to the socialist economy) and they didn't mention the fact that sixty percent of young and educated swedes have considered moving abroad, many for a greater personal challenge or for greater opportunity.

And let's face it: Sweden is not the Soviet Union. Sweden may have a strong welfare state, but they also have a strong market based economy. They let you earn a lot of money but they tax the hell out of you. They Daily Show's point is that that isn't so bad, and that our passion of ostentation wealth and hyperconsumption, symbolized by Baconaise, is perverse. Sure, it is saying, we have the freedom to make baconaise, and people will actually buy it, but that is only because we are a bunch greedy gluttons. Swedes may have a lot of their decisions made for them, and they may have to pay a to in taxes, but they also have a different kind of freedom: freedom from poverty, freedom to live a comfortable life and find personal fulfillment without having to worry about their basic needs being met. This is the type of freedom that Marx was talking about. But is it actually freedom, or is it oppression? The freedom that the founding fathers were fighting for--at least those in the Jeffersonian mold--was the Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman sort of freedom: the freedom to be free to rise to whatever heights your ingenuity and drive would take you without interference from the government. Freedom from doctor's bills and poverty was not what they were fighting for. To make things more interesting is a report from the Milken Institute last year of a study that found there is actually *more* upward mobility in Europe than there is in the United States. Chew on that for awhile.

I don't know if Obama wants a true socialist state in America (looking at his health care plan, which is basically a give away to the insurance companies, it sure doesn't look like it). But that is the America we are ending up with nonetheless. In my field, where I just knocked myself out to get to an interview for--I kid you not--a $37,000 a year job (me with a Ph.D. and over $100,000 in student loan debt), the socialist thing looks like a pretty good option. But not for entrepreneurial me, to whom taxes are a cancer.

I'm so confused! ;-)

Late to the party

2009-04-22T08:04:00.000-07:00

Ok I admit it, I have hopped on the Susan Boyle Bandwagon. She is amazing, but what her case says about ageism, classism, and looksism (I hate that term, but what else can you all it?) is even more amazing. Plenty of people have already written about how her defiance of expectations lays bare our culture's prejudice against the plain-looking and our obsession with beauty, so I don't have to. I can just say "wow!" If you haven't seen it, here it is.

Doc Felix Blanchard

2009-04-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

The death of Doc Blanchard today reminds us that once upon a time there were more important things than football. Blanchard was one of the greatest college fullbacks of all time and, with Glenn Davis, lead Army to two national championships and a 27-0-1 record over three years. In his final game for West Point he scored three touchdowns against Navy. Drafted third overall by the Pittsburg Steelers in 1947, he never played professional football. After completing his military obligation he stayed in as a fighter pilot. When the Army Air Corps became the Airforce, he stayed then too. He served a twenty five years in the military, fighting in Korea and Viet Nam, and retired with the rank of colonel.

Can you imagine? I mean, I know: Army guys don't get drafted very often, though Caleb Campbell and two others were drafted last year. There was a new policy in place that would have allowed them to play while on active duty for two years and then buy out the rest of their commitment, but the policy was suspended in last July and Campbell reported to active duty (which apparently means he's coaching). Reportedly, he cried. Nowadays you are supposed to want the money. Even if you do serve, like David Robinson when he came out of Navy as a basketball star, you are expected to bolt for fame and fortune as a pro athlete as soon as your commitment is up. After all, the money is so much greater now than it was back in 1947, and we are all supposed to want fame: it's the number-one currency in a postmodern world. You are supposed to want to play ball. You certainly aren't supposed to want to serve your country for your entire career, fight in two wars, and never play football again. Who does that?

(besides Pat Tillman, of course)

Sun Spots

2009-04-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

Did Larry Ellison just pay $7.4 billion dollars for Java? Is that what it comes to? The purchase of Sun, big news in the Bay Area but not a lead story elsewhere, is an interesting one. The Chron's headline, "Larry Elison, the Sun King," is worthy of The New York Post. Ellison isn't seen as near the villain that Bill Gates is, even though he's nearly as (or perhaps more) rich, is a much more colorful character, and his Oracle Corp. is just as rapacious as Gates' Microsoft was in the 90s. In Charlie's Angels, most people caught on that Sam Rockwell's nerdish disguise was inspired by Gates, but few caught on that Tim Curry was doing a spot-on Larry Ellison spoof, right down to Ellison's love of all things Japanese. I guess it was a California/computer nerd inside joke.

Ellison espouses that old 80s saw that all business is war, and that the greatest warriors are samurai (which kind of made sense in the 80s, fueled as it was by our anxiety and fears that Japan might be buying up our country). He tries either to crush his opposition or to conquer them through acquisition. When IBM's bid for Sun faltered, Oracle, which has been buying up corporations right and left in this downturn, flush with cash as they are and not in bad business shape themselves, charged in and took it away. They topped the IBM bid by a staggering ten cents a share. Now they own one of the great Silicon Valley icons, probably the finest server manufacturer in the world and, more importantly, the inventor of Java.

It's Java that is the big deal. Ellison acknowledged as much when he said that Java was the most significant software acquisition Oracle had ever made. Sun's server market is shaky at best and in these times downright miserable. Yes, there were some areas where Sun and Oracle went together, software products Oracle had developed specifically to run on Sun platform,s that sort of thing. But hardware is not and never has bee Oracle's business. Will they be able to keep Sun's core business afloat? Will they care? Will they let it falter or, perhaps, split it off from Java and the other valuable Sun assets, and then sell it to IBM at a premium? In other words, did Larry Ellison just pay $7.4 Billion Dollars for Java?

Granny with a Gun

2009-04-20T09:20:00.001-07:00

This story from Gothamist is great. It is unusual for New York City: Gothamist is not a webiste where I'd expect to find pro-2nd Amendment rhetoric. While it does show that New York juries are way to sympathetic to criminals (and prejudiced against guns), it also shows that even in New York a person can carry a handgun for self defense (it's an expensive permit, but it can be had). But what I find funniest is that the word is now out that this guy tried to mug. But what I find most amusing is this: how much do you think this guys life is worth now that the word is on the street that he tried to mug Bumpy Johnson's grand-daughter? There is some aging gangster out there who worked for Bumpy or for Frank Lucas who is coming after this guy.

Back from break

2009-04-20T08:09:00.001-07:00

Today was the first day back from spring break. I talked with my students about pirates and about Basketball Jones. The two were strangely linked when one of my students said "I never thought there could be black pirates. I thought pirates were always white guys." This led to yet another discussion of racism and the portrayal of race in the media, which, of course, led to "Basketball Jones," Superfly, and the Dirty Dozen. My students, most of whom are African American came up with this: they don't mind racism as long as its funny.

As an added treat, I found this on the internet.

Squeal, little piggie!

2009-04-19T16:05:00.000-07:00

The whining you are hearing right now from the republicans, the squeals of pain and outrage, are not feigned--not this time. Oh, some of the outrage may be mock, and some of the whining calculated, but much of it is real. From the ridiculous tea-bagging protests of April 15, to the Governor of Texas hinting that he too (like Sarah Palin) might be a secessionist, to today's cries of outrage over President Obama holding out a olive branches to Cuba and Venezuela, there is something real back there. They see their world, built up over thirty years, since the Regan Revolution, crumbling around them. And they are afraid. They are afraid of a world where America is not the belligerent, bullying redneck on the block who can kick everybody's ass and gleefully does so from time to time. They fear we will no longer be top dog. They fear an America that looks like France, with government control of industry, high taxes, high unemployment, and a stagnant economy. They fear the Europeanization of America, where the individual and individual liberties are suddenly pushed aside in favor of social interests--in other words, socialism. And they fear that their guns and SUV's and muscle cars will be outlawed. The testosterone fueled American dream is under direct attack--or so they believe--and they are afraid of the change. Change was, after all, the slogan of the Obama campaign, and change is what he is bringing in abundance. He has changed so much about America that it resembles now every nightmare of intellectual urban liberalism that the conservatives have been dreaming since the fall of Jimmy Carter. This is not just Rush Limbaugh being an idiot or Fox News whipping up a frenzy. This is real deep seated fear, like my mom and her nightmares about Nancy Pelosi taking away her guns. A sea change is going on in America right before our eyes, and they see it and they are scared of what the future holds.

I'll give them a hint: it's starting to resemble the American that those of us who spent thirty years in the wilderness waiting for the pendulum to swing back out way have been dreaming of. Take the Cuba thing, for instance. Obama is no fool. I doubt he is going to simply wave his pen and make Cuba an ally. But he is going to try real diplomacy with them, and Venezuela, and Boliva, and Nicuragua. He is going to do the thing that Texas Yahoo from Crawford refused to do, which is act like a grown up and treat the rest of the world with just a modicum of respect, on the belief that if you talk to people they might be willing to listen. Horrible thought to a group of people who view Jack Bauer as the exemplar agent of American foreign and domestic policy.

I don't think it will get that bad. Obama, like all Democrats, has to govern from the middle, so much of the American dream is probably safe. He said at his inauguration, that we have to preserve the entrepreneurial spirit of America. BUt, I admit, I'm afraid too. I believe in that America-- the muscle cars, guns, cowboy, robber baron, individualist America, the America found in Ted Nugent songs and seen in Norman Rockwell paintings and Frederick Remington sculptures. I honestly believe that God made man but Sam Colt mad men equal. And as much as I love France and Italy, and on occasion dream of living there (were I rich) I don't really want America to become Europe. There is a great difference of character, a different dream.

Here is my theory, I've expressed it before, and it is likely all bullshit. It has no basis in fact. I just kind of came up with it thinking about why we are who we are and why conservatives hate the French (after all, we owe them our country. Sure, we paid that debt back twice, in 1918 and 1945, but they are still they were our closest ideological ally once our mutual revolutions were over). It's like this. Everybody who came willingly to America after 1492 (as opposed to those who were dragged here in bondage for servitude) did so for what we have defined as "the American Dream" the desire to better their lives, to own property, a business, and so that they, or if not they then their kids, could one day be rich. This is the driving philosophy behind most of the great things in America and much of the evil as well. Tied up in that is the idea of opportunity, that the individual has to have rights that the state cannot take away and those rights center around personal security, financial opportunity, and property. Some Americans--mostly from the south it is true--were so afraid of a powerful federal government that they insisted that the constitution include a bill of right curtailing the federal government's power significantly, protections against the so called "tyranny of the majority." There are regional variations on this: the North East, where federalism was strongest, believed in a stronger federal government. The cities, with people crowded on top of one another, were the first to see the need for social reforms, a safety net of some kind, and the idea of community taking precedence over individuality. But by far the majority of people in this country have cling to the American dream: the primacy of the individual and the desire to get rich. And this is what gave us Thomas Edison (who gave us the movie industry, the recording industry, the electronics industry, and the power companies), Henry Ford (who gave us the automobile industry) Samuel Colt and John Moses Browning (who gave us the firearms industry), Andrew Carnegie (who gave us the steel industry) J.P. Morgan (who gave us the banking industry) the Rockafellers and the Gettys (who gave us the oil industry) Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, and on and on and on. In other words, the people who made America a prosperous and powerful nation.

It has often been said that Marxism doesn't really work in America because we never had a titled, landed nobility--Marx's upper class. But we also never had a peasantry either. One of the virtues of America is our rejection of the idea that one man is any better than another, or that any person has a "place" high or low, in society. We are a nation of bourgeoisie, and we are proud of it. Back in Europe the people who stayed were either those who were filthy rich already, either the nobility who were still rich or the bourgeois who had already made it, and the peasants who were either content to stay peasants or who couldn't take that leap and uproot themselves and the security of their servitude for the dangers of true economic freedom. As they gained political power through revolution and democracy, they established a peasants paradigm of democracy, one in which their security was assured: the rich are taxed, they have a strong social safety net with unemployment benefits and free health care and guaranteed housing. Most of them are employed in a job with some kind of pension, they get a lot of vacation, and they live "la dolce vita." For a long time they didn't worry about the high unemployment rate because they were happy just to live and be taken care of (though now young men in France--mostly imigrants who made the mistake of going to France looking for opportunity, are rioting in the streets).

The liberal in me wants an America that looks more like Europe, with a strong social safety net, strong banking regulations, universal health care, and people who now how to enjoy life instead of struggle in the rat race. But the American in me, who love guns and NASCAR and football, and longs to drive my old 72 Ford Grand Torino once again, worries what we would have to give up if that Euro-America were to come to pass.

So yeah, in other words, I get it.

I hope we can have a more civilized America without losing the land of opportunity or the drive to become rich that has made America what I truly believe to be the greatest nation the world has ever seen. I come from California, where we do live the good life and where people can still get rich and not be completely reviled for it. So I have to believe it is possible. I have to have that hope.

But I still love to see the little piggies squeal. They rogered us in the rear for thirty years. It's time they know how it feels.

California Dreamin'

2009-04-14T14:20:00.000-07:00

The news media is trying to paint it as a "back to the future" quest--an attempt by a vain politician to recapture his former glory. But Jerry Brown is running for governor of California, an office he held for two terms in the 70s and 80s. Since I have made no secret of the fact that Jerry is "my guy" the politician I truly believe in and the reason I'm a democrat, it will come as no surprise that I'm supporting him. That and a small contribution are all that he will get from me, since I don't live in California any more (though I wish I did). The republicans are painting him as too eccentric and the other democrats are painting him as too old, but none of that really flies. The "governor moonbeam" appellation tacked on him by Mike Royko after Brown suggested California invest in telecommunication satellites was never accurate to begin with, and Royko even retracted it years later (though it likely cost Bron the presidency in 1992 nonetheless, when he was running against Bill Clinton for the nomination and was clearly the better candidate. Rose Bird, Prop 13, and the Medfly--Jerry's real political problems back in the day, are all old news. The news on Jerry now is how he moved to Oakland and became its mayor because he wanted to work in the trenches, and how on his watch crime went down and investment up in one of most infamous cities on the West Coast. And after that he won his current job as attorney general. A ploy? Perhaps. It gives him law and order credentials that he never had as governor. But he has been a good one. Now he wants his old job back. The republicans are gleefully rubbing their hands together, eager to paint him as a washed out hippie, while the lesser known democrats are crying foul, that he's essentially had his turn.

But it really comes down to this: Jerry Brown was the best governor California has ever had. Who better to lead California now? No one, that's who.

Vote Brown.

Amazon stifles gay voices

2009-04-12T21:36:00.001-07:00

I stole this from rufinia 's LJ. It is appalling. I urge everyone to go to the petition site and sign it.

Cross Posted to LJ and to Mediagrouch.

**************

Amazon has been stripping the sales rank from and the search results of, according to people who have spokien to customer reps, "books people have complained about."

Example: My roommate's book, Yes Means Yes does not come up in a search, and the sales rank is gone. Other books include:

Books Stripped Of Amazon Sales Rankings:
Wetlands
Ellen DeGeneres: A Biography
Outing Yourself: How To Come Out As Lesbian Or Gay To Your Family, Friends, And Co-Workers
Gay Life And Culture: A World History
Homosexuality And Civilization
The Way Out: The Gay Man's Guide to Freedom No Matter if You're in Denial, Closeted, Half In, Half Out, Just Out or Been Around the Block
The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World
Coming Out Of Shame: Transforming Gay And Lesbian Lives
The Gay And Lesbian Self-Esteem Book
Heather Has Two Mommies
Dude, You're A Fag: Masculinity And Sexuality In High School
Sexing The Body: Gender Politics And The Construction Of Sexuality
Chelsea Handler's My Horizontal Life: A Collection Of One Night Stands
Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown
Full Frontal Feminism by Feministing's Jessica Valenti
Lady Chatterley's Lover
For Yourself: The Fulfillment Of Female Sexuality
Queer Theory: An Introduction
Out In Theory: The Emergence Of Gay And Lesbian Anthropology
Diary Of A Drag Queen
The Rise And Fall of Gay Culture
A Memoir Of No One In Particular
Apples And Oranges: My Journey To Sexual Identity
Bi Lives: Bisexual Women Tell Their Stories
Bisexual Women In The 21st Century
Lesbian, Gay, And Bisexual Identities Over The Lifespan: Psychological Perspectives
Social Services For Gay And Lesbian Couples
The Lesbian Parenting Book: A Guide To Creating Families And Raising Children
The Truth Is...My Life In Love And Music by Melissa Etheridge
Nasty: My Family And Other Glamorous Varmints by Simon Doonan
The Praeger Book Of Transsexuality: Changing Gender to Match Mindset (Sex, Love, and Psychology)
True Selves: Understanding Transsexualism—For Families, Friends, Coworkers, and Helping Professionals
GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond The Sexual Binary
Girl Meets Girl: A Dating Survival Guide
The Art Of Meeting Women: A Guide For Gay Women
The Mayor Of Castro Street: The Life And Times Of Harvey Milk
Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life In America
Women, Gays, And The Constitution: The Grounds for Feminism and Gay Rights in Culture and Law
Identity And The Case For Gay Rights: Race, Gender, Religion as Analogies
Gay America: Struggle For Equality (YA)
Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer
Men Who Rape: The Psychology Of The Offender
Gay Day: The Golden Age of the Christopher Street Parade 1974-1983
Gay And Lesbian Washington, DC
Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter To America
Stone Butch Blues: A Novel
Sexual Rhetoric: Media Perspectives on Sexuality, Gender, and Identity
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965
Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities
Odd Girls And Twilight Lovers

See what happens when you put "homosexuality" in the search for all departments on Amazon. Go on.

It's not just "erotica." It's not just "adult content."

Yo ho me hardies

2009-04-12T12:03:00.000-07:00

Everybody has been making pirate jokes lately. Maddow used the Pirates of the Caribean logo on her show the other night. The New York Post, comical as always, had a picture of Johny Depp as Capatain Jack Sparrow running toward the camera, with the headline "Yo Ho Doh!" Me, I'm an old pirate fan, so I giggled along with everybody. Yes, I knwo piracy is no laughing matter, but still....

In movies, comics (well, except for Watchman) and on TV, pirates are romanticized. They are seen as a people who are beholden to no government, no country, are only answerable to one another. Lawless men on the high seas they meet the true definition of "outlaw", which is "one who is outside the law's protection." And because the law can't protect them they have to protect themselves, create their own nation of laws based on lawlessness. Jean LaFitte is the true American pirate, hero of the battle of New Orleans and privateer extraordinaire, he operated out of the Louisiana swamps, raiding shipping in the Gulf of Mexico and then selling his spoils to the rich citizens of the Crescent City. Whether in the flesh or as played by Tyrone Power or Yul Bryner, he was admired as a man of action who was answerable only to his own sense of honor. In the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, we mock the pirates but we mock authority, in the form of the British naval captain Norrington, even more. In a pirate tale, except for the greatest of the all, "Treasue Island", authority usually corrupt and piracy offers the only just, honorable, and therefore desirable alternative to modern society--a free company of men who live for the sword and by the sword with no apologies. Even in "Treasure Island" Long John Silver, the most dastardly of all the pirates, is an attractive figure, charming young Jim Hawkins into helping him right up to the end.

In real life, pirates hanged (and it is "hanged": meat is "hung", men are "hanged", though it's amazing how many people get that wrong).

It's no surprise that we glorify the freedom of piracy and make folk heroes out of Blackbeard and Jean LaFitte. We do the same to Gangsters, old West outlaws, and Robin Hood: from Bonny and Clyde to Jess James, to Don Corleon to Robin Hood--murderers and thieves all--those of us who bend, often unwillingly, to authority look to those who refuse to bend as heroes. But there is something special about pirates. Because they exist mostly on the high seas they truly are outside the bounds of law. When they come to port in their "stongholds," like Tortuga, it is in places where there is no government to try to keep them in line. They themselves are the only law.

Interestingly enough, they often act as a form of law, and do as good a job as many to keep order--in a way--and maintain the lives of the people. The image of the pirate stronghold as a din of sin and iniquity may not be far off, but it is still a functional economy, where people live and work every day in an environment if, not stable, then not completely in chaos either. It is the kind of paradise of freedom that an anarcho-capitalist like our old friend David Friedman would just love.

Somalia is more or less the same. It has an economy that functions, if on shaky foundations, and as in all places where governmental authority has no real power armed men constitute only "government." (it might be said that this is true of any government, no matter what form it takes. Mao would certainly say so). The situation in Somalia, which we deplore, is no different than that of Tortuga in the Seventeenth Century, which we romanticize. It is a mostly lawless area where anybody with enough guns can hold power, and an area where international shipping is common enough to provide easy targets for enterprising buccaneers. Piracy is, quite frankly, the only growth industry in Somalia, and the one which brings the most money into the Somali economy. And the pirates in Somalia are beloved as the type of free roving buccaneers that we've celebrated in all those Errol Flynn movies, and as people who bring real cash money into the country. The shipping companies have more or less decided that paying ransom to the pirates for the return of crew ship and.or cargo is more or less the cost of doing business, and so nothing serious is done about it.

Until now, because now they have attacked an American flagged vessel.

With the rescue of the captured captain earlier today and the capture of one of the pirates, the immediate situation is now over. But the larger one is just beginning. For years now this has been brewing, only waiting for an Ameircan excuse to take over, and now there is one. President Obama, faced with two wars (Cheney would claim on, but whatever) in two Muslim countries and a worsening situation in both Pakistan and North Korea, now has a Jeffersonian decision to make.

And comparisons with Jefferson are not out of line here, because it was Jefferson who sent the U.S. Marines to The Shores of Tripoli in America's first act of military intervention to destroy the Muslim pirates who were attacking American shipping. Sound familiar? Jefferson was successful. Obama has a harder row to how. How can we justify going back into Somalia, the site of our most ignominious military fiasco since Viet Nam? How can we take on yet another Muslim country, one that we've already been kicked out of once? We have a big enough image problem in the Muslim world without invading yet another Muslim country. But too Obama can't just ignore the situation, nor should he. Since in a capitalist republic the most important function of a government is to support (and I would argue regulate, even if the Friedmans--or is it Friedmen?--would not) commerce. We can't have pirates mucking it all up, whether they live in a society that is actually more free than our own, and which is celebrated in Disney movies, or not.

But one thing that may well happen now that the US Navy has a pirate in custody for the first time practically ever. We may actually see a trial for piracy on the high seas in the Supreme Court. Now that would be a spectacle worth watching. The Supremes would have to make a finding of fact, not a finding of law. It would be fun to see them try.

Racism?

2009-04-08T16:44:00.000-07:00

So, I was surfing You Tube when I came upon this relic of my youth!

This is one of the greatest songs, and greatest videos, ever made. But I have a question: is it racist? Look at the physical portrayal of the main character, Tyrone Shoelaces. Look at the physical representation of the other black characters, especially the cheerleaders. Are the other black basketball players depicted as thugs?

Next, is this imagery used by whites to marginalize African Americans? Or is it typical urban imagery of the mid-seventies, used by African Americans to express pride in their racial identity and their culture? Would African Americans of the time think it was racist? (my bet is some did and some didn't. It would be easy to find out).

btw: if you are not familiar with the song, it was by Cheech and Chong, it peaked at #15 on the Billboard charts. The band included George Harrison, Carol King, Tom Scott, and Billy Preston. I never could find out who animated it, but it has the look of the cutting edge animation of the mid-seventies. Very urban and very hip. It reminds me a bit of Ralph Bakshi (especially Fritz the Cat), Terry Gilliam's Python stuff, Alegro non Troppo, and School House Rock (all of which can be found on You Tube).

Moron.

2009-04-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

So if this yahoo in Pittsburgh was worried about Obama trying to take away his guns he sure approached it in a stupid way. Not only will he never own a gun again, and will probably get the death penalty, but he just gave the anti gun folks all the ammunition they need to reinstate the assault weapon’s ban. And the worst part is, Obama was going to have a hard time of it. Yes, he said he wanted to reinstate the assault weapons ban, but it is unclear if he had the support in congress to do so. A lot of those new Democrats are really NEW Democrats, from states where gun ownership is still seen as a right (Kirsten Gilliland is a special case. She is a staunch 2nd amendment supporter but she now has to win votes here in NYC, so I don’t know which way she will blow when that comes to the floor).

If he does get it passed it’s unclear whether this version of the Supreme Court will uphold it. After Heller I don’t think it would fly. But with Binghamton and Pittsburgh you can bet the gun fight is about to heat up.

Wow! Some sanity, and out of my belived Barbary Coast!

2009-03-31T18:31:00.000-07:00

I was greatly heartened, at last, to find someone else who has noticed the similarities between the anti-abortion movement and the animal rights movement. I've been saying for years that there is no difference between the two. They are both based on a kind of fanatical religious faith: they are spearheaded by organizations, PETA and Operation Rescue, which are wholly cut from the same cloth; both movements are made up of a bunch of radical idealists who want to cram their personal morality down everybody else's throats; both movements use similar tactics of intimidation and vandalism; both movements inspire and tacitly condone domestic terrorism; and, finaly, both movements favor their own doctrine over science, logic, or any form of evidence that might contradict their orthodoxy.

But here in New York I've often thought I was screaming at the wind. I don't fit in with the rest of the liberal academics on this issue, after all. So I was very please to see this letter from Incanto, the fine Italian restaurant in by beloved San Francisco (the place I feel most at home, in spite of the PETA presence). Read it, and read the Village Voice article it references as well. I admit I don't think much about Foie Gras. I've had it a few times, but it's not something I care about one way or another--except that I admit to a knee jerk reaction to support anything the PETA nazis are opposed to. So I found these two pieces of writing to be very informative. And, as I would expect, the truth knocks the legs out from under the PETA argument.

Read them.

Ok, so it's fluff...

2009-03-30T10:40:00.000-07:00

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, in which he speaks of his disdain for Sean Penn (which is fair) and about his attacks on Hollywood in general. It is actually a pretty good interview (O'Reily, like a lot of the right-wing ideologues, is a fairly calm and reasonable guy when he's on somebody else's mike). But he does tell a few whoppers.

In one he claims that Fox does not promote any party or candidate. We all know that is a bald faced lie, and it can easily be disproved by looking at their coverage of President Bush over the last eight years, and their open war against the Obama administration (a war which O'Reily is not really part of--he is sincere when he says he likes Obama and wants him to succeed).

Another doozy is when he talks about right-wing actors, writers, or producers not being able to get work in Hollywood. He cites the late Ron Silver as an example of someone who left the "liberal mindset" and suddenly couldn't get work. And he may have a point--in the eight years since 9/11 Silver has 14 credits according to IMBD. In the eight years prior to that he had exactly half as many. But if that is the case how does Bill explain the success of Dwayne Johnson, let alone Chuck Norris, Tom Selleck, Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson and Heather Locklear? Leave us not forget that Hollywood has produced some very notable republicans, from John Wayne and Charleton Heston to Ronald Regan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. among the loudest and most influential conservative voices of the past ten years have been Tre Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the wildly conservative (and wildly funny) South Park. O'Reily, when asked about his attacks against Sean Penn and George Cloony, said that if there were right-wing ideologues in Hollywood he would go after them, but they just aren't there. Really: and how did O'Reeily react to the Ayn-Rand inspired "The Incredibles," a film which was such a polemic in favor of Ayn Rand conservativism that they made her the basis of the movies best character Edna Mode? What they did with The Incredibles was exactly what conservatives excoriated Dr. Seuss for doing in The Lorax From everything I heard he waxed poetic about it and said it should win the Oscar for best picture. Of course, the gave O'Reilly a character cameo, so he was bound to go easy on them.

But probably the biggest lie O'Reily tells is when he chastises NBC and the New York Times for spreading hate and demagoguery. This from the number one guy at Fox Network News, one of the most hateful and ideologically strident institutions in America.

Inspired

2009-03-27T09:48:00.000-07:00

There's inspired casting, and then there is this: the Farrelly brothers are making a Three Stooges movie staring Benecio Del Toro, Jim Carey, and Sean Penn. Now THAT'S inspiration!

BUSTED!

2009-03-27T08:35:00.000-07:00

With the losses of Duke and Memphis, two of my final four, my bracket is totally completely and forever busted. Too bad. Notre Dame over in the NIT is still making me proud.

But look at it. Right now there is a real possibility that we could have an all Big East final four. As a New Yorker I would love that! UConn, Pitt, and Louisville are all still alive as number one seeds. If they hold serve, all that has to happen is that Syracuse has to get through Oklahoma and then beat the Tar Heels (assuming they make ti past Gonzaga).

And Notre Dame is still alive in the NIT.

I know I KNOW!! I'm thinking like a fan and not a professional. Have to get hold of myself and do something sensible, like taking North Carolina over Gonzaga in spite of the 8-1/2 point spread. Or not. The zags only won their second round game by a couple of points, and the Tar Heels have been crushing people. But this is Gonzaga. They never go down without a fight.

Hell, roll the dice and take Gonzaga and the points.

Not bad so far

2009-03-26T20:57:00.000-07:00

Well, my bracket wasn't busted. I think I had four losses in the first round, two more in the second, but nobody that I had going any deeper. Yes, I know, I said that you'd be crazy not to take Binghamton and the points, and that was a stupid thing to say. I didn't take into account that they'd be facing a Duke team that hadn't played since being embarrassed by their cross town rival, and that they would be mad and hungry and prepared to lay a beat down on Binghamton as if they had caught the hall monitor on the way home from school. That's ok: American evened that one out, and then Michigan came through for me. I have never gone wrong betting against Clemson. It was a lesson I first learned when they lost the NIT final to Cal ten years ago. That was at least half way a fan's bet, emotional, hopeful. But it also won, and since then I've found that Clemson is a rainmaker. Bet against them and you almost never lose. I don't know when the last time they covered the spread was.

President of Hip

2009-03-20T09:46:00.000-07:00

Is Obama the first president to do late night? I know Clinton went on Arsineo while he was campaigning, and this last election it seemed everyone had to make a run through Saturday Night Live. McCain announced on the Tonight Show. But a sitting president? On a late night comedy talk show? Once upon a time it would have been unheard of. Ford reportedly wanted to host Saturday Night Live while he was president, but his handlers talked him down off the ledge.

So Obama going onto The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (a show I have successfully boycotted since NBC screwed Letterman out of what should have been his job) may not seem like much, but I think it is. In our post modern world a lot has been written about how comedy has become an important political forum, and satire has been elevated to the realm of serious discourse. What once was frivolous is now serious as the old hierarchies of taste and propriety are broken down along with that of high and low culture. I don't know if Obama is the first sitting president to do late night or not, but no matter: he has given the ultimate imprimatur to the guys who brought you Bassomatic, Stupid Pet Tricks, and Floyd R. Turbo, American.

March Madness in a World Gone Mad

2009-03-19T04:54:00.000-07:00

We all know that President Obama is a sports fan. He has even weighed in (albeit on the wrong side) on the call for a playoff in big-time college football. Nonetheless it was encouraging to read this morning that he had filled out his bracket for the NCAA tournament just like everybody else. Somebody will probably raise the specter of gambling in the White House, and I'm sure it's illegal. The NCAA, which opposes all forms of sports betting and yearly about this time puts out a finger-wagging paper about why joining the office pool will lead to points shaving in the national championship game, will likely whine about the president setting a bad example. But who cares? This is America, and if you can't blow a few bucks on the NCAA what good is it living here? The fact that our president is playing the same game we are, with the same ridiculous hopes and stupid picks, is somehow comforting.

But this particular year the NCAA is a much bigger deal. We are a nation of doomed souls--or at least that is how we have been acting lately. Between the stock market crash and the housing bubble, fears of an even Greater Depression and the impending terrorist attack that we all know is coming sooner or later, not to mention war in Iraq and Afghanistan and, much worse, Pakistan, we are a whipped nation, beaten down and cowering in a corner, hoping the rest of the world will just ignore us, go away, and leave us in peace, if only for a day.

So the tournament cannot come at a better time.

Across the nation offices are abuzz with predictions, most of them insane. Some bozo alumni from Chatenooga are actually betting that their boys will beat lofty UCONN. Fans of Moorehead State, the number 64 seed and winner of last night's play-in game, have filled them in as the national champion. Fans make the worst gamblers. But office pools are small time, and the real professionals are going to take Bingahmton and the points to beat Duke (at +22 you'd be crazy not to).

But blown tuition funds and a few shaven points are not the issue. The issue is the flow. Gambling is an industry that does well in a recession, as desperate people bet their last dime on the lotto in the vain hope it will change their fortunes. But it is also fun, and nothing is more fun in this regard than the NCAA tournament. If you've ever been in Vegas during the final four you know what I mean. The Federal Reserve has been trying desperately for two months to get money flowing again. Well I guarantee money will be flowing freely for the next three weeks. It will be changing hands in bars as people place side bets on Tyler Hansbrough missing his free throws, or what the over/under will be after the first quarter. It will flow to beer distributorships and to corner markets who sell potato chips and dip. It will flow into the malls where spouses (not necessarily wives in these enlightened times) will go to avoid the mayhem that is taking place in their living rooms. But mostly it will just flow because, for the next three weeks, everybody will be excited and, tonight at least, everybody in the country except the Alabama State fans will be happy, and will believe that this is their year. If the thing we need most right now is optimism and enthusiasm, the NCAA tournament is the prescription for what ails us.

For the record, I've got Louisville, Memphis, Duke and North Carolina in my final four, with NC cutting down the nets in Detroit. But what do I know?

Another Feeding Frenzy

2009-03-18T05:22:00.000-07:00

I work under a contract as a member of a union. I make less than $30,000 from this contract, but I think it is pertinent. It so happens that this contract is with the government--in this case CUNY, which is some kind of joint venture of the City and State of New York (my checks from BMCC come from the city, my checks from CCNY come from the state).

And I expect that contract to be honored.

So does every member of my union. As does every union that has a contract with the government. As does every contractor who does business with the government. As does everybody who has any contract with anybody.

So I want those AIG fat cats to get their stupid bonuses. I don't want the government to be able to break a contract because times are hard, or because they don't now like the terms. You want to see real financial chaos? You think it's bad now? Just set a precedent that lets a contract be broken just because one party doesn't like the terms anymore. We live in a land where contracts are enforced.

Oh yeah: I think this idea of punitive taxation is unethical. I think targeting a specific group for 100% taxation to punish them for something is worse than breaking a contract. It is the government saying, in a sense, "we dont' care about the law, we are going to find a way around it because we are mad." It's kind of like setting up a prison in CUBA in order to get around laws governing torture and due process.

What we have here is a feeding frenzy. It is as grotesque and as crazy as the frenzy of the paparazzi around Angelina Jolie that I wrote about on Sunday. Only this time it is the whole country that is going mad. Just like after 9/11, America has turned into an angry mob. They are out for blood and, by God, they are going to get some. It is just the type of mob that lynches black men for being black, or breaks the windows of Jewish shop keepers, or ties gay men to the backs of vehicles and drags them to their deaths. Let me tell you, the spectacle of my senator standing up and saying 'we are going to make sure these people get none of this money' (I'm paraphrasing, but it's close) was as frightening to me as Bush talking about an Axis of Evil. One Republican senator even suggested that AIG executives commit sepuku. Howw far is it from that to some yahoo here in NYC (and our town is full of yahoos) deciding that they aren't acting fast enough and he's going to take matters into his own hands? Maybe march into AIG like John Luigi Ferri and gun down as many people as he can? Our Senators are already giving him the moral justification to do so. When you create scape goats and spread hatred, that is exactly what you do.

Lately the talking points from my party have included comparing the economic crisis to a war, and suggesting that anybody who opposes the president is being un-patriotic. It is a play right out of the GOP playbook and it is a good one. But if this is indeed a war (it's not, no more than the war on terror was a war) then it is having the same effect on truth, ethics, justice and due process as our other wars have. MSNBC is right. We have declared "war" on wealth. We have created an enemy--bankers and wall street execs--and we will fight them in the trenches and the streets blah blah blah. There is nothing new to any of this. A crazy man declared long ago "we shall not be crucified on a cross of gold!" Hating the rich has a long history in this country, and this is no different. We have declared them to be evil, greedy, fat pigs, who deserve to be destroyed. And as with the "war" on terror, we are willing to do unethical and illegal things to exact our revenge. My party, my president, is starting to remind me frighteningly of President Bush and the republicans right after 9/11 (and like the Dems at that time, the GOP are going along with them). If Marx is right the people will not be satisfied with legislative attempts to bring the rich down and the next step will be revolution. I hope not, because we've all seen how communism failed.

If you ask me, Cuomo's approach is the only one that has any merit. Investigate them for fraud and, if it was committed, then you can void the contracts on that basis. That would be ethical, legal, and I hope it happens.

Because I want my pound of flesh from these bastards too.

Leeches on the Ass of Humanity

2009-03-15T07:48:00.000-07:00

I have been around rock and Roll. I have met governors and senators and presidential candidates. But I have never seen craziness like I did yesterday.

Yesterday Hanna and I worked as extras on “Salt”, the new Angelina Jolie film. Mostly, it meant standing around outside in the cold pretending to be part of a news crew at a state funeral, freezing my butt off (I was more poorly dressed than anyone else on set), getting a mild case of hypothermia and frost bite, and shredding my back. Good thing I had my new LL Bean boots to wear. Holding was in the Marriot on Lex. Checking us in and out was a chore, and we never got to go back to holding except for lunch. But it was fun!

There were 800 extras, including a military honor guard, pall bearers, mourners, spectators, news people, Secret Service, and cops. Liev Schreiber was in there somewhere, but nobody seemed to care. It was at St. Bart’s, right next to the Waldorf Astoria (the only time I ever get over to the Waldorf is during NASCAR week). The procession included three limos, a hearse, an SUV, six motorcycle cops, five squad cars, and the NYPD pip and drum core. There were also four mounted police moving around in the background. They had blocked off Park running North and were locking it down running south during takes. Occasionally some bozo would try to turn East on 50th right into the cops standing there, and honk, expecting them to move the hearse, squad cars, and horses blocking the road. (most of the time the road was open, but sometimes it was blocked and traffic was being directed to turn south onto Park). I saw one guy in a Mercedes get mad, flip the cop off, refuse to move, finally move, then come around ten minutes later and repeat the entire dance.

But the craziness came from the paparazzi. I didn’t even notice them at first, but as the day went on, like cockroaches, they started coming out. The paparazzi were supposed to be confined to a couple of pens set up by the police, but they tried as best they could to ignore that. The fake press (us) was placed on the two traffic islands in the middle of Park Avenue across from the hotel and the church on either side of East 50th street. Every once in awhile, paparazzi would try to come in and mingle with us. Nobody knew where Angelina was or what she was doing. We kept looking at the people in the limos, assuming she was one of them, and so did the paparazzi, but it became clear that she wasn’t. We were told no to let the paparazzi in and to tell a pa if any of them showed up. I told one of them who showed up that he wasn’t’ supposed to be here and he said “what, this is just for the legit press?” I realized he thought we were all real. “No, this is the fake press. We’re actors and you are standing in the movie set.” “Oh.” She smiled, and walked away. But I watched him all day and he was one of the pushiest around. I heard later he was from TMZ. At one point a paparazzi appeared next to me. I heard one of the other extras say “Hey, you can’t be here.” I turned around to find a paparazzi getting all up in his face. I said “He’s right. You can’t set up here.” The paparazzi got belligerent. He looked at me and said “What do you make? Eight dollars an hour? You take your job that seriously?” The PA in charge of us was waking by and we called for him. The other extra pointed the guy out and the PA said “you can’t be here.” The paparazzi tried to give the PA lip but the PA just threatened to get a cop (there were two cops there doing double duty—real cops in uniform working as extras).

Late in the afternoon things started to get noticeably more tense. More and more paparazzi tried to jump the police lines. The cop assigned to deal with them started shouting. Our PA came over to us and said “Ok, we’re about to bring out our star. Remember the focus isn’t on her it’s on the procession. She’s going to be across the street from the church. Ignore that. Just look over here. And don’t do anything to make her security nervous.” The paparazzi seemed to sense it, because they all started jockeying for position. Then a back SUV appeared, driving the wrong way up 49th street, having come from the Waldorf’s drop off bay. It parked right next to the director’s station and stayed there for twenty minutes. Burly security guard surrounded it. A couple of people went up and talked through the window to the driver. There was a delay while we got one of the fake news people back in position. When we were ready to go the door to the SUV opened and Angelina stepped out. She kept her head down and rushed to the set, surrounded by her security. Once in the crowd of extras she couldn’t be seen any more. We shot six quick takes while she was there (might have been five) of her watching the procession. After the first take an extra on the sidewalk in front of the Waldorf collapsed. All the paparazzi on that side of the street (there were probably fifteen or twenty), swung their lenses around and started snapping her. The crew brought an ambulance in, they loaded the woman up, and took off. It took just over five minutes to get her cleared. But it still made crowd (read paparazzi) control a bit harder. Some of the Paparazzi were crossing back and forth between the pen on the East side of the street to the pen on the West side of the street to get better shots. After Angelina’s last take they started to move her toward her SUV again and the paparazzi who were in the middle of the intersection rushed her car. The cops and security guards threw themselves in front of them. More paparazzi started to jump the barricades. The cops yelled “Clear the road!” and the SUV (which had turned around at some point), sped off down the hill with security running along side and in front, racing the 120 yards to the underground entrance to the Waldorf, where it turned in. All the while the paparazzi were going crazy. It was truly a feeding frenzy. A couple of them got arrested, one for climbing up on one of the fake news vans to get a better shot. A few extras were grumbling that Angelina keeps herself so aloof (I’ve actually only ever met one movie star who like to hang with the extras, that being David Warner, not an A-lister but a really great guy). Me, I felt sorry for her, and I totally understood why she had as much security as a pope or a president (she has been called “Queen of the World” recently, and you can see why). The fans and over eager extras would be hard enough to manage, but the paparazzi were insane. It is easy to hate them—and easy to see how they killed Princess Diana (and after yesterday there is no doubt in my mind who is responsible for that).

Our celebrity culture feeds on people. Fans develop deep emotional ties to people they have never even met, and emotionally they desire that to be reciprocated. They are often shocked when it is not—not consciously, but emotionally. Rejection is rejection. Others get jealous of wealth and fame. Most are simply adoring, Many love the spectacle and sparkle. Others worship. And all of these love a fiery crash. Either with outrage or joy they yearn for a scandal, a tragic death, they long to see the king fall. Maybe this is what Aristotle was taking about when he talked about catharsis. The pity and the terror of the celebrity train wreck. And the chorus in all of this is the paparazzi—they are our eyes and our ears, they represent us and our desires in our pursuit of fame. They are our surrogates, and their feeding frenzy comes from the money the magazines will pay for pictures that we will consume—feeding symbolically on the bodies of our idols, eating the flesh of our golden calves.