Cogitamus

Pastoring

As a further thought on the continuing Jeremiah Wright saga:  what Obama has said and done has been hurtful and, I believe, a bit dishonest.  However, Jeremiah Wright was Obama's pastor, his spiritual leader and mentor.  That's a significant responsibility, one that requires personal sacrifice.  For Wright to attack Obama and generally make an ass of himself to repair his own reputation is a betrayal of what it means to be a shepherd over God's flock.

Being a pastor should mean that even when a member of your congregation hurts you, you don't respond in kind.  You don't sabotage that member's goals and ambitions in order to enhance your own standing and reputation.  It's a shame that Pastor Wright has forgotten this.

Wrong On Wright

In his post below Nicholas highlights the disparity between the number of Hillary and Bill Clinton appearances in Indiana and those by Barack and Michelle Obama.  What we're seeing is a candidate going into hiding.  Obama is limiting his public appearances in order to avoid potentially embarrassing questions and comments about Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  It's the classic Democratic response to any problem:  hunker down and wait for it to blow over.

When the Wright "scandal" started to gain traction, it became clear fairly quickly that the Obama campaign had not come up with a strategy ahead of time to deal with it.  I saw what I believe to be Barack Obama's response, which was to concede the inflammatory nature of Wright's remarks while using them and that concession as a springboard to guide the conversation onto issues that actually matter.  I also saw what I believe to be the DC Democrats' response, which was the repeated, ever-intensifying repudiation of those remarks and the inartful, condescending descriptions of Wright as Obama's "former" pastor, as some crazy old uncle, a once-respected man going through a pitiable decline in his old age.

The latter strategy has won the day, for now Obama isn't even attempting to reshape or redirect the conversation.  He's simply issuing one condemnation after another, each one sharper than the last.  Again, this is the classic DC Democratic response to a problem.  They have no long-range vision whatsoever.  All they care about is trying to get rid of the problem right now.

But no matter how many times Obama and his campaign might say it, the plain fact is that most church-going Americans don't disagree with their pastors, at least not to the extent Obama is trying to convince us he does.  Rev. Wright was Obama's pastor for 20 years, while the average tenure for a Protestant minister is fewer than five years.  Trying to convince us that he spent 20 years under the spiritual leadership of a man with whom he disagrees so substantially just makes Obama look like yet another politician who is willing to through anyone under the bus if it helps a campaign.  And that's not even the worst of this.

Hustle

First Read:

*** On the trail: Clinton spends her day in Indiana, stumping in South Bend, Portage, Lafayette, and Kokomo; McCain raises money in Florida and then holds another health-care event in Allentown, PA; and Obama, in Indiana, has events in Indianapolis and then holds a rally at Indiana University in Bloomington. Also, Bill Clinton has a whopping seven events in North Carolina, and Michelle Obama is in Indiana.

That's four for Hillary and seven for Bill against two for Barack and an unknown number (probably two) for Michelle. I'm told that Obama does more TV-only appearances (interviews by satellite, sit-downs with local anchors, etc., but you'd have to do an awful lot to make up for this kind of gap.

Deep Thought

The volume of electability-based concern trolling from Clinton supporters (both explicit campaign surrogates and allies) is about to go to eleven. And this election's insanity isn't ever going to stop.

Shoot. Me. Now.

Monday Miscellany

It is too Monday Miscellany, because before I could finish it I got called over to fix my in-laws' computers, which then took all day.  The first and last time I had a virus on my computer was in 1996.  But somehow I keep having to deal with them, along with pretty vicious spyware.  Of course, it did give me an all-day break from my son, who is in his "Screamy McScreamerson" phase again. 

Anyhoo. . .

• Western Christians celebrated Easter a while ago, but the Easterners have a different way of figuring when Easter is supposed to happen, so they just celebrated it this last weekend.  The island of Chios, part of Greece, stands out among Easter celebrations.  They really get into it, by way of making thousands of homemade rockets throughout the year.  Then during the Easter Vigil (Saturday night) the parisioners of two churches shoot the rockets at each other's church with the goal of hitting the bell tower.  And during this the traditional Orthodox Easter Vigil continues as if nothing is happening outside.  There's a video at the link which doesn't allow embedding, so be sure to click through and watch it; it's visually stunning.
• Look at this photo:

Yes, that is an orangutan using a pole as a spear to catch fish.  Apparently this individual has been observed watching the local humans hunt fish in this way.  According to the article he didn't do very well at it until he used the pole to snag fish that were trapped in nets.  It would be fascinating to see what our primate relatives could become as they continue to evolve, but I don't think we're going to allow them enough time.

• "Researchers Create 'Green Gasoline' Ethanol Killer From Biomass."  They're using switchgrass and poplar trees, and apparently the resulting fuel is more efficient than ethanol from corn.  John probably needs to weigh in on this, but if we can grow plants that don't require more gasoline than they replace, don't result in higher food prices and put a dent in the stranglehold corn has on this nation, then I'm behind it 100 percent.

F-L-O-B-O-T-S

There's a new song getting a lot of airplay on Kansas City's "modern rock" station:  Handlebars by the Flobots.  The Flobots are a Denver-based band that probably could be best described as an indie-rock/underground rap/???? group.  Ok, so they're a bit hard to pin down.  I like their music because their songs have more than three or four notes and on any given song you can hear strings, brass, acoustic and electric guitar, heavy bass, techno effects and even real percussion, which just sounds better than electronic drum kits.

The Flobots are also extremely political.  Their songs are protest songs for this generation, this time.  The Flobots rap and sing about injustice, about war and poverty, about state-sanctioned violence and killings, about the way in which so many of us are starting to understand that the government of the USA, what is supposed to be our government that represents the people and only does what the people tell it to do, is and has been ignoring us for quite some time in order to represent the desires and whims of a very small and select group of people.  People who buy and sell governments, who will gladly poison our children to make a few extra cents on a toy, who will poison our food if it means extra profit and who will then buy off more politicians to make it illegal for businesses that act ethically to tell us about it.

I personally can't stand it when entertainers and artists ramble on about their political beliefs, expecting people to listen to them because they're famous.  But creating art that reflects their beliefs, that makes a statement is something that I appreciate, because then they're using their gifts, they're tapping into the power of music and poetry and film and all the rest to speak to the rest of us on a higher plane than merely blabbing into a reporter's microphone.

I've got some Flobots videos and some lyrics after the jump.  Feel free to leave comments recommending other good protest music.

News Bleg

Does anyone know if there's a site that summarizes the ABC/NBC/CBS nightly news broadcasts? ABCNews.com used to produce such a summary in conjunction with The Note, but I haven't been able to find it lately.

Faux News

What Chris Bowers said. Democrats don't watch Fox News. Independents who might vote for Obama don't watch Fox News. Lots of Republicans will admit that it's a propaganda outlet and not a news channel. So I don't understand the angle for the Obama campaign. Is it proof that he really can get cats and dogs to live together without causing human sacrifice and mass hysteria? Is it some sort of play for the rest of the national press corps? Just a way to end the damn 'Obama watch' segment? Personally I don't really care that much; I agree that "legitimizing" Fox News with a candidate's appearance isn't the greatest of ideas, but lets be clear that John Kerry made appearances on Fox News, Bill O'Reilly's radio show, and other right and center-right outlets (Don Imus) during the 2004 election. Obama's certainly not the first to make this sort of appearance.

Elsewhere, Jeremiah Wright sneezes and the national media all reach for the fainting couch? I don't understand. I did like this:

We're going to end with a joke. Chris Rock joked, "Of course Reverend Wright's an angry 75-year-old black man. All 75-year-old black men are angry." Is that funny? Is that true? Is it unfortunate? What do you think?

WRIGHT: I think it's just like the media. I'm not 75.

Sometimes, only the Court Jester can tell the royalty the truth.

The Game Is The Game

Ryan Lizza on Bill Clinton:

Clinton is angry that this side of him has been nearly absent from the coverage. “You don’t ever read about this stuff! This is never part of the political debate!” he said at one event. “But this is what matters.” Adjusting to the modern, gaffe-centric media environment has been wrenching. At most of his Pennsylvania stops, the national press was represented mainly by a pair of young TV-network “embeds,” whom Clinton regards not as reporters but as media jackals who record his every utterance yet broadcast only his outbursts, a phenomenon that has helped transform him into a YouTube curiosity and diminished him—perhaps permanently. “It’s like he’s been plucked out of time and thrown into the middle of this entirely new kind of campaign,” the adviser told me. Jay Carson, a senior Clinton campaign official and Bill’s former spokesman, said, “Because of the way he is covered, the only thing anyone ever sees is fifteen seconds that is deemed by the pundits to be off message.”

Due respect to Bill Clinton and Jay Carson, but this isn't a new phenomenon. The press corps has always amplified gaffes over substantive Q&A, which change little from appearance to appearance. And Bill Clinton knows this. As President he repeatedly commented on how you can do all the good in the world during the first part of the day, but if you make a mistake, that is the only thing people will know about, because it will be all over the news. Now, I don't like it any more than he does. But I'm not a former President who's wife is running for President. If you want to play the game, you have to learn the rules.

Circular Firing Squads Of The Left

I'm certain our readers already know that Amanda Marcotte recently wrote a book which was published by Seal Press, a publisher that focuses on works by women writers.  It's intended to be humorous, satirical and um, blunt - pretty much everything we've come to expect from Amanda. 

At her blog, Amanda uses quite a bit of retro-looking artwork to go with her posts.  It's usually old ads featuring women and/or women's products that are slightly tweaked to have them poke fun at the attitudes they espouse.  Things like Lysol Douche ads (how we survived as a species I'll never know) and other ridiculous products.  Given that practice, Amanda and Seal decided to use some old comic book images in her book that would go along with the title, It's a Jungle Out There.  Campy, cynical, ironic - the essence, in my opinion, of Amanda's writing.

Unfortunately, old comic books contain some of the most offensive racist and sexist images our culture has ever produced - the other great source of these types of images being the classic Warner Bros. cartoons.  The sexist imagery was actually what they were looking for, since their intention was to use it satirically.  But the racist overtones of the images went right past the people at Seal Press and Amanda; my understanding is that all of them are white.

Amanda has apologized, Seal Press has apologized.  In neither case was the apology of the sort where people are sorry that someone was offended - a type of "apology" that should be known as the Republican's Sorry or something like that.  They both owned up to the pernicious, blinding effects of white privilege.  Seal Press has already redesigned the book and issued another edition without the images.  I can't think of another public apology that has been as forthright and clear as what Amanda and Seal Press have done here.  It's actually a bit shocking; apologies in our culture, no matter the reason or source, are now carefully worded to convey no actual remorse on the part of the person apologizing except that other people failed to properly understand what they clearly meant.  No responsibility is taken, because people seem to believe that taking responsibility is the same as admitting some sort of legal or financial liability.

But these apologies have not been enough, and I've basically had it.  This ties in to several things I've been reading and hearing over the last few months, both in the blogosphere and in real life; I'll discuss them in more detail below the fold.

Compassion is a Virtue -- But I Don't Have the Time

In today's New York Times, Gail Collins dismantles the fraud that is the McCain "It's Time for Action" Tour.  [Maureen Dowd -- you might want to take notes on what you can actually accomplish in a Times Op-Ed piece beyond commenting on someone's wardrobe or the shape of their ankles.]  Choice sample from the column:

"[W]e applaud his efforts to show compassion and interest in people for whom his actual policies are of no use whatsoever."

Now that's nice work -- and snarky too.  But snark actually used in the service of the public as opposed to someone's personal demons.

Collins is particularly devastating when discussing McCain's opposition to legislation designed to overturn the Supreme Court's odious decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, in which the Court ruled that Lilly Ledbetter's sex discrimination suit against Goodyear for being paid less than men in comparable positions was time barred because she did not sue when she first received a paycheck in which the discriminatory payment occurred.  This ruling occurred despite the fact that Ledbetter was not aware of the facts at that time and only became aware of this at a much later date.  Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, those fine Bush additions to the Court, furnished the decisive votes in a 5-4 decision.  As a labor lawyer, I was absolutely stunned when this decision was issued.

The Democrats moved to overturn the decision legislatively with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.  Once again, they had a majority of votes in the Senate, but could not overcome the now routine Republican practice of filibustering that which does not serve the will of their corporate masters.  McCain did not vote because he was out being "compassionate" but made clear he would have opposed the legislation because the bill

"opens us up for for lawsuits, for all kinds of problems and difficulties."

Might I politely inquire who is "us" motherfucker?  And what "problems and difficulties?"  Oh, you mean corporations who engage in crap like this might be sued and lose as they did when the Ledbetter case was tried before a jury.

The more I ponder John McCain, the more convinced I become that he might well be worse than Bush.  It might be worth looking into MoDo.   

The Mighty Mekons - Kicking it Old School on a Friday Night

Memphis, Egypt -- Mekons

The strange, great and eclectic left wing collective from Leeds.  From their fabulous and undeservedly obscure 1989 release "Rock 'n' Roll," which I recommend highly.

[Pinch hitting for Deborah and Nick, our usual musical hosts on Fridays.]   

Satire executed too well...

...is not funny because it reminds you too well of the things that are tragically wrong in the world.  Senator Ron Wyden has hit that sour note with this ad.  (Doh, my video embedding skills aren't very well-developed)

John Henry was a Hummel Sellin' Man

OMFG, I listened to a story on NPR this morning about John McCain's ironically titled "Time for Action" tour of some of America's forgotten, economically disadvantaged areas.  This is the phony compassion extended photo op that is aimed at attracting the votes not of the people to whom McCain is putatively speaking, but to moderate Republicans who want to salve their stunted consciences by thinking their candidate gives a crap about the working poor.

There were several highlights, but to me the best was McCain, speaking in Youngstown, Ohio, I believe, noting that "1.3 million people in the world make a living off of ebay and most of these live in the United States."  My jaw dropped -- this clown is so out of touch that he thinks that hawking items on ebay is going to replace manufacturing as a way for people to make a decent living.

Or as a friend of mine imagined a conversation in this vein:

"What do you do for a living?'

"I clean out my basement." 

McCain basically gave the worst sort of warmed over glibertarian speech -- strangely enough this guy may be even more vacant than Bush on policy matters -- stating that there is nothing that government can do for people and how it can't create good and lasting jobs or buy them a house.  I found this interesting coming from a man who has been employed by the government for more or less his entire life and who as a third generation military member has probably lived in government provided housing for a pretty big chunk of his existence.  At least until he had a chance to marry his fabulously rich second wife. (I'm surprised he didn't suggest that approach to getting out of poverty.)         

So who's the fucking elitist? 

[Hey look over there -- Obama's preacher done give an interview on the television set -- sound of rodent media feet scurrying.]

Which story do you think you'll be hearing about on the news tonight?

How Good People Can Be Guilted Out Of Their Rights

I was talking about abortion with two students today -- we've read a few articles on the issue, including Judith Jarvis Thomson's defense of abortion and Don Marquis' anti-abortion argument.  Thomson's argument is a particularly interesting one, because she argues that abortion is permissible even if we regard the fetus as a person with the same rights as you or I.  This is one of the many picturesque thought-experiments in her piece:

suppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don't want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective, and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the person-plant who now develops have a right to the use of your house? Surely not--despite the fact that you voluntarily opened your windows, you knowingly kept carpets and upholstered furniture, and you knew that screens were sometimes defective. Someone may argue that you are responsible for its rooting, that it does have a right to your house, because after all you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and doors. But this won't do--for by the same token anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape by having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never leaving home without a (reliable!) army.

One of the two students (I think they're on opposite sides of the issue) wanted to argue that even in this case, you're responsible for the upbringing of the person-plant, and that a woman similarly has the obligation to nourish a fetus within her for nine months after it's conceived, even if she used contraception.  She justified her opinion by talking about how bad she'd feel if she had an unplanned pregnancy, even if she had used birth control.  Someone who did something like that, she said, ought to bear the consequences.  And here I discovered something interesting about the issue of abortion, and about the debate over rights in general. 

Why We Fight

Like many people, I have gotten pretty caught up in the Democratic nomination fight over the last couple of months.  After initially leaning towards Edwards, I shifted to Obama for a variety of reasons.  As I became increasingly invested in (and excited by) the prospects of his winning the nomination, I found myself getting irritated by the tactics of the Clinton campaign, sometimes voicing my frustrations on this site in a fairly full-throated fashion.

It occurred to me that this was not producing the most edifying or rational state of mind for me and many others.  This should have been self-evident when I was muttering about sitting out the general election if Hillary won the nomination -- okay, a pretty guilt free indulgence in its way when you live in DC, which has never been characterized as a swing state -- here we like to see if we can keep the Republican from getting into two digit percentages, something we have achieved in the last two presidential elections.  The madness of this perspective was really driven home to me on the night of the Pennsylvania primary when perusing other sites where Clinton or Obama supporters were vowing to vote for third party candidates or sit out the general election as though none of us had absorbed the lessons of the 2000 election.

And then I awoke the next day to two stories on NPR concerning rising food commodity prices and the enormous impact that this is having domestically and internationally.   I felt a bit ashamed that I was obsessing over the Democrats' internecine battle and issues of tactics and the like at a time when the ability of large numbers of people to feed themselves and their families seems to be growing ever more tenuous as a result of poorly crafted public policies.   

Knives at Gunfights

So, McCain is continuing to play "good cop" and politely asking that the "bad cop", the North Carolina GOP, not air an ad that uses a picture of Bev Purdue, Barack Obama, and Reverend Wright. Obama has had a decent response, which is that as the party's standard bearer, if McCain thinks the ad ought not to be aired, the ad ought not to be aired. But that's just part of the strategy to counter race-baiting; carping about ads isn't going to win Ohio or Pennsylvania or Missouri.

I don't envy the folks on the Obama campaign or at the DNC whose job it is to think about this. It's a tough sort of ad to counter. But it has to be done.

Where's the [conservative] beef?

Readable righty Daniel Lairson on Obama: "The one thing that some of the neoliberals got wrong, foreign policy, was the one thing Obama has chosen to imitate for the most part, while ignoring or discounting the neoliberal domestic policy shifts that were, in fact, reasonably successful." I have to say I don't see what you can point at to make this claim.

Where The Goalposts Are

In the end it's quite silly, but I can sort of understand why success and failure in Iowa, New Hampshire, and other early states are measured against the numbers in pre-election polling.  There really isn't much else to go on, so you try to get a sense of who underperformed and who overperformed expectations. 

But this late in the race, it's completely ridiculous.  This is time to measure things by their impact on the final score, like the way we measure a drive at the end of a football game.  If Clinton's down 22 points with 4 minutes to go and she kicks a 50-yard field goal, that's not a successful drive.  It doesn't matter that a 50-yard field goal is an impressive achievement.  She needs touchdowns and two-point conversions (not to mention an onside kick or two) to win the game, and that's not what she got on that drive. 

Of course, portraying the race this way would make it very clear that Clinton can't win, eliminating the juiciest media story currently going.  So I'm not expecting the media to report it this way, at least unless superdelegates declare themselves in large enough numbers for some contest to bring Obama close to 2025. 

2008 Pennsylvania Democratic Primary Results Map

This is a mostly unsurprising map, as Obama won Philadelphia and some of its suburbs, State College, and the city of Pittsburgh while losing the rest of the state, including suburban Pittsburgh, leading to a loss on Allegheny county. Obama fared worst in Southwestern Pennsylvania and the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre region. He kept the margins unexpectedly close in York, Lancaster, and other counties in the Harrisburg and Philadelphia media markets. On the whole his performance in rural Pennsylvania, with an older electorate, was better than it was in Ohio.

Both teams played hard, God Bless and good night.

Update: my humblest apologies, I read the results in Lancaster and Harrisburg backwards. Lancaster is a heavily Republican county, so what you probably have there is a "rump liberal" Democratic party. I'm cautiously optimistic that Clinton +8 will hold, and perhaps even +6 depending on how PA-13 shakes out, though I think she ended up winning reaching the 70% margin in PA-12 and perhaps elsewhere. If I were Paul Tewes I'd be mostly happy with this result. And in retrospect the decision to spend the final Monday in Pittsburgh instead of Philadelphia wasn't such a bad iea.

Election Results

Get 'em here. This is an open thread.

Compare and Contrast

As soon as MNSBC posts the final exit polls, I'll use this thread to look at the demographic changes between Ohio and Pennsylvania, to see where Barack Obama made improvements, and where shifts in the composition of the electorate worked in or against his favor. In the meantime try OpenLeft.

Visual Aids

I almost forgot! Here's my projection for tonight's results in map form. Obama gets a 5-2 split in PA-01, a 7-2 split in PA-02, then wins PA-07 and PA-14. Clinton takes PA-10 3-1 and PA-11 4-1, but otherwise everything stays close. The colors here represent delegate margins, not popular vote margins ... sorry 'bout that.

A Partial Defense of the Big Dog

I've launched this defense before. You have to feel bad for Bill Clinton. Unquestionably, his presidency had the best record on civil rights and improving living standards for African-Americans of anyone since Lyndon Johnson. And here he stands as various Clinton surrogates have been (correctly) accused of trying to scare voters about Obama's past drug use, etc. Clinton makes a relatively innocuous observation, that Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice with a coalition of heavy black support and modest white support, and the world explodes around him. Sometimes, you just mess up and underestimate how crazy people will get. This is particularly true because Clinton clearly has more respect for Jackson than the rest of the national media, so he doesn't think it's demeaning at all to be compared to him.

I say "partial defense" because Bill Clinton continues to just make shit up. After going on WHYY and saying "they played the race card on me", he later says "that's not what I said". Likewise he claimed, with no evidence that Jackson's white supporters were blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth types, while Obama had the backing of a bunch of effite college boys. I'll bet him dollars to donuts that exit polling would show that Jackson's white support in South Carolina was primarily from upper-middle class voters, as it was in New Hampshire.

Bill Clinton Opens Mouth, Inserts Racist Foot (Again)

In an interview with WHYY's Susan Phillips yesterday, President Clinton discussed his comments about the South Carolina primary and Jesse Jackson, dismissing voters' concerns that he'd been surreptitiously injecting racism into the campaigning:

"You gotta really go some to play the race card with me--my office is in Harlem".

Yikes. I suppose we should be grateful President Clinton didn't say that some of his best friends were black. He did come close, though.

Listen carefully at the end of the tape, too, when the interview is over but the mic's still live. Our erstwhile egalitarian, who has criticized Senator Obama for using identity politics yet has referred to himself as "the first black president" more times than I've had hot dinners--and let's not even go into his use of gender politics--refers to the reporter's line of questioning with this telling and FCC-rule-violating touch of class:

"I don't think I should take any shit from anybody about that, do you?"

Also at litbrit.