Cogitamus

She Apparently Didn't Take Kindly To Being Marooned On An Ice Floe

McClatchy Headline: "Who should Democrats fear the most?  Maybe it's Grandma" noting that the 65+ age group tilts GOP by 48-33 as the 2010 midterms approach.

Open thread.

Negative Externalities

Those of us in the reality based community, i.e. people who think that chanting "drill baby, drill" isn't an energy policy, continue to be frustrated by the fact that the true cost of our carbon-based energy economy are simply not taken into account by a vast swath of the population.  One can only hope that these "negative externalities" have been driven home with some potency in the last few weeks by the corpses of 29 dead miners and what now appears likely to be an environmentally devastating oil spill in the Gulf. 

I would like to think that coastal states with significant amounts of tourism -- I'm talking to you Florida -- might think again about the safety of offshore oil exploration. 

And I also hope that some people on our side may think a bit about the NIMBYism that is holding up alternatives.   

We've spent nearly four decades knowing that we had a problem and still progress has been almost non-existent.  It's time to make this happen -- even if Huckleberry Graham's feelings have to get hurt in the process.    

What is this Freedom of which you Speak?

"Power in the Darkness" - Tom Robinson Band

Matt has a post today noting that although Republicans and Tea Baggers are rather big on invoking "freedom" one is generally at a loss to find instances when they actually embrace genuine freedom.  What you see, when you sift through the dreck, is a group of people who value the "freedom" to stiff their employees, avoid paying taxes, pollute the environment, tell racist and sexist jokes without fear of being rebuked, and pinch the asses of the secretary/waitress/stewardess they feel entitled to have waiting on them, without legal recourse. 

Because people who love freedom would certainly not embrace Arizona's "Papers Please Act of 2010."  Nor could they ever stand for something as truly repugnant to individual liberty and human dignity as this abomination of a law, which may be about the most offensive thing I can recall any legislature doing during my adult life.

Anyway, the accompanying song (circa 1978) lays out two contrasting images of "freedom" -- and pretty much nails the right wing use of the word -- as well as anything I could think of -- and it does it with cowbell.  

The Empowerfulment Concern Troll

Pleasure is not a zero-sum pursuit. The skeptical reaction to the Boobquake has centered a lot on the fact (and I'm paraphrasing) that men like looking at scantily clad women, so obviously this simply perpetuates patriarchy. I see this attitude a lot when it comes to ladies who wanna be naked: Erykah Badu shouldn't have gotten naked in her video because men are titillated by her nudity. That's not her fault, and it doesn't mean she can't use her body to express herself. Not everyone will get it, but when does that ever happen?

 Especially with boundary-pushing? It's a concern trolling technique that really gets to people. Oddly enough, it tends to put a lid on female sexual expression in the end. The collective clitoris will never be avenged. I just don't believe in revenge (especially when the score is spread across generations. *I* have not been oppressed for tens of thousands of years - just 27). An age of matriarchy would give women a boost, but male oppression wouldn't. Schemes of supremacy do not liberate or avenge, when all it takes to "win" is to come out the least badly.

Jan Brewer is the new Katherine Harris: on the Arizona bill and the GOP's newest voter disenfranchisement effort

I sensed--make that, I knew--there had to be something more to the Arizona "Papers please!" bill than that which the media were reporting, which is to say, the racism angle and the concomitant immigrants-are-fighting-back angle, that classic binary (and delightfully simplistic) narrative of which our newsfolk are so regrettably enamored. I also knew I wasn't alone in my sense of being ill at ease with this whole ugly mess.

(My discomfort with the Arizona bill is rooted not only in my being an immigrant myself--albeit a blonde, blue-eyed one--but also in the fact that I speak Spanish and live in Florida, where entrenched Old White Dude attitudes regularly clash with the heterogeneous, multilingual reality of the state's populace. Then there's this: I'm married to an Italian-American who to this day, despite being a law-abiding and socially responsible citizen, continues to face a dispiriting and disgusting amount of...extra scrutiny, shall we say, because his name ends in a vowel and his black hair and deep tan give the less-enlightened authorities pause to suspect him of doing something he hasn't or being someone he's not. So, fair complexion notwithstanding, I do get it. I observe the manifestations of xenophobia and racism all the time; indeed, I've experienced the former in a more personal way than you might imagine.)

As it turns out, there is quite a bit more going on behind the illegal-foreigners-are-causing-crime-waves fearmongering--and the attendant façade that is Governor Brewer's bill--than meets the eye. Considerably more. And as he has done countless times before, Greg Palast nails down the sickening specifics (emphasis mine):

Don't be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.

I don't buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.

What's new here is not the politicians' fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote -- and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.

So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution? No, not one.

Which raises the question: were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?

The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western mesas looking for these illegal voters. "We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost 2 years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case." This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.

Iglesias' jurisdiction was next door, in New Mexico, but he told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.

"They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments," Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.

But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as "Prop 200," which required proof of citizenship to register. It is important to see the Republicans' latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party's desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box. [...]

State Senator Russell Pearce, the Republican sponsor of the latest ID law, gave away his real intent, blocking the vote, when he said, "There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country." How many? Pearce's PR flak told me, five million. All Democrats, too. Again, I asked Pearce's office to give me their the names and addresses from their phony registration forms. I'd happily make a citizens arrest of each one, on camera. Pearce didn't have five million names. He didn't have five. He didn't have one.

The horde of five million voters who swam the Rio Grande just to vote for Obama was calculated on a Republican website extrapolating from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had registered to vote: they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law.

The illegal voters, "wetback" welfare moms, and alien job thieves are just GOP website wet-dreams, but their mythic PR power helps the party's electoral hacks chop away at voter rolls and civil rights with little more than a whimper from the Democrats.

Indeed, one reason, I discovered, that some Democrats are silent is that they are in on the game themselves. In New Mexico, Democratic Party bosses tossed away ballots of Pueblo Indians to cut native influence in party primaries.

But what’s wrong with requiring folks to prove they’re American if the want to vote and live in America? The answer: because the vast majority of perfectly legal voters and residents who lack ID sufficient for Ms. Brewer and Mr. Pearce are citizens of color, citizens of poverty.

According to a study by prof. Matt Barreto, of Washington State University, minority citizens are half as likely as whites to have the government ID. The numbers are dreadfully worse when income is factored in.

Go read the whole thing.

Also at litbrit.

Epistemic Closure 1, Jonah Goldberg 0

At the end of a long post disputing the notion that conservatives have fallen into the epistemic closure trap, Lucianne's Not-So-Little Boy says the following:

A friend swaps the Left for the South in Noah [Millman]'s analysis, and it works pretty well:

The hard Left does have a distinct history and culture; that culture is substantially oppositional; and the Democratic Party is dominated by the hard Left in a way that it has not been before.

As Matt Yglesias says, "there are a lot of liars and idiots in the world, and subjecting them to scorn and mockery is part of what you’ve got to do in life."  It's hard to count the number of ways this synopsis is actually mind-bogglingly stupid, and demonstrates the very thesis that Goldberg is trying to rebut.

The first thing that's laughable is the notion that any group is even capable of 'dominating' the Democratic Party.  Even during that brief time when there were 60 Senators in the Dem caucus, a Nelson or Lieberman could demand his pound of flesh by threatening to pull his support for a bill.  What sort of 'domination' is even possible in that environment?

Next is the idea that the culture of the 'hard Left' is substantially oppositional.  I suppose there must be some splinter 'hard Left' that meets that description, but you'd need a microscope to find them.  The Left of the blogosphere, or of the labor movement, or of anything else I can think of, wants to get stuff done to solve the world's problems and make people's lives better.

Third, and most tellingly obvious, is the list of stuff that the left would actually like to get done, and would have done while we had 60 Senators, if we indeed dominated the Democratic Party.  Single payer health care, fully auctionable cap and trade, a big 'second stimulus' with a hell of a lot of infrastructure investment and aid to state governments, some serious tax hikes on the ultra-rich (and increased enforcement so that they have to actually pay what they owe), card check, net neutrality legislation, and much more stringent financial regulation than is being considered now, just for starters.  Plus we'd be winding down the war in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq.

That's what a 'left-dominated' Democratic Party would have done while it had 60 Senators.  Plus it would be ready to take advantage of a GOP filibuster on this afternoon's motion to proceed on financial regulation to pass, by majority vote and a ruling from Biden, a rules change banning filibusters of motions to proceed.

That Goldberg is so blind as to believe his friend's comment has any connection to reality, let alone a shred of perceptiveness, is itself an excellent example of the epistemic closure that Goldberg claims isn't happening.  It's not like the desire of the American left to actually accomplish shit is a deeply hidden secret, nor is the enormous gulf between what we want and what the Democratic Party is willing to try to pass.  And yet he thinks his friend is saying something insightful.

They tell each other myths about the left (and the world in general, but that's beyond the scope of this post), believe them, and think they see.

Good Lord, Is Tom Friedman Really THAT Stupid??

Apparently so.

Other, better bloggers than I have already jumped on the idiocy of Friedman's conceit that the Tea Partiers could, if they chose, widen their movement into a 'Green Tea Party' that would support a $10/barrel "Patriot Fee" on imported oil to reduce the deficit.

But even aside from any connection with the Teabaggers, Friedman's idea is still just plain dumb.

1) It's a multibillion-dollar gift to domestic oil producers.  Haven't we talked about this enough since 1980 that this idea would have sunk into Friedman's consciousness by now?

If you raise the price of foreign oil by $10 per barrel (by tax, cartel, or whatever), what on earth does Friedman think will happen to the price of domestic oil?  Light crude is currently trading at $85 a barrel.  If the price of imported crude jumps to $95/barrel for any reason, does Friedman think domestic producers will continue to charge only $85?  Not for a millisecond.  The market sets the price of oil, the market just went up $10, and domestic producers will of course collect that extra $10 on their oil as well.

At 5 million barrels per day, 365 days a year, that's a free gift of $18 billion a year to domestic oil producers, who aren't exactly hurting to begin with. 

Of course, that's the sort of welfare that the Teabag crowd never seems to have any problem with, so I suppose it does make a perverse sort of sense from a strictly political point of view.

2) Energy independence isn't the same thing as progress on climate change.  Reducing energy use would make us more energy independent, but the converse is false.  Despite this, the equating of the two ideas seems to have gained great currency in the pundit class lately. 

The problem is that America already has an abundant but extremely dirty energy source in coal.  We could achieve energy independence by moving to electric cars ultimately powered by coal-fired power plants, but the world would keep on getting warmer.

Billing climate change legislation as energy-independence legislation is politically dangerous.  There are a bunch of 'centrist' Dems who will vote for climate change legislation if they have to, but they'd love an excuse to cut and run.  Selling the bill as energy independence legislation would give them cover to make the bill about energy independence, while gutting its effectiveness as climate change legislation.

Friedman seems to have a ridiculously idealized notion of American politics: that somehow the right idea, or the right way to sell the right idea, will manage to win everybody (or at least some key bloc) over, and it'll be clear sailing from there.  But it's not at all like that.

The Eternal Teabagger

No, I'm not referring to a tantric sexual practice that leaves one participant with blue balls and the other with TMJ.  I am merely stating that teabaggers, like the poor, have seemingly always been among us.  Why angry embittered white people are now being treated like both a novelty and a major mass movement is beyond me.

Rick Perlstein, who has immersed himself in the ugliness behind both the Goldwater movement and Richard Nixon's manipulation of the "Silent Majority" (perhaps they were silent because their mouths, too, were full), had a very good piece in the New York Times recently in which he argues persuasively that there is nothing particularly new about this phenomenon nor the motivations behind it.  (The fact that Rick was one of thirteen experts asked for their opinion on the subject -- including the execrable Amity Shlaes, who is to history what Bernie Madoff was to finance -- suggests the Times doesn't understand Rick's point.)

A follow up news article the next day had a wonderfully representative quote from Richard Gilbert, a 72-year old white guy -- a retired former Air force officer and teacher:

I do believe we are responsible for the widow and the orphan, but I think there is a welfare class that lives for having children and receiving payment from the government for having those children.

So here you've got a guy who is on Social Security, covered by Medicare, collecting a military pension, probably also eligible for VA benefits, who probably received GI bill benefits, who collected a government pay check of one kind or another for his entire life and he's out there fighting big government and socialism.  A guy who has been firmly attached to the government teat for at least a half a century.  But all you need to know is revealed in his quote, a restatement of a classic Sixties trope, one that helped make Ronald Reagan president -- there are welfare queens among us wantonly breeding and collecting welfare checks and driving Cadillacs -- and young bucks buying steaks with food stamps-- while hard working white people -- even white people who are retired and collecting their own government checks are hard working -- support them. And we all know what color the welfare queen and the young buck are, don't we?

Facts do not matter to these people.  The fact that Welfare Reform made impossible long term use of the former AFDC program, that it pays meager benefits and represents a minute part of the budget -- especially when compared say to the care and feeding of old white guys, especially old white veterans -- just doesn't matter. 

The news media needs to wake up to the fact that this movement represents nothing new, it is ugly and retrograde in its motivations, and is utterly incoherent in its positions.  It's the pure racist id of the society.  And when these people talk about taking "their country back" we should all be clear on who they think are taking it back from.

Time to drink here in Sin City.   

 

Talk Amongst Yourselves

"How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" - Del Lords

"I Play the Drums" - Del Lords (Another one for Corvus.)

The Del Lords burned brightly and briefly in the mid-1980s.  Like another great roots-rock band, the Blasters, they never really got the attention that they deserved.  They were a terrific live band -- I saw them in 1984 and it was an incredibly fun show. 

I had the pleasure of breaking bread last night with bigbadwolf and, oh yeah, having a few drinks as well.  A good time was had by all -- and my head only hurts slightly as a result.  Hopefully he and his family will enjoy what looks to be a splendid day here in DC.

I will try and post tonight, although I've got to pack to head to Las Vegas -- it's business people, business.  In the meantime, what's going on with you? 

   

The Easter Sunday earthquake in Mexico: whither the American media?

Photo via Border Angels

Yesterday, April 19, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger asked President Obama to declare a federal emergency in California, where an Easter Sunday 7.2 earthquake in the Baja area of Mexico has wrought an estimated $91.3 million in damages stateside.

This figure is sure to climb; furthermore, as of this writing, I've been unable to locate even a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the damages on the Mexican side, where the devastation is widespread and horrific, even as the fatalities are, thankfully, few in number.

Forgive me--I know they've all been busy this month, and I mean no snark here--but where on earth is our media on this?

People are suffering, and aid is desperately needed! According to reader and friend to this blog, Minstrel Boy, who lives in the area, there are more than 50,000 people in Mexicali who are now without homes. Writing at Group News Blog, Minstrel Boy reports:

Aftershocks are close to continuous. We don't even notice most of them. Some of them are downright troubling though.

Food, what we have, is moving well. Special thanks to the Firefighters of Calexico and El Centro. I know that their job description is to be the hero when it's what is called for, but these guys are special. Viva Los Bomberos. [...]

Last night, we had a rain. Nothing horrible. We almost never get that kind of rain. It's a desert after all, but, the rain reminded us all that shelter needs are next on the triage list. In a few short weeks the temperatures here will be topping 100° on a consistent basis. The homeless will need shelter from that I'm searching for things to link, but, I can't find any. We are still mostly the forgotten disaster.

Please help if you can, readers; there has been precious little national media coverage of the disaster, but the need is, nonetheless, real and pressing and staggering in its enormity. Even a little money will go a long way in the hands of The First United Methodist Church of El Centro, who've ramped up their food bank efforts. And of course, the aid of the brave Border Angels is needed more than ever.

For updates, please stay tuned to the Group News Blog, where Minstrel Boy, Maggie Jochild, and other wonderful writers continue in the tradition of fearless truth-telling-in-blogging established by the late Steve Gilliard.

The First United Methodist Church of El Centro

Border Angels

Hope and Change

One of the difficulties of struggling to post a few times a week is that ideas come and go, bits of posts get written and abandoned, and weeks sometimes pass between reading something and having a chance to react to it -- often to the point where a response no longer seems worthwhile.

Yglesias has written a couple of things in recent weeks that set my mind racing -- one was his piece, much emulated, about the books that most influenced his thinking.  Another was his semi-triumphal piece in the wake of the passage of health care reform arguing essentially that it represented the final triumph of liberalism or as he puts it "the crux of the matter is that progressive efforts to expand the size of the welfare state are basically done."  Implicit in the comment is that efforts to roll back the welfare state will be unavailing.  Instead, we will be arguing mainly about the relative distribution of the resources of the welfare state between say the young and the elderly and various technocratic tweaks to improve the running of the ship of state.

It put me in mind of another triumphalist bit of writing that followed another epochal event -- a much more cosmic one at that -- the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, which inspired Francis Fukayama's "The End of History and the Last Man."  In that 1989 essay (later expanded to book form) Fukayama argued that liberal, free-market democracies represented the endpoint of man's ideological evolution, a universal and final form of human government.  My reaction to Fukayama's essay at the time was that it reflected a far too cold-blooded and rational assessment of humanity and its development.  It failed -- in much the same way the far more banal and mediocre musings of Thomas Friedman throughout the 1990s did -- to really understand the degree to which hate is an animating emotion for much of humanity and that people are far more attached to their hatreds than they are to the idea of having cell phones and blackberries and laptops and efficient markets.   

Similarly I fear that Yglesias doesn't understand that the battle to fully institutionalize the welfare state in the U.S. is only beginning.  After a thirty year retreat, liberals have had a significant win -- but for the moment, that's all it is.  As has been apparent for at least a year, the forces of reaction in this country are prepared to fight on the most savage of terms to destroy the Obama presidency and to discredit the notion of liberal, activist government, even of the most moderate nature.  I remain worried, notwithstanding my hope in the long term demographic changes waiting to take hold in this country, that this onslaught, aided and abetted by a criminally complicit or negligent news media, coupled with the current economic crisis, will deeply undermine the standing of liberalism with younger white voters, and in the process render impossible the kinds of decisive political victories necessary to sustain and expand the welfare state.  

Which leads me back to Matt's other post -- about our decisive influences.  One of mine for the last fifteen to twenty years has been the historian Tony Judt, who has written extensively about Europe with a particular focus on French intellectuals and the left. Judt has been a model of a genuine public intellectual, a man of the democratic left who has always been willing to put truth before ideology.  In addition to his scholarly writings, Judt has written extensively for the New York Review of Books and has sought a broad audience for his work without compromising its intellectual rigor.

Judt is suffering from ALS and his time appears likely to be short.  He is unable to breathe without the aid of a machine and is largely paralyzed.  Thus, it was with some surprise that I saw a new essay by him in the current version of NYRB, which serves also as the introduction to his soon to be published book "Ill Fares the Land."  In this essay, Judt confronts the state of our public affairs in the United States (and to a lesser extent England and Europe) and makes the case that those of us who wish to make meaningful change here must do so in the name of social democracy and must, in the process, defeat the ideology of the extreme free market that has dominated our collective discourse for the last thirty years.  Judt understands the desperate moral stakes of this battle and knows that it is not going to be won by a resort to technocratic approaches.  In other words, Judt grasps what I think Matt is missing -- we are going to have to fight tooth and nail for a worthwhile welfare state and for institutionalizing the principles that will render such a welfare state permanently unassailable.

The Libertarian Pathology

I remain amazed by the degree to which libertarians are taken seriously in certain parts of the liberal blogosphere.  Oh sure, I guess compared to their foaming at the mouth right wing brethren they seem respectable -- they've gone to good schools, can string together a coherent set of sentences, and spew a lot less vitriol that their fellow travelers.  They won't call you "morans" and won't write that most complete of right wing sentences - "also."  But in the end, the Reason magazine set espouse a philosophy so juvenile, so at odds with life as it's actually lived, I really can't imagine engaging in a dialogue with these folks.  There's something about their absolute lack of empathy and imagination that just stuns me.

The illustrative piece that's making the rounds is by Jacob Hornberger extolling the highwater mark of freedom -- America in 1880.  No, seriously.  Okay, others have pointed out-- rightly and obviously -- that 1880 wasn't exactly the golden age of freedom for women, who were forty years away from the franchise; or blacks, who were recently freed, but heading towards a violent and systematic disenfranchisement that would last nearly another century; or Native Americans, who literally hovered on the brink of extinction; or Chinese immigrants, who were subject to periodic pogroms and hatreds so profound that they resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.   Libertarians are by definition white guys.  Even the women.  When any of them are magically transported back to the golden age of freedom known as the "Gilded Age" they are karmically incarnated as white men -- no doubt with abundant side burns, copious bellies, and pocket watches.   

Now I know a bit about the period in question and can't really imagine anyone waxing nostalgic for it, nor can I see how anyone of sound mind could characterize it as an epoch of freedom in bloom -- well unless I was a railroad or steel magnate or a Wall Street titan.  And therein lies the rub -- all of these little 21st century Galts must imagine that they would be sitting at J.P. Morgan's right hand or buying steel companies along side Andrew Carnegie or crushing railroad competitors with Jay Gould.  Clearly none of them picture themselves in the lives that even most white men were living at the time -- laying rails and pounding spikes, mining coal, struggling on failing farms, laboring in the inferno of the steel mills -- in a word, working with their hands and their backs under the control of either corporate power or at the mercy of markets and monetary policy designed to their detriment.  

I seriously wonder if Hornberger knows anything about 1880.  (By the way, I was shocked to see that the guy is a middle aged lawyer and former military member -- I assumed based on this piece that he must have been 23 and in his first "job.")  The American economy was still reeling from the "Long Depression" triggered by the Panic of 1873, the longest period of economic contraction in American history -- (65 months versus the 43 months of contraction during the Great Depression).  Another recession would follow in 1882, lasting for 38 months, and still another in 1893-94, which lasted for 17 months.  Farmers suffered brutally during this period, workers were subject to massive wage cuts, strikes were suppressed by a combination of private and government sanctioned violence, union leaders were jailed, political radicals executed.

Violence was a central feature of the culture of the era.  President Garfield would be assassinated in 1881 -- following Lincoln's death in 1865, and with McKinley''s to follow in 1901 -- three Presidents murdered in thirty-six years.  Paramilitary groups, such as the "White League" perpetrated atrocities like the Colfax Massacre as part of a systematic campaign of violence against Black Americans in the South.   Workers who asserted their rights via strikes would be met time and time again with violence and murder -- during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket Affair of 1886, the Homestead Strike of 1892, and the Pullman Strike of 1894 for example.  The systematic expulsion of American Indians from their lands would continue unabated, climaxing in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.

I could go on and on I suppose -- but you get the point.  

The Global Food Security Act, S.384, unfairly benefits Big Biotech and must not, as it stands, be passed

Its name alone makes it seem like a wonderful and much-needed initiative: The Global Food Security Act. What could possibly be bad about working toward eradicating hunger on a world-wide basis? Well, here's what's bad about it: the Global Food Security Act, S.384, contains billions of dollars in giveaways--yes, that's billions--to Monsanto and other biotech giants who are in the business of producing, and then patenting, genetically modified crops, aka GMO's. (Background on the downsides of GMO crops may be found here; a brief summary of Monsanto's behavior as corporate "citizens" and its various legal entanglements is here.)

Here's what the excellent blog Food Freedom has to say (emphasis mine):

[SAN FRANCISCO and JOHANNESBURG] — Experts, scientists and advocates from around the world petitioned the U.S. Senate today in a concerted attempt to strip what they term a “stealth corporate giveaway” embedded in a foreign aid bill which is expected to hit the Senate floor soon. The “Global Food Security Act” (S.384), sponsored by Senators Casey (D-PA) and Lugar (R-IN), is intended to reform aid programs to focus on longer-term agricultural development, and restructure aid agencies to better respond to crises. While lauding the bill’s intentions, the petitioners object to a clause earmarking one agricultural technology (genetically modified – GM crops) for potentially billions of dollars in federal funding. $7.7 billion in U.S. funds are associated with the bill and no other farming methods or technologies are mentioned.

Monsanto has lobbied more than any other interest in support of this bill. The company is one of two or three dominant corporations in the increasingly concentrated biotechnology industry likely to benefit from the new research funding stream as well as from future profits from their patented products (both seeds and pesticides).

Today, scientists, development experts spanning a dozen countries, and 100+ groups representing anti-hunger, family farm, farmworker, consumer and sustainable agriculture delivered a letter urging the Senate to reject the “Global Food Security Act” until the bill is made technology-neutral. Their specific concern: language in the bill that would amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to read “Agricultural research carried out under this Act shall . . . include research on biotechnological advances appropriate to local ecological conditions, including gm technology.”

“The bill’s focus on genetically modified technology simply makes no sense,” stated Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, Senior Scientist at Pesticide Action Network. “Independent science tells us that genetically modified (GM) crops have neither increased yield nor reduced hunger in the world. The most credible and comprehensive assessments of agriculture to date say that if we want to end global poverty and hunger, we’ll need to focus on increasing the biodiversity and ecological resilience of small-scale farming systems.”

If you follow the Food Freedom link, and I hope you will, you'll find an impassioned letter to the Senate--the signatories of which go on for pages--concluding thus:

As scientists and anti-hunger, religious, family farming, sustainable agriculture, environmental and consumer groups, we believe farmers and communities working with scientists—not Congress—should identify what technologies are most appropriate locally and what research is needed to meet socially and environmentally sustainable development goals. We ask that the mandate for GM crop research be stricken, eliminating Section 202 of the Global Food Security Act. This will keep agricultural research funding under the Foreign Assistance Act appropriately focused on the priorities and local conditions of small-scale farmers.

Please oppose S. 384 until the bill is made technology-neutral.

I urge readers to contact their senators too--simply go here--and tell them to oppose the bill until it is made technology neutral. Thank you, as ever.

[Full disclosure: as most readers are aware, my husband Robert owns and operates a family farm that grows organic and hydroponic vegetables. He is proving that it can be done--and done sustainably, responsibly, and cost-effectively--while using technology to conserve water and tap alternative energy sources. As opposed to using technology to damage and destroy biodiversity and, ultimately, if the use of patented GMO seeds continues unabated, to control the world's food supply.]

BREAKING: President Obama orders hospitals to grant same-sex couples visitation rights

Oh my goodness, I dearly hope that this is a sign of things to come.  Because I've long supported marriage equality, and I'm upset that it's taking so long for for gay friends and family members who love each other to be able to enjoy the same rights that Robert and I--and other married heterosexual couples--take for granted.  And as for Don't Ask; Don't Tell, well, even conservative generals agree with me on that one--it's a hurtful, hateful policy, and it needs to go.

Still.  Bravo, President Obama. As we used to yell at the Gators: First and ten--do it again!

President Obama on Thursday signed a memorandum requiring hospitals to allow gays and lesbians to have non-family visitors and to grant their partners medical power of attorney.

The president ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to prohibit discrimination in hospital visitation. The memo is scheduled to be made public Friday morning, according to an administration official and another source familiar with the White House decision.

An official said the new rule will affect any hospital that receives Medicare or Medicaid funding.

The decision injects the president squarely into the debate over gay marriage by attempting to end the common practice by many hospitals of insisting that only family members by blood or marriage be allowed to visit patients.

UPDATE: Pam Spaulding has posted the White House memo, which begins thus:

There are few moments in our lives that call for greater compassion and companionship than when a loved one is admitted to the hospital. In these hours of need and moments of pain and anxiety, all of us would hope to have a hand to hold, a shoulder on which to lean -- a loved one to be there for us, as we would be there for them.

Yet every day, all across America, patients are denied the kindnesses and caring of a loved one at their sides -- whether in a sudden medical emergency or a prolonged hospital stay. Often, a widow or widower with no children is denied the support and comfort of a good friend. Members of religious orders are sometimes unable to choose someone other than an immediate family member to visit them and make medical decisions on their behalf. Also uniquely affected are gay and lesbian Americans who are often barred from the bedsides of the partners with whom they may have spent decades of their lives -- unable to be there for the person they love, and unable to act as a legal surrogate if their partner is incapacitated.

Go read the whole thing.  Wow.

Open thread: The view from my window

Yes, I am a very lucky girl indeed.  That's a typical Gulf Coast sunset, as seen from the living room window of my apartment in downtown St. Petersburg.  I actually sent this image to Andrew Sullivan for his ongoing photo series; thus far, it hasn't made the cut.  Then, while reading comments to Sir C's post below, Prup's mention of the proximity of our local team's stomping grounds reminded me of this pretty shot, and I thought, Hell, I can just post it right here in the blogospheric nerve center so our own readers can enjoy it.

Within the shadowy skyline of buildings, slightly right of center as you're looking at it, you can see the dome of Tropicana Field, where our fabulous Rays are playing some very fine baseball this season (or so I'm told on a daily basis--I'm not much of a sports fan, but Son Two lives and breathes baseball.  When he's not living and breathing soccer, that is).

For whom are you cheering these days?  (He, she, or they don't have to be sports figures!)

Tuesday Trivia

This might be the 101 proof Wild Turkey talking (won, embarrassingly enough at below market price at the school auction -- one of three alcohol related items that my wife bid on and we won -- it was only mildly embarrassing to walk out with two bottles of Belvedere Vodka, a bottle of Hendrick's Gin, the aforementioned Wild Turkey, a bottle of Blanton's Bourbon, a small bottle of vermouth, a couple of bottles of wine and several bottles of home made beer brewed by one of the science teachers -- called the "Doppler Effect") but:

- "Where was the Union?" - strangely enough Rush Limbaugh and I ask the same question.  Of course, Rush doesn't seem to understand that the union wasn't there to help protect the miners because his asshole buddy (and tea party benefactor) Don Blankenship told the 70% of workers who supported the UMWA that he would close the mine if it unionized.  But, and this is the really important thing [just ask Mickey Kaus] the workers didn't have a union imposed upon them by the authorization cards that they signed.  Must make all of those widows happy. 

- Speaking yet again of Kaus, I forgot to include my favorite blog post on "Hey Mickey's" Senate campaign by the inestimable James Wolcott, in which he speculates that Mickey spends his leisure time "drawing cartoon mustaches and goofy glasses on pictures of Ezra Klein, the Zac Efron of blogging."  (We kid, Ezra, we kid -- we're old and jealous.)   

- TNR has produced many, many deeply annoying writers, for instance (and not to harp) Mickey Kaus, Charles Krauthammer, Charles Lane, Michael Kelly -- oh well, you get the idea.  But few are more annoying than the perky and inexplicably self-confident Peter Beinart -- oh well he went to Yale and Oxford, so I guess that explains that.  Anyway, in last Sunday's Times Book Review, Beinart reviewed "Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents," Ian Buruma's latest book.  In a generally favorable review, Beinart felt the need to lecture Buruma on misunderstanding the religious right in the United States and Ronald Reagan's deep religious faith.  Beinart rejects the comparison of America's right wing evangelicals with conservative Islam, stating that

Dinesh D’Souza notwithstanding, it’s an exaggeration to say that “American Christians . . . sometimes feel more akin to conservative Muslims than to secular liberals.” It would be truer to say that the Christian right moved from an apocalyptic struggle against a godless foe (Communism) to an apocalyptic struggle against a god-fearing one (“Islamofascism”) without missing a beat.

Now, I'm no fucking Rhodes Scholar, but I lived through the rise of the religious right in this country -- indeed was interning on Capitol Hill during the 1980 election -- and I can say with confidence that the realm of human sexuality -- from abortion to gay rights to sex education to pornography -- namely, the attempt to roll back the cultural liberation of the Sixties and Seventies has been the animating force behind the religious right, not anti-communism.  Were Beinart to check he might notice that more than a decade passed between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9-11 (when everything changed!) and yet the religious right continued on an ever more virulent course throughout this period.  They contested abortion rights in every way possible, including the use of violence and intimidation, shamelessly demagogued against gay rights, and sought, rather successfully, to enshrine the absurd doctrine of "abstinence only sex education" as a part of the curriculum in a huge swath of American schools.

So no, Beinart, Buruma is right and you are wrong.  Beinart also claims that Ronald Reagan was, contrary to Buruma's assertion, a deeply religious man.  Now I don't know what went on in the Gipper's head, but I do know that Reagan seldom attended church, and unlike Presidents Carter, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama, never really seemed all that fluent with religious doctrine.  I know of no basis for Beinart's assertion and, again, I lived through each and every fucking year of the man's reign of error as an adult. 

In other words, Beinart opted to nitpick over two points on which he is dead wrong.  It's this sort of thing that makes me feel really hopeful about Beinart's impending book on American hubris.  No really -- it is.  At least it's the rare subject in which he is an expert.

- Why is National Public Radio treating militia groups like they're the Boy Scouts for adults?  Today we hear how these heavily armed, camouflage clad douche bags are learning to make a fire with a wooden bow and read a compass!  Do you get a Tim McVeigh merit badge for that.  Ugh. 

- Oh, and throw anything else in that's bugging you.   

-

Satire Murdered in Religious Ritual Slaying

So a couple of weeks ago I linked to this piece from the Onion from a few years ago regarding a discussion of the transnational, ongoing, omnipresent, and never ending Catholic priest child rape stories in which the Pope "forgives" the molested children:

"As Jesus said, 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,'" the pope continued. "We must send a clear message to these hundreds—perhaps thousands—of children whose sinful ways have tempted so many of the church's servants into lustful violation of their holy vows of celibacy. The church forgives them for their transgressions and looks upon them not with intolerance, but compassion."

Of course, as the Onion points out, there are always dissenters from compassion:

What kind of a message is the pope sending today's children? That it's okay to seduce priests?" said one concerned Baltimore priest who asked to remain anonymous due to a pending court case. "With the pope's announcement, the church is essentially telling its youngest members, 'Go ahead and let Father So-And-So reach into your swim trunks at the church-youth-group pool party. It's okay, the pope will forgive you in the end.' Without fear of eternal damnation, how are these provocative young lotharios ever going to learn? As the creep of secular humanism continues to chip away at our most sacred institutions, the Vatican has established a dangerous precedent," the priest continued. "We look to the church's authority for justice and righteousness, not politically convenient solutions that maintain the status quo. These nubile sinners should be held accountable for the damage they've done."

Ah, but then the Bishop of Tenerife -- yes the real fucking Bishop of Tenerife, not some Onion-parody bishop -- recently described "youngsters who want to be abused." He said that on occasions the abuse happened because there are children who consent to it.  The money quote:   

‘There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what’s more wanting it, and if you are careless they will even provoke you’, he said.

Evidently it's like a plague of barely post-pubescent chunky Reese Witherspoons (and their younger brothers) and they all want thy staff and thy rod.  What's a man of God to do?

Personally, I blame Tiger Woods. 

Where Have You Been All My Life Pea Soup

Yesterday I made one of those recipes that makes me feel stupid for not having invented it or even heard of. I'm not a practical cook. My repertoire of go-tos is very small. Pesto pea soup is going in that mental file. It's easy, cheap, healthy, and delicious. The recipe is so simple I hardly need to write anything. It's exactly what you think it will be: carrot, onion and celery are simmered in stock until tender, add a pound or two of frozen peas and simmer a few more minutes until it seems done, then blend the hell out of it. 

 I used one onion, one carrot, and one rib of celery, plus 2 lbs of frozen peas, and a quart of chicken stock (the final product had a thick texture, about the consistency of heavy cream). To this I added a quarter cup of basil pesto. The recipe calls for using more pesto to garnish the soup when you eat it, but I found the pesto I stirred in to be almost more than enough. The sweetness of the basil and peas needs to be tempered with a little salt. I prefer to leave fine-tuning like that to the diner, so keep a salt shaker handy when you sit down to eat this.

Monday Miscellany

Sorry for the light posting friends.  It's been a bit busy around the homestead and yesterday was one of those rare, absolutely perfect spring days, so I stayed more or less untethered from the computer all day, except to do my mother-in-law's taxes -- they don't call me Mr. Excitement for nothing.  

- I was having a very pleasant evening -- it's beautiful again here tonight -- enveloped in that springly spirit of bonhomie, when I made the mistake of finally going online and finding this.  Sweet fucking Jesus on a Ritz cracker -- the Pulitzer Prize to Kathleen Parker.  I am pretty sure I just threw up on my keyboard.  Talk about wingnut affirmative action.  This clown can barely string together a couple of coherent sentences and she gets the fucking Pulitzer.  Living proof that we live in a void, a grand cosmic joke, with an indifferent creator who runs a 50s laugh track while gazing upon our horror stricken faces.

- Speaking of faces that strike horror into my heart, I was amused and astonished to see that goat fucker extraordinaire Mickey Kaus is running for the Democratic nomination for Senate in California with the slogan "take our party back."  Are you kidding me?  Our party?  The arrogance blows me away -- a candidate who devotes the greater part of his web site to attacking unions -- a guy who fucking hates the United Auto Workers -- tries to claim that the Democratic Party is his.  Mickey -- listen up -- fuck you you arrogant piece of shit, you fucking rat bastard.  Unions made the modern Democratic Party.  The only group that could remotely claim greater pride of place in the Democratic hierarchy would be African Americans (whom Mickey spent the 90s attacking).   He should be shunned.

- I groaned as I watched Phil Mickelson hugging his wife -- who is suffering from cancer -- after his stirring win in the Masters golf tournament last night.  No, not because I am a cold-hearted bastard or a Michelson hater, but because I knew, just absolutely knew to a certainty that columns would be written today contrasting Michelson -- exemplary husband, family man, and winner -- versus Tiger Woods -- serial adulterer and loser.  And this, by Thomas Boswell, was a bit of that.    But this -- nicely skewered by ari over at TEOTAW -- not by some hack sportswriter, but by Blogging Heads godfather (and Kaus pal) Robert Wright, was even worse than I had imagined, albeit written before the morality play on the greens had concluded.  Wright, who I imagined I liked as a writer, really goes over the top on this one -- and then doubles down -- arguing essentially that we all have a stake in Woods' fidelity -- or, in seeing that he is punished for transgressing.  To wit:

I want to defend the proposition that, in its own way, the Tiger Woods scandal is as important as Kandahar and the Catholic Church. Leaving aside the question of whether we should shower condemnation on Woods — a hard question that I don’t purport to have a compelling answer to — one thing I feel sure of is that this Tiger Woods thing matters.

Seriously.  It goes on and gets worse.  It's classic right wing claptrap really -- all of life is about rearing children and monogamous marriage is the best means of doing that and therefore, we all need to throw metaphoric stones at the adulterer because otherwise, we'll all be abandoning our responsibilities and buying lap dances with Tiger.  

- I saw the movie "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" on Saturday -- it's a bit grisly and should be avoided by those troubled by very non-stylized violence, much of it sexual.  But if you are only going to see one Swedish language, feminist revenge thriller this year, this is the one to see.  I noticed that in Sweden one can be a movie actor and look one's age, not be ridiculously fit, etc.  (well except for the tattoo girl who is sinewy beyond belief).  (The credits took me back to this moment.)  Anyway, with that caveat -- and I'm quite serious about it -- it's a pretty compelling film.

For Poland, in solidarity

Stefania Woytowicz, soprano, sings Wiosna (Spring), Op. 74, No. 2., one of various works by Polish romantic poets for which Frédéric Chopin composed melodies; all were gifts to his beloved, Maria Wodzińska, whom he adored but was too ill to marry.

The bright beauty of this spring morning seems appropriately defiant, given the sadness shrouding our world, every moment, in every country. May the people of Poland turn to their artist's heart and find comfort today.

Wiosna (Spring)

Błyszczą, krople rosy,
Mruczy zdrój po błoni,
Ukryta we wrzosy
Gdzieś jałowka dzwoni.
Piękną, miłą błonią
Leci wzrok wesoło,
Wkoło kwiaty wonią,
Kwitną gaje wkoło.

Paś się, błąkaj trzódko,
Ja pod skałą siędę,
Piosnkę lubą, słodką
Śpiewać sobie będę.
ustroń miła, cicha!
Jakiś żal w pamięci,
Czegoś serce wzdycha,
W oku łza si` kręci.

Łza wybiegła z oka,
Ze mną strumyk śpiewa,
Do mnie się z wysoka
Skowronek odzywa.
Lot rozwija chyży,
Ledwo widny oku,
Coraz wyżej, wyżej...
Zginął już wobłoku.
Ponad pola, niwy,
Jeszcze piosnkę głosi
I śpiew ziemi tkliwy
W niebo aż zanosi!

Stefan Witwicki (1801-1847)

Translation after the jump.

Open Thread and Saturday Frank: Holiday in Berlin; The Bogus Pomp Orchestra with Jerry Outlaw; Tampa, 2004

St. Petersburg Zappaphiles (and those hailing from the Tampa area) are really, really fortunate in that we are home base to the band Bogus Pomp, a group of brilliant musicians the ranks of which include members of the Florida Orchestra and numerous teachers dedicated to playing the intricate and expansive compositions of the late Frank Zappa. So talented are Bogus Pomp, in fact, various musicians who played with FZ himself have traveled here to guest-star at their performances; Ike Willis and Jimmy Carl Black are just two that spring to mind.

(I'm feeling extra-fortunate this week because Son Two just began studying guitar with Jerry Outlaw, Bogus Pomp's fearless leader--see above--and one of the most talented artists I've ever had the pleasure of watching and listening to.)

Hooray for music! There it is, always, a momentary holiday that makes me immeasurably happy no matter how trying a week I've had.

Where do you go, musically speaking, when you want to get away?

The Kill Coal Miners Party

If the Democratic Party does not hang Don Blankenship, the piggish CEO of Massey Energy, firmly around the necks of the Republican Party, they are even more inept than I imagine them to be.  Especially Arlen Specter, who should be going after Pat Toomey hammer and tongs about Blankenship's patronage, given the ample presence of miners and mining culture in Western Pennsylvania.

A review of his campaign contributions shows him to be an inveterate supporter of every swinging right wing fuck stick around, including Toomey, Rob Portman, James Inhoffe, and George Allen, among others.  As Laura Clawson argues at kos, the Democrats need to present Blankenship as a man who would rather buy Republican office holders than pay for the safety of his workers.  And he's a man who expects a return on his investment.   

Once again, the simple question is "which side are you on?"   That's the way the Dems need to frame this.  It's a question that I would hope answers itself.

Push-polling the medical literature

I'm a person with many medical problems, none of which are doctors. As a feminist and sometimes invalid, I'm supposed to feel mistreated by the medical system. While I do have the being a freakish lady thing working against me, I also have a background in science working for me. In general, I'm a well-informed consumer of medical services, and my doctors know it. Being sick makes medicine as a subject pretty compelling, so I read a few medical blogs, including Kevin, MD. The mood around Kevin's is pretty darn anti-patient, and this post was the last straw for me. Take out the words you'd skip on a google search, and you get a title that says chronic pain patients are disobedient children. Patients with weird conditions: threat or menace? The quote from the article that really got me was

“The study of life-course influences on chronic pain is still in its infancy,” the researchers said.

This layperson is not surprised at the results, nor is she suspicious of their validity. I'll bet the researchers had a similar perspective when they put the study together. If a field is still in its infancy, why start with something you are pretty sure will make patients look bad*?

I'll give practitioners and researchers the fact that chronic pain is a sticky wicket; there are addicts out there seeking drugs from you just cuz they want 'em, and the process of sifting them out insults the people you're really trying to help. An objective diagnosis is a hard sell without blood tests or x-rays. Things get a lot simpler when you can say that the distinction isn't important to make because it's all in the "real patients'" heads. So you look for some data that support that conclusion. I respect the fact that many docs take up this challenge and treat sufferers of chronic pain, but I still feel pretty betrayed seeing this hostility laid so bare.

I don't really go in for "a few bad apples" explanations, mostly because of this talk by Dan Ariely [He talks about how almost everyone cheats a little, but there are only a few Lynndie Englands out there, so the aggregate adds up to a lot of cheating. Subtitles are available for the video]. I want a reasonably skeptical doctor. In case all this waffling doesn't make it clear, I am not willing to unequivocally condemn a whole group of medical professionals.

[I got rid of a bunch of equivocating stuff down here, because it was boring the hell out of me. Ambivalence: who cares?]

West Virginia Mine Disaster

The news regarding the coal miners in West Virginia -- the 25 dead and the 4 who remain trapped -- is incredibly bleak.  Coal mining has long been among the most dangerous of trades and it spawns a certain kind of militancy the world over.  Whenever workers assert their rights, you can almost certainly count on miners to be in the vanguard -- and for very good reason.  

Our friend T. R. Donoghue reminds us of the essential role that government plays in trying to keep work places like mines safe, and how those efforts have been systematically undermined by Republican lawmakers and operatives.   Massey Energy, the owner of this mine, is a perennial offender of safety rules.  Its CEO, Don Blankenship, is an arrogant, indifferent, anti-union rat bastard, who is trying to buy the judicial and political systems in West Virginia.  Although the U.S. Supreme Court shot him down in terms of allowing a judge whose seat he virtually purchased on the West Virginia Supreme Court to hear a Massey related case, the Citizen's United decision is certain to allow Blankenship and his ilk to continue their attempts to own the political process.

And in the end, that is going to mean more deaths of more miners.  

Because it's such a beautiful morning...

...here's the opening movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony to get you into your day, courtesy of Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.

Open thread.