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.

A hero ain't nothin' but a sandwich...

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, at 90, is no fool.

You know, just because he is black, everyone thought he was a revolutionary. He's no revolutionary. Obama is a centrist. And as far as any on the left who thought he was a revolutionary, I think the air is going out of his revolutionary balloon daily.

One sad chunk of fallout from the last eight years is that Obama's centrist moves look radical and will be spun as downright subversive by the right. A look at the plus column shows Barack is piling up a lot of reversals of odious Bush policies, and I'm all for that. But moving the government closer to the center on a scale that doesn't take into account the true middleground when voters resoundingly repudiated the right and center right is a waste of time and political capital. You can't take credit for stopping the rain when all you did was wait out the storm.

ht to alr

Single Payer in the Door?

Apparently as a result of criticism raised by the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Health Care (LCS-P), the Obama administration finally invited Congressman John Conyers, who introduced HR 676 (the "Expanded and Improved Medicare for All," which establishes the federal government as the "single payer" of everyone's medical bills), and Physicians for a National Health Program (a major advocate of Single-Payer) to participate in the Obama Administration's Health Care Summit. According to a press release issued by LCS-P, the original invitation list included no supporters for the single-payer solution.

Time to keep the pressure on.

Getting Things Done

As I noted in an earlier post, Democratic Party effectiveness will require that they get past the false notion that without a filibuster-proof majority they can't get things done. David E. RePass in an op-ed in today's Times argues eloquently to the contrary:

[F]ixing the problem would not require any change in Senate rules. The phantom filibuster could be done away with overnight by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid. All he needs to do is call the minority’s bluff by bringing a challenged measure to the floor and letting the debate begin.

I say amen.

Change in the Wind?

Having observed a week ago that Obama appeared to be listening more to the voice of David Brooks and his ilk than to the Paul Krugmans of the world, I have to be heartened that Krugman’s response to the President’s Budget Proposal Plan was largely positive. Quoth Krugman:

President Obama’s new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but with policy trends over the past 30 years. If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course.

That’s no small beer (although, quite possibly, an overstatement).

I haven’t read the budget plan in its entirety, and am still worried about some of the signals it sends (for example, he lists the growing obligations of Social Security among the threats to the nation’s economic health), but I’ll go with the “It’s better than I expected” feeling of the moment as long as people don’t start claiming the budget to be farther to the left than it actually is. And frankly I can't shake my suspicion that the plan's title, “A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise,” portends, in the next installment, some “Get off your lazy asses!” to the nation’s poor-- but, hey, I guess we’ll see...

Friday Malamute Blogging

A boy and his dog...
or
Two peas in a pod.

Doctrinaire Bipartisanship

If anything recommends bipartisanship to us (and frankly I think the entire approach is a pile of shit) it would presumably be its expressed commitment to engaging problems as they come without asking first whether or not a proposal advances or compromises party interests. The goal would be to de-calcify political thinking by focusing on solutions.

But wouldn’t it be a deep irony of the moment if President O’s governing philosophy turns out to be a doctrinaire bipartisanship that deems worthy only those solutions that enjoy the backing of both parties? I’m not talking here about compromising to get the votes needed to pass a piece of legislation. I’m talking about elevating bipartisanship to a guiding principle so that even when you have a majority of votes on your side of the aisle in favor of, say, healthcare legislation, you choose not to put forward a bill unless you believe it has some chance of gaining support from the other side of the aisle.

That’s what happened with the stimulus package, although the Prez was unable to get a single Republican vote in the House and only three in the Senate. So, in essence, a lowball stimulus package, designed to gain Republican support, was pitched even lower at the request of “centrist” Republicans and still failed to gain any Republican support.

The Democratic leadership will tell you, though, that they face a practical political problem in that it doesn’t make sense to go forward with legislation in the Senate unless you have the 60 votes necessary for cloture, but is it only me, or does this sound assbackwards? You need cloture to end or avoid a filibuster from the other side, so why not, on truly important measures where it would be refreshing to draw clear political lines, put forward the bill you really want and force the Republicans to filibuster it? It’s not clear to me that they will filibuster every piece of legislation that the Dems put forward, so why not put the heat on them and force them to be openly obstructionist? (After I'd drafted this, I was alerted to a superb post on Common Dreams making just this argument--thanks for the tip brokenwindows!)

No matter. In this case, before the bill went forward the Democrats made “a procedural deal [which meant] the bill needed 60 votes to pass.”

Well, this does begin to look on Obama’s side like bipartisanship uber alles and on the Republican’s side like a “well, thank you very much.”

So, with apologies to poetry lovers everywhere, and most of all, to Archibald MacLeish, here is

The End of the World

Quite unexpectedly as Barack O
That doctrinaire bipartisan
Back-stabbed healthcare and gave the go
To an invasion of Pakistan
Saying Asif Ali Zardari was about to prove no better than Musharraf,
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off

And there overhead, there there hung over
Those millions of unemployed white faces, those Obama-manic eyes
There in the bankrupt dark and mortgaged skies
The pall
Of nothing nothing nothing—nothing at all

Time to End It and Not Mend It: The Republican Party, That is . . .

Well, hey folks, I’m back. (I haven’t really gone anywhere, just sitting back and seeing how the Obama era begins to unfold.) It comes as no surprise to readers of this blog that my expectations are not high, but under the circumstances it’s hard not to hope for the best. Yet, alas, signs are not particularly good.

Imagine, if you will the Friday, NYTimes op-ed page, bookended by Paul Krugman’s and David Brooks’s biweekly columns, as an image of Obama staring up at you from your morning breakfast table. In one huge ear a doughy, bespectacled avatar of Brooks whines in an inimitable smarmy voice, "embrace 'a functioning center,'" while in the other, an exasperated Krugman risks tumbling into the massive auricular cavity as he shouts, "Go left young man, your 'attempts to transcend partisanship [have only ] ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh.'”

True to form, however, Our Boy Barack, rather than recognizing he has to make a choice is trying to follow the advice of both angel and demon, which in effect means he’ll be listening to Brooks, which also means that he’s trying to save a party that has no justification for continuing to exist as a major force on the American political scene.

Why are there any tax cuts in the proposed stimulus package? Do Republicans really believe that tax cuts will turn the economy around? Well, since some folks believe that Elvis is still alive, perhaps. But whether or not they believe in the efficacy of tax cuts, what they know is that absent a commitment to tax cuts, the Republican party doesn’t exist. That’s why, as Krugman reports in his blog:

Thirty-six out of 41 Republican Senators voted for the proposed DeMint amendment to the stimulus bill — a massive package of permanent tax cuts that would create a huge hole in the budget, while doing very little to help the economy.

Republicans know that if a stimulus plan goes forward without any tax cuts and the economy begins to turn around, the empirical basis for their existence will have simply disappeared. By contrast, a stimulus plan with some tax cuts will allow them to attribute any subsequent success to the presence of tax cuts, whether or not the tax cuts contributed to the turnaround.

So, now is the time to drive a stake through the heart of the political vampire that’s been sucking this country dry ever since Grover Norquist crawled out from some cave during the reign of Reagan with his “Tax-Payer Protection Pledge.”

Obama has the stake in his hand but doesn’t seem inclined to use it.