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April 8th, 2015

Now Where Have I Heard This Before…

In my newstream just now…

Tom Cotton: Bombing Iran Would Take “Several Days,” Be Nothing Like Iraq  War

“It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions. All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough as in the protection of America’s national security interest as Bill Clinton was.”

Yeah…yeah…  But as I recall that wasn’t the end of it.  And the next step was advertised as being another several days thing.  If that.  And…it wasn’t…

Time to repost this I reckon…

Flashback…Washington D.C…March 18, 2003

Tuesday afternoon. I am attending a conference on open source software in government being held at George Washington University. I am here because my project manager is investigating the possibility of moving the system I’ve been working on for the past several years to open source software. Work on the Hubble Space Telescope will go into maintenance mode shortly, and the thinking is that the Institute doesn’t want to spend a lot of money it won’t have on software upgrades, simply because a certain vendor has a business cycle that requires you to do that. At least with open source we would have the option of making any small fixes we absolutely needed to have before the end of the mission ourselves, without breaking our systems that depend on it. The alternative is to stick to the vendor’s upgrade cycle, and pray the new versions don’t break anything in our software, or introduce new bugs and security holes.

Between conference sessions, I wander around the Foggy Bottom area, and back and forth to my hotel, which I paid for out of my own pocket, rather then hassle with Washington traffic, which is a nightmare. The hotel has a nice little kitchenette, which allows me to eat reasonably well without further damaging my budget for the month. Around noon I begin the walk back to my hotel for lunch, stopping to examine a decrepit building right next to the conference hall, that I assume is one of the student dorms. It is, and I see by the bronze plaque by the door that this one is named Lafayette Hall. I read the inscription, which briefly describes the history of Marquis de Lafayette, who fought beside George Washington, taking a bullet in the process, for the freedom of a nation that was not his own, and who later attended the first commencement ceremonies of the university that bore his friend’s name, shaking the hand of each of those first graduates. While I am reading, a snarky voice in the back of my mind is saying Freedom Fries…Freedom Toast… An old friend of mine I’d had breakfast with that morning, told me a joke he’d heard about a man who, while visiting France recently, asked a random Frenchman, “Sir, can you speak German?” When the Frenchman replied that he couldn’t, the American said, “You’re welcome.” I told my friend the Frenchman could just as easily have asked the American, “Sir, do you have a king?”

My hotel is somewhat oldish. My room is on the sixth floor and the elevators are small and slow. I press the button and when one finally appears, I see that there are already two businessmen inside. It’s a tight fit for three. As we go up I feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. There are some who you would never know from the look of them, to be of the right wing thuggish persuasion, and there are others who hit you with it in waves, in the cut of the clothes, the bullying posture that is as second nature as breathing, and the coldness of the face, particularly when smiling at nothing in particular. I tune them both out, pulling out from a space within me I’d almost forgotten about, a “Yes I’m a longhair, yes I know you hate my guts, and no mister establishment person sir, I really don’t give a flying fuck” attitude, close my eyes, and listen to the elevator floor counter click off the floors to mine. I toy briefly about writing a book, “Everything I know about living under Bush II, I learned from Nixon”. The old elevator rises slowly. I hear one of my companions say, “I hope they don’t cancel our flight out Thursday.” The other chuckles and says, “The war will be over by then.”

by Bruce | Link | React!

December 10th, 2014

Staring Into The Pit…

I link to Andrew Sullivan reluctantly, Very reluctantly, but I have to give credit where it’s due too. This livestreaming he did on the torture report is very good, the outrage in it genuine and worth sharing. You should feel that outrage too.

Darkness Visible: Live-Blogging The Torture Report

“The barbarism was the very opposite from a few bad apples at the bottom of the pile, as they tried to persuade us at Abu Ghraib. The bad apples were at the very top of the chain of command, rotting this country’s reputation and honor from the top down. And those begin with Bush and Cheney and Tenet. They are now wanted men. And they will go abroad again – at their legal peril. And so America becomes a legal sanctuary for war criminals. As long as they are our war criminals.”

Like a lot of Americans, I believe in that liberty and justice for all stuff, and government of the people, by the people and for the people, and I want so much to be proud of the way my country embodies those principles. Civilization stands or falls on them. But it is not always so. Just ask the native Americans, just ask the sons and daughters of the slaves, just ask the peaceful protestors of any decade who felt the club and the boot. Mary Renault, at the end of her novel about the poet Simonides, wrote “In all men evil is sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.” That sense we often feel among us, of American exceptionalism, ought rightly to impart a sense of obligation, as something every generation is called to live up to, because we are human after all, and with the potential for great good comes the potential for great evil. But too often powerful evil people manage to turn that sense of ourselves and our purpose into cheap bar stool nationalism, an excuse to congratulate ourselves as we look the other way at the evil done in our name, in the name of our country. They need to be held accountable. Or history will hold us accountable, and laugh at all the times we waved our flag as if it stood for anything more than a place on a map.

 

by Bruce | Link | React!

March 19th, 2013

A Splendid Little War…

Andrew Sullivan has been relentlessly digging up and reposting his horrible Iraq war posts as a kind of public confession and mea culpa.   So very Catholic, and I mean that in a respectful way.   For all the hostility I threw at him back then I must say now that he has my respect, being one of the few Bush cheerleaders I’ve seen to change their minds about both the man and his war, and while you can argue that this is just a matter of plainly seeing the facts for what they are and you don’t pat someone on the back for doing what they ought to have been doing in the first place, that’s ignoring some hard truths about human nature and what can happen to any of us who get caught up in a mob.   Sullivan deserves a great deal of respect in my opinion for so publicly eating crow and more to the point, for setting an example.   If more of us owned our mistakes in life instead of passing the buck this would be a much better world.

The rest of us who were right all along need to look squarely at the fact of our utter uselessness.   We tried, we failed, and way too often it seems to me, we settled for the sanctimony of being right over making a difference.

Flashback…Washington D.C…March 18, 2003

Tuesday afternoon. I am attending a conference on open source software in government being held at George Washington University. I am here because my project manager is investigating the possibility of moving the system I’ve been working on for the past several years to open source software. Work on the Hubble Space Telescope will go into maintenance mode shortly, and the thinking is that the Institute doesn’t want to spend a lot of money it won’t have on software upgrades, simply because a certain vendor has a business cycle that requires you to do that. At least with open source we would have the option of making any small fixes we absolutely needed to have before the end of the mission ourselves, without breaking our systems that depend on it. The alternative is to stick to the vendor’s upgrade cycle, and pray the new versions don’t break anything in our software, or introduce new bugs and security holes.

Between conference sessions, I wander around the Foggy Bottom area, and back and forth to my hotel, which I paid for out of my own pocket, rather then hassle with Washington traffic, which is a nightmare. The hotel has a nice little kitchenette, which allows me to eat reasonably well without further damaging my budget for the month. Around noon I begin the walk back to my hotel for lunch, stopping to examine a decrepit building right next to the conference hall, that I assume is one of the student dorms. It is, and I see by the bronze plaque by the door that this one is named Lafayette Hall. I read the inscription, which briefly describes the history of Marquis de Lafayette, who fought beside George Washington, taking a bullet in the process, for the freedom of a nation that was not his own, and who later attended the first commencement ceremonies of the university that bore his friend’s name, shaking the hand of each of those first graduates. While I am reading, a snarky voice in the back of my mind is saying Freedom Fries…Freedom Toast… An old friend of mine I’d had breakfast with that morning, told me a joke he’d heard about a man who, while visiting France recently, asked a random Frenchman, “Sir, can you speak German?” When the Frenchman replied that he couldn’t, the American said, “You’re welcome.” I told my friend the Frenchman could just as easily have asked the American, “Sir, what is your king’s name?”

My hotel is somewhat oldish. My room is on the sixth floor and the elevators are small and slow. I press the button and when one finally appears, I see that there are already two businessmen inside. It’s a tight fit for three. As we go up I feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. There are some who you would never know from the look of them to be of the right wing thuggish persuasion, and there are others who hit you with it in waves, in the cut of the clothes, the bullying posture that is as second nature as breathing, and the coldness of the face, particularly when smiling at nothing in particular. I tune them both out, pulling out from a space within me I’d almost forgotten about, a “Yes I’m a longhair, yes I know you hate my guts, and no mister establishment person sir, I really don’t give a flying fuck” attitude, close my eyes, and listen to the elevator floor counter click off the floors to mine. I toy briefly about writing a book, “Everything I know about living under Bush II, I learned from Nixon”. The old elevator rises slowly. I hear one of my companions say, “I hope they don’t cancel our flight out Thursday.” The other chuckles and says, “The war will be over by then.”

by Bruce | Link | React!

May 13th, 2012

Sowing The Wind

Brad DeLong asks…

Is American Democracy Broken?

This post on his blog is apparently a talk he gave at the second Berkeley Faculty Club symposium on American Politics and Democracy.   He begins by noting he is out of his comfort zone discussing these matters, being an economist and not a political scientist.   You should read it anyway because he brings to it the same thoughtful, insightful thinking he brings to economics.

I want to quote some of its passages…

An economist is going to start thinking about democracy with Tony Downs’s economic theory of same. First-past-the-post electoral systems and office-seeking politicians should produce a two-party system. Office-seeking candidates simply won’t join any third party because their chances of election will be too small. Only those who want to make some ideological or demonstrative point rather than to actually win office and then make policy–cough, Ralph Nader, cough–will do so. Hence the stable configuration has two parties. And then the two parties hug the center and follow policies attractive to the median voter.

Ideology will matter–politicians do not run purely for love of office but rather to then make the country into what they regard as a better place. There will be swings to the left, to the right, to the up, to the down, to the forward, to the back. But the policy views of the median voter ought, according to Tony Downs, function as a strong attractor and we should not expect the policies implemented by the politicians who get elected to deviate far from them.

Now there are qualifications. It is the median voter, not the median citizen.George W. Bush became president not because his policies came closer to the preferences of the median person who voted on that Tuesday in November but because his policies came closer to the preferences of the median Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor. Gerrymandering and misapportionment–cough, the Senate, cough–matter a lot. But these are qualifications. Tony Downs made a very strong case that first-past-the-post electoral systems will produce policies that the median voter likes. Thus in this sense the electorate gets the government it deserves. If there are problems, the problems are in the minds of the voters rather than in the Democratic system.

That is the economist’s not theory, not analysis, but rather prejudice. theory. Political scientists will scorn it as hopelessly naïve. But it is the benchmark from which I start.

In a democracy…in a healthy functional democracy, the middle will act as a check on the extremes. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, like when the middle position still favors segregation of the races and the second class status of women as it did here in the 1950s.   But the point is the voters generally get the government they asked for, or in H.L. Mencken’s lovely phrase, “Democracy is based on the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

But the middle does not like republican policies. I could go on and on about that but it’s basically a fact that the polls show next to no public support for republican economic policies, which are generally understood to benefit only the richest of the rich. Yet those are the policies we get, often with lackluster democratic opposition, if any. So what happened?

Now let me shift and talk about our experience here in America since I got to Washington in early 1993, carrying spears for Alicia Munnell in Lloyd Benson’s Treasury Department in the Clinton administration.

Clinton was a centrist Democrat. The Clinton administration’s priorities were by and large, with exceptions–gays in the military–what you might call “Eisenhower Republican” priorities. Expand healthcare coverage so there were fewer uninsured and fewer people dumped by ambulances on the corners of the Tenderloin. But also control government healthcare cost which were then ballooning out of control–even though we didn’t know what “ballooning out of control” really meant. Balance the budget. End welfare as we know it–thus buying into the Republican critique of the Depression-era belief that raising children was real work–even if you were not married to a rich husband who was the chief executive of Bain Capital–and a socially-valuable task. Passing NAFTA. Creating the World Trade Organization. Strengthening Social Security through a combination of tax increases, benefit cuts, retirement=age increases, mandated private accounts requiring individuals to contribute their own money over and above Social Security (as an add-on but not a carve-out, as a supplement to and not a substitute for Roosevelt’s New Deal’s Social Security).

All of these seemed to us in the early 1990s to be bang-on the median voter’s preferences, Eisenhower Republicans. Clinton Democrats. We in the Bentsen Treasury at the start of 1993 looked forward to doing an awful lot of technocratic work–cranking out centrist legislation approved by large bipartisan majorities.

We found Republicans cooperative on NAFTA.

We found Republicans pushing for welfare reform–but only to the extent of passing things that were so highly punitive that they could not believe any Democratic president could in good conscience sign them. But Clinton fooled them. He signed welfare reform–and then spent some time in 1996 campaigning on the message: “re-elect me because only I can undo some of the damage that I have done to the welfare system”. Which was true. And which he did.

Otherwise…

That was the old game. Hammer out compromise legislation and move on because at the end of the day what was important to both sides was keeping the country strong and prosperous, even if they had different ideas of how to go about that, even if it meant their individual constituencies didn’t get everything they wanted. Everyone agreed at the end of the day that the government still had to function and it’s work needed to get done.

But notice how the center as defined by Bill Clinton was by then way further to the right on economic policy then it was at any time since The New Deal. What was happening was since Watergate the republicans had become more radicalized and the democrats just kept playing the old game of Find The Center.   And over a span of just a few elections that had moved the center way to the right. What happened next was the logical outcome of that.

Otherwise the Republicans when I got to Washington at the start of 1993 decided that they were going to adopt the Gingrich strategy: oppose everything the Democratic president proposes, especially if it had previously been a Republican proposal and priority. That is not a strategy that would ever be adopted by anybody who wants to see their name written in the Book of Life.

But Gingrich found followers.

And so things that we in the Bentsen Treasury all expected to happen, did not happen. We had expected that sometime between January and June 1994 Lloyd Bentsen’s chief healthcare aide would sit down with Bob Dole’s chief healthcare aide. We had expected that they would hammer out a deal so that people in the future would never be as dependent on on charity for their healthcare as Bob Dole was when he returned injured from World War II.

That meeting never happened. Bob Dole decided he would rather join Gingrich to try to portray Clinton as a failure. So Bob Dole never got a legislative accomplishment out of his years in Congress. Instead, he got to lose a presidential election. And I now remember Bob Dole not as the co-architect of health care reform in 1994 but as somebody who denounced Roosevelt and Truman for getting us into those Democrat wars that saved Europe from the Nazis, China and the rest of Asia from Imperial Japan, and that have allowed South Koreans to grow five inches taller than their North Korean cousins.

As my friend Mark Schmitt wrote in his review of Geoffrey Kabaservice’s book about the moderate Republicans, Rule and Ruin, the moderate Republicans were partisan Republicans first and Americans second…

Exactly.   He goes on to give an account of this just getting worse and worse, first with Clinton and the impeachment circus, then, massively so, with president Obama.

Then came Obama in 2009 and 2010. My friends–Christina Romer, Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, and company–headed off to Washington to plan a Recovery Act that they thought would get 25 Republican votes in the Senate. It was a squarely bipartisan fiscal stimulus: this tax cut to make the Republicans stand up and applaud, this infrastructure increase to make the Democrats applaud, this increase in aid to the states to make the governors and state legislators applaud.

It didn’t get 25 Republican votes in the Senate. It got 3.

On healthcare reform, Barrack Obama’s opening bid was the highly-Republican Heritage Foundation plan, the plan that George Romney had chosen for Massachusetts.

RomneyCare got zero republican votes.

On budget balance Obama’s proposals have not been the one-to-one equal amounts of tax increases and spending cuts to balance the budget of Clinton 1993 or Bush 1990. Obama’s proposals have been more along the lines of $1 of tax increases for every $5 of spending cuts.

And the Republicans rejected them

And so on…   DeLong starts the time of the breaking of our democracy with Gingrich.   That’s likely because he saw it first hand there in Washington.   But Gingrich was the next logical outcome down a course the republicans have been relentlessly following since Nixon and the Southern Strategy.

In the years after the civil war and the first and second world wars, we thought of ourselves as one country. Regardless of where people stood on the left/right spectrum there was this general sense that at the end of the day we were all Americans and there was a love of country that moderated all but the lunatic fringe. Nixon understood that this e pluribus unum mindset would leave a party that by then existed simply to represent the interests of big business, the rich and the powerful in a permanent minority status.

Working Americans were fine with The New Deal.   As long as the prosperity of the working class was rising the tide for the upper classes too the republican establishment was fine with just tinkering around the edges.   But it couldn’t last.   Eisenhower was conservative on many social issues, weak on civil rights and civil liberties, but not overtly hostile as the Nixon/McCarty branch of the party was. He was the last of the moderate republicans who believed that a healthy middle class was necessary to the vitality of the economy and the security of the United States.

Nixon hated the elites, the intellectuals, the liberals.   He positioned himself as the champion of the common man against the elites.   But it was those elites who had improved the status of the common man, and now threatened to do the same for women and minorities. Nixon was no great friend to the rich and powerful either, but as they would decades later in a man called Dubya they saw in Nixon’s paranoia and bottomless hatred someone who might just break the New Deal coalition of labor, rural and urban voters. And then they could go back to what they were doing back in Hoover’s Day…getting rich quick in the Wall Street casino.

Divide the country and we’ll have the bigger half Pat Buchanan told Nixon.   But without a doubt Nixon took that advice because he was already considering it.   Divisive pit American against American campaigning had been his method of winning elections since his first run for congress.   They simply scaled the Nixon technique up and made it a permanent American against American cold war. Very deliberately they sought to replace in the working class voter love of country with love of tribe.   No more of this e pluribus unum communist socialist nonsense.   And like Gingrich would decades later, they found allies.   White blue collar workers who hated black people.   Males resentful toward independent women.   Rural voters who loathed big city people with their big city morals and ideas.   Poor people jealous of union workers with their union paychecks.   Christian fundamentalists who loath the people in the church across the street.

When you got right down to it, America was a country of the imagination only.   It wasn’t a nation by blood and ancestry.   Our shared history is very brief compared to what the peoples of Europe, Asia and South America see as their own.   The United States is a nation based on a political ideal of liberty and justice for all. The social contract was simply that we had each others backs when it came to that liberty and justice for all thing. Your freedom in the pursuit of happiness is as dear to me as my own. We are all Americans.   As long as that held true a party of the rich and powerful would never win very many elections or wield enough power to impose its will on the majority.   But the New Deal majority was a coalition of many diverse parts of working America and the republicans became expert at playing them against each other, that they might rule over all.

When Scott Walker was caught talking about using a divide and conquer strategy he wasn’t just talking about himself or just breaking the unions: this has been the essential republican strategy for gaining and keeping power since Nixon. Divide the country, set working American against working American, and in the end the rich and powerful take all. And it’s worked.

One thing I have learned from watching the Wall Street boys run the country is they’re not very good at it, and at some level they might even know they’re not very good at it.   But they don’t care about running the country, they just want to get it out of their way so they can chase some more money.   It’s all about the money chase with them.   When the economy tanks, when the stock market goes bust, when banks and businesses go bankrupt right and left, they blame everyone but themselves.   They’re like a bunch of drunk drivers convinced they’re fit to drive because they haven’t killed anyone yet, and when they do it was an accident and it was dark and that pedestrian just jumped right out in front of them and they didn’t mean to do it so stop treating them like criminals.   Once upon a time the nation had laws against their sort of drunk driving. Those laws were there to protect the rest of us. But those law got in their way.     Who are you to tell me I can’t drink and drive…it’s my car and my taxes paid for the highway and if I can’t drink and drive then it’s not a free country and all you other drivers on the road are socialists.

The money chase is all they care about.  The New Deal coalition got in their way so they set about busting it apart. If in the process of doing that they ripped America apart too and put the nation at risk of catastrophic social upheaval that isn’t important. If once the brakes are off their reckless driving crashes the economy to smithereens and the lives of honest hard working Americans are destroyed and the future strength and security of the nation is placed in jeopardy that isn’t important.   They don’t care about America.  They are citizens of the stock market.

by Bruce | Link | React!

June 20th, 2011

I See Election Campaigning Has Already Begun

So I see the ex-gay movement held it’s annual medicine show down in Orlando earlier this month…

by Bruce | Link | React! (1)

November 16th, 2010

Well I’ll Probably Never Fly Again

What do I have to change my name to so I can get on one of those No-Fly lists?   Seriously.

Napolitano defends new screening at airports

Amid criticism over intensified airport screening measures, Secretary Janet Napolitano defended the Department of Homeland Security’s use of full-body scanners and pat-downs as essential to “match the changing threat environment that we inhabit.”

“This is all being done as a process to make sure that the traveling public is safe,” she said, adding that officials would “have an open ear” if adjustments to the new rules needed to be made.

Got an open ear do you?

Good thing I actually like long distance road trips.   But hopefully in my lifetime the great ocean liners can start making a comeback.     Please.   I would still like to see the world someday.

by Bruce | Link | React!

April 11th, 2010

The Difference Between Having Values And Wearing Them

I’ve been meaning to link to this Fred Clark sermon…

12 vicious values (cont’d.)

I think part of the reason Glenn Beck’s 912 Project opts for the term “values” rather than “virtues” is because virtues take work. They require practice to acquire as habits.

This is not what the 912 Project is for. It is not a group or “movement” of people who have chosen to practice these 12 virtues in order to acquire them as habits. It is not a group that seeks to learn or to embody those virtues at all.

Look at that list again: Honesty, reverence, hope, thrift, humility, charity, sincerity, moderation, hard work, courage, personal responsibility, gratitude.

Does any of that characterize the agenda or the practice or the visible habit of Beck’s tea partying mobs? Were any of these virtues on display in the town-hall disruptions, in the angry marches or the signs carried under Beck’s “912” banner? Was there even a hint that these gatherings were composed of people even slightly interested in such virtues?

This is why Beck’s list of “12 values” can’t withstand comparison to the first similar-seeming list that comes to mind, the Boy Scout Law. The Boy Scouts of America isn’t my favorite organization as I’m not a fan of either homophobia nor vacuous civil religion, but I am a big fan of that Scout Law:

A Scout is: Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.

Against such there is no law.

The 12 virtues listed there are at first glance quite similar to Beck’s, but the differences are telling. The Scout Law begins “A Scout is“…

Is verses waving them around like a damn flag.   This is the single most telling thing about the culture warriors.   They yap, yap, yap about Values…but they don’t ever act like they have any. And there’s a reason for that.   Values are to them as weapons to wield against the Faceless Other…not things that actually sustain and guide.   Values aren’t a part of your bedrock, they’re rhetorical tools to use as needed and discard like a Kleenex afterward.

You should go read the whole thing.

by Bruce | Link | React!

August 10th, 2009

The Fox Speaks For The Chicken Coop…

Via Sullivan…a handy little snapshot of the state of the Union…

As the GOP declines in popularity, Fox News gains audience. Or in other words, as reality presses closer in, that subset of the American population who never saw a fact they couldn’t look right in the face and deny, is cocooning.  Surprise, surprise.

What was once a cultural divide has become a chasm, bigger, and vastly more dangerous then anything the "generation gap" of the 1960s could have produced.  Again, from Sullivan

A reader writes:

I just want to share a sad story with you. Tonight I was at my regular Friday night AA meeting in LA that I have been attending for 18 years – I am a 48 year old woman. One of my oldest friends, a male with 30 years sobriety, is a Republican. I am a Democrat. Every week he talks politics with another like-minded friend. Tonight he arrived a bit later than usual, so as I gave him a hug, I said, "Thank goodness you arrived because I am sure Betty* (name changed) did not want to discuss politics with me!"

He then turned around and started screaming at me. I was so taken aback, I didn’t even know what he was screaming about at first. When I finally tuned in, he was yelling that Obama "sent the SEIU thugs to beat up the senior citizens" protesting at the health-care town hall meetings and that Obama had instructed the SEIU "if they come at you, you go at them twice as hard."

When I tried to reasonably protest this statement, he just spewed forth a tirade of vile invectives.

We were outside and there were about 30 people milling about. I was shocked, embarrassed and literally frozen in place. I managed to turn and walk away. This is a man I have known and respected for the entire length of my sobriety. I am fairly certain this friendship is over. Reasonable discourse is over. The lies and hate spread by the right-wing have won. As a side note, his wife, who is one of my best friends would not talk to me for over a month after the election in November. I am just heartbroken. Sorry, I know this is not the most well-written account, but I am so shaken, I can barely wrap my head around it.

I have an acquaintance…someone I used to call "friend" but simply cannot anymore…who nonetheless calls periodically.  I wrote of my frustrations about that Here.  Last time he called I ended the conversation when he started going on about how the new supreme court justice Sotomayor was a racist.  Next time he calls I’ll have a simple question ready for him…

Do you think President Obama was born here in the United States?

End of story.  Life is short.  The American Dream is still beautiful and I believe in it and you don’t anymore.  There is are lot of things Americans need to discuss with one another and hash out together and the politics of life in a democracy is you have to have those discussions and maybe even a few major arguments and in the end you compromise and you hold a vote and you get on with it.  But you’re not there anymore.  You’re somewhere on the dark side of the moon where not even light can penetrate.   We can’t talk anymore, and to have an America Americans need to be able to talk with each other and you want to shut down the talking so everyone can listen to you scream about nothing for as long as you have the breath to scream about it.  Fine.  The conversation is shut down…with you.  I’ll talk it out with anyone who has a gripe about what I think or what I believe, no matter how angry they are…but not with a Fox News crack addict.  You drag yourself out of that gutter and maybe I will.  But not before.

 

by Bruce | Link | React!


Welcome, My Heterosexual Friends, To The Front…

Via Sullivan…this little nugget from the front lines from Daily KOS…

It is, in short, a movement made up of the enfranchised and enabled; people who have gained every benefit from the politics of America and yet who feel in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones, the ones who have nothing left to lose, so rapidly is America falling away from them. It is rare to run across any movement so deeply angry — or more to the point, a movement which explicitly celebrates anger as the primary mission of their activism. They are not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs in whatever dark conspiracies have been peddled to them; they have in fact made it their publicly proclaimed mission to block any such explanations from even being attempted.

This could be a description of the anti-gay movement in America ever since Anita Bryant.  Enfranchised and enabled?  Check.  They have every right that their gay neighbors are fighting for.  Every.  Right.  Feeling in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones?  Check.  It’s a constant refrain.  Militant homosexuals are oppressing them.  Somehow.  But don’t ask how exactly because all you’ll get are either vague claims that their "deeply held religious beliefs" are being trampled on every time they’re told to leave gay people alone, or if not that, then outright lies. Remember this?

Another "Yes on 8" canard is that the continuation of same-sex marriage will force churches and other religious groups to perform such marriages or face losing their tax-exempt status. Proponents point to a case in New Jersey, where a Methodist-based nonprofit owned seaside land that included a boardwalk pavilion. It obtained an exemption from state property tax for the land on the grounds that it was open for public use and access. Events such as weddings — of any religion — could be held in the pavilion by reservation. But when a lesbian couple sought to book the pavilion for a commitment ceremony, the nonprofit balked, saying this went against its religious beliefs.

The court ruled against the nonprofit, not because gay rights trump religious rights but because public land has to be open to everyone or it’s not public. The ruling does not affect churches’ religious tax exemptions or their freedom to marry whom they please on their private property, just as Catholic priests do not have to perform marriages for divorced people and Orthodox synagogues can refuse to provide space for the weddings of interfaith couples. And Proposition 8 has no bearing on the issue; note that the New Jersey case wasn’t about a wedding ceremony.

We’re being oppressed…by having to live by the same rules everyone else does…

Not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs?  Check.  Not only are they not willing to listen to the facts, they’ve built a multi-million dollar industry with dozens of front groups whose only job is to churn out one lie after another about gay people which they insist everyone else accept as holy writ, whereas any actual science is regarded as pro-homo propaganda.  Publicly proclaimed their mission to block any actual facts from coming to light?  Check.  From keeping honest, factual information about sexual orientation out of schools, to keeping it out of public libraries, to keeping it off of television, there is no public space that the facts about homosexuality and sexual orientation can appear that they have not vigorously…and I mean vigorously…worked to shut it down.

This Daily KOS post could have been written years ago, decades even, about about the anti-gay culture warriors.  But it isn’t about the fight over gay rights.  It’s about the struggle for America…

The Rise of A Postmodern Racist Movement?

There seems little question that something odd is going on with the healthcare debate. Foremost is the ridiculous extent to which the debate has been entirely commandeered by flagrant, outright lies — things about euthanasia, and death panels, and the like, abject propaganda peddled directly from House and Senate offices. We have had lying in our discourse since the beginning of that discourse, but it has been a long while since the fabrications have been so blatant, so absolutely without even the smallest grain of truth. To take a Republican-sponsored healthcare provision that rather innocently and uncontroversially extends insurance coverage to those that want to create their own living wills and turn it into a declaration that the government will decide every five years whether or not you should be euthanized is something out of the Protocols, or out of Saddam’s Iraq, or a mimicry of the worst and most stupid and most absurd of North Korean propaganda towards their own citizens.

Likewise, the explicit instruction to protestors not to debate, but to aggressively attempt to shut down the meetings entirely — not normal. It is perhaps the best possible approach for insurance lobbyists to take, if their goal is to protect the profits of their industry — but it is still not normal. We have always had the fringes of such speech, but I cannot recall a time it has been so celebrated as the formal solution to political debate. Certainly not by a major political party, coupled with the majority of their most popular pundits and talking heads, coupled again to lobbyist groups with long histories of corporate astroturfing. And the proud shuffling just-up-to-the-line-of-violence, right in the very faces of their own representatives of Congress, requiring police protection in order to escort those elected representatives safely from the meetings — that part is new. That part is not normal.

It’s been normal in the battle for gay rights for decades now…you’re only just now noticing it, because they’ve moved beyond us.  But you have to understand this: you’ve always been the target too.  A free, just, and proud America has always been their target.  The America of liberty and justice for all has always been their target.  Because in that America, they’re then just a bunch of ignorant runts, resentful that the universe doesn’t revolve around them, resentful of everything fine and noble human beings can be, they they never will because it’s too much work.

You haven’t seen the hate like your gay neighbors have seen it.  Now you are.  Surprised?  Shocked?  Just wait until you realize, really realize, that there is no bottom there. 

One thing to keep in mind is that race, and racism, have rarely ever acted alone. One of the best points that Phillip Dray makes in his classic history of lynching is that epidemics of lynching often coincided, not just with an expansion of black rights, but with increased labor mobility among white women. So fear of white women, and their independence, as well as fear of sexual competition, all worked in concert. It wasn’t simply "I hate niggers" — it never is. It was "I don’t much like black people, and prices are going up, and I have to let my wife work, so I can survive, and I’m scared she won’t stay with me if she’s not dependent on me and I’d die if she left me for a black guy." Or some such.

Ditto for the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t just racism — it was class also. In the South you had this black middle class that always had to be deferential to the most poorest white person in the world. The prospect of losing that deference, of already being lower than the white aristocracy and now also being lower than a class of blacks too, wreaked havoc.

We’ve got governors yelling about secession, and major politicians peddling stories of imminent threats to your family and your children by the very government they are supposedly a part of, and every day the town hall footage just seems to look more and more like a modernized version of the mob attacks against citizens and legislators during old anti-desegregation rallies, and we don’t need to say "sooner or later someone will be shot" because it has already happened, and multiple times, and in truth it never really left us, these last fifty years.

It wasn’t about desegregation.  It wasn’t about feminism.  It wasn’t about gay rights.  Those were just the flashpoints…the excuses.  It wasn’t about any of those things.  Not ever.  Think about the other major event of the last half of the 20th century…the cold war.  Think about the Iron Curtain.  Think about the Berlin Wall.  Think about all those people who were shot, trying to get over it to freedom.  Think about what was going through the minds of the people who gave the order to shoot and kill those wall climbers.  What this has always been about: The Gutter…resentful, hating everyone who ever managed to rise above them, fearful of being left alone in the gutter, afraid of the day when the walls all fall down and everyone who can leaves them behind and all they’ll have is each other to look at, and to blame.

by Bruce | Link | React!

April 29th, 2009

Bigot Outburst

Many people are going to remember yesterday as the day Arlen Specter switched parties, and it became painfully clear to most Americans how fast the republican party was collapsing into a political black hole of insular nativism and bigotry. But I will remember it as the day I watched, slack-jawed, this article on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I am 55 years old. I still remember the Nixon years as if they were yesterday. I remember Agnew spitting on four dead students at Kent State. I remember Ronald Reagan’s indifference to the growing AIDS epidemic. I remember him laughing at Bob Hope’s sick AIDS joke during the re-dedication of The Statue of Liberty…

I told one of my students that the most memorable Reagan AIDS moment for me was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagans were there sitting next to French President Francois Mitterand and his wife, Danielle. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners Hope quipped, “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989 and the Reagan years, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States, and more than 70,000 of them had died.

I will go to my grave remembering how the republicans cynically incited anti-gay hatred in one election after another in order to win votes. I have watched them grow meaner, smaller and cheaper year after year after year and I cannot begin to describe how sickening it feels to think I’d seen them finally hit bottom, only to realize that there is no bottom. Last night on Olbermann Chris Matthews was blunt in the wake of Specter’s defection, that the republicans had made two deals with the devil that they were paying for in spades now. First, they embraced Nixon’s racist “southern strategy” to peel southern states and white working class democrats away from the party. Second, they embraced the culture war of the religious right. Now, after the Bush economic and military debacles, what had been the republican’s only two marketable strengths, national security and the economy, have withered away, leaving decent people to finally, Finally see the Devil’s Deal…the stinking rotten core that has been animating the party ever since Goldwater lost. And they’re flinching away. In droves.

I am 55 years old. I’ve watched all this happen in my lifetime. And watching the Republican Noise Machine on Fox News trying to whip up the swine deadly flu outbreak into a brown-skinned people hatefest still managed to leave me completely dumbfounded. It really is the party of hate now.

by Bruce | Link | React!

March 4th, 2009

Atlas Shrugged…Then Charged It To Someone Else…(continued)

Commentary from John Stamos on This Post regarding the new hippies.  Why yes John, I have read Doctor Seuss.  Let it be said that Seuss could get his point across in a few pages of a children’s book.  Rand on the other hand…  Well to paraphrase Mark Twain’s comment on the music of Richard Wagner, Ayn Rand’s novels are better then they read.

Meanwhile, back in Atlas Slouched…

You’re in the high rent district

Approximately 2% of the American households make more than $250,000 a year and (you may find this hard to believe) a very high percentage of these high-earning go-getting producers spend their days commenting over at Michelle Malkin’s place… when they’re not busy flying their Lear jets up to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun.

Scenes from the Go Go Gaults:

  • I’ve resigned from my job, and I’m selling my rental properties. After this, I’m moving to a rural little town and simplifying everything. I’ll be reading so many more books soon, if that sort of thing is still allowed.
  • What motivation do we have to make more money? Only to have it confiscated by the Feds. Bad enough CA just increased a variety of taxes, including the income tax. That’s why I’m looking to move to NV. I was just there on Saturday. Won’t be too long now.
  • I decided I will endeavor to take more business trips and continuing education classes at exotic places and try to reduce taxable income.
  • Yep, it’s happening. Several friends are shutting down to sustaining levels. Partly due to housing and the rest due to the tax hikes.
  • I shut down my online businesses in early November, I don’t remember why. I’m now a net user of Obama Cheese. I may even apply for food stamps.
  • Small businesses will lay off employees, and I hope the first to go are the ones that voted for bho. They wanted ‘hope and change’, well you got it. These bho voters have NO idea how much more taxes they are going to be paying. I just hope those bho voters have their IRA, 401k and stocks cratered as much as those who DID not vote for bho. Such(sic) it up kids!
  • I’m starting my victory garden this spring. My sister is expanding hers and in exchange for my helping with that I will be able to claim some of the produce. I’ve been couponing for over a year now and have a nice stockpile of food for when things get really, really bad. I can’t believe that my country is on this path. From Ronald Reagan to this Marxist in the span of one generation. Unbelievable.
  • I have a friend who is planning to not work overtime this year to stay well below the dangerous benchmark that is 250k. His point was that he might as well take some time off and enjoy and relax rather than work and give every dollar above 250 away. I don’t blame his reasoning and the loss is, he spends his money.

You have to wonder if this guy ever paid taxes because here be basically admits he doesn’t understand how the income tax works:

ABC News reports on "upper-income taxpayers" who are trying to reduce their income so they avoid proposed tax increases on those earning more than $250,000. 

According to ABC, one attorney "plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law."  According to the attorney: "We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00."  ABC also quotes a dentist who is trying to figure out how to reduce her income.

This is stunningly wrong. 

The ABC article is based on the premise that an individual’s entire income is taxed at the same rate.  If that were the case, it would be possible for a family earning $249,999 to have a higher after-tax income than a family earning $255,000, because the family earning $249,999 would pay a lower tax rate.

But that isn’t actually how income tax works. 

In reality, a family earning $255,000 will pay the higher tax rate only on its last $5,001 in income; the first $249,999 will continue to be taxed at the old rate.  So intentionally lowering your income from $255,000 to $249,999 is counter-productive; it will result in a lower after-tax income. 

The people ABC quoted don’t seem to understand that.  Worse, ABC doesn’t seem to understand it, either.

Anyway…back to Atlas Slouched, and TBogg’s personal favorite:

  • We also have “gone Galt”. Hubby decided to retire and start Medicare instead of our original plan of waiting two years.

Well that’s showing those looters a thing or two.  Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan has a note from a reader that explains it all for the dense of skull…

Downsized out of my career in my mid-50’s, after 20+ years of faithful service to a 150-year-old company that declared bankruptcy some months after my termination.  I got a decent severance – in the latest wave of layoffs, there were people with more years of service who got zilch.   I have found some freelance daily-hire work here and there – last year my after-tax/after-insurance net was about 25% of what I had been making. Still looking, still hoping.

 The 401(k) that I’d faithfully funded since the mid-80s lost a third of its value in just a few weeks.  I had bad vibes about the bankster/gangsters over a year ago (CDO’s and swaps? I’d read about them on internet message boards back in 2006, but gave more credence to my adviser since he’s an expert and the internet is notoriously unreliable.  Fat lot of good that did.)  I know he wasn’t trying to steer me in a wrong direction – he feels as badly as I do.  Thank God BushCo never got their filthy mitts on Social Security.
 
 I’ve always conducted my financial affairs in a conservative fashion, so I have a (dwindling) cushion to rely on and some equity in a home with a (for now) manageable mortgage.  I pay for my own health insurance (a lousy policy with high premiums and deductibles – please, dear God – help me stay healthy.)  The premiums are about four times more than I spend for food, all of which is prepared at home by me.  I haven’t been more than 15 miles from home in more than a year.  When cabin fever sets in, I go for a walk.
 
 I’m not complaining, really I’m not.  I am able to stay warm and dry and fed, and current on my bills.  I am fortunate – I know I am blessed.  I don’t take it for granted and don’t consider myself more worthy than others who find themselves in far more dire straits.  I could very well be in their shoes before this is all over.

This is exactly what woke me up from my libertarian delusion back during the big Reagan recession: seeing so many decent, hard working people who did everything the way they were supposed to get clobbered because the gods of finance and industry turned out to be fallible human beings too, and not Greek gods holding the world on their shoulders.  I was working as an architectural model maker back then, and watched appalled as developers and their financiers ran themselves off a cliff, knowing full well they were heading for the edge, knowing full well they were going to fall off eventually, knowing full well it would be a financial disaster, but utterly unable to stop themselves from chasing those last few dollars off that cliff.  When it was over, nearly all my clients, the businesses I sold my services to as a model maker, had gone belly up and I was mowing lawns to make ends meet.  But at least I didn’t have any mouths to feed.

When the brakes came off the savings and loans, the crooks moved right in and without oversight, there was nothing to stop them.  And even had they all been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, the damage was done.  There’s the problem.  I saw families who had once owned nice homes, whose parents worked hard, made good money, saved responsibly and lived within their means, living in tents in campgrounds because everything they had vanished in the savings and loan scandals. What good would prosecuting the savings and loan crooks have done for them?  Their money is gone. 

That was the end of my libertarian years.  I saw that greed is not good after all.  I saw that wealth is not an indicator of either moral, or common sense.  I saw that to err is human, but to really screw things up you need a lot of money.  I saw that selfishness is not a virtue.  Pride is a virtue.  Ambition is a virtue.  Selfishness is a cancer on your soul.  It turns your neighbors in this life, and all their hopes, all their dreams, everything they ever made for themselves, their families, their kids, into play money.

by Bruce | Link | React!

February 27th, 2009

Slouching Toward Fort Sumpter

You know…the mainstream news media really needs to start paying more attention to this crap.  Just letting it fester isn’t a plan…

 

It’s beyond irresponsible that major U.S. corporations are sponsoring this crap, let alone pushing it out onto the airwaves.

 

by Bruce | Link | React! (1)

February 16th, 2009

How The Game Is Played…(continued)

Jim Burroway makes a good catch I’d missed when looking at the new anti-gay ad campaign created by Campaign Secrets…the one that shows an unseen gay sniper putting a family and more specifically their little children in the crosshairs.  This one is good…it really says it all…

By the way, we also learn that public schools no longer celebrate Father’s Day. Wait a minute. That couldn’t be because it’s celebrated on the third Sunday in June while school’s out, could it? Naah, it’s a much better story when it’s all the gays’ fault.

Dig it.  Never mind that Father’s Day happens after the school year ends…just remember that the homosexuals have forced schools to stop celebrating Father’s Day.

Now…this kind of crap may actually fool a lot of people, not all of whom necessarily want someone to feed them pre-fabricated lies about gays they can pass around without taking responsibility for it.  Some people will actually hear this and think…Wow…the gays took Father’s Day out of the schools…  But you know goddamned well the people who made that ad knew that it was horseshit, and almost certainly so did the folks who bought it.  And it’s a safe bet that its target audience doesn’t care if it’s truthful or not.

There’s your moral crusade right there.  There’s your righteousness. 

by Bruce | Link | React! (1)


The Fine Art Of Inflaming Violent Passions Toward Homosexuals

Via Pam’s House Blend…and as of now racing across the net like a fire.  West Virginia Christianists are gearing up for a push to enact an anti same-sex marriage amendment in their state.  As always, it isn’t enough to simply make a case for heterosexual supremacy.  They have to demonize gay people too.  Their latest ad starts out with the image of a gay sniper putting a heterosexual family, and more specifically their little children, in the cross hairs.  They are being targeted, to be gunned down, by some the homosexuals.  Here’s a screen shot:

 

Bear in mind that this ad is running in a state that’s maybe only a tad less armed to the teeth then Texas.  And the message of this particular sequence is crystal clear: The homosexuals are going to kill your family, starting with your children.  Of course they’ll insist its only a metaphor.  They don’t mean that homosexuals are Literally going to kill your family.  Naturally all the West Virginians who see this ad will understand that.

This is what gets gay people killed in this country every year.  And make no mistake, the people creating and the people running these ads are well aware of that fact.  But we are not so much human beings as cockroaches to them.  They want us gone.  They want us eliminated.  If the state won’t do what Leviticus commands, then maybe Bubba will…

The video is below. The sniper shot comes in at about .53 seconds. Then it’s another four minutes plus warning everyone about the threat the homosexuals pose to families and children. In 1977 Jerry Falwell stood beside Anita Bryant, who was then fighting to have Dade County’s anti-discrimination ordinance repealed by popular vote, and told a room full of reporters that “A homosexual will kill you as soon as look at you.” Now they are, almost literally, telling people in West Virginia that we do in fact intend to kill them, and kill their children. Gay people are going to die because of this ad.

Pam over at the Blend notes this same group who made the ad…Campaign Secrets…also created an attack ad against the AARP back in 2005. AARP’s crime back then was opposing Bush’s plan to let the stock market play with your social security pension money. To discredit AARP, Campaign Secrets cooked up this little gem:

Dig it. The AARP is wrong about social security, because it hates our men in uniform and loves faggots. That, literally, was the message.

by Bruce | Link | React! (1)

February 10th, 2009

Mischief

Some time ago the Bay Shore Gay and Lesbian Center for Youths was vandalized.  Its front door was broken and its van had its tires slashed, its windows busted out, and its sideview mirrors mangled.

Today I read that arrests in the case have been made and…surprise, surprise, the police have in their impartial wisdom determined that the vandals had not a prejudiced bone in their bodies after all…

Cops: Vandalism at gay center not hate crime

Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy called the vandalism at a Bay Shore gay and lesbian center for youths an "attack against the gay community."

Gov. David A. Paterson dispatched the state’s commissioner of human rights to visit the site and deliver a message calling for acceptance.

And the Suffolk County Police Hate Crimes Unit investigated last week’s incident as a hate crime.

It turns out the vandalism at the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth Center was not a hate crime after all, police said Tuesday.

What a relief to know that!  Because…er…because…  Well because the police just say so…

Police declined to say what led them to determine the crime was not bias-related.

I see.  Three men and a woman, two of them 21 years old, one 20 and one 19, decided to slash a van’s tires completely at random.  And then they broke out all its windows.  And then they mangled the sideview mirrors.  And then…again completely at random, they decided to break out a door that only happened to belong to the same group that owned the van.  Just…on a lark…  It had nothing to do with the fact that the van had the Long Island LGBT Youth center logo on it.  And that door…it was just a coincidence that it also happened to be the door to the Long Island LGBT Youth center.  There was no anti-gay animus involved here.  Take our word for it.  Because we insist you take our word for it.

Police arrested three men and a woman, all from Bay Shore, Monday in connection with the vandalism and charged each of them with second-degree criminal mischief. None of the four was charged with a hate crime.

Mischief…

Mischief…

 

But seriously…what more could attacking homosexuals amount to anyway, other then mischief?  You say "hate crime" like its a bad thing…

[Update…]  Reports are coming out now that two of the suspects were former clients of the center, who had been asked to leave for an as yet unspecified disruptive behavior…more then three years ago.

 

by Bruce | Link | React!

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