Friday Malamute Blogging

Happy Father's Day Weekend!

Ian Frazier says it best.

O my children, you are disobedient. For when I tell you what you must do, you argue and dispute hotly even to the littlest detail; and when I do not accede, you cry out, and hit and kick. Yes, and even sometimes do you spit, and shout "stupid-head" and other blasphemies, and hit and kick the wall and the molding thereof when you are sent to the corner. And though the law teaches that no one shall be sent to the corner for more minutes than he has years of age, yet I would leave you there all day, so mighty am I in anger. But upon being sent to the corner you ask straightaway, "Can I come out?" and I reply, "No, you may not come out." And again you ask, and again I give the same reply. But when you ask again a third time, then you may come out.

Hear me, O my children, for the bills they kill me. I pay and pay again, even to the twelfth time in a year, and yet again they mount higher than before. For our health, that we may be covered, I give six hundred and twenty talents twelve times in a year; but even this covers not the fifteen hundred deductible for each member of the family within a calendar year. And yet for ordinary visits we still are not covered, nor for many medicines, nor for the teeth within our mouths. Guess not at what rage is in my mind, for surely you cannot know.

For I will come to you at the first of the month and at the fifteenth of the month with the bills and a great whining and moan. And when the month of taxes comes, I will decry the wrong and unfairness of it, and mourn with wine and ashtrays, and rend my receipts. And you shall remember that I am that I am: before, after, and until you are twenty-one. Hear me then, and avoid me in my wrath, O children of me

Obama's Panderer's Box...

...is always open.

When David Horowitz is complimenting you, it's way past time to trash the preferences and uninstall the software.

Michael Smith at Stop Me Before I Vote Again describes Obama's Cairo speech as an "...emetic concoction of falsehood, sanctimony, and hypocrisy..."

The whole sick-making performance is like this -- Parson Obama, master of the drone aircraft and the cluster bomb for six days in the week, ascends the pulpit on the seventh and tells everybody -- well, almost everybody -- to renounce violence.

On Obie's one hand, the Israelis. On his other, the Palestinians. Obie weighs, Obie judges, Obie sits on the throne and apportions the deservedness and destiny of nations. So let it be written! So let it be done!

[snip]

The qualities that his admirers admired him for -- intelligence, moral seriousness, high purpose, the whole Eagle Scout package -- curdle, it seems, once mixed with actual power, into a filthy foetid smarmy preacherly pustular effluvium worthy of Woodrow Wilson himself.

Obama and his administration are not really change agents. They are more like grand cosmeticians trying, and possibly succeeding, at putting lipstick on the pig that is the United States (to borrow a phrase from the whole McCain/Palin episode). No one will buy the line about the USA not being a self-serving empire, but they'll appreciate the effort.

Dear Mr. President

It's always heartening to find that there are many who are not hoodwinked by the rhetoric:

Mr. Obama,
You are a fine speechmaker and have helped the government and people of the U.S.A. generally feel a more sincere and positive connection to the civilized world than they have had a right to feel in recent years. However, to name a few of what I honestly feel are dangerously misguided positions of yours that will allow the black mark on our nation’s legacy to further stain its way towards becoming a permanent scar:

1) Afghanistan is not a “good” war.
2) The government and people of Israel ought not be held in higher esteem than those of any other nation.
3) Most importantly, you should not let Cheney, G.W. Bush, and other immoral, murderous criminals in their administration off the hook. You and your relatively new government are, it is hoped, better than Gerald Ford and his government, who unforgivably pardoned the wretched criminal Richard Nixon for somewhat less significant wrongdoings and betrayals of the people of this and other countries than Cheney and company are guilty of.

Mr. Cheney,
Please return to cuddling up on your immense pile of blood-soaked plunder and go back to sleep. You are a lying, mercenary, savagely cruel, shameless coward. You were a child once; please remember that there are children and families of these children in the United States of America and in the rest of the world who suffer long-lasting harm from your merciless, uncompassionate words and actions, and from your continuing unrepentant espousal of the same.

V.M.

Umm...V.M. is Viggo Mortensen.

Friday Malamute Blogging

Finally warm enough to drink water with two feet. He kept batting at the reflection of himself, or something, in the water. I couldn't get a pic of that. Maybe next time.

Stupid and Contagious

(click on image for a larger version)

From the Center for Economic and Policy Research

This report finds that the U.S. is the only country among 22 countries ranked highly in terms of economic and human development that does not guarantee that workers receive paid sick days or paid sick leave. Under current U.S. labor law, employers are not required to provide short-term paid sick days or longer-term paid sick leave. By relying solely on voluntary employer policies to provide paid sick days or leave to employees, tens of millions of U.S. workers are without paid sick days or leave. As a result, each year millions of American workers go to work sick, lowering productivity and potentially spreading illness to their coworkers and customers.

"Not really any surprise here, but it's nice to have the numbers."

thanks A.

Friday Malamute Blogging

He's very sweet after a long walk by the lake, otherwise he's cranky.

Seoul Music

...or as Maurice White would say "Can I get a right-on?"

A moment of (ex)Catholic reflection

So what has struck me most about the Miss California thing is what it says about that strain of Protestantism. There's nothing special about the fact that she did the softcore photos; that hardly registers on the hypocrisy scale any more -- not after legions of Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader prayer leaders, dope fiend anti-drug crusaders, barely closeted gay ministers
denouncing homosexuality, etc. And the cute little "whore next door" thing -- e.g., Hooters -- has long been a staple form of respectable titillation among the holyroller set, even down to slutting up the barely post-toddler girls for those hideous child pageants. I used to think of this as a distinctly southern phenomenon, and I guess I still do, even though its range has broadened greatly. In this regard one strain of California is the biggest, boldest southern state, a semi-autonomous, or at least closed, republic of parvenu okies. (I suspect in Miss CA's case that a little unraveling would find some Cajun roots not very far back, and Cajuns who'd become holyrollers at that.) A few years ago, with Engels and Mencken on my mind, I watched one of those wedding preparation shows that featured a former Miss Mobile who had washed out at the Miss Alabama pageant and her minor league baseball player boyfriend, who was from either CA or one of those big, empty states out West. Part of what was going on was clearly that her wedding was to be her consolation victory pageant, and she planned it accordingly. A leitmotif, though, was that they were both celibate holyrollers and were going to have sex for the first time in their lives after the wedding. The guy seemed like he could be deeply closeted even to himself, but she was a different story. The show was an hour-long pricktease. She kept winking and making coy references to what she was going to give him on their wedding night, pulling up the skirt of the wedding gown to show the garter, flexing her hotness for the camera and the like. It was extraordinary.

What most intrigued me about Miss CA's reaction to discovery of the photos is the way her first move has been to do damage control to protect her brand-- going first and without modification by attempt to explain them away or defend her morality -- to try to preempt their circulation by insisting that she was a minor when they were taken. Here she'd just set herself up to become a star on the right-wing Christian circuit as a sexy little kewpie-doll martyr to the fags and liberals and the like, and she may have rushed straight to her Jimmy Swaggart moment before she even got the career off the ground. Makes you wonder how many years of him and Jim Bakker we'd have been spared if you tube had been around.

For this kind of holyroller, apparently, God -- or Jesus -- is that little ventriloquist's dummy or imaginary Friend you carry around with you to tell you, and of course anyone who might even hint otherwise, that whatever you do -- whatever nasty prejudices you hold, whatever meanspirited actions you undertake or endorse, whatever apparent hypocrisy you may display, whatever you calculate to be in your narrowest and most immediate self-interest at the moment, whatever unreflected-upon impulses you act on no matter how outrageously they seem to contradict "principles" or "values" you parade around in public or what harm they might inflict on others -- you're fine, Saved, elect, and that, therefore, your qualifications for passing peremptory judgment on others based on your superiority as His one true Xtian are in no way compromised or impaired.

I suspect that only the deeply stupid (e.g., GWB, Palin), or psychotic, can take solace in so obviously self-serving a fairy tale, and only the deeply immoral (e.g., ditto) would want or need to do so.

A.

Thanks, Professor Reed

Confederate History Month?

Last week Georgia Governor, Sonny "chickenshit" Perdue signed into law a bill permanently designating that:

every April “shall be set aside to celebrate the Confederate States of America, its history, those who served in its armed forces and government,” and all those who contributed “to the cause which they held so dear.”

I would think that this news would cause more than a ripple of interest and derision in the 21st century, or are we now celebrating slave owners in our brand new "post-black"— "post-race" world?

This excellent column goes on to quote the Vice President of the Confederate States, Alexander Stephens, a Georgian:

“Our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists among us — the proper status of the negro in our civilization. … was the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution...
...[the Confederacy’s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.”

Most of those who supported the Confederacy and secession unambiguously supported slavery and this should be pointed out at every opportunity during the month of April in Georgia. It should be noted that not all white southerners aligned themselves with secessionists, and it is those whites who resisted the tyranny of the Confederate majority before and during the war, and who fought against white supremacy and for black political rights in the Reconstruction period following the war who deserve commemoration.

with the professor

Another Promise Bites the Dust

I think that the current NAFTA regime lacks the worker and environmental protections that are necessary for the long-term prosperity of both America and its trading partners. I would therefore favor, at minimum, a significant renegotiation of NAFTA and the terms of the President’s fast track authority.





Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Tuesday he is ``delighted'' the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has closed the door to reopening the North American Free Trade Agreement.

U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk told reporters in a conference call on Monday that it is not necessary to renegotiate NAFTA to honour Obama's campaign promise to add stronger labour and environmental provisions.

``The president has said we will look at all options,''Kirk said. ``But I think they can be addressed without having to reopen the agreement.''

US Deploys Anti-Nuke Contingent to Israel

Ominous news from the Army Times:

U.S. European Command has deployed to Israel a high-powered X-band radar and the supporting people and equipment needed for coordinated defense against Iranian missile attack, marking the first permanent U.S. military presence on Israeli soil.

...

EuCom has repeatedly deployed troops and Patriot air defense batteries for joint exercises and Iraq-related wartime contingencies but has never before permanently deployed troops on Israeli soil.

I got a bad feeling about this.

ht alr

Friday Malamute Blogging

Spring has sprung, but not Kodi.

Blogroll please...

We're adding emptywheel to our home remedies. Marcy Wheeler, welcome!

Is this the beginning of the end...

...of public schools and teachers unions?

Here's Morning Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan, and D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty talking about education reform:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

• Privatization of public schools?
• Freeing teachers and principals "from the burdens of contracts" -- i.e. union busting?
• using D.C. as a national model?

Is this really what's coming down the pike nationally? With charter school and voucher-loving Arne Duncan at the helm of our public education system we need to be worried.

ht to alr

Change? Count on it

Here's part of Barack's Floor Statement on the Habeas Corpus Amendment on September 27, 2006:

We don't need to imprison innocent people to win this war. For people who are guilty, we have the procedures in place to lock them up. That is who we are as a people. We do things right, and we do things fair.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. Glenn Greenwald breaks it down in detail:

The Obama DOJ is now squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions. Leave aside for the moment the issue of whether you believe that the U.S. Government should have the right to abduct people anywhere in the world, ship them to faraway prisons and hold them there indefinitely without charges or any rights at all. The Bush DOJ -- and now the Obama DOJ -- maintain the President does and should have that right, and that's an issue that has been extensively debated. It was, after all, one of the centerpieces of the Bush regime of radicalism, lawlessness and extremism.

and here's the nutshell:

Obama files a brief saying he agrees in full with the Bush/Cheney position. He's arguing that the President has the power to abduct, transport and imprison people in Bagram indefinitely with no charges of any kind. He's telling courts that they have no authority to "second-guess" his decisions when it comes to war powers. But this is all totally different than what Bush did, and anyone who says otherwise is a reckless, ill-motivated hysteric who just wants to sell books and get on TV.

We had an "Historic" Election...

... and all we got was Barack Obama.

Here's a really succinct observation from an East Coast union activist:

I am glad we put the struggle on hold so we can elect a guy to give the bankers a trillion tax payer dollars so we can refinance our own debt with our own money, send 50K more combat troops to Afghanistan to win a war that no military authority says can be won with guns and is a land that has defeated imperial conquerors for a thousand years, and, oh yeah, we are withdrawing our troops from Iraq not by actually moving them out of the country but by calling combat troops trainers and declaring the withdrawal complete, Mission accomplished. Maybe he will even get on an aircraft carrier if he isn't too busy sucking the queen’s butt.

ht alr

The Nation Jumps the Shark

A friend writes: As if it weren't already clear, The Nation has dropped all pretense to critical integrity or political and intellectual standards.

Here's Melissa Harris-Lacewell on how her friends pull themselves up by their bootstraps in these difficult economic times:

I have a good friend who has decided to get rid of their family's second car. Though she and her husband work 30 minutes in opposite directions they are finding a way to make this crazy commute work. Why? Because they live a town with seriously underperforming public schools and they are absolutely committed to providing their daughter with a first class education. For them, this means private school tuition. So everyone is bracing for obscenely early mornings and far more inconvenient work schedules. They never thought twice about this priority.

Well, one must have priorities, mustn't one?

Where to begin?

• The endorsement of the privatization of public schooling?
• The endorsement of faith-based initiatives?
• The false claim that generous financial aid packages at elite institutions significantly improve access to higher education for poor people?

Note to The Nation: if you're paying Ms. Harris-Lacewell to shill for the Obama administration the rules of political advertising for print media clearly state:

Step 1

Set aside a small area outside of the main body of any printed advertising material. The text must state who paid for the material and whether or not it is authorized by the official campaign.

Step 2

Check to be sure that the disclaimer box is in a contrasting color from the rest of the ad. Make sure that the font size is clearly readable to an average person.

And I think the advertisers are supposed to buy the ad, not the other way around.

with the professor
ht to alr

Obama Takes in Millions...

...and he made a buttload of cash, too.

About Last Night

It was deeply satisfying to see Jon Stewart putting it to Jim Cramer on last night’s Daily Show. Cramer deserved no quarter and Stewart gave him none. And it’ll be interesting to see whether the handshake at the show’s close does result in CNBC’s trashing the “In Cramer We Trust” promos. But let's face it, at the end of the day, asking CNBC to step up its investigative reporting of the finance sector is a bit like asking the cheerleading squad to improve oversight of your athletic department. As the Times reported today and on March 9th despite CNBC’s culpability in the financial crackup, they win regardless.

For there’s virtually no learning curve as far as this debacle is concerned. In the eyes of the system’s staunch defenders, the boom and bust cycle is a necessary feature of the progressive force of capitalism. As Alan Greenspan puts it in a recent interview when asked what benefits were left behind by the bursting of the housing bubble:

Well, that should be clear - entire neighborhoods have been revitalized, home building and renovation technology has been advanced, and millions of Americans who could never afford a home before are now homeowners because of innovations in mortgage finance and debt securitization.

Or the nature of capitalism is creative destruction, and every cycle leaves more winners than losers, more prosperity than misery, yadda, yadda, yadda.

So if you’re expecting a retreat from Cramer and the forces he represents and serves don’t hold your breath.