Cogitamus

The 'Cash For Clunkers' Program Is Wildly Successful

No, really.  It's not "running out of money" in the sense of poor planning.  It's not "ending early" in the sense that it had a specific amount of time it was supposed to last.

The reason the US House just voted $2 billion more for the program is because it's easily the most popular and effective program the US government has created in years.  Consumers get to buy new cars that get better gas mileage and have lower repair costs than what they've owned, saving money in the long run.  Dealers get to move inventory and pay employees, automakers earn more, and we all benefit from reduced gasoline consumption and pollution.

The Republicans are trying to spin all this as a failure and make it about hwo the government will mess up health care:

"There are a lot of questions about how the administration administered this program. If they can't handle something as simple as this, how would we handle health care?" Boehner told The Associated Press.

Yup, the fact that everyone involved in the program loves it - and even those dealers complaining about the backlog of reimbursement requests will come around once everything works through the system; typical that businesses which make you wait 2 days for a widget to get shipped across town to fix your car need their business taken care of right the hell now - and that it's succeeded so well that even GOP lawmakers support putting more money into it means that the government-run health plan which will never exist is going to be a failure. 

I swear, these guys have so many different layers of deception going on it's hard to know just what it is they're lying about at any given time.

No, if this program tells us anything, it's that we finally have some people in Congress and the White House who have the slightest clue about what matters to American citizens.

Friday Funk: Johnny Guitar Watson; A Real Mother For Ya

For my money, this is one of the best bass lines ever. I dare you to try to sit completely still, ha!

Bon Weekend, everyone.

XXX
D.

Wednesday Grace: Steve Vai; I Know You're Here; Denver, 2003

Beautiful guitar music for a summer night's musing. Spiritual Steve looks so grown-up compared to his protégé days of playing alongside Frank Zappa (who called him the "Little Italian Virtuoso") while wearing leopard-print t-shirts and wowing the girls. I love (and relate to!) the glasses, too--apparently even rock-'n-rollers get around to needing them sooner or later.

Guantanamo, Revisited

Naomi Wolf returns to the scene of the crimes.

Blowin' in the wind, Arlen Specter is blowin' in the wind

No idea if that makes sense in English, actually. But it seemed a fitting title for the numbers Nate Silver laid out this weekend. Read his post for the details, but this chart sums up his findings:

Development In India

India recently launched their first Indian-made nuclear submarine.  They relied very heavily on Russian help, but obviously going forward they will be able to build items such as nuclear-powered-and-armed submarines on their own.

What struck me, at least, from this article is how the USA isn't mentioned.  Like most Americans I tend to think that everything in the world is about us.  However, it does seem clear that if there is a message being sent by this submarine, it is primarily to China, with Pakistan stinging from the fact that India is able to pursue such projects while they can't. 

India's rise as a world power, seen through an USA-centric lens, is encouraging.  While they have their share of problems, India's government can be said to be at least as open and benign toward its citizenry as ours, and as we've seen through nimh's excellent reporting, India has a vibrant democratic process.  They're close allies with the USA, and since we're still indebting ourselves to China at an insane pace, it's nice to see an allied nation make moves toward being able to take a leadership role in that part of the world. 

Let's face it:  America's reign as the world's superpower is over.  We'll still command respect and appear to be preeminent among nations, at least to ourselves, for a while because of the inertia of history.  But our time is over - and really, I'm ready for someone else to muck things up for a while.

Pelosi more unpopular than Cheney?

In my post just now, I noted the irony of David Brooks lamenting the "media and activist cocoon" liberals reside in, even as he himself demonstrated having apparently no idea what actual liberals feel about Obama. Pot and kettle came to mind.

It's worth noting, though, that Brooks also derided liberals relying on "their own cherry-picking pollsters" to confirm their biases, before proceeding to ... cherry-pick poll numbers to confirm his biases. Brooks:

Nancy Pelosi has lower approval ratings than Dick Cheney and far lower approval ratings than Sarah Palin.

Is that really true? Lower approval ratings than Darth Cheney? Well, kinda ...

Cheney is out of office, so there are no more approval ratings, which measure how people consider an elected politician to be doing his job, for him. There's only favourability ratings, which measure how people view that politician as a person. For Pelosi, there's a smattering of both types of polls. (In general, favourability ratings tend to be higher than approval ratings, even for the same person).

I found four recent polls that asked about both Cheney and Pelosi - three of them asking the favourability question on both, and one (CNN) asking about favourability for Cheney and job approval for Pelosi. Turns out that it's true that she has lower approval ratings ... but she also has lower disapproval ratings. Because she is less well known and fewer people have an opinion about her one way or another. In three of the four polls, the net balance is better for Pelosi than for Cheney; in the fourth poll (by NBC/WSJ), they come out equally badly.

Less impopular than Cheney - 't aint much to be proud of. But it's also the opposite of what Brooks asserts.

Pelosi vs Cheney

	Favourable	Unfavourable	Net
	Approve	Disapprove
NBC/WSJ 6/12-15
Nancy Pelosi	24	46	-22
Dick Cheney	26	48	-22
Fox, 6/9-10
Nancy Pelosi	29	47	-18
Dick Cheney	34	57	-23
Hotline, 6/4-7
Nancy Pelosi	32	43	-11
Dick Cheney	36	53	-17
CNN, 5/14-17
Nancy Pelosi	39	48	-9
Dick Cheney	37	55	-18

By Brooks or by Crook

This is not the freshest blogging you'll see on Cogitamus, but I found myself chewing over a blog post over at The Atlantic I read a couple of days ago. On his blog, Atlantic senior editor Clive Crook lamented "Obama's suicide march", assenting with David Brooks' assertion that Obama is on a "leftward surge". He claimed to be baffled by how Obama is choosing to fall out "not with [the liberals] but with the party's moderates." It's a "perplexing" political strategy:

Why did Obama win in the first place, for heaven's sake? Because he campaigned as a centrist. [..] If Obama offends the left, what are they going to do apart from whine? Let them whine. If he offends the center, he [..] is deeply wounded electorally.

Crooks has a straightforward solution too:

Obama could fix this problem so easily. [He] has to start disappointing the party's liberals. He has to pick a fight or two, and takes [sic] sides with the centrists.

And yet still more of my Blathering

- I finally got a chance to talk to my father regarding the Gates contretemps -- he is a veteran of 23 years as a cop, including numerous riots, standoffs, and other nasty spots. He also did a lot of training over the years and was very big on it as a means of producing a smarter, more effective police force with less need to resort to violence.  As I suspected, he thought the cop in the Gates mess had screwed up.  He told me that he instructed his people to "always leave room to back up" if the need arose and if possible, avoid humiliating men in front of family or neighbors.  He observed that as a cop you always hold the trump card, i.e. the ability to lock someone up -- but you don't want to use that card too often or too quickly.  He said he would have apologized to Gates and just gotten out of there.

- Reading this by Roy Edroso, I was struck by how often right wingers write in ways that seem to show a need for approval by respectable liberal opinion.  The plaintiff tones of "why won't you" 1) make my movie; 2) publish my book; 3) talk to me like I'm sane; or 4) give me a pity fuck seem to emanate regularly from the right wing blogosphere.  It fascinates me.  I can't imagine giving the least little fuck what people like Glenn Reynolds, Jonah Goldberg or the douche bags at Powerline or Red State or any of the other insane clown posse think of me.  I think they're idiots -- I would view their approbation as a sign of my failure as a human being.  Basically, when I am in the unusual circumstances of being with right wingers -- only through business, family or happenstance, never voluntarily -- I try to be polite and talk about sports and the weather.  But no, I will not discuss whether there is reasonable doubt that Obama is a citizen or that evolution is just a theory.  Go find friends or go get help, but don't expect me to act like you're reasonable people. 

- I was really annoyed by this astonishingly vacuous piece in the Washington Post yesterday by Kathleen Parker touting Utah's health care reform as a model for the U.S.  Talk about no there there -- there is literally no description of what exactly was done to increase coverage or control costs nor any discussion of actual outcomes.  Parker mentions insurance exchanges -- but that's it.  That was followed today by another disingenuous piece by Robert Samuelson, claiming that we can't insure everyone while cutting costs.  And yet, every country in western Europe manages to provide universal coverage while spending a significantly lower percentage of GDP on health expenditures.  Perhaps that's worth looking into Bobby, you twit. 

- And then there's Kristol -- badness in a whole 'nother dimension.  This twisted grinning fuck really has no idea of the irony of him admonishing people for speaking of things they know nothing about.  And by the way Bill, as with my comment about Samuelson, oddly enough, people are getting better and cheaper health care throughout the industrialized world.  

- Did I mention that I fucking hate the Post?  Lazy, irony deficient, and ill-informed -- that's our media in a nutshell.

- Except, of course, for Krugman, who remains the sole glimmer of light amidst this darkness. 

- Ah, and Bill Clinton remains a man of prodigious appetites. Jesus Bill, usually we choose, onion rings or fries, milk shake or apple pie -- but the Big Dog's gotta have it all.   

   

Isn't There Another Philip K. Dick Story Around?

The real problem with adapting any of the Foundation books into movies isn't Roland Emmeritch, it's that they weren't very good books.  They start off ok, but after a while it becomes clear that Hari Seldon is just a particularly egregious Mary Sue:  we get it, Isaac.  You're smart and good looking and tough and incredibly altruistic.

Why Delaying Health Care Reform is not an Option

I work for (and am a part owner) of a law firm that is a classic small business.  We have about 30 lawyers and 20 support staff of various kinds.  We provide health insurance to all of our employees, and continue to this day to provide family coverage to all at no additional charge.  This is no small benefit, as several of our employees are single mothers.  We provide health insurance through Carefirst, the local Blue Cross/Blue  Shield affiliate.  Premiums increase every  year, of course, but this year, Carefirst is presenting us with a 34% increase -- for employees with family coverage this will increase our costs by nearly $3 an hour.  Our premiums for employees with families will be approaching the $1,600 a month range, more than $10 an hour, and exceeding the recently increased minimum wage rate by $3.00.   

We will bite the bullet and continue to provide this benefit because of our strong commitment to doing the right thing (and our ability to do so).  But how many businesses faced with this option will have to cut or eliminate health insurance?  And what if, as is the case with many of the union employers with whom I deal, your competition is providing zero health insurance while you are paying anywhere from $4 to $10 an hour for your employees' health care?  The notion that there is no need for change is simply absurd.  Current insurance inflation is unsustainable and ever more people are going to be added to the ranks of the uninsured or the underinsured.  Our businesses will be less competitive in the international arena.  Insured employees will see take home pay stagnate as more and more of the money that employers allocate to labor costs will have to be used to pay for health insurance.  

The status quo is simply not sustainable.  To claim otherwise is delusional. 

Saturday Night Song of Obsession

"We Both Go Down Together" - Colin Meloy

A solo performance by Colin Meloy of the Decemberists.  [Kind of a (Don't Fear) The  Reaper for the new millennium.]

My 16 year-old son, with whom I share quite a bit of musical taste in common, finds Meloy to be an annoying singer -- I think he views him as overly mannered and affected -- whereas I rather like his voice.  Curious where others come out on this.

[I am peeved by the fact that I wrote a response to every comment on my Gates post and lost it -- let me just thank all of you for your thoughtful responses.  Alas, I lack the energy at this point to try and recreate it -- maybe tomorrow.]   

  

Heavens, Gates!

I've been mulling over the Henry Louis Gates imbroglio for the last couple of days and trying to compose a post that does at least minor justice to its racial and class implications, its town-gown subtext, and what it says about our attitudes toward police-civilian relations.  I feel like I have some sense of the dynamics involved here -- I grew up in the Boston area, the son of a long-time Massachusetts State cop. Massachusetts is neither the stereotypical liberal utopia of some imaginations (nor the racist distopia advanced by others) -- it's a complicated, deeply rooted, oft-times parochial place laden with a certain chip on the shoulder aggressiveness steeped in issues of class.

I can't, on the other hand, pretend to know at a gut level how someone like Henry Louis Gates would feel upon being challenged in his own home by a police officer.  About the best I can do is imagine my own cranky, middle-aged guy reaction to coming home from a long trip, finding I can't open my front door (because it has been damaged in a break-in attempt), finally getting into the goddamned house and then finding myself being confronted by a cop demanding to know why I was in my own house.  Even without the racial context (a classic how'd you like the play Mrs. Lincoln caveat), I am pretty sure that I would be really pissed off and ready to explode.

My guess is that Gates may have unloaded on Sgt. Crowley pretty well.  It would hardly be shocking.  And it sounds like Gates probably resorted to the "don't you know who I am" gambit -- a favorite of cops since time immemorial.  (I can attest from my father's experience that every guy in Massachusetts who has a cousin who is a city councilman thinks he is a VIP and thus entitled to speed, double park, or drive drunk.)  So not only do we have a confrontation here with all of the immense baggage of a white cop confronting a black man in his home, we also have the class component of a Harvard professor berating a Cambridge cop.  Clearly, no good could come of this particular dynamic -- and didn't.   [I was amused to see that Crowley was once a security officer at Brandeis, my alma mater -- and a place where I was stopped by security multiple times over the years for looking like a townie.]

I think the onus for the blow up lies with Crowley.  Once he had ascertained that Gates was in his own home, Crowley should have gotten the hell out of there.  He should have apologized for any inconvenience he had caused Gates and retreated, even in the face of verbal abuse.  Gates is a 58 year old man who walks with a cane -- he was not remotely a physical threat to Crowley.  Arresting Gates and handcuffing him was an unnecessary escalation of a situation that Crowley could have ended by simply hopping in his patrol car and hitting the road.  A police officer's job is to preserve the peace, not wield his authority to arrest and detain someone in order to assuage a wounded sense of pride. 

Of course, this was a relatively minor abuse of police authority compared to the shooting of an unarmed man by BART police, the recent pepper spraying of attendees at a Francine Busby fund raiser in San Diego, the tasering of a 72 year old women in Texas, not to mention the seemingly endless series of bad shoots and racial abuses by the NYPD over the last decade, e.g. Sean Bell, Abner Louima, and Amadou Diallo.  What I find astonishing is the number of people who seem to take the position that the only appropriate stance when confronted by police is to shut the fuck up.  This does not really seem to be an approach befitting a democracy.  (Of course some of the right wingers seem to think shooting law enforcement officers in the head is alright, as long as you aren't verbally disrespectful.)  The growing tendency of police to escalate in even the most minor confrontations should be a concern to us all.  

Having said all this, I winced when Obama weighed in on the case Wednesday night.  He should have given the standard "I don't know all of the facts" pablum.  Instead, he stepped all over his health care reform message by giving the idiots in the media a tasty racial story to obsess about.  It was an uncharacteristically undisciplined moment by the President (one which I think bespeaks his genuine outrage about the case) and it destroyed the entire purpose of having called the press conference in the first place.  (And I'm sorry, as someone observed (I think at Eschaton) you deal with the press corps you have not the one you wish you had.)  I was glad to see him backing off a bit today -- who knows, if he gets Gates and Crowley to come to the White House, it may turn into a public relations triumph.  But for the moment it seems a self-indulgent mistake.        

   

What Obama Can Learn From Seminary

I hate the American media - the Villagers, the DC press corp, whatever we need to call it to make it clear that I don't harbor ill will toward the countless real journalists who do good work and who are indispensible to a healthy society.  Sorry to paint with a broad brush, but your industry is dominated by a very few pathologically self-centered, intentionally ignorant and, quite frankly, vicious moral monsters who are going to destroy the whole thing for all of you.

I can only imagine that President Obama and most key members of his administration hate the media as well, since they all seem to be sincere, policy-oriented individuals who want to do the right thing.  Many Democrats in Congress and almost every "Democratic consultant" that float through the DC swamp are unfortunately of a kind with the worst the media has to offer.

But Brad at S,N! is absolutely right:

The thing about our elite press corps is that everyone knows they’re dumb as rocks and everyone knows they hate, hate, hate thinking about policy. OK, so you’ve got some Ezra Kleins and Jon Cohns who do smart, substantive work on health care. But for the average Jake Tapper or Marc Halperin out there, policy work is BOOO-RIIIIIIING.

My point is that Team Obama should understand this and work it into their strategy. If you want the press corps to pay attention to your arguments you have to make it interesting for them. If that means resorting to cheesy Reaganesque anecdotes, then so be it.

You pitch your policies to the press corps you have, not the press corps you’d like to have.

My homiletics professors would call this "exegeting the congregation."  Everyone in seminary knows that your average church is going to have a couple of really outstanding people, a fair amount of people who will just be around and do some things but otherwise have little impact on you or anything else, and then a proportionately sizable asshole contingent - people who are stupid, or insufferably self-righteous, power-hungry, nosy busybodies, proud know-nothings, those who shoot down every idea because it won't work or we already tried it, and those who combine all of the foregoing in one hideous monster that belongs to a church because the Devil won't have anything to do with them.

And that's who you have to reach with your sermons on Sunday morning.  They're the ones that are the public face of your church, the ones who will take whatever emphasis or program you may have and actually make it work or not.  The seminarians, then, can become one of them, can just phone it in and work with those who will produce something good, or they can try to find a way to effectively communicate even with the asshole contingent.  Or they can just say "Aw, hell no" and go become a network administrator for a web hosting company, but I realize not everyone will do that.

Obama is right to want to talk policy and to be serious.  And he's right to want to get his message out past and, if possible, around the media filter.  But if he wants to do that then he needs to use the tools at his disposal for that - OFA, blogs, even that damned Twitter malarkey.  If he is going to speak to a room full of dumb-as-rocks Villager "journalists," then he needs to exegete that congregation and find a way to manipulate their prejudices and habits so that they're forced into writing the stories that he wants.  The media is incredibly easy to manipulate; the GOP does it all the time and no one on their side is going to be receiving any genius grants.  It's harder for our side to do it, what with trying to tell the truth and all, but it can still be done, and it should be done.  It's as essential to governing this nation as it is distasteful, and Obama/Gibbs et. al need to just accept that and do it.

They've Finally Found Unassailable Arguments

Lisa in email pointed out the latest bit of absurdity from right wing religious zealots in Texas:

The Christian right is making a fresh push to force religion onto the school curriculum in Texas with the state's education board about to consider recommendations that children be taught that there would be no United States if it had not been for God. . .One of the panel, David Barton, founder of a Christian heritage group called WallBuilders, argues that the curriculum should reflect the fact that the US Constitution was written with God in mind including that "there is a fixed moral law derived from God and nature", that "there is a creator" and "government exists primarily to protect God-given rights to every individual".

I honestly have no idea how to counter this.  The claims being made by Barton and the others pushing this nonsense are so dumb, so inaccurate and so completely irrelevant to the study of American history that it's beyond my ability to refute them.

Consider this:

Barton, a former vice-chairman of the state's Republican party, said that Texas children should no longer be taught about democratic values but republican ones. "We don't pledge allegiance to the flag and the democracy for which it stands," he said.

What can one say?  There isn't a rational thought behind that statement.  Anyone who believe that the above makes any kind of coherent point at all doesn't possess sufficient mental dexterity to understand how ignorant and utterly absurd it is.

We say it's "indivisible" in the pledge too, dumbass, but I bet you were cheering Governor Goodhair  when he was prattling about secession last April.

Health Care Reform's Public Enemy #1: Rick Scott

Please watch this important film short; feel free to share it far and wide.

Via Collateral News.

That Word Doesn't Mean What You Think, Dumbass

Pituitary case and Sunday morning fellatio artist, David Gregory, defends his invitation to Mark Sanford, in which he promises Sanford's press secretary that by coming on Meet the Press, Sanford can "frame the conversation how you really want to . . .  and then move on."

Writing in defense of his journalistic bona fides to a Daily Kos blogger, Gregory writes: 

Thanks for the email. I wasn't promising a friendly forum. I was offering a fair forum to discuss his problems. I meant my forum allows him to have the time to discuss the situation in a fullsome way, to say what he wants and move on.

Skipping the obvious farce that is David Gregory and Meet the Press, I want to focus on the more serious issue, his butchering of the English language.  The word is spelled "fulsome" Stretch, and it doesn't mean "complete" or "exhaustive" as your context would seem to imply, but rather means excessively flattering, unctuous, oily compliments.  Although one alternative definition seems to describe both Gregory and Sanford to a tee -- "smug, self-serving earnestness."  

Jesus, the stupid indeed burns. 

One Small Step. . .

Forty years ago today, two human beings set foot on the Moon.  It was the first time anyone from our species had ever stood on soil not of this planet.

Without being able to provide any economic or scientific justification for it, I am firmly convinced that we need to go back to the Moon.  We need to build a permanent base there and then even tourist facilities.  We need to use the Moon as a launching point for Mars.  Or perhaps I should say that after sufficient time has elapsed for these activities to be in the reach of non-astronaut/non-billionaires, I need to go to the Moon and to Mars.

Walter Cronkite with Dennis Kucinich: For a Department of Peace

In September 2005, the late, great Walter Cronkite sat down with Rep. Dennis Kucinich to discuss a novel and, as yet, heartbreakingly little-explored approach to making our world a better place: create a Department of Peace. Watch and be inspired.

Sadly, the idea makes far too much sense to be a plausible goal for our violence-addicted culture, especially when you consider that many of our leaders have track records of slavish devotion to the makers of Things That Go Bang in the Night. And that said leaders themselves are, all too often, wealthy white male draft-dodgers with pneumatic Caymans accounts in need of constant feeding. But you never know--perhaps we can get Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, et alia, interested in the dove-breeding and butter-distributing business?

(H/T commenter atheist over at Roy Edroso's place.)

Making The Right Decision

You may have heard that the recent General Convention of The Episcopal Church passed a couple of resolutions about same-sex marriage and the role of homosexuals in the church.  You can read about it here and here, and this link points to a list of daily newsletters from the Convention; as these votes were the big news they figure prominently in most days' reports.

This Article Made My Day

The New York Times reports that a group of French workers won greater severance benefits from their employer, JLG, by threatening to blow up valuable industrial equipment.  And they totally weren't fucking around:

"On Wednesday, the JLG workers placed four of the company’s products — large platform cranes with a total value estimated at $352,400 — in a car park and surrounded them with gas cylinders and kindling."

The workers won an additional $42,000 each in severance pay.  I know as a lawyer I am not supposed to condone such things, but I wish U.S. workers would from time to time engage in or at least threaten to engage in the venerable practice of industrial sabotage to win better treatment from employers.  

[This by the way was my first blog post ever typed with slightly orange fingers due to Cheeto consumption -- well not actual Cheetos -- Utz Cheese Curls.  But close enough.  Washed down with sangria.  Just like all of the other sophisticated Washington lawyers do.]

Food Pantries

This morning I and a few of my fellow parishioners went to St. Mary's Episcopal Church in downtown Kansas City to prepare and serve the weekly meal.  It's an important food source for the few hundred people that come in, both from the meal and the bags of groceries distributed from the pantry.  I'm proud that my church - not even a full parish yet and the youngest in the diocese - has become the biggest supporter of the food services at St. Mary's - the oldest congregation in the diocese.  And I'm damned proud that my wife is the person leading the way.

It's an incredible building, with every window, every brick, every statue having a story of its own.  A book is being published that will guide you on a walking tour; if you're ever in KC shoot me an email and we'll do it together.  Also, every year the Rainbow Angels Guild of the church presents a dinner theatre called "The Haunting of St. Mary's," and yes, it is supposedly haunted by a former rector.  Being an Episcopalian is fun.

I helped in the pantry, preparing bags of groceries.  It's staffed by a woman one step removed from the streets, an incredible combination of savvy, willpower and compassion.  We made one type of bag for families, one for singles and one for the homeless, because they get the cans with the pop-tabs if we have them.  Everyone gets some peanut butter, some fruit, veggies, soups, even some cereal and granola bars this week.

The pantry consists of two small rooms.  There is another room that stretches the whole length of the sanctuary; it's less undercroft and more crawl space, but it used to provide a lot of storage space for food.  They even set up metal rollers so boxes of food could be shuttled back and forth quickly. 

This room used to provide such a space, but there's no food in it now.  The pantry is serving more people than ever and the food is just trickling in - the classic problem when the economy goes bad.  Episcopal Community Services, I was told, will serve over 1 million meals in the Kansas City metro this year.  And of course there are other groups and missions trying to do their part as well. 

People are hungry.  We need health care reform, we really do, and we need to address global climate change and reform labor laws and all the rest.  But in addition to all that, people are hungry, and America's food pantries are running dry.  So if you can, give.  I don't care if you give to a church or the American Alliance of Stone-Cold Atheists.  Just pick up a few extra cans at the store - add $1 or $2 to your total costs - and give it to someone who's hungry. 

Sorry if this is preachy

Saturday Morning Musings

Still lying in bed, but always productive.

- I missed this the other day at Pandagon, having read the post about Vegas but not really looked at the picture with any care.  This is actually where I got married.  No, seriously.  Over twenty-one years ago, which I am betting may be the longest single marriage to ever emerge from this place. And yes, I got married there before Michael Jordan.  I get tired of that dude always emulating me.

- Our friend low tech cyclist inquired as to my thoughts on an Employee Free Choice Act without card check.  Although I like the card check component for reasons I've written about earlier, federal labor law is so flawed when it comes to protecting union advocates that it would not be hard to improve it substantially even in the absence of card check.  Stricter penalties, quicker elections, limitations on captive audience meetings -- there are a host of things that can be done to put some teeth in the law where presently none exist.  If labor can get three-quarters of a loaf, it should grab it.  The most important provision of all, even more important than card check, is the requirement for mandatory arbitration of first contracts.  Having been involved in a couple of successful organizing campaigns that got nowhere when the time came to get a first contract, I would really welcome this provision.  Wait for the employers to start going after this hammer and tongs.  But it may be too late -- they got their way on card check and that should be the maximum that the Dems have to give away.

- Reading the work of young right wingers is sometimes very strange.  I happened upon this essay by short-lived Washington Post blogger Ben Domenech the other day -- at least I'm clear that this wasn't plaigarized -- and was left mouth agape by its contempt for the individual choices that people make with respect to personal decisions like marrying and having children.  The message from Ben is a simple one -- breed white people, breed, damn you!  And women -- get back in the home now!  There's a weird nostalgia here for an era that Ben never lived through and a completely ahistorical sense of what the times for which he longs were actually like.  

It's actually a little difficult to unpack all of the wrong here, in large part because it is an incoherent, rambling mess.  (Why did anyone think this guy could write professionally?  More wingnut welfare I guess.)  A couple of things stand out -- one, this all too common phenomenon among right wing men of needing to pay homage to the manly men of yesteryear.  There is something pathetic about this generation of keyboard commandos and their fetishization of things military and quasi-military.  Really, if you boys want to join the military or be a police officer or fire fighter, I'm sure opportunity abounds.  I would point out a couple of things -- all of these people are government employees.  Even the brave astronauts Ben so loves -- the heroes of "The Right Stuff" to whom he rather childishly pays homage worked on the government dime.  (Ben also doesn't seem to understand that Tom Wolfe is a conservative, which is also amazing.)  Indeed, the military is the ultimate socialist institution, with a leveling conformity at the heart of its ethic.  (I won't even mention that 30% or so of the men of the greatest generation were union members or that many of them relied on government programs to get them through the Great Depression -- that would just be too depressing for Ben to contemplate.)

What really irritates him, infuriates him seemingly, is the unwillingness of his peers to get married young and start popping out babies.  He sees later marriage ages and smaller families not as the assertion of personal autonomy, but rather the road to oblivion -- as if an America of 250 million or 200 million people would be a disaster.  Severe demographic declines can be a problem in terms of maintaining a social welfare state -- Italy, Japan and to some degree Spain are all faced with issues in this regard.  And what do those three countries have in common?  Despite their progressive, democratic faces, these are three of the more male chauvinistic cultures left in the industrialized world.  Women today, oddly enough, are not anxious to have children in countries in which the men will not do their share of the child rearing and housework.  On the other hand, countries like Sweden and France, with extremely family friendly policies and a more egalitarian culture have basically maintained fertility rates that are comparable to those of the United States. 

As with most right wingers today, Domenech is not interested in policy approaches to this issue, he would rather fulminate about our fallen nature.  And this seems to be the right wing blogosphere in a nutshell -- beyond tax cuts and bombing people, they are not really interested in policy -- certainly not in politics as a means of crafting effective policies.  Rather, politics is a means of conveying an attitude, of being a method to show your antagonism towards people you just don't like.  Sarah Palin has become the exemplar of this -- she is a void in terms of policy, a walking embodiment of ignorant arrogance or arrogant ignorance if you prefer, someone whose entire political being is about not being an educated, liberal, coastal dweller.  This politics of resentment has been rather potent for several decades in the U.S., but seems to have lost its allure for all but a small rump of the populace -- maybe 20-30% of the electorate.  For the increasing majority of us, this is a baffling, nihilistic brand of politics.

I really dislike the politics of right wingers.  However, I can't imagine devoting much time to how my life decisions or policy preferences make them feel.  I have my own life to figure out, and it's complicated enough.  The goals that l would like to see in society -- universal health care, drastic reductions in poverty, greater worker empowerment, an economy that is geared to the sustainable long-term greater good -- none of these things spurs me to disparage the personal choices of my opponents. If they want to marry young, have large families, go to church twice a week, live in the exurbs, hunt for sport, and eschew the pleasures of big city life, so the fuck what -- good for them.   But one senses a deep insecurity in the other side, as if they know that the vision they are holding out -- welcome to the 1950s ladies! -- just isn't that compelling to people and they fear that in the proverbial "marketplace of ideas" that they don't have a chance.            

Beautifully Said

Actress Rita Hayworth points out that she donated her car’s steel bumpers to the war effort; note Hayworth's crisp outfit, jaunty brooch, and prettily-curled hair.
(Photo from the National Archives.)

She's probably too modest to mention this herself, so I'm going to tell you about our own Lisa Simeone's winning column/blog, Glamor Girl, over at Baltimore STYLE Magazine. In today's piece, Lisa discusses the importance, now more than ever, of creating and appreciating beauty--including gorgeous fashion. I encourage you to go read the whole thing and show her some comment love:

Asking, “what’s the point of fashion?” betrays a profound ignorance. What’s the point of music? Of art? Of literature? With so many more “serious” concerns in an often brutal world, why waste time on anything as trivial or as frivolous as creativity? What’s the point of beauty? Of joy? Of aesthetics?

I would argue that it’s precisely because the world can be such a cruel, barbaric place that we need beauty, we need pleasure, we need self-expression. We need the dreams and fantasies of designers made incarnate.

And it’s not all just a Madison Avenue conspiracy, another inane theory floating around out there. Maasai teenagers in Kenya don’t primp and preen in front of car mirrors in the bush, comparing their red shukas and trying to one-up each other in adornments, because they’re being pressured by ruthless advertisers. Their sisters and mothers don’t spend hours and days fabricating intricate beaded jewelry because some corporate titan came along and urged them to do it.

Oh, and my favorite—the pseudo-feminist argument that fashion is a method of oppressing women. As a proud loudmouthed feminist, I’m particularly rankled by that one. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian women had for the first time in their lives the chance to buy beautiful, lacy, feminine bras. Yes, bras. Middle-class and blue-collar women would save up for months, forgoing other needs, just to buy one beautiful bra. Why? Because Western capitalists were trying to oppress them? No, because they craved beauty.

I couldn't agree more--Hooray for beauty, hooray for creativity, and down with wanton destruction and violence, I say.  Go read!

A Song for your next Abortion Party

"We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives" - Los Campesinos

I was amused by the "Abortion Party" story controversy discussed by Amanda the other day.  The story itself on Alternet struck me as an amalgam of fact and creative writing.  Bad creative writing at that, featuring among other absurdities a knowing three year old saying something implausible -- and trust me I've had a knowing three year old, but this dialogue does not ring true. 

The long and short of it is that the story depicts a young college student throwing a house party to raise money needed for an abortion.  As Amanda points out, such fund raisers are not unusual among uninsured people in lots of parts of the country.  But evidently doing so for an abortion is either 1) murderous; or 2) incomprehensibly tacky.  It's just not done.  

Of course the righties got their granny panties in a knot (your humble blogger joined in the commenting fun) and depicted this as a post-abortion bacchanale in which fetus tartare was served as an appetizer.  The alleged feminists at Salon decried the aforementioned tackiness and worried that such ill-bred women will spoil choice for the rest of us due to this self-evident lack of seriousness.  

Look, there have been somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million abortions in the U.S. since Rove v. Wade was decided.  I have seen statistics showing that between 30 and 40 million different women in the U.S. have had abortions.  Approximately 41% of women in my age bracket have had abortions.  Isn't it time to stop pretending that nice women don't have abortions?  Can't we acknowledge the likelihood that our mothers, sisters, daughters, wives or lovers have had an abortion and that it is not a shameful thing?  More importantly, can't we acknowledge that for many this was not a devastating event filled with trauma and regret.  Because, I've got to say, that's the case with the women I know.  Salon women --either step up or go fuck Will Saletan.     .