The MacArthur Foundation announced the winners of their Genius Fellowships this week for 23 people. They each get $500,000 do whatever they want with the money.
What would you do with half a million dollars?
Well, first aside from the obvious such as pay off my debts, I'd contribute to a worthy college or university theatre department in support of playwriting students...right after they do a production of one of my plays, which I would, of course, help pay for. Fetch more...
About 12:01 on the afternoon of January 20, 2009, the white American mind began to unravel.
It had been a pretty good run up to that point. The brains of white folks had been humming along cogently for near on 400 years on this continent, with little sign that any serious trouble was brewing. White people, after all, had managed to invent a spiffy new form of self-government so that all white men (and, eventually, women) could have a say in how white people were taxed and governed. White minds had also nearly universally occupied just about every branch of that government and, for more than two centuries, had kept sole possession of the leadership of its executive branch (whose parsonage, after all, is called the White House).
But when that streak was broken—and, for the first time, a non-white president accepted the oath of office—white America rapidly began to lose its grip.
In a larger sense, there's always been a sense of entitlement among certain people, especially conservatives and those who live by the credo that all the rules they've put in place to run a nice polite society apply to everyone but them. (I had to sit through a rant from someone who has a marital history that rivals thrice-married Newt Gingrich on how outraged! he was that Bill Clinton got a blow job. It was hard not to laugh.) That's why they feel entitled to tax cuts that will increase the budget deficit but refuse to approve of jobless benefits for the unemployed because they say we can't afford it. They also presume to tell other people what to do with their bodies and their relationships while they're fending off divorce lawyers and grand juries.
This irony-impaired phenomenon has been around for generations, but it's always been relatively low-key; it was one thing to hear about the dangers of "class warfare" when it was on the level of the Buckleys chiding the Roosevelts or the Kennedys, but the arrival of Barack Obama took it to another level. All of a sudden those catch-phrases such as "All men are created equal" and "Equal rights under the law" took on a new dimension: they're all well and good, but we didn't actually mean it, and it's absurd to think that they apply to everyone.
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...it seems laughable on its face that otherwise smart people are going around these days and repeating this bullshit meme about how "both sides" are to blame for the insanity that's overtaken American politics.
The DeMint one-man choke hold on the entire Senate is unmatched on the Democratic side. The filibustering is unmatched. The brazen, hubristic flaunting of obvious hypocrisy is unmatched.
But still it's "both sides." Somehow. And I'm directly referencing here left-of-center writers, pundits and, disappointingly, guys like Jon Stewart, who's Rally to Restore Sanity is directed at "both sides."
It seems as though whenever Democrats control Washington, liberals shift focus from attacking conservatives and Republicans to attacking "both sides," perhaps out of some kind of hipster intellectual craving to seem fair-minded (falsely fair-minded in this case). Or maybe it's out of a desire to not appear subservient to the majority party. I don't know for sure.
[...]
Perhaps I'm missing something. But show me where there's equal and precise equivalencies between "both sides." Show me a TV pundit on the left with the same audience reach and capacity for wackaloon conspiracy theories as Glenn Beck. Show me a traditional media outlet on the left as massive as Fox News Channel or Clear Channel.
Sorry, "both sides" fetishists, but one viewing of her show proves that there's no comparison between Rachel Maddow's fact-based analysis and Sean Hannity's Republican talking point hootenanny.
It's also evident when you get a conservative pundit on TV whip out the "both sides" argument when they are confronted with the latest batshittery from Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, Tom Tancredo, or Christine O'Donnell, and the host or the interviewer nods sagely and lets it go by like a soft pitch. They do it either because they're uninformed, which means they shouldn't be hosting a TV show, or they're under some delusion that they can't be seen as being "biased" and that the guest is entitled to his or her opinion.
Not when it's demonstrably false. Someone needs to call out the bullshit and it shouldn't be the people at home shouting at their TV.
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Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) has come up with a brilliant plan for people on welfare.
We have people on welfare and I know there's some that just don't wanna work, but there's some that do. How 'bout if instead of the welfare, we give 'em an alternative. We'll give you so many acres that can provide land where you can live off of it, make a living and we'll give you seed money to start, but you have to sign an agreement that you'll never accept welfare again. How 'bout that? We got plenty of land.
Of course, you do realize that when I said this was "brilliant," I was being sarcastic.
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James O'Keefe thinks he's either James Bond or G. Gordon Liddy.
A conservative activist known for making undercover videos plotted to embarrass a CNN correspondent by recording a meeting on hidden cameras aboard a floating "palace of pleasure" and making sexually suggestive comments, e-mails and a planning document show.
James O'Keefe, best known for hitting the community organizing group ACORN with an undercover video sting, hoped to get CNN Investigative Correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat filled with sexually explicit props and then record the session, those documents show.
The plan apparently was thwarted after Boudreau was warned minutes before it was supposed to happen.
"I never intended to become part of the story," Boudreau said. "But things suddenly took a very strange turn."
O'Keefe is best known for making a series of undercover videos inside ACORN offices around the country in 2009. The 40-year-old liberal group was crippled by scandal after O'Keefe and fellow activist Hannah Giles allegedly solicited advice from ACORN workers on setting up a brothel and evading taxes.
The videos led to some of the employees being fired and contributed to the disbanding of ACORN, which advocated for low- and middle-income and worked to register voters.
But prosecutors in New York and California eventually found no evidence of wrongdoing by the group, and the California probe found the videos had been heavily and selectively edited.
I don't think he even comes up to the level of Maxwell Smart.
It looks like TD Sixteen will bring a lot of rain but not a lot of wind with it when it crosses South Florida today. Flash flood advisories are posted, but schools are open in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
There are a lot of people on the progressive side who understandably feel angry, frustrated, and just plain pissed off by what they've seen coming from the Obama administration. I won't argue with them; there have been some real disappointments and unpleasant moments, up to but not limited to Rahm Emanuel's outbursts. I know exactly what they're talking about, and I'm not here to defend them or rattle off the talking points.
But I do think we have to look beyond what we wanted or what we expected and realize two things. First, nobody could live up to the hype that accompanied Barack Obama's run for the White House. The combination of a dynamic speaker and the revulsion at the failure of the Bush administration made the perfect climate to sweep him into office with the expectations of miracles and deliverance. So no matter what he did, even if he accomplished everything in the first one hundred days and relegated Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and Sarah Palin to selling Christmas goodies on HSN, there was bound to be disappointment and unmet expectations. In some ways we set ourselves up for the let-down, and that made the missteps and the screw-ups even more painful and aggravating.
Second, I think we woefully underestimated the visceral hatred that would erupt when it dawned on the right wing that America had actually elected a black man with a centrist/liberal agenda. I remember writing a post back when Barack Obama started his run for the nomination in 2007 that if he got elected, the Republicans and the hard-core wingers would go to heights unimagined to denigrate and slander him and possibly even threaten his life, but I don't think we really understood the depths of depravity that would come out. Even the worst things that the rudest left-wing bloggers said about George W. Bush amount to gentle chiding compared to what we're seeing. And it's not just from the fringes. We have elected members of Congress who are questioning everything from the president's place of birth to his faith, and we have an entire industry devoted to churning out this crap. (Ironically, it's probably good for at least one segment of the economy; there's money to be made in Wingnuttia.)
So now we're coming up on the mid-term elections. There's been a lot of talk about the enthusiasm gap; Democrats are demoralized and disappointed, the Republicans are ginned up, and it's all Barack Obama's fault. The Democrats aren't going to vote and the Republicans will vote twice (and suppress voters where they can just for good measure). If that happens, the results will be even worse than what's going on now because no matter what happens -- even if every teabagger candidate out there loses by double digits and the Democrats cling to the House and Senate -- the Republicans will claim it as a win and, like George W. Bush did with his "mandate" in 2000, take every pound of manure and sell it as gold. And, true to form, if the Democrats manage to pull it off, they will breathe a huge sigh of relief and not feel as if they deserved to win.
So let me be perfectly blunt: your feelings don't matter, and failing to vote because of your disappointment will only empower the wingnuts. In fact, they're counting on it.
Matt Taibbi heads to Kentucky to get a handle on the Tea Party and comes away with this conclusion:
Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.
Actually, the people behind removing certain books like The Catcher in the Rye, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and To Kill a Mockingbird from libraries and schoolrooms don't like to use the term "banned." According to them, it has negative connotations. They prefer "challenged." The result is usually the same.
A challenge is a formal, written complaint requesting a book be removed from library shelves or banned from the school curriculum. Since 1990, the American Library Association's (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom has recorded more than 11,000 book challenges, including 460 in 2009. About three out of four of all challenges target material in schools or school libraries, and one in four target material in public libraries. The Office for Intellectual Freedom estimates that less than one-quarter of challenges are reported and recorded.
Unfortunately, losing the right to choose reading materials for ourselves and our families is a reality in the United States.
Frankly, I don't care if there are parents out there who don't want their kids reading certain books. I don't agree with it, but they're the ones raising their kids, not me. What I really despise, though, is their presumption that somehow they have the right to tell other parents what their kids can or can't read. It says a lot more about them as parents if they can't teach their kids effectively than it does about the schools or the public libraries.
Not only that, it is an attempt to tell authors what they should or shouldn't be writing and demanding that they crank out the bland crap that passes their muster until all we have to choose from are Sarah Palin biographies and pale imitations of The Da Vinci Code. But we writers are an ornery bunch, and for many of us, nothing motivates us so much as to hear that our books have been banned. You can't buy publicity like that.
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CNN has the results of a poll by the Pew Forum that shows while Americans may be the most religious people out there, a lot of them don't really know much about their own faith.
The survey is full of surprising findings.
For example, it's not evangelicals or Catholics who did best - it's atheists and agnostics.
It's not Bible-belt Southerners who scored highest - they came at the bottom.
Those who believe the Bible is the literal word of God did slightly worse than average, while those who say it is not the word of God scored slightly better.
Barely half of all Catholics know that when they take communion, the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ, according to Catholic doctrine.
And only about one in three know that a public school teacher is allowed to teach a comparative religion class - although nine out of 10 know that teacher isn't allowed by the Supreme Court to lead a class in prayer.
I suppose you can make the argument that the atheists and agnostics came to their conclusions after being inundated with religion and decided, after weighing all the evidence, that there was no there there, while the evangelicals were more likely to take it to a level of emotional connection rather than a journey of scholarly research. It may also explain why people who can't get through the first act of Romeo and Juliet because of the Elizabethan English can parse every syllable of the King James bible, which uses pretty much the same language, and divine the intent of God. It is all the more irritating when you realize that some of the people who are making a living by using religion as a cudgel against everything from same-sex marriage to Sunday car sales have no clue as to what they're talking about.
There are some questions from the quiz at the site. I got 10 out of 10. How about you?
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Michael Crowley at Time points to three headlines that leave the ACLU and, frankly, a lot of people, unhappy with the Obama administration on issues that involve privacy and civil liberties.
Anyone who thinks that there aren't bad people out there with malicious intent is fooling themselves, and Mr. Crowley makes the point that the president, knowing he's perceived by both critics at home and enemies planning attacks as a weak-willed fighter, has to be a extra vigilant. It's ugly, and it's not what this country stands for, and it's the wrong reason to push them. But as someone who knows a little something about the business once told me, there are people who work for our government and our interests who do things you really don't want to know about but keep us safe. I have to take his word for it, because, as Glenn Greenwald notes, it's not our goal in life to emulate some of the worst excesses of dictators.
We know this stuff goes on regardless of who's in the White House. We've known this has been going on in some form or another since the founding of the nation; indeed, throughout history. I think we all would just rather not know about it so we can spend our time wondering what's in the next clip of Christine O'Donnell that Bill Maher will pull out next Friday night.
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Alan Grayson isn't shy about taking on his opponents.
Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, an Orlando-area lawmaker who has employed flamboyant rhetoric against the GOP since winning office in 2008, is running an ad on broadcast and cable stations in central Florida that highlights state Sen. Dan Webster's views on social issues. The ad says Webster would force women to carry to term a fetus resulting from rape and would bar abused women from seeking abortions, medical treatment or divorce.
"Daniel Webster wants to impose his radical fundamentalism on us," the announcer says. "Taliban Dan Webster — hands off our bodies and our laws."
[...]
The ad cites votes from 1990 in favor of covenant marriage, which bars couples from divorcing except in the case of adultery.
The black-and-white ad also includes video of Webster reading a Bible passage: "Wives, submit yourself to your own husband. ... She should submit to me. That's in the Bible."
Grayson, who won office two years with 52 percent in a district President George W. Bush carried in 2004, is one of the Democrats' top incumbents to defend. But unlike other endangered House members, Grayson has neither cooled his rhetoric nor focused on the economic issues Democrats hope will help them defend majorities in Congress.
Instead, Grayson has delivered a string of fiery interviews and speeches, including one on the House floor several months ago describing the GOP health care plan as "don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly."
It's actually not a lot different than some of the ads I saw running in South Florida put up by conservative groups against various candidates, although I have to say that "Taliban Dan" is a bit much. But then, there's never been much about Alan Grayson to suggest he'd go for the subtle approach. He knows what gets his name out there -- and on the blogs -- and it works, obviously.
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The good folks over at First Draft are holding their annual fund-raiser. They were one of the first blogs to show up here to welcome me to the blogosphere nearly seven years ago and they're still going strong, so if you can, stop by and drop some coin. Good work over there.
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Cheap socks shed. (Try saying that five times fast.) I've found so many lint balls it's like Sam came back from the Great Beyond just to leave hair tufts.
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House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) told Chris Wallace that the Republicans' "Pledge to America" (already labeled "Lemon Pledge" by some wags) is a long list of complaints but doesn't have any solutions.
When you start down that path, you just invite all kind of problems. I know. I’ve been there. I think we need to do this in a more systemic way and have this conversation first. Let’s not get to the potential solutions.
Rule Number 1 in good management: don't come to the boss with a problem unless you have a solution or suggestions on how to fix the problem. Otherwise you're just complaining, and that doesn't help. It does, however, get you on Fox.
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What can be done about mass unemployment? All the wise heads agree: there are no quick or easy answers. There is work to be done, but workers aren’t ready to do it — they’re in the wrong places, or they have the wrong skills. Our problems are “structural,” and will take many years to solve.
But don’t bother asking for evidence that justifies this bleak view. There isn’t any. On the contrary, all the facts suggest that high unemployment in America is the result of inadequate demand — full stop. Saying that there are no easy answers sounds wise, but it’s actually foolish: our unemployment crisis could be cured very quickly if we had the intellectual clarity and political will to act.
In other words, structural unemployment is a fake problem, which mainly serves as an excuse for not pursuing real solutions.
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I’ve been looking at what self-proclaimed experts were saying about unemployment during the Great Depression; it was almost identical to what Very Serious People are saying now. Unemployment cannot be brought down rapidly, declared one 1935 analysis, because the work force is “unadaptable and untrained. It cannot respond to the opportunities which industry may offer.” A few years later, a large defense buildup finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs — and suddenly industry was eager to employ those “unadaptable and untrained” workers.
But now, as then, powerful forces are ideologically opposed to the whole idea of government action on a sufficient scale to jump-start the economy. And that, fundamentally, is why claims that we face huge structural problems have been proliferating: they offer a reason to do nothing about the mass unemployment that is crippling our economy and our society.
There are plenty of jobs to be done that don't require college degrees or long courses in specialized training, including a lot of the infrastructure repairs and construction. But those are considered to be "boondoggles," to use a term from the Depression. A job is a job. It also occurs to me that all the people who keep saying that there are plenty of jobs out there if only the unemployed would get off their couches and find them need to make it clear to those who are creating the jobs that they need to stop making excuses like "the future is uncertain." No shit, Sherlock; when isn't the future uncertain?
It's almost as if they want to keep the economy down just to score political points. But no one could be that cynical and coldly calculating, could they?
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Lexington at The Economist looks at the Tea Partiers and their worship of the Constitution.
[T]here is something infantile in the belief of the constitution-worshippers that the complex political arguments of today can be settled by simple fidelity to a document written in the 18th century. Michael Klarman of the Harvard Law School has a label for this urge to seek revealed truth in the sacred texts. He calls it “constitutional idolatry”.
The constitution is a thing of wonder, all the more miraculous for having been written when the rest of the world’s peoples were still under the boot of kings and emperors (with the magnificent exception of Britain’s constitutional monarchy, of course). But many of the tea-partiers have invented a strangely ahistorical version of it. For example, they say that the framers’ aim was to check the central government and protect the rights of the states. In fact the constitution of 1787 set out to do the opposite: to bolster the centre and weaken the power the states had briefly enjoyed under the new republic’s Articles of Confederation of 1777.
When history is turned into scripture and men into deities, truth is the victim. The framers were giants, visionaries and polymaths. But they were also aristocrats, creatures of their time fearful of what they considered the excessive democracy taking hold in the states in the 1780s. They did not believe that poor men, or any women, let alone slaves, should have the vote. Many of their decisions, such as giving every state two senators regardless of population, were the product not of Olympian sagacity but of grubby power-struggles and compromises—exactly the sort of backroom dealmaking, in fact, in which today’s Congress excels and which is now so much out of favour with the tea-partiers.
More to the point is that the constitution provides few answers to the hard questions thrown up by modern politics. Should gays marry? No answer there. Mr Klarman argues that the framers would not even recognise America’s modern government, with its mighty administrative branch and imperial executive. As to what they would have made of the modern welfare state, who can tell? To ask that question after the passage of two centuries, says Pietro Nivola of the Brookings Institution, is to pose an impossible thought experiment.
Not unlike the Christian fundamentalists who believe that every word in the Bible is literally true, there is no room for error in the idolatry of the Constitution. But also like those who fail to see the metaphors and obvious flaws in the through-line of Genesis -- where did Mrs. Cain come from? -- they fail to take into account the fact that, like the Bible we know today, the Constitution was written by a committee that involved deals and bargains, arguments and choices, and that what was designed as a work in progress would be altered and adapted as the years passed and the nation grew. Certainly the rich white guys that wrote it didn't have the foresight to see two hundred years into the future, and they knew they couldn't. The Constitution is silent on a number of issues. Presumably it is so because the writers either trusted the people who would follow them to live up to it, or -- more realistically -- they just couldn't predict that one day slaves would be free, women could vote, and two people of different races would want to get married. They did, however, leave room to change it.
Lexington also makes an excellent point: the Constitution is not the sole property of one group alone; it belongs to every American, be they liberal or conservative, straight or gay, black, white, or whatever. That's what the whole "we the people" thing is all about.
Ann Coulter addressed Homocon, a gay conservative organization, this past weekend on the topic of marriage equality. You may remember that she got in trouble with her wing-nut friends at World Net Daily for accepting the invitation, but based on what she said, WND will probably welcome her back.
First, she ran down the stereotypical stand-up comedian's list of reasons, including that lacking the legal right to marriage allows the less-committed partner to weasel out of it. But in a more serious note, she parroted the losing arguments of the lawyers supporting California's Prop 8 and told the crowd that the reason she opposes (and they should oppose) same sex marriage is that it is strictly for procreation.
In one of a series of racially insensitive remarks that pervaded her speech, Coulter added, "Marriage is not a civil right. You're not black." It was part of a larger argument on which she later elaborated, telling the crowd that the 14th Amendment only applies to African-Americans and that it does not, in fact, apply to women, LGBT people or other minorities.
[...]
Several attendees, who requested anonymity, were also startled by her racially-tinged humor: in addition to her comments about civil rights, she also accused single parents of breeding muggers and blamed the decline in marriage in the African-American community on welfare, "the subsidization of single parenting" and overly liberal child support laws. Coulter's comments about civil rights being "only for the blacks" rubbed many people the wrong way as well, though her joke about oppression and the amount of money in the gay community compared to other minority communities ("Blacks must be looking at the gays saying, 'Why can't we be oppressed like that?'") garnered plenty of laughs from the well-heeled crowd.
GOProud's executive director, Jimmy LaSalvia, told TPM after the speech, "I don't agree with Ann Coulter about gay marriage, but there was a real conversation here. That's what we're trying to start."
I used to think that Ann Coulter was some kind of an act; that her shtick was to be the Andrew Dice Clay of right-wing punditry. No one could be as insensitive and bigoted as that and still walk upright. (Then we got the current crop of Tea Party candidates and proved that theory wrong.) Then I thought, well, like the old song, she is more to be pitied than censured; something in her past or upbringing that she had no control over turned her into this caricature of the charming Klanser in a Vera Wang knock-off and she can't help it.
But now I realize that she's an adult; she's capable of being responsible for what comes out of her mouth in public, and looking for some way to excuse her behavior is pointless. Some people are just assholes, and she's one of them.
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I was really fortunate to grow up gay with a loving and supporting family. But for those kids who didn't, writer and columnist Dan Savage and his partner offer support and proof that it really does get better.
A professor at Florida International University won $60,000 to research a rise in litigious Peruvians during the 18th century. Weight Watchers earned $1,200 under Florida's program to help the disabled become better job candidates.
An arts program in Florida City secured $25,000 so it could continue inspiring prisoners with dance and other creative pursuits.
How does Washington pump more than $9 billion worth of stimulus money into Florida's economy? With big checks, of course -- $87 million for work on the Palmetto Expressway, $500 million for teacher payrolls -- but also with thousands of small ones.
From a Key Largo doctor earning $250 for an office visit under a worker rehabilitation program to $2 million to fix public housing in Fort Lauderdale, Washington's nearly $800 billion stimulus plan dropped money scattershot into almost every South Florida ZIP Code, federal records show.
The large recipients attract the most attention.
Florida Power & Light won $200 million to install ''smart'' electric meters, devices that allow homes to monitor power use by the minute. The program is being rolled out first in South Florida.
Washington gave $70 million to Miami-Dade to upgrade the Palmetto Metrorail station, buy fuel-saving buses and fund other improvements.
Marathon is getting $10 million for a new sewage system, and Doral's Health Choice Network, a nonprofit that provides technology services to community health centers, won $12 million mostly to digitize paper medical records.
But with the stimulus program a major fault line in the fall congressional races -- Republicans generally lambaste it; Democrats praise it -- the smaller payments offer a look at the breadth of the spending package.
''It's probably not something most people think of when they think of stimulus dollars,'' said Nicole Bible, executive director of Homestead's Art Spring, which received $25,000 to pay its artistic director's salary for several months. ''This allowed us to keep the position and essentially keep the organization alive.''
To see where the stimulus money is going in your neighborhood, click on Recovery.gov, the website set up by the Obama administration to track the spending. And chances are you'll find some Republican who railed against the bill turning around and begging for money from it.
Watching cable TV news -- often a bad idea -- one cannot escape a sense that everybody in America is yelling at everybody else.
But what about the rest of us?
People frame all this as a debate between political extremes, a mud fight between conservatives and liberals. I submit that it is more than that. I submit that because they are louder, more colorful, crazier, angrier, and thus, more entertaining, the fringe elements of American political thought -- right, and, increasingly, left -- have made themselves irresistible to the 24-hour cable and Internet megaplex which, like a shark, is always swimming in search of its next meal. In response, that megaplex has ceded those denizens of the fringe the center stage and given them a megaphone.
The result has been less a clash between ideologies than a clash between reason and its opposite, between those who are willing and able to talk a thing through, think it through, even argue it through, and those who are unwilling and unable to do so. We're talking about people who believe what they believe because they believe. Their ignorance is bellicose, determined, an act of sheer will, and there is not enough reason in all the world to budge them from it.
So, for example, a large minority of Americans continues to believe the president to be a Kenyan-born Muslim, despite the fact that there is not a shred of evidence to support that dumbbell theory. And they don't care. When have the fringes ever needed evidence? That's why they are the fringes.
But what about the rest of us?
What about those of us who are busy raising our kids, paying our bills, living our lives, those of us who have concerns about the future, questions about the economy, maybe even disappointment with the president, but who are able to express those things logically, without reflexively screaming, invoking socialism or calling anyone Hitler? What about those of us who feel living in a civil society requires the ability to talk, compromise and reason, and that those who insist on behaving instead like a classroom full of five year olds deprived of nap time whenever they don't get their way do not deserve center stage -- deserve nothing, in fact, other than a chair facing the corner.
What about the rest of us?
It is Jon Stewart's contribution to rational national discourse to remember and remind us that we exist. And, that for all the media megaplex has done to confer importance upon the fringes, a large minority is still a minority.
We, the rest of us, are the majority. And maybe it's time we started acting like it.
Op-Ed at Forty: The New York Times looks back at the words and writers who have contributed to the "opposite editorial" page since its inception in 1970.
On Sept. 21, 1970, readers who turned to the last inside page of The Times's main section found something new. The obituaries that normally appeared in that space had been moved, replaced by something called Op-Ed. The vision of John Oakes, the editorial page editor, and Harrison Salisbury, the eminent foreign correspondent, Op-Ed was meant to open the paper to outside voices. It was to be a venue for writers with no institutional affiliation with the paper, people from all walks of life whose views and perspectives would often be at odds with the opinions expressed on the editorial page across the way. (Hence, Op-Ed - Opposite Editorial.)
And so here we are. Four decades and nearly 15,000 pages later. This special anniversary section features artwork and adapted excerpts from a tiny fraction of the writing that has appeared on the Op-Ed page over the years, as well as selections from commentary published exclusively online.
One of the benefits of living in Florida is that for those of us who can kill a houseplant by just looking at it, orchids grow like crazy. All I do is fertilize them every so often and they just keep on growing.
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When I arrived at camp in June 1981, my Indiana plate was about to expire, so the only choice I had was to register the Jeep in Colorado. I didn't mind at all; I've always admired the Colorado plates with their mountains and simple layout. I was also moving to California after camp and I knew that registration in California meant that the car had to live up to the emissions standards out there. The previous owner of the Jeep had basically stripped the pollution controls from it, and I had spent some money getting them back to normal, but I knew it would never make it, and when I got there in August, a mechanic took one look under the hood, laughed, and said to hang on to the Colorado plates.
As it turned out, my stay in California was brief. The school was on its last legs when I got there and by February I was accepted at the University of Colorado's grad school to begin my doctoral studies in August. And the Colorado plates stayed on the Jeep. In fact, the plates served three cars. After pouring tons of money into keeping the Jeep running, I traded it for a 1984 Subaru wagon -- a woefully underpowered car that developed a major engine problem at 64,000 miles -- and then on the 1988 Pontiac station wagon that I bought in January 1989 and is still in my garage today. So far, the Colorado plate was the longest-tenured, from 1981 to 1990.
There is deep, ancient, and primeval magic in the mountains. Gazing down into the forested canyons of the Front Range from the heights of Trailridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park, it is not hard to believe there are places there where no human has yet set foot. Standing on top of Longs Peak after a six-hour hike beginning in the pre-dawn darkness among the ponderosa pines and rising above tree-line as the sun climbed over the distant prairie was the journey of a lifetime and the memories are still there thirty years later. I loved the years I lived in Colorado; the summers I spent in the mountains were some of the best times of my life, and I met someone with whom I fell deeply in love and shared my life with for fifteen years. Were it not for my growing intolerance for cold weather, I would probably still be there, and I hope that when I am retired, I will be able to go back and spend the summers in the peaks and pines.
David Kurtz at TPM tries to put the current Democratic crisis of courage in perspective.
I know it's cathartic to howl at the moon, and in most cases it's just a heat of the moment reaction. But the "take my marbles and go home" crowd has always struck me as peculiarly both overinvested and underinvested in politics: overinvested in the way a rabid sports fan's mood rises and falls with the fate of the hometown team; underinvested in that they go from supposedly caring so much it makes their hearts ache to washing their hands of politics entirely.
What I think it speaks to is a lack of control. A helpless feeling washes over people who care passionately about the issues that confront the country but who, because of the demands of work and family, are limited in how involved they can be politically. They have their vote and in some cases they have some disposable income to give to campaigns. But they don't have much of a voice, certainly not a loud or influential voice. In casting about for some way to exert more control, a take it or leave it mentality starts to seem like a viable option.
I don't have any silver bullet to offer. Politics is a long hard slog, with frequent reversals. It's about making the best decision from among the available choices. Often the available choices, as they say in political science circles, suck. The fact that political successes are so rare and fleeting is what makes them so glorious. But you have to gut it out through the lean times. No guts, no glory.
Mr. Kurtz got some pretty angry responses to his post, calling him "condescending" and "ludicrous," and explaining why they were done here. But as I said in my previous post, it's not about what the party or the White House is doing; it's about what you're doing. And, by the way, have you considered the alternative? Do you really think that letting people like Sharron Angle or Ken Buck or Carl Paladino try their hand at governing is worth it because you got pissed off? We still have echoes of 1994 ringing in our ears.
That said, it doesn't help when it seems like the Democrats and the White House are drawing their inspiration for policy and election strategy from watching re-runs of The West Wing on Bravo. On the other hand, it's better than 24.
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House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) on the Pledge for America's new and improved ways for the Republicans to bring wonderfulness and prosperity to the world as opposed to the failed policies of the current and previous administrations:
We are not going to be any different than what we've been.
Someone in the office of Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) has issues with gay people.
The office of Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) has admitted that an anti-gay comment left on a gay rights blog this week came from the senator's office, though it has not determined who actually posted it, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
As TPM previously reported, soon after a Senate vote to block debate on the repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' someone wrote "All faggots must die" on the blog of gay rights advocate Joe Jervis. Other commenters traced the origin of the comment to a senate.gov IP address located in Atlanta, Georgia, near the offices of both of the state's senators. Chambliss' office then said it was investigating the matter.
Today, the AJC's Bob Keefe received a statement from Chambliss' office confirming that the posted comment did in fact come from one of his offices:
[...] "The (Sergeant at Arms) has worked side by side with our personnel to determine whether the comment in question emanated from our office. That appears to be the case," an unsigned statement from Chambliss' press office read.
"There has not been a determination as to who posted the comment," the statement read. "That part of the review is ongoing, and is now in the hands of the Senate Sergeant at Arms."
There's no mention of what will happen to the person who posted the comment, but my guess is that Sen. Chambliss will, at the least, invest in some IP masking software so the next time they do it, they won't be traced back to him.
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Even though I leave the house for work before sunrise, I occasionally drive in with the top down. It's nice, especially when it's not too humid. This morning there was a clear sky with the harvest moon and Jupiter in the west, and overhead the constellation of Orion, the harbinger of autumn.
See, we do have seasons in Florida. You just have to notice them.
Everybody in the Village is reading Bob Woodward's new book about the war planning inside the Obama White House, and the righties are all twitterpated about one particular quote from President Obama that seems to predict we'll be attacked again by terrorists.
The prospect of another attack against the United States is very, very real. It’s just as real, in my opinion, as it was September 12. [...] Not a matter of if, but when.
The people at Fox etc. went ballistic to the point that John Bolton's mustache twitched when he said the president doesn't care about people being killed. Liz Cheney was incensed.
This comment suggests an alarming fatalism on the part of President Obama and his administration. Once again the President seems either unwilling or unable to do what it takes to keep this nation safe. The President owes the American people an explanation.
Oh, wait. Sorry, that quote above wasn't from President Obama; that was Vice President Dick Cheney to Tim Russert on Meet the Press. My mistake.
We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever. … We absorbed it and we are stronger.
Maybe John Bolton, Liz Cheney, and the kiddie party over at Fox don't get it, but that's a stronger and more resonant statement than "Bring 'em on."
The Republicans are unveiling their "Pledge to America," which sounds a lot like the same old crap we've been hearing from them since the last time they tried it with the "Contract With On America" at the hands of Newt Gingrich and his band of dyspeptic pranksters in 1994: tax cuts, defense spending, "traditional marriage," the sanctity of the sperm, and more tax cuts.
There are several moments of unintentional -- at least I think it's unintentional -- irony, including the line about "an unchecked executive, a compliant legislature, and an overreaching judiciary". Isn't it a little late to be going after the Bush administration and the "unitary executive," the rubber-stamp GOP Senate and House of 2001-2007, and the Supreme Court that gave us Bush v. Gore?
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Finally there's some good news on the equality front for gay families in Florida.
A state appeals court on Wednesday struck down Florida's controversial ban on adoptions by gay men and women as unconstitutional, and Gov. Charlie Crist and the state's child-welfare chief announced hours later they will immediately cease to enforce the ban.
In a unanimous ruling, a three-judge panel of the Third District Court of Appeal in West Miami-Dade said there is no ''rational basis'' for excluding gay men and lesbians from the pool of potential adoptive parents, upholding a November 2008 opinion by Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman.
Calling Wednesday ''a very good day for Florida'' and ''a great day for children,'' Crist told reporters his administration will immediately cease enforcing the statute, which has held sway over Florida child welfare policy since 1977, when the Legislature voted overwhelmingly to exclude gays and lesbians from adopting.
''Children deserve a loving home to be in, and the opportunity for judges to make this call on a case-by-case basis for every adoption,'' said Crist, who once supported the ban. The U.S. Senate candidate reversed himself after he left the Republican Party and began courting liberal and moderate voters.
First, I don't think the court had much of a choice; the ban is clearly a violation of the equal-rights provisions of the state and federal constitutions, and singling out one group for discrimination on the basis of fear and superstition is something only the ignorant and the hateful could support. Second, I suppose we owe the Tea Party and Marco Rubio a vote of thanks: had they not driven Charlie Crist out of the Senate race as a Republican, he would not have had to run to the center and court liberal voters, which, cynical though it may sound, is one reason for his switch to supporting gay adoption.
But no matter how you slice it, it's a win -- especially for the kids* -- and we'll take it.
I would advise [Obama] and all the Democrats to talk about what we are going to do now and ask them who is more likely to do it. If this is a referendum on people's anger and apathy -- so our side stays home and their side's inside -- we don't do well.
What solo musical instrument makes you cringe when you hear it played?
The solo violin. I know there are a lot of brilliant violinists, including Itzhak Perlman and the late Isaac Stern, but when I hear a solo piece on the radio, for some reason it just makes me cringe. So do operatic sopranos. Fetch more...
As noted previously, President Obama held a town hall meeting earlier this week where he took unscripted questions from the audience. Some the questions were rather pointed, and he also heard from a woman named Velma Hart who told the president that she was exhausted.
Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the man for change I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are right now. I’ve been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I’m one of those people and I’m waiting, sir, I’m waiting. I don’t feel it yet.
She's not alone, and if the polls are to be believed, it's showing up as the "enthusiasm gap" between the Democrats and the Republicans in the run-up to the mid-terms. And as Digby says, it's not really new.
Those of you who went through the 90s will recognize this phenomenon. It's when the right's ferocious attacks are so vicious and relentless that they eventually wear down average, common sense people with normal lives to lead --- and even scare them a little.
In Clinton's case it was defending him from the non-stop personal attacks that was so wearying. It took a brave soul with a taste for political combat to keep fighting in the face of that onslaught. It was called Clinton Fatigue, the sense that even people who were sympathetic to the president's political plight and understood that his enemies were rabid and insane, just wanted it to end. Many analysts think it was the reason why Gore had such a hard time even though the economy was roaring --- normally the country would have not wanted to rock that boat. It was the prospect of four or eight more years of wingnuts shrieking and howling that made at least few people say "whatever... give it to them ... anything to shut them up."
In Obama's case it's this moribund economy vs the outsized expectations that form the substance of the Democratic base's complaint. And there's good reason for people to be disappointed and worried. But the exhaustion at defending him, at least some of it, comes from the same place as that Clinton Fatigue. The right's non-stop attacks eventually just wear people down, sap them of their enthusiasm, make them question their own judgment, especially in the face of a negative and less than hopeful future. You have to be pretty committed to want to wallow in this toxic mud every day and most people have better things to do with their time.
This is where it gets difficult. It's not easy fighting the relentless and the trivial; it's like being pecked to death by ducks. And don't think for an instant that the attackers don't know this; it's the basis of their strategy. Don't go after the big things like how to rescue the economy or fix healthcare; they've shown that not only do they not have any ideas, even if they did they wouldn't put them out there because that would both raise the argument to the level of a real discussion about things that matter -- which is the last thing that they want -- and take the attention away from the silly and the insane such as the conspiracy theories about birth certificates and Luo tribal anti-colonialism.
The thing to remember is that this fight cannot be about one person. President Obama or Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich are, in the long term, temporary figures and at some point they will leave the scene, so focusing on them diverts our attention from the ideas, and those are the things that matter. That is why the right wingers label the healthcare reform "Obamacare"; they latch it on to a person and attach all the personal baggage that he brings with it rather than focus on the benefits that healthcare reform brings with it. It's an old tactic and it works.
Ms. Hart is right when she says she's exhausted by defending President Obama. But what about the ideas that she believes in that made her vote for him and support him to the point of her exhaustion? Is she ready to give up on them? Is she ready to concede the points of the opposition; that healthcare reform and the stimulus package are socialism and that the president is secretly a Muslim born in Kenya? Forget about Mr. Obama; is she -- are we -- too exhausted to fight for the things we believe in?
I'm not. I've been fighting for what I believe in all my life and I've faced some pretty steep and tough obstacles, and I have some scars to prove it. It can be exhausting. But if it wasn't, it wouldn't be worth fighting for.
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I wasn't really surprised that the Senate Democrats could not muster enough votes to overcome the Republicans' filibuster of the Defense Authorization bill that included the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Disappointed, yes; listening to John McCain's whiny voice and his objections made me accuse him of indecent and unnatural acts with certain barnyard creatures at a volume level that made me glad I didn't have the top down on the car for fear of frightening the other drivers. But not surprised.
The arguments that the Republicans brought up against the bill were ridiculous, and Rachel Maddow did a fine job of picking them apart one by one. What it comes down to is that the GOP is, as a party, anti-gay. That's not news. Neither is the fact that they are sniveling cowards who haven't got the courage to come out, so to speak, and admit it. Say what you will about people at the Family Research Council and other rabidly homophobic groups; at least they don't hide behind the skirts of excuses like the bill shouldn't have "extraneous" amendments attached to it or other such nonsense. I suppose it's because they're afraid that if they come right out and announce that they're against the repeal of DADT because they don't like Teh Gayz, they'll come off as "extreme." Yeah; after hanging out with the Tea Party and Newt Gingrich, that's a real danger, isn't it?
So the next question is Now What? The fact that DADT is in its final throes -- it's already been held unconstitutional in one court and thrown out in another -- is small comfort to the soldiers who have been discharged or are already in the process. The Pentagon study is due out in two months, and even if it finds that both the brass and the troops are fine with allowing openly gay soldiers, you can be sure that the Republicans will come up with some other objections; they always do. The next step could come from the White House by simply ordering a halt to all procedures for discharging soldiers under DADT. Leave the law on the books; just don't enforce it. It would not mean the end of the law, but at least it would put an end to the discharges until the bill is repealed to the point that it cannot be resurrected and the seventeen years of this worst of all compromises is over.
I would be surprised -- pleasantly -- if the Obama administration took that step. Go on, Mr. President; you've said many times that you will end DADT, and this year. This, at least, would be a start.
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Eight officials of Bell, California, are arrested on corruption charges.
Wait and See -- Cubans in Miami wonder if Castro really means it when he says he's open to private enterprise.
Raising Questions -- Why did the the new director of Miami's redevelopment agency get such a hefty salary increase?
Instant Recall -- A Miami business leader threatens to recall the Miami-Dade County commissioners who raise property taxes.
Tropical Update: Hurricane Igor is still a Category 1 off Newfoundland; Tropical Storm Lisa is way off to the east in the North Atlantic, and there's an area of disturbed weather down near Aruba that could get interesting.
The Republicans say that letting the Bush tax cuts expire would place an unbearable burden on small businesses, which they say are the lifeblood of the American economy. Okay, but let's define "small business." To most of us, that's something like a company that employs maybe twenty or thirty people, like a machine shop, a lawn-care business, maybe a restaurant or a window and door distributor. Except they don't make enough to qualify for the higher tax rate should it come back -- according to the House Democrats, 97% of small businesses wouldn't get hit with it.
Well, according to the Washington Post, the Republicans' idea of a "small business" is a company like the Bechtel Corporation, the fifth-largest private corporation in the U.S.; PricewaterhouseCoopers, the eighth-largest; and most major law firms around the country. They get around the corporate tax rules by filing as a "pass-through," reporting profits on the individual tax returns of the owners or shareholders, much the same way a mom-and-pop business would. Heck, if I made any money as a blogger and filed my taxes that way, I'd be a small business just like Bechtel.
Oh, did I mention that most major lobbying firms are considered "small businesses"? I'll bet you figured that out already.
I forgot to mention this earlier, but last Saturday the results of the voting for the South Florida Daily Blog Post of the Month Awards for August were announced, and my post A Fishing Stream Runs Through It received the Editors' Choice award.
Thank you to all who voted for me. It means a lot, and I'm honored to share the recognition with my dad, who made the whole thing possible.
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President Obama to whiny hedge-fund manager: "If you’re making $1 billion a year after a very bad financial crisis where 8 million people lost their jobs and small businesses can’t get loans, then I think that you shouldn’t be feeling put upon."
All he needs is the beard and he's a dead ringer for Vladimir Lenin.
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Cody Buzzell of Esquirenotes that along with the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, the DREAM Act is up for a vote in the Senate.
Last week Harry Reid announced that he will insert the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act into a defense authorization bill, granting permanent residency to young undocumented immigrants who honorably serve in the armed forces for two years. This infuriated Republicans, including John McCain, who called it “onerous” and “a pure political act” despite co-sponsoring the same bill in 2005, 2006, and 2007. (Colin Powell, still technically a Republican, approves of the proposal.)
McCain has obvious political considerations — he’s up for reelection in a state hostile to immigration — but this flip-flop seems especially cynical. It blows my mind that he would threaten to block this reform.
The reason is pretty simple, actually. The Republicans want us to think that all immigrants are scary brown people who smuggle drugs, behead people, and want to build mosques on top of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The idea that undocumented young men and women who want to serve their adopted country might find an easier path to citizenship goes against their pre-determined talking points.
Gallup's generic ballot for Congress for the week of Sept. 13-19 shows a 46% Democratic and 45% Republican split in registered voters' preferences for the midterm congressional elections. It is the second week out of the last three in which the two parties have been virtually tied.
Take from that what you will, but two weeks in a row could be seen as the first faint signs of a trend.
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According to Lori Montgomery in the Washington Post, letting the Bush tax cuts lapse at the end of the year would bring us closer to a balanced budget in five years.
Official and independent budget estimates show that letting tax rates spring back to pre-Bush levels for all taxpayers would bring the country within striking distance of meeting President Obama's goal of balancing the budget, excluding interest payments on the debt, by 2015.
"If we actually ended the Bush-era tax cuts, that would pretty much do it," Obama's recently departed budget director, Peter Orszag, said in an interview last week with CNN's Fareed Zakaria. "If you do a bit on the spending side and then end the tax cuts, you pretty much get there."
But for all the election-year hand-wringing about deficits, no one in Washington is talking about letting the tax cuts lapse on schedule in January. Instead, Senate Republicans have offered a measure that would extend all the cuts, adding nearly $4 trillion to the debt over the next decade. This week, Senate Democrats say they plan to unveil a bill that would preserve most of the cuts for most Americans. That would add nearly $2 trillion to deficits by 2020.
So there you have the choice: fiscal responsibility or political capital. You make the call.
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I don't care if Christine O'Donnell hung out with someone who believed in witchcraft in high school, and apparently the GOP and the Tea Party are fine with it, too. Hey, she was a kid; what's the big deal? It's not like it marked her for life, any more than Barack Obama was by going to a Muslim kindergarten when he was six. I'm sure the right wing would give him a pass on that. Right?
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According to this piece in The New York Times, the Democrats are trying to come up with their last stretch strategy to keep the mid-terms from going down in flames.
President Obama’s political advisers, looking for ways to help Democrats and alter the course of the midterm elections in the final weeks, are considering a range of ideas, including national advertisements, to cast the Republican Party as all but taken over by Tea Party extremists, people involved in the discussion said.
White House and Congressional Democratic strategists are trying to energize dispirited Democratic voters over the coming six weeks, in hopes of limiting the party’s losses and keeping control of the House and Senate. The strategists see openings to exploit after a string of Tea Party successes split Republicans in a number of states, culminating last week with developments that scrambled Senate races in Delaware and Alaska.
“We need to get out the message that it’s now really dangerous to re-empower the Republican Party,” said one Democratic strategist who has spoken with White House advisers but requested anonymity to discuss private strategy talks.
So far so good. But wait...
Democrats are divided. The party’s House and Senate campaign committees are resistant, not wanting to do anything that smacks of nationalizing the midterm elections when high unemployment and the drop in Mr. Obama’s popularity have made the climate so hostile to Democrats. Endangered Congressional candidates want any available money to go to their localized campaigns.
Late Sunday night, White House advisers denied that a national ad campaign was being planned. “There’s been no discussion of such a thing at the White House” or the Democratic National Committee, said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser.
Argh. This is what drives people crazy. Newt Gingrich is fulminating about passing a federal law banning the use of shariah law in the courts (we already have one; it's called the First Amendment); Christine O'Donnell, the Republican nominee for the Senate from Delaware, is deemed to be "a bit of a flake" by William Kristol (who says he would still vote for her. Of course he would); Sarah Palin is defending the use of racial epithets by radio pseudo-shrink; Sharron Angle is endorsing armed insurrection, and who knows what tomorrow may bring in the annals of right-wing batshittery. The Tea Party is delivering the Democrats campaign fodder to their door; they couldn't have asked for it better if they had done with candy and a stripper. But the Democrats are worried about taking advantage of these gifts because they're afraid of being attacked in a position of weakness and, as the article states further on, they want to hold their fire for the 2012 campaign.
That makes as much sense as the Tigers keeping their best pitcher out of the rotation in April because they want to save him for the World Series six months later. Trust me, he'll be in good shape if you never use him, but then you won't be in the World Series, either. Certainly the GOP and the Tea Party aren't going to hold their fire because they're afraid of exposing their weaknesses; they revel in that sort of stuff. They're going to capitalize on Christine O'Donnell's serial quotations as proof that she's a genuine American with all the quirks and peccadilloes that are emblematic of what we really need in Washington instead of the career politicians who wait until they're elected to go off the deep end.
A.J. MacInerney (The American President) said you fight the fights that need fighting, not just the ones you can win. That means you do it because it's the right thing to do. And that also means standing up for people who are fighting for their political lives right now because they won't be fighting for you two years from now if they're out of office.
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Ben Stein, who achieved his first fifteen minutes of fame by delivering the line "Bueller....Bueller" and now makes his living as shlub on TV commercials, is upset that he might get a tax hike.
I am a fairly upper income taxpayer. Not anything even remotely close to sports stars or movie stars or financial big boys. But I am above the level Mr. Obama says makes me rich. So, in the midst of a severe recession, I am to have my taxes raised dramatically.
I am not quite sure what my sin is.
Your sin, sir, is being a whiny little snot who doesn't get the idea that the Internal Revenue Service and the tax code were not created just to make your life miserable; it's just one of the perks.
So while people like Ben Stein will have to pass up the S-Class Mercedes and settle for the E, the rest of us will just have to remind them that "class warfare" was a term invented by people who don't have a whole lot of class in the first place.
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The opinions expressed in the postings on this site are, unless otherwise noted, solely those of the author (me). I take no responsibility for the opinions or contents expressed in referenced links or websites. The opinions expressed in the Comments section are solely those of their author and are subject to editing or deletion for offensive content.
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I forgot to mention this earlier, but last Saturday the results of the voting for the South Florida Daily Blog Post of the Month Awards for August were announced, and my post A Fishing Stream Runs Through It received the Editors' Choice award.
Stop That Noise!
