There Is No Such Thing As A Filibuster Proof Democratic Majority
Atrios on Arlen Specter switching parties:
I hope this works out better than I expect, but 60 nominal Ds doesn’t equal 60 votes.
Right. And Specter isn’t the only D who, as Harry Reid said of Specter, is "with us except when we need him". Whenever I hear republicans fear mongering about a democratic super majority it always puts me in mind of what Will Rogers said: "I am not a member of any organized party – I am a Democrat". There could be just one republican left on Capital Hill, just one lonely republican in the House of Representatives, and there would be enough democrats willing to vote with him, that he could get his way on just about anything.
Democrats don’t like playing hardball. Republicans think bipartisanship is when democrats give them what they want. Until we get more democrats willing to fight for democratic principles (you know…that "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" stuff…), it won’t matter how many democrats there are in congress, the republicans will still control the agenda.
In case you’re wondering what the head of the Republican Party thinks about the flu outbreak, here is his statement:
After the break, Rush attacked the UN for issuing a warning for a worldwide flu pandemic, claiming that it is “by design” to get people to respond to government orders. The media fall right in line with this stuff, Rush said, amplifying the nature of the crisis. Rush — in his capacity as public health expert — added that “the flu’s a common thing.”
This makes perfect sense. If you are a conservative you can’t believe that something like an epidemic or a pandemic could even exist or you would have to grant that the necessity for public health — a government function. Indeed, you even have to grant that a pandemic requires that people are going to be forced to behave in ways that explicitly explicitly define their own personal survival with the common good.
Rush is right to be a little bit nervous about this, though. Public health crises tend to focus the public on the usefulness of things like science, international cooperation, government coordination. You know, the sort of thing that liberals think are necessary. Something like that simply doesn’t fit into the conservative worldview.
The magic hand of the free market is suppose to prevent pandemics. Somehow. Actually, they don’t give a rat’s ass about any of that. In the rarefied gated communities and resorts of the fabulously well to do, communicable diseases don’t matter unless they somehow manage to get inside. And once there, these are people who really do have access to that “best health care system in the world” thing that the rest of us here in the U.S. only rhetorically do.
Less than two weeks after raising the prospect of seceding from the union, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is calling on the federal government to come to his state’s aid in the midst of the swine flu outbreak.
Repeat after me: Government is the problem, not the solution… Government is the problem, not the solution… Government is the problem, not the solution…
Fred Clark writes about the persecution complex behind the NOM ads…
We’ve seen how this plays out on the national scene two, three times a month. Some pious dignitary remarks that homosexuality is just like pedophilia or bestiality — a statement regarded within the hegemony of the sect as wholly innocent and inoffensive. Someone outside the sect will reply, accurately, that this is an offensive lie, a vicious slander. That response will be perceived, within the sect, as "religious persecution." The response — any response other than "thank you, sir, may I have another?" — implicitly rejects the legitimacy of the hegemony and rebels against the privilege enjoyed by the sect. (A big part of that privilege, it turns out, is the expectation that one can say offensive things without others taking or expressing offense. This has become far more important as a hallmark of American evangelicalism than, say, Sabbath-keeping.)
I’d say this isn’t just a religious right phenomena. You see culture warriors on the right holding the same two mutually contradictory positions that Fred points out in certain American evangelical circles. On the one hand, we represent the Great American Heartland…the Common Folk…The Moral Majority…The Silent Majority… And so on… But on the other, we are oppressed. Our values and our way of life are in danger of becoming extinct.
Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been hearing a version of this self contradicting complaint for decades now. On the one hand, gay people are a teeny-tiny minuscule minority, whose claims of oppression don’t even merit a laugh, let alone any serious thought. On the other, we are a vast and powerful conspiracy that will soon extinguish any trace of American values. On the one hand we are contemptible, weak, easily frightened swishing faggots. On the other hand we are dangerous militants. Huh?
The thought police are always out to get them. Political Correctness is always taking away their right to express their deeply held beliefs. Whenever someone is called out for their cheap bar stool prejudices, they complain that they are being silenced. It isn’t that people find their knuckle dragging bigotries disgusting. It’s that a vast liberal socialist communist homosexual conspiracy is out to get them. When Mrs California endorsed cutting off the ring fingers of all the gay citizens of California, and promptly fell out of favor with the Mrs America judges, a great wail arose from the kook pews, clamoring that she was the victim of political correctness, and that people who opposed the gay agenda were being silenced.
PRAGUE (AFP) — A former US Ku Klux Klan chief was arrested Friday in a Prague restaurant while he was on a speaking tour here, Czech police said.
Former Grand Wizard of the Louisiana-founded Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, was arrested on suspicion of promoting movements seeking the suppression of human rights, police spokesman Jan Mikulovsky told local media.
Regardless of how low in the human cesspool Duke is, that charge sent a little chill down my spine. It was pure reflex, most likely born of having spent my entire life swaddled in American culture. But there it was. David Duke is lower then spit in a urinal in my book, but I am much less afraid of anything David Duke might say, then I am of the charge he was arrested under. …suspicion of promoting movements seeking the suppression of human rights… What the hell does that mean? Suspicion of promoting movements…? Seeking the suppression…? What is the fucking criminal act here? It could be anything. Today that might mean talking about suppressing the rights of black people. Tomorrow it might mean arguing against it, thereby suppressing the right of white people to keep black people in their place. It could be anything. Totalitarian states love that kind of thing. It’s the kind of law that can be whatever they want it to be, whenever they want it to be that. And you don’t have to actually Do Anything to break that law. Just talk about doing something. Maybe with one person. Maybe with a whole roomful of people. It doesn’t matter. You open your trap, say the wrong thing, and you’re toast. And you can never be sure what the wrong thing to say is. It’s whatever the state wants it to be. Probably just right then, in order to arrest you and make it all seem legal. Giving police the power to arrest someone for speaking their mind just greases the skids for fascism.
Mrs Proposition 8 California and her fans aren’t being silenced. Critics of same sex marriage aren’t being silenced. Their freedom to dispense horseshit about morality, religion, family values and same sex marriage does not trump other people’s freedom to call their cheapshit prejudices for what they are, and regard them with disgust. If you can’t tell the difference between loosing a crown or loosing a tax break and going to jail then go get yourself arrested in some foreign land for opening your trap at the wrong time in the wrong place and find out.
Back in 1979, on Meet The Press and countless other TV appearances, Masters and Johnson touted their book, Homosexuality in Perspective—a 14-year study of more than 300 homosexual men and women…The results seemed impressive: Of the 67 male and female patients with “homosexual dissatisfaction,” only 14 failed in the initial two-week “conversion” or “reversion” treatment…During five years of follow-up, their success rate for both groups was better than 70 percent.
Not bad. However…there was just one wee problem…
Prior to the book’s publication, doubts arose about the validity of their case studies. Most staffers never met any of the conversion cases during the study period of 1968 through 1977, according to research I’ve done for my new book Masters of Sex. Clinic staffer Lynn Strenkofsky, who organized patient schedules during this period, says she never dealt with any conversion cases. Marshall and Peggy Shearer, perhaps the clinic’s most experienced therapy team in the early 1970s, says they never treated homosexuals and heard virtually nothing about conversion therapy.
When the clinic’s top associate, Robert Kolodny, asked to see the files and to hear the tape-recordings of these “storybook” cases, Masters refused to show them to him…
Kolodny began to suspect Masters had, at best created “composite” cases out of many individual ones at best, or at worst had committed outright fraud. Virginia Johnson apparently had similar misgivings about Master’s conversion successes, but never spoke publicly about them. She later regretted that the book had gone to the publisher in the form it had, saying, “That was a bad book.” She feared that “Bill was being creative in those days” in compiling the conversion case studies.
Masters insisted right up to his death in 2001 that his work had been based on “…10 years of work with five years of follow-up—and it works.” But he never showed anyone the actual data, and few who worked with him never saw any of the patients, let alone the work with them actually taking place. Given how reliably such therapy fails to work for everyone else, it isn’t hard to figure why Masters never showed anyone the data. He had the same reason Exodus, Love In Action, and a host of other conversion therapy quacks have. The data doesn’t exist. The human consciousness isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will on. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t talk someone out of being homosexual any more then you can talk them out of being left handed, or having blue eyes.
From Pat Robertson, speaking about the DHS report on right wing extremists:
"It shows somebody down in the bowels of that organization is either a convinced left winger or somebody whose sexual orientation is somewhat in question. But it’s that kind of thing, somebody who doesn’t think that we should have abortion on demand, is labeled a terrorist! It’s outrageous."
And then there’s good old Scott Lively wandering around the globe telling people that genocide is caused by homosexuals When I was a kid, it was the Communists who were secretly behind every hidden plot the lunatic right was babbling on about. Now it’s Teh Gays.
We Can Be Frinds If You Send Me An Ambassador Who Hates Your Guts As Much As I Do
From the Science Blog’s, Dispatches From The Culture War blog, comes news that pope Ratzinger finds President Obama’s ambassadors lacking in some basic quality…
It was reported a couple weeks ago that the Vatican had rejected three possible nominees to be the next ambassador to the Holy See because the people they’d nominated were pro-choice on abortion:
The Vatican has quietly rejected at least three of President Obama’s candidates to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See because they support abortion, and the White House might be running out of time to find an acceptable envoy before Mr. Obama travels to Rome in July, when he hopes to meet Pope Benedict XVI.
Italian journalist Massimo Franco, who broke the story about the White House attempts to find a suitable ambassador to the Vatican, said papal advisers told Mr. Obama’s aides privately that the candidates failed to meet the Vatican’s most basic qualification on the abortion issue.
Okay…so this is about Abortion…right? The pope doesn’t want President Obama slapping him in the face with a pro-choice ambassador…right?
Caroline Kennedy, the Roman Catholic daughter of the assassinated President, has been rejected by the Vatican as the next US ambassador to the Holy See because of her liberal views on abortion, stem-cell research and same-sex marriage, according to Vatican insiders…
Mr Obama was said to have wanted to reward Ms Kennedy for supporting his election. The other rejected nominees reportedly included Douglas Kmiec, professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University and a former legal adviser to Presidents Reagan and George Bush Sr, who urged American Catholics to vote for Mr Obama.
But Kmiec is firmly anti-choice on abortion and always has been. He endorsed Obama despite disagreement over abortion. Which means the only basis for rejecting him is that he supported someone who is pro-choice. And on that basis, Obama would have to pick someone who does not support his presidency in order to satisfy the Vatican.
Kmiec was probably a worse pick then a pro-choice candidate. Kmiec is probably a traitor in Ratzinger’s eyes. It doesn’t matter that he opposes abortion. He supported Obama. Probably because he, like a lot of social conservatives who, after eight years of watching the republican party run itself into the ground, put his country before his personal views on abortion. That is precisely the kind of thing that would have made him absolutely unpalatable to Ratzinger. The first thing you have to abandon in the culture war, is your conscience.
[Longish post about the continuing trials and tribulations of a geeky little techno nerd trying to understand how to take care of a house of his very own. Skip if talking about refrigerators is likely to bore the hell out of you…]
The trick to buying major household appliances like…well…the new fridge I bought last week, is to match them correctly to the scale of your life. The problem is, at least here in Bigger-Is-Always-Better America, you need to have a life scaled to the expectations of American corporations. Specifically, you need to have a large family living in a McMansion with a mortgage you can’t afford and two Hummers in the driveway. Get that, and everything they want to sell you in the major appliances department…everything nice at least…will fit your lifestyle to a ‘T’.
The refrigerator problem I related last September…Here…came back last month. I noticed frost forming yet again at the bottom corner of the freezer, which meant that the cooling coils were probably frozen up by then. And sure enough the ice maker stopped working shortly thereafter. Icemakers, as I discovered last time, have a thermal switch that won’t turn on until the temperature of the unit is cold enough to freeze water in a certain period of time. I also had a thermometer mounted in the freezer this time, which allowed me to see exactly how much less efficient my freezer was getting by the day.
To get it fixed would have meant the third time since September that someone from GE has been out to fix it. I don’t blame GE service, which at least here in the Baltimore area is very good. But the fridge was more then 20 years old judging from the records left by the previous home owner, and had a lot of trouble when it was brand new. Each time it was something else in the system that had failed. First it was the thermostat. Then the defroster timer. Now for all I knew it was the defroster heater, or something else. I could have had it fixed again but the fixes were starting to add up to the cost of a new one, and a new one would be much more energy efficient. Especially if I bought one scaled more correctly to the life of a single guy. But it was also money I really hadn’t wanted to spend just now.
I started doing some somewhat more in-depth research then I’d done last September, and quickly became shocked at the state of the art…or at least what I could see of it here in the U.S. Fridges made in the last half decade appeared to be loud, cranky and a whole lot less efficient then advertised. Consumer were complaining bitterly online about just about every brand, including the brands Consumer Reports says need the fewest repairs. It took me a while to realize that those ratings were relative to each other, and not to other products. Even U.S. made automobiles seem to be more reliable these days then refrigerators.
It made me almost want to just keep getting the old one fixed. But old as it was, that wasn’t likely to be a less costly choice either. So it seemed I was stuck with getting a new one. But at least I could take the opportunity to get one more suited to the life I live.
I’m a single guy, living alone, in a small Baltimore rowhouse. I just don’t need a big family sized fridge like the one that came with the house. That fridge was almost always nearly empty, except for the freezer. I live so close to two really nice grocery stores that I almost always buy perishables the day I am actually going to use them, and then only just enough to use right away. If I buy more food then I am likely to use in a week I end up throwing most of it away when it spoils. Milk, cheeses, veggies, lunch meats…it all either gets used right away or I end up having to throw it out. So I don’t buy much at any one time. So the fridge is mostly empty most of the time. Figure I was spending a lot of electricity just to keep the air in it cool, which has been an annoyance.
The freezer compartment however, was another story. Between the TV dinners, french frys, onion rings and other deep fryer treats, fish, shrimp, beef and occasional ice cream treat it was almost always packed full. It’s not just that I like meat. It isn’t simply that I practically live out of the deep fryer some weeks. It’s that the stuff in the freezer, so long as it stays frozen, stays good to use for months. I purchase on a longer time frame for the freezer then for the stuff that gets put in the fridge. And I really wanted more space to do that. I’d been thinking about getting a small chest freezer now for some time.
So what I really needed, I decided, was less refrigerator and more freezer. I could buy a much smaller sized fridge, and then pair it with a small chest freezer. I had a spot in the basement where a small chest freezer would fit nicely and have a circuit all to itself off the main box. The previous home owner had a second refrigerator there for his club room, which I gave to a friend shortly after moving in. There is even a water tap there for an ice maker. A small 5 sq foot chest freezer would do nicely in that spot.
On a hunch, I looked to see if they sold refrigerator only units. That would have been ideal. I found some but they were all second refrigerator units, for those families even a monster sized fridge just wasn’t big enough for. They were even larger on the inside then the fridge I was replacing.
So I decided to go with a small top freezer unit. The fridge section would hold everything I needed without wasting energy just cooling off empty airspace and the small freezer section could hold the icemaker, and be a staging area for the kitchen. The chest freezer would be for long term bulk storage. Whenever I saw a sale on meats and TV dinners, I could take advantage of it. I could buy the bulk meat and fish items at Costco and have a place for it. On an as-needed basis, I would periodically restock the fridge freezer with items from the basement freezer.
So now I had my specs. I began looking around for something to fit them and it was frustrating. Last September I wrote:
I could get a good, state of the art energy saver fridge, sized just right for a single guy, for around 850 to a thousand bucks. Or I could get a decent low tech smaller one for about 300-400. I figured if I was going to replace the fridge I might as well buy a good one, but money for one of the good ones wasn’t in the budget.
Well I could squeeze it out of the budget now, but alas I was completely wrong about getting a good one sized for the life of a single guy. I could get a nicely built, nicely equipped fridge, but only at a size a large family would ever need. And mind you, what I mostly desired was something that was built well. The built-in gadgets would be nice…oh look, an ice dispenser, oh look, a built-in wine rack…but I wanted something built well first. I like solid things in my life. I want to reach out and touch the shelves and they fit well into their slots and don’t feel like they’re about to come apart in my hands. I want to slide the snack tray and the veggie bins in and out and they move smoothly and don’t feel like they’re cheap plastic that’ll crack and break and I’ll always have to be replacing them. I see stuff like that and I wonder how well the stuff I can’t reach out and touch and see is made.
But all I could find in small, single guy sized refrigerators, was cheap plastic crap on the inside and no nice extras, except the ice maker, which I guess is considered essential now in a refrigerator. Some of what I saw was done more nicely to the eye then others, but it was still all low quality plastic on the inside. I wondered how they did it over in Europe, where small scale living is fairly common, even for families. I tried looking for some European brands, and some from Japan and Korea, but it seemed the only things that got exported to the U.S. were the family sized fridges and those were hugely expensive.
I tried looking around the appliance outlet stores. There were places you could buy factory reconditioned units, or ones that had minor cosmetic damage, for a whole lot less. But again, most of what I saw were the big McMansion style units. The few small, single person units I saw all looked…a bit less then factory reconditioned. More like second-hand and a tad cruddy more often then not.
Why aren’t you married with children citizen…?
One thing I discovered, in the nick of time since I was considering buying a stainless steel unit, is that fridge magnets don’t stick to stainless steel. My fridges always get decorated with fridge magnets, reminders, letters and cards from friends. I still have the Christmas card my first high school crush sent me a couple years ago, tacked to the fridge with a magnet I got in Monument Valley the summer before I’d found him again. I started pocketing one of my fridge magnets on my shopping trips, along with the tape measure.
In the meantime, I’m eating out of the old fridge and not buying any new food to put into it so I don’t have any to spoil when I make the change from the old to the new. It takes about a day, really, for the inside temperature in a fridge to stabilize and you don’t want to be putting food in until it’s cold enough, especially lunch meats and dairy products. The freezer, which by this point was just barely getting cold enough to freeze food, but not freeze it really hard, took the longest to empty. The fridge section not so much. I emptied the snack bin pretty quickly. The only thing I kept putting back into the fridge was the daily batch of fresh ice tea. After about two weeks of it I was eating almost exclusively from local restaurants and eating peanut butter sandwiches and I was getting desperate.
I ended up buying a Kenmore fridge and small chest freezer from Sears. The fridge wasn’t as horribly cheap on the inside as some, but it was still less well made then I wanted. But by now I’d given up on getting what I wanted in the size I wanted it and this fridge was just exactly the right size. It was also inexpensive since Sears was running a sale at the time. It is small enough that instead of having a fan that forces air through a heat exchanger coil it has the old radiator style heat exchanger mounted on the back. Since the whole unit is smaller, it can sit in the space where the old one did and get more air circulating around the back anyway, so that older passive air cooling mechanism shouldn’t be a problem at all. Simpler is better, when you can manage it. Or so I’m hoping anyway. The freezer is a very small chest model that will require manual defrosting periodically. Interestingly enough, the freezer is quieter then the fridge.
I let the units run for a day to stabilize temperatures. Late in the evening the icemaker in the new fridge finally began making ice, so I knew the freezer was ready to hold food. Which meant that the fridge probably was too.
So now I have a smaller fridge, and a chest freezer now, and a better balance of food storage here at Casa del Garrett. To this I added one more thing: A small, self contained ice maker for the bar downstairs. By self-contained I mean it drinks from its own built-in water tank, not a hookup to the household plumbing. More on it later, but it’s part of a master plan to improve the bar for when I have company.
Mrs. California apparently doesn’t much like them thar gays…
"We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite. And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised."
You were raised to parade around in front of TV cameras in high heels and a tiny little bikini were you? Then later, out comes this…
"It is a very touchy subject and [Perez Hilton] is a homosexual and I see where he was coming from and I see the audience would’ve wanted me to be more politically correct," she added. "But I was raised in a way that you can never compromise your beliefs and your opinions for anything."
and still later…
"I think Mr. Mellish is a traitor to this country because his views are different from the views of the President and others of his kind. Differences of opinion should be tolerated, but not when they’re too different. Then he becomes a subversive mother."
No…wait… I’m confusing Carrie Prejean with a different Mrs. America.
Freeing People From The Bondage Of Homosexuality In Uganda, One Bullet At A Time…
Via Box Turtle Bulletin… Scott Lively and Exodus’ hard work in Uganda is paying off it seems…
Timothy Kincaid, notes that the Ugandan government is now denouncing Amnesty Internation and UNICEF the U.N.’s children’s relief fund, for promoting homosexuality (UNICEF is accused of smuggling pro-homosexuality books into Ugandian schools…) and he asks…
I wonder if American anti-gay groups, including Exodus International, are proud of the part they played.
Yes.
This has been another edition of Simple Answers, To Simple Questions…
For the past couple weeks or so, the net has been all abuzz about that almost too campy to be real National Organization For Marriage ad…you know…the Scary Gathering Homosexual Menace Storm ad. The National Organization For Marriage said it was spending 1.5 million dollars to saturate several New England states considering same sex marriage with it.
Listen okay…just listen. When some group you only vaguely ever heard of before suddenly bursts into the national dialogue with millions of dollars to spend on anti-gay advertising, the very first fucking thing that should cross your mind is: Where Did The Money Come From?
That was my first thought, but I didn’t see anyone else out there who seemed to be sharing it. I knew that the usual suspects, Forcus On Your The Family and other religious right groups were actually hurting for money since Proposition 8 drained their coffers of what little was left. They’re just not raking in the dough from the faithful like they used to, since the Bush Gang started eating the life savings of all those older folks in the pews. So where the hell did the National Organization For Marriage suddenly get one and a half million fucking dollars to wage a targeted media campaign in New England?
I figured I’d wait and see, because sooner or later someone was going to turn that rock over and see what maggots crawled out of it. Swear to God I thought it was going to be one of the usual right wing billionaires funding this. Ahmanson most likely…
Tomorrow Californians Against Hate will be launch a six-state online ad campaign in the Northeast to let everybody know that NOM, the National Organization for Marriage, is a front group for the Mormon Church. Banners ads will appear on the capital city hometown papers of states currently in play for marriage equality: NY, NJ, DE, ME, NH, and RI.
Jesus Christ…why couldn’t Joseph Smith have sold extended automobile warranties or hedge fund shares or something?
Personally, I Think Grown Men Who Still Wear Bow-Ties Are Pretty Pathetic…
I’ll endure George Will’s half-assed There Is No Such Thing As Global Warming claptrap…but by god not this…
Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy’s catechism of leveling — thou shalt not dress better than society’s most slovenly. To do so would be to commit the sin of lookism — of believing that appearance matters. That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.
Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances.
Sure George…whatever…
I can’t think of a better reason for the existence of blue jeans then human skin. Snuggled up there at the hips, that little gap between denim and flesh is just so damn lovely you can’t look away. Or at least I can’t. Polyester just doesn’t cut it. Neither do dockers. Blue jeans are that perfect marriage of form and function, utility and art, durable and almost unbearably sexy. Low class is a mindset, not what you wear. There are a lot of low class assholes in this world, wearing very expensive clothes made from rare and expensive fabrics that can’t hide the asshole that face and body language give away.
I have a couple-dozen or so jeans in my closet, each with their own personality if you will. Patterns of wear and fading…slight differences in fit…dark blue, black, low risers, boot and straight leg…they each require careful consideration. Do I wear the light stone washed 527s I bought last July, or that pair of nicely faded 501’s that’s almost a year old now, but fits perfectly in all the right places? Or maybe the new pair that looks really sharp with the red SM-4 Mission shirt I got last September? Decisions…decisions.
I like how guys look in jeans. I like how I look in them. And let it be said, they keep me in line. They are my motivation to stay in shape…or as much shape as a nerdy fifty-something IT worker can stay. As I get older it gets harder to keep my waistline in control. But swear to God I’ll eat birdseed for the rest of my life if that’s what it takes to wear my blue jeans and they fit right and I’m not not looking like…well…like this sad example of malehood they found over at Fark.Com…
Denim is what people who don’t care about what they look like wear. Yellow saggy polyester pants and a shirt that telegraphs to the whole goddamned world that lazy ass self indulgence isn’t just for welfare state liberals…that’s okay. Mature. Sensible. Ugh. Just…ugh. I’ll endure lectures on what a well dressed male looks like from a lot of people…but not you bow-tie boy…
Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 16, @07:57AM from the sunny-side-of-the-street dept.
Mike writes "The sunny state of Florida just announced that they will begin construction this year on the world’s first solar-powered city. A collaboration between Florida Power & Light and development firm Kitson & Partners, the 17,000 acre city will generate all of its electrical needs via a 75 megawatt, $300 million solar-powered generator. The city will also use smart grid technology to manage its power and allow all inhabitants of the community to monitor their energy consumption."
Nice idea. Sounds…vaguely familiar…
It’s not just about how the energy is produced. It’s about how it is used.
Joanne Wilder has never protested anything in public before. She’s never boxed with City Hall, let alone Washington.
"I’ve been a quiet little person my whole life," she said.
But today in downtown Syracuse, the 60-year-old great-grandmother will lead a Tax Day Tea Party protest against the spending policies of the Obama administration and Congress.
Well good for you Ms Wilder! We Americans should all roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty in the nuts and bolts of making representative government work for us. After all…it Is our government. Of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Common, average, everyday people…like the Heritage Foundation, FOX News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck…
The protests are being coordinated by a coalition of national conservative groups and promoted by celebrity conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.
But they’re being carried out across the country by new grass-roots leaders like Wilder, who are upset that the government seems to be bailing out everyone but them.
Everyone but you, eh?
After a lifetime of working, paying taxes and raising three children on her own, Wilder is struggling.
She said she retired on disability from M&T Bank three years ago after undergoing knee replacement and back surgeries. She lives on her Social Security and disability benefits. Last year, she petitioned the bankruptcy court for protection from creditors.
She said she did not have to pay federal income taxes last year because her income was too low.
"I don’t want to see this country turn into a welfare, nanny state, where we stand in line for groceries, and we’re in welfare lines, and in socialized medicine lines," Wilder said.
Okay…let me get this straight. You’re living on social security and disability benefits and you want the government to get off the backs of the rich, cut taxes and put an end to entitlement programs. I have a question: who pays your health care costs m’am?
Tool.
I actually know someone in a similar situation. Lives on disability (it’s legit…trust me)…lives in one of the most upscale counties in the nation and gets section 8 housing because he has no source of income…medical and health care costs all paid either by the state or the feds, which yes, he really needs or he’d have died long ago. Oh…and smokes pot like a goddamned chimney. Liberal socialist communist hippy freak? Oh mes non… Loyal Republican. Listens to Rush…watches FOX…just can’t stand what the liberals are doing to this country. Like…oh…putting food in the stomachs of people who can’t work and giving them a roof over their heads and some semblance of human dignity instead of tossing them into the street to beg…which is exactly what would happen if the right had its way.
If it amazes you how so many people whose lives have been made better by American liberalism have turned against it with a snarl you aren’t paying attention. This isn’t about policy. Digby’s right…the issues are fungible. This is about tribe. The folks saying now that the republican party needs to move beyond the culture war if it wants to survive, seem not to have got the point of the last few decades. It was always about the culture war. The social issues aren’t tangential, they’re the bedrock.
Loving The Sinner…My Mother Came At Me With A Butcher Knife Edition
In a week where headlines announcing two more gay bashings glided across my computer screen, along with the murder-by-bullying suicide of an 11 Year Old Boy who couldn’t take the fag baiting he was getting at school anymore, this headline somehow managed to grab my attention…
After asking the conversation-opener of the group — "So, would you like to all share your coming out stories with me?" — a young woman on my right named Angie* immediately burst out, "My mother came at me with a butcher knife!"
Stunned, I was trying to process this when a young woman to my left whispered, "You don’t want to hear my story, it’s too violent." More violent than your mother attacking you with a butcher knife? How is that possible? What does that mean?
Maybe you don’t want to know. The author of this AlterNet post, Bernadette C. Barton, has done these Gay/Straight alliance visits previously, as she says, "…during my campus visits". Apparently this was the first time she’d done that in the God fearing Jesus loving South. Never mind the stories you heard that day Ms Barton…all the stories you didn’t hear are staring you in the face right here:
Meanwhile, the alliance students, although attentive and respectful to Angie and one another, did not act disturbed or even very surprised by the butcher-knife story or the ones that followed. Their general demeanor suggested that these kinds of horror stories were simply business as usual in their lives.
I am 55 years old and ever since I came out to myself in the early 70s, and began to wander my way through the gay community and this never ending scorched earth war on our hearts and souls, I have heard stories from gay teens and grown adults alike, bearing wounds from their childhood days that would make a stone cry, if not a fundamentalist. That time in our lives, when we are just discovering desire, and what it is to love another, and be loved by them in return, ought to be one of the most magical times in our lives. Instead, it gets turned into this:
"My father called me an abomination and quoted Scripture."
Remember this the next time you hear some drooling numbskull yap, yap, yapping about how they’re not anti-gay, just pro-family, and that same-sex marriage will irrepairably harm children. Presumably in some sort of way that a butcher knife, or their own parents calling them an abomination won’t.
Divide the nation, Nixon’s adviser Pat Buchanan told him, and we’ll have the bigger half. Several decades of culture war later, the right has simply led a fairly sizable slice of America into a kind of mental prison more lock tight then anything old Joe Stalin, Mao or Goebbels could have wished for in their wildest dreams. Here’s one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers explaining something I’ve seen with my own eyes in my own family, and among folks who once upon a time were friends of mine…
I celebrated Easter yesterday with my ultra conservative family. I love my family but they have gone so far to the right over the past 8 years that it is difficult to have any sort of discussion with them. I think they are typical of conservatives born in the baby boom. They are scarred by the culture wars and the hatred they have for the left is so strong that it becomes disturbing.
That hatred, let it be said, didn’t start with Reagan. It started with Nixon. These are the folks of my own generation and earlier, who cheered on the hard hats as they bashed the hippies protesting racism, the Vietnam war, and fought for women’s rights and sexual liberty. You need to remember about this crowd that they thought that the twin beds in Lucy and Ricky’s television apartment and the fact that even when Lucy was clearly "with child" nobody was allowed to utter the word "pregnant" on TV was as perfectly appropriate for TV as Fred Flintstone selling cigarettes. Separate But Equal was working just fine until some communist inspired uppity blacks and a bunch of New York Jews started agitating everyone. A woman’s place was in the house cooking dinner for her husband not in the workplace unless she was too ugly to find a man and maybe those women could be secretaries or nurses or waitresses or something. And the more horrifying symbol of social decay, the biggest threat to the sanctity of American family life wasn’t homosexuality or even the Communist Menace, it was males wearing their hair so long it went below the collar.
These people weren’t scarred by the culture wars. They were scarred by the shock, shock of seeing that there were other people in the world who didn’t buy into their racist, sexist, war mongering moral values. Let’s see how well they’ve matured over the years shall we…?
So with this in mind I compiled a few themes from the days discussions that you might find interesting (or horrifying). None of this is ground breaking but it is interesting to see these generalizations about the current conservative movement be personified in ones family.
1. Total insulation from MSM.
Everyone refuses to read the New York Times or Washington Post. Sunday morning while getting ready for Church I put on "Meet the Press" and my father looked on with disgust and changed the channel to Fox News. At dinner I brought up an article in The Economist that was critical of Barack Obama and my uncle said that it was a socialist rag.
2. Distrust of centrists When discussing the future of the Republican party I suggested that we needed to create a bigger tent and avoid social issues that alienated us from younger voters. My GRANDMOTHER responded that we don’t need the back benchers like Christopher Buckley dictating our principles. I think that line was straight from the Mark Levin show.
3. Neoconservative aspirations The most interesting part of the day, was that so much of the discussion focused on the Somali Pirate issue. It was the story of the day, but I didn’t think their was that much to talk about. Surely, not as interesting as talking about Iran, Obama’s budget, the economy etc. However we spent most of the day discussing Obama’s lackluster response to the issue and the weakness he displayed in not acting quicker. My father was incensed that the media kept referring to this as a crime rather then an act of terrorism. His suggestion was to engage in a land war in Somalia…
This tracks pretty well with my own personal experiences, particularly among a few ersatz friends of the Republican Persuasion who kept right on voting for the Shrub even when his party waged one of the most blistering anti-gay election campaigns in American history. They get their news from FOX. As terrified of them as the mainstream news media is, the hard core Still avoids it like it was radioactive, and read only their own tribal publications.
Let me tell you a wee story about that. After I’d been to Memphis to show my support for an Ex-Gay Survivor’s conference, I noticed that Time Magazine did a story that week on gay teens that touched on how this new generation of gay teens is often pressured by their families into ex-gay camps. So I figure I’ll pick up a copy on the drive back home. My drive took me east on I-40 to I-81 and up the backbone of Virginia. Starting around just north of Galax I began to check the drugstores and WalMarts for copies. What I found was that nowhere…and I mean nowhere I stopped, and I must have stopped at dozens of places on the way home…had Any mainstream news magazines for sale on their racks anywhere between Hillsville and Winchester Virginia. Not just no Time, but no Newsweeks, no U.S. News…nada…nothing. Maybe there were some to be found somewhere in that stretch of countryside…but I never found any near the highway until I got to Winchester and pulled into a shopping mall. And the young lady behind the counter gave me a dirty look when she saw what I was buying.
They don’t want to even hear it now. And they don’t have to. They can get their news exclusively from tribal sources. But those sources are anything but grass roots. They imagine they are part of a disenfranchised grass roots majority that was…somehow…denied power that is rightfully theirs by a variety of secret liberal-communist-socialist-homosexual cabals. In fact, they are almost completely owned by right wing billionaires and corporate America.
Case in point…this sad, odd, pathetic tea protest. I’m going to steal this post from Digby (who you should read more often if you don’t already) because it pretty well sums it all up…
Following up on Krugman’s column today and the shrieking and rending of garments by the rightwing, I think it’s it’s probably important to make very clear why the tea-bagger parties are not a grassroots uprising.
The right seems to want us to believe that Fox News is promoting this non-stop as a genuine news event rather than a sponsor — despite the fact that it is an event which hasn’t happened yet. They are, by definition, promoting it.
Local news organizations, which are reporting on the planning for this event either do not realize that they are being spun by a front group pretending to be a grassroots organizing campaign or they don’t care. That front group is called Freedom Works, which presents itself as the conservative answer to Move On.
The MoveOn.org domain name was registered on September 18, 1998 by computer entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, the married cofounders of Berkeley Systems, an entertainment software company known for the flying toaster screen saver and the online game show "You Don’t Know Jack." After selling the company in 1997, Blades and Boyd became concerned about the level of "partisan warfare in Washington" following revelations of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. The MoveOn website was launched initially to oppose the Republican-led effort to impeach Clinton. Initially called "Censure and Move On," it invited visitors to add their names to an online petition stating that "Congress must Immediately Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country."
At the time of MoveOn’s public launch on September 24, it appeared likely that its petition would be dwarfed by the effort to oust Clinton. A reporter who interviewed Blades on the day after the launch wrote, "A quick search on Yahoo turns up no sites for ‘censure Clinton’ but 20 sites for ‘impeach Clinton,’" adding that Scott Lauf’s impeachclinton.org website had already delivered 60,000 petitions to Congress. Salon.com reported that Arianna Huffington, then a right-wing commentator, had collected 13,303 names on her website, resignation.com, which called on Clinton to resign.
Within a week, however, support for MoveOn had grown. Blades calls herself an "accidental activist. … We put together a one-sentence petition. … We sent it to under a hundred of our friends and family, and within a week we had a hundred thousand people sign the petition. At that point, we thought it was going to be a flash campaign, that we would help everyone connect with leadership in all the ways we could figure out, and then get back to our regular lives. A half a million people ultimately signed and we somehow never got back to our regular lives." MoveOn also recruited 2,000 volunteers to deliver the petitions in person to members of the House of Representatives in 219 districts across America, and directed 30,000 phone calls to district offices.
Here’s how it does business:
MoveOn uses e-mail as its main conduit for communicating with members, sending action alerts at least once a week.
The MoveOn.org web site also uses multi-media, including videos, audio downloads, and images. In addition to communicating via the Internet, MoveOn advertises using traditional print and broadcast media, as well as billboards, bus signs, and bumper stickers, digital versions of which are downloadable from its web site. It also contains an area called the "Action Forum", which functions much like a traditional electronic discussion group. The Action Forums act as a grassroots organization allowing members to propose priorities and strategies.
Through this grassroots methodology, MoveOn collaborates with groups like Meetup.com in organizing street demonstrations, bake sales, house parties, and other opportunities for people to meet personally and act collectively in their own communities.
Some of its core principles are that it is not dependent on foundation money and that it has the ability to use ‘hard money’ – as opposed to grants and tax-deductible contributions – which enables them to be partisan, contribute to political campaigns, and exercise clout in the political process.
Stealing a page from MoveOn.org‘s successful organizing playbook, the leaders of FreedomWorks – a complete merger of the conservative think-tanks Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America – hope to conduct massive get out the vote and political education campaigns in the swing states on behalf of President George W. Bush.
The two groups decided to merge because there was "an overlap in issues between the two organization," Shawn Small, the Director of Policy at Empower America, told me in a telephone interview. It was an opportunity to bring together Empower America, which Small characterized as a "grasstops" organization driven by such inside the beltway "superstars" as William Bennett, Vin Weber and Jean Kirkpatrick and CSE’s "grassroots" following.
Will FreedomWorks be successful? Maybe, maybe not, but it is sure to be controversial with longtime Republican Party operative Matt Kibbe at the helm.
If the agenda of FreedomWorks sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The organization’s new website proclaims that it "will expand and broaden the national fight for lower taxes, less government, and more economic freedom."
The leaders of FreedomWorks have all been around the Beltway a number of times. Former House Majority Leader, Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey, C. Boyden Gray, onetime legal counsel to Bush’s father and chairman of the Committee for Justice, an organization about to launch a campaign on behalf of Bush’s right wing judicial appointees, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and failed vice-presidential candidate, Jack Kemp, will serve as the Co-Chairmen of the organization.
And here’s how it operates:
FreedomWorks claims a membership of over 360,000 and a multi-tentacled legal structure that includes a 501 c(3), a 501 c(4), a 527, a federal PAC, and various state PACs. John Stauber, co-author of Banana Republicans: How The Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State, recently pointed out that that according to internal documents leaked to the Washington Post in January 2000, the bulk of Citizens for a Sound Economy‘s revenues ($15.5 million in 1998) came not from its members, but from contributions of $250,000 and up from large corporations, including Allied Signal, Archer Daniels Midland, DaimlerChrysler, Emerson Electric Company, Enron, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Philip Morris and U.S. West (now Qwest).
And like their progenitors they get millions from the conservative foundations.
Can we all see the difference between Freedom Works and Move On? I knew that you could.
This is what a grass roots movement looks like in conservative America. It’s fake. Just like all the rhetoric about individual freedom, Jesus and family values. Just as The Washington Times could not survive without the infusions of large piles of cash from messianic crackpot Sun Myung Moon, nearly every so-called conservative grass-roots organization could not exist without the largess of corporate America and the stable of right wing billionaires who have been funding the modern conservative movement since the culture wars began in the 60s. Scaife. Ahmanson. Coors. Bradley. Olin. Koch. These people, and the rest of what Eisenhower warned as The Military Industrial Complex, are the crack epidemic poisoning the veins of our country. Without them Americans might actually be getting along with one another reasonably well.
And families like those of Sullivan’s reader might not be living in a 21st century cave, complete with nice TVs and radios that stroke their bar stool conceits, making goddamned sure they see of the world outside only what the ayatollahs of the hard right want them to see, and think Exactly what they want them to think. They are tools, useful idiots, disposable human lives in the war a small but very powerful group of billionaires and corporate interests have been waging for decades now on the American Dream.
What you need to understand: many of them made that of themselves willingly. Joyfully even. Better to live in a cave, then to know that the heathens aren’t monsters after all, but other human beings, happy and content with their own lives just as they are. Anything to not have to know that.
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