… that the Log Cabin Republicans may have done far more than any Democrats to get active-duty military service by openly gay men and lesbians legalized.
Given how consistently, vitriolically opposed to equal protection on the basis of sexual orientation the national and most state Republican parties are, I have always wondered what the point was of the Log Cabin Republicans. Perhaps now we know — and good for them.
On most anniversaries of the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and Flight 77, I have been much more about sorrow than anger.
Not today. Today I’m pissed.
A recent confluence of events is emerging into a mosaic that depicts the destruction of some of what’s most valuable about America. Our Fourth Amendment in particular, and many of our essential rights in general, are under attack by our own government at all levels by officials of both major parties.
This not only could have been avoided, it should have been. But as a country, we panicked; constitutionally speaking, we filled our pants. Worse, and even less defensibly, some who didn’t panic sought to exploit the fears of those who did and, disregarding Benjamin Franklin’s timeless warning — They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety –we let them get away with it.
Consider:
I could go on, but you get the picture: The three branches of the federal government are colluding with weak, unscrupulous and/or uninformed citizens to gut the Fourth Amendment by ignoring the plain meaning of the text:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In short, if you want a search, get a warrant, and if you want a warrant, you provide probable cause to believe a crime has been committed, and you swear to that probable cause on penalty of perjury, and you explain exactly what it is you’re looking for — no fishing expeditions allowed. Memo to our courts: Where are the strict constructionists when we need them?
This is a basic and easy-to-understand rule. In fact, it has been under assault for most of the country’s history by law-enforcement officers who cheerfully perjured themselves, swearing to things “upon information and belief” when lacking the former and lacking any basis for the latter, and never suffered legal consequences. More recently, however, it has been under assault by politicians who knew what they wanted to do and also knew that what they wanted to do was unconstitutional by the plain meaning of the Fourth Amendment, so they set up NSLs and the like as a kind of legal window dressing or fig leaf. And illiterate and/or dishonest judges have let them do it.
This must stop, and I can think of no better tribute to the Americans of all races, faiths and political orientations who died in the terror attacks of 9/11 than to start rolling back the destruction of our rights, particularly our Fourth Amendment rights, that began in their name the minute they could no longer speak for themselves.
You don’t have to burn a copy of the USA Patriot Act, although frankly, I like the symbolism. Holding your elected officials accountable would be a start. And I don’t just mean voting out the ones who have done the wrong thing. I mean impeaching them for violating their oaths of office to uphold the Constitution.
Brother Love’s Travelin’ Salvation Show – Neil Diamond
Anthem – Blink 182
A Song to Help You Keep Your Job – Ray
Endless Cycle – Lou Reed
Black Houses – Modern English
New Values – Iggy Pop
One Fine Day – Chiffons
Life Gets Better – Graham Parker
It’s a Wonderful Lie – Paul Westerberg
1952 Vincent Black Lightning (live) – Reckless Kelly (a Richard Thompson song)
lagniappe: “Let It Rain” – Dream Syndicate (surprisingly good guitar work, not at all imitative of Clapton)
Tony Plutonium: I don’t care what you say, scat singing is not jazz.
Me: Why not?
TP: If it has vocals of any kind, it’s pop.
Me: What about Ella Fitzgerald in Radio City Music Hall?
TP: That’s … very good pop. But it’s still pop.
Me: What?
TP: Hey, they’re only my rules, but they’re very strict.
Me: That seems —
TP: And if it has vocals, it’s not bluegrass, it’s country.
… if the My Lai massacre happened today, no one would even react. Hell, as it is, we kill 90 people at a time with predator strikes (1/6th the death toll at My Lai), and no one even blinks.
Not to mention, Sarah Palin would probably go on Facebook and attack the people who uncovered any similar massacre as America hating troop bashers, and then David Gregory would ask his Sunday morning roundtable of Bill Kristol, Krauthammer, Haley Barbour, Newt Gingrich, and John McCain if Sarah Palin was right.
And John also links to a timely update:
Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret “kill team” that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.
Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.
In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, the killings are alleged to have been carried out by members of a Stryker infantry brigade based in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan.
According to investigators and legal documents, discussion of killing Afghan civilians began after the arrival of Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs at forward operating base Ramrod last November. Other soldiers told the army’s criminal investigation command that Gibbs boasted of the things he got away with while serving in Iraq and said how easy it would be to “toss a grenade at someone and kill them”.
One of the many, many reasons you don’t start a war without a good reason is that war inevitably does this to at least some of the people we ask to kill in our name.
I don’t do predictions on politics, so I don’t know whether the Democrats can keep the House this fall or not. In 435 separate races, weird things can happen.
There’s a lot of talk about the “enthusiasm gap” between likely Republican voters and likely Democratic voters. That gap is real, although several different reasons, some conflicting, go into it. A lot of people are unhappy with Democrats because of health-care reform, for example, although some of those people are unhappy because it went too far and quite a few, myself included, are unhappy because it didn’t go nearly far enough.
As a group, House Dems face a tough fight this fall. But mistermix at Balloon Juice makes one very good point:
… the fact remains that John Boehner is not popular, that doing nothing in the middle of an almost-depression is not popular, that sneering at teachers, cops and firemen is not popular, and that tax cuts for those making $250K or more are not popular.
Exactly right. If Democrats lose the House, it won’t be because the House wasn’t winnable for them.
The more geologists learn about earthquakes in general and the San Andreas Fault in particular, the more likely they think it is that Southern California is overdue for The Big One.
… you might start by worrying about the $1 billion+/year being spent by the Pentagon to convince people here and abroad that our efforts in Afghanistan are succeeding.
There may be plenty, but they haven’t been nearly as busy as their counterparts:
Eric Rudolph: Four bombs, two dead, 110 wounded. Motivated by hatred of abortion and homosexuality. Conservative response (Cliff Kincaid): He’s not a “Christian terrorist,” he’s a “doper.” Marijuana bad!
Scott Roeder: Shoots abortion doctor George Tiller in the head in front of his church. Motivated by hatred of abortion, subscribed to magazine which called killing abortion practitioners “justifiable homicide,” received operational support from senior Operation Rescue staffer. Conservative response (Randall Terry): He’s a lone wolf, not my fault, but Tiller totally had it coming.
James Von Brunn: Shoots Holocaust Museum guard to death. White supremacist and Holocaust denier. Conservative response (Holocaust denier Mark Weber): Don’t blame me for the actions of crazy people! The Holocaust Museum is a historically inaccurate “expression of the enormous power of the Jewish community,” but I would never condone violence against it!
Byron Williams: Taken down in shootout with cops on his way to “start a revolution by… killing people of importance” at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation, the latter of which is featured prominently in Glenn Beck’s abundant conspiracy diagrams. Conservative response (Beck and his producer): “Liberal blogs” are unfairly blaming us, we can’t be responsible for every crazy person who watches the show, and the Tides Foundation is still the Antichrist.
Hutaree Militia: Arrested for plotting to murder a cop and then blow up his funeral. Self-described “Christian warriors,” “Preparing for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive.” Conservative response (Robert Spencer, Jihad Watch): This is a dream come true for the Islam-coddling Left! And why don’t we ever see quotes from Christian leaders protesting that Christianity is a religion of peace after Christian terrorists are caught or go off? If the Hutaree even are Christians…
Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman: White supremacist skinheads arrested for bizarre plot to kill 88 black people and get themselves killed while trying to drive-by President Obama while wearing white tuxedos.
Richard Poplawski: Ambushes and kills three cops, apparently out of fear that Obama would take his guns away. He’s a big fan of conspiracy nut Alex Jones, as is Fox News, apparently. Conservative response (Noel Sheppard, Newsbusters): He was just an angry crazy person, the liberals want to pin this on the courageous conservative truthtellers so they can silence us! Fight the power!
Jim Adkisson: Kills two and wounds six in a killing spree in a Unitarian church during performance of a children’s musical, “because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country… had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and… had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets” – oh, and it was liberals’ fault that he couldn’t find a job. Police find books by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage in his house. Conservative response (Free Republic): Too bad the liberal secular humanist hippies didn’t have guns, now they’re going to Hell because they’re not real Christians.
Jerry and Joseph Kane: Father and teenage son shoot two Arkansas cops to death. Members of right-wing “sovereign citizen” movement who refuse to recognize any government authority.
Mistermix at Balloon Juice explains what the Republicans are up to:
A lot of people don’t vote because they view it as a pointless act. The more Republicans make government into a meaningless sideshow, the fewer voters will be interested in voting.
The sheer stupidity of a Republican-led Congress isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It helps to convince younger, intelligent, uninterested non-voters—a group that would probably vote for Democrats—that their lack of interest is a rational choice.
But, you know, it’s not like we’ve got any kind of economic crisis or war going on, so we’ve got plenty of leeway to put up with crap like this.
I wasn’t gonna write anything about the Glenn Beck Jaysus Fest, because, c’mon, Biblically speaking, my life is two-thirds over and why waste the time, you know? But Dennis G. at Balloon Juice has the best take I’ve seen so far on this event and the epiphenomenon that led to it, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t share:
In 1922 Hiram Evans became the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He led a movement that would see more than 6 million Americans join the KKK. In August (of course) of 1925 more than 40,000 Klansmen marched through the streets of Washington, DC. While hatred of black folks was (and is) a strong motivator for the Klan and other neo-Confederate movements (like the Teabaggers) that is not a very great organizing tool. What worked for the Klan in the Twenties was fear of foreigners, immigrants and their weird Religions that were out to conquer and subjugate the United States.
Back then the main threat was from Catholics, then Jews, foreigners and (as always) African Americans. This passage from Wikipedia describing the 1920s Klan could be about the Teabaggers, Fox, Beck and most of the current GOP if you replaced Catholic with Islamic:
The Klan’s Teabagger’s primary enemies were Catholics Muslims who the Klan Teabaggers feared were behind secret plots to overthrow the government and exterminate Protestants. Another important enemy was people of foreign birth, especially those from Catholic Islamic countries. A third, and lesser enemy, were blacks.
It was Evans who hit upon the bright idea to wrap the Klan in the American Flag and Jesus and market the group as a grassroots movement firmly rooted in traditional American values. Mobilizing around hate and efforts to restrict liberty are always easier when you evoke the blessings of a divine power and magical ancestors like Founding Fathers. It worked for the Confederacy, it worked for the Klan and it works for Beck.
Of course the comparison of Beck to Evans isn’t really fair — to Evans. Beck is really just a common grifter. A better comparison from the second Klan era to the Teabagger era might be between Beck and D.C. Stephens, who — back in the day — was the Grand Dragon of the Indiana KKK. Stephens was a real grifter. He backed Evans in a power play to take control of the Klan and was rewarded with control of Indiana and 22 other states. It was a money making operation. Stephens took a cut of every dollar paid for hoods, robes and other tools of the Klan trade. In no time at all he was a millionaire and he used his influence with the gullible rubes flocking to join the KKK fad to elect certain candidates to office — candidates who would do his bidding. By the mid-Twenties almost all of the elected officials in Indiana owed their office to Stephens and the Klan.
Like Beck, D.C. Stephens was very powerful with the wingnuts of his era. And then he fell. Turns out that Stephens kidnapped and repeatedly raped a young women who then ate (or was fed) poison. As she got sick, Stephens refused to release her. After a few days he finally sent her home, but by then she only had days to live. Before she died she told her story and Stephens was arrested for murder. He thought his political pals would get his back, but instead they let him go down. Once in prison, Stephens spilled the beans on the grifters he helped to elect and they followed him to ruin. On the way down, he also helped to end the KKK fad of the Twenties. So at least he did some good.
It would be nice to think that Beck will do this country some good before he goes to prison. But then, it also would be nice to think that Santa Claus is real, and I don’t waste much time on that, either.
Could Bank of America executives finally, finally be in the path of the kharma bus? It seems almost too much to hope for …
A federal judge yesterday allowed Ohio pension systems to proceed with their legal claims that Bank of America paid billions of dollars in bonuses to executives of a firm it was absorbing without informing shareholders, Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray said.
U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel denied motions by Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, which the banking giant acquired in September 2008 amid the financial crisis, to dismiss the state’s lawsuit against the companies and their executives.
Ohio’s pension funds claim that the companies committed securities fraud and issued false proxy statements by issuing $5.8 billion in accelerated year-end bonuses to executives and employees and failed to disclose that information to shareholders before they agreed to allow the companies to merge.
Specifically, the court indicated that the following claims could proceed:
- Securities fraud claims against Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and their respective CEOs, Ken Lewis and John Thain, for alleged misstatements related to the failure to disclose the agreement to pay up to $5.8 billion in discretionary bonuses, and against Ken Lewis and Bank of America for alleged omissions related to the bonus arrangement.
- False proxy statement claims against Ken Lewis, John Thain, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and certain Bank of America directors about the bonus arrangement.
- False proxy statement claims against all defendants arising out of their failure to disclose Merrill’s fourth quarter 2008 losses.
- Liability claims against certain officers and directors for issues under their control.
- Claims relating to false offering statements that misstated or omitted Merrill’s bonus payments.
The district court dismissed certain securities fraud claims, including claims relating to the failure to disclose Merrill Lynch’s fourth quarter 2008 losses.
Cordray said he was very pleased with the ruling and that the language upholding the false proxy statement claims is particularly helpful. “In the order, Judge Castel held that liability under the false proxy statement claims in this case could be imposed if negligence is shown. He squarely rejected the defendants’ position that the lead plaintiffs must make a more stringent showing of ‘scienter’ — knowing or reckless intent to deceive or defraud. We are looking forward to developing evidence against the defendants under this negligence standard,” Cordray stated.
I, meanwhile, am looking forward, perhaps in vain, to the stripping of billions in assets from BoA officers and directors, followed, perhaps, by indictments. Hey, a guy can dream.
If you read/listen to the mainstream financial press, you probably presume that the primary responsibility of the Federal Reserve is to control interest rates.
That’s true, but it also is required by law to do something else:
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.
So, in addition to interest rates, the Fed also is required to seek maximum employment.
Has it done so? Obviously not. For one thing, it (or, for that matter, Congress) could have required banks and other firms that got bailed out to increase hiring, or to increase lending in ways that reasonably could be expected to lead to increased hiring. Instead, the money mostly went to bonuses and other nonproductive uses.
As Ryan Grim noted last December:
The Fed is mandated by law to maximize employment, but focuses on inflation — and “expected inflation” — at the expense of job creation. At its most recent meeting, board members bluntly stated that they feared banks might increase lending, which they worried could lead to inflation.
Board members expressed concern “that banks might seek to reduce appreciably their excess reserves as the economy improves by purchasing securities or by easing credit standards and expanding their lending substantially. Such a development, if not offset by Federal Reserve actions, could give additional impetus to spending and, potentially, to actual and expected inflation.” That summary was spotted by Naked Capitalism and is included in a summary of the minutes of the most recent meeting. The bank keeps secret the actual transcript. Likewise, because of Fed secrecy, it’s unknown which or how many members voiced such concerns.
Suffering high unemployment in order to keep inflation low cuts against the Fed’s legal mandate. Or, to put it more bluntly, it is illegal.
But, as is true of every other illegal thing banksters do, there will be no consequences. Remember, right after Grim wrote this, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was reconfirmed. And things have only gotten worse since, and neither Obama nor Congressional Democrats nor Congressional Republicans nor business is doing one damn thing about it.
Relatedly, and unfortunately, Crimes Against the Economy is not a capital offense, which is a lucky thing for former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan because Gonzalo Lira is standing by for the prosecution with a blindfold, a cigarette and one heck of a case.
UPDATE: Oh, and here’s a best-case projection of how long it’s going to take us to get back where we were, jobs-wise, in December 2007. And by best-case, I mean this chart outright ignores growth in the labor force, currently in the vicinity of 90,000 people per month.
Seven years. Best case. Reality: given that growth in the labor force since the Great Recession began in December 2007 means that instead of 7.6 million jobs lost in the past 32 months, we’ve actually lost 11.2 million jobs, it’ll be a lot longer than that.
… here’s a simple lesson in geometry as it relates to the Park51 project:
To get to the Cordoba Centre from Ground Zero, you’d have to walk in the opposite direction for two blocks, before turning a corner and walking a bit more. The journey should take roughly two minutes, or possibly slightly longer if you’re heading an angry mob who can’t hear your directions over the sound of their own enraged bellowing.
Perhaps spatial reality functions differently on the other side of the Atlantic, but here in London, something that is “two minutes’ walk and round a corner” from something else isn’t actually “in” the same place at all. I once had a poo in a pub about two minutes’ walk from Buckingham Palace. I was not subsequently arrested and charged with [defecating] directly onto the Queen’s pillow. That’s how “distance” works in Britain. It’s also how distance works in America, of course, but some people are currently pretending it doesn’t, for daft political ends.
I have long believed that the Congressional Budget Office is staffed by robots — not because of the quality (or lack thereof) of their work, but because I think carbon-based life forms would be unable to respond to idiotic question after idiotic question from congresscritters and their staffers, day in and day out, year in and year out, without allowing at least a modicum of snark to seep into their reports and responses. And yet, as with the watchdogs of the Governmental Accountability Office, they manage to continue to produce reports and analyses from which every last bit of partisanship, emotion and edge has been thoroughly expunged.
If you think I exaggerate, consider the recent question posed by the felicitously named Sen. Mike Crapo, Republican of Idaho (flagged by Sarabeth at 1115.org): If passing certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act was estimated to reduce the deficit by $455 billion over 10 years; what effect would repealing these same provisions have on the deficit?
Picture, if you will, the CBO office in which this communication is first received. Normal, carbon-based life forms would be saying things to an imaginary Crapo like, “OK, Mike, it’s like this. See this cookie? This cookie is the part of the deficit affected by the act. If we enact the act [holds cookie behind back], the cookie goes away. But if we then repeal the act [brings hand forward again], the cookie comes back. Got it?”
But because normal, carbon-based life forms aren’t involved, instead we get this:
Finally, you asked what the net deficit impact would be if certain provisions of PPACA and the Reconciliation Act that were estimated to generate net savings were eliminated—specifically, those which were originally estimated to generate a net reduction in mandatory outlays of $455 billion over the 2010–2019 period. The estimate of $455 billion mentioned in your letter represents the net effects of many provisions. Some of those provisions generated savings for Medicare, Medicaid, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and some generated costs. If those provisions were repealed, CBO estimates that there would be an increase in deficits similar to its original estimate of $455 billion in net savings over that period.
In other words, a = a. It’s standard pre-algebra. It’s called the Reflexive Property of Equality. Learn it, love it, live it.
And then there’s this lagniappe, which I am not making up: Crapo is considered such a whiz on this subject that his party has made him the ranking minority member on the Senate Finance subcommittee on healthcare.
For some time now, American investors’ fear has been that the Chinese owned so many T-bills that if they sold a bunch at once, interest rates (bond yields) would have to climb dramatically for those bills to find buyers, with horrible consequences for U.S. credit markets.
Thing is, as Charles Hugh Smith reports, the U.S. stock market is now so widely (and correctly) perceived as a rigged game that many American investors have gotten out of stocks and into Treasury bonds — so many that the leverage of the Chinese over U.S. finances has been significantly diluted:
But a funny thing happened to the “nuclear option” story: American investors have absorbed almost $4 trillion in U.S. Treasuries, making domestic owners the largest holders of Treasuries. China’s holdings, as vast as they are, are now a modest percentage of domestic owners–as little as 25%.
This domestic move out of equities and into Treasuries is a sea change with broad consequences. Hundreds of billions of dollars has been pulled out of U.S. equities and dumped into low-yield Treasuries. For context, recall that domestic U.S. assets (real estate, bonds, equities, and other marketable capital) is around $52 trillion.
So owning $4 trillion in Treasuries–more than all non-U.S. owners combined, including China, Japan and the Gulf Oil states–does not require that great a percentage of U.S. capital. Even if U.S. owners absorbed another $4 trillion, that would make Treasuries less than 20% of total capital.
There are limits to U.S. debt growth, however, and it is those limits which constitute “the nuclear option.” The U.S. could readily absorb the entire Chinese portfolio ($1.2 trillion), but what it cannot absorb is $1.4 trillion in annual deficits, year after year. In other words, if debt is a “nuclear” weapon, the U.S. will have to set the weapon off itself by borrowing more than it can support out of national income.
If the U.S. economy melts down due to over-borrowing, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Of course, the deficit hawks claim that that’s where we’re headed right now. The other side of that argument — and the correct side — is that we need to be running deficits in the short term to get people back to work (more people working and paying income taxes and buying stuff and paying sales taxes, and fewer receiving unemployment checks, also will help reduce the deficit), and we need to be directing that spending toward means of increasing our future productivity so as to generate the wealth needed to bring deficits back under control and pay down debt long-term.
Now, while it’s good that China no longer has the capacity to blow up our economy — which has positive ramifications for everything from our relations with Iran and North Korea to the security of Taiwan — we also don’t want things to veer too far in the other direction:
… if China’s export market implodes and its trade surplus disappears, the central government will have trouble creating the jobs needed to maintain its power.
If China launches its “nuclear option,” the market might be roiled for a short period of time, but their share of the total Treasury markets is simply too small now to be “nuclear.”
Perhaps the real “nuclear option” here is the potential for the U.S. to restrict China’s imports to the U.S. market. Should China’s exports dry up, it will face domestic turmoil on a scale few can imagine.
Tiananmen Square showed us that the Chinese government has the will to deal ruthlessly with domestic turmoil. But that was primarily a political movement. But if tens or hundreds of millions of Chinese rise up because exports have fallen off so badly that they can no longer afford food, Beijing may find itself faced with a situation it cannot shoot its way out of … not solely against internal targets, anyway.
… but he can be remarkably naive and/or oblivious sometimes:
I don’t see any evidence that the particular apocalyptic “my enemies are totalitarian madmen” strain of Birch/Beck/Goldberg conservatism has helped anyone win any elections.
To which Tristero responds, in effect, Yo, dude, do the names Bachmann and Coburn and Tancredo and DeLay ring a bell?
Let’s ignore all the obvious contradictory examples … and — solely for the sake of argument — go so far as to entirely concede Matt’s point: no one gets elected by being a rightwing loon. That doesn’t mean that lunacy has no palpable effect on the public discourse, or on policies that national-level politicians deem to be politically acceptable. In fact, the effect of extremist rhetoric within mainstream discourse is very well known and lunatic ideas are clearly being employed by the right in precisely this fashion: To shift the palette of acceptable ideas further and further to the right.
Yup. In 1988, everyone thought it was insane that Newt Gingrich was arguing for privatizing Social Security. But by 2005, that was the primary plank in the GOP’s domestic agenda. Only an inspired effort by the liberal blogosphere, led by Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo, prevented that disaster from being foisted on the country — and just imagine how much worse we’d be screwed today if more of people’s retirements had been in private investments, as Gingrich and his ilk wanted.
Yglesias goes on:
But there’s no real upside in lying to the choir. Political movements need to adapt to the actual situation, and that means having an accurate understanding of your foes. You need to see them as they actually are so that you know the right way to respond.
And there he goes again, being all liberal and rational. Unlike, that is to say, the people he’s writing about, who, it is obvious to pretty much everyone but Washington media, are neither.
No real upside? Horseshit. Lying to the choir has an enormous upside. It’s worth tens of millions a year to Beck alone. You play to people’s fears and resentments, you tell ’em somebody else — ideally, someone not like them, someone brown and/or foreign and/or of a different religion and/or someone who is better educated than they — is to blame for their troubles. And then you ride those folks’ votes into office, turn right around and screw ’em out of every last dime they have, and then lie some more when/if you get caught.
Because for the last 40-plus years, that is exactly how it has worked.
Tristero takes it home:
Matt makes some seriously faulty assumptions here. The most egregious is that he mistakes playing a lunatic in public with actually being a lunatic. He assumes that [Glenn] Beck really believes what he says, the way a good liberal might, rather than accept the far more likely possibility that Beck simply doesn’t care what he says, as long as it helps his career. No doubt, Beck is a deeply disturbed man, but the fact that he said Obama is a racist doesn’t necessarily mean he’s crazy enough actually to believe it to be true.
What Beck does understand, and understands with complete accuracy, is that calling Obama a racist will infuriate liberals and help sow doubt about Obama among his listeners. That is precisely what a sane opportunist in Beck’s position would want to do. (FWIW, it’s just the same trick all over again now that Beck has decided that Obama is “practicing” liberation theology: whether it’s true or not isn’t the point. It makes us angry, it feeds his flock and it sets up a dichotomy that establishes fundamentalism as the norm and any other religious interpretation a perversion.)
Matt here also lumps people like [Jonah] Goldberg in with Republicans who don’t act as crazy (usually) and yet benefit enormously because they come off as “men of reason, Republicans you can talk to” — e.g., [Sen. Roger] Grassley — in comparison. Rest assured that people like Grassley have a deeply accurate picture of who their Democratic opponents are. And Grassley well understands the usefulness of portraying them, as Grassley did during health care, in a manner as reality-challenged as Goldberg did to liberals.
Despite what Matt says, the right wing has quite an accurate picture of what liberals and Democrats are likely to believe, and how they are likely to behave. They have played us like a virtuosic, if thoroughly demented, violinist. One of the most useful techniques in the right wing repertoire is The Crazy Lie. And we still haven’t found any effective riposte to it — or at least, any effective rhetorical counter-strategy that mainstream politicians would be willing to use. Matt’s failure to understand how incredibly effective this tactic has been for illiberals, and how debilitating it has been for liberals, is simply astonishing. …
This ain’t no serious effort to persuade based on the truth. This is, as far as the right is concerned, about getting power, holding on to power, and extending power.
It is more than a little surreal to see that Yglesias, who gets so much right on health care and other issues, so completely misses this when it’s all going on right in front of his face.
This happened in California, but I’m pretty sure it could happen just about anywhere in the U.S.:
On June 29, 2009 McFarland and his wife Pearl were returning home from a charity fundraiser just before midnight. McFarland injured himself as he stumbled and fell down the long steps to his front door.
“Mainly it was to my knee and the front of my leg, my shin,” McFarland said.
His wife called paramedics, who helped him into the house and treated him. As the paramedics were leaving, two sheriff’s deputies arrived.“All of a sudden, they just showed up, they came in here like there was a fire going on, like a gunfight was going on,” McFarland said.
What happened in the following minutes was captured on a camera mounted on the deputy’s Taser.
The deputy tells McFarland he is going to take him to the hospital because he may be suicidal.
“We want to take you to the hospital for an evaluation, you said if you had a gun, you’d shoot yourself in the head,” the deputy can be heard saying.
McFarland says it was just hyperbole. He was tired and in pain.
The deputy orders him numerous times to get up or else.
“Stand up, put your hands behind your back or you’re going to be Tased,” the deputy says.
McFarland keeps refusing.
The exchange goes on for about five minutes; his wife keeps pleading with the deputies not to Tase him, saying he has a heart condition.
Then, McFarland tells the deputies in no uncertain terms to leave.
As he gets up to go to bed, McFarland is Tased. Not once, but three times.
“There’s got to be a problem in terms of training and on supervising deputy sheriffs in the county; it’s hard to imagine something so shocking could happen,” McFarland’s attorney John Scott said.
McFarland says he never had any suicidal thoughts. In fact, he considers himself lucky to be alive.
“I’m a survivor of pancreatic cancer; one of 4 percent in this country,” McFarland said.
Scott says his client was arrested, jailed and charged with resisting arrest. A judge later dismissed the charge.
OK, kids, what’s wrong with this picture?
First, why in hell were deputies even on the scene?
Second, why in hell were deputies in the house without permission, let alone a warrant?
Third, why in hell did they believe they had any legal basis for trying to take McFarland anywhere against his will when no judge or magistrate had issued any kind of finding that McFarland posed a danger to himself or others — indeed, when no one had even petition a court for such a finding?
Fourth, when ordered to leave a property on which they had no legal business, why in hell did they not leave?
Fifth, why in hell did they use a Taser on a man who posed no physical threat to them or anyone else? The Taser is not a compliance mechanism, it’s a means for an officer to defend himself or innocent third parties. Period.
Sixth, why in hell did they use a Taser on a man who, they had been warned, had a heart condition?
Seventh, why in hell did they use that Taser three times? Were they such wimps that they couldn’t take the guy into custody after Tasing him twice?
This was not law enforcement, this was felonious aggravated assault. The deputies who perpetrated it ought to lose their jobs, their pensions and their freedom, and the sheriff who employs them and presides over this lame excuse for “training” ought to be charged as an accessory. But that won’t happen because OOH SCARY OBAMA SOCIALIST MUSLIM BROWN PERSON!!!11!1!1!
Meanwhile, cops all over the country are complaining when civilians videotape them as they perform their duties. And it never seems to occur to them to wonder why people think they ought to be videotaped.
UPDATE: Sean Hannity naturally thinks this is just fine. No surprise there; he’s always been a thug and always will be. Although it might be interesting to Tase him and see if his position remains consistent.
… and out comes stuff like this:
One of the things that we see as we look at Glenn Beck’s work that’s been fascinating to me, is we see a more true and accurate history of the United States, and we see it documented at levels of rigor that, in fact, one would expect out of Ph.D. dissertations — it is serious, scholarly work….[Liberal critics] don’t have to argue with Glenn Beck. They have to argue with his documentation and they can’t match that level of rigor.
Of course, this becomes slightly more understandable when one learns that Armey has a Ph.D. himself … from the University of Oklahoma.
The Disney brothers’ first success wasn’t all that lucky for the company. The cartoon’s distributor wrested the rights to Oswald [the Rabbit] away from Walt and Roy almost as soon as he had become popular. This loss was a huge setback for both men, and my grandfather vowed never to let himself be taken advantage of again. He soon registered a copyright on a new character named Mickey Mouse. It was 1928, and it was neither the first nor the last time the Walt Disney Co. benefited from a federal system of protections, laws and taxes that created fertile ground for building a business empire.
In addition to the copyright protections for Mickey, the Federal Communications Commission regulated the airwaves that carried the Disneyland television series and, of course, the Mickey Mouse Club. The transportation and federal highway system built in the wake of World War II took millions of visitors to Disneyland. The Marshall Plan helped rebuild devastated European markets into which Disney poured its products, turning a quaint American company into a global brand.
Taxes are on everyone’s mind lately for good reason. Not only will Congress have to make some tough decisions about the Bush tax cuts soon, but if lawmakers do nothing, the estate tax will automatically be reinstated after a year’s hiatus — in its 2001 form. A great deal of misinformation is flying around out there about this, but most agree that the tax is flawed and needs to be modified.
One thing I do know is this: In a far stricter tax environment, my grandfather still managed to accumulate and pass on ample funds to make three subsequent generations very comfortable indeed. And as an inheritor I am here to tell you, the estate tax is not as much of a bogeyman as you’ve been led to believe.
Whet Moser: “Why renovate the place if you’re constantly living in fear that the landlord’s going to torch it for the insurance money?”
Now that I think about it, I think this sentence pretty much encapsulates everything wrong with the entire country, not just the newspaper bidness.
What do the “professional liberals” want?
We want not just incremental steps back from crazytown but a bullet train taking us away. We want passionate advocacy in the exact opposite direction, because people have spent the last eight years getting beat on and simply not being kicked anymore isn’t enough. Nobody’s gonna send a thank-you card to the administration for refraining from hitting them in the head with a hammer. “Oh, Mr. President, thank you for NOT pissing on me as you walked by, what a huge favor you’ve done me.”
So, Obama and the Democratic Congress, huge disappointments? Uh, yeah. Unfortunately, what a lot of people who ought to know better don’t get is that if the current crop of Republicans regain control of Congress, we’ll be right back at the Crazytown Town Square.
Texas has taken another big step in its long campaign to become the galactic capital of Stoopid.
The Texas A&M University System has announced that it will be evaluating its professors (which is good) in this way (which is very, very bad): weighing the cost of their salaries against the size of the research grants they bring in and how much money they generate from teaching.
A several-inches thick document in the possession of A&M System officials contains three key pieces of information for every single faculty member in the 11-university system: their salary, how much external research funding they received and how much money they generated from teaching.
The information will allow officials to add the funds generated by a faculty member for teaching and research and subtract that sum from the faculty member’s salary. When the document — essentially a profit-loss statement for faculty members — is complete, officials hope it will become an effective, lasting tool to help with informed decision-making.
“If you look at what people are saying out there — first of all, they want accountability,” [vice chancellor for academic affairs Frank] Ashley said. “It’s something that we’re really not used to in higher education: For someone questioning whether we’re working hard, whether our students are learning. That accountability is going to be with us from now on.”
Peter Hugill, the head of the local chapter of a national faculty group, calls the measure simplistic and crude, and views it as an idea spawned from a conservative think tank in Austin that has advocated faculty accountability and has the support of Gov. Rick Perry and the A&M System Board of Regents.
You can quantify any damn thing you want, but quantifying anything and everything is not necessarily going to improve your productivity or your accountability because some things are harder to quantify meaningfully than others.
In this case, you start with a question: What is it that you want college professors to do? If the answer is “bring in more money than they cost,” then you use an assessment like this one. But if the answer is “teach” or “impart knowledge” or something similar, then your assessment must be quite different. And that’s before you even get into the question of what you want them to teach: facts? Methods? What?
The article adds:
A rawer form of the idea was advocated by the conservative think tank the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a group whose board members are major financial contributors to Perry and whose ideas have been embraced by the A&M System Board of Regents.
One of the group’s seven “solutions” to higher education reform called for improving “the quality of teaching by providing legislators and governing boards with a simple tool to measure faculty teaching performance.” The reform called for dividing the teacher’s employment cost by the number of students taught, “and force rank from highest cost per student taught to lowest cost per student taught.”
If we pay the Texas Public Policy Foundation the common courtesy of presuming that it knew what it was doing, then we are forced to assume that it holds higher education in tremendous contempt. Why that might be is a matter of speculation. I speculate that research skills, logic and analytical ability honed in a quality program of higher education tend to undermine the tendentious, fact-averse world views and recommendations of groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which exist to advance the interests of a wealthy few at the expense of the rest of us. And you can rest assured that the children of such people won’t be going to college at Texas A&M unless their parents are confident that they’ll be leaving their offspring enough money that they need never have any inconvenient encounters with the real world.
These are the people who have supported Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has publicly flirted with the idea that Texas should once again secede from the U.S. My disgust at the repugnant idea of dissolving the Union and letting Texas go its own way is tempered, I must confess, by the possibility that the rest of us might well be better off without it.
John wants a Googlebomb. John deserves a Googlebomb. So John gets a Googlebomb.
(And honestly? I’m trying to decide whether I’ve ever had a worse consumer experience than the one he describes with Paypal, and I think I’ve got to say no. I’ve had consumer experiences that were worse initially — the great indoor waterfall of 2008 comes to mind — but nothing that ever turned out as badly as his experience has.)
UPDATE: Still.
Bernard Fanning – Watch Over Me
Horse Feathers – Belly of June
Iron and Wine – Half Moon
Pressure Boys – Radar Love
Susan Tedeschi – The Soul of a Man
Fear – Let’s Have a War
Stornoway – Zorbing
The Plugz – El Clavo y La Cruz
Fool’s Gold – Nadine
Mary Gautier – Mercy Now
lagniappe: Scarface: Money and the Power
… are gonna suck eggs, if you believe the NFL’s stable of prognosticators. The best anyone predicts is 8-8 and 3rd in the conference, several say 6-10 and one says 5-11.
Me? I think a defense as good as the Panthers’ D has looked in the preseason will take you places. The big question mark was the D-line, and it has played well against the run and gotten a serious pass rush on. It sucks that MLB Jon Beason had to move outside to replace the injured Thomas Davis, but 1) Beason is gonna get tackles no matter what position he plays, and 2) Davis apparently may yet play this year.
Special teams appear solid, with John Kasay and Jason Baker quite reliable and the kick/punt coverage appearing to be significantly improved from last year. But kick/punt returns are still a big question mark.
The problem is that the offense, which the team didn’t do a lot to revamp in the off-season, has serious problems: Not only can Matt Moore not find a receiver, but nobody, nobody has emerged as a viable alternative to Steve Smith. (For yet another year.) Worst of all, the O-line, which was thought to have enough spot-for-spot talent to match up with anyone in the league, appears to be having serious problems playing as a team.
Based on what I’ve seen this preseason, this team is not going to score many points. And the best defense in the league can’t help you all that much if it’s on the field too much. Against a dramatically improved division, that spells trouble.
So: If Steve Smith says healthy, I predict 8-8, which may not be good enough to keep the Panthers out of the NFC South cellar.
Hooper: So, what do I say in the first paragraph?
Me: You could start by restating the question.
Hooper: OK. Then in the second paragraph I can give my answer. And in the third paragraph I can give a reason for my answer and in the fourth paragraph I can give another reason.
Me: Sounds good so far.
Hooper: But what do I do for an ending?
Me: Well, you could rephrase your answer in a slightly different way.
Hooper: Why in the world would I do that?
Me: Because sometimes, when writers are trying to get an idea across, they say the same thing more than once in different ways.
Hooper: Well, I don’t want to waste time on that. I think [teacher’s name] is smart enough to get it the first time.
Me: Well, it’s not a question of whether he’s smart or not. Saying things more than once in slightly different ways helps people learn and remember things better.
Hooper: What? I”m not buying that. If you have to tell ’em more than once, they’re stupid.
Blog on the Run: Reloaded